iLoch

Snap's data has real value, like Facebook's. For most of their users, they have a large portion of their phone's contacts (whether you opt in or not is irrelevant due to your contacts opting into this + a network effect.) They also have media preferences based on what articles you're watching/reading. They also know who you're most interested in (who's stories you're watching most, and who you send/receive snaps from the most) and what their interests are, so they can potentially infer interests from that too, even if you don't read articles. They have location data turned on for most of their users thanks to geo filters, and if they've been "good" data miners, they're sending your facial mapping home when you do a face filter effect. I'd be surprised if Snap doesn't have the most comprehensive faces database out there with all the angles they get from selfies (though they may not have the most unique faces.)

Oh yeah, and they also have the perceived privacy that Facebook doesn't have. Deleting messages doesn't actually delete them, but it just feels better when they're gone, so people are more candid on Snapchat.

Not to mention they've also done an excellent job monetizing their features thus far, with very little intrusion that I've noticed as a user. You get the occasional ad when you're looking through stories, but most of the money is coming from things like sponsored content and geo filters, which users don't complain about.

Why Cloudbleed and not Cloudburst? Seems like a missed opportunity (though I understand it's a reference to Heartbleed.)

You must be familiar with the pizza story? http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2013/12/23/the-bitcoin-...

> More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes.

Doesn't affect the vast majority of users.

> But I realize I'm in a minority.

Yes, your statements are pretty anecdotal and don't really relate to the vast majority of internet users.

I'm sure your setup works great for you, but it sounds like a ton of overhead, none of which is required if you have fast internet and don't give a shit about what's going on (like nearly everyone who uses the internet.)

So a couple sites go down on a single day of the year because they were unprepared and suddenly it's a bad idea to depend on CSS?

Seems like costly optimization with almost no benefit to me.

As soon as WebAssembly is stable and available I'm predicting we'll see a dramatic shift away HTML + JS as the target for most web apps. I don't mean blogs, I mean people who are trying to build websites that work like apps.

Most webpages today that would work fine in HTML 3.1 aren't built as massive JS web apps. If they are, it may serve a purpose (better UI/UX for most of their users being a major one.)

Absolutely, but those are secondary markets for most American businesses because there are an abundance of issues with delivering any application to those areas. Whether its political, cultural, financial, etc. Priority for most businesses and website owners is to serve the people you know you can serve first, then work on supporting those other areas.

Twitter, like most companies, exists to make money. If you're busy shaving off every bit you can from your requests, you're spending a lot of money. You're also losing money because I'd expect you wouldn't be serving ads, etc. as well.

Most blogs that exist to make money aren't targeting those without good internet either, so I don't really see the problem.

The concept behind Twitter? No. Twitter? Maybe..? They have a user experience they want to deliver to 9X% of their users, so they optimize for that. For most of Twitter's users, their connection speeds aren't the limiting factor in their experience. If you optimize for the lowest common denominator, that 9X% almost certainly gets a worse experience.

> Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection?

Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?"

> Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript.

No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands that it's total madness. The cost however, in supporting people so far behind as to only be able to serve them text is quite frankly unmanageable. The web has grown dramatically over the past 20 years both in terms of physical scale and supported media types.

The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications. Some people like to think of the web as just hyper text, and everything on it should be human parse-able. For me, as someone who has come late to the game, it has never seemed that way. The web is where I go to do things: work, learn, consume, watch, play. It's a tool that allows me to access the interfaces I use in my daily life. I think there's a ton of value in this, perhaps more than as a platform for simple reading news and blogs.

I look forward to WebAssembly and other advancements that allow us to treat the web as we once treated desktop environments, at the expense of human readability. It doesn't mean we need to abandon older + simpler protocols, because they too serve a purpose. But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me.

Security issues aside, why wouldn't we want "WebVulkan"? I suspect there would be some interest from various parties in making a WebAssembly compatible cross platform 3D library. Being able to create something with Unreal Engine, for example, while targeting both web, mobile and desktop seems like it would be incredibly powerful.

I think you might be confusing Facebook with Google.

Ask any app developer that's used React Native or any web developer that's had to create a native app if it has a reason to exist.

Facebook has hundreds or thousands of React developers that - before React Native - could only develop for web. Now they can move their web developers to their native apps almost seamlessly.

I'm a web developer. We've picked up Microsoft Orleans for a large scale data analysis platform we're building. Realizing the power of an actor model on a mature platform like .NET has been a real treat. So many nasty problems go away: threading, messaging queues, job queues, caching, general scaling.

"Long time" React user, still use it on new projects, but I was looking at Vuejs in depth a little bit yesterday, and it augments JS and HTML in a much simpler way. That simplicity - to me - is reminiscent of jQuery to a certain extent. I'm sure it has its own faults, but not having to write a webpack config or download some sort of transpiling monstrocity for once was a nice change.

I think I'd probably agree with you on the "ship it ASAP" premise, but Vue could be a real contender in that category as well.

1.) Over time, the number of new players playing a game decreases, to the point where most writes will be updates. That being said, in some cases we have access to totals via the APIs, so we just do a replace/upsert.

2.) We tend to do a bit of both. One of the main uses we have for aggregation right now is for global-level analytics (ie. how are certain weapons in the game being utilized over time)

I think the second approach sounds more closely aligned to what we're interested in doing.

The trouble with any of these solutions (and this is where I sort of neglected to make my description of the problem more complex) is that their fairly one dimensional. The reality is that one player may have multiple characters each with their own stats, and we may want to track the statistics of each weapon of each character for each player as well. We may want to track all of this per playlist as well. The relationships start to get very complex, as does the data.

Avoid the problem: if you receive a flight delay notification, check the airline's flight status website. Flight logistics are complicated and in constant flux.

It'a not a big issue at all. I have moderate delamination issues in the top right of my screen (just on the black bezel) but it's not affecting my ability to use the computer so I've left it as is.

Great perspective, thanks!

Access to guns is extremely restricted. Canada is the second largest country by land mass, and thus police protection is not readily available at all times. In these cases, and others where protection of life is concerned, hand guns and other firearms may be authorized. There should be no instance where a common civilian is issued a hand gun or the authority to do concealed carrying. I've been in Canada my whole life, the only guns I've seen are on the hips of police officers (they all carry tazers as well as a first line of defence) and held by armoured vehicle occupants. I have seen one hunting rifle, but you'd have a hard time carrying that around in public. Permits must be readily accessible at all times while in possession of a firearm.

> I haven't seen where it is available in a scriptable API.

They're provided at `window.getViewMatrix()` and `window.getCameraPositionVector()`. See here: https://github.com/Microsoft/HoloJS/blob/master/HoloJS/HoloJ...

> It would be better to include an extension to the WebVR API to provide the environment geometry.

This is on their radar by the looks of it: https://github.com/Microsoft/HoloJS/issues/4 I've also thought about this.. Could be a bit tricky. The meshes are quite large and getting them over the bridge could be a bottleneck.

> Also, I feel pretty strongly that automatically applying the stereo rendering is a mistake.

This happens to be a limitation that (I believe) is specific to their ANGLE fork, which may change at some point.

Agreed, this would be the best way forward IMO. There is a benefit to shipping applications if you have a need to access other system level APIs. But for the general use case of rendering, well, it's a bit of a hassle to have to create an app.

Very similar to my work here: https://github.com/lwansbrough/HolographicJS that got no love on HN. :(

But I'm really happy Microsoft has chosen to create something similar - I had hoped they would. Their implementation seems quite solid, I wonder if it supports libraries like Three.js yet.

If anyone is wondering why you might use this, the reason is pretty simple. Before this, there was only two ways to build HoloLens apps: Unity, or C++/DirectX. DX is great but slow to develop, Unity is fast to develop but requires a ton of prerequisite knowledge, and it consumes a ton of RAM. Baseline for this project will probably be similar to mine (around 15MB) whereas Unity's baseline in my experience is around 10x that at 150MB. This is substantial on HoloLens, because the maximum amount of RAM allotted to any application is 1GB.

I'm looking forward to seeing this bring web developers into the new world of MR. I'll be interested to see if this can be coupled with React VR for rapid prototyping.

Yeah, it shouldn't. I found this odd too.

They're referring to Edge on HoloLens, and it's something I've thought a lot about to. Something like `canvas.getContext('webgl-holographic')` to harness holographic space rendering from the browser.

This uses the same engine, however that host doesn't provide any support for 3D. You wouldn't be able to write WebGL in it, for example. This library exposes a WebGL interface to the JS environment.

Similarly, I'd like to see a map of where the edits are coming from.

100kb * 100 tabs is 10MB. I'll take my chances.

I built this as an experiment to get acquainted with the Windows Holographic platform. I believe Javascript could be a great jumping off point for developers who are interested in hologram development on HoloLens.

There's a lot to understand when it comes to getting started with HoloLens (Unity and DirectX are the only choices other than this) and the ramp up time can be significant. A lot of web developers out there have experience with, or have played with Three.js. My hope is to bring WebGL and Three.js to HoloLens so the barrier to entry for curious developers will be as low as possible.

"Web fundamentals", headlined by Web Push Notifications. Good to know where Google's head is at.

It's practical for designers, which is what these resources were designed for.

My Mac just went belly up - a software corruption in my encrypted partition has rendered Mac OSX unusable. I took it to Apple, they spent over an hour throwing every piece of software they had at it. Their own diagnostic tools were freezing up from this issue. The tests that did run indicated no problem with the physical hardware, and indeed Windows runs flawlessly.

So their totally shit software destroyed itself and they don't have the tools to fix it. Now they're recommending forensic recovery and of course they won't pay the $500-1000 for that.

I think I'll be sticking with Windows from now on.