denniskane

>Mozilla has your back

That's kinda funny when you consider where Mozilla came from... the ashes of a thing called Netscape... who tried to rule the world while a couple grad students were busy plugging away at Stanford, doing it the right way.

Hi, yes, that stuff is from quite awhile ago, seeing that NaCl/PNaCl is quite dead, and WASM is now all the rage. I previously had actual vim running via NaCl, but the current (better IMO) version is just a fairly small JS clone (about 70kb). The whole system is rapidly stabilizing right now, what with the entire gui framework being fleshed out, both conceptually and technically.

I try to stay away from the above kinds of sweeping generalizations about the whole thing nowadays. It is best to let it speak for itself and evolve in its own good time.

Did you try the "desk.os" link that is link number 3 on that page... https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com/desk.os ? I can really only guarantee that things work on a relatively recent version of Chrome (like within the last few stable releases). The version that is live now is a couple weeks old. I'm working on some really cool features for the modular synth app right now. I'd love to start sharing this stuff with you guys!

Also, link number 5, at https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com/shell.os is for people who just want to poke around the deep system internals via a command line. For that, you need to use the "import" command in order to pull in libraries of commands. For instance, running a command like:

$ import fs && vim

should open up my custom-made vim clone.

I started building something I like to call "Linux on the Web" (LOTW) 6+ years ago in order to start working on this problem (it's live on the web right now). Just like with node.js applications, the smallest legal file size for an app running inside of LOTW is precisely 0 bytes. I've tried to shave that down even more, but I seem to be running into physical limits :)

I also have a sandboxed interpreter in my site... I use JS to parse strings of shell/bash text. The site is a full-scale desktop environment in a browser: https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com

It is Chrome only as it relies on access to a local filesystem, and using Native Client plugins.

The first time I was aware of Larry as a person was in early 2014 when I saw a replay of him on stage at the 2013 Google I/O event. I immediately got an impression of him as being a truly saintly figure, with his gentle, soft-spoken demeanor.

Considering what I have been going through in my daily life, I could not be more in awe of what Larry has been able to accomplish. I feel that Google is easily an order of magnitude more important than the next closest institution, be it public or private, be it a business or a government.

My offering to Larry is a little thing that I've been working on for the past several years called "Linux on the Web". If you stick those four words together and put it into a relevant search engine, then the link should appear as the top hit. It only works in Chrome... a fact that truly warms my cockles at this moment.

I f*ing love that man.

Screw all the haters.

Suggestion to all potential future reporters out there: pay more attention in your math, science and engineering classes, and less in your liberal (f)arts classes.

If we turn the web itself into an actual developer (and user) friendly platform, then we could probably start making better use of it as an application delivery vehicle. To enable this, I've been furiously working on this OS-in-a-browser concept for the past 3+ years: https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com

>in order for linux to take off

We need Linux on the Web!

https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com

It makes heavy use of the HTML5 Filesytem for local storage, as well as Native Client for vim, python, and plugin codecs to enable highly configurable realtime a/v streaming via WebRTC peer connections. Windowed HTML5/JS applications can be developed live within the site itself. There is a feature to stream terminal sessions to each other, in order to show how to efficiently use vim to develop applications, for example.

My idea is to "self source" it. You will be able to edit the source code from within it, using a powerful editor like vim (emacs might be coming soon). The version that you are editing will be embedded inside of an iframe that is inside of an application window, and people will be able to easily share their hacked versions using the distributed filesystem that I am actively developing. In other words, I have absolutely no interest in putting up yet another lame github project that absolutely nobody cares about. For me, it's about going all the way or no way at all.

If anyone is interested in working together with me, the best place to join me is the "native client discuss" forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/native-client-discus...

> Let's suppose our AI must chose, in a flurry of combat, between sacrificing the life of a friendly soldier, or killing two other people, likely to be civilians.

This question of programmatically determining "friend" vs "foe" is highly problematic, to say the least. The only reason why humans make such distinctions is because they rely on them in order to ensure their own physical survival, so they can successfully propagate the species.

In order for a lifeless machine to make these kinds of distinctions, there must exist some kind of objectively verifiable calculation procedure that decides what exactly makes another human friendly or not. If this calculation procedure is simply meant to mimic the subjective calculations that are made by human military strategists, then this technology could not properly be considered the kind of interesting problem that AI researchers would want to work on. But if it is indeed meant to be objectively valid, then it will surely need to initiate a deep learning function that can very easily come up with a conclusion that finally determines that the so-called "friend" as determined by the human military strategist is actually a foe that needs to be eliminated.

So I think that the entire concept of developing highly sophisticated autonomous agents is inextricably wound up in the interesting, objective question of what it truly means to be human, rather than the more prosaic, subjective question of what it means to be a certain type of human that happens to judge another type of human as friend or foe.

I will do everything in my power to ensure that corporate-backed, ivory-tower, anti-philosophical, techno-enthusiast academics do not figure out some kind of formula to dominate the world of human affairs with their so-called "super intelligent machines". I'm not saying that this specific research group falls under this umbrella, but they are all credited as being associated with Facebook AI research, so take it FWIW. I do believe that a certain Elon Musk would back me up here:

"I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah he's sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out."

The classes of algorithms that are meant to directly interact with people in a way that appears authentically human must obviously be highly regulated, and I certainly agree that these kinds of regulations should be on par with international nuclear oversight bodies.

It is always important to give end users the option to figure out for themselves how the algorithms that they interact with actually function. In order to encourage this kind of thing, I have been working on an online, distributed operating system concept for the past several years, and one of the apps is a simple, "Hello World" kind of an AI that goes by the name, Bertie.

I am working on making the underlying system code (which is mostly JavaScript) completely editable by end users. They will be able to test out their edits in an application window inside of the web page, and will be able to share their changes with each other over the distributed, web-based filesystem that I am actively developing.

If you are running Chrome, you can try out the OS by going to https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/. To see the AI app, just click on the Applications folder, and then click on Bertie's face. Alternatively, if you are feeling lazy, just click on the following link and the Bertie app will automatically open: https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk?open=Bertie.

Thank you for this, I will look into it :). I was actually going to tell these people to give me a github link or go away, haha. I don't need any kind of license page that looks like http://alchemy.cs.washington.edu/license.php?action=2, thank you very much!

By the way, you can talk to my AI guy if you have a recent Chrome/Chromium browser. It is actually an entire OS in a browser, and the AI guy is an app called Bertie. My current implementation of the OS is called "The Native Client Proving Ground", and can be found here: https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk. The OS should install in less than 2 seconds after clicking the link. Then you just open the Applications folder and click on Bertie's face. He will then introduce himself, and you can start talking to him.

It's quite a coincidence that you posted this while I was writing up my own post evangelizing the virtues of NaCl :)

I don't worry so much about encryption, since I am really not into keeping secrets, but I agree about the client-side part.

...and now a brief word from our corporate sponsors...

Haha, not really :) I'm just trying to get the thing that I've been working on "out there". It's an operating system that runs in a web browser. How's that for client-side awesomeness? The current project I'm hawking is called "The Native Client Proving Ground", in order to get people to see the inherent awesomeness of running arbitrary computational logic on the client. So yeah, encryption is definitely do-able, though not extremely interesting IMO.

I posted this here a couple days ago, and actually got it onto the front page for a brief minute. So fire up your Chrome browsers and check out the infinite potential that exists on the client-side: https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk?intro=the-shaker

If you didn't know, Native Client (NaCl) is the plugin architecture for Chrome so you can run arbitrary C/C++ code inside of a sandboxed runtime.

Join the revolution!

"over-bearing central planning"

Ever heard of the city of Naypyidaw? It took about a decade to build in the middle of bumfuck Burma. It's like 6 times the size of NYC, with 20 lane highways that are almost always empty. I guess they tried to make it seem luxurious, but the ghost-town vibe makes workers want to commute from Rangoon. I just heard about it on 60 minutes during a piece about Aung San Suu Kyi. She's the badass whose party just won in the recent elections there. Which has nothing to do with the current thread, but I'm a rebel like that :)

I don't need to sell anything. I've already proven my point by building something that actually works. If you want to prove something about your favorite technology, you are going to have to build something that actually works using it.

Given the current state of browser technology, the simple prototype that I've created could not possibly have been done with a dumb little JS thread running in a dumb little Web Worker.

What in the world does it mean to "compile an engine I like better"? Do you really have any clue how much sophistication is going on server side with the SpeechRecognition API? Am I supposed to just magically conjure up something that can be compiled in order to recognize arbitrary words from arbitrary people?

Hi, I love you. You are a normal person on HN trying to honestly make sense of the world of technology, and not taking any crap from all of the "Haha, U srsly don't know about xvzz and zxcz, LOL" types of people around here. I just love that!

If the author is around, I've got a project working that I just posted to HN that I think can be pretty promising as an AI research platform. If you have Chrome, you can find the project at [ https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk?intro=the-shaker ]. It's called "The Native Client Proving Ground". I actually have a silly little AI application in JS on the site, but I would like to leverage Chrome's Native Client SDK to get some really awesome native algorithms running in the browser, doing things like NLP and computer vision.

(You can find the post under my submissions, I think it actually got onto the front page on HN. I saw it high up on the second.)

The fact that they use their own karma system to automatically rank certain trusted users who might have done things like invent entire programming languages or started up 10 billion dollar companies ahead of random "asshats" who hang around HN is not very surprising in my opinion ;)

(edit: Whoever downvoted this, I was responding to someone who goes by the name AdmiralAsshat, and I was obviously joking. But that might just be HN automatically downvoting people for using words like asshat. In which case, HN is being a pure asshat.)

Emscripten running a crappy voice synthesizer might work, but nothing close to the silky smooth voices that chrome includes. It will really just add tons of bloat to the page. Voice synth is truly something that needs to be baked into the browser.

Are you seriously implying that pocketsphinx in JS will do anything close to the level of voice recognition necessary to recognize pretty much anyone's voice, sight unseen? I mean, really? You kinda need to train the hell out of that thing to get it to recognize the difference between "merry christmas" and "happy hanukah", and even then, it will only really work for one person.

Funny how you see that on like every UA string, but no one really talks about it. I guess you can say that that's going to be the KDE project's most lasting contribution to the world of technology, since it gave rise to the most popular rendering engine on the planet.

I wonder how this works, though. I assume there is not any kind of automated system on the backend of HN trying to figure out what is "good content" and what isn't.

This is weird. I actually posted this like 20 hours ago, and it was a spectacular flop. Now it says 5 hours ago, and now I'm actually on the second page of Hacker effing News!

(Hi Mom!)

About the "Why chrome?" page. I needed to put something there to explain why you need to use Chrome to get any use out of the site. I realize anything that I put there will only wind up as flame bait, so I tried to make it as "politically acceptable" as possible. The bottom line is that I couldn't care less about those political arguments. To me, the web will always be more about technical merit than anything else. Back in the "bad old days" of the original browser wars, Mozilla was at the forefront of pushing the technical boundaries of the web. Not so much anymore. Such is life.

But don't let that stop anyone from engaging in an old-fashioned flame fest. Anything that gets this to the front page of HN is a-okay with me :)

>You do realize Hacker News itself is a Lisp application on the web?

...and now we finally arrive at the fundamental quarrel that I have with using the terms "web" and "application", such that, when linked, can lead to a state of confusion about the nature of the technologies involved.

In the generic sense, there is application vs theory, so that everything that has to do with a real computer program is always going to be an "application", and therefore, any arbitrary program that is used as a backend for a website, can indeed be called something of an "application for the web".

But this is not what normal human beings are thinking about when they use the word "application" in conjunction with their own computing devices. They are thinking about whatever is running on their machine that they can sense, and can thus physically interact with.

In this way, the correct dichotomy is application vs service. So, the Lisp backend for HN is just a service for the user facing application (the web browser).

All of this goes hand-in-hand with my larger point about styles of informing that are not quite as informative as they can possibly be.

>Obviously it primarily means CLI applications. I think you're being unreasonably pedantic.

My point is that that style of conveying information is more propagandistic than it is truly informative. It is in the style of a typical startup in the valley run by Stanford whiz kids who are trying to impress their classmates as much anything else. Everyone who is already hip to hacker culture knows how to correctly interpret those kinds of statements, but everyone else is just left more confused.

Gnu-ish tools like Guile really have no place in the marketplace of "hipster in a Starbucks with a Macbook plastered with shiny decals" kinds of technologies, and to pretend otherwise is to do a disservice to humanity, IMO.

I just see this style of "informing" as an end of a kind of age of innocence, when seekers of deep knowledge about technology could go to the gnu.org domain, and be absolutely certain that they weren't being sold a bill of goods.