Hacker News Reader

kirbysayshion Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web

looks at code, sees safety closures, function assignments, sequential var declaration

Ahh I see you are one of the old ways, of the lost knowledge :)

I am very nostalgic for this style of development, even though I do not miss it in a team setting at all!

Super cool app you’ve made!

kirbysayshion Visualize How CSS Rules Interact with a Page

Seems to be broken in FF 23

kirbysayshion Show HN: My 5-year basement Plan 9 project

I've heard of Plan 9, but I honestly have no idea what this is. But it sounds interesting... could you give a briefer to someone that is not familiar with Plan 9?

kirbysayshion Be nice to programmers

Something that struck me from your comment is that yes, there are more serious repercussions than others. The problem here is that the pressure and feedback from those repercussions is relative, and knowing this makes it especially difficult to accept tons of negativity. If a bug caused someone to die, and this was preventable (i.e. obviously your fault) then yes, you should feel horrible. Most of our jobs though, involve loss of money, not loss of life. The pressure to fulfill these tasks is therefore completely constructed. Success or positive feedback is simply that the people paying you continue to make money, the status quo continues.

Being optimistic or pessimistic isn't quite relevant when people's lives are on the line, I think it's more about being _realistic_. Everything can fail, and everyone makes mistakes. This is reality. When people can die, there is much more impetus to pay (time and money) for everything to be triple-checked and triple-redundant.

But in pretty typical software development, that money and time isn't there. And the feeling of knowing you could have done better, if only given a chance, is horrible and eats away at your resolve. Then you wonder, "well perhaps I'm not fighting strongly enough," or "People are coding for space shuttles, and I can't even get this page to load!"

I believe it's a human right that your individual problems are no greater than another's, because it's relative. If you feel about it strongly enough, then it's valid. Saying it's not because people's lives aren't at risk is invalidating the human right of pursuit of happiness.

kirbysayshion Writing Desktop Class Applications in JavaScript

I agree, this article feels like it was written in 2006. While the analysis of Obj-J is spot on, does anyone actually use it anymore? I would never consider it a viable framework, especially with the proliferation of top-notch, extremely active community-driven projects, like Backbone, Ember, Knockback, Spine, Angular, and so many others.

kirbysayshion "Eve" automatically reads, sorts and generate new knowledge and/or content.

This is absolutely fascinating, but how do we actually interact with eve? How does she actually work? Where is she running?

kirbysayshion Gimme Bar: Don't bookmark the web. Save it. Forever.

If you really want quotes and things to be presented in the same formatting as the site, you might want to try Citational. It fills a different role than GimmieBar, in that it's meant for one-shot sharing instead of an archive. But it does let you highlight text or an image and show it in context: https://citational.com/v/5mf/15-learn-to-cook

(Yes, I built it... )

kirbysayshion IE 10′s "Do-Not-Track" default dies quick death

This was my exact thought as well. Just because the ad industry doesn't want this to happen, doesn't mean the apps implementing it should get slammed. IE has done great strides in the past few years.

kirbysayshion Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

My completely non-scientific observations have found that OS X needs plenty of RAM, like any modern OS. However, any disk I/O task has a huge performance impact on the rest of the system, as described by this article. For example, something like unRARing a file will affect the entire system detrimentally, even if CPU usage is nominal. By affect I mean even the cursor can get jittery, which is normally unheard of on OS X.

This typically affects me in low memory situations, such as less than 100mb of free memory. The effect is most pronounced when switching between browser tabs, which would cause a lot of disk usage... pulling all of that data in and out of non-ram cache.

kirbysayshion Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

Firefox 12 does this too, on both my MB Pro and iMac. I think it has to flush so many caches that disk I/O just takes forever. This is purely conjecture, though.

kirbysayshion Follow up to the CSS Google Doodle - Accurate this time

You won't be surprised, but checkout Project Bikeshed, which was just demoed at JSConf: http://bike.sh/

Pretty cool stuff!

kirbysayshion The New iPad's Screen Under the Microscope

Ah, my mistake, I should have looked first. Honestly, it was a beautiful screen.

kirbysayshion The New iPad's Screen Under the Microscope

Any chance you have a Motorola Droid (1st one) hanging around? I'd love to see how that screen compares. It was near-retina, at least by the look of it, and I think was AMOLED (since you mentioned the Nexus One).

kirbysayshion Download Public User Data with Oink's Export Tool

I thought some weird cache from Oink's Pink Palace was found! Hadn't heard of this Oink until now.

kirbysayshion Why we need Python in the Browser

The view source is not a non-sequitor. What would prevent a server from refusing to stream the source? It would have to be part of the VM spec that the source must be made available, and that seems unlikely.

I look at Flash, which I used to develop in (this is not meant to be a comment on Flash itself). There are amazing people out there doing amazing things, but because the source isn't right there, a blog post with code snippets is mandatory. Whereas with JS you can typically learn something even if it's obfuscated (to an extent).

kirbysayshion Why we need Python in the Browser

Yes, you're right. Sorry, I was mistaken, confusing how Dart has its own VM, and how the browser has to have explicit support for said VM. (And yes, I know Dart can also compile to JS, that's not my point).

kirbysayshion Why we need Python in the Browser

Brendan Eich has talked about why bytecode + VM is a bad idea for a browser: http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20101122

If you really want a VM, it already exists. It's called JavaScript, assembly language of the web.

I would hate for sites to start saying, "Requires the PyJSVM v0.8 or better to function, download it now!"

EDIT: in hindsight, this post was careless. I was wrong about the "PyJSVM" point, and I posted the minutewithbrendan link to provide commentary, not "Eich said it, so it must be true."

What I should have said:

JavaScript is so widely used today, that anything that comes along purporting to be better (such as bytecode, Dart, whatever) must be so much better as to provide a clear reason for developers and users. If it's just "better", then JS will remain dominant because it's good enough. Therefore, it makes sense to target JS from other langs. It's definitely not getting slower, and we're on the cusp of some great APIs!

kirbysayshion Show HN: Github for Designers

Yes, Git does. For text files. Not for something like a PSD. A PSD absolutely requires some sort of visual diff tool that can interpret a diff of a binary PSD, just just a binary file.

kirbysayshion Star Trek as a purely symbolic artifact of past times

Picard states this several times, almost explicitly, when explaining to alien cultures why the Federation doesn't use money. The pursuit of wealth was superseded by the pursuit of the betterment of the fellow man/member of the Federation.

kirbysayshion Star Trek as a purely symbolic artifact of past times

Keep this in mind too: Star Trek, while originally attempting to portray humanity in the future, inevitably created canon. Thus, there is a world war 3 in the star trek universe that occurs around 1999 (I can't remember the exact time frame). So It makes sense that 20 years after the world "ended", people would be pretty scared and do anything to try to right civilization.

In the end, as the original post implies, Star Trek is no longer a vision of the future, but rather a sandbox to put humanity into and see how they react.

kirbysayshion [dead]

I would discount any performance/benchmarking discussions unless it uses jsperf, benchmarkjs or a similar suite.

kirbysayshion [dead]

I'm glad I'm not the only one. Basically, this article should be retitled, "jQuery Good Practices", and only then after most points are either removed or revised. Is it worth an itemized address? It's nice to have a list of good things to do, but only when they're actually good... and can be explained as to WHY they're good. Having "cheat sheets" attached to it also lends credence where there should be none.

kirbysayshion Morph C++ into Javascript

There was mention of a performance overhead of _ as a suggestion as to how to improve... How does JSPP, in its current state, compare with V8 execution speed?