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Re:Ask HN: Alternatives to Gmail? on Monday March 02, 2015 @02:12AM (#9130703)
They have a good spam filter.
The problem is way deeper than the UI itself. You think a socket, a thread and a file somehow magically become multi-platform because of c++ ? Chromium embed is 100Mb for a reason just like Java and Qt. The dependencies define the app and not hipster culture. Mocking UI is a sport for people who do not understand the underlying problem. Huge industrial sewer pipeline is too ugly for my living room, etc.

Apple, Microsoft and Google made three different phone UI API´s for the same problem just to lock people in. Apple and Google then beat Microsoft at their own game because they themselves defined the marked. Legal bullshit and patents is the main driving force behind all this non-standard API idiocy. Everyone claims to be unique and non-obvious.

Native apps on many platforms are easy when most of the work is server side. So native is now big because of servers, multi-touch dependencies and code signing complexity. Hybrid is big when the client does all the work. HTML/CSS works when you are showing a document, a list or a form.

Re:In response to a blog post on Samsung Knox on Monday October 27, 2014 @12:17AM (#8513796)
Having read actual Samsung code I would guess it was written in India by someone who uses copy/paste instead of a small library. I understand that runtime dependencies are a problem in embedded programming, but the Bada platform suffers because it was written by lots of people who were all not talking to each other.
Re:William Gibson Writes the Future on Sunday October 26, 2014 @11:52PM (#8513706)
Fax and email as services does not really age. They are simply integrated as servers, messaging applications and printers. A VCR is now Netflix minus the record button. Byproducts of the underlying network topography, storage options and short term legal agreements. A future without fax is a service restriction, not modernity.
Re:Ask HN: Where do you see web and desktop apps in 5 years? on Sunday October 26, 2014 @11:22PM (#8513604)
Desktop software is desktop because of mouse. Touch software replaces mouse with hand gestures on screen or panel. But web apps still trying to be 1990 desktop replacement. Soon biometric feedback makes this painfully obvious. Security and compatibility is key. But Apple and Microsoft refuse to agree on anything except basic web standards. Third player needed for anything to change.
So is the person sitting next to PG a real prime madonna ? He he... (Sorry!)
Re:Ask HN: Programmer career problems on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @12:03AM (#8457101)
Do you love VAT, taxes and payment problems ? Three people buying your software and then the $10 000 consulting payment keeping you afloat is delayed another month ? 1 star reviews, angry emails from paying customers and dangerous programming errors ? Being alone is brutal. You probably need partners who believe in the same idea as you.
Just write code that creates a massive security hole and your syntax problems will feel like a gentle breeze.
Re:Ask HN: Do we need a Mozilla for web apps? on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @11:17PM (#8457029)
Mozilla is the Mozilla of web apps. Without them we would have brain dead IE and Safari API´s. Stuff like VML and -webkit-match-nearest-mail-blockquote-color. Standards are what makes web apps possible. Who pays for running servers is another issue.
Re:Mac App Store: The Subtle Exodus on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @11:06PM (#8457000)
I wrote some clever code that fixed a problem on Windows. When running on Mac the same code leaked memory and blocked the event loop. 1 star - "crashed my entire computer".
Re:Mac App Store: The Subtle Exodus on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @10:49PM (#8456968)
Spotify, Lightroom and Skype replaces iTunes, iPhoto and Facetime for lots of people. Dropbox works better than iCloud when it comes to camera images.
Re:Ask HN:What valuable company is no one building? on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @08:45PM (#4109253)
Converting YC internet points into anger management classes ?
Re:Making money with a product: a myth? on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @08:24PM (#4109200)
Making money with a product is easy. Staying cash flow positive is not. Selling $10 for $5 works great as long as you have money to burn. But then reality sets in and as you point out "profit" becomes the keyword. My best guess is that people pay to solve annoying problems faster.
Quick, somebody put this YC link on Reddit so we are allowed to be snarky ! This is too meta for me.
Re:Box and Parse: Create Your First Mobile App in Seconds on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @08:09PM (#4109152)
So how do you make money on that several seconds app ? Is there a need for apps made in seconds :)
Re:Ask HN: deciding to join startup or not? on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @07:56PM (#4109115)
Financial solidity and honesty. It is a social nightmare when "friends" owe you $10k and the money is not coming.
Headphones, music and write code ? Then write code, write some more code and then rewrite that code ? Basically, code.

Procrastination is often a sign of not being interested in the topic.

Re:When to kill your startup on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @07:33PM (#4109047)
Designers do not like strangers. Hard to build up trust unless you got direct connections and phone numbers. Lots of pressure in the biz.
Re:Java creator James Gosling: 'Google totally slimed Sun' on Monday April 30, 2012 @06:58PM (#3912024)
Sun has not made anything of user interface value over the last five years because of legal bullshit. Android fixes this problem. The reason Android exists is the massive NIH ego of Sun engineers, the total ignorance of Sun management and the fact that AWT/Swing is a desktop API that ignores mobile phones and tablets. Sun ignored video, audio, animation, maps, vector graphics, DPI/PPI differences, multitouch, GPS, sensors and memory consumtion. The AWT/Swing alternative called JavaFX ignores all the problems that Android solves. I respect Mr Goslings work, but AWT/Swing/JavaFX has nothing on Android and is unable to compete with WebOS or Bada from many years ago. Sun Java WebStart was such a bad product it infected more computers with malware than Adobe Flash over several years.

Java itself is a good product. J2EE works everywhere if you rip out AWT/Swing/JavaFX references. If you do use the UI code your app will probably blow up every couple of years because Sun hired a new developer or Apple is working fulltime on iOS Cocoa. Android is weird, but there is no other Java-like alternative except Windows Phone 7.

Swing/AWT example http://us.int.teppefall.com/products/colorspace

http://labs.teppefall.com/2012/05/former_sun_totally_slimed_...

Sun was a supercomputer company. Java is the alternative to IBM operating system VM's running on mainframes. Nobody has that kind of hardware just lying around. Java was designed to run on $1000 SCSI hard-drives and 32Gb of RAM. The focus is on standardization, scalability, portability, buzzwords and expensive catering.

The guy that made the Chrome Javascript VM sat with a laptop in a small house in the Danish countryside. Because the focus was on normal everyday hardware. And guess who that was ? A former Sun Java VM programmer. So the "just use Chrome" developer demographic is sort of unintentionally ironic when they, well, open their mouths. Why do they think Chrome is so memory hungry anyway :P Well, the problem is actually the same problem that you have in other UI frameworks where event listeners and DOM references never gets released from the UI side. And there are some strange issues with anonymous functions and closures, but I do not know enough about that to comment.

Java is fine, but Javascript does not need to be Java. Apple just screwed up the LiveConnect bridge in Safari just to piss us off.. transition us all to a better state of mind. Or maybe that was Oracle, I have no clue anymore. The guy that worked on Jython probably felt very alone doing all the work and JRuby is only here because of desperation from Sun. And Scala is the solution for people who never finish anything. So maybe I should.. oh shiny..

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2008/gb2008... http://labs.teppefall.com/2011/08/why_not_use_java_and_invok...

Re:HP To Apple: You Win. on Friday August 19, 2011 @12:05AM (#2902189)
Translation: Apple VS Samsung/Motorola.

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