sudo_bang_bang

Can I run WebVM inside WebVM?

He graduated with a mathematics degree from Harvard so the concept of binary search would have likely been familiar to him. But you’re right, as far as I can tell, he never did any technical work like programming in his career.

It’s both a username and a password

Very rarely do I so vehemently disagree with a particular argument in software. This idea epitomizes much of what is wrong in the industry.

We can all agree security updates are essential, but a lot of libraries are “done” from a functional perspective for a majority of their existing use cases.

Yes updates can be needed because interfaces break between other programs, standards evolve in backward incompatible ways, performance improvements can be made, etc. But much of the updates I see are changes for the sake of changes.

You could use a 5 year old version of React for example, and modulo some set of security fixes if any, you could have a robust application.

Sometimes software is just done. We are better off for accepting that idea. Get us off the update hamster wheel and stop the enshittification.

I changed my mind about what constitutes a fulfilling life for me. I realized that I personally could not live a life consisting solely of devotion to work and consumption of luxury goods. I started a family and have two wonderful children.

I still believe that investing in work is necessary and rewarding, and indulgences are a somewhat important part of life, but those alone are all kind of meaningless for me in the end. It’s the endless chase of another dragon.

With my children, I feel a greater sense of joy and accomplishment when I watch them grow. I’ve had higher highs raising kids than I ever did finding the next excursion I could go on or the hottest new company to work for.

The Lindy Effect is real.

Important to note that real income per capita isn’t actually flat, only household income but that’s likely because of household size changes.

See here for disposable real income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0

Safe:

* Recession will happen that will affect the global economy causing at least a 30% decrease in major world stock indexes.

* China will stumble in a major recession but the Communist Party will maintain power.

* Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft will still be the biggest tech companies by market cap.

* A new company that hasn’t been started yet will be in the top 10 tech companies by market cap.

* The duopoly of cloud computing services will be AWS and Google Cloud. Nearly all Fortune 500 companies will use one or the other.

* Big Tech will not be broken up because of their large value decline during recession, with focus being diverted to prop economy back up.

Bold:

* Breakthrough battery technology will make electric vehicles better for consumers than than their fossil fuel counterparts.

* The breakthrough battery tech will allow a very affordable manned mission to Mars.

* Solar will be the dominant form of energy creation in the United States.

* HIV vaccine available to nearly all healthy adults.

* Netflix will be bought by Disney.

* DeepFake technology will be used to create an entire feature film by a major studio.

* Donald Trump will win the 2020 presidential election despite being unsuccessfully tried during impeachment.

* In the United States, majority of people will eat synthetic meat over animal-based meat.

* San Francisco Bay Area will not be globally in the top 10 areas of funding for new technology startups.

Crazy:

* A state in the United States will successfully secede.

* Glaciation will increase in parts of the world with their albedo effect predicted to offset most of the temperature increase from man-made climate change.

* Major disease epidemic will kill at least 20 million people. Will not be noticed at first but will rapidly kill after long incubation.

* Artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be achieved, accidentally.

* Despite AGI, self-driving cars will not be the majority of vehicles on the road.

I tried interviewing with Asana and they rejected me on the basis that I didn't have a computer science degree. For the record, I've built apps that have generated millions in revenue and I have many years of experience. If they are trying to be meritocratic and community friendly with this, they should change that aspect of their culture to reflect that.

There's also a great Freakonomics podcast about this story http://freakonomics.com/podcast/make-me-a-match-a-new-freako...

Build tools are partly necessary because of how many old crusty browsers hang around out there. I mean, I still work on an app that has to support IE8. That's just ridiculous. As it is, ES6/ES7 imports make a lot of the issues of JS inclusion a thing of the past, but the build tools are necessary for packing these together and transpiling down to ES5, to support older browsers. The other tools you see in the React ecosystem do take time to learn for sure. The whole React/Flux paradigm takes a while but once you get it there's not many surprises. I do feel the fatigue though just as the author does. There's a million ways to do what the browsers should just do natively already. In a few years we hopefully won't have to worry about this anymore.

Awesome essay! It looks like some version of the source code at least is available here: https://github.com/macek/google_pacman

I've been looking at trying out AppHub https://apphub.io/, which is comparable to CodePush. I'll have to try this.

As it is, both are definitely useful for better handling upgrade process with users. A couple drawbacks with mobile apps are that it's harder to hotfix errors, and you sometimes have to support older APIs for longer. With a web app, a user can visit the site and the entire app bundle can be downloaded after a cache bust.

The user is also the author of this, which will artificially inflate the number of commits a user has made of a calendar year. https://github.com/4148/greenhat

Perhaps 4148 is testing something out related to that or a new project and the script went bad?

I loved Django when I started using it about 4 years ago. Lately, I've switched to Flask and replaced the templating with React. I love the new way, but I still have a place in my heart for Django. Does anyone on HN still start new projects with Django or have you moved on as well?

I think this should be the future of native apps. You do get all of the benefits of native apps -- there are plenty of modules to handle key bindings, notifications, file system IO, etc. By using web page rendering you also get the incredible ecosystem of front-end tooling and plugins (React, Bootstrap, the infinite jQuery plugin world). All of this beats Qt in my opinion, having designed both.

Likewise, I switched over. I just wish HTTPie could have an "output to curl" feature.

I love React, it really does make development more straightforward. I was skeptical for a long time, but React + Redux is a great way to go. As for grid system, you can't beat Bootstrap. For a material design spec, I would check out this set of React components: http://material-ui.com/#/

"The human brain, which accounts for less than 2 percent of the body’s mass, uses 20 percent of its calorie budget, or three bananas worth of energy a day. That’s remarkably low, given that spikes require a lot of energy."

What is amazing about this fact is that this is only 20 watts of power. The brain computes at 10 quadrillion calculations per second. While the largest supercomputer (China’s Tianhe-2) is at 34 quadrillion and has "beat" the human brain, it comparatively runs at 24 megawatts of power [1]

[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...

As people have stated here, the forests need to burn. Ponderosa Pine, which covers a lot of the Western U.S., burns at a cycle between 5-25 years. [1]

However, we could and already do, control the natural process this through prescribed burns. The issue is the federal government is appropriating less funds to the Department of the Interior and Forest Service. In fact 2016 will represent, "a decrease of $246 million below the fiscal year 2015." [2] Climate change could potentially shorten these life cycles. We definitely need to spend more to ensure safety and survival of homes and the forest.

[1]http://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/fire-i... [2] http://appropriations.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Doc...

I've never had any major problems with a gTLD and email but I have had colleagues have spam filtering issues. I have used a .io domain and I haven't had a problem, although we don't email too frequently. I must say it is somewhat fashionable with startups now to get gTLDs or cute ccTLD. However, there is an ethical issue with io specifically. [1]

As for my own personal opinion, I'm getting far more used to seeing startups and other services on TLDs other than .com. I think consumers are getting used to it now as well, in fact a lot of clients I work with won't even type the address into the browser anymore. They navigate to it via Google. Also, if you need to change TLDs at some point there are plenty of successful companies that have done so. [2]

Namecheap, it's great. I like using it. I also use Google Domains which is surprisingly nice.

[1]https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-...

[2]http://mashable.com/2013/01/08/business-domain-names/#eBSI4O...

This needs a potentially NSFW tag. Looked at this while working and quickly had to close it due to some questionable content.

"Protocol buffers are a language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanism for serializing structured data." [1]

Interesting, I figured Google was handling data serialization in their own way, and now I know[2]

[1]https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview [2]https://github.com/google/protobuf

"you’d expect it to do something pretty deep right?... Nope. It reads in a string and writes out a string."

We're all just doing the same thing in one way or another :) Good work and nice article.

Definitely look at this before you use React Native. RN makes heavy use of flexbox for layouts, and if you come from living in a world of <div style="position: relative; margin-left: x;"> then it can be a bit foreign. As for browsers, I'm still waiting on more flexbox adoption.

It's likely that there are many factors at work. You'll hear everything from changes in diet, too much TV, too much social media, too much time in front of the iPad, etc.

As an anecdote to perhaps corroborate yours, it felt impossible for me to get up at 7am every morning M-F from the ages of 9-22. It also felt highly unnatural to be doing so at all, as a majority of my friends experienced the same thing -- a very shifted sleep schedule which started later in the evening and lasted 8+ hours into almost noontime. Of course this could all be due to too much TV, too much social media, too much iPad, etc.

As for the article, play seems central to development. It certainly plays a role in bonding formation[1] and neural development[2]. However, just like every other factor, it's just hard to suss out its relative weight compared to everything else a child experiences during development.

My personal view is that this is all very speculative. When we can model the brain better, whether it's through more carefully controlled studies or even through machine intelligence simulations, we will actually be able to determine its real value. Though, I do suspect its high.

[1] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/119/1/182.full [2] http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/06/336361277/scientis...

I haven't had to rely a lot on math skills for a large portion of my career. For most "full-stack" stuff I've been involved with, it barely gets any higher than algebra. However, I've found math creep up though here and there, whether it be in understanding how projections worked in the mapping software I wrote, the computer graphics code I assisted with, and also in my routing algorithms for traffic flow.

Nowadays my lack of knowledge is most apparent in studying machine learning. There have been some very high level concepts employed, at least for me: Jacobian matrices, partial derivatives, tensors, etc. I've been able to fake that for a while, the algorithms get abstracted in the libraries. Yet the abstraction obscures a real understanding for me in how they work.

I never studied math in college, in fact I barely studied math in high school. It was always daunting to try to parse the notation and figure out how the abstract symbols corresponded to some piece of reality.

When I became a self-taught developer I found my math skills continuously lacking. I started teaching myself on Khan Academy and really picking it up a lot better because of the simplicity of the language and the good examples. I finally realized I learned math best visually.

Interactive lessons like these are great. There are things that can be improved about this book (load times and enhanced interactivity) but all in all this a great resource for people that learn best visually. I'll come back to this soon in my future self-education.

"Research has shown that users are already desensitized to privacy and security warnings."

This along with the quote below are my biggest takeaways from this article:

"it can be difficult to avoid information leakage through URLs or cookies or more sophisticated attacks."

People may not even realize they are giving the keys away until it's too late. It's unlikely that a dialog box for confirmation would be explicit anyway, especially if Ancestry and others stand to monetarily gain from your DNA.

Moreover, if you're a malicious actor you can simply display an ad from Ancestry and when you have a logged in user you could potentially identify a whole host of other information that can be associated with their email and other aspects of their identity. The malicious actor could resell this to even worse offenders.

Having worked with dc.js and D3 for interactive visualizations, I'm eager to try something else like this that could simplify charting. When recharting via an API, a lot of code needs to be written to handle it. With Vega though, at least from first impressions, it seems that all you need to do is pass a payload and you can immediately re-render. There's no need to run it through reducers or unpack and massage the data to get it to fit. I'm looking forward to trying it.