Hacker News Reader

curiouslyon Bill C-51 passes in House of Commons

some mentally ill guy goes crazy, President of Canada hides in closet, patriot act cloned.

curiouslyon What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school?

you need to get new friends.

curiouslyon Sprint – A high-performance, DOM library for modern browsers

Hey guys found this neat little library

I get 12+ million operation (a true master race class) vs advertised 800,000 and peasantry of jQuery's 300,000.

Not sure if I want to sacrifice performance for aesthetically better looking (debatable ofc) syntax and bother investing time learning how to do something slower.

curiouslyon The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

or the game s.t.a.l.k.e.r

curiouslyon Unix swiss army knife for headless browser JavaScript

considering firefox userbase is many many times those of phantomjs it shouldn't be of surprise to you. especially when most of phantomjs issues revolve around the same issues, unable to render a website that you can browse fine with firefox or chrome. this is a consistent issue that has haunted the project since the beginning.

curiouslyon Unix swiss army knife for headless browser JavaScript

apples and oranges. chrome and firefox is used by millions of people. of course its going to have more eyes on it but when was the last time you couldn't render something in your browser?

phantomjs is used mainly by developers. you can't seriously compare it to chrome or firefox.

quick scan shows that most of the bugs showing up in chrome and firefox are very platform centric or esoteric issues while phantomjs is concerning because they are literally about being unable to render a webpage without crashing.

curiouslyon Unix swiss army knife for headless browser JavaScript

just run it with Xvfb, and you got a headless browser.

curiouslyon Unix swiss army knife for headless browser JavaScript

https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues

1470 open issues

the first one is about phantomjs crashing and many many other scary sounding issues you wouldn't have if you've used just a regular browser with Xvfb.

you can't really be sure unless you've literally run a test on the colorful variety of websites in the wild. You need a huge development and quality assurance team. You also need a way for a large crowd of people to test your browser and send back useful reports automatically whenever it crashes.

curiouslyon Unix swiss army knife for headless browser JavaScript

why wouldn't you?

curiouslyon Columbia Engineering Professor Invents Video Camera That Runs Without a Battery

fascinating. it gets its power from the light itself and is able to record it. still can't wrap my head around it.

curiouslyon Unix swiss army knife for headless browser JavaScript

1. Take open source library built on a fake browser

2. Write a wrapper around it claim its good as a real browser.

3. Plug company name

4. Profit ??

curiouslyon Unix swiss army knife for headless browser JavaScript

this reminds me of the time they removed the vulcan cannon during the start of vietnam war because they thought the days of dog fighting was over because of missiles.

Then their jets started falling left and right and they ended up installing it back again.

curiouslyon Unix swiss army knife for headless browser JavaScript

You would be able to do it with Selenium, which drives a real browser not a fake one.

curiouslyon Unix swiss army knife for headless browser JavaScript

Take headless browsers with a pinch of salt. They are not a replacement for a real browser. Don't be surprised when it renders or behaves differently from a real browser.

Did they fix the memory leak issues in PhantomJS? Take a look at the issues and consistently you will find people having trouble rendering a complete site.

Creating a headless browser is really taking a real browser on Xvfb. You have the support of a billion dollar company supporting and updating their browser, you reap the benefits of being able to run it headlessly. The drawbacks of this method is often overstated, 'oh my run a fat browser process AND X display? ok grandpa' but the real hidden problem with PhantomJS is understated 'why does my phantomjs process balloon in memory and cpu usage and crash, I can render the website fine in my browser'.

Standalone headless browsers are good for hacks but I wouldn't rely on it.

curiouslyon Ask HN: When do you know your startup has failed?

it's over when you quit. plenty of people work on their startups/business without a salary, sometimes for years. it's fucking tough, it's no easy street.

Get your shit together and then reassess, you need a roof over your head first if you wanna keep at it.

good luck.

curiouslyon WikiLeaks publishes 30,000 leaked Sony documents

Why don't you care?

curiouslyon Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

is there an open source streaming media server?

could you host this on digitalocean?

curiouslyon Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

can you use this to build something like twitch.tv?

curiouslyon Why the sun is a poor dumping ground for nuclear waste (2010)

omg....when I was 10 I wrote a story about how humanity takes nuclear waste to the sun. tl;dr results in nuclear apocalypse destroying the entire solar system.

curiouslyon Instant Cloud – SSD Bare Metal Servers

this is great. I just wish digitalocean would deploy faster. it says 60 seconds but more than often it takes several minutes to load a snapshot or destroying can take ages (since you are still billed for idle and off servers).

curiouslyon Amazon Machine Learning – Make Data-Driven Decisions at Scale

do you mean that it takes more work to do the stuff surrouding the machine learning like gathering data to build a dataset that takes months and other resources where as the fun stuff is actually very short and easy to do.

I smell commoditization.

curiouslyon Should Future Fighter Be Like a Bomber? Groundbreaking CSBA Study

well I don't know about that since operational history from Iran tends to be shaky in credibility. I mean they have no training and maintenance capabilities after the revolution when the American technician sabatoged the Tomcats as well as critical parts.

Even the two times the Phoenix missile was fired they both failed. Not sure how a completely cut off Iranian air force with no spare parts or maintenance knowledge would've been able to fire at Iraqi, an equally incompetent force, my guess is the Iraqi air force actually crashed before the Iranians did.

curiouslyon Should Future Fighter Be Like a Bomber? Groundbreaking CSBA Study

bullshit. you always need visual confirmation of your target by a human. no matter what foe-friendly system you implement, it's down to visual range ID. you simply can't do this better than strapping someone in a fighter. you can't do this without high power to weight ratio and tight turning radius for dog fighting scenarios.

we are seeing revitalization of McNamara's failed Standardization policy in all fighter. The very fact that completely different plan designs came out for different theaters and purposes show this. A-10 for low flying, heavy, armor shelled plane. Tomcat that withstands naval capatapults and fly long range with good fuel efficiency (variable swept wings), and eventually the Hornet vs. using naval F-16 or F-15

curiouslyon I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

well considering we still live in the industrial age system of factory owners and factory workers (concept of managers and even lean startup has roots in car factories), I would find it very rare that a non monopoly software business would view their engineering team as profit generators.

software and everyone involved in it's development are becoming commoditized via open source or money being injected by venture capital or a non-monopolized industry over time ends up on certain standards and margin falls for everyone.

curiouslyon I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

software engineers are also a cost centers.

curiouslyon John Resig annotates original jQuery source code

would love to see a frontend framework that uses jQuery syntaxes only.

curiouslyon If a Caller Says, 'I Am with the IRS,' He's Not

some job recruiters also hide their numbers for some reason

curiouslyon Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

it would be nice if xamarin implemented it.

curiouslyon Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

can you develop iOS apps in a windows environment without any mac machine? is there a cloud build service for mac that you can integrate?

curiouslyon Secret Service Interrogation of Wozniak (2002)

holy crap I just have a renewed respect for Wozniak. He is a true thug.