Hacker News Reader

irrelativeon Google Has A Solution For Internet Explorer: Turn It Into Chrome

Oh boy. Another browser to support. Thanks Google!

irrelativeon Ask HN: Javascript best practices?

Just my 2 cents: Javascript gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with. Personally, I try to stay away from prototypical objects unless the style fits very cleanly with what I'm trying to do. Otherwise,the best way I've found to keep my sanity is to pick whatever language you're developing the backend with, and use as many conventions you've established there as possible.

For me, this means my Javascript looks more like Python -- it can be a little weird, but switching between the frontend and the backend is easier that way.

I'd also recommend using objects as namespaces if you're not dealing with prototypical objects. It makes grepping easier - you can search for 'Graphs.init' instead of 'init' in this example:

var Graphs = {

    state_variable: null, // store global state somehow

    init: function() {
        // Some initialization code
    },

    refresh: function(img_element, url) {
        // some code to refresh the src url
    }

};

irrelativeon The Fall of Hacking

Absolutely. The smartest hackers I know don't even have something as self-indulgent as a public web site.

In my experience, hackers have always been the quiet type. Now some loud ones have changed what it means to be a hacker through popularity.

irrelativeon Google App Inventor uses Scheme under the hood

It's a testament to how rarely Scheme (lisp, etc) are used when a story like this makes it to the #1 on HN.

irrelativeon Python, client side: Skulpt

I was just looking at the source, and I want to compliment you on how good it looks. Very well done -- really organized and thought out with much less hackery than expected (which JS seems to have a tendency to bring out...)

irrelativeon Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

I can no longer understand the computer I am forced to spend my days in the lonely struggle against an implacable and yet deterministic foe: another man's APIs.

Having worked as an electrical engineer creating hardware, this seems strange. Obviously the computer designer had to create an API of some sort, even if they did it in transistors. Computers aren't given to us from above -- there are people creating them too.

irrelativeon YC startups unite to drive nail into the coffin of Internet Explorer 6

Really not trying to be snarky here, but I don't think too many grandmothers are using weebly or reading reddit.

irrelativeon The earliest version of HN I can find; 166 LOC

I agree completely. Even if I'm just playing around, the cost of creating a source repository is so small (especially with distributed repos) that I pretty much do it when I'm just playing with an idea.

If the idea grows big, it's fun to look at where it was when I started. If it fizzles, well at least you have something for the memories...

irrelativeon Review my startup: vistrac.com

Very nice, and very appealing.

Some impressions from the demo:

Resolutions appear to be backwards to what I'm used to seeing -- I'm used to 'width by height.'

Demo page says I've received 0 visits. Maybe make the demo page some live data for vistrac or something -- that reads strangely.

Oops, can't click around more right now... looks like your site went down.

(shameless plug, I run http://sitecanary.com/ -- check it out :)

irrelativeon Ballmer: Microsoft Will Move Jobs Offshore If Taxes Rise

That's fairly vague statement for a group of people that thrive on facts. What kind of jobs? Programming jobs? New jobs?

How much would taxes have to rise? 0.0001%? Or is there some room for negotiations? What if the US raised taxes more on companies that offshored jobs?

This seems like basic politicing at its best. Big companies are going to start playing taxes chicken with big government. By making blanket, vague statements like these, they hope to shape the conversation amongst politicians. There's a real conflict of interest when these guys start telling the government what's good for business.

irrelativeon 1 line CSS Grid Framework

I don't think it makes sense either, but it's not that far off from any other CSS 'framework'

irrelativeon E Ink bought for $215M

I agree -- the number seemed low to me too.

That said, how much of our idea of valuations come from web apps? I was thinking about the number $215M and realized the only reason that it seems small is because Facebook is valued at $6B, or YouTube was bought for $1.6B. Outside of software, I can't think of companies that are really valued at these amounts, unless they make power plants or airplanes or some other giant necessity.

Is this how much companies are actually worth and we're all just in such a ridiculous bubble that we can't see it, or did these guys get desperate and cash out?

irrelativeon Libraries versus Frameworks

That's a great article -- hadn't seen that before. I guess everything's already been ranted about...

irrelativeon Libraries versus Frameworks

I agree with you on premature optimization. However, once you've learned how the internals work, using that framework doesn't save you much time in the future.

For instance, once you know how databases work, an ORM won't save you that much time -- it'll just shield from the internals, which are what I find interesting.

irrelativeon Twitter to Launch Business Tools by Year-End

Call me skeptical but I suspect this is a stall technique, perhaps to implement some of their ideas.

Given their recent media attention and emphasis on new users, I will be surprised to see a business model any more innovative than advertising. However, I really hope to be surprised!

irrelativeon Scribd Invites Writers to Upload Work and Name Their Price

Ok fair enough. I didn't mean to put words in your mouth :)

I consider the music, movie and now literature based problem to be basically the same issue regarding digital distribution. Any problem that was present with music will be a problem with the others. I wouldn't be surprised to see iTunes selling books in the future.

If Scribd can provide some pressure to make content less expensive or give people more options, I think that's as good as Amazon's mp3 store was towards making iTunes DRM free.

irrelativeon Scribd Invites Writers to Upload Work and Name Their Price

I think you're right, and I agree. That said, I also think that most people prefer convenience over anything else.

iTunes has managed to sell an incredible amount of content, even though it doesn't make much sense to me or you. I think in the past I've overestimated what an individual will pay for the ability to Buy This Copyrighted Content. I guess time will tell if this model can apply to text-based content.

irrelativeon Ask HN: What Web frameworks exist around Python?

I don't know about that. I've written some fairly large programs in webpy lately.

Our latest site, http://sitecanary.com/ has the UI completely written in webpy.

irrelativeon Wolfram - what is the speed of an unladen swallow?

I think we all know the answer to:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=meaning+of+life

I guess they knew their audience enough to answer the obvious questions.

irrelativeon RIP Internet Explorer: 1995-2021

While it has remained linear up until now, I doubt it will continue, regardless of which way you think it will diverge.

If Microsoft gets its act together and makes a browser that people don't mind using (and I believe IE8 is significant progress), I could see that level off around the 50% mark.

Similarly, if Webkit or FF makes some tremendous progress or has some killer feature, I could see IE's share drop very abruptly. So far however, the competition has mostly gone for feature parity.

One of the things that bugs me about the IE6 browser wars is that the majority of outspoken people think supporting standards would help. In nearly all fields (with healthy competition) supporting standards is something you need to do before anyone will adopt your product, and then you get to worry about new features.

I think this mindset of standards compliance has caused FF and Webkit to not push more interesting ideas. Want to support a video tag? Do it. Just make sure you follow the HTML 5 spec first. That's where real innovation comes from -- for instance, the creation of AJAX wasn't a standard, but Microsoft adopted it, and the other browsers thought it was a good idea.

irrelativeon Ten Things Twitter is Not

I'm a little disappointed that Twitter has become the next big thing. Does it seem to everyone else that the next big thing has gotten easier and easier for the average programmer to make?

Google made sense as king of the hill, since it solved a relatively hard problem incredibly well. Then came Facebook, which solved a fairly easy problem, but scaled really well. Now Twitter has come along and solved a relatively simple problem, and they probably have the scaling issue figured out finally. Maybe I've just become jaded, but I thought we expected more from the next big thing both in terms of execution and difficulty.

irrelativeon India's richest men lose billions

Indeed. A year ago, Microsoft's stock was around 30$/share, and then this past year fell to low of about 15$/share. I don't think anyone said anything about Bill Gates losing almost half of his net worth (which is presumably still mostly in stock).

irrelativeon Ignore Y Combinator at Your Own Risk

You know you've made the big leagues when people write fluff pieces like this about you. Congrats guys!

irrelativeon General Electric Develops a 500GB Optical Disc

Well, GE is certainly interested in the copyright enforcement ideas behind this media, but there are still commercial uses.

I suspect that a fairly common use for commercial users would be medical imaging storage -- huge amounts of data, but rarely accessed. A few other pluses for medical applications: hospitals care about volumetric density so that they don't have to store giant piles of USB keys; they don't want to have to maintain electronics on a per-disc basis so harddrives aren't the best solution.

Just a thought, but GE usually markets towards industries with technological applications rather than computer technologies themselves.

irrelativeon Ask HN: Please review our project SiteCanary

We put SiteCanary in the user agent for that very reason -- we figure a really curious person could figure it out from there. That said, the fastest polling period is 1 minute, so we think it would be pretty hard to DoS someone with this :-)

Good idea with DomainKeys -- gmail seems to be alright with a reverse DNS lookup resolving to our domain.

Cheers!

irrelativeon Ask HN: Please review our project SiteCanary

Thanks kiwidrew -- great feedback. We'll these fix things and they should be out soon.

Cheers!

irrelativeon Ask HN: Please review our project SiteCanary

Thanks for the feedback. We could see that being confusing... we'll fix it!

irrelativeon Ask HN: Please review our project SiteCanary

Thanks for the feedback. Regarding IM, I think you need to add us to your buddylist for gmail (sitecanary@gmail.com) -- we'll make that clearer! Email should work always -- check your spam filter.

Cheers!

irrelativeon Ask HN: How to deal with SYN FLOOD and extortion

There are several companies that create DDoS mitigation hardware/software. I have good knowledge that Amazon (et al) use several of these companies for solutions.

irrelativeon Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python

Absolutely I'd call it a new form of literacy. The most impressive applications of computer science always happen outside the realm of computer science disciplines.