Hacker News Reader

Or they will use it to track every video you watch and post it on Google+

Please don't spread misinformation; this doesn't happen.

All the while serving ads that are suited to your taste based on the video you are watching.

Yes, Google is able to show you videos for free by using ads. Would you prefer that they weren't suited to your taste or related to the video that you're watching? And would you prefer to have to see more ads because they would be less effective in that case?

timothyaon WebM for Internet Explorer

A lot of those still exist, just not in quite the same way that they did before or as part of other products. It's a bit dishonest to pretend that all of the functionality in the products you listed above isn't still available (for example, there might not be a "Google Dictionary" product anymore, but Google provides dictionary definitions directly as a part of Google Search simply because it makes a lot more sense to users).

timothyaon Open Source Google App Engine Clone

I wouldn't exactly say that AppEngine doesn't have much traction. Every month, half the world's IP addresses touch some service hosted on AppEngine[1], which is a pretty huge number.

[1]: And that statistic is more than a year old now (from 2012's Google I/O: http://gigaom.com/2012/06/28/google-app-engine-by-the-number...), it's a higher number now.

timothyaon Hacker News in the Terminal

To where?

As far as I know, the current version of HN isn't open source.

timothyaon GitHub's on your phone

I've been hoping this would happen for a long time. Most of the views look really good, but I'm not very excited about the code view. The font on the code is bigger than necessary, in my opinion, and the word-wrap on the code text just makes it really hard to read.

Displaying code on a narrow window is difficult, but I'm not convinced that this is the right solution. I'd prefer to be able to zoom out.

timothyaon Google releases first beta SDK for Dart, including 20% faster analysis engine

It's very exciting to see Dart reaching beta status. The project is definitely maturing, and hopefully this means that the 1.0 release will be in the next few months.

The Angular team recently announced[1] that they are going to start supporting the Dart project too. This means that if you're already familiar with writing Angular code but you want a language with some better semantics, better tooling, and a standard library, this may be a good time to start checking it out.

[1]: http://news.dartlang.org/2013/06/angularjs-announces-port-fo... , https://github.com/angular/angular.dart

timothyaon Retiring Chrome Frame

What were you paying for Chrome Frame?

Sometimes, it makes sense to retire products. And if you're not making money on the product, then it can be expensive to keep supporting it. I think six months is still a reasonable amount of advanced notice. No matter what, a small minority will be unhappy.

I think the real lesson here is: don't build something serious on top of a product you don't pay for and you don't have any guarantees on support.

timothyaon How JavaScript compilers work

My understanding (though I'm not an expert) is that the way the JavaScript spec is written, you first try to parse a line as is, and if you encounter a parsing error in trying to do that and the line doesn't have a semicolon, then you insert a semicolon and you try again. The end result is that it's a bit different then semicolons being optional; they are instead inserted automatically to try to recover from parse errors.

timothyaon SQL injection search

Is it an XSS if you can only make it output code to your own browser? I can already execute whatever JavaScript I want in the console, so what's the advantage of having the server deliver that code to (only) me?

I can definitely see the issue if the server saves the unfiltered input and tries to print that out for other uses, but it seems to me that outputting a raw $_GET variable will only go to the requester and therefore could only run unfiltered code on that requesters machine.

EDIT: Answering my own question:

This is a security hole because the unsafe JavaScript is stored in the URL for the page (it is a GET parameter). This bad URL could then be sent as a link in a spam email or similar. Victims clicking on the link would then see a page that comes from the legitimate source, but is running unsafe code compromising that user's session. This sort of attack relies on the attacker distributing the link with the bad code as a URL parameter, and is not a vulnerability that a user could encounter when just visiting that site as I had first assumed.

timothyaon Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

The team said at I/O that they're trying to hit 1.0 sometime this summer.

timothyaon Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

At Google I/O this year, Google indicated some interest in asm.js, and noted that since asm.js was released V8 has already gotten significantly faster in running asm.js code.

With regards to Dart, Google has said that they plan to get the language formally standardized after reaching the stable 1.0 release. It doesn't make sense to try to standardize something that's still in beta.

timothyaon Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is

Respectfully, I disagree.

I've written Java in plaintext editors before, and that is truly terrible. Dart is nowhere near that verbose. Dart's imports feel pretty lightweight (rather Python-esque) and the fact that the language has top-level functions and variables means that you're not always trying to juggle a bunch of classes and objects and interfaces when you don't need to. In fact, Dart's style guide explicitly recommends that you don't put things in wrapper objects just because you can. http://www.dartlang.org/articles/style-guide/

I really don't think that Dart brings in any more complexity than you'd have in a JavaScript application. I actually think it's a lot easier to hold a Dart application in your head because all the APIs have a consistent interface. With JavaScript, you often have a bunch of different libraries and you have to remember how each of them behaves.

timothyaon Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is

My only concern is lack of browser support.

Because Dart compiles to JavaScript (which can even perform better than handwritten JavaScript to perform the same actions[1]), it runs everywhere. You don't need the Dart VM built into a browser for your Dart application to work; it already works today.

What would it take to get these vendors to add support?

I think that likely they would want to see more applications written in Dart. If a big company (like Facebook, for example) wrote a large application in Dart, other browser vendors would see both that big name developers are using Dart for their applications and they'd see the performance boost that browsers with the Dart VM built in take advantage of[2]. This would make it more compelling for them to include a Dart VM in their browser.

[1]: http://news.dartlang.org/2013/03/why-dart2js-produces-faster...

[2]: http://dartlang.org/performance

timothyaon Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is

Here is what I think about Dart: it is huge and is another programming planet that you can't reuse what you already have (like thousands of libraries in NPM).

Dart has a js-interop library for the times that you want to reuse some code written in JavaScript. This video gives a good introduction to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFuCFUd2Zsw

And the most important part; it looks boring.

That's was a big design goal when they created the language. It's designed so that, for the most part, it looks and behaves like other languages that you're used to. You can pick it up in an hour or so and be productive right away. The Dart team didn't want to create some esoteric language with all sorts of crazy features, they set out to create a real language that people would feel comfortable using.

timothyaon Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is

IDE like Eclipse

You don't need to write Dart in the Dart Editor if you don't want the IDE experience. I happily write Dart in Sublime, and Dart has command-line tools that I can use to validate the code that I write.

But web developers, who are the primary producers of JavaScript, will happily stick with Node.js, CoffeeScript, or plain JavaScript.

If web developers are happy with the tools they have, then that's just fine. The Dart team isn't trying to replace JavaScript, but instead provide another option for web development. What I think the Dart team is finding is that there are a lot of people that are having trouble with putting together all the pieces just to build a web app. This is especially true if you are new to the web platform, and you're familiar with the development from other places. Dart provides a very consistent platform that you can build web applications with, and you don't need to worry about jumping through all the hoops that normal web development requires.

By way of contrast, consider Go. Go is (in my opinion) an extremely successful successor to C, in terms of its design. It fixes a handful of problems with C (strings, and I would argue pointer arithmetic), and modernizes and streamlines it. The interface system is fantastic. In terms of its design, I have nothing but good things to say about Go.

In a way, this is how I see Dart too (though Dart is a much newer platform, not yet out of beta). Dart aims to fix a handful of problems with JavaScript (like better scoping semantics, a built-in module system, better toolability and static analysis tools, etc.), and then also takes the existing browser APIs and modernizes and streamlines them (for example, all of the core browser APIs use a consistent Future-based API for asynchronous values, which cleans up a lot of messy code that you'd ordinarily see in JavaScript web application code).

Is it any surprise that Dart has failed to take off?

It's not at 1.0 yet. I still think there is plenty of room for improvement, and plenty of time for adoption.

timothyaon Chrome’s requestAutocomplete()

One of the best use cases for this is on mobile. Conversion rates on mobile are really low because users usually don't want to dig out their credit cards when on their smartphone, let alone fill in all their details on a tiny screen. The ability to just tap a couple of times and use their existing billing information (which is synced from their desktop browser) is a huge win. And as mobile becomes the more popular way to browse the web, I think this could be a pretty big deal for online sellers.

timothyaon Hangouts for iOS

I think they are trying to move more towards the long-lived conversations, where it shows you if the person is there and willing to be interrupted (the green bar), or they simply are not necessarily there to answer right now (because they are away from their computer, or they are in do-not-disturb mode). I realize that this is missing the middle "busy" state, but I don't really think that's a big loss. It used to be that when you sent offline messages it would end up as an email to them. Now when you send messages and they aren't in the online mode you can just assume that they'll see the message at the time of their choosing and respond then.

timothyaon Hangouts for iOS

Online users are shown with a green bar under their photo.

Inside the conversation, if someone is faded out then they are not there, but an unfaded image shows when they are currently in the conversation.

timothyaon Send money with Gmail

I've known plenty of people who have opened bank accounts in the US without an SSN. I don't think it's strictly required.

timothyaon Go 1.1 is released

This website now reflects it too: http://isgo1point1outyet.com/

(For those that don't know, this website was created for a talk about Go given by Andrew Gerrand. Code: https://github.com/nf/go11 , slides: http://talks.godoc.org/github.com/nf/go11/talk.slide#17)

timothyaon Go 1.1 RC1 is out

I guess this website is going to have to change soon: http://isgo1point1outyet.com/

timothyaon Google releases some Glass source code

There are many other RSS readers out there that are open source; having the source of Google's wouldn't be much different. And the part that would be different is all the code to integrate it with Google's infrastructure, which wouldn't be particularly useful to anyone who doesn't run said infrastructure.

timothyaon How You Can Do Cool Image Effects Using HTML5 Canvas

Cool article.

A made a screencast a few months ago which shows how you can move your filtering logic into a web worker so that the main thread doesn't lock up during an intense filter; it goes well together with this article: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDKoh0JDTJs

timothyaon Show HN: April Fool's Pranks

Gmail Tap is from last year.

timothyaon Issue 224182 - chromium - Chrome wakes me up in the middle of the night

I run into similar situations whenever I restart my browser. All of the YouTube tabs I had open from before start playing simultaneously (at any given time I often have some tabs with videos paused, ready for me to watch later). It's quite distracting and takes some effort to find and stop them all.

I think a good solution for both of our problems would be to not load any of the Flash content in a particular tab if the tab hasn't received focus since the application was restarted. Once I open that tab, the plugin can load at that point and then the video can start playing.

timothyaon Dart2js is faster than V8 in DeltaBlue test

Digging through some of the links, here are the sources I found:

The JavaScript version is part of the Octane Web Benchmark. The DeltaBlue component is here: https://code.google.com/p/octane-benchmark/source/browse/lat...

The Dart version of DeltaBlue is here: https://github.com/dart-lang/benchmark_harness/blob/master/e...

timothyaon Using 'debugger' to help in javascript debugging

Pro Tip: ‘debugger’ statements cannot be disabled at runtime

In Chrome, you can just press the "Deactivate Breakpoints" button in the DevTools and `debugger` statements won't do anything anymore. Closing the DevTools also prevents `debugger` statements from breaking execution.

timothyaon Why HN was down

This is a reasonable solution. While it will (almost) never provide the correct result (it might print out a cycle of comments until X is reached, or it might cut off a very long but legitimate comment thread), it would provide a reasonable guarantee on this sort of problem not generating infinite pages.

timothyaon Why HN was down

What assertion would you have used in this case? For every comment you'd have to iterate through all it's parents to check if there is a cycle, which seems pretty inefficient to do for something that should never happen (there are other ways that you could check for this problem as you go, but the only other ways that I can think of require holding extra state just in order to perform the assertion).

I'm for assertions when they are simple and don't cost much (especially during development), but it's not feasible to check every condition that should not happen.

timothyaon Heroku - Bamboo Routing Performance

Working closely with our customers to develop long-term solutions

Of the five action items they listed, it seems that only the last of them is about actually solving the problem. I hope they are committed to it - better visibility of the problem can help, but I'd rather not have the problem in the first place.