Apple claims Snow Leopard will be a "breakthrough" in parallel processing tech - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/apple-in-parallel-turning-the-pc-world-upside-down/ <comment><USER2> Why don't they replace Finder with something that works at least on par with Explorer from Windows 95? Adding "move/cut" feature in 2009 will be a huge step forward. Or make iPhoto actually usable, so it will see and recognize JPEGs on your own file system without "importing"? Or how about making Aperture just slow, as opposed to pathetically slow as it is right now? How about fixing Spaces to exclude icons of other desktops from Alt-Tab list? How about making the whole thing to feel like it's been made for non-retards?

Catch up to _freaking Gnome_ first, dammit. Then talk about parallel computing...

Come on, macwhores, let the downmodding begin.

</comment><comment><USER3> Parallel programming isn't easy.

I'd like to see more real details before they claim that they've figured it out. I love Apple, I use a Mac exclusively and I'd love to see my computer rock, but I'd holding my breath until I see some actual details.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to know more about how they are integating GPUs. I've been looking at CODA (nVidia library to use the GPU) and it looks mighty interesting.

<comment><USER5> Take a look at the link I posted below - OpenCL can be accomplished by using a thread scheduler that's "aware" of asymmetric processing capabilities across the different cores (and treating the GPU as a usable processing core in non- OpenGL code). I suspect they'll be using ULE or something similar to it to pull this off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Must be in the same sense that Altivec was a "breakthrough" in SIMD architecture, or the PPC 601 was a "breakthrough" in CPU design. Apple's history is littered with breakthroughs like this. I'll believe it when I see it.

As things stand right now, typical SMP scalability benchmarks put OS X solidly behind even Vista, and trailing Linux and FreeBSD by a mile (I wish I could find a cite for those -- they were doing the rounds a few months back, I think).

<comment><USER7> Considering OSX was originally built from FreeBSD, I suspect it wouldn't be _that_ difficult to merge some of their work into OSX.

<comment><USER6> This is mostly a fallacy. The FreeBSD code is limited almost exclusively to userspace stuff. The Darwin kernel descends much more directly from NeXT's mach-based product. It grew SMP support only very recently, and via a very different path from that taken in the monolithic BSD community.

Honestly, I don't understand why Apple continues to work on their own kernel. It has near zero competitive advantage relative to FreeBSD or Linux, and much cost a fortune to maintain. The real value of their product has always been above the kernel anyway: I have to believe that switching the kernel out for a more robust Unix variant can only be a good thing for the Mac.

<comment><USER8> Switching to the FreeBSD kernel seems like it would have been a good idea back in the Rhapsody days, but Tevanian probably wouldn't allow it. By now Apple has added so many OS X-specific features like IOKit and DRM that it would be a lot of work to switch. Costs a fortune to maintain, costs a fortune to switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone have a link to something with more juicy technical details than are provided in the article?

<comment><USER10> A little more here [http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/10/apple_skinny_snow_le...](http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/10/apple_skinny_snow_leopard/)</comment></comment>


Apple's Over-Ear Headphones Will Be Called "AirPods Studio" - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/11/airpods-studio-features-exclusive/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how these are going to stack up. I currently use Bose N700 and while I love the noise canceling and the sound they are very heavy. You can only have two devices connected via Bluetooth so if I want to mow the grass with these I have to disconnect from my MacBook Pro or iPhone and connect to my watch. I also don't like the fact that I have to create an account and login to their app in order to change noise canceling. I guess I'll have to wait and see.</comment>


British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16306742 <comment><USER2> "D'Aloisio is by no means a typical teenager - he is polite, highly motivated and enthusiastic."

Wow, wonder how many other groups they'd be able to get away with stereotyping like that.

"D'Aloisio is by no means a typical (woman|Mexican|black person|obese person) - he is polite, highly motivated and enthusiastic."

Ouch.

Makes the BBC sound out of touch, considering that most teenagers are under a historically unprecedented amount of pressure to succeed (eg: <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6221872>).

<comment><USER3> I'm cynical when I read these sorts of articles, especially when the person involved has good links through relatives: "the son of a lawyer and an investment banker".

It should be praised that someone can show initiative like this, but I just can't help thinking it's happening too easily - especially getting free PR on the BBC website.

<comment><USER4> A couple days ago BBC was carrying the story of a 15-year-old who had become the youngest person to climb the Seven Summits (the tallest summit on each continent). He was, of course, the child of two wealthy mountaineers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand the writer needs an introduction to the article, but F everything about starting with this:

"Most teenagers will find any reason under the sun not to do their homework."

No most won't and stop repeating it.

<comment><USER6> The writer was, at some point in his life, a spoiled teenager. Most of my friends and other teenage students near me, (By the way, I'm from India, 15) love to do their homework, as, it's challenging and we feel something after completing it. Same is the case for most of the teenagers in other parts of my country, nearly everyone does their homework properly.

<comment><USER7> """The writer was, at some point in his life, a spoiled teenager. Most of my friends and other teenage students near me, (By the way, I'm from India, 15) love to do their homework, as, it's challenging and we feel something after completing it."""

Yeah, we sure buy this...

<comment><USER4> I am from India. I find the remark quite plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heh. They should have asked him what "ontological detection" means.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ontological+detection%22+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ontological+detection%22+-summly)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)>

There's _no way_ he fit a useful semantic network in an iPhone app, and I doubt he interfaces with an external one such as OpenCyc, or in fact uses any kind of automated reasoning that can sort of be classified as "ontological".

It's VERY impressive for his age (even if it doesn't actually work that well outside the demo/testcases, according to a commenter below), but more general terms such as "it uses Computational Linguistics" would sound just as impressive and are actually descriptive instead of meaningless buzzwords.

<comment><USER7> "There's no way he fit a useful semantic network in an iPhone app"

Define "useful".

It doesn't have to be big to be useful. A perfectly fine for summation purposes semantic network can fit in an iPhone. The bloody thing has several GBs of storage last time I checked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel I have to say something positive in light of the other comments; this is great to see from a 16 year old.

</comment><comment><USER10> Isn't it redundant to summarize BBC articles? A bit off topic, but I do think it's a horrible way to demo your app considering that the BBC's online news outlet has been publishing articles that feature "paragraphs" which are rarely longer than a single sentence for years. In other words, summarized news. Still an interesting concept. Quite interesting that this idea has already been pointed out well over a year ago out by one HNer, Geee, via Open Text Summarizer. Makes you wonder what he's actually using to summarize the content.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that I suggested this idea for someone asking for app ideas on HN almost 2 years ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1450570>

</comment><comment><USER12> Regarding the hype of this app -- this is a response from a friend who is a journalist and has covered this kid's app :

"unfortunately the kid is pretty good at marketing himself, and a 16 year old app developer makes a good story"

<comment><USER13> This is true. This gizmodo article covers how he "markets himself": [http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app- deve...](http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-developer- cry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think a $250,000 _investment_ is considered a "jackpot".

<comment><USER15> It's probably not a jackpot in terms of this project, but imagine how much this kid will learn in the process. It's a jackpot for his growth as an entrepreneur, if he sticks with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A MacBook when he was 9 ? Damn, I'm 32 and still cannot really justify one. And I'm sure his parents had nothing to do with his funding arrangements, of course.

I hate to talk about privilege, and this kid is clearly smart, but the smell of upper class is hardly bearable, sorry.

<comment><USER17> Nitpick: being the son of a banker and a lawyer hardly qualifies you as "upper class", even if that was relevant.

<comment><USER18> Nitpick: being the son of an investment banker (not a retail banker; there is a big difference) and a lawyer (barrister in the UK) likely places this family in the top 1% of income earners in the UK. By most people's definitions, that qualifies their family as "upper class".

<comment><USER19> In Britain the "upper class" is more about political power than just how much money you make in a year.

<comment><USER16> That's not been true at least since Blair got into power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> App aside, this kid has a fantastic camera presence, although some of his words made no sense ("quickly and instantaneously") I would guess a large part of his success is down to his ability to talk so well.

<comment><USER21> It's odd you say that because the one thing I noticed was that he didn't seem be very comfortable describing the product in laymen's terms. His word usage seemed forced and his hand movements too. He had good camera presence insofar that he was bold and moderate in volume. Beyond that, I don't see what you mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any insight into the tech this is using?

<comment><USER22> Opening the ipa file, and browsing the contents, there are a couple of plain text files - containing stop words, dictionaries and others on natural language processing.

The summarised results from the app are very random - pick any article other than the test case in the video and you won't get any useful output, 3 random sentences usually.

<comment><USER23> I thought it was a stretch that D'Aloiso taught himself the linear algebra, statistics, probability theory, NLP, and machine learning required to implement such an algorithm. Especially since he doesn't take a deep interest in programming.

<comment><USER22> It appears to be an iteration of his previous app Trimit: [http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/the-15-year-old-brain- beh...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/the-15-year-old-brain-behind-the- trimit-app-and-why-young-app-store-entrepreneurs-can-succee) [http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/trimit-summarizes-emails- bl...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/trimit-summarizes-emails-blog-posts- and-more-with-a-shake-of-your-iphone/)

I am guessing that he just outsourced the AI/algorithm part based on the articles content: 'we' and 'The Trimit team' and Nick just designed the UI. Overall, great concept, but poor execution (in terms of accuracy) and journalists seem to be buying the hype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "I find the product and the design of the product much more interesting than the programming"

Of course. Programming is hard work.

</comment><comment><USER25> Good job kid. Keep it going</comment>


Bre.ad - a url shortener with a twist - <AUTHOR> http://bre.ad/

<comment><USER2> This seems like a good way to get spammed with ads before being able to see the actual content. Can anyone see the benefit for the person clicking a bre.ad link, in the general case?</comment>


What are you proud of? - <AUTHOR> http://swizec.com/blog/what-are-you-proud-of/swizec/2620

<comment><USER2> The Turing Apology: <http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its-gordon- brown.html>

I try not to be 'proud' of things I've done because I do believe that pride comes before a fall, but every time I see a newspaper article mention that apology I'm reminded that I did that.

<comment><USER3> That's a pretty amazing thing to accomplish!! Thank you.

What's especially nice about it is that it concerns righting the wrongs done to [the memory of] another person. I think helping other people has to be worth a lot more than any entirely technical accomplishment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it's really important to feel proud of what you do. For me, I always like to feel I'm the center of the world, while knowing that it's not true.

When people ask me what I'm proud of I always list the stuff that gave me most satisfaction. I often start with the stuff that they would understand or heard of, but if you'd ask me again I'd probably list some obscure stuff.

For example, I am really proud that I started the online version of the Romanian Computer Science olympiad for high school students. I convinced people to let me build a parallel online system where we'd post the problems at the same time with the real contest, and people would submit solutions by the end of the allocated time, and then we'd grade those too. Totally unofficial, just for kicks and training.

It's a stupid thing that nobody ever heard of here, but I'm still terribly proud of it, it made a huge difference in the life of some kids and it would not have happened if it wasn't for me, so I'm quite proud of that.

<comment><USER5> Kudos to you for making the world a little bit better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a huge difference between healthy pride and unhealthy vanity.

For starters, pride can come from things you didn't even do -- and people who are not you. You can be proud of your kid. You can be proud of your student. You can be proud of your husband, wife, boyfriend/girlfriend, parents, friends, etc.

It's good to be proud when people you care about accomplish something they struggled with, something difficult, something important.

And, you are a person you care about. (Or at least, you should be.)

Pride means giving yourself credit where credit is due. In enjoying the things you worked hard to achieve.

Nowhere in the dictionary definition of "pride" will you find "holding yourself above other people, thinking you're better than them and better than Creation, blah blah blah."

Vanity, on the other hand, is defined as _excessive_ pride. We've all known vainglorious jerks who had excessive pride.

And we've also all known people who were good people, who did good work, who worked hard, who did hard things -- who had insufficient pride, who didn't give themselves enough credit, who wrote off all their accomplishments and generally made themselves (and the people who loved them & wanted the best for them) miserable.

I'm honestly shocked that (at writing) the 2 top-level comments on this article are "Pride is a sin" and "I try not to be 'proud' of things I've done".

Where's the evidence that pride is bad, guys? Do you have something other than the Bible to back you up?

<comment><USER7> I essentially agree with you but it _is_ important to understand that pride has its failings, even without being what I would consider excessive. By being proud you put yourself in the position of having your pride wounded. This is distinct from lacking pride somewhat like lacking feeling while having surgery if different than having to feel every cut. On the other hand, pride can be _very_ important in giving the self-confidence and motivation needed to improve oneself and one's skills.

<comment><USER6> You're taking the word "pride" and talking about it as if it were a physical thing that really exists.

"Wounded pride" is something that can happen to anyone, regardless of whether they give themselves credit for their achievements. "Wounded pride" really means "wounded self-image" -- everybody has a self-image, regardless of how good or bad it is.

<comment><USER7> Maybe my understanding of pride is flawed but let me put it another way. By holding an opinion or expectation of oneself (or another) you're setting yourself up for disappointment in the case that the opinion or expectation is challenged. If I pride myself as highly knowledgeable in some field and someone comes along and points out all the flaws in my knowledge then it's probably going to hurt. If I _don't_ pride myself on this sort of knowledge then it won't force me to reconsider my self-view in the same way. The flip side being that if I pride myself on this sort of knowledge that very pride may be the impetus that makes me actually go out and learn the things I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not.

Pride is a sin.

I found it curious that in the unofficial ranking of the seven deadly sins, pride was considered the worst. How could this be? Pride worse than greed? Than wrath? It didn't add up.

Then I looked at the rationale behind it. Pride puts ones self before god. It says that my accomplishments, my work, my existence, is greater than all of creation. And that line of thinking can actually fuel the remaining six sins. Pride can lead to greed. Pride can cause you to rest slothfully upon your laurels.

I'm not a religious man, but that rationale has always resonated with me.

<comment><USER9> I don't think you or anybody else has an insight into what pride means to me. I don't think you can walk around saying that when I say I'm prod of writing, or my work, or my children, or anything else that I'm putting myself before your God or anything else in creation. I don't agree that pride fuels greed, and I don't think you've made any kind of rational case that pride causes anyone to become slothful.

I'm ok with you believing that pride is harmful for you personally, but the sweeping generalizations you draw are woefully devoid of evidence of rational thinking on the subject.</comment></comment>


Beyond Quantum Mechanics [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvsTVlwek-g <comment><USER2> Some context: t' Hooft the man is treated with great reverence among physicists for his many impressive accomplishments and deep physical insight, but the overwhelming majority think he is dead wrong on quantum mechanics. Even among the small number of nonconformists who would describe their primary work as on the foundations of quantum mechanics, his position is a distinctly minority one.

<comment><USER3> Einstein also personally believed in complete determinism and lack of free will, but did not formulate a solid argument before he decohered.

See also superdeterminism: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism)

It's interesting that it's possible for there to be unfalsifiable theories that are nevertheless true, widely believed, and inform how we might approach everyday problems. While not able to be "proved", it still may be possible one day to come up with large amounts of evidence in favor of such a theory; Stephen Wolfram's work and ideas seem like they could be in the right direction, even if it is only the very first initial steps: "If the rules are simple enough, one might be able to do something that seems quite outrageous: just search the universe of all possible rules, and find our own physical universe." - [https://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/11/my-hobby-hunting-for- our...](https://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/11/my-hobby-hunting-for-our- universe/)

While the scientific method is extraordinarily effective _for questions in its domain of applicability_ , there _are_ questions that exist out of that domain on which we can nevertheless make progress.

<comment><USER4> (I'm new to this concept) Does free will in the context mean, people's actions could be predicted? Is it just referring to particles as having free will?

If it's people, is it generally considered that if a person could be accurately modeled and predicted, then they have no free will?

<comment><USER3> Superdeterminism implies that people's actions are fully _determined_ for their entire lives, but we would likely not be able to _predict_ them in any meaningful way even if we had access to all the necessary information, because the computation would be too large to handle. (The "you need a computer more powerful than the universe to compute the universe faster than the universe computes itself" argument.)

In the PDF book linked elsewhere in these comments, t' Hooft makes the argument that what we mean colloquially by "free will" is more of an emotional definition, and he proposes a rigorous scientific definition that may be more productive.

(Of course, given certain neural data from a person, we _can_ predict certain actions on the order of 100's of ms in advance of the person's conscious awareness of choice, so...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in learning t'Hooft's theory in detail here's a link to download his book for FREE. You have to pay for a physical copy but Springer has decided to make this book open access.

[https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319412849](https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319412849)

</comment><comment><USER6> He gets to the meat of his argument at 22:37

[https://youtu.be/jvsTVlwek-g?t=1357](https://youtu.be/jvsTVlwek-g?t=1357)

Essentially that the Bell theorem is wrong because his definition of causality was incorrect. I'm in no position to comment on it one way or another, but it seems like quite an odd forum to be presenting his case.

<comment><USER7> A less odd forum, where he presents his ideas, is his book "The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics":

> > [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One quantum automata question I have is this: is there a rigid lattice that the photons exists on?

If one photon is able to exist at any arbitrary position and at any arbitrary spin orientation it would seem simple to imagine an event space between two photons having a distance between 0 and the plank length

Unless there is a lattice that ensures that all photons are minimally oriented at a distance of at least a plank length in all directions and whose spins must orient along the lattice in 90deg transformations

<comment><USER3> Possibly but not necessarily; one of the models is where the fabric of spacetime itself is constructed from an automata where individual graph edges reconfigure as part of the evolution of the automata; this could be responsible for relativistic distortions of spacetime.

It gets really interesting when you consider that the lowest-level edges do not have to obey what appears to be local speed-of-light restrictions — entangled photons could have a "thread" cutting across the higher-level emergent spacetime that could provide a simple mechanism for "action at a distance" that does not actually allow external information to be transferred from one location to another, just information internal to the functioning of a superdeterministic universe. (Though, strictly speaking, if you believe in superdeterminism, you don't need such a mechanism, but it could be useful for convincing other humans.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While the math in this paper is way too dense for me to fully comprehend, the larger premise here -- that the mysteries of quantum mechanics as presently understood mask a deeper, deterministic, discontinuous regime -- is actually gaining ground in many quarters.

(Disclaimer: I co-authored a paper referenced in the article)

<comment><USER7> > (Disclaimer: I co-authored a paper referenced in the article)

The submission links to a video, not a paper. Thus: what paper are you referring to?

<comment><USER9> I should have specified I was talking about the book "The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" mentioned in the thread.

The paper he references is "Two-state, Reversible, Universal Cellular Automata in Three Dimensions"</comment></comment></comment>


A map of publicly available fruit trees, mostly in Slovakia - <AUTHOR> http://www.fruitmap.sk/ <comment><USER2> It's a shame that neither this site nor mundraub.org mentioned by _yorwba_ utilizes the OpenStreetMap database. It shouldn't be too hard to find or introduce the proper tags; trees already support genus/species etc. It would expose this data to a larger community, and encourage contributions from local mappers.

I would try to get rid of the 'Use ctrl+scroll to zoom the map' limitation; it's annoying and pointless on a full scale map.

<comment><USER3> > It shouldn't be too hard to find or introduce the proper tags

There's lot of people mapping such details in OSM already:

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural%3Dtree](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural%3Dtree)

<comment><USER4> I have actually been doing some of this in my area for crabapple trees. Not necessarily to eat them, but I find it useful to clean up the sidewalk and dump the fallen crabapples in my compost. IMO it just needs a viewer that focuses on plants that bear fruit, and potentially a tag to designate public access (maybe just reuse access:public).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somewhat offtopic, but (almost) all of these websites use Google Maps. This means they probably are going to get large bills with this extra HN traffic flood. :(

Since these are non-commerical tools, my company (in my bio) would be happy to provide free maps for these websites—as would many other OpenStreetMap-based providers.

<comment><USER6> This is very kind of you! Thank you for supporting an open web!

<comment><USER7> Let's not pretend that this is from the bottom of their hearts. This is a business strategy to increase penetration.

Nothing wrong with it except the duplicitousness.

<comment><USER8> symbiosis is not duplicitous.

<comment><USER7> We would all be irritated if Facebook or Google tried to pretend giving its products away was any kind of charity.

<comment><USER9> Anyone who wants to load in a list of coordinates manually into a maps website is more than welcome to do so. That's what I did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Global focus

[https://fallingfruit.org/](https://fallingfruit.org/)

<comment><USER11> The resources listed nearest me are mostly dumpsters.

<comment><USER12> There's a large demographic overlap here with the freegans.

Might not be amusing to have dumpsters all over your list but if you're in a concrete jungle it might not be so surprising.

<comment><USER11> That's in a medium-small town, the next one over. There's only 2 entries that aren't dumpsters (and those are herbs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://mundraub.org/](https://mundraub.org/) is similar, but for Germany.

<comment><USER14> This is great, when you don't have family with a garden, it's hard to take your kids somewhere to pick fruit straight from the tree.

<comment><USER15> except most of these trees grow usually next to frequented roads and I would pass on fruit exposed 24/7 to gases from cars

<comment><USER16> Is that still a concern? It _used_ to be a major health issue when I was a kid because of tetraethyl lead pollution, but now that leaded fuels have been banned long ago, the car emissions should be harmful only to breathing and climate change, without any poisonous residue on roadside plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sweden: [http://fruktkartan.se/](http://fruktkartan.se/)

Fruit on public land.

</comment><comment><USER18> Apropos, I like the stories of Johnny Appleseed and Luther Burbank, both of which I read as a teenager, when I used to both do and read about organic gardening and related topics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Burbank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Burbank)

</comment><comment><USER15> Czech version [https://na-ovoce.cz/map/](https://na-ovoce.cz/map/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Austrian version: [http://fruitmap.at/](http://fruitmap.at/)

</comment><comment><USER20> New Zealand: [https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1HDtmvU4XemdY0bDLDf...](https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1HDtmvU4XemdY0bDLDfNdSEUnjb0&hl=en&ll=-36.861027756917345%2C174.73274743200238&z=16)

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand why Slovakia has so many fruit trees compared to other countries!

</comment><comment><USER22> i run a fruit tree map for atlanta too: [https://www.concrete-jungle.org/food- map](https://www.concrete-jungle.org/food-map)

</comment><comment><USER23> How long until someone hatches a plan to harvest all the fruit and sell it at a supermarket?

</comment><comment><USER24> And I just left Slovakia....

</comment><comment><USER25> harder to use. by inaturalist may hold some data either.

</comment><comment><USER26> At first it's funny then it's kind of unsettling. Not even trees can hide from the all-seeing eye.

Just go spot fruit trees on your own.

<comment><USER27> >Just go spot fruit trees on your own.

How would you know if you are allowed to pick the fruits? Not all private properties are fenced, so if you take your bugs and go hunting for fruits you could get face to face with the angry owner, his dog and who knows in some countries his gun.

<comment><USER12> What pisses people off the most is when people damage the tree trying to get the fruit. Losing one crop is frustrating but now some jerk has compromised the tree for years or maybe forever.

There's a group here that gets the owners' permission. Some of those trees were planted by the previous owner or someone whose health or free time doesn't let them pick like they used to. This group gleans the tree, and then the fruit is split evenly between the owner, the pickers, and a food bank. The owner gets a little less fruit but does something good and has less rotting fruit to clean up that year.

<comment><USER28> You just made me recall one of my favourite movies:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_and_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_and_I)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is the P2P revolution here already? - <AUTHOR> Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain and all the hype.. is the P2P revolution happening? <comment><USER2> No offense, I find this question akin to "will the world end in xxxx?" [1]. There is clear widespread use, and early miners with big fortunes. There is also uncertainty and risk. What do you mean by revolution? How do you determine when the world ends? If you had a testable metric, you would have an answer (and if you could forego speculation, you'd be playing the market).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events)</comment>


Mozilla's 18-month effort to market without Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://digiday.com/marketing/after-mozilla-stopped-spending-on-facebook-the-company-increased-its-focus-on-offline-marketing/ <comment><USER2> "Facebook was one of our better-performing channels at the time that we made the decision"

Everyone likes to say they don't use Facebook, but they do. Or at least 10 people they know do.

Local businesses use Facebook relentlessly because, lots of times, it actually works to get people in the door or calling your number. Small businesses almost have to use its ad platform (in my opinion). I don't think local businesses can afford to look away from a top performer like this.

When I ran an escape room business, my fill-rate on weekends was typically dependent on whether or not I was spending money on Facebook. Google ads were second. Anything else barely had any ROI. Well - in the first few months of running the business, the local newspaper actually brought in some people, but nothing compared to my longer ad runs on Facebook.

I feel like this is a "you don't need Facebook" chant, but I feel that's not true for all industries, and I hope the take-away here is that maybe a huge online business with a giant ad budget can find other means, but if you are a small local business with $300 a month for marketing, I personally believe that you kind-of need Facebook.

<comment><USER3> >Local businesses use Facebook relentlessly because, lots of times, it actually works to get people in the door or calling your number. Small businesses almost have to use its ad platform (in my opinion). I don't think local businesses can afford to look away from a top performer like this.

Anecdotally, based on my experience working with over 250 local businesses across the business spectrum, this doesn't reflect reality. A very small percentage of my clients "actively" use "organic" Facebook, an even smaller percentage use their ad platform (much higher usage of Google Ads). The ones that do (buy FB ads), typically do so through local "media company" who tack on their own fees, which in turn makes it a poor investment. I can count on one hand (out of hundreds) the number of our clients who effectively use Facebook. In fact, in the last couple of years, the number of businesses forgoing a "real website" and choosing Facebook (a common theme just a few years ago) has basically disappeared.

<comment><USER4> It completely depends on the target demographic. For escape rooms, for example (mentioned in the above post), everyone is going to look up reviews on Facebook before buying tickets.

<comment><USER5> Not so sure that's true - most of the people I know look on Google/Maps for reviews now rather than trusting FB (or Yelp). It's probably demographic and market dependent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > it's unclear why Mozilla is fine with Google's data practices but not > Facebook's as the company did not immediately respond to a request for > clarification.

I often wonder the same.

And also:

Why there is an official Facebook container[1] but not an official Google container?[2]

Why a fresh install of Firefox sends multiple calls to Google, including services that track users such as Analytics?[3]

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now- availab...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-available- with-enhanced-tracking-protection-by-default/)

[2] there is a third party Google container at least [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google- contai...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/)

[3] [https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...](https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480)

<comment><USER7> That's a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque)

<comment><USER8> No, _tu quoque_ is when someone defends entity _A_ 's bad actions by saying that entity _B_ also does bad things.

The GP is not trying to defend Facebook here. Their argument is that _Mozilla_ is not acting fully ethically, by seemingly treating Google specially. Therefore _tu quoque_ does not apply. (Moreover, the argument is logically sound.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my opinion advertising browser on facebook is absolutely useless. How many users do you think see an advert and install browser when they current one is for all their intents and purposes same. Mozilla needs to aim at technical people, who will install Firefox not only on their own devices, but also on devices of their relatives (or in case of administrators on devices of their users).

And only few technical people care about minuscule difference in performance anymore, so they need to advertise what Google, their main competitor, doesn't offer - privacy. Best way to advertise would be either tech news on articles related to privacy issues and possibly tech influencers who can properly explain privacy benefits.

Another way to strike favour with tech crowd would be eliminating bloat from Firefox (e.g. Pocket, still no idea why they bought them, as an extension it worked fine).

<comment><USER10> Given the changes google is making...

"Google is breaking ad blocking in Chrome, try a browser that works for you."

<comment><USER11> If you're talking about putting that in ads, then it becomes a chicken & egg problem - people who care about ad blocking won't see your ad because they already block them, people who don't won't care about Chrome breaking something they don't use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Firefox's marketshare is pretty horrible - non-existence on mobile and very small on desktop and shrinking at 10% a year. It is basically at Edge-levels of adoption on desktop:

[https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market- share#monthly-2009...](https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market- share#monthly-200901-201910)

<comment><USER13> Firefox on mobile is actually pretty good and more people should use it.

(At least on Android, on iOS it's just a skin on top of whatever engine apple forces down their throats).

<comment><USER14> I started using Firefox Android a year ago and now I can't stand chrome and all the Ads!

Ublock origin on Firefox mobile is a godsend.

<comment><USER15> Add on dark reader and the mobile experience is dramatically better. It's still a little clunky from a UI/UX standpoint, but still superior experience overall.

<comment><USER16> I'd describe the mobile UX as less optimized and more straightforward than Chrome. Definitely easier to tweak your privacy settings as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> um, did anyone else notice that Mozilla has _100_ people in their marketing department?

What do they all do?

<comment><USER18> I was also shocked to read they spend between $20-100 million in advertising!

Which that much money, couldn't they just use the majority of advertisement budget to pay a team of great developers for decades?

<comment><USER19> Sure, but what's the point, if no one uses your browser? Marketing is a necessary evil.

<comment><USER20> In this case, with Mozilla Corporation as well as the budget mainly coming from google instead of user donations, you have a point. They have a financial interest in higher user numbers. Your statement is however not universally true. If you have a large enough userbase to finance development, or are an open source project, as a non-profit growth is not something you need to spend money on. That really only matters if you have a profit interest. Differently put, you dont need everyone to use your software, it is enough that its available for people who need it. With more growth you get a litany of new problem with having to do something with the incoming money as a non profit. That often means feature bloat, while, "keep it simple stupid" would have led to a better solution. Not to mention adding features the new userbase requests. In the worst case you end up with a completely different product which for many of the old userbase and volunteers is just as bad as if the project was canceled altogether.

All of this not to mention that, while it makes sense for Firefox, the thought that my donation to develop Firefox ended up in some marketing budget irks me deep down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _Mozilla's marketing budget is between $20 million and $100 million, said Kaykas-Wolff, adding that "it varies depending upon the different programs we're running." Per Kantar, which doesn't track spending on social channels, Mozilla spent $8.2 million in 2018. The budget is split with 50% focused on North America and 50% focused on the rest of the world.

Mozilla's pivot away from Facebook followed the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Now, the majority of the company's digital spending goes to Google properties — Mozilla's Firefox competes with Google's Chrome — as a part of its digital acquisition strategy. According to Netshare, as previously reported by Digiday, Firefox's market share is 9.3% of global monthly on desktop; meanwhile, Google Chrome's is 66%. Aside from Cambridge Analytica, it's unclear why Mozilla is fine with Google's data practices but not Facebook's as the company did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. The rest of the digital budget goes directly to publishers._

</comment><comment><USER22> Keyword that I like was PRIVACY

It's meaning is fading today too much.

</comment><comment><USER23> Fundamentally the platform (facebook, google, etc) the majority of folks use to connect with be the best one to market products and services on.

The issue is that these platforms change over time and across generations.

In short, as firms, markets, and societies change so will effective marketing strategies.

We can still bicker about whether or not FB has reached its high watermark. It looks like it has for Firefox users though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does Google allow politicians to lie on their advertising platform like Facebook? Genuinely asking, as it's a stated policy of Facebook but I haven't heard or seen analysis comparing Google's ad network. I realize this decision by Mozilla was based on a previous Facebook _blunder_.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think Mozilla needs to re-think their whole marketing approach yesterday. A few remarks:

\- 50% US / 50% "rest of the world"? Nah. There's little to no chance to make a strong dent in the US, home of Chrome and Apple and Microsoft etc. Pivot to 99% "rest of the world" and switch to my other point entirely for the US. There's much more need, reason and room for Mozilla to grow internationally.

\- forget about ad spending, whether Google or TV, it just doesn't suit Mozilla's image, mission, product, nor customers. What we want is to attract the core deciders, from a grassroot kinda move, which spreads to peers, circles, and grows up, towards the corporate. What we want is the 'elite' or 'nerdy' segment even if we'll never call it that. The 1% that make a community thrive because they're so quintessential to tech in general, locally in their projects / cities / worlds. The few that are blessed with speech and some social presence, aura, authority. The ones others follow and listen to for 'tech stuff'.

So move worldwide now, and spend almost exclusively on these people. Influencers, media, awareness, image, mission — maybe even some communities living on forums could become advocates. Coordinate locally through bigger advocates to form an army of legions.

Maybe find a big thing, like "we'll be in space for humans day 1 to assist expansion" — moon, mars, satellites, whatever rocks the boat for the next decade (think really big, above yearly trends, give a face to a "superior" company). (I'm a space geek, perhaps this is just my taste)

Working with people directly, podcasters and youtubers gitlabers and whatnot, hordes of them, is a more tedious, longer approach, but as well a more long- term and much more engaging way to reach people. The money paid in sponsorship goes directly to 'building the world' (these people are evangelizers of principles and values, they're teachers, they're coaches, they play a valuable role in society), not some indirect major ad platform engrossing. It fuels communities that become grateful, with good reason, for marketing money. It becomes "clean" money by virtue of being used for something good.

\- Don't dictate the message, let your 'influencers' feedback your way to browser supremacy, publicly so; make it a topic not a mandate — this is not just a 'strategy', it's a " _why_ " materialized, a life path, a superior way to accomplish the mission. It's immortality through the software we give now and leave after us. Pivot to meet that, to meet your dearest users needs and wants. That's how you beat the faceless Google Chrome, imho. By giving the browser back to the people, by being a positive company not in some abstract "PR-humanitarian" way (although that's good!) but in a more direct-to-user way. By serving the worthy movements and people you find in this world. Grassroots seeding. Think: _for a browser company, connecting people and stuff is pretty much what we do. Let 's show the world how much good we can do when there's a whole company behind that!_

It'll take 10 years. There's no "too late" — until someone else does it, but that's also considered a win for Mozilla in that regard. By 2030, it can be done. And by virtue of being a dominant OSS, it has a staying power far greater than its rivals.

It's possible, Mozilla. This is just one rough draft, maybe not the one, but just to say: reinvent that sh--.</comment>


Israelis log out of high-tech jobs for a life offline - <AUTHOR> http://www.timesofisrael.com/israelis-log-out-of-high-tech-jobs-for-a-life-offline/ <comment><USER2> I have been thinking along these lines for a long time now. But never had the courage to breakup with my first love - tech. But more & more, i am able to see the pointlessness and the absurdity of professional tech work!

What do we really do ? Make people click ads ? Increase productivity by making people stay connected even after office hours ?

What happened to all the family values and community ? What has happened to trust ? What has happened to the beauty of relationships if you dedicate all your time to "productivity" and learning "new stuff" and office ? Few are lucky to work in a place where personal time is respected (i am lucky in that sense, at least so far) but majority of people (and my own previous experience in tech) clearly shows that there is too much mind share we willingly give away to our work! This isn't healthy.

One can never be fulfilled in this way. I hope the tech world wakes up to the reality of individual aspirations instead of capitalistic greed!

And we should really engage in constructive criticism and conversations around this topic.</comment>


Air pollution from every power plant in the world, tracked - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/5/7/18530811/global-power-plants-real-time-pollution-data <comment><USER2> > Who's behind it

> Google.org, Google's philanthropic wing, is getting the project off the > ground (pardon the pun) with a $1.7 million grant; it was selected through > the Google AI Impact Challenge.

Well kudos to Google.org for this. This is such a basic and potentially impactful dataset. In addition to providing scientific data, I can imagine all kinds of neat interactive 3D globe visualizations to help people "see" the pollution volumes.</comment>


How connected cars are turning into revenue-generating machines - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/28/how-connected-cars-are-turning-into-revenue-generating-machines/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> Just saw a Buick commercial touting their in-car wifi and my first thought was, why is this something I want to pay extra for? Whatever crappy mobile network device it has is already older than my iPhone/Hotspot and I'm tied to whoever their provider is for however much they want to charge.

Let me run it in reverse. Let my connect my phone using my frequently updated hardware and the network that I want to use. I've got power so I don't care about the battery drain, and I gaurantee I will have a better speed/data cap/price relationship than whatever tiers they will have.

Better yet, instead of the crappy infotainment system make it Android and/or AirPlay capable and let the phone run the head unit and you just have a dumb display.

<comment><USER3> I think the systems that are powering this are being phased in in relation to the US government's "smart roads" initiatives. This stuff starts becoming mandatory in 2020 or thereabouts.

There are pilot programs in place now where over the air motor carrier inspections and other road telemetry is being exchanged with vehicles. You're also going to be taxed based on mileage or other telemetry and certain classes of vehicles can have geofencing and other controls enabled.

<comment><USER4> The Buick thing is via Onstar and uses AT&T 4g.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article was really hard to read. Here's my attempt at a summary:

* The author expects new cars to be networked and to have beefy CPUs.

* There are lots of cars, and each car will use lots of data. To network all these cars, you'll need investment from telecom companies like carriers.

* Today the car's systems don't talk to each other, or the internet that much. Once you network them, it'll be good for companies who make cars to see how their product is used in the wild.

* Now that you have smart cars, people can write apps for them. The author thinks this will be a large market with a few killer apps.

* Car's are really complex, and were not designed to be networked. You should expect a lot of security issues during this transition.

<comment><USER6> on the security side

[http://www.tu-auto.com/cyber-security/content-zone.php](http://www.tu- auto.com/cyber-security/content-zone.php)

<comment><USER7> on the security side

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_\(journalist\))

[http://nymag.com/news/features/michael- hastings-2013-11/](http://nymag.com/news/features/michael-hastings-2013-11/)

[http://i2.wp.com/www.dcclothesline.com/wp- content/uploads/20...](http://i2.wp.com/www.dcclothesline.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/06/michael-hastings-crash.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like such a luddite for saying this, but this article makes me want to go torch a car dealership just to sabotage the idea of connected cars. This just sounds like marketers looking for new ways to shove ads where they don't belong.

Even well-established connected car technology like built-in navigation still sucks. I know people with built-in nav, but they all use google maps on their phones instead, because it works better and is more up-to-date. What does that say, if car companies haven't even gotten navigation systems right yet?

</comment><comment><USER3> If you think of it from an old-school, consumer viewpoint, "connected cars" are a solution looking for a problem.

This seems unusual, since automakers will eagerly save <$5/unit to place a deadly Takata airbag or that faulty GM ignition switch in a car. Why spend $50 to give me some shitty functionality that I don't need?

So obviously these investments are being made to address some tangible problem -- and "let's make more money" is a problem that everyone has.

</comment><comment><USER9> That saying about how if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product bothers me. Because it implies that if you do pay for the product, you somehow get to avoid being the product.

<comment><USER10> Popularize a corollary! Paying for something doesn't protect you from being monetized.

Or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That article lacks any useful ideas on how to generate revenue with a connected car. It's suggested that payment at gas stations could be automated, but that was first deployed in 1997 as Mobil Speedpass, and still has only about 3 million users.

Ads on the dashboard maps are likely, but you can get a map overlay with fast food restaurants now.

Monetizing tracking data on where the car goes seems almost inevitable. GM has such data from Onstar, but they're hesitant to do it. "If we can monetize that connection at some point then there is revenue potential, but selling a $20,000 or $30,000 vehicle, that's where the value to GM is" \- GM exec. They don't want to jeopardize the car business by trying to get a little extra revenue by selling tracking data.

</comment><comment><USER12> The last American Airlines flight I took, the plane had no built-in screens at all. No TV, no movie, nothing. It was great. I think they realized that sinking money into their screens was just dumb - everyone who wanted to watch a movie or TV just their own device, etc.

The idea of cars using more and more realistic to bombard their users with "infotainment" is just awful. I want a car to tells me less and less because it needs to tell me less and less. Speed and maybe which lights are on and maybe fuel/energy gauge. I shouldn't need rpms or fuel mileage or whatever because the car should take care of this normally - emergency information is a different matter but the car should avoid emergencies.

<comment><USER13> American Airlines just made the in-flight entertainment free for all and is seeking to have more aircraft with seat-back entertainment, rather than less.

[http://apex.aero/2016/08/19/behind-scenes-american- airlines-...](http://apex.aero/2016/08/19/behind-scenes-american-airlines- decision-offer-free-ife)

[http://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/american-airlines- introd...](http://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/american-airlines-introduces- free-premium-inflight-entertainment-20160809-00584)

<comment><USER14> Better in-flight seat back systems and BYOD systems both seem to be happening. I'm not sure if there is a difference in philosophy with different airlines or if anecdotally-observed different approaches are just a matter of timing.

I could imagine airlines preferring systems, such as the one United is pushing these days, of customers using their own tablets/phones for reasons of cost/weight. It also gets customers onto their app and perhaps increases the rate of purchased WiFi.

On the other hand, seat back systems can run ads etc. and are often a premium service. They're also just convenient for a lot of travelers who may not have a charged and loaded device for everyone in the party.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is going to work only if we change cars every two or three years, like phones. Otherwise the (probably) immutable hw in the car will soon be unable to interact with newer phones and services. And the builtin services will soon look old and uninteresting.

So, is long term rental and automatic new car after two years going to be the new normal for car "ownership"?

<comment><USER16> There's a word for that. Leasing. [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/business/auto-leasing- gain...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/business/auto-leasing-gains- popularity-among-american-consumers.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER17> Which is generally accepted to be the worse way for any given individual to take possession of a car. Does it work in some cases? Sure. But overall leasing is just a way for people to drive cars they can't afford.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great article. This makes a few assumptions about the future, but I can really see the potential here for media in cars that the author is getting at:

\- Once the driver is no longer driving, they're going to pretty bored

\- As the need for windows becomes less important, this area can be used for displays instead

\- These lead to the potential for passengers to do something else with their time, such as watching videos, doing work, playing games, etc. like they would on a flight

\- It's likely consumers may expect this experience without it coming from the data of their smartphones (less setup, better connectivity, not dependent on a phone)

\- The new media systems and potential data subscriptions opens the door for lots of new revenue streams

</comment><comment><USER19> Does it speak TCP/IP? Someone is figuring out a way to use it to sell you to advertisers.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm a little surprised that "smart" TVs aren't mentioned; the situations seem very similar, and major brands (Panasonic and Samsung at least) have put ads in their smart TV interfaces. Maybe this is too much of a puff piece to mention such a disliked point of comparison (the author all but admits to being in the tank for "connected" cars)?

I guess if nothing else it ought to be possible to buy retired fleet vehicles without this crap.

</comment><comment><USER21> I just read a bunch of reasons to learn proper auto-maintenance to keep my current vehicles running for as long as possible.

</comment><comment><USER22> I imagine a time in the future (months from now) when we will summon an Uber and it will list all of the stops it has to make along the way to deliver/pick-up packages.

We'll be able to sort our autonomous ride options by lowest number of stops.

<comment><USER23> More like airlines where you will pay more for a nonstop flight.

<comment><USER22> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is going to be a dumpster fire, at least for a while until the best overtakes the best-funded and marketed.</comment>


Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl <comment><USER2> Nice idea, but I don't like that's it's not written by a native speaker. You're bound to learn bad habits. Just spend less time on English sites and more time on sites in your target language wherever possible.

Two easy ways to immerse yourself with content created by native speakers in your target language:

1) Listen in your target language whenever possible (via audio books, movies, tv shows, and podcasts). I like podcasts best.

2) Read in your target language. Major news sites and blogs will most likely exist in your target language for free. And you maybe be able to buy books (fiction or non) written by native speakers as well.

You can _supplement_ those two with working through exercises in a grammar book of your target language.

Obviously, if you have a native speaker to practice speaking with, do so, but the listening and reading suggestions alone will get you very far. I'm immersing in Spanish right now, and this is working well for me.

<comment><USER3> I think this breaks down somewhat for languages that don't use phonetic characters, such as Mandarin and Japanese. It would take a long period of dedicated study before the average person could read media in these languages.

<comment><USER4> For Mandarin (not sure about Japanese), the plugin would definitely benefit from pin yin supplementation at the 'novice' level. Non-latin characters are difficult for people whose primary language is a language of Latin derivatives. But implement this, they would have to take Google's pre-existing translation tools and translate the translated text into pinyin using something like the Ruby on Chinese Pinyin tool (<http://www.kawa.net/works/cantonese/canton.html>).

But at the moment, the plugin seems to expect people to have prior knowledge of the language and its so-called immersion revolves around reading and literacy uptake. Pin yin is more for speaking/oral purposes so translating articles into phonetic characters is unconventional for languages that are not meant to be read in such a way.

<comment><USER5> Try Zhongwen Chinese-English Popup dictionary chrome extension. Simliar to Raikaikun for Japanese (above post). I've always found it really helpful :)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kkmlkkjojmombglmlp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the idea - I've been looking for ways to try and "immerse" people in a new language without actually travelling for a while now.

I do have two worries about it, though. The first is that they seem to be using translations which aren't particularly accurate, which means its possible that if it works, you'll still end up sounding like a beginner.

The other worry is that the language you are learning is still embedded in your native language. I'm pretty sure this will not help with learning the grammar of words, and when you are constantly switching between your language and another language, it won't be very conducive to memorisation of the new language (from my own experience learning Japanese).

Its still a really neat idea though, and I wish the best to the creators.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure si está working pero it's really entertaining to leer todo sus comments en espanglés.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks remarkably similar to Polyglot, which was released over a year ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669162>

It's interesting how many of the comments here are similar to the ones there.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Regarding the comments, as a fluent but somewhat lapsed Norwegian speaker I don't think this is necessarily a great way to learn sentence structure or grammar, HOWEVER, it's an amazing way to buff up on vocab.

Maybe "brush up" would be more appropriate than "learn". The main advantages I see are that;

a) It's pretty passive

b) You're likely to learn vocabulary related to areas of interest, or at least areas you read about (work related perhaps).

It might benefit from some gameification or stats perhaps (e.g. number of pages, number of words, range of words)...

</comment><comment><USER9> This is beyond awesome for a few reasons. Historically, learning a new language was hard because it generally wasn't interesting.

This extensions allows you to browse the internet and specifically your interests while immersing you to a language...uh whoa. Half the reason I didn't like my language courses was the content and classroom was hardly stimulating or relevant to my interests; this changes that entirely.

A great model if we could apply it to education more broadly.

<comment><USER10> Back when I was an undergrad we used to play MUDs, which were a player- extendable cross between a MMORPG and a text adventure. It was a terrible time sink, but I'd always wondered if it would be a good tool for making foreign language learning more fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The technique I like to do is read the foreign language Wikipedia. I try to pick articles that exist in both languages. It helps to know the subject a bit so you aren't constantly flipping back and forth.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Sorry, your operating system is not supported just yet. The Chrome Web Store is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Why don't you send yourself a reminder to try it out later?_

Silly me for using Chrome on ICS.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is amazing. Perfect way to practice a language and pick one up. Only problem I can see with it is that it wont have pronunciation. This is a problem for character languages like Mandarin. I'll be using it regardless though.

edit: Never mind, you can hear pronunciation as described by the post replying to me.

I wonder how they will manage to increase the reliability of the translations. It would also be interesting to be able to practice multiple languages at the same time.

<comment><USER14> \- Roll-over a translated word to hear it pronounced.

I put it on intermediate spanish, it's interesting but it feels like it's doing literal, disjointed word translations which gets messed up with the different sentence structure.

The giant translating box is really annoying, it needs to be something much more discrete I think.

<comment><USER15> Thanks. Just found that feature. It was off by default for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an interesting idea but awkward to use. I am semi-literate in Chinese so I selected intermediate Chinese immersion. I like that the words can be reverted to the original language, but having these Chinese words littered amongst a sea of English words is odd and difficult to process. If you go through an article and you're met with a Chinese word, your brain can't immediately process the new language. The constant switching between languages when it comes to reading is quite cumbersome, even if it is for the sake of learning. This is particularly so for languages of different forms like English and Chinese. Words/phrases that are slang cannot be directly translatable, which is detrimental to beginners who do not know that it has been incorrectly translated. I think it is mildly useful for intermediate leaners trying to increase their vocabulary set but not for language immersion or introduction to a new language.

<comment><USER16> Turn it up to "fluent" and you'll get entire passages translated, which is more interesting I think.

<comment><USER4> But would you need to use the tool if you could read an entire passage in that language? If you were literate in that language, you could just go to a native newspaper website and read those articles (something which I cannot do). And I think a mildly fluent person would find translated passages hard to read, which is why I don't translate Chinese websites into English (aka Engrish). The only advantage the language immersion plugin has is the ability to hover over the passage if you don't understand what it means, but it's annoying to do if you just don't understand an individual word/phrase and the whole passage gets reverted to the original language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am a little annoyed, Esperanto is supported by the google translate API they cite (and say they support all languages on) yet it is not an option. I would love an immersion tool to help lean Esperanto (immersion is especially hard for Esperanto because of the small speaking population) I think I need to write my own version to spite them.

<comment><USER18> I'm working on this as a side project right now. I'm actually bypassing Google Translate and just doing it myself in the hopes of getting better quality output. Expect a release in a month or so. Ping me at email@example.com if you're interested and I'll keep you in the loop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I used to speak French. Since I still know the grammatical rules of the language, but have largely lost any vocabulary I once had, this is perfect. I've been using it for the last hour or so and words long-since forgotten are slowly coming back to me. I'll leave it enabled and see how things go.

</comment><comment><USER20> Awesome idea, but it doesn't have Japanese. Got me excited for nothing. :/

<comment><USER21> English-Japanese machine translation is still very bad. I think a lot of people have worked on it, but the problem is inherently tough. Also, there is nothing like the hundreds of millions of words of corpora of example translations for machine learning that exist for European languages

I think the main problem is that Japanese requires a lot more context to make meaning clear than most languages. A translation of an English sentence can be pretty good just based on the context of the sentence itself. Japanese doesn't even indicate in any way who the subject of a sentence is. Lots of sentences don't even require a verb.

And it doesn't help that Japanese has a quirky preposition system that doesn't line up with other languages.

<comment><USER22> If it was limited to adjectives or nouns in Japanese it would still be incredibly useful (personally that's all I really wanted out of the extension). As you say, lots of sentences don't even require a verb, a well placed piece of vocabulary is everything (from my experience living here anyway).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a great solution to unobtrusively learn vocabulary while reading the things we're interested in. As others pointed it's weakness is clearly in how it handles sentence structure, but it seems reasonable to accept that it's just going to do one thing really well.

There's only one problem I see with learning vocabulary this way, you need a way to store what you've learned. I thought of one solution, you could drag and drop words into a box linked to your Quizlet (or a similar service) account.

Great Extension. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER24> I've seen similar extensions for Firefox for years - one or two that replace words on webpages with Mandarin/Japanese translations (and I think even allows you to replace only the ones you have on a wordlist - meaning that you can choose to revise words via browsing). I've always meant to use those extensions but never got around to.

Guess I won't be using this one since I don't use Chrome (I still find it a surprise to discover that most web developers actually use Chrome and not Firefox).

</comment><comment><USER25> I think it's better to read a broken translation than a broken original source. That is: go to a foreign language site of your choice, then translate it into broken english.

</comment><comment><USER26> I moved to Spain a couple of months ago and currently work for my company in London from a shared office in Granada. I may well be the perfect user of this plugin. I've already studied Michelle Thomas' course so I understand grammar etc. My problem now is purely vocab. I spend my working day on the web, reading page after page of english. This plugin is perfect! It means I can now be learning vocab while I'm working.

</comment><comment><USER27> I totally had this idea 1 month ago. I was trying to get myself excited enough to go through with the implementation. And here it is...! A bittersweet moment indeed. :)

I'm going to keep this on for a while. My inlaws are visiting from abroad, so I need all the help I can get.

</comment><comment><USER28> Very nice idea, I'm trying it at the moment but it seems not to speak the translation. English > Danish, anyone has the same problem and how to fix ?

</comment><comment><USER29> I thought Google did away with the Translate API. Are you sneaking around this by loading it in a background page and simulating user interaction?

</comment><comment><USER30> Seriously? Learning a language translated by Google Translate websites to watch? With ideas like this to run we are all dumber, not smarter.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is very cool. Definitely giving it a shot.</comment>


Coding Horror: Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001311.html <comment><USER2> The original (Zalgo'd) version of the StackOverflow answer is even funnier than Jeff's excerpt: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match- open-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags- except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454)

<comment><USER3> It is, but it doesn't answer the question. The asker doesn't ask how to parse HTML, he wants to match certain tag-like patterns, and not others. He doesn't define the document, or the context, and could plausibly be wanting to remove certain tags from a non-HTML text document or the like.

There are plenty of potential areas involving HTML tags where you can manipulate the document with regexes, so long as you're not actually trying to make a proper parsing job of it. But everyone was so keen to show that they know you don't use regexes to parse HTML, they blew the actual question away. The asker did try to point out that he didn't want to parse the HTML, but still the points kept on rolling up for an answer that ... told him not to try and parse the HTML.

<comment><USER4> While I agree that using regexes for one-off jobs is not the kind of thing that would summon Cthulhu. I think it's still the wrong thing to do and you would still be better off using a parser.

I think, to sum up this whole drama, we have one group saying "you should use a parser" and the other group saying "but sometimes regexes aren't totally horrible, and this is just a quick job. I don't want to take the effort to use the proper tool."

The latter group sees themselves as being pretty reasonable. And perhaps they are. But the thing that exasperates the former group is that it is generally _not_ quicker or easier to use regexps -- even for one-off jobs --- than using a nice parser like BS or lxml.

Those tools give you a object-view of the document which, as JGC demonstrated, allows you to express what you want to do concisely and easily, even (especially) when you're picking a few tags out of the document.

The reason why regex hacking on X/HTML documents remains popular isn't because it's 'easy' but because it doesn't require people knowing how to use the proper tools, nor does it require people to make the conceptual leap from the document as a long string of unstructured text to the document being a tree- structure of objects.

It's a classic "The Wrong Way" choice made by people who don't have a mechanical or conceptual understanding of the right way.

It's like this. Imagine you come upon someone banging in screws with a hammer. And laying next to them is a nice power drill with a Phillips bit. You say to them "why aren't you using the drill for that. It'd do a better job and be a hell of a lot easier too".

And the guy responds "This is a quick job. These screws don't need to hold very much weight, or for very long. If this was a serious piece of construction I would totally use the drill, but for my needs this is just easier."

Now, you might look at him with some incredulity. No way is his way "easier." It's _much_ harder, on top of doing a worse job. The real reason why he's not using the drill is, quite obviously, he doesn't know how!

So you say to him "seriously, try the drill" and he keeps on insisting that his approach is "totally sufficient" (which it may well be, that's not the point) and that using the drill would be "too much work."

And then that's how we got here in this discussion.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you, but I may not have made my point clearly enough: It's not about "should he use regexes?" it's the other classic mistake of _not clarifying the problem domain first_.

Everybody is assuming he wants to _parse_ this document, which isn't proven and is mostly unfounded. What if it's the text of a book, including all sorts of mentalism that will blow up any parser? Nowhere does it say that he's got valid (or invalid) HTML/XML here.

It's actually as if he said "hey, can I borrow a screwdriver?" and everyone went "He wants a screwdriver? He must be building a box, and that means nails! Give him a hammer! A hammer! You can't put in nails with a screwdriver, Zalgo wouldn't do that!"

So now he's off trying to put his screws in with a hammer, because in the race for points people wouldn't first ask him to clarify the problem domain and work out what he's actually trying to achieve.

<comment><USER4> He narrowed his problem domain to the one suited to parsers when he said he had a structured document. He did that when he said "HTML."

Regular expressions are a tool for extracting (semi)-structured patterns from unstructured text. For instance, it is unfortunately the case that we must treat English text as unstructured. It is not possible (at least not yet) to build a parser that will be able to correctly discern every syntactical structure in English text.

So if you want to operate on that text (suppose, slicing it into sentences) with a computer, then doing something incredibly superficial --- say, looking for periods --- is the best that can be done. It may need special casing for abbrevs., etc, but it would still produce _something,_ even when the parser would get confused because it couldn't find the predicate of half the sentences.

Now, granted, HTML (or SGML) is not the same thing as XML. But the fact is that HTML is _by definition_ structured. Even bad HTML is still structured.. and it's still machine-translatable because it has to be renderable by at least one browser (and therefore understandable by at least one quirks-mode SGML parser). Even the most technically incompetent designer in the world is aware that he has to load the page he's butchered into at least one browser and make sure it still renders.

Trying to use a strict XML parser on HTML will likely end in tears, because it has a different definition of validity than the quirks-mode SGML parser the designer used to check his work. But Beautiful Soup is not a strict XML parser, it's an SGML tool. One that, in my experience, is a pretty good approximation of the parsers the browsers use.

<comment><USER3> _He did that when he said "HTML."_

He _didn't_ say that. There's not a single "HTML" anywhere in his question. (There's an "XHTML", but it's in the title as something he wants to _exclude_.)

Everyone is making that assumption on his behalf, which is my point.

<comment><USER4> You're right. :x

It was a while since I looked at the original question.

It would be interesting to hear what he's actually trying to do. Looking closely at the question, he wants all open tags, but not ones that are self- closing.

My guess is that he is trying to find HTML elements that have content. That should, of course, be done with a parser. But you're right that he could be doing something completely tangential to the structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See [http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/11/parsing-html-in-python- with....](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/11/parsing-html-in-python-with.html) and <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923775> . Btw, as someone that has sometimes parsed html using regular expressions (for small and localized html snippets extracted by bigger pages) and has dealt with the numerous patches needed everytime something changes (structural changes or random \n,\r,etc... added to the source html ), i definitely agree that a html/xhtml parser is the way to go. The resulting implementation will be cleaner and the typical issues will be adressed slightly changing the parsing code or fixing bugs in the html cleaning/validator section of the parser...

</comment><comment><USER6> It's actually really simple.

You can't parse HTML with regex.

You can parse text blobs with regex.

If your input looks like HTML but is really a text blob, you can parse it with regex.

<comment><USER7> No, it is even simpler than that. Regular expressions are for matching patterns, not parsing. They don't parse HTML. They don't parse text blobs. They don't parse anything. They just match.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice, codinghorror has audio ads for Mastercard which cause Safari to hang and then finally crash.

I loooove it when a site justifies my use of AdBlock.

</comment><comment><USER9> Don't HTML parsers use regexes for their lexical scan phase?

<comment><USER10> I suppose that depends entirely on how the parser was implemented.

You could write a scanner that doesn't use regexes. It could just read in characters one at a time and hard-code the logic for matching tokens.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the standard html parsing libraries use regex libraries internally to match tokens.

If you used a scanner generator like lex, you would specify your scanner using regexes and lex would generate code that expands those regexes into an automata. I guess that also counts as using regexes, only they're compiled down at compile-time instead of at runtime.

</comment></comment><comment> PHP-TROLL This is total bullshit. This is assuming that you are parsing well formatted, modern HTML.

Anyone who has had to data mine HTML on a regular basis knows regular expressions are the only way to go because most web pages are clusterfucks of invalid, font-tag laden, id-less, ancient piles of shit.

Any XML parser I threw at the sites I was mining ran away crying with it's pants soaked with urine. So climb down your ivory tower, because XML parsers may be the "correct" way to get data out of HTML, but they are near worthless for most situations.

<comment><USER11> Thats because you're using an XML parser to parse HTML. You should use an HTML parser, like hpricot or beautifulsoup.

<comment> PHP-TROLL Yeah when I said XML parsers I was speaking generically. I tried many HTML and XML parsers as well has HTML sanitizers. They worked, maybe, 60% of the time. Hpricot regularly segfaulted, beautifulsoup didn't even begin to work. Even if I ran the HTML through tidy first it would fail to parse.

Most people are ignorant of how bad most of the HTML on the web is, it is simply unparseable.

<comment><USER12> >>Most people are ignorant of how bad most of the HTML on the web is, it is simply unparseable.

And somehow using a regex to guess at all the possible combinations of "badness" is the correct way to go? You seem lost my friend. Everything you're saying is backwards to what someone who actually parses a lot of HTML "in the wild" would say on the topic. It sounds more like you're trying to cuss your way into being correct.

<comment> PHP-TROLL I'm not talking about parsing HTML. I'm talking about getting data out of HTML which is completely different.

One doesn't need to guess at all possible combinations of badness using a regex, you just need to find the data you need and adjust the regex to the badness of that particular page.

Do you know anyone that mines for data out of HTML "in the wild"? I didn't think so.

<comment><USER13> Uh, Google?

<comment><USER12> I know, I know. It blows your mind. I think we're feeding the troll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> <obligatory anti jeff attwood comment>

<comment><USER15> the title was good though</comment></comment>


Tips to Become a Better JavaScript Developer - <AUTHOR> http://justinchmura.com/2014/08/20/become-a-better-javascript-developer/ <comment><USER2> Second example in tip #2 is dead wrong. JavaScript does NOT do Dymanic Scoping.

I suspect he didn't even bother to run the code. His example throws an error when I try it: "ReferenceError: x is not defined" (as expected).

blind-leading-the-blind etc.

<comment><USER3> The first example is wrong as well I believe - there is never a function call of bar.

<comment><USER4> I came here to say this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author should test their own examples

        var $ = document.querySelectorAll;

That doesn't work, it throws `TypeError: 'querySelectorAll' called on an object that does not implement interface Document.` The correct line is:

        var $ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document);

I know this well because I use it in all my JS projects and plays nicely with Python style for loops (e.g. in CoffeeScript).

While I avoid jQuery I awknowledge the value of it, esp with old and mobile browsers. I avoid it precisely because my apps need modern HTML5/WebGL capable browsers anyway.

</comment><comment><USER6> I dislike when people say that good developers don't use libraries like jQuery. The main reason I use them is because I'm lazy. I'd much rather write $("#id") than document.getElementById("id"). I rarely write any javascript code that is so resource constrained that the extra time added by jQuery is not acceptable.

<comment><USER7> The actual quote was:

>>What I'm saying is don't rely heavily on jQuery, or any other library, without having some sort of understanding of how that library is accomplishing it's tasks.

Which I think is fair. (However, I don't agree with his assertion that using vanilla JS will be more efficient - in most cases, it won't.)

<comment><USER3> Vanilla JS is more efficient than jQuery a lot of the time - for example, consider the $(...) api - this has to do string parsing before it makes its selector call, which by its very nature take away computing power.

These days it is negligible though. The argument for using jQuery for DOM manipulation is oftentimes just one of readability.

<comment><USER8> In 99% cases the performance difference doesn't matter - users won't notice that a jQuery method runs 5ms slower than it would run in vanilla JS, but they will notice if the script doesn't work at all, because your vanilla JS code fails on older browsers.

<comment><USER3> I agree for the most part - I'm just making a theoretical distinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tip #4 Ditch the jQuery Crutch: "If you can accomplish the same thing by using vanilla JavaScript, 90% of the time, it's more efficient to do so."

No. Just no. It is not more efficient to do so 90% of the time. jQuery is mature and battle proven. It is already doing what it can do with an efficient way, which comes with years of experience.

Saying, write your vanilla javascript and ditch jQuery, your implementation will be more efficient, is a no-no. Especially in javascript world!

<comment><USER10> The statement about jQuery being more efficient may have been true about some handrolled for loop selector engine in ie7, but modern browsers have the tools we need now.

You can replace most uses of jQuery by aliasing querySelector to $ and querySelectorAll to $$. You lose some of the automatic array iteration stuff, but really, if you were writing good code you would know how many elements you are about to select.

jQuery is a gigantic dependency and it's kind of sad if you need that crutch to write js. Beyond the selector stuff, its promises and xhr stuff is dubious as hell and can be done much better by several node.js libs like superagent and async.js or bluebird.js.

jQuery goes in direct opposition to a composable module-based approach, because it is a massive dependency.

<comment><USER10> Downvote away, but if you've got to load 90kb to alias $, damn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wrote an article about `this` [1], where I try to explain it in painstaking detail, and the best way I found to explain it was as "the argument which is passed to a function by placing it left of the dot"

[1] [https://gist.github.com/spion/7180482](https://gist.github.com/spion/7180482)

</comment><comment><USER12> Shouldn't this be titled something more like "five things every competent Javascript developer must know"?

<comment><USER13> No, because I think one of them is kind of wrong (you can be competent and still use jQuery) and three of them are better off replaced by "use jshint".

Also, you'd be surprised how many otherwise competent javascript programmers don't understand _this_ and simply avoid it most of the time. Heck, I wrote some pretty ridiculously awesome (and robust) stuff without really understanding _this_ , and it's quite possible someone telling everyone they need to understand _this_ , doesn't.

<comment><USER14> 99% of the time I can, I avoid this. Only use it when it's the cleanest way to do something... Avoids a few headaches. Of course, this is also helpful, and when it is, it's great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Author, please correct this article or put a disclaimer that it is not authoritative. There is a certain responsibility in publishing articles like this; since, for example, your (false) explanation of scoping is likely to waste a lot of time for many people.

</comment><comment><USER16> _" You can write your own basic jQuery by doing this:

      var $ = document.querySelectorAll;

Obviously this won't cover everything, [...]"_

wat

<comment><USER17> It's not even right for what the article author is trying to do. Or in other words, s/he just broke their own rule #1: understand "this". "document.querySelectorAll" must be called on the document object, and reassigning it to a variable like this will make it be called in whatever function scope it's currently in. To even get this to call correctly, it needs to be "var $ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document);"

<comment><USER18> >> "document.querySelectorAll" must be called on the document object, and reassigning it to a variable like this will make it be called with "this" assigned to the global object, or "undefined" if you're using "use strict"

fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Didn't know that `var $ = document.querySelectorAll;` will give you a chainable and highly fluent API, if I only knew earlier....

<comment><USER20> Yeah, it will also give you an array as the result. #not

<comment><USER17> it won't give you anything, calling that $ function will result in an error in all but stupidly rare cases. And by stupidly rare I mean, it's rare to see anyone use "with", and it'd be stupid to do "with(document)"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, author here. I first want to say, I appreciate the feedback. This is my first article that I think people have actually read and going back, I saw all the mistakes that you guys did. I've gone through and done some edits.

I apologize for the inaccuracies. I was just looking to help some beginner JavaScript developers.

</comment><comment><USER21> Read "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford instead of this article. It has all the information this article attempts to explain but written much more clearly and accurately.

</comment><comment><USER22> Second example of second tip is a lie

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't think of "this" as having weird rules with strange edge cases about what it defaults to in certain scenarios. It is always dependent on how you call the function, and there are only two rules, depending on your situation.

        1) "this" is whatever you set it to with call/apply/bind, or, if you didn't,
        2) if you're using "use strict"
        2.a) "this" is whatever is to the left of the dot when you call the function.
        2.b) otherwise, "this" is wherever you got the function from.

Think of 2.a in the literal sense, if you called the function from a bare variable reference with no dot operator on an object, then the statement "whatever is to the left of the dot" is "undefined". Basically, this means that you generally shouldn't end up with "window" as "this".

So, if you got a function from the global scope, it's "this" is in the global scope. If you got it from an object, it's "this" is that object.

        function AClass(){ this.id = "bar"; }
        AClass.prototype.func = function(){ console.log(this.id); };
        var id = "foo";
        var obj1 = new AClass();
        var obj2 = {id: "baz"};
        var func = obj1.func;
        obj2.func = obj1.func; // or even just "func"

        console.log(func === obj1.func, func === obj2.func, obj1.func === obj2.func);

        func();      // prints "foo"
        obj1.func(); // prints "bar"
        obj2.func(); // prints "baz"
        with(obj1){ func(); } // prints "bar"
        with(obj2){ func(); } // prints "baz"

Same exact function in all cases. The reason func's "this" in the first of the last three calls is "window" is not because that's what "this" defaults to, it's because that's where we found "func".

Think of the global scope in a browser as looking something like this:

        function window(){
            with(this){
                // your code
            }
        }
        window.call(window);

So that is why, when an event handler is executed, it's "this" is the DOM element to which the event handler was added.

        myButton.onclick = function(){
            // do something
        }

You just stored the function on the myButton object, so when it gets read back again to be executed, it's coming from myObject.

Using addEventListener does the same thing. And if the browser vendors don't actually store the event callbacks in the object, then I guess they must be using "call" to maintain backwards compatibility with the old event wiring syntax.

</comment><comment><USER23> To these I would add: "test everything".

</comment><comment><USER24> only needs one point, "only use javascript when you have to, it's a terrible language and best avoided"

<comment><USER4> Why do you think its terrible?

<comment><USER24> the + operator, is it concatting strings, or adding? who knows.

the scoping sucks, e.g.

      (function() {
        var x = 1;
        console.log( x );
        if ( x ) {
          var y = 2;
        }

        console.log( y );
      })()

why is y defined? its being called out of the block it was declared in?

there's no proper foreach using other files is an effort and requires hacks to get them loaded. callbacks everywhere. variable names as object keys is a pain regex is a pita

i just don't like it, i have no idea why it's become so popular recently, i can understand it runs in the browser and everyone has a browser, but why server side stuff?

but whatever, each to their own i guess

<comment><USER25> > why is y defined? its being called out of the block it was declared in?

Javascript doesn't have block scope; above example is equivalent to:

      (function() {
        var x, y;
        x = 1;
        console.log( x );
        if ( x ) {
          y = 2;
        }

        console.log( y );
      })()

Variable declarations are always hoisted to the top of containing scope.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ecommerce Shopping Cart Recommendation - <AUTHOR>

Looking for a good e-commerce solution.  Thanks for your help. <comment><USER2> <http://www.shopify.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.prestashop.com/> <http://www.magentocommerce.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Shopify +1, if they fit your needs, you can't go wrong.

</comment><comment><USER5> I used foxycart before.

<http://www.foxycart.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> If you told people what you were selling that may help ex: Downloads, physical goods, etc

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://spreecommerce.com/></comment>