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iSoron

130 karma · joined July 1, 2016

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iSoron··on Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell
Loop Habit Tracker: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

Open-source Android app for creating and maintaining long-term positive habits. We have more than 5 million downloads, but zero revenue and near zero recurring costs (no servers, since the app is offline-only for privacy reasons).

iSoron··on Faster Ruby: Thoughts from the outside
I see it as a pendulum. In the old times, we used to write web applications in CGI, where there was no fixed structure whatsoever; the application programmer was responsible for creating the entire web stack with their own bare hands. Then the pendulum started swinging towards more structured frameworks and reached a peak with J2EE, where the application programmer only had to write a tiny piece of code (servlet) that went into a massive framework (servlet container), in a language that had a huge standard library (Java), following clear industry standards (e.g. JavaBeans, design patterns). By the time Rails appeared, the pendulum had started swinging back towards less structure and less formalism. Rails was still a framework, with a strong set of conventions, but it was quite simplified compared to J2EE. The pendulum then continued and people switched to Node.js, which was much more barebones and flexible than Rails. Right now, the pendulum seems to be reaching the opposite extreme with Go, where not only there isn't a framework, but there also isn't a virtual machine (everything is compiled to native code), the language itself is almost as simple as C, and there is barely any standard library.
iSoron··on Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
If this is such a great idea, I would recommend the author of this proposal to work instead on a transpiler that converts the proposed javascript-only websites into a mix of HTML+CSS+js. If the idea catches on and, at some point in the future, people start using the transpiler almost exclusively, then the web browser developers could add direct support, and even eventually phase out support for legacy individual HTML/CSS/js files. Another benefit of implementing a transpiler first is that it would make the proposed javascript-only approach usable today.
iSoron··on You download the app and it doesn’t work
If Apple provided an official jailbreaking tool, I would actually consider this a valid solution, even if it voided the warranty on the device.
iSoron··on You download the app and it doesn’t work
> "That’s not what we want on the store" -- Apple Vice President of Worldwide Marketing

What if I own an iPhone and HEY is what I want on my phone? How can I override Apple's decision? If I can't, who really owns this device?

iSoron··on Ask HN: What can I do with extra electricity?
Instead of consuming the extra energy, OP could also provide it to another customer through the grid, by selling it back to the utility company. This would reduce the total amount of energy that needs to be generated from non-renewable sources. If OP increases their own consumption instead, those non-renewable kWh are still being generated and causing environmental impact somewhere.
iSoron··on Ask HN: What can I do with extra electricity?
You can sell it to your local utility company. You will get paid for it, and another power plant somewhere (maybe a coal power plant) will need to produce 1 kW less power.
iSoron··on Show HN: A Firefox extension to add latency to distracting webpages
This is exactly the approach taken by F-Droid (for Android apps). All apps available on F-Droid have been automatically built from a publicly available repository, and you can either download the binary (APK) or the source tarball that they used to produce it. Updates are manual.
iSoron··on Show HN: A Firefox extension to add latency to distracting webpages
Looks like an interesting extension, but unfortunately I would never install it given that "this add-on can access data for all your websites". As far as I am aware, this means it can read and record all data in all websites I visit (including emails, banks, etc) and record everything I type anywhere (including usernames and passwords).

Even if the extension's source code is available on GitHub, there is no guarantee that the code hosted at addons.mozilla.org corresponds to the same one found on GitHub; and even if I (or someone else) could verify that the code is indeed the same, and that there is nothing malicious in it right now, there is no guarantee this will still be the case in future (silent) updates.

To be clear, this is more of a criticism to Mozilla Firefox's security model, not to this particular extension.