lorddoig

Those links are very interesting, I didn't know it was such a common question.

However I still wonder - is bytecode the only way to go about this? Every compile-to-JS language I've used has either been sugar over JS or had JS's semantics/syntax seeping through the cracks...what if the base language was a Lisp? There's a big difference between being bound to the semantics of a language like JS or dart and those of Lisp.

I have no doubt that a new VM would be a herculean undertaking and be riddled with all sorts of problems, but I remain unconvinced that it wouldn't pay off in the end. Maybe I'm being naive, but if what we're doing now really is as good as it gets then it seems either I'm much more ignorant to the issues at play than I thought or this hole is significantly deeper than even I imagined.

Here's what I don't understand: why is there any focus on alternative VMs for specific languages? Surely all this effort should be going into a VM for some kind of highish-level intermediate representation that's trivial to generate from any source language? That way no language has a monopoly and there can be peace on Earth.

It seems odd to be arguing for generic computation abilities in the place where most "computation" is done nowadays. Can you imagine what could be achieved if the browser vendors and standards bodies put business considerations aside and spent a good couple of years designing such a thing? We could have an almost endless list of goodies: threads, code isolation, multiple number types...

Just like Intel, AMD, and the rest in effect control (much to Alan Kay's despair) hardware architectures, the vendors & standards bodies are a sort-of natural cartel controlling upwards of, what, 50%? 80%? the code end users actually interact with. The quality of the decisions they make has deep repercussions beyond the tech community and it's simply not possible for any of us to know what they all are. Even if they were bona-fide saints, this would still be too much power to tie up in such a small group.

I would highly recommend spending a little bit more (ok, double) and investing in a TypeMatrix 2030.[0] The size/mouse position thing is important I think - and the 2030 is of comparable size - but it's nothing compared to having vertically aligned keys and the most used buttons (enter/backspace) in the middle. Also the build quality is superb. I could never go back.

    [0]: http://www.typematrix.com/

Because any other approach, even those with the best of intentions, eventually boils down to the supposition that what you've got between your legs is somehow relevant.

And you know what - on an aggregate, societal level - it might actually be: men and women are not the same, and that's OK. But this is a statistical observation that only applies to the population as a whole and is completely invalid at the individual level. If you feel yourself reaching for this knowledge at that level then evidently you don't have enough good information about the individual in front of you - that is the problem you need to fix.

If we took away all the contextual stuff we know about our founding mothers and fathers and referred to them only with asexual codenames like 'Person X', absolutely nothing would change. If one's aim is achieving equality, the only way to truly do that is to strip away all the bullshit: gender - just like hair colour, accent, and anything else you care to name - shouldn't even register. It's a non-thought.

If that's what feminism is about then I'm a feminist; but I'd never actually call myself that because 90% of the feminism I see today is most definitely not like this, it seems instead to be about making gender register in a very big way - and that's just as misguided and self-destructive as misogyny.

Sometimes I get a little happy - maybe even proud - when I read about the achievements of women who pioneered this field (especially the awesome Admiral Hopper.)

Then I stop smiling and remind myself that, even in praise, it's not relevant.

I put GitLab on a personal server a week or two ago for some stuff, and I'm sorry to say it but the overwhelming takeaway from that experience was watching it hog memory and spawn what felt like a million processes which somehow lingered for days after uninstallation until I noticed them. This thing runs one process, idles at 0.0% CPU, and is blazing fast in <450MB memory - when all you want is a nice git GUI for a small group it seems pretty perfect.

Religion is borne out of not knowing what on Earth is the right thing to do, and hence having to adopt a certain approach instead of being convinced by the merits of one over the others: it's policymaking in the absence of facts. Do something for long enough and it becomes a part of who you are (your so-called "worldview"), at which point an attack on the thing is actually an attack on the ego, and we'll naturally and automatically defend it with the same dirty emotional bullshit trickery we use to gloss over all our insecurities.

The toxicity of this is not limited to front-end development, of course -- this is, in fact, the very framework we base modern democracy on. It's just lots of completely unqualified people (myself included) making a great deal of noise based on shitty information, then - once it inevitably goes tits up - we get together and point the finger at some scapegoat to absolve ourselves of liability.

We like to think that as a society we've developed from the primitive peoples of yore, but really all that's happened is that communication tech and industrialism has allowed us to mass produce and saturate our world with the achievements of a very, very select few and thereby create the illusion of universal progress. This entirely baseless pretence is giving unjust confidence to the (figuratively) blind, who are now leading us into a society of completely misguided moral absolutes: one in which local government officials will parent your kids for you with legislation, physicists will be lynchmobbed for the wrong choice of shirt, and Github will outlaw the use of the word 'meritocracy' for fear of intimidating the weak.

So yes, these issues are very important, but HTML and CSS hate games are the least of our worries.

The CommonMark is definitely more readable, but Markdown is just so sparse by design that every time I tried to use it for anything more serious than e.g. a blog post I found myself banging my head against the wall, so it's a tradeoff I'm happy to make - and we're talking about languages whose purpose is to produce readable output, so while a readable source file is definitely a nice thing I think it's hard to make a case for valuing that over functionality. To title a paragraph in markdown you can choose from an <h[1-6]> or a <strong>, that's it, and it's so tightly coupled to HTML (it's more of an HTML generation format like HAML than a document format really) that if you need to do anything remotely complex you're forced to either inline the HTML or bind yourself forever to external tools - in which case the goal of universal readability is defeated anyway.

Markdown's syntax constrains how much it can ever do, whereas AsciiDoc is designed to be extensible, providing macros at the "language" level and underneath that there's the whole DocBook toolchain: it seems to me that the clever move is leverage all this, rather than create yet-another-Markdown (and it's not like the syntax tradeoff is at all dramatic.) I think the footnote issue you mention can be done in block macros, but I'm not sure.

I might be getting a bit utopian here, but what would be really great is if all these markup languages sought to have their canonical implementation in pandoc, which would allow for the standardisation of a set of pass-throughs/filters/annotations for things like equations and citations.

Thanks for pandoc, btw. Just out of interest, is there a reason you haven't attempted an AsciiDoc reader? (Or have you?) Assuming it'd be quite a bit more work than the others, what with macros and so forth.

> A 32-bit counter for the number of seconds since 1970 [UNIX] wraps in 2038.

What's the bet this one actually causes problems

I've been prototyping in this space for a while now - trying to scratch my own itch, as it were - and seeing as this is climbing the front page I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask HN: what exactly is it you want from this kind of application? I dislike Evernote because of it's lack of structure, dumb text with a few bells and whistles added doesn't work for me.

Would love to hear any and all suggestions: personal wiki, deeply structured personal knowledge graph, UI concerns...anything! I'm not saying anything will come of it for sure, and doing it open-source wasn't my plan, but I'd be very grateful for any input.

Edit 2: Questions 1 and 2 from the Adult ADHD Self Reporting Scale[0] (from Harvard, endorsed by the WHO) -

    1. How often do you have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project, once the challenging parts have been done?
    2. How often do you have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization?


    [0]: http://www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/ncs/ftpdir/adhd/18Q_ASRS_English.pdf

I was speaking from experience. I have it too.

Edit: and even if I wasn't it wouldn't make a difference - flitting from one grand project to the next without actually completing any of them is a clear diagnostic marker anyone can read in a book.

> I believe the appropriate term for someone like this is "architecture astronaut"

This is a much better term for ADHD.

This is cool, but now there's a risk that tomorrow will bring us JVM.js with a kickstarter, trendy logo, and a subtle but distinct whiff of moral superiority.

Edit: so I really am a cynic, I count at least two on the first page and neither are at all as wanky as my imagination likes to think.

Well here's some formulae:

    http://www.noteshare.io/section/the-fundamental-class-of-projective-space
    http://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#using-multiple-stem-interpreters
    http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/latex-filter.html
    http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/example/dblatex/example_mathml.pdf

As for references, it has it's own lightweight bibliography system out of the box, but there's a plugin[0] for BibTeX too, and DocBook has full-on support for BibTeX so it's just a matter of tooling. AsciiDoc gives you DocBook, and DocBook gives you pretty much everything.[1] The whole thing is completely extensible at multiple levels (macros, XSL stylesheets), so adding any essential features it doesn't already have is certainly much simpler than starting from scratch!

    [0]: https://github.com/petercrlane/asciidoc-bib
    [1]: http://pub.hdcrd.com/kb/Dev/Documention/LaTeX/Tool/Dblatex%20%28DocBook%20to%20LaTeX%20Publishing%29/0.3/manual.pdf

Unfortunately not, XSL isn't really my thing. I'd probably consider trying to go via LaTeX, but that's because I like the way LaTeX looks out of the box and probably isn't appropriate for most things.

I read your link and, per my main comment, I'm pretty sure AsciiDoc answers 99% of your needs.

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/#_overview_and_examples

And for everything else, there's AsciiDoc.[0]

For an extra five minutes learning you get a boatload (think container ship) more features[1] - it compiles to DocBook: a mature, actually standardised, highly structured format, and from that you get HTML, EPUB, PDF, slideshows, and man pages for free.[0] For math you get MathML, ASCIIMath, and LaTeX (along with a number of ways to render them.) It has a super nice syntax, is equally good at little docs and huge books, and you could theoretically write a proper academic paper in it with the LaTeX backend. And you always know what's going to happen when you try to mix bold and italic...

Also endorsed by Linus.[2]

    [0]: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/#_overview_and_examples
    [1]: Well, five minutes to be able to do everything Markdown can do; everything else will take a bit longer
    [2]: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/X2XVf9Q7MfV (comments)

Net neutrality is very important, but it occurs to me that when we finally figure out that we don't need separate telephone lines, cable tv, etc - i.e. when we realise it's all just data and one-pipe-fits-all - then it seems fairly obvious that your neighbours 999/911 VoIP call should perhaps not be drowned out by 4K Netflix. And neither should your burglar alarm. Or panic button. Or self-driving car. Or robotic doctor.

It's an issue in its infancy now, sure, but it will become a problem.

I was investigating this the other day, as it happens. Recent research from France (can't find the paper now, sorry) shows that unless you're very, very highly skilled your personal bargaining power is almost zero. What was important however was how many companies were competing for you, how profitable those companies were, and the current state of the economy.

This implies that a negotiation like this is just back-and-forth-ing within some window of acceptability that was probably predetermined before you walked in, and if you want to have a successful salary negotiation and get your prospective (or current) employer to redefine that window, your best bet is to a) orchestrate (some) of these external factors to work in your favour; and b) find a way to get that information into the exchanges without being a dick.

They also noted that doing all this then staying with your current employer was often the best strategy because at the very least you can expect to capture some of the hiring/firing costs associated with replacing you.

Who has, wants, and/or needs access to a riverfront is a marvellously practical problem to solve. A lot of high-school kids are equipped with the scientific know-how to get a relatively robust answer to this question, and there are many, many smart mofos in universities around the globe who could get a pretty damn definitive answer, taking into account relative harm/benefit and everything!

But no, that just won't do. Instead let's reformulate it in ideological terms - who should have access? Now the whole planet is entitled to chip in. Facts just became irrelevant. Yay. "So let's go collect some 'facts' for our story," said someone at The Guardian before cherry-picking a few half-notable views from the (now global) distribution of opinions. One tiny little change to the premise and this problem went from something well-defined and manageable to a thinly veiled pitting of rich against poor with no objectively defensible outcome. The Guardian - our dear moral leaders who spend their days paving the path to social equality - pouring petrol on the class warfare fire to sell papers? Well I never.

This is all fine if the point is entertainment, but this bullshit - coupled with a super out-of-date version of democracy we like to get sentimental about - is how we govern. It's madness. It's certifiable, crack-a-jack, put-you-on-strong-pills craziness of the highest order.

Lisp

The point about religion is key. We really need to go back to basics with this stuff and reevaluate what exactly we're trying to achieve here from the ground up. We simply cannot retain first-class support for 20 years of legacy cruft and make meaningful progress. So if we could start again today, what would we want from a 'browser'? How about:

    - A cross platform execution environment
    - Hot code loading
      - Fetch, load, run in seconds
      - Source based; inspectable by user
    - Complete separation from the host OS except via well-defined, permission-based APIs
    - A mechanism for including 3rd party code and UI modules, fetched at runtime, and appropriately sandboxed
    - A suite of strong, high-level, declarative UI APIs
    - A suite of strong, low-level, UI APIs
    - Good crypto support
    - Pain-free concurrency
    - A nice language that behaves well as a transpilation target
      - Ints, floats, and all the other wonderful number types (and not just in arrays)
    - Strong support for displaying structured information
      - Accessibility, extraction, etc
    - etc, etc, etc

I don't know about you, but none of these things scream HTML, JS, or CSS to me. HTML is an arbitrary XML schema that's fixed and subject to standardisation because it's trying to do too much: it cares about layout, content, semantics, accessibility, and programmatic stuff. All of that needs to be parsed out into separate, much simpler data structures anyway to actually be used.

And I'm sorry if I'm offending your world-view here, but JavaScript is a complete fucking mess. If you love it that's great - nothing to do with me - but as the only language on the dominant end-user runtime environment? What a sick, twisted joke. Honestly how much time has been wasted dealing with it's deficiencies? With a language that has a monopoly, every little quirk, every tiny failure in the design process that makes it do something you didn't expect translates to hundreds if not thousands of man-years shat away. I'm not exaggerating either: shit adds up at scale (and if you don't believe me, consider that the subset of British people who actually had reason to call the government(?!) last year spent a cumulative 750 years on hold).

So much of everything we do (in the western world, at least) is dependent on the technology we have for creating, moving, and consuming information, and the browser is the king of this world. So it's not just mission critical that we get it right, it's economy/happiness/progress-as-a-species critical too. A big shift here would be in the same ballpark as the switch from steam to internal combustion! And we already know it's possible, we're just too risk-averse to commit - but that's the short term view, in the long term digging this hole any deeper carries significantly more danger.

I suggest we take the plunge and commit to a wholesale overhaul to something correctly designed by the best minds around, and with an aim to deprecate the current system in 5-10 years. We're (slowly) doing it with IPv6 because we have little choice, let's not wait for that to happen here - let's get it done before we're in a corner and are forced to make a tonne of half-baked decisions in a hurry.

I can understand the motive, however flawed it may seem in hindsight. They were seeing dollar signs, happy shareholders, job security - so they took a chance that massively backfired.

Am I the only one who thinks they deserve a little credit for getting their CTO to publicly deal with the issue on the same day all this came to a head, including saying that a guy was literally sat coding out a removal tool right now and due for release tonight? That's a damn respectable feedback loop for a megacorp if you ask me, and we'd have a lot less to whine about here on HN if all mistakes were rectified so expeditiously.

"Getting shafted" is a bit strong - it's quite understandable really. Card fraud, and particularly the statutory liability incumbent on banks/card issuers, is a major thorn in institutions' sides. It's the perfect incentive to make the system more secure. If you were the CEO of a payment processor you'd do the same (or get fired.)

It's exactly the same story with chip+pin: when the customer is the creator, owner, and maintainer of the ultimate authorization (fraudsters can passively steal your card number/name/expiry/CVV2, but your PIN and/or 3DSecure password is on you) and fraud occurs then it's the customer's fault for not protecting said PIN/password. Assuming the bank's security doesn't lapse (in which case they are liable, not you) then this is perfectly sensible, no? Are we seriously suggesting a bank should be liable for you not taking password security seriously enough? Or that we should stick to bullshit authorization methods like a signature purely because it takes liability away from the "little guy"?

We wouldn't blame Facebook if our accounts got hacked because we kept our password on a post-it note stuck to a monitor. The logic here is the same - to imply it's any different because it's an evil bank is letting our hearts rule our heads.

With other recent news in mind, I wonder what effect compounds like these might have on religious extremists. I wonder whether - assuming some kind of method of administration is figured out (a love bomb?) - they might stop burning people alive in cages after a decent trip.

I speak for no one but myself - I'm sure many will pay those prices :)

On a separate note... Every so often (once every 3/4 months) I have occasion to use litmus.com to test an email template for a freelance gig. They only do monthly plans too - plans which I'll never be able to justify paying. I'd be happy to pay a one-off fee every time I needed it but they won't offer that pricing model, the end result being I cycle trial accounts through my many email addresses and they miss out on revenue.

It doesn't sit well with me because their sole factor of production (like yours, I imagine) is CPU time which is pretty well commoditised nowadays, so offering anything more complicated than a single unit of the product immediately tells me that artificial barriers have been created with the sole purpose of extracting "extra" money from me. It kinda grinds my gears.

Nice designs, but my eyes almost fell out of my head when I saw the pricing. The regular price of the mid-tier is double the price of the highest Adobe Creative Cloud package!

Interestingly that crazy looking magic roundabout serves a purpose. The (seemingly correct) theory was that such a setup would slow people down and make them cautious, thereby dispensing with the need for traffic lights and allowing safe self-organisation.

Presumably UBM is willing to sell the brand? I can't say I'm terribly familiar with Dr Dobb's but it seems a terrible shame and quite inefficient that something in such high demand can't find a way to survive. Feels like there's a win-win situation hidden in the world somewhere that needs uncovered.