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shwetank

143 karma · joined March 28, 2007

I'm passionate about the web, and would like to work to make it a better place for all of us.
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shwetank··on Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?
I'm working on Voohy (https://voohy.com), a platform for leadership development.

It's a leadership development platform, aimed at new managers who want to do it right. I'm solo bootstrapping it.

It has a combination of learning resources (courses, research paper insights etc) and tools.

While the learning resources are for helping you with knowledge, the tooling aspect is for developing the right habits for staying a good leader.

shwetank··on New in Chrome 70
>What's more, because the barrier for entry as well as people's own expectations were that much lower it meant you saw a hell of a lot more individuality in the content posted. People would literally put a website up about their favourite designs of bridges, the shapes of snail shells, cartoon trivia no normal person should care about, or some local landmark

You can still find those types of sites if you want.

>These days the signal to noise ratio is so far tilted the other way with people obsessing too much about contributing what they think people want read or boasting about stuff they feel is boast-worthy that it almost completely drains out the purist content from people who just post stuff that genuinely interests themselves.

With more people joining the web, that will be a side effect of it. On the flip side, there has been so much massive positive change on the web too. Online transactions, many government services becoming online (many times reducing corruption), email and IM connecting people around the world in a way never before, and many many more things. Just focussing on the negatives by commenting a few types of sites like fb, insta, twitter etc is fainting a very one-dimensional picture.

>The only good thing about the modern web is that while the barrier for entry writing a website has gone up, inversely the barrier for entry publishing content has gone down dramatically

I actually think that is a bad thing, not good. What made the web the web was the low barrier to entry. Also, if you think that is the only good thing about the modern web, then I really don't think you truly realize the scale in which most people take the web for granted nowadays in their everyday lives, which affects them in a positive way.

shwetank··on New in Chrome 70
>the Web was far more pleasant when it was about hyperlinked documents and not this cloud-computing-inspired frenzy.

The web was far more useful for you. I, for one, am glad the days of IE6 and the lot are over.

shwetank··on New in Chrome 70
> And now, random websites can grab control of my radios? With JavaScript?

No. Only the user allows it.

>FFS. This is like the battery api. Too much time spent on "can we", too little time spent on "should we".

The battery API can be tremendously useful on mobile if used effectively. For example, disabling certain animations and high end GPU intensive effects if the battery is less.

shwetank··on Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
I disagree. You have games like The Last of Us, The Uncharted Series, Yakuza 0, and even the latest Wolfenstein game having very well made and engaging stories which I think can translate well on film.
shwetank··on Introducing TensorFlow.js: Machine Learning in JavaScript
Think more from the inference angle. There are a lot of use cases for ML and many are using native apps or desktop apps. This allows you to run it on the browser on the web, which significantly broadens the amount of people who can use it.

So can you think of use cases for using ML in an app (native or desktop?) Many of those would be good to have in the browser as part of a web app too.

shwetank··on Does India need its own vernacular internet?
With the growing use of Whatsapp in India, SMS is actually quickly dying as a medium of communication between humans here. Poeple who have whatsapp (there's a lot of them in india) seem to use that to communicate instead of SMS (which is then used mostly for messages from companies, or stuff like 2-factor authentication etc).

Also, I see a lot of people use Whatapp to send/share actual hindi (written in devnagari) instead of hindi written in roman alphabet. I would say the latter is still more popular, but the former growing quite a lot.

Another thing I see is people use whatsapp to bypass typing altogether. Since you can share pretty much any media easily on whatsapp and other messaging serivices, I've seen some people leave short voice messages instead of typing text.

shwetank··on Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
Opera does still contribute quite a lot to blink/chromium (check out https://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/ which lists them), though the gist of what you've said still stands.
shwetank··on Opera browser built-in ad blocking, now in beta
Maybe take a look here https://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/comments/3xb7n6/how_ex...
shwetank··on Best things and stuff of 2015
In Opera, you can right click on any tab in the tab menu, and click 'save tabs as speed dial folder'. All open tabs will be saved in a folder on your speed dial. If you wan to open them again, you can right-click the speed dial folder and select to open them all at once.
shwetank··on Building digital products with simple feature phones in mind
If you haven't, I would recommend you look into m-Pesa. In some countries (not all countries), M-Pesa uses USSD (like Tanzania I think).

Overall, some of the solutions for payments and banking being implemented in some developing countries is quite different than what most people in the west are used to. M-Pesa is one of them, but in countries like India, online wallets are starting to gain traction too.

Most people in developing countries don't have credit cards, let alone being comfortable using them online. So a lot of people in India still use the 'Cash on Delivery' model, which isn't very much prevelant in the west, and other solutions like 'Netbanking' (in which the shopping site redirects you to your bank provider's site, you log in, and through the bank provider's site you do the payment, and then it redirects to the shopping site's payment confirmation page ; In other words, you haven't used a card, you've just paid directly through the bank) are also there.

shwetank··on Adblock Sold to Mystery Company
With the [Opera addons catalog](https://addons.opera.com), every update goes through a moderation process to prevent this kind of situation from happening (which is one of the reasons why we encourage everyone to install extensions from the official addons catalog site rather than from other sources).
shwetank··on Writing a browser extension for three browsers
Extensions in Opera based on the chromium model, but have a few unique APIs too, like the ones for speed dial and the sidebar, which are not there in chrome.
shwetank··on Show HN: Hacker News desktop app made with Electron and Node
And the sidebar extension for Opera for Hacker News (using Dharmesh Patel's app) https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/hackernews-si...
shwetank··on The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons
We at Opera have called on for a single (or at leat a shared) API for making browser extensions, which I think will benefit the developer community immensely (instead of making one set for each browser).

I think now the time is right to take a look again at NEX https://dev.opera.com/blog/introducing-nex/ and standardising core parts of browser extensions.

shwetank··on Chrome is developing a Sidebar API
Opera already has support for Sidebar extensions, you can check it out here https://dev.opera.com/extensions/tut_sidebar_actions.html
shwetank··on Synthesising Drum Sounds with the Web Audio API
The article links to that page. I don't think its absolutely necessery for the article itself to have a play button, as long as it links to a page which does.
shwetank··on Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat
Also the fact that you can embed youtube videos in other web pages.
shwetank··on Show HN: Write Chrome Extensions in Go
This more or less should work with Opera extensions too.
shwetank··on New JavaScript techniques for rapid page loads
More than that, its a project which a number of other browser also rely on and contribute to, for example Opera.
shwetank··on Generation JavaScript
Firstly, just because someone makes a compile-to-js language doesn't mean they ncesserily "hate" JS ... I mean, it may, but it could also very well mean that they prefer their own language instead of JS, but not hate JS per say.

Also, compare this to the number of people who are just using JS normally worldwide, then we'll have perspective of just how many more people are just fine with JS Vs the people who feel the need to make these.

My guess would be that the number of people who like JS and use just normal JS in their projects is far far greater in number than the people who use compile-to-js solutions. So in comparision to the former, the latter group could be called as 'few'.

shwetank··on Firefox 34 includes WebRTC videochat client “Firefox Hello”
Encryption is mandatory for WebRTC. It uses DTLS for it - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6347
shwetank··on Surfing the Modern Web with Ancient Browsers
It's still pretty popular even now. More than 250 million people use it worldwide.