no_more_death

PDF.js is used by Firefox to render PDFs in the browser.

Come on! This is one of the most remarkably run companies around today. They never do anything halfway. If you balk at $350, you either aren't their target market or you don't think very highly of Dropbox.

$350 is about an hour and a half of work, at $215 per hour. That's chump change. Most significant conferences are about $300, such as ConvergeSE which happened just a couple weeks ago.

Dropbox knows that people will buy tickets because they believe in Dropbox, and then Dropbox will make it awesome. Then everyone will know that when you've got a company that does things right, you can trust them with a tiny percentage of a typical webshop's daily paycheck, which they already knew anyway. And if $350 seems like a lot per person, when you add up all the costs involved it's really not that much. Money adds up quickly when a conference is done right. Most conferences pay a full-time employee for months just to make sure that the wifi won't melt under the load of hundreds of conference goers. There are a huge number of things to think about and make sure that everything goes right.

I'm shocked at this thread. Utterly shocked. Someone else actually complained that the three letters DBX are already taken. Come on! Every possible three or four letter acronym is taken. This thread is crazy. There is nothing of value here, at all, period. Not sure what happened to HN here.

Yeah, in high school in the early 00s I was a big Oberon fan. I had booted the system from diskette on my windows computer. I also had Blackbox and built some really basic things. Overall it was a huge amount of fun, and I have fond memories of the Object Inspector and connecting references together on forms and stuff. It was really Brett Victor's "tangled" before Brett Victor came along with these ideas. Actually, it was a lot like hypercard, based on what I've read of hypercard. LayLa was a cool layout system kind of like flexbox. They had a lot of cool applications. The flat filesystem was weird (no directories), but it was certainly simple.

Over time it was so disappointing, though, that the system never went anywhere. My biggest takeaway was to not be such a programming language purist. Now I'm a javascript fan. It's not pure or perfect, but it's simple and it nails the important things. Plus for the foreseeable future it's the most widely supported computer language in existence. Simplicity and pragmatism are really key.

It's not that extreme of a groupon. I think that businesses typically get 25% or less of the cost of a groupon, so it's closer than you think.

They don't want to report daily revenue because it would average out to a lot less than $900 million a year, I think. Two weeks ago they were making over 1 million a day, now it's over 2 million a day.[1] To me, that growth rate at this kind of scale is more meaningful than a yearly figure (or a daily figure, to be honest).

Of course, the reason they use "2.5 million per day" is to give you a classic Scrooge McDuck kind of visual, with a big semi trailer packed with money entering your palace every day.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/28/supercell-2/

Valve doesn't have a CEO. It's an undifferentiated mass of people, at least as far as power structure goes -- sort of like a slime mold. I think that's a lot different than having a CEO who prides himself on being an inspirer instead of a controller (if I'm reading the article correctly). In other words, it sounds like he is a constitutional monarch. (Of course, that bursts the whole "American miracle" thing about him being like the president.)

Seivan, I apologize deeply for getting your comment off track, and I hope others will not follow this further from your main point.

However, I would just offer a quick point of advice. Don't spend keystrokes saying you might be down-voted for something. It's actually bolder to just say what you're going to say. When you reference downvoting, you stigmatize it and influence people not to do so. I would rather know if people are going to have a downvote reaction to my comment than shame them into not downvoting me. I've had the exact same tendency to observe "well I might get downvoted for this," but I think it's a tendency that should be resisted.

Installing a new Android home launcher, setting up llama, etc on Android is NOTHING like trying to work through an automanual and make changes to your car. This analogy is utterly wrong..

...or you could get an Android for much cheaper and install some home screen widgets.

Apple fanboys insist that Android features, such as widgets, are unnecessary. Then they go crazy over iPad dashboard apps that weakly simulate Android functionality.

Hmmm, could someone build a text "scrambler" that would intentionally create broken English? I have also noticed that "broken English" is more effective by some measures than ordinary English.

Note also that the broken English here is not the author, but it's Google Translate. The text has been machine translated from Russian. Also interesting that Google Translate is much more effective translating the mathematical portions than the other portions of the text. Another case of what people find hard computers find easy, and vice versa.

Step 1: Learn to use the CSS profiler in Chrome.

Also, here are some articles I found in my links list:

CSS Stress Tester Bookmarklet (Copy into a bookmarklet. Then it will tell you the rules that are causing the most lag.)

javascript:(function(d){var s=d.createElement('script');s.src='http://andy.edinborough.org/Demos/css-stress/stressTest.js?_... es=d.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];es.parentNode.insertBefore(s,es);var doit=function(){if(window.stressTest){stressTest.bookmarklet();}else{setTimeout(doit,100);}};doit();})(document);

Old but still relevant I think: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/06/18/simplifying-css-... Text makes CSS slow (don't render too much): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2232212 In general, following good guidelines might help: https://github.com/csswizardry/CSS-Guidelines

I think it works great on desktop via keyboard shortcuts. I use it all the time and I hate it when I have to use other systems.

Uninstalled. I checked, and Facebook took up more memory than any other application I have installed, even more than TSF Shell. (By the way, a MUCH more "feature-rich," useful, and snappy app than facebook!) Facebook isn't doing anything comparable to what TSF Shell does, not for me anyway. I bet this is why my phone recently started taking 30 seconds to make a phonecall (!).

I can't believe an app requires 8M RAM just for method names! That's 3% of my entire usable memory (what's left after Motorola Blur takes its share) -- just for the method names for a single app. Surely I must be misunderstanding what goes into that buffer. It's unimaginable to me that they really need such a vast amount of space. It's unimaginable that they really expect their app to work at all on an old phone without choking it to death.

If I grasp this correctly, printing just the method names would create a book double the size of the King James Version of the Bible. Maybe you are going to argue having so many methods is good programming practice, not bloat. But don't argue that you "support" a system when just the method names total around 3% of usable memory for that system. And there are a lot of devices with considerably less memory than what I've got.

Why don't you release a stripped down, "lite" version of the app that works on an Android 2 phone even if it has more than 5 applications installed? Some phones don't even allow uninstalling facebook. They are simply stuck with the bloat (I mean, good programming practices :-).

NodeJS is written from a MUCH different approach than Rails. An example quotation from Isaac Schlueter (and he says this OVER AND OVER):

  We like dull models.  They're easier to reason about.  Programs should 
  be boring dull things that solve problems in predictable ways. [1]

[1] The whole discussion is most instructive. https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/nodejs/kxw...

Of course, you may easily download a framework that makes foolish choices as a number of Rails developers have migrated to javascript :-p. Actually, I don't have a "thing" about Ruby or Rails developers, but some aspects of their mindset are very dangerous. The first time I heard that YAML could initialize objects from the serialization structure, I was absolutely shocked. How could that NOT be a disaster?

Take care. You're responsible for your code and its security. You're not playing a game. Your business is not a hackathon. Don't claim to offer "services" unless you are plan to be a servant of others. Servants don't code recklessly. You are the custodian of your clients' digital life and wellbeing. Choose projects run by grownups -- like izs and ry (the people who have run nodejs). Again, getting hacked is NOT okay.

By the way, if you want to learn how to run a project, subscribe to the nodejs-dev thread. That's a first-rate education in how to manage a large project with a lot of hype and growing pains. Watch and take notes.

There are 100000 perl modules, all backed up by an extensive test suite. About jobs: knowing a popular language guarantees you a job, but it doesn't guarantee you a good job. Those shooting for a higher level can pick what language they want. Those looking for higher level programmers will find a much broader distribution of language preferences. Hence Twitter runs on Scala, Blekko runs on perl.

I find that really doubtful. I used to believe it, but it seems like you still need operators to run things. Programming tools may become much more powerful, but when it goes wrong, you will need an incredibly intelligent person to sort out what just happened. A five-year-old won't be of much help then. I doubt that we can make computer which simply never go wrong. For example, if a 5yo requests a PB&J sandwich, a powerful machine might accidentally inject something undesirable. How would he know? Or if a kid requests the computer to invent a new skateboard, what if there's some flaw in the material that he can't see that suddenly pops up when he least expects it? A clever machine is only a tool to help with original design -- it really needs an even more clever human being to operate it.

Well, currently birth rates are declining not because people have too little, but because they have too much. We only want as many children as we can have without degrading our quality of living or theirs. E.g., a typical family cannot have more than two children because they cannot afford to have the same quality of housing and give the child the same quality of education. Plus, having children gets in the way of people doing what they want to do.

The level of inefficiency and unused territory in the world is mindboggling. I think the national park system ties up one-third of land in the US -- land that's absolutely unused. If worst comes to worst, I'm guessing we will start cutting into that resource little by little. It would take many, many decades or centuries to exhaust all of that.

Two possibilities: continuation of existing trends, leading to a hyper focus on education, or a sudden reversal, where we live in a post-technological world.

Some are speculating about needing to work less or not at all. I would argue that we WILL work less, only because we will have to spend more time in education. It seems like however much society & science advances, we still need people to sort things out and run the whole huge machine of society. For example, machines can't parse Mochizuki's conjectured proof of the ABC conjecture. That requires clever humans to wade through hundreds of pages of analysis, carefully inspecting for holes. It takes more clever humans to program clever machines.

The little work that we do becomes incredibly powerful, but most of our time is spent learning. We will learn as teams instead of as individuals, where each person takes a tiny wedge of the pie and learns to master it and learns to master the tools necessary to deal with the wedge. This already happens with scientific papers. New scientific papers are published by teams of old people, but almost never by young people. This pattern is going to spread from the hard sciences into every line of work, until everything operates like science. Construction, engineering, marketing design -- everything will be huge dollops of education to a small speck of actual application, but that speck will be incredibly powerful.

Now, if we eventually unlock a new frontier, like exploring other planets or underwater / underground cities, then we'll probably have a place for people who simply thirst for adventure. (So far information technology has been basically a place for adventure-seekers -- an immature discipline where you can get by without following the dictates of some elite, because even the elites do not fully understand this discipline yet.) The conditions those societies will experience will be extremely new and different, and may require new tools and new ways of making things happen. But for the most part, I see the (comfortable) person of the future on the one hand being a great generalist, able to switch directions when a position becomes unnecessary, and on the other hand a great specialist, learning everything there is to know about less and less, and that's what he actually lives off of.

What if there's a reversal? The whole thing may come crashing down, and we might have to start over. We would live in a bizarre world where life is about recycling all the astonishing things synthesized in a previous culture, instead of being about making new things at a blistering pace. We make more and more things that are better and better, and we're just throwing away astonishing amounts of stuff. Rummaging through garbage cans and land fills might be the work of the future, if the higher class (1%) were to collapse permanently. If there's no one to spearhead the increasingly difficult march to technology, it may become cheaper to reuse previous things instead of inventing new ones.

Yes, this is really a great example of how most things that we attribute to brilliance are due more to preparation and foresight.

Right. It's not correct that people will blithely accept an error like "Error: this image failed to load." These people don't think about errors the same way we do. To them all errors are the same and mean there's a catastrophic failure. Developers understand that some errors are minor, but a user faced with an error, where he expects a reassuring "security image," will probably become fearful and bail from that page.

Of course, he might still type in his password even if he decides not to go through and submit the form, in which case his data is still compromised.

Yeah, as a contrary piece of information, Fred Brooks considered his single most significant act, ever, to be sending E. F. Codd to further education. Codd devised "Codd's 12 Rules," and invented the relational database.

This submission is absolutely first-rate. Must-see for serious javascript developers. Note http://media.tojicode.com/sfjs-vectors/#35 in particular and remember that TypedArrays are not a silver bullet. It's a shame I'm (apparently) the only one who saw it.

Yeah. Interestingly I got all the way to the download with Chrome 25 Beta (for Android) but then it couldn't handle the data URI.

It's unfair to say that the core language is flawed. Maintainability depends on how the language features are utilized. Some code uses monkey-patching gratuitously and that can harm maintainability, but judicious use of monkey patching is not a problem. On the other hand, maintaining a several gigabyte Java project can be a nightmare. Code bloat is certainly a factor here. Java is probably better for larger, more ponderous, enterprisey projects. Ruby is designed for rapid, agile development. So we don't need a "war" here; they serve different, equally important niches.

I agree that there are performance issues with Ruby implementations such as the MRI. That's really part and parcel of an immature implementation, that is, it hasn't received the millions of developer man hours spent fine-tuning it, such as the Java ecosystem has received. However, I would observe that it's still easy to get Java performance very wrong. It turns out that efficient GC is hard -- really, really hard.

Android innovates on connections between apps more than the interface design itself. For the most part, the interface design is simply a modified desktop approach.

However, I would note that Google changed the old search button into a "swipe up from bottom" approach for Android 4.1. This brings up Google Now + voice search. So there is some "swipe from edge" functionality.

For Ubuntu Phone, the functions of the different edges will take getting used to. Of course, power users will eat it up.

I've noticed that most large companies go for a sterile look. Google, Microsoft, etc. I've always thought of Apple design as sterile as well.

Getting off track, Apple design is simply not a monolithic, "zen" one-stroke entity. Apple design amalgamates understated hardware with loud, lickable user interfaces. To see my point, consider that Apple hardware is definitely NOT lickable, whereas software generally is. Historically this may be due to the dissonance between Forstall (software design) and Ive (engineering design).

(Feel free to shred me as I don't really know anything about Apple design.)

Thank you for a thoughtful and probing post. It is bold to write on a spiritual topic to this audience. I don't usually talk at length about spiritual matters, but everyone else here seems to be doing so and so I think it's appropriate.

I would like to talk about one idea you brought up: the idea that the Christian Gospel involves some sort of coercion. In particular, the little story you told about God vs. the devil.

This is what the gospel says. "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life." John 3:16

We're sinking in quicksand. God reached out His hand to save us. But if we refuse, we will die. Does that make God a monster?

Indeed, if you refuse God's love, the consequences are not good. If you refuse my offer of a kidney transplant to you, the consequences are not good. Does that mean I'm raping you by offering to save your life?

Please do not blame God that there are people in hell. God doesn't use hell as an instrument of coercion. We sink into hell under the weight of our own evil. We put ourselves there. We wouldn't be happy in heaven, if we don't like God's rules here on earth.

But God loved us even though we could not repay him in the least. He is rich in mercy. God gave the world an unspeakably wonderful gift that we can never, ever repay. Jesus Christ took my hell upon himself. He took all the punishment I deserved on Himself. How can I repay that? That's the essence of unconditional love. And He offers this gift to you.

Christ is my brother, my friend. He died for me. He forgives my sins against Him and helps me every day with my pride and my bent toward sin. Do you realize this is not a game? He has seen what you wrote -- don't you think it hurts Him?

I'm genuinely confused why you insert such strong language in a thoughtful post about loving life and valuing the right things. If you disagree with the Gospel, feel free to say so. But why do you want to vilify the God I love, call Him "the devil," call Him a rapist? He is grieved by these remarks. I am grieved as well.

I will pray for you. You seem to be lashing out at God with the grief and difficulty you have experienced. That's an awful place to be in. I know from personal experience that my words are not able to help you, but God is able to help you. I hope that some day, you believe in Christ and come to understand that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. No one can go to God the Father except through Him.

There is harm and foul here.

Apparently, they developed iteratively and failed to do "premature optimization." Fact is, hosting servers costs money, and developing optimized software costs money and time. The pirated copies are costing them money without giving them anything in return. On top of that, a lot of these people might have paid for the game if they had not been able to get it free.

As a game dev you are going to have an awful lot of things on your mind that are more important than optimizing a system that currently works. This is business reality. Obviously, this could have been an "excuse" to shutter a poorly-constructed game, but I totally believe that the load from copies freely obtained (against the developers' wishes) made their product untenable. All their blood, sweat, and tears, wasted.

I feel deeply about software piracy.

Piracy disrespects the software developers. The developers worked hard to produce something and you tell them that there code is worth $0.00. I'm extremely offended that people pirate code.

The key is that they asked for money and you told them no. It's one thing for someone to offer their software for free, it's another thing for someone to say, "I need money to develop this," and you tell them "No, your software isn't worth that." Maybe you didn't mean that. It's like slapping someone in the face and telling them that you really didn't mean it that way.

I'm absolutely shocked that comments in this thread insist that it's the responsibility of the developers to either throw up an authentication wall (think about the conversion losses!) or just handle thousands of people using their software for free. That's precious development time that they've spent on premature optimization when they could have built better features for paying customers.

I'll wager that 95% of the developers commenting here actually get paid for their code in some way, shape, or fashion. Why wouldn't you want to pay for someone else's code? Why do you have a kneejerk reaction when other people don't want to pay to use others' code?

I go out of my way to support free code if there's a donate button. Nearly every time I see a donate button I click it. I used Readability before their donations fell apart. I have a gittip account. I respect developers and the time it takes to create code, so I pay the price.

I assume the people reading this are like me. You also donate to open source projects and buy the paid version when possible, once you've tried the game. However, the rank and file of people who are pirating software probably do not.

Even though copying code is cheap, piracy takes a toll on the company: - It often takes away potential sales. - Pirated copies are often sub-par and can tarnish your brand. Some developers might not realize how important brand is, but just consider how many millions of dollars are spent to build brand for these companies. - In this case, pirating imposed an unbearable load on servers. They had to shutter the game.

I am all about open source and donate whenever possible. I totally understand that, for example, patents are just ridiculously overplayed in today's world. However, software piracy offends me deeply. I think it ought to offend other developers as well, but you are free to hold whatever opinion you like.

So I've created a shim for iOS. You play a gentle, low sound, not unlike goats bleating. Then you check the accelerometer[1][2] for the unique pattern of sound waves rebounding from the hairs of theuser's beard. (Remember, the iOS accelerometer is amazingly accurate. This technique really works!)

If you're interested, drop me a line at 1.800.GOAT.API and I will license my patent for your app.

[1] Cf. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13248493/detect-ipad-mini... [2] Also relevant: http://xkcd.com/378/

Graham isn't a conservative. He consistently splits from other Republicans. He's criticizing his own party as a party of "angry white guys" when he says this. Surely you don't think Graham considers himself on the same side as "angry white guys"! The article linked does not quote him as an example of racism, but rather as someone inside the Republican Party who is criticizing their own demographic.