ender7

Things unfortunately get more complicated if you allow children of varying heights. Then, in order to know what content should be visible at a particular scroll position, you must first fetch and lay out all content that appears above it. Or cheat by storing that information in a cache somewhere.

On quibble: I don't foresee the market for luxury and sports cards drying up any time soon (as the author suggests). A status symbol is still a status symbol: the main value proposition of an expensive car is to be expensive [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Performance would always be my key concern with something like a general-purpose constraint solver. I know that LP is a field in its own right, but I don't have a ton of experience there -- do you think there's a practical path to bringing the performance up to a necessary level (i.e. real-time, <10ms calculation times for complex pages)?

Graphical layout is one of the most underestimated challenges in computer science. Programmers instinctively look at the problem and thing "oh, this is logical, I'll just whip up some basic principles and layout primitives and I'll have this solved in no time!"

No, you won't. Designing a layout framework is really, really hard. Designing one that is simultaneously expressive enough to handle all of the crazy corner cases that pop up on a daily basis AND simple enough to allow "normal people" to actually use and extend it is quite difficult. For example, the Android layout system is suitably expressive but totally mystifying to anyone who hasn't spent a year reading the source for View/ViewGroup/FrameLayout/ViewRootImpl.

The OP's suggestion that there is some singular, beautiful, composable layout system that we could drop in to replace CSS is, frankly, a pipe dream. Or rather, I would be far more convinced if he actually pointed to a spec or pre-existing system that we might base our new system off of [1].

I see only three real possibilities going forward, in order of increasing likelihood:

1. Someone does indeed come up with the One True Layout System (very unlikely).

2. We finally shove bytecode-level runtimes into a browser and let a thousand flowers bloom (even odds).

3. We keep incrementally improving CSS, adding support for various layout relationships that people need (probably).

[1] Elm's system looks neat, but it's not there yet.

The shocking, unprecedented, world-changing difference that the web brings is that on the web all you have to do is click a link and your computer downloads, "installs", and runs a program. No manual installation necessary, no upgrades, no installers or wizards. No delay. This process is safe -- the page is sandboxed and can't interfere with the rest of your machine. And these things can be instantly shared! All I have to do is paste a bit of text to my friends and it turns into another clickable link that's only a touch away.

Engineers frequently undervalue this feature, especially considering the things that the web give up in order to achieve it. So yes, it's a pain in the ass to get that div to align correctly but in exchange you get to run instantly and almost everywhere [1].

Relevant: http://xkcd.com/1367/

[1] Depending on your target audience, old browsers might be a major problem (China), but the browser landscape is rapidly improving in terms of a minimum expected set of features.

I suppose it's my turn to link to another effort in this area, liquid salt batteries: http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_...

They have the advantage of being much cheaper to manufacture, but I don't know how their energy density stacks up.

This reduces to the same problem mentioned above (which is essentially the halting problem). The browser has no way of predicting which elements you will add or remove these classes from.

Automatic preparation would be possible for transforms/animations that are applied in pseudo selectors such as :hover, but not in any other cases.

Style properties such as transforms can be changed at runtime by JavaScript (and frequently are for things like dragging operations). There is no practical way for the profiler to detect which styles of which elements your JavaScript will attempt to modify.

As an aside, I would highly recommend making a trip out to see Discovery if you are ever in the DC area (the Udvar Hazy Center is just a few minutes' drive from Dulles airport). They let you get remarkably close to the shuttle (close enough to touch, although you shouldn't do so). Also, they chose not to clean her up very much when they installed her (as is somewhat evident in the linked photos). As a result she retains all of her scars from usage and re-entry, which I think makes her feel both much more real and fantastical.

There are plenty of reasons to switch to another host from Gmail, but this oft-expressed one is not great:

"Getting my data back under control

In the past months we’ve had a lot of scary revelations about privacy violations, the biggest being of course the NSA spying scandal. It became urgent to regain control of my data."

If someone else is hosting your e-mail, then you do not have your data "under your control". A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process (as they should be able to, to be honest). Additionally, there's no evidence that FastMail (or any other e-mail provider) is better protected from NSA infiltration [1].

It seems like the author has plenty of other reasons to switch, but this one lends nothing but a false sense of security [2].

[1] Possible exceptions being Lavabit-esque systems that do client-side encryption or Google itself, which has begun encrypting their internal as well as external traffic.

[2] Not that I really recommend running your own e-mail server either. Setting one up (and maintaining it) is so error-prone that you're probably even less safe than before.

This is sort of like saying the perfect phone is fundamentally devastating to Apple's business model since it would never break and you'd never need another one. Both situations might some day arise, but until then both Google and Apple have great incentive to improve their core products.

I don't really see how the title of the article matches its contents. Sure, they figured out how to super-impose the NSA logo onto stock photos of Google, but you usually need actual evidence in order to report on something.

The article's claims seem to be:

- The NSA is in communication with tech companies and is attempting to make friends with them (duh).

- The NSA worked with unrelated tech companies to maybe-maybe-not fix a BIOS issue (why is this in the article?)

- The NSA periodically invites Brin and Schmidt to "security conferences" where they are presumably cozied up to by second-tier brass. Brin and Schmidt don't seem to think much of these invitations as they both declined the one that Aljazeera managed to get its hands on.

So, uh, what?

The only problem for GitHub now is finding a way to attract talent. If your best response to

"You have a hostile work environment."

is

"We don't have a provably illegal hostile work environment."

then that doesn't inspire great confidence when evaluating it as a place to work.

"We didn't do anything illegal, or that would leave us vulnerable to a lawsuit" is about the only content that this blog post contains.

While Horvath characterized much of her woes as being gender-related [1], the investigation could have classified most of them as either unprovable or terrible-but-not-provably-sexist (in particular, the behavior of the Preston-Werners).

I doubt it will ever be clear what actually happened. Theresa Preston-Werner's response [2] spends more time avoiding topics than actually covering them. Tom Preston-Werner likewise [3] makes sure to reinforce the fact that GitHub is immune to lawsuit while providing no real details. I'm sure there are plenty of GitHub employees who have a strong opinion, but enough of them seem to have an ax to grind in one way or another that it's hard to trust that testimony.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

[2] https://medium.com/p/2fe173c44215

[3] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2014/04/21/farewell-github-hel...

Can anyone proffer an opinion on Chris Beard as the new CEO? Is he a good choice, or should this remain an interim position? I don't know anything about him.

"Accepting each other's beliefs" seems like a simple solution, but it has a very problematic result. To LGBT Mozillians, this becomes "you must respect beliefs that say that you are a second-class citizen."

No one should feel like they must respect beliefs that devalue their person.

The misunderstanding was not the price of the clickbait, it was the intention. boyd does provide a very careful definition of sexism buried at the addenda to her article, but that explanation did not appear with the original article when it was published. boyd even admits this, saying that a more accurate title would have been "Is Oculus Rift unintentionally discriminating on the basis of sex?".

"Sexist" is an emotionally charged term, and when you use it out of context the reader will assume its most common meaning, not the more academically accurate one. boyd knew this and decided it was better to rile people up than let her article go unnoticed. I can't even fault her, to be honest -- I just don't like manipulative headlines (or writing in general), even when used for a justified end.

Ugh, I wish we didn't need such a rage-baiting title to talk about this. I'm not a huge fan of danah's methods [1], but then againit's hard to argue with her results.

danah is right that her findings are not at all conclusive. I'm somewhat doubtful that the root cause is what she suggests, but the problem itself seems to be very real. I'm quite excited to see if we can find a solution, as it may have broader-reaching effects. Could this allow people who get motion sick even from 2D presentations to enjoy them sickness-free?

[1] Labeling a company and its engineers as sexist for not being aware of certain, extremely obscure research is unfair to say the least. But, you know, institutional and implicit biases in subconscious power structures etc. etc.

Two thoughts:

- Brendan Eich is a great guy and I suspect would have been a great CEO and done good things for the company.

- I fully respect the actions of Mozilla employees who did not want someone with Eich's opinions as their CEO. It's all very well to "respect the opinions of others" but when the opinion in question is that you should be treated as a second-class citizen, that you are not as good as other kinds of people, then that becomes very problematic if that opinion is being held by your superior. If that superior is in fact the CEO, someone who is the "face" of the company, provides leadership, and rallies the troops, then it becomes even worse.

I find both statements above to be true, despite the fact that they are at odds with one another. Humans are complicated.

If this were any other company I don't think this would turn any heads. However, much of Mozilla's ethos and community support is built on ethical rather than capitalistic foundations. It's hard to reconcile thoughts on a company that seems to so value freedom in some areas but not in others [1].

[1] Inferring what Mozilla values based on the opinions of its CEO is not particularly fair, but then again I'm not sure it's unfair either.

US education has both private and public aspects. Private schools are, surprisingly, almost unregulated in terms of the content that they must teach (high school students are required to take one class in American History).

Public education is administered at the county level (if you can believe it). States have a decent amount to say with regards to what schools teach; the federal government does not. This system is not great for a variety of reasons (primarily the fact that education quality varies astronomically from county to county), but it does mean that "propaganda in schools" is hard to effect from a centralized location.

1TB for $10/mo is a big deal for me and I imagine that the 100GB for $2/mo plan is a big deal for the average user.

Once you push a change to a public repo, you should not change it. It sucks that it's broken, but that's your fault; you should either roll back your change or submit a second change that fixes it. However, you shouldn't rebase your second change onto your first one. There be dragons.

If you want to have a perfect public repo history, you can revert your change, fix it in private, then push the modified version to the public repo.

In the trademark world you are arguing that "npm" has become "genericized" [1]. That certainly can happen, but that would be a very hard argument to make given npm's relative youth and the lack of true use as a generic. The people you link are either forking the actual npm client (in which case they are referring to it as a proper noun), or are building their own repo architecture, in which case they refer to it as an "npm registry" or "npm repository", not just "an npm".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

Despite the fact that Laszlo is the head of HR, engineering is in charge of its own hiring procedures. I would take all of this with a giant grain of salt.

The game business is like the movie business in that projects are "seasonal" rather than a constant thing. Unless you are working on a tight little indie game or a recurring blockbuster series (Call of Duty, Madden), the number of people that are required at any one time in development is incredibly variable. "Pre-production" headcounts need to be very small because the devs are still figuring out what the game is and so don't have anything for an army of artists or engineers to do.

Programming jobs in the games industry (and the entertainment industry in general) are not like "normal" programming jobs, despite the fact that they require an almost identical skill set. Put another way, they require the skills of a programmer but function on the employment schedule of a Hollywood lightning technician.

(It sounds like the company your friend worked at was also mismanaged on top of this cycle, which always makes things worse. Sometimes very much worse.)

git's CLI design is byzantine and inconsistent, with terms that are both overloaded and underloaded (many commands do multiple, unrelated things while at the same time many common tasks do not have commands). It's very easy for newcomers to place their local repo into a limbo or failure state that they can't get out of without consulting a git guru. git's error messages and man pages are written for its developers, not for its users. git's overall CLI structure maps poorly onto its underpinnings, half-hiding parts and not explaining the rest. Pushing and pulling have really bizarre default behavior that easily confuse those who have not carefully studied how they work.

git is extremely powerful and is, buried underneath its abysmal UI, a thoughtful and elegant work of engineering. However, as a product it's incredibly difficult to explain to other people. Until you've invested a thoroughly unnecessary amount of time learning its gotchas, quirks, and vagaries it is a monumental pain in the ass to use.

(Don't get me wrong, I use git all the time and appreciate its power. I just wish Linus has asked someone else to design the CLI.)

The debate over spaces vs. tabs is as old as time. Associating one side of the argument with "top-down corporate numbnuttery" betrays a lack of familiarity with the issue.

The fact is that whatever shop you work at should have an opinion one way or the other, and you should follow it. Programmers will endlessly bikeshed the issue regardless of which style is chosen.

As someone who has used similar tech, I can vouch for the fact that the immersion really is on a completely different level. Vertigo can be especially unsettling. In my demo there was a large hole in the floor and I found myself physically unable to walk over it, despite knowing that it wasn't real.

Edit: on reflection, the sensation was remarkably similar to how it feels when dreaming. Signals from the real world can intrude on your experience (e.g. running into physical objects can cause pain in dreams), but it doesn't break the feeling of immersion. There's that strange mental transition point in a dream where you get dunked under water but realize that you can still breathe; the same thing happens in VR.

Be careful when flinging bias accusations around; the author is not actually from the US/UK [0].

In addition, while .NET methods will work correctly for "ØÆÅ", they have incorrect behavior when it comes to any characters that lie outside the BMP, which includes many CJK characters. So, .NET only meets your requirements if you never interact with such languages.

[0] http://www.utf8everywhere.org/#faq.anglophile