skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Native apps are by definition less portable than web based ones.

I don't believe it is that clear cut. I think you are ignoring the fact that native developers have frameworks of their own. Using Boost, GTK+, or Qt gives various layers-of-thickness over the OS so the native code is portable. Some, like Qt, also cover mobile operating systems as well as desktop ones. These frameworks are not young either; so while websites had browser-specific-detection-code (thanks to IE), native apps were already running cross-platform by leveraging frameworks of their own.
Well that's been the holy grail for a long time. But I believe it's also important to put the ability and literacy to build UI, and powerfully compose extensible high level building blocks, into the hands of the user.

The dynamic generation tools should be able to remember and apply the changes and preferences the user and their context require, but the user still needs complete control to easily make one-off special purpose "instance first" interfaces, and then iteratively generalize, abstract and refactor them into reusable specifications, rules, classes and prototypes.

By "instance first" I'm referring to the term Oliver Steele used to describe declarative programming with constraints in OpenLaszlo:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7756151

http://blog.osteele.com/posts/2004/03/classes-and-prototypes...
No, the web means web. Internet means internet.
But what should the author explain to Chromebook users? They can only have web applications on their desktop as an icon.

Actually I think they're doing pretty good with that.
Typically that is produced by lack of paid projects using it
If you were interviewing for such a position and came across this candidate, would they have a "very difficult interview?" How would you treat them differently, and why is that okay?
Youtube is an interesting choice of example, since in a way it's "just documents" - those documents happen to be video, and are surrounded by hyperlinks to other video's pages. The real achievement here was cutting through the intellectual property thicket so that everyone could have an in-browser video player in HTML5.

The first site I ever saw that used Javascript to produce a useful application rather than annoying frippery was Google Maps.

(Rhetorical question: why does everyone use youtube rather than hosting videos on their own sites? Unpacking this question will show the obstacles that "redecentralisation" faces)
I recently needed to build an internal GUI app - after seeing how much time it will take me to get a HTML client/server set up I looked around for a GUI framework in Python and I was thrilled when I found : https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

With Glade + Python 3 I was chucking out GUI code faster than the Visual Studio + Win Forms because there was no compile step. No over engineered MVVM ala C#/WPF for a simple app - load a glade layout file, hook up callbacks - bam everything works together. The MVC is already there because the content pipeline (model) is already separated and views are defined in glade files. I had a prototype functional by the end of the day - it would take me that much just to choose which tools to use if I went Javascript client/Python server.

Seriously - couldn't believe how fast you could get stuff done with it - everything works as expected, you get all the controls you need - no need to learn random stuff like that qtscript, no build process (this is actually huge !), insanely fast iteration (faster than web-dev). I always thought of GTK like some obscure C gui lib but the Python wrapper makes it very usable.

My only complaint so far is that Glade seems to be getting progressively slower as you remove/add stuff so you need to restart it from time to time (eg. once per hour) but it starts instantly so it's not really an issue.

Note : I haven't yet tried to get it running on Windows or OSX since we all use Linux internally.
>why should they if their excess production goes to subsidizing non-producers who stare at the sky all day?

There's a lot of room for manouver between 'everyone gets exactly the same amount no matter their contribution' and 'everyone must be productive (net-positive on the society) to sustain themselves'.

So, reasons you might contribute when even the sky-gazers can survive at a decent level:

1. Because the extra pay lets you do more fun things

2. Because you enjoy the work

3. Because the extra status you get from your work contributions is rewarding

4. Because you like the people you work with

5. Because you're one of the one in ten thousand people who can leverage the technological progress to make significant contributions, and feel something of a noblesse oblige

6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!)
Calling Stallman "Linux creator" is quite an achievement in ignorance when he explicitly refers to the os as "GNU/Linux" to give GNU credit.
Most people argue that technological advances made since Jamestown mean that we literally absolutely don't need everyone to work, because we are no longer an impoverished subsistence society.
This is how we get ants
We're all in this together, so you can either keep up this act of lying to employers and handing out resumes that put you one position below superman, or if you're quite capable and credentialed as many of us are, we can set a precedent. Walk out of obnoxious interviews - stop pretending to be the best developer ever on your resume - answer questions about shortcomings without apprehension (because we're all human and there should be nothing to hide).

Will you make less money? Probably, but you'll make the job field easier for everyone else and at some tipping point maybe jr. level employees won't have to pretend they have 5 years of experience for a jr. level position in the future and those people won't make less money just because they refuse to pretend to be superhuman during the interview process.
Your first paragraph now is aligned with my own statement, which is either that it's deliberate or accidental overwork. My conclusion was that people need to be able to recognize that there's a problem (either in themselves, co-workers, or employees) and be able to talk about it.

Your point is that people should keep this sort of issue hush-hush. It is in that where we disagree.

While it may be best for someone, depending on the circumstances, to not talk about such issues in public, your view seems to be that no one should ever do so. Otherwise you would have said "you need to be careful if you blog or write" rather than "you better not blog about or write".

This sort of caution happens often. I gave an example of public salary information, but I could have talked about unionization. The first person to propose unionization often has negative job consequences, despite the laws against employer retaliation. The people who want to change the statue quo often receive advice like "keep your head down", "don't rock the boat", and "know which battles to fight." But the only way to change, and hopefully be in a better situation, is to start doing it.

Your advice is to continue with the status quo, and you use language of social mores to make that advice. I strongly disagree.
> I think the Google IO 2015 web app [1] is a good example of what can be done on the web right now with minimal overhead.

Recreating the glory days of whole-page Flash sites, or those old Macromedia multimedia CDs?
> Sure, you can't write a great 60 fps first person shooter game for the web

you can, you know WebGL is hardware accelerated and there is Asm.js - even the Unreal game engine runs in Firefox and Chrome.
Just for the history, i stands for the (i)terator and not (i)ndex..
Using a feature in exactly the way it was intended to be used counts as a hack now?
Isn't that guy sorta missing the point of the first website?
How I Design a Website from Scratch (LIVE)
Startup's Journey from an Idea to 1000 Customers
>Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible.

Flash DRM replaced with another closed source DRM. No progress whatsoever. And now it has embedded in the browser itself, greatly increasing its vulnerability.
This is exactly the letter-based version of the "Dissociated Press" Markov-chain algorithm, right?

I'd suspect some of the perceived quality at higher orders (particularly for the source-code example) is just coming from the transition graph becoming sparse and deterministically repeating long stretches of the input text verbatim.
Historically, doesn't seem to be true at all. Local law enforcement likely cares far more about prosecuting you individually and has far more means to do so, than some foreign national agency. Imagine if Twitter was based within one of those countries that had a major uprising. Would the locals still be as safe using it, as if it were based far beyond the control of their country?

Not really anything unknown about this situation. There are many obvious historical incidents.
I know you're probably saying it tongue-in-cheek, but not really. I'm a fairly lazy person; it bothers me to no end. I wish I could do more work more reliably, but I can't (yet! growth mindset).

A degree of laziness might look like having your priorities in order, but they're not really the same thing
Is pretty damn perfect for a chemical process. Each replication of the genome introduces only one error on average and given that the majority of the genome is junk DNA (not just non-coding, but actual junk), the single error is roughly analogous to a speck in the margin of a photocopied page.
Looks like a fun project on its own, with a lot of syntax tree hackery going on, but I see no real (pragmatic) use since many of the AST hacks and use cases presented are in my opinion completely unwarranted and can already be solved by the existing machinery (perhaps with quite heavy use of the metaclasses).

As an example, instead of hacking the AST via macros:

@case
Point(x, y): pass

one could just do a (this example implies, of course, that there is a CaseClassMeta somewhere attached to CaseClass):

class Point(CaseClass):
fields = 'x', 'y'

Not only this is nicer, you retain full control of the MRO on the metaclass level and can adjust its behaviour as needed and when needed.

Enums, complex enums and class body nesting examples -- can also be solved via metaclasses quite easily.

Quick lambdas example -- is somewhat close to "whatever" Python library, this is probably the one case which cannot be reproduced as is without AST hacks.
>Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible.

What exactly is incredible about YouTube today (apart from it being a huge repository of videos, of course)?

That it almost works like a 2000 era video player, only slower and clunkier? The new fangled DRM? That it can bring a decent computer to its knees with the fans blaring playing HD video? The automatic non-skippable ads?
What is your opinion of the section-structured HTML documentation itself? http://www.w3.org/TR/html/ It's all neatly sectioned with anchor links and so on.
There was nothing "socialist" about Jamestown. Many of the initial settlers were aristocrats who had no experience of work, and no interest in it.

Unsurprisingly this didn't end well.

>If we create a culture that tells people they don't have to work to receive those benefits, it will disicentivize people to actually work.

We already have a culture like this. Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money" believe they're entitled to live off the efforts who don't.

It would take an outbreak of unreasonable optimism to claim this is the most efficient and productive of all possible systems - especially considering it's notorious for its many completely predictable failure modes.
The Superformula
Internet used by 3.2B people in 2015
Those were the historical and technical divisions.

Because http & https is ubiquitous and they have a defacto pass through most firewalls, the modern "web" is the "internet" as far as application interfaces are concerned.

The idea of a pure separation of concepts such that http is "documents" and some other protocol on some other port is "apps" is not going to happen. All those IT departments' security teams and Cisco admins at Fortune 1000 companies are not going to adjust their firewall rules to open new ports and protocols. The "http port 80" has become the "internet" on top of the old definition of "internet". It's not ideal but that's where we are today.
The Persian dream: An in-depth look at the Iranian startup scene
Show HN: An Isomorphic JavaScript Framework Faster Than React
Sure it's just me anecdotally, but I don't care about native apps versus web apps. I care about where the ship takes me not the arrangement of its deck chairs. I'll use the command line...or the address/search box...if it gets me what I want. Good user interaction and great functionality subsume widget chrome and when it comes to native versus web experience please feel free to do something else on my behalf whenever it means doing more of the things I care about and less time bikeshedding.
those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. watching the mother of all demos once a year is a sobering reminder of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

some better-than-most discussion here:

http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2015/04/from-the-vault...
Lack of support for shared state is no disadvantage! When you write multithreaded programs in a language such as C++ or C#, you try to impose on yourself the same restriction, in the interests of making your life easier...

(I haven't used web workers, so maybe they're in fact awful to use. But from what I've read, it looks like the right decisions were made, pretty much.)
> Look at a site like YouTube today.

And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback.

Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer.
There even are addons to export YT playlists to VLC and stream them.

pdfjs is great. but every 3rd scientific paper I read tends to be somewhat broken (missing diagrams/images) or sometimes fails to render completely. native readers provide a better experience and better render times.

>And mimicking native can often lead to bad results. But to go from that and say that we shouldn’t try.

Maybe sometimes it would be better to provide better integration with native applications?

Native applications and browsers really don't like talking to each other.
People creating a vibe in pubs doesn't feel like a bullshit job. They're providing a service to other pub goers, making it a more pleasant place.

You can't ignore pleasure and satisfaction of other people when considering a job is useful or not. In the end, those are the goals of anything we do; that the job does it directly rather than indirectly (by say improving industry, which makes life easier, which means people have more free time, which provides happiness/satisfaction) doesn't make it 'bullshit'
> If you don't believe in copyright, what do you think is
> my economic incentive to create original work, or anyone
> else's to commission/purchase such work?

What was your (economic) incentive to take the time to write that thoughtful and informative response to the parent post?
The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and tag hell to support said shitty frameworks and having to deploy massive fuuckton heavy sites for a simple blog post.
It also sucks hard for the end users : they can see their whole months mobile data allowance get pissed away on a couple of bling websites. It can takes ages now for modern site to finally work as it downloads so much shite. Some big name sites used to render quicker five or ten years ago.
At least in the past, you could turn off scripting, images and styling and get to the basic content, but not even that works now due to crap developers.
It all sucks. Diseased turtles all the way down.
Yes, open boundary conditions at the walls.

I am not sure what happens if you have two possible paths to the exit but one of them is wider, but longer. It might not always find the shortest path.

I like this main idea, because it is independent on the dimension and structure of the maze.
Meshly – “Tinder for nearby business opportunities”
I think there's a middle ground to be found here. What if everyone gets the necessities and some basic niceties, and the most productive get the rest? You'd be working for luxury and status, as opposed to necessity, but isn't that motivation enough?
32 day journey across Kyrgyzstan on horseback
I support the idea of a basic income, but only if it is a replacement for the system of piecemeal welfare programs and tax-breaks that we currently have. The entire system could get so much simpler than it currently is.

You get your basic income check for X dollars a month. If you work a job, run a business, whatever, in addition to that, you get taxed Y% on your earnings, excluding the basic income amount. No deductions, no write-offs, no tax-shelters. If you wanted to have a progressive sliding scale tax rate, fine, although that makes it more complicated than a flat tax.

HR Block and Intuit would scream, but if you could do your taxes with just your W-2 and a four-function calculator, how many billions of dollars could we avoid wasting and invest in a more productive sector of the economy?
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Pipework – Software-Defined Networking for Linux Containers
Sure it can. Look at a photograph, make a mould and find a freezer :P
I was just about to say this. If Linus Torvalds said this, I would be shocked and astounded (not because it's out of character for him, but because it's a very shortsighted point of view). RMS, however... Yeah, this is basically totally expected, and what he's been saying for basically ever. No news here.
I think a lot of the slightly crazier competitive types would be completely happy competing in virtual market games that have no real physical effects.

I'm totally fine with slightly insane people gambling and trying to out-deal each other, providing they're not doing any physical damage.

The problem we have now isn't so much that competitive people exist, but they're not just allowed to do physical damage, they're encouraged to do it to gain "rewards" in the form of tribal status markers.

As games go, that's not a winnable strategy, because sooner or later you run out of usable game space.
Critical mass: how nuclear weapons work
Stress makes the brain lose focus.
> ... TCPIP, DNS routing..

Also known as Ethernet protocols, nothing to do with "The Web".
What, using Donald Duck cartoons as evidence?
Those orbits are all outside the event horizon. Inside it, all you can hope to do is fall inward as slowly as possible.
To be fair, that could be said about most software projects.

Yes, absolutely true. The difference here is between "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", to paraphrase a certain renowned military strategist...

With Cordova/PhoneGap, it's easy to get the initial impression that you're dealing with "known unknowns", just the typical web development project pitfalls -- "This is HTML, I know this stuff".

When the "unknown unknowns" hit the fan, it's often pretty late in the development cycle, and so things blow past original estimates even though they were competently planned. It's just that the plan was for web development, not the shifting art of websites-in-drag-pretending-to-be-apps-development.
Not using A* ?
I've heard that Mark has money put away in the event of an IPO to reward employees for their loyalty (based on seniority), but I have no way of verifying that.
Of course some people need more than just basic income to survive - if your medical expenses are 10x basic income, and you cut out all other welfare, how are those people meant to compensate?

There are some kinds of welfare that you can replace with basic income, but not all of them.
This is sadly true, but I think collapsing the distinction between "internet" and "web" is annoying and needlessly confusing.

Maybe things will be different in the IPv6 world.
Things got bungled when Smalltalk used an old version of ASCII which had a backarrow instead of underscore. Smalltalk used backarrow for assignment and had no way to separate words in identifiers other than CamelCase. Smalltalk programmers kept this convention when they moved to Java, even though the technical limitation was gone and they could have used a more legible style.
It's far more common among off-roaders than you know.
> bad developers develop bad software

I whish this phrase would die and be replaced by bad "teams" produce bad software. I have worked on some projects with fantastic developers, but awful or no UX, or a misguided vision, rushed to market etc etc.

I have also worked on projects with awful awful code base but the end product is actually alright (so long as it doesn’t need any maintenance).

Perhaps we should flip it on it's head and say, "good technology doesn't guarantee good software".
So, is a HTTP (Hypertext Transfer...) REST API used by a native mobile app "web" or not?

How about a native app based on a "web view" that uses HTML, CSS, JS, etc. (the whole W3C stack) and doesn't even talk to HTTP/S but uses some other port and transport mechanism?
10 must-haves for your van
How to Write GWT Generators by Christian Goudreau
As an aside:

"[T]hey believed that after a slight economic adjustment the gradual elimination of slavery would create a more diverse and dynamic economy."

It's amazing to me how close we came to having a totally different society.
> The car works best as a transportation device.

This is only true if you constrain the "car" to mean the Henry Ford, transport-centric engine-and-chassis.

The "car" also means the whole transportation stack: pavement, asphalt, road signaling, etc. In that case, the car is a foundation tool for anything that transports people or inanimate objects. To say the "car works best as a transportation device" is like saying "the electricity grid works best as a lightbulb platform." We've gotten past the historical motivations of a horseless carriage and have done other things with it.
Show HN: Vizito is a solution to register, track and manage your visitors
If you really need to get across firewalls UDP sockets provide much better functionality than HTTP.
Because we are playing the game. Some call it presenteeism, other call it face time, some even view it as the boss owning your ass during the work hours. But basically, we don't really give a fuck for the organisation, for the team, for the project, for the job. We just do enough to keep the gig until something better rolls along.
We know you would have no hesitation to cut jobs and other such when it suits, so don't expect any more from us.
To a certain extent, I think this is true. Many mobile sites still need to be more engaging, but they need to do it by taking advantage of their strengths - server side rendering, a nice easy way to stylize (think CSS is bad? try styling your application in Android's framework, or WPF for that matter) - rather than going the route of the "SPA". Once a web app tries to look and feel like a native app, other things out of the web app developer's hands are going to make his app always look inferior. In fact, it may be some of those strengths I listed earlier.
End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies [pdf]