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dumbmatteron Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

In some ways it's limiting, but overall it's a good thing. Less complexity, less network transfer, works offline, etc. It's just more challenging to do in JS/HTML than in your choice of traditional desktop app dev tools.

dumbmatteron Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

It is a pure SPA, you just have the option of opening multiple instances at the same time. Like I can open gmail in two tabs, but it's still an SPA.

And yeah tabs in JS are possible and I might go down that route, it'll just be a lot of extra work to replicate a UI that already exists fine.

dumbmatteron Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

I think I might actually try this lol

dumbmatteron Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

That might work, but it's much more complicated and given the issues I'm already facing, I wouldn't want to rely on that communication actually happening (maybe background tab won't be able to send a signal to the foreground tab, since JS is apparently not running in the background tab).

dumbmatteron Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

I don't think that replacing a traditional desktop app with a web app is an edge case. That's one of the main points of HTML5.

dumbmatteron Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

Problem is, there is no server. All client side. So the tab on which you click "run simulation" is effectively the "server", except it stops running when the user switches tabs.

dumbmatteron Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

It is. But then you open it in multiple tabs, because that's how people use websites.

Unless I'm supposed to re-implement tabs within my single page application and then force it to only let one tab run, which I guess is possible but horrible :)

dumbmatteron Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

What are we supposed to do about stuff this? Like I wrote a video game https://play.basketball-gm.com/ that lets you open multiple tabs for viewing multiple screens even while simulation is occurring in another tab. But Chrome recently stopped running the simulation if it's in a background tab. Putting my simulation code in a Shared Worker would be nice, except Safari and IE will never support it and it seems likely to be deprecated soon. Service Workers kill anything that takes over 30 seconds, so no long running processing allowed. What do I do? Go back to writing desktop apps that nobody will install?

dumbmatteron Moving beyond localStorage

First time I've ever seen the IndexedDB API described as "delightful".

dumbmatteron Bootstrap 4 drops IE9 support and goes full flexbox

You missed the 2% on IE 7.

dumbmatteron Ask HN: Political Polling Methodology?

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-users-guide-to-fivethi... is a decent overview of the most popular forecast. There's plenty of other relevant content on that site, too.

dumbmatteron How Economic Gobbledygook Divides Us

Libertarians do make exactly that argument about immigration. And people who disagree make exactly the same counter-argument - that even if it is a net benefit globally, some people might not like the result locally.

dumbmatteron What’s new in IndexedDB 2.0?

Despite what some claim, Safari 10's IndexedDB is still quite broken, except possibly for some trivial cases (like if you only use one object store, or you don't use indexes): https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/545ylm/psa_inde...

dumbmatteron What’s new in IndexedDB 2.0?

What happens if you access the database simultaneously from different browser tabs?

It works fine. Transactions prevent conflicts. And you can even do schema upgrades because there is built-in versioning, and it provides events to let you handle when a version change occurs in another tab.

Also, is there some eventing mechanism to push messages through the database between tabs?

No, you have to do that yourself.

dumbmatteron What’s new in IndexedDB 2.0?

Here's the discussion on promises: https://github.com/inexorabletash/indexeddb-promises

The 2.0 spec is just a bunch of minor changes. Promises will be a big change - although I would argue it's way more important than all this other stuff combined.

dumbmatteron What’s new in IndexedDB 2.0?

That's actually not true in Chrome https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=457409 although it's not clear if that is a bug in Chrome or in other browsers. It would be nice to have more clarity on that, or an explicit promise API like https://github.com/inexorabletash/indexeddb-promises because until then it's really shitty to use - you have to constantly worry about cross-browser compatibility.

dumbmatteron Common prostate cancer treatment linked to later dementia, researcher says

This article actually does a decent job of explaining the limitations of retrospective analysis, unlike most articles about retrospective studies. See the "Retrospective complements prospective" section at the end.

dumbmatteron You might not need JavaScript

IndexedDB is actually not fixed in Safari 10: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/545ylm/psa_inde...

Hopefully they'll figure it out eventually!

dumbmatteron Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

The article does mention it:

Brahe had theorised that all planets circled the Sun, while it circled Earth. Locher noted that Brahe might be right, but what was clear was that the telescope supported Ptolemy.

dumbmatteron [dead]

I would guess that they tested how many sites it would break and found that mostly it just broke ads. And even better, probably mostly non-Google ads. That's certainly the only document.write code I've deployed in recent years.

dumbmatteron Safari 10.0

I don't own a Mac, but I'm curious if Safari 10 is finally good enough to run one of my hobby projects, and if not I'd like to debug it because it seems the feature support is finally here (specifically, IndexedDB).

Are there any better options than coercing one of my friends with a Mac into upgrading and letting me borrow their laptop? If not, will I have to get them to upgrade the whole OS like it's old school Internet Explorer, or is it standalone?

dumbmatteron Alzheimer’s treatment appears to alleviate memory loss in small trial

Several similar drugs have had similar early results and then failed in more comprehensive trials. Hopefully this time it'll be different, but I think if you polled people in the industry, most would wager that it won't be.

There is a large phase 3 trial going on now https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02477800 but we won't know the results for several years. They are still recruiting patients, so if you or someone you know has early stage Alzheimer's, it's worth considering.

dumbmatteron A century of trends in adult human height

I wonder if Guatemalan women were really shorter than African pygmies, or they just didn't have data on pygmies. Either way, seems strange to write a long article about extreme heights and not even mention pygmies.

dumbmatteron The Future of TypeScript Declaration Files

How do people using Flow handle this problem?

dumbmatteron Latest Safari 10 features

Safari’s IndexedDB implementation now fully supports the recommended standard.

It's been a long time coming, but this is pretty awesome! Although after their previous IndexedDB implementation, I'm still feeling a bit of "trust but verify".

dumbmatteron On Mother's Day, My Mom Asked Me to Help End Her Life

Forgery - require a notarized document, a video, etc. Tons of documentation, why not.

Duress - could apply equally to euthanasia today too, couldn't it? If not, then take whatever magical anti-duress method we use now and apply it to this.

dumbmatteron Bublé: a fast, batteries-included ES2015 transpiler

kneden is cool, but fairly buggy still. I wouldn't recommend it unless you just want to play around with it and possibly work on making it less buggy.

I believe most people use Babel to compile async/await to generators.

dumbmatteron On Mother's Day, My Mom Asked Me to Help End Her Life

Encourage people to plan ahead, in the same way that you should have a living will and other legal documents in place before you actually need them.

dumbmatteron A Virus That Could Cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and More

People with Alzheimer's would love it too, because the status quo is that your memory deteriorates and then you die, and there's basically nothing you can do about it.

dumbmatteron A Virus That Could Cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and More

Yes, except other drugs designed to clear the plaques have been tested and they've all shown no reduction in symptoms. So my flu analogy was not great :)

But it's absolutely possible that the prior drugs were all tested wrong or didn't quite do what we thought they did. That is not sarcasm, sadly.