skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So it's an OS that requires apps to be written in JavaScript (an interpreted language that was designed by Netscape for web scripting and nonprofessional programmers) and HTML (a markup language designed to display static documents in the browser). None of these technologies were designed to help developers create software applications, so why is this magical?

Let's look at few possible reasons:

1. JavaScript/HTML/CSS are better tools for developing software than anything else out there. No.

2. It's open source. So is WebOS, Android.

3. It's more efficient - same software can run on cheaper hardware. No, Java & Objective C are more processor-efficient. If Firefox OS runs on $100 hardware, than iOS can run on $50. The fact that nobody is making an ulta-cheap smartphone is because there's little demand for one (it's like making a shitty Porsche)

4. Developers can package existing web applications as native mobile applications. There's already a thing called PhoneGap for that.

5. More teenagers know JavaScript than any other language

It seems like #5 is the only valid reason. A lot of kids don't know Objective C or Java, so they must love Firefox OS if they just know the web stack. But sometimes you've got to ask yourself - why rewrite an OS in a new cool language? Just because you can? Look how far Apple has come with Obj-C, why constantly replace the hammer? Having said that, the force of teenagers is not to be underestimated.
When I clicked on the play button on the homepage under Chrome (latest) on Macbook i7/8gb, my fans popped on and I thought I was going into outer space. Is that just me?
Balsamiq has forever been my favourite wireframing tool, it offers great power with great simplicity. But as the blogpost states, the interface was a little "messy".

My favourite wireframing tool just became beter! Way to go team balsamiq!
I could never really use this for long listening because the sound quality of youtube music is so variable. It would be pretty annoying.

Otherwise, very cool concept and good implementation!
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No, exactly the opposite. I'm saying if you can't have perfect then take the next best thing. In your example the next best thing would be taking an imperfect spam filter over none at all.
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An interesting thought -- is this for performance on the "hamster wheel" stuff or does it actually improve "deep" thought. alot of the latter seems to come more from perserverence, inspiration, and character than IQ per-se.
I think that quote is appropriate if you fear collisions with your own data set. The worry with a cache scheme like this is people would be actively seeking to find cache collisions.
First, nobody has a 72 character password. Second, at some point, the length of the password stops being the dominant factor in brute-forcing the hash, as Mazieres points out in the bcrypt paper.
Balsamiq Mockups is not webapp. It is Adobe AIR application. However, they have other service where you can store mockups and access them via webapp.
Some helpful links: http://examine.com is an excellent, unbiased, citation-oriented database of supplements and nutrition information. Reddit also has a nootropics subreddit: http://reddit.com/r/nootropics.
Balsamiq isn't a webapp exclusively, they offer an offline Adobe Air version that actually requires manual upgrading.
This. The Firefox OS license for carriers should be "you can modify our OS however you like, but you must take no steps to keep users from installing a clean one, nor penalize them for doing so."
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Are you sure it doesn't already work? The build prerequisites page[1] makes it sound like all variants should work. I've run it on maguro, but it's definitely the most well-supported of the variants. The lack of softkeys made it astoundingly painful; I ended up using a USB OTG keyboard just to navigate.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...
Uh huh. Let's see, pragmatic...

pragmatic [prægˈmætɪk] adj 1. advocating behaviour that is
dictated more by practical consequences than by theory or
dogma

Sounds like a good idea. Hey, wonder what this style guide says about semicolons?

Don't write semicolons that are optional
Put a single semicolon before statements that start with
( or [ (see above article as for why it's needed)

No. The pragmatic approach to semicolons is to put the damn things in, because it makes life a little simpler on coders, it fixes a few corner cases (mostly relating to concatenation), and it has no meaningful impact on file size. (Also, as a personal opinion, starting a line with a semicolon looks hideously ugly.)

The dogmatic approach is to leave out as many semicolons as possible, because it adheres to some grand theory you have about the language, even if it causes issues and yields no benefits.

So no, this style guide is not pragmatic.
The closing curly brace of an anonymous function being on the same line as the last line of the body makes me cringe.

something.forEach(function(event) {
$.fn[event] = function(callback){ return this.bind(event, callback) }

Space between the closing parenthesis and opening curly of a named function, but not an anonymous function strikes me as 100% arbitrary. It's inconsistent and would bother me if I saw it in production code.

> No curly braces for single-line control flow statements such as if & friends

Disagree. It's too easy to add a line later and forget the curly braces. This goes back to the definition of pragmatic not fitting what's being advocated.
I've yet to understand this thinking. What I see from that gist is that you have to insert a semi-colon at the beginning of your code because he doesn't want to insert a semi-colon at the end of his code.
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Servers should not have GUIs. Period.
What bugs me is perhaps even more fundamental:

All those "superstar" programmers started somewhere.

Whether they were a teenage-hacker prodigy or not is irrelevant, they were young, inexperienced, and foolish programmers at one point.

Yet once they age (and gain knowledge, or perhaps more importantly, _practical_ experience) they suddenly forget that their journey had a beginning.

When you're on the road, everything feels like the middle. So I think it's important to keep perspective, and realize that (irrespective of age) their journey has just been longer than yours.

---

The other thing is: I think a programmer's fundamental job is to make computers useful for people.

At the end of the day: we provide meaningful abstractions that allow others to get computable tasks done.

I don't think it really matters how you define "get stuff done."

To the end user: the computer is a blackbox.

The fact that they can buy underwear online is just as amazing as the fact that they can turn around and plug in their digital camera. Thanks to the magic of device drivers; they can then download pictures of themselves in their fancy new underwear.

So, no, I don't think a web developer is any less of a programmer. For the same reason I don't look at a heart doctor and think: "he is clearly less of a doctor than the neurosurgeon down the hall."

Just my $.02
Don't I know it! I have them bookmarked :)
> Firstly you need a way to incrementally verify a file

Following the proposal of the article, you don't really need that. If you don't have the hash in your local cache, you should assume that the link provided by the site is correct and resume as you normally would without the hash present. When it's downloaded, you verify the downloaded contents with the hash, and add the file to the cache if the verification succeeds.

If you already had the hash in the local cache, then you already have the entire file and there's no need for incremental verification.

As I understand it, the point of the hash is purely for caching purposes, not strictly for validating that the downloaded file matches it.
Looks like a great update! I've always loved how Balsamiq didn't give options for the skinning of the mockups as it made it easy to say no to clients that wanted to spend more time on that. However, I can see how that would be a popular request and it seems like they integrated it very well into the app.
Flick based scrolling in javascript
Rob, could you put on the article which devices we already can build the OS?

I want to buy one but i don't know what is already supported :)
Will do, thanks for noticing this.
That answer clearly explains why you can't, using current techniques and hardware.
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My feedback:
1) You could narrow down needs. Imagine how hiring a "tech person" to build a cloud service is too broad.

2) Read about marketing people with technical skills to understand what they do. Decent but dated example:
http://okdork.com/2010/10/14/how-mint-beat-wesabe/
Many other examples blur lines too (patio11, SEOMoz, etc)

3) Couldn't tell if they had investors but that might be a source too. As hackers can find hackers, I bet investors can find marketers.

4) Find a successful competitor who filled the position. Write a job description based on that person's bio.

5) Consider trying out a contractor or consultant first. If having that person in the office would destroy culture, maybe you don't need them.
I've proposed that to W3C HTML WG few months ago:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Jun/0094...
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How much longer will you be RDPing to servers from a laptop instead of from a tablet?
> As I understand it, the point of the hash is purely for caching purposes, not strictly for validating that the downloaded file matches it.

That is a very useful consequence that prevents malicious content.
And why would developers sacrifice their own freedom just because of freedom of end users?

Also, the fact the FSF has its own definition of words "free" and "freedom" doesn't make that others are not free to use the more common meaning of the word. Free != "free"
> Most hackers are too ethical to work for the government, and the ones that aren't can make more money elsewhere.

There's also the fact that many-if-not-most hackers are... shall we say... "unsuited" (in terms of their temperament) to the kind of work environment found in government security agencies. Let's just say that your tolerance for pointy-haired administrative BS had better be pretty dang high (like, somewhere between "ISS" and "Earth-Moon L1") if you're going to go down that particular professional path.
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It's a big job, spying on every US citizen, treating each of them as a "terrorist", and coordinating which secret internment camp to send dissidents.
It's rare to see a kickstarter with an actual finished product on display ready for market or at least an estimated date before 2014. Looking forward to getting my unit pretty quickly.

There has been lots of buildup around this release...
>I understand and agree with your point, as it is scientifically based. I remember seeing a great TED talk on the effect this is having.

Going off a tangent here, but I would agree with that even if it was not "scientifically based".

For a lot of stuff, especially cultural stuff related to societal norms, the philosophy of it (the "how we want to live" part) is more useful than science.

That is, even without any papers or clinical studies, one can deduce things like the above. It's not like we need scientists to tell us even the more basic things of our everyday existence. Some cannot even be measured or quantified objectively, because they relate to what we want to be the norm, and not what is "objectively right" or "natural". Not to mention that what is a "scientific result" in this kind of issues (i.e outside of physics, math, etc) is prone to lots of biases and/or interests.

It's better to ask "what kind of world we would like to live in" in those cases, and judge by that.
War on Drugs.

Militarization of the police because we took the most violent route in trying to control the "illegal" drugs.
Is this some word play on the site name? Or is it sarcasm that's not particularly funny?

The article is the exact _opposite_ of the HN headline. Here I was checking the article out to see if there was a quick registry hack or something similar that I could use on a normal Win8 install. Disappointed.

I get it. You hate Metro/ModernUI/whatever. Just add explorer.exe to the startup and a few shortcuts on the desktop for shutdown/other utilities. Pin frequently used programs on the taskbar.

And. Move. On!
Only links with a hash initially get put in the addressable cache. So if I download foo.js without a hash in the script tag, it is effectively a different document than foo.js with the script tag. The cache address hash would include the file hash, if you will.

This would effectively mean the person serving the files gets to determine if you are succeptible to this. If I serve you foo.js and don't want others to know you've seen it, I just make sure not to put a hash.

Although, overloading the hash this way sounds wrong. I'd rather see a "shared_cache='public|domain|none' property. I still like the consuming HTML being responsible for deciding that, though.
I feel like not including generics is a huge oversight. Also, the way many go aficionados discuss this over at golang-nuts put me off a great deal.
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I'm not certain that Javascript isn't similarly `optimised' by such networks, but images are significant for the mixed content case.

I believe that we collected some data in Chrome about the efficacy of a content addressable cache in improving density that was underwhelming, despite expectations. I don't have it to hand, but I suspect that it'll appear in a paper at some point.

I've not seen data about how well it reduces network loads yet, although I believe the same colleagues were intending to collect that too.
Here's a thread on Bluelight on Nootropics, usage, dose and reports on their effects that I found quite informative: http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/206147-Aniracetam-holy-cr...!
Please, please, please ... Be careful with Nootropics.

I'm a bit of a consciousness-naut and self-experimenter who's obsessed about increasing productivity. I've experimented a lot with Nootropics.

My thoughts?

Modafinil. Stay away from it. The stuff is wickedly addictive and many people have experienced significant long-term side effects, especially if they try to go off it.

Piracetam. Does a lot to reduce ADD and has strong anti-anxiety properties. That said, I found the benefits (minimally increased focus and less anxiety) to be far outweighed by the fact that you have to keep taking the stuff obsessively lest you go into withdrawal (coming off the stuff is horrible once you've been on it for a couple weeks).

If you want to increase productivity and focus there are a ton of other things you can do, starting with the basics of exercise, proper nutrition, and meditation.
The color choices in Server Manager are just astoundingly nauseating.
Yes. Combined with Dart and Google has their strategy for leaving Java and Firefox in the dust.
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>And what if porn was censured? There would be a lot more crazy people on the streets.

Historically porn wasn't that available, and no, you didn't have lots more "crazy people on the streets".

In fact, judging from crime rates, depression, substance abuse and such, modern societies are far crazier than 50 years ago.
"For obvious security reasons we cannot say what these measures are."

Rubbish. Anyone know that the measures are?
It's certainly the new go-to programming language for blog posts about programming languages :)

It's a very nice language, I like it a lot, but if there's one thing we all should have learnt over the last few years, it's that no programming language is the right choice for every task.
Developers scramble to ready apps for iPhone 5
Sounds a lot like webOS; huge amounts of potential, only to be plagued by 'being ahead of the game'. Probably still 5 years out, sadly. I really like the idea of a JavaScript OS.

Why was webOS not mentioned in the article? They have a very nice linux stack, telephony, and radio interfaces as well. Not to mention it's been open sourced (both OS and framework)

https://github.com/openwebos
http://enyojs.com
To be clear, the OS is not written in Javascript. It's simply Mozilla's Gecko platform (the same engine used by Firefox, written in C++ since time immemorial) running directly on top of Linux. Nothing was rewritten to get this to work: Gecko was originally designed to be a portable application platform rather than "just" a layout engine (and it was this concomitant complexity that led Apple and Chrome to use Webkit (which is just a layout engine) for their own browsers).

It's literally just a web browser running directly on a smartphone. Any web apps that you're using right now will Just Work on Fx OS. No rewrites required.

One last point: it seems intuitive that Java would be more processor-efficient than Javascript, but SpiderMonkey is waaaaay more mature than Dalvik (Android's Java VM). I'd like to see some hard performance numbers before making that call.
I believe OP is referring to a service-based architecture.

Basically you have a front-end, written in rails, and a back-end, written in java. The two communicate using REST service calls.

Personally I think for a lot of apps this approac has a lot more cons than pros.

- everyone that wants to work on the app needs to know both ruby/rails and java/whatever else

- multiple ways to handle deployment, continous integration, testing (different tools for java vs ruby).

- have to run multiple apps constantly to be able to do end-to-end testing

- harder to create full-stack integration tests

- deployments between the apps are often coupled and thus require more planning

- more up front API design work for the team. much harder to add new features that require API changes than ones that dont.

- Automated end to end integration testing can be much harder to do with an app made up of multiple services than simply living inside on process and being able to have test code access both databases to seed data.
I spend a good portion of my day remoted into Windows servers and I perform exactly zero system administration. Having only a command line would make my job impossible because of the software we need to run on these servers.

What you claim might be acceptable if you were only running Windows Server out of the box or solely Microsoft software, but that is not the case for much of the industry.
Can you share the code for your textmate version please.
It seems like the people who say the "new" one is thinner, lighter, more elegant, etc, all have cases on their phones.

So in essence, the case sets your phone back a generation or two.
Blank keys now cost £50,000 each, so you might as well just buy a BMW to start with.
I pick option 3. The author probably knows about WebOS and didn't think that it was necessary to go over it for this article.

[edit] If someone offers you n options, always pick option n + 1.
I just wish Firefox wasn't coping iOS. Slide open, 4 x 4 grid with a dock, swipe between panes. It's just sad that companies think this is the 'standard' for any phone os and stick to it. Metro gets some respect from me for taking a fresh approach, this, unfortunately doesn't.
My bank uses java applets to "secure" it's web interface, most banks in Brazil use java applets. I should be worried...
How is owning infrastructure anything other than a low-margin hot-potato if you let yourself be turned into a dumb pipe?
Since this is possibly going to start another round of the "right way" to code Javascript; I propose that everyone that is pointing out their issues with this guide submit pull requests, if in a position to do so, changing it to their own preferred style. After all, he does ask for contributions.

Then we can sit back and see what happens.
Someone asks in the blog comments: What is the new watt usage after the environment is set up? I'm curious too.
Wow, thanks. I might give this a go.
To this article I say-- Wow. Jump on the Microsoft-bashing bandwagon some more. This writer has not actually used the product at all. The desktop is still there. The command line is still there. If you're the type of customer that wants a server OS with a GUI on it, you get the same capabilities in 2012 as you had in 2008 R2. You don't need a touchscreen. I've used it now for two weeks and I don't feel any need for a touchscreen. Yes it's a little weird at first to get used to, but my taskbar icons were all still there and I use them same as I did before. This article is so bad I wish I could downvote it.
I never understand why people use cases. What's the point in preserving something in mint condition if you never see it without the case?
I think Go has big potential, especially with those who now code C++ or Java but also with some users of dynamic typing languages. I have a feeling Go is here to stay for a while.
Also, if you ask enough people the same thing you are going to get stupid answers from someone, even people who aren't stupid.
I'm waiting for a mature GUI library to start something serious in Go.
What is an example of a use case for generics that can't be done, or is significantly less convenient to do, with interfaces? It sounds like there is at least some thought that generics may be included at some point, but I really haven't missed them thus far.
That's 8 long weeks to wait, compared to the 3 minutes it takes for thieves to get away with the car...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DshK4ZXPU9o
This was the most self serving, disingenuous, logically unsound sentence I've read in the past few days.

Firstly - "isn't necessarily a competition". A half truth. The rest of the time it is a competiton and is bloody damned important.

In classes graded on a curve? Percentile based rankings?

What about a country like India or Japan or any country where competitive exams determine your chance to gain an extremely competitive seat?

This becomes more pernicious in a country which is trying to build an educated populace.

Who is going to have access to these drugs in a third world country?

Aside from a few outliers, let's agree that that subset of people with the means and knowledge won't be the chap who doesn't get three square meals a day.

it entrenches older families/competitors with money unfairly
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Yeah, it basically makes the answer to the original question an emphatic "No".
This is basically a type of youtube radio, in which you just have to provide one video of your liking, and the player does the rest. It automatically picks best match related video and plays it automatically.

I dont think its currently possible on youtube, and more over youtube is'nt meant to do this.
"C will always have its place but Ruby and Python code bases will go to Go."

Not in the web world. Go will take programmers from the C/Java camp, but not many from the ruby/python camp.

Not even one in a hundred startups will use Go as their main programming language. Ask PG to confirm.

I am an early golang user and once in a while play with it to try new stuff, but still coding everything else in python.

To answer the question: Yes for systems work, No for web work.