Hacker News Reader

whowouldathunkon Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

XAML components ("controls" in MS terminology) contain both declarative markup and code. And it's flexible because the visual presentation can be completely overriden by the component's consumer without altering behavior, and your code can be either C# or C++.

What does dependency injection have to do with anything? There's nothing stopping you from using global variables or an event bus or something like Redux in a XAML app.

whowouldathunkon Proton Native – React Native for the desktop

> and now we're making traditional UI dev like web

It's been like that on Windows since 2006 with XAML. In fact, if you squint at typical JSX, it looks like XAML.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

whowouldathunkon Fuchsia is not Linux

Not really, that's how Windows works too since Vista.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa9...

And it's what enables effects like this in Windows 10:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/style/re...

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft

whowouldathunkon Single Family Homes in Santa Clara County: March 2018 Report

About the same here in Seattle. It makes saving for a down payment even more depressing.

I don't understand who is able to buy these houses when my partner and I can't as software engineer + physician assistant. Maybe it's just because we're not willing to decrease or dip into our retirement savings and we have no help from parents.

I just don't feel comfortable taking out a jumbo mortgage. Even though we could make the numbers work, I'm not confident either of us won't burn out from our stressful careers.

whowouldathunkon The Role of Luck in Life Success

We're on a small rock flying through an infinite universe. Our lives exist in a small blink of time. Computers run billions of operations per second using software with countless defects at every level of the stack.

We're lucky anything works at all. In that context, we succeeded just by being born and living as long as we have, and we'd be pretty narrow-minded to assume that the material success we enjoy is significantly more than a series of happy accidents.

whowouldathunkon Unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially (2015)

A small example is my girlfriend getting charged for a pregnancy test in the emergency room even after she told them she doesn't have a uterus.

whowouldathunkon Announcing Flutter beta 1: Build beautiful native apps

Not sure why you're being downvoted. XAML definitely supports complex widget composition in markup. Since the XML is basically just describing an object graph, it's a more concise way of writing the equivalent imperative code:

    <Button>
        <StackPanel>
            <Image/>
            <TextBlock/>

    ...

    <Button>
        <Canvas>
            <Ellipse/>

although the Dart syntax makes this look similar, albeit a little more verbose, if you squint.

Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

whowouldathunkon The Teens Will Save Us

One cost of all the guns is all the extra security. Schools resembling prisons, TSA, metal detectors and surveillance everywhere... doesn’t that also infringe on my freedom in a way?

whowouldathunkon Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)

Missed opportunity for "reticulating splines"

whowouldathunkon Ursula Le Guin has died

RIP Ursula. I just finished The Left Hand of Darkness and am in the middle of the Earthsea series and it's absolutely fantastic. Love her writing.

whowouldathunkon The estate tax is a bad tax say economists (2001)

The estate tax is justified as a means of reducing the concentration of wealth. However, the truly wealthy and their estate planners avoid the tax. The low yield of the tax is a testament to the ineffectiveness of the tax as a force for reshaping the distribution of wealth.

Of course, those recommending the repeal of the estate tax are also probably of the opinion that wealth concentration is not a problem.

whowouldathunkon Bitcoin is an Energy Hog

The cost of electricity is artificially low because it doesn't include the cost of the associated pollution.

whowouldathunkon Bitcoin is an Energy Hog

The market is ignoring externalities.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

whowouldathunkon Apple Plans Combined iPhone, iPad and Mac Apps to Create One User Experience

> The concept was tried with Windows 8; they had to go back to offering both desktop and touchscreen options.

Still using the same platform. The idea is to use responsive design rather than different UI frameworks.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

whowouldathunkon Apple Plans Combined iPhone, iPad and Mac Apps to Create One User Experience

Hopefully this means the iPad Pro will gain support for trackpads and mouse input.

whowouldathunkon Apple Plans Combined iPhone, iPad and Mac Apps to Create One User Experience

Apple Watch has a crown and a touch screen. iPad Pros have keyboards, pens, and a touch screen. Apple TV has directional and trackpad input. All support voice input. All work fine with basically the same UI toolkit.

whowouldathunkon Apple Plans Combined iPhone, iPad and Mac Apps to Create One User Experience

That's an orthogonal problem. Why should the Apple platform arbitrarily require you to use different toolkits for different form factors or input modalities? They already support phones, tablets, TV's, and watches with the iOS toolkits. Adding desktops and laptops to that mix seems obvious.

And it goes the other way. The iPad Pro will probably benefit by gaining support for pointer input.

whowouldathunkon The Big Vitamin D Mistake

Same experience for me. The University of Washington headache clinic recommended Vitamin D and Magnesium supplements and it made a marked difference in my mood. Turns out having constant mild headaches is pretty depressing.

whowouldathunkon Ajit Pai is right

Wow. And this:

https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help...

I really don't want utilities making value judgements for me.

whowouldathunkon Ajit Pai is right

You need electricity to power everything you do online. I don't think anyone would support being charged different rates based on what you plug into a power outlet.

whowouldathunkon An Open Letter to the FCC

Best thing to do is probably to contact your representatives and senators in order to get Congress to act on net neutrality.

whowouldathunkon Movies Anywhere App Launches with Joint Studio Backing

That's exactly how it works. It took about an hour after linking my Vudu account before they showed up on the Movies Anywhere site and iTunes.

whowouldathunkon Movies Anywhere App Launches with Joint Studio Backing

Nice, my UltraViolet codes for Mad Max and The Revenant now show up as 4K HDR versions on iTunes. And I even got the Black and Chrome version of Mad Max as a bonus "iTunes Extra."

This is a very pro-consumer move.

whowouldathunkon On Performant Arrays in Swift

On the contrary, developing a good intuition about stuff like this so you get it right the first time is a big time saver in the long run. Especially when it's no extra code to do the better thing to begin with.

Good developers have battery empathy.

whowouldathunkon Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

I would bet there would be less bugs overall if everyone was always using the latest version since it would reduce the test matrix.

whowouldathunkon Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

You're arguing in favor of OS segmentation on a developer forum. Please no!

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.

whowouldathunkon Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

The dumbest is that their "auto" modes aren't as good as phones. I bought a Fuji X-T20 and am really disappointed with it; it is definitely capable of much better results than my phone as long as you have the time to switch all the knobs, which is way more annoying than I thought it would be and often not possible depending on your subject.

I have no desire to do any post-processing and didn't realize that most of the amazing photos I saw in camera reviews were the result of professional-level post-processing.

whowouldathunkon Introduction to WebRender

Sounds good. Just a word of caution to make sure you're ready for future UI design direction changes:

https://fluent.microsoft.com/

DirectComposition powers a lot of that and I bet web devs will want that kind of stuff too. Notice things like per-element shadows that are lit by global (OS-wide) lights.