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zkhaliqueon Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

I agree with the downvoters of your comment.

edit: You downvoters of my comment, however, are lame!

zkhaliqueon Stack Overflow Outage Postmortem

This is great. I just want to add something that might not be well-known: StackOverflow is all hosted from ONE web app server! It handles all the writes.

zkhaliqueon Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

YCombinator told us that we are essentially a single-founder company, based on our equity split. You can see our growth straight on our website: http://qbix.com/groups and http://qbix.com/calendar

Revenues per user are increasing slightly with each product version, but we haven't released a big game-changer yet.

zkhaliqueon Scientists are teaching robots how to hunt down prey

Yes, not scary at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_luhn7TLfWU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2itwFJCgFQ

zkhaliqueon Coming Soon: Gut Bacteria That Cure Disease

Gut bacteria from thin people can help lose weight?

zkhaliqueon Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

They've also done it with app developers!

zkhaliqueon New Cities

What about the Venus project

zkhaliqueon The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

Is your platform distributed and decentralised?

Yes

Is your platform easier for Joe public to publish websites on than wordpress and without a central service provider?

Yes, just as easily as in multi-person Wordpress. But it does much more than just publish a website. It can power a web app, one that goes in the app store, support social features like contacts, access control, realtime updates and offline notifications, and more.

Does your platform prevent government snooping?

Yes, by preventing data from accumulating in a single information silo. More than that, we believe that access to the global internet (as Facebook was trying to with Internet 2.0 in India) should be unnecessary, as people on cruises or local villages should connect on local area networks, and only access the wider internet when necessary. We believe the older tools in the dialup era were designed more properly than the ones which assume always-on broadband access and only have "isOnline/isOffline" dichotomy.

Does your platform prevent the accumulation of data in a single information silo?

Yes. People choose what organizations they host with. When they visit another domain, they have an instantly personalized experience, with all friends who wanted to share that they also use the service. Much better than "Your friend XYZ is now on Instagram" without their permission, and much better than oAuth. Over time, you might import enough information to have a full-fledged presence in both communities, and choose which one to auth with. Some communities are for your videos, the others are for some group activities or whatever. Any community can embed components from any other community. Any aggregator can subscribe to publishers (with their permission) and get realtime updates, with custom stream types, instead of e.g. Google spidering your site.

Just take a look: http://qbix.com/platform/features/distributed

Does it reinvent the Web, making it, as a whole, inherently less centralised than it already is?

It builds on top of the web, which is already decentralized, and makes it possible for communities to deploy apps on their domain which rival those on facebook.com, and which allow users to seamlessly use their identities and friends across domains.

Can it do all of the above in a non-centralised way, resilient to network outages, and loss of resources at their original location, across the whole of the Web?

It is designed to power mesh networks such as the ones being set up in various cities. The mobile wireless infrastructure is still centralized, but that will eventually change.

Does it embed key moral principles into the fabric of the Web?

See http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135 for my own overview of the moral and political principles behind the platform.

Some of the other things you mentioned aren't really addressed, such as "Can it verify financial transactions and authenticate data sources?" That's more for blockchains. Our platform does not rely on any global resources except possibly DNS.

zkhaliqueon The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

"It does nothing to address any of the points raised in the article"

Really? It seems that many of the actual quotes from the Fathers of the Internet in the article apply to existing web client-server architecture:

“We hoped everyone would be making their own web sites—turns out people are afraid to.” - Tim Berners-Lee

“People have their friends on Facebook and some photos on Flickr and their colleagues on LinkedIn. All they want to do is share the photos with the colleagues and the friends—and they can’t. Which is really stupid. You either have to tell Flickr about your Facebook friends, or move your photos to Facebook and LinkedIn separately, or build and run a third application to build a bridge between the two.” - Tim Berners-Lee

(by the way, we address this explicitly in our platform)

"Don’t discount Wordpress, it has been embraced by large numbers of people, perhaps the new web should have a decentralized Wordpress type of service." - Brewster Kahle

That doesn't sound like a necessarily serverless architecture to me.

zkhaliqueon The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

Your mistake is thinking that the relevant centralization is in the client-server architecture. The real reason that people have centralized social is because it's hard to let people authenticate and find their friends across domains. And even further, there are no good tools comparable to Facebook when it comes to subscriptions, notifications, updates, realtime collaboration, and all those other multi-user things that happen on a centralized domain.

The Web is decentralized, email is decentralized, git is decentralized, bitcoin is decentralized, now what is the analogue for social? That's the reason github is centralized. You get all the goodies of the accounts. Once you disrupt this social layer with something decentralized, you disrupt centralization in a big way. That's the more relevant phenomenon.

Once you have a conversation with multiple parties, you need to elect someone to be the authority on "what happened". Mental Poker is still an unsolved problem for arbitrary conversations and participants. So that may as well be a server. The question is about centralization in the macro sense.

zkhaliqueon The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

That's funny, they are basically describing our platform.

http://qbix.com/platform

zkhaliqueon Why the US never fully adopted the metric system

Can you share some links about when it was in style?

zkhaliqueon Caution: The DAO Can Turn into a Naturally-Arising Ponzi

How does a startup even apply to be funded by the DAO?

zkhaliqueon Study: To Beat Loneliness, Visits Must Be Real, Not Virtual

That is why there needs to be a social network where you can just hop on and meet people for dinner, yoga class, or whatever.

I don't mean Meetup.com ... you don't use Meetup to go to dinner.

zkhaliqueon Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

"Press the 'f' and 'd' keys randomly. As randomly as you can. I'll try to predict which key you'll press next. 0.4893617021276598 A rolling mean of my accuracy in predicting what key you'll press."

So does that mean it's not able to predict with more than 50% accuracy?

zkhaliqueon Apple, Microsoft, and Google hold 23% of all U.S. corporate cash

3) What is the US government getting now from all that cash that is not being repatriated? Is it a game of chicken? Apple is using that money, investing it in Chinese companies:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-invests-1-billion-in-didi-...

It could have been doing that in the USA. It could have acquired Tesla. It still can.

Forget creating jobs... Apple is now funding businesses in other countries that will be competing with US companies.

zkhaliqueon Reddit launches image uploads, ditching alliance with Imgur

This is what you get for relying on someone else's centralized platform.

zkhaliqueon Google Maps is about to get a lot more ads

What about the Google Maps api? Will companies be able to use the maps to display things, unmolested by google-sponsored ads?

zkhaliqueon Unnecessariat

It's not a Ponzi scheme. You simply tax the thing (savings from firing humans) that is increasingly eating the lunch of the other thing (humans being employed), which you want to subsidize, because of a constraint libertarians don't mention (we want all humans to live even if demand for their labor is low).

Here's what you do:

1) Tax the monetary gains made by corporations from greater automation, not enough to disincentivize R&D, but enough to counteract inflation from step #2.

2) Institute an unconditional basic income, like Alaska already does for natural resources. Everyone gets a check in the mail.

You balance #1 and #2 so there is no net inflation. The more corporations lay people off in the aggregate, the more wages will be replaced by UBI.

zkhaliqueon CSS coding techniques

I am surprised none of the replies (thus far) endorsed the above view, so I will.

Yes, if you are building something that should look the same across websites, this is a good idea.

Though it's often better to just have your own iFrames and use cross-domain communication, since your plugin will have to do its own authentication and API as well.

zkhaliqueon uWebSockets: Scalable WebSocket server library for Node.js and C++11

Why is your username green?

zkhaliqueon More contributions on your profile

Our team made http://quickmarklets.com at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon. It can currently only be used on http websites (until we host it on https) but it lets you do what you say, on mobile phones.

Do you think it's useful btw to have bookmarklets on the mobile web? Until now, you were limited to safari extensions and intents which you had to install through the app store.

zkhaliqueon Why do old statues have such small penises?

I heard from my professors that a smaller penis represented sophrosyne (latin temperantia) rather than great unconstrained passions, a desirable trait.

zkhaliqueon Angular 2 Release Candidate

In our platform, we just let the developer call a function manually after updating the state of a tool. So it is event-driven reactive changes.

Yes, shockingly, we don't save those keystrokes, but we also don't have the elaborate dirty checking. The developer of a component is extremely likely to make sure during development that the update to a state has updated the view. Of course, you could just hook up React or VDOM or mirthril and it's totally complementary to what we do.

zkhaliqueon Angular 2 Release Candidate

React is just about dirty-checking the view, while Angular dirty-checks the model.

I mean, seriously, that's the main difference conceptually. You just modify some data structure and both frameworks will update some view.

zkhaliqueon Feinstein-Burr: The Bill That Bans Your Browser

But what makes the "would have to" follow, let alone be enforceable?

ANY sovereign government can pass a bill saying the same thing about any maker of any software, and they might even have long-arm statutes via agreements between them. It's not like Google doesn't have subsidiaries in China, and it's not like they're not restricted in China.

zkhaliqueon Feinstein-Burr: The Bill That Bans Your Browser

Yeah, this is bordering on ridiculous. But, if any of this is contemplated, you can bet it's also being contemplated in China, Russia and everywhere else.

The standard response should be: "would you want us to do the same for foreign governments?"

zkhaliqueon Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider

Well, it can be linked to the more serious Everett's many-worlds explanation and quantum immortality ... we don't live in a world in which we successfully fired up the LHC and the black hole destroyed everyone on Earth, because in that world, there is no life on Earth. So we live in one of the other worlds in which, by whatever improbable means, the black hole never materialized.

Why is this not a serious topic?

See also the "Doomsday argument". It makes similar arguments in a different context without resorting to many worlds. Just the fact that we are alive at a certain time affects the probability that we are part of a doomsday scenario.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

zkhaliqueon Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider

First birds dropping bread, now this?

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1937370,0...

Perhaps the animals are trying to tell us something...

zkhaliqueon Amazon Doesn’t Consider the Race of Its Customers. Should It?

Betteridge's law.