HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

kumar303

409 karma · joined March 22, 2011

submissionscomments
kumar303··on Swift is Open Source
I think they will co-exist as separate languages for separate problem-solving approaches. Go has first class support for channels and duck-type interfaces, for starters.
kumar303··on Fxpay: Mozilla's JavaScript library for in-app payments
Also, nothing on Firefox OS would stop developers from using any payment processor they wish to. It's all just web technology running on a mobile device so there are many payment providers to choose from, especially for US and European users.
kumar303··on Fxpay: Mozilla's JavaScript library for in-app payments
Actually you can [theoretically] put a charge on your phone bill from desktop but there are some open bugs around this and it's not a high priority use case for us. The main case for desktop is credit card processing.
kumar303··on Fxpay: Mozilla's JavaScript library for in-app payments
The main reason Mozilla built a payments service and offered a custom library for developers vs. recommending Stripe (etc.) is because no one supported the direct operator billing we needed in our Firefox OS launch countries with a developer friendly interface.
kumar303··on New Search Strategy for Firefox
The deal is only for the default engine. Firefox users are still free to switch it to Google, Duck Duck Go, or Yandex or anything
kumar303··on Matchstick Brings Firefox OS to Your HDTV
I signed up for a dev unit but the "early prototype" part makes me think it won't work all that well ;) We'll see.
kumar303··on Matchstick Brings Firefox OS to Your HDTV
No commercial Firefox OS devices are shipping in any English speaking country. It looks like you're finding community blog posts probably clustered around launch countries. Anyway, press releases are always announced in English here: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/category/press-releases/
kumar303··on Diaspora social network cannot stop IS posts
I'll admit I'm somewhat conflicted. You can arrive at similar conclusions thinking about it as child pornography. In both cases it does seem like censoring the material is the right thing to do.

However, my conflict comes from the fact that censorship doesn't really solve the root problem. In child molesters, the problem is better treated in psychiatric care and in extremism the problem is better treated through education, peace, and tolerance.

kumar303··on Amazon Cognito
Yes. Firebase. I think Firebase is interesting because they focus on realtime data which is crucial for a lot of apps these days.
kumar303··on Firefox OS Apps run on Android
It won't be integrated into Android very well though; you can't kill the process, you can't check its resources, it's not in the task switcher, etc, etc
kumar303··on Firefox OS Apps run on Android
If you build an app with Cordova you can easily get stuck in their APIs. If you build a Firefox OS web app you get stuck in Mozilla's APIs :) BUT Mozilla is making a strong effort at standardization and is working with Chrome and others to reach consensus. Cordova strays farther away from stable HTML5 APIs than Mozilla does so in Firefox OS you will definitely be building a more webby app. I.E. some HTML5 APIs work great on mobile, no reason to use a custom Cordova one in many cases.

However, if you need rich cross platform support for your app (like iOS) I'd still suggest going with Cordova. There is a Firefox OS backend! https://github.com/apache/cordova-firefoxos

kumar303··on Firefox OS Apps run on Android
Yeah, a lot of web APIs have implementations that connect directly to the Android equivalent. When writing a web app you'd always use a "web" API though. Some of those APIs are still very new and Chrome and Mozilla haven't reached consensus yet so you'd have to deal with prefixing and what not.

Mozilla's APIs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API

kumar303··on Marc Andreessen says Snowden is a traitor
"The fallout from the Snowden leaks have hurt U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas"

What an idiotic, capitalistic claim. So Andreeson calls him a traitor because "business is now harder." Huh? Nevermind invasion of privacy and injustice.

kumar303··on FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support DRM
"The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser marketshare"

misguided, as in, Firefox wants people to actually use its browser? I'm seriously surprised at some of these idealists failing to understand that normal people just want to watch House of Cards (or whatever) and that's pretty much it. Mozilla can't turn their back on those users.

kumar303··on Jest – Painless JavaScript Testing
Can someone copy/paste this into the docs? :) It was really helpful, thanks.
kumar303··on Salted Password Hashing – Doing it Right
There are many things wrong with this article. You can't hash secrets like this because hash functions are iterative. You should be using HMAC. Here's a good explanation http://benlog.com/2008/06/19/dont-hash-secrets/
kumar303··on PHP or ASP.net: Did I Do The Right Thing?
I had to make this exact same decision in 2001 and I chose PHP!

I subsequently fell in love with Python and am still active with it today. I think a choice as far back as 2001 doesn't matter too much, programming is programming. However, I feel like I became a better programmer by having to deal with a language as shitty as PHP. There were so many pitfalls that I quickly became an expert at working around them -- this took a lot of painstaking investigation into the inner workings of the language.

kumar303··on Clientside App Crypto-Currency Payments with Web Activities
Lengthier discussion about it: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.webapps/...
kumar303··on Ask HN: I have 89,830 sound clips of rare records. What should I do?
I have a sign-up thing that collects emails in case I ever launch it http://recordbox.com/ As I said, has some speed issues.
kumar303··on Ask HN: I have 89,830 sound clips of rare records. What should I do?
Dammit. After posting, I caught up with the feed of clips and just bought six records :( It turns up records like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCC0wgVXNpc Wat??
kumar303··on Ask HN: I have 89,830 sound clips of rare records. What should I do?
It totally would! Licensing is pretty tricky with this sort of thing though. Oftentimes there's some mogul who owns the rights but they won't budge on a price. Then if you use the sample anyway and they'll sue you.
kumar303··on Ask HN: I have 89,830 sound clips of rare records. What should I do?
Hah. That would last for days on end.
kumar303··on Ask HN: I have 89,830 sound clips of rare records. What should I do?
Cool, thanks for the info! Amazon S3 costs are getting high so it would be nice to get some relief
kumar303··on "Chrome-style" Desktop Apps that work today in Firefox
marketing/PR has been focused on mobile so that we can shift as much focus there as possible. The dilemma is that most devs are not spending time to make their apps work on mobile devices. However, a miniscule amount of people use Firefox OS on their phone so it would have been nice to use desktop apps to bootstrap the ecosystem.
kumar303··on Ultrasonic Networking via Web Audio
FYI, Web Audio is about to land in Firefox 25 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779297
kumar303··on Working at an Open Company
actually, arguing that fraud filters must be private is interesting. Would you make the same argument about keeping encryption algorithms private? :) The two concepts are similar but not exactly the same. Unlike encryption algorithms, a fraud filter is not bullet proof. It is just an alert mechanism. So, yeah, it probably needs to be kept secret.
kumar303··on Working at an Open Company
The idea of a completely open company is interesting. Balanced is not completely open (yet?) because there are still financial info and salary info that is not public. Gittip is an example of a fully open organization http://gittip.com/ where every single aspect is open. Personally I work at Mozilla which is not fully open but we strive to be as open as possible. For example, salary info is only public for board members, not all employees. Also, Mozilla needs to keep severe security bugs private until all patches are out in order to minimize wild exploits. It is definitely a challenge to be a fully open company.
kumar303··on Please stop serving .git to the outside world
or, to put it another way, please stop writing closed source software ;)
kumar303··on Mozilla should move Persona out of the US
To clarify more: Persona is not "moving in this direction," it has always been designed as a completely decentralized identity solution. The Persona server is just a boostrap to get it started so here's what you can do: create as many identity providers as you can! Seriously, put one in every country.
kumar303··on Firebase Adds PhoneGap Integration
I guess it would use a provided intermediate server like the one Facebook offers: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/howtos/login/login-for-...
Page 1 of 2Next →