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skyhook_mockupson The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

Thats another Then... you could add

  - Then they said it didn't have an ecosystem of frameworks like OSX or .NET

the frameworks will come. It's undeniable that the web, and tooling surrounding it is reaching critical mass.

skyhook_mockupson The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

Looks like I didn't communicate too well. I wholeheartedly agree that JS is a real language. It's my main language and I've written tens of thousands of lines of the stuff. It has it's quirks but I like coding in it. My "JS as a 'real' language" was a tongue-in-cheek go at those who constantly criticise it for being a toy language. I've edited my original comment.

skyhook_mockupson The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

The last slide was interesting: http://brendaneich.github.com/Strange-Loop-2012/#/50

  - First they said JS couldn't be useful for building 'rich internet apps'
  - Then they said it couldn't be fast
  - Then they said it couldn't be fixed
  - Then it couldn't do multicore/GPU
  - Wrong every time
  - My advise: always bet on JS

It turns out that JS might soon be a mature language which can be used to build real apps. That future has arrived (or at least you can see the train).

es6/7+hardware accelerated graphics+ continued broadband adoption and speed increases (gigabit internet) make the 'web as a platform' dream a reality. I'd love to peek at Microsoft's medium term plan to deal with this.

Also: I wonder how long until we see a full replacement for something like eg:3DSMAX with GUI on the client and rendering done in the 'cloud'?

skyhook_mockupson Show HN: Shoeboxify is your shoebox for Facebook

number of IE10 users is a rounding error... why would a (presumably) solo developer waste precious time supporting it?

skyhook_mockupson Ask HN: Difficulties of a web app that sends out emails?

Yes deliverability is always going to be an issue. Sending mail from your own domain is really hard. For example, after jumping through all the required hoops to establish trust for my domain I still was going straight to spam for any hotmail address :|

I overcame this by routing all mail through google servers. They have a limit of about 2000 messages per day which may be enough to get you going.

skyhook_mockupson Dropbox dives into CoffeeScript

I think OP mean that }); doesn't on its own affect program logic, and, realistically if you're reading JS all day your brain is filtering those characters out for you.

The other argument is that }); is line noise and therefore unnecessary, which I think boils down to preference.

skyhook_mockupson App-UI

Unless it's a very simple game (very little animation, no physics etc) then a game that uses the DOM (and CSS) for game objects will perform horribly.

HTML5 canvas is definitely a possibility though. Check out http://impactjs.com/

Its a great game engine which will allow you to create all manner of high-performance games on iphone4+ hardware (i've never tested on <iphone4, so performance may be ok there too)

skyhook_mockupson Learn How to make a Single Element iPhone in CSS3

This really is excellent... shows an amazing level of creativity and skill.

Just bear in mind that these effects will incur a huge performance hit compared to bitmaps.

skyhook_mockupson Don’t drink the startup Kool-Aid – just find a problem and try to solve it

ahhh please don't give up on openexchangerates.org, it's an awesome service which I'd be happy to pay for.

skyhook_mockupson The Pixate Project: Bringing CSS to Native Apps

  How many times have you look into webkit or gecko 
  source code to fix layout problems?

That's not really the point. Let's use the Adobe Flex Framework as an example. If you bought into Flex 5 years ago then you're probably starting to feel a bit nervous. The reasons being:

  1. Adobe are themselves signaling that 
  HTML is the future by releasing HTML5 tools (Edge)
  2. Adobe have abandoned mobile Flash development
  3. Developer mind-share is firmly in the HTML camp.

Now, if the full adobe/flash stack were open source and there were multiple companies working on it, it would be less of an issue as the technology you invested into would continue to be supported. The fact that you, personally are not working on the flash/flex core would be irrelevant, as is the case with HTML5 and the open web.

  If you think a layout engine is complex enough that 
  need to be open sourced, you are doing it wrong.

I'm at a loss trying to respond to this. If you think writing a layout engine from scratch is easy then you simply don't understand the problem very well. Even writing a good text layout engine is very hard to get right, and text layout is only a subset of the whole problem. Not only that, but layout is an orthogonal problem to the one you're trying to solve (unless you're writing a browser or word processor), so the time you sink into it is wasted.

  native app development (Visual Studio, XCode) layouts are much 
  simpler and more powerful

It's simpler because the complexity is abstracted away from you by the IDE/tools. The actual (hidden) application logic driving the layouts is just as complex if not more so.

  The problem with HTML and CSS is that they are either 
  document flow based or absolute position.

Absolutely agree with you here. The document paradigm has been abused horribly to allow for complex layout on the web, and its roots are painfully evident - it certainly wasn't meant for this type of work.

  It's easier to do it right in native ways. There are much richer containers,
  control groups and docking options.

Agree here too. Having said that though there are great advances being made, the flexible box model being one of them.

  Oh wow, Javascript for layout, right.

That's sarcasm not a rebuttal :)

Going back to the original point, I think that CSS for native layout may be an OK idea, CSS certainly has it share of strengths and weaknesses. One thing this approach has in its favor is a low barrier to entry for web developers which may help bridge the designer/developer divide.

It's been fun sparring with you :)

all the best, eli

skyhook_mockupson The Pixate Project: Bringing CSS to Native Apps

  "CSS3 is just a standard."

That's a very strange criticism. Would you prefer a proprietary black box to do your layout for you?

  "Do you have a full CSS3 implementation embeddable in programs"

Another strange one. You can embed webkit and gecko in a desktop app.

On iOS the recommended way of getting formatted multi-line text is to use a UIWebView (webkit)

  "I'd rather invent something new layout engine than using the lame CSS way"

I'm guessing you've never actually written a layout engine before. They're notoriously hard to get right.

  "For example I want place an box A next the box B 
  on its right at the distance of 
  50% of the height of the box C on the left"

You could either use a pre-processor (such as LESS) for the placement of Box A, or if its position is a dynamic property then you can set it using JS.

skyhook_mockupson The Pixate Project: Bringing CSS to Native Apps

check out the CSS3 flexible box model... it'll blow your mind :)

skyhook_mockupson The Pixate Project: Bringing CSS to Native Apps

The new CSS3 flexible box layout changes all that. It's incredibly rich and designed to obviate the need for clumsy CSS layout hacks. Check it out if you haven't already... it is the missing piece for app-like layouts for the web. The incredibly complex layouts that can be achieved with minimal CSS and no JS is astounding. Pair this with text-overflow and with ~ 50 lines of CSS and some very basic html you can achieve wonders.

Not only that but it's usable today. Both webkit and gecko have very close implementations with only minor edge cases, none of which are insurmountable.

Not sure about iOS support for the new layout modes.

skyhook_mockupson First employee or co-founder?

wow there are a lot of things i'd do on a budget but flying isn't one of them (i'm very risk averse by nature)!

It really is refreshing to see a non-web start-up mentioned here on hn. Well done to you guys and I hope the negotiations pan out for you.

skyhook_mockupson Ask HN: Review my startup: Hackerfly.com

The marketing site looks great and I like the sound of the idea, however I was surprised to see this as a paid-for service.

This is not because it is data not worth paying for but rather because I usually start thinking about new tech at the start of a new project, and I only start a new project once every year or two. An ongoing fee for this type of aggregator seems hard to justify.

A possible alternative would be to open up the data for free and supply affiliate links to related books, tools etc.

Maybe it's just not aimed at a user like me.

All the best :)

skyhook_mockupson How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

At this point you are the product Patrick. The second you decide to monetize the patio11 brand (maybe by writing a book?) you're going to print money.

PS: write a book.

skyhook_mockupson Show HN: HackerNews reimagined without tables or center elements.

I give up on long threads. There's no way to know at a glance which comments I've already read which makes keeping up-to-date on a quick moving discussion so painful I just give up. A simple colour coding of replies would make it much easier to revisit a thread.

skyhook_mockupson Synthetic biology is heading for the cloud

The scary part is not the regulated market, but rather the black market. What happens when an unscrupulous mafia family starts doing DNA printing-for-hire?

skyhook_mockupson 4chan: Beyond one billion

I can guarantee you that 99% of America, has no clue what 4Chan, Rage Comics, lolcats is

I'm a high school teacher. I can guarantee you that 99% of kids 13-18 know what Rage Comics & lolcats are. The youth of today are the first Internet generation. They have spent their entire lives immersed in Internet culture. The true impact of this generation will start to be felt in 10-15 years.

skyhook_mockupson Just pay me.

I recently had a non-paying web hosting customer. 3 Months without payment for multiple sites. Finally after numerous warnings I replaced her sites with a 'this account has been suspended' notice.

Received payment that day.

Kill switches work wonders.

skyhook_mockupson Show HN: eLearning for teachers, not CIOs

Looks really nice. I'm a high school teacher. We use Moodle at my school. If I were to pitch this to my school how would I describe the benefits of this over Moodle? One of the highlights for us is a local install and AD integration. Does your product allow on-site installation?

skyhook_mockupson Marissa Mayer Employment Offer Letter

Well I'm from Australia, so I think there are at least another 5-10 public holidays that i'm not counting.

skyhook_mockupson Marissa Mayer Employment Offer Letter

Conversations like these make me realise how lucky us teachers are with our 13 weeks of paid vacation time.

skyhook_mockupson Fluid: A UI Prototyping Tool

Great job on the page linking UX. Very intuitive. I'm working on a similar product so it's good to see what others have come up with.

Good Luck!

skyhook_mockupson Two men wrote the original Adobe Flash in 1993 - where are they now?

I feel the rapid deploying of browsers is just increasing the fragmented world of html + js

Not in my experience. I've recently finished writing a fairly large and reasonably complex HTML5 app and getting it to work across standards compliant browsers Chrome/Firefox/Safari has been absolutely painless. In over 6 months of development I have (without exaggeration) spent no more than 8 hours fixing cross browser issues and this includes cutting edge and vendor prefixed stuff.

I think that flash still has its place... it's still way better at doing things like client side image compression/encoding and has very sophisticated binary manipulation capabilities (if you need those).

It really is a technology of the gaps, and the number of gaps that it can exclusively fill is rapidly dwindling.

skyhook_mockupson The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

I don't think that we will see totally autonomous cars _in_our_lifetime

Now you're moving the goalposts to suit your argument.

Supersonic flight was abandoned because it is expensive and prohibitively noisy. Will some set of obstacles also arise to stymie autonomous vehicles? Maybe, but we wont know till we try.

The regression in medicine is due to pure stupidity. Will the same or similar type of stupidity raise its head to block self-driven cars? Again the answer is maybe. Maybe not. We wont know till we've tried.

many, many, many people pay the ultimate price to prove you wrong every day

You misunderstood what I said. My point was that if a computer controlled car's computer fails it can be made to fail-safe. Shut down and coast to a stop. The same cant be said for planes.

Of course we will have scenarios of computers being mis-programmed and causing death. The point being that once a bug is found and eliminated it wont reoccur. Not to mention that a human will never drive as well or recover from trouble (such as a fishtail) as well as a computer. Our interfaces are simply too slow, clumsy, prone to fatigue, prone to mis judgement due to adrenaline etc. the list goes on.

I get what you're saying about optimistic extrapolation being a trap... but we don't have to extrapolate far from where we are today. The google self driven cars have already driven tens of thousands of miles with the only recorded accident occurring when the vehicle was under human control.

Not only that but Nevada has already licensed the cars for testing on its roads. Now you can argue that the testing is not 100% authentic. From what I understand the routes are pre-programmed and 2 occupants must be in the car at all times. But to say that this tech wont go anywhere for the next 50-60 years (however long you intend to live :) ) ... seems to lack imagination.

This isn't everyone using personal jet-packs or interstellar travel we're talking about here.

skyhook_mockupson The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

That's certainly a LOT better than I would have thought, although still depressingly short of the 100% reduction that computer controlled cars would give us.

skyhook_mockupson The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

Ok I see what you were getting at now but I still don't agree with your conclusions and here's why:

1. Anti-drink driving campaigns and counter measures don't work. People make the choice to drive while drunk when their decision making powers are at their worst.

2. The issue with human controlled driving goes far deeper than just DUI. The fact is that we're (collectively) just not very good at it. Even if you are the best, most cautious most defensive driver there's nothing you can do about some idiot running a red light because he was adjusting his stereo. Your perfect driving record is intact but you're dead anyway.

3. The chance of being injured or killed while driving are astronomically higher than the chance of big brother having the motive/inclination to want to remotely control your car (although I might feel differently if I lived in Syria - even then this is getting really close to tinfoil hat territory).

The way I see it computer controlled cars shouldn't be seen as curtailing freedoms, rather as relieving us from tedium and making us safer.

skyhook_mockupson The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

It would be interesting to know the injury/fatality stats for the kind of roads you're describing. If the rates are high (relatively speaking) then I would argue that yes a total conversion to computer controlled driving (when available) is the only socially acceptable thing to do. Public safety would trump your personal enjoyment of the act of riding.

Realistically speaking though truly autonomous driving in tricky (even for humans) conditions like you describe is probably a long way off, although within our lifetimes I would think. The other option is a total rethink of the city/suburb nightmare that we now live in. But that's a debate for another time :)

skyhook_mockupson The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

I'm FAR more frightened of being t-boned by a drunk driver than of big brother taking control of my car. Honestly can't tell if you are trolling or serious.