Ask HN: What will Warren Buffet buy with 125B cash? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> One would hope he'll bail out the airlines that he owns part of... unless of course our government decides to do that for him.

<comment><USER3> He wouldn't buy them unless he thought the government would bail out the airlines.

<comment><USER4> He might not buy them if the gov was going to bail them out, as they could wipe out shareholders (hopefully).

<comment><USER3> Agreed. My point was simply that he wouldn't buy them to have to bail them out himself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know why people are asking this again.

This 125b cash is from BH, not from himself. He doesn't decide it all alone. If you want you can buy BH stock and follow along and be one of the shareholders.

It also isn't 125b cash, but 125b not in stocks, in possibly very liquid investments and well diversified.

I doubt it matters what he does with this money, unless you want to do the same. He completely missed the boat on the last ~10 years and I doubt he's the best example nowadays, his company is just very rich because for many decades he got the fundamentals right. You can as well invest like him if you learn what he knows, but I doubt you can get as rich as he did, because he did it in a different time.

He'll likely invest in businesses he knows, just like anybody investing should. Possibly brands, he's a big fan of businesses with a good brand and margins, who isn't? :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> That's a great question. Although he has made some really bad investments, his overall record is astonishing if his main objective is maximum return. Some of us have other objectives besides profit, such as investing in renewable energy companies that care about mitigating climate change. I suspect that Buffett doesn't think about that sort of thing too much.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.barrons.com/articles/warren-buffett-berkshire- ha...](https://www.barrons.com/articles/warren-buffett-berkshire-hathaway- solar-power-nv-energy-690-megawatt-51577995149)

You mean, aside from building the largest solar power plant in the USA, and specifically calling out renewables over the last few years as a good area to invest?

<comment><USER8> Berkshire Hathaway Energy knows that Renewables both solar and wind are much cheaper than their existing coal plants. They are closing coal plants as quickly as they are allowed.

Many PUCs are reluctant to allow too many coal plants to close due to local politics and fears about grid reliability.

<comment><USER9> BHE should buy some energy storage from Tesla or BYD (Buffet is a BYD investor).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the question is: "What CAN he buy with that amount of cash?"

</comment><comment><USER11> Look at the Occidental deal (a few months ago) or the Goldman Sachs deal (2008) for a template. Preferred stock with a fat dividend plus options (warrants) to buy stock in the future.

</comment><comment><USER12> FWIF he's pledged to donate 99% of his wealth upon death. Given that he's 90 years old, I imagine his primary goal with this capital is preservation, not achieving returns in excess of the market.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does he really have 125B in cash ?

<comment><USER14> He has been sitting on a lot of cash for a while. He expected the market was due for a down turn and made a big shift.

You can look up articles. I found one from November saying he was on 128B, a second one in October saying 122B. So I guess between the two he liquidated 6B of investments.

<comment><USER15> Apparently he also has revenue from operating businesses that he owns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A seat in the Linux Foundation

</comment><comment><USER17> The blood of the youngs, to live another 50-75 years.

</comment><comment><USER18> MacDonalds.</comment>


North Korea submarine missile launch photos may be fake, say experts - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/20/north-korea-submarine-missile-launch-photos-may-be-fake-say-experts <comment><USER2> Called it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516074)

:-)</comment>


Help Annie help NYC - <AUTHOR> http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/helpAnnieHelpNyc <comment><AUTHOR> BTW, a friend has a truck loading food and clothes for Staten Island tomorrow at 8AM near Columbia Univ.

If you know anyone nearby, please pass this on.

<http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/helpAnnieHelpNyc>

We're all connected in this one as long as you live near an ocean. :-)</comment>


Get your gateway drug into the hardware revolution here - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/09/24/get-your-gateway-drug-into-the-hardware-revolution-here/

<comment><USER2> This is great, I've tried playing with Arduino a bit in the past, but didn't have a real understanding of what I was doing.

On the flip side, I still struggle with most of these arduino or RaspberryPi "make hardware" stuff, because I don't understand what the next step is after I make the prototype for myself. Are we expected to build on top of an Arduino or RaspberryPi? Do we have to then port our designs to a custom platform? Hopefully the course will answer these questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yo Pete,

When you say "prototype", do you mean breadboarding and plugging stuff into the headers? If so, the next step would be to make a PCB, which is exactly what this course is about. It would be "custom" but it's built on top of the Arduino. Plus it's all Open Source Hardware, which means the design files are open no matter what.</comment></comment>


A U.S. Secret Weapon in A.I.: Chinese Talent - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/technology/china-ai-research-education.html <comment><USER2> Paywall.</comment>


Apple says Steve Jobs has died. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Sad news. He was in the same league as Thomas Edison or Henry Ford.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was honestly kind of expecting this. A person like Steve Jobs doesn't step away from everything that defines him unless something is seriously wrong.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks Steve.</comment>


Show HN: FlatUIKit - Flat UI components for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Grouper/FlatUIKit <comment><USER2> I'm going to say something that many won't like, but I feel very strongly about it.

      --

Please stop wasting time on pretentious designer bullshit like this. Skinning is great for in-game HUDs, but making a regular repeated-use app look _completely_ alien against native look and feel is one of the worst things one can do.

Some customizations here and there are fine and all successful apps notable for their UI do it to a degree. This is what gives an app its personality and character, _but_ note that it's done through meticulous visual polish and attention to details. On the other hand, if you are running on a device that uses inherently skeuomorphic styling and a specific font, then going all flat, green and Proxima Nova is like walking into a cocktail party in flip-flops and a pirate hat. Sure, it will give some people a chuckle and make everyone notice, but it will also make you look like an eccentric dork. And sure as hell it will make hosts think twice about ever inviting you again.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everybody, creator here. Let me know if you have any questions/comments/feature requests - I'm going to keep working on this.

<comment><USER3> This total disregard for platform conventions does your users a disservice by making moot the effort they've spent learning how the platform operates and what to expect from UI elements and interactions.

On top of that, you have to reinvent all the native components you otherwise would get for free, and your app looks like an ugly odd duckling on the platform.

Why do this? It demonstrates an insane level of condension towards your users, the platform they've chosen, and the time they've spent learning it.

<comment><USER4> Disregard this feedback. Do you know how to use a blue pencil instead of the standard yellow? I thought so. These controls maintain the overall look and feel of the native components while just giving them a different skin. Sheesh, even Apple recognized that developers wanted to give their own look to controls by giving them Appearance hooks.

You know what else you get by coding your own UI components that mimic native components? A greater knowledge of the underlying platform. Even if you and everyone else hates the end results, the creator has increased his knowledge, which is more valuable than your troll.

<comment><USER3> Disregard this fellow's feedback, since he clearly has disregarded the platform users and the shared conventions of the platform community.

These elements don't maintain the look and feel of the components at all. They're roughly in the same place, most of the time, and that's about all you can say for them:

[https://www.joingrouper.com/assets/new_landing/OnboardingScr...](https://email@example.com)

> _Sheesh, even Apple recognized that developers wanted to give their own look > to controls by giving them Appearance hooks._

Yes, which you can use without breaking users' expectations, because they still look like they belong. They truly are re-penciling, not a rework of the UI to look like Windows Phone.

<comment><USER5> > _They're roughly in the same place, most of the time, and that's about all > you can say for them_

> _a rework of the UI to look like Windows Phone_

I am laughing at this comment in particular only because most of the project uses the APIs _provided by Apple_ to change the appearance on _existing controls_ , exceptions being the switch and the alert view.

The project only makes it easy to generate and integrate flat images into these controls. You make it sound like he is rewriting UIKit.

<comment><USER3> > _The project only makes it easy to generate and integrate flat images into > these controls. You make it sound like he is rewriting UIKit._

What does 'native UI element' mean if you're swapping out all the bitmaps and completely changing the visual language, and _ALL_ UIKit elements must be significantly modified to fit into your new language?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great job, Jack! I love when companies open source their projects. Aside from sharing knowledge, they're a great 'passive' way to recruit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It feels good to get this out there - we want (and plan) to open- source more stuff but have been so busy that we haven't had the time. Deliberately writing this to be open-sourced also made me a lot more considerate when developing it and improved the code quality as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> FlatUIKit reminds me of following the projects on Github: <https://github.com/domesticcatsoftware/DCControls> & <https://github.com/domesticcatsoftware>

I personally had to fork the DCRoundSwitch project to make it more FlatUI like. I am glad there are other efforts out there to help grow this component set.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great work! This is a really cool project. I actually did something like this in an app I am working on using the same approach. I knew it could be generalized to all UI components and not just buttons, but I did not take those further steps and implement it.

This is definitely a step above using drawRect: to draw custom views, when images are more efficient in this case thanks to UIControl.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks good. You should sell it, rather than give it away under the MIT license.There is good demand for this sort of stuff.

<comment><USER9> Make sure you file DMCA takedown notices for anyone who ever makes any similar icons, though.

<comment><USER8> He could sell the icons as a pack, too.</comment></comment></comment>


TripAdvisor removed rape and injury warnings at Mexico resorts, tourists say - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/11/01/tripadvisor-removed-warnings-rapes-and-injuries-mexico-resorts-tourists-say/820094001/ <comment><USER2> This is horrifying behavior. I'm certainly not going to use TripAdvisor again.

The most depressing part of this story is the sheer number of comments alleging sexual abuse TripAdvisor deleted. I was expecting this article to slim with about two to three allegations. The fact that USA Today could find so many people to corroborate this sort of behavior shows that TripAdvisor is making a deliberate choice to sexually and physically endanger their customers.

<comment><USER3> If Google penalized or delisted TripAdvisor, they would go out of business.

<comment><USER4> Would be very hard for them to do that without inviting serious antitrust scrutiny.

<comment><USER5> How, though? It doesn't seem like they compete with TripAdvisor. Their "Google Reviews" product isn't in the same class at all.

<comment><USER6> Google Trips seems pretty close to me: [https://get.google.com/trips/](https://get.google.com/trips/)

<comment><USER7> And their standard search/mapping product returns lists of hotels/attractions on a map with star ratings, unique and syndicated reviews, photos, opening times and availability & price with booking link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TripAdvisor is probably paid money to promote businesses. I suspect that these warnings were automatically deleted by their servers and that TripAdvisor employees did not make a deliberate decision to endanger people. Still, this is terrible

The problem is that people want everything for free. No one wants to pay for the news. No one wants to pay for reviews. Lots of people download stuff for free. Well, if you are not paying for it, you are not the consumer. You are the one being consumed. Maybe some savvy entrepreneurs can build a business model off of providing genuine reviews

Edit: Maybe some clever person could create a decentralized, distributed review system, like bitcoin, but for online reviews

<comment><USER9> It doesn't matter who's paying or not. If you lead people to believe it's an egalitarian review site - and burying caveats in some 20,000 word ToS contract doesn't count - then stealth-editing out bad information is deceptive, and deception is a form of fraud.

The problem is _not_ that people want everything for free. People were perfectly happy buying tourist guidebooks when they went somewhere and choosing accommodations or activities based on collected information from backpackers, tour guides etc. As in many other contexts, companies like TripAdvisor blew a hole in that market by offering what appeared to be free, instant, and open-source trip-sharing information, while quietly monetizing it in the background and using their monetization strategy to wreck any genuine open source competition. It's a business model we've seen deployed over and over again, and it's turning out to be a rather shitty one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TA has a glaring conflict of interest here. They can't represent the interests of both the travel businesses and the travelers at the same time: the commission will win every time.

<comment><USER11> Also, hotels have an interest in putting bad reviews and closing their competitors.

<comment><USER12> But wouldn't an effective bad review be a seemingly real testimony that you were raped at their establishment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is a difference between alleging poor service or quality of accommodation, and, alleging a criminal act committed on the premises or by hotel staff. Trip Adviser likely must take down these posts because they allege criminal acts that in many cases are not proven in a court and therefore, Trip Adviser can be sued for libel by the hotel. If the crime is reported and charges are subsequently proven and the case is a matter of public record, then I'd say Trip Adviser is obligated to report that fact in some way. But that can take a long time, and I'd guess some guests don't report the crime to the local police at all.

It's a terrible situation not just that someone is victimized, but that they cannot warn others and spare them. What is the solution? How can victims ensure that future guests are warned?

<comment><USER14>
      allege criminal acts that in many cases are not proven in a court

... which the media does all the time, often even before/without formal criminal charges being filed.

I think they would be justified in removing such reviews with allegations _uncorroborated by supporting police reports_. But if there _is_ an open criminal complaint or indictment, review removals about such a case looks improper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a horrible situation and TA probably deserves a class-action lawsuit. That said, Mexico has become a dumpster fire and the old days of "just stay in the tourist areas and you'll be safe" are long over. I'd sooner vacation in North Korea than Mexico.

<comment><USER16> I think most of Mexico is ok, however I speak a bit of Spanish and keep a low profile (not flashing wealth, not showing off my new smartphone).

Mexico is inexpensive and the weather is nice. I don't know what you mean by "dumpster fire". You gotta steer clear of the hot spots (such as Juarez) and just not get involved. Most people are super nice.

<comment><USER15> I used to go to Juarez regularly before it became a war zone. Then the common wisdom became "stay in the touristy areas." But over the past ten years, there have been several well-covered attacks in tourist towns on both coasts. I'm not saying you can't still have a good time, but there are just no low-risk places in Mexico any more, and the cops are not likely to be of much help unless your interests align with those of the drug cartels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article has several spots where TripAdvisor is said to have deleted/not published a comment because they ruled it, "hearsay".

I would like someone to comment on

a) Who says TripAdvisor can tar a post with that brush anyway?

b) Does this word mean what they think it means?

Let's say, I went to a restaurant. I found huge nails in my salad. I talked to the maitre'd and he says, "there are no nails in this salad"

It seems to me that the above account, according to how TripAdvisor seems to behave, would be labeled hearsay and rejected as a whole, because I attribute words to the maitre'd, who of course is not me.

To me the account should be regarded as a first person account.

Also to me, regardless of whether it meets the technical definition of hearsay, it is valuable if someone says, "My wife found nails in her salad." or "My wife said she found nails in her salad." If I wrote, "My wife overheard a customer telling the maitre'd that there were nails in his salad" would be over the line but if that was only an embellishment of a post you'd want to include it.

</comment><comment><USER18> From the article:

'The company isn't the same as a travel agency with experts personally advising and selling trips, he said. Travel agents have a legal duty to disclose information about travel destinations or resorts when they know about specific risks. If they don't and travelers get injured, the travel agent can be held liable for "failure to warn."'

So one of TripAdvisor's competitive value-adds for advertisers is its ability to shield them from accountability for the horrific crimes occurring at their resorts.

</comment><comment><USER19> To me is sounds like somebody wants to put out the competition.</comment>


Deliberate Git [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/72762735 <comment><AUTHOR> In this presentation Stephen Ball talks about ways you can utilize git to be more than just source control. Not being able to speed up videos on Vimeo is a bit annoying, but still there are some nice ideas in there that makes it worthwhile to watch. The talk is given on August 17 2013 at Steel City Ruby in Pittsburgh, PA.</comment>


Civilization Is Built on Code (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/-civilization-is-built-on-code <comment><USER2> There's a lot that can be unpacked here -- several accurate observations, but in my opinion the author stretches the metaphor too wide to accommodate a narrative, then offers an underwhelming conclusion in turn.

They simply mean recipes, instructions, laws; anything that communicates instructions of desired behavior. Even they acknowledge that there's a wide spread of optionality, from good-faith advice to laws backed by the treat of state violence, but at this point the metaphor ceases to be useful. Humans have always been telling other humans what to do, but civilization is built from the combined survivors of thousands of years of experimentation, adaptation, governance, and passing down good advice. Saying it's built on 'code' is no more revealing than saying it's built on actions, or the shoulders of ancestors, or imitation, especially when you expand definition of code to encompass any sort of prescriptive (or descriptive!) record about behavior.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I think about treating laws and recipes as code, I think of the difference between absolute machine computation vs a process that collaborates with human judgment. The "stupidity" of computers' literal-mindedness is something that non-programmers just don't seem to understand. Some recommended things to consider:

\- Aristotle: laws are for the general case, judges for the particular. This gives the saying, "Hard cases make bad law." It's good to have rules, but keep people in control.

\- Michael Polanyi: not all knowledge is "formalizable". Actually recipes are an example of his: two cooks following the same recipe may give drastically different results.

\- Roger Penrose: If the human mind were a computer, why does it seem not bound by the constraints Gödel's theorem implies for a formal axiomatic system?

I wonder if the author's book engages with any of these people?

<comment><USER4> The first quote makes sense, the latter two are at best mistaken.

> Michael Polanyi: not all knowledge is "formalizable". Actually recipes are > an example of his: two cooks following the same recipe may give drastically > different results.

... or rather, our formalizations are lossy for the purpose of their usage, lossily interpreted by their users, or simply not good.

Recipes are a good example of a lossy formalization, lossily interpreted (very much on purpose, to keep the recipe a reasonable size and to put only a reasonable amount of effort/time into cooking for the circumstance).

They are in no way indicative of our inability to formalize (and indeed changes due to environment, whether they be ingredients, humidity, temperature, etc. are in fact encoded in some more sophisticated recipes, or more commonly in baking).

> Roger Penrose: If the human mind were a computer, why does it seem not bound > by the constraints Gödel's theorem implies for a formal axiomatic system?

It's 'extremely hard' to show that the mind would somehow escape being bound by this (a very incomplete reading as to why can be found at [1]).

This is like suggesting that the mind isn't subject to complexity theory by observing that we can factor 'large numbers' in reasonable time.

[1]: [https://thefutureprimaeval.net/godel-vs-the-human- brain/](https://thefutureprimaeval.net/godel-vs-the-human-brain/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently finished reading Snow Crash (1992), which touches on this topic in an interesting way. The general premise without giving too much away is that ancient Sumarian was made up of a specific structure that acted as a kind of assembly language for the human brain, enabling self-executing code like "How to Bake Bread" or "How to Plant a Field". A villager could go to the "source code repository" aka "the temple", get a recipe for some function they wished to complete (or needed to be completed by the village in general), and execute it by having it read to them by the priest.

This was a way to bootstrap human society, ultimately giving rise to free thought and "higher level language" that was not bound by self execution.

It was a pleasant surprise and I found myself enjoying it immensely, even with a bit of suspension of disbelief.

<comment><USER6> I loved Snow Crash ( [https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal- Stephenson/dp/1491515...](https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal- Stephenson/dp/1491515058) ) too.

Something I find interesting is that the instructions described in the book, the Sumerian 'Me', actually existed. They were instructions on how to do fundamental things, managed by the priests and which the Sumerians believed came from their gods and goddesses. The concept of neurolinguistic programming by the Sumerians is a nice fiction, or at least there's never been any evidence of it.

A good book on it is Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character, by Samuel Noah Kramer. [https://www.amazon.com/Sumerians-History-Culture- Character-P...](https://www.amazon.com/Sumerians-History-Culture-Character- Phoenix/dp/0226452387)

An online version can be found at his university: [https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/...](https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/sumerians.pdf)

Interesting bits around the Me are around page 116.

<comment><USER5> Very cool, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem with treating laws as code - which seems to be a popular idea these days - is that by trying to do so, we'd be ignoring _lots_ of hidden complexity. All humans have brain with more-less the same architecture and the same "firmware", we also share stupid amounts of common context (all those years spent constantly learning and observing). All of that lets us skip stupidly high amounts of computation when dealing with each other. Things like trust, reputation, or just two people looking at a rule and both knowing what it really means and was intended for (and knowing the other party knows it too) - all of these are huge efficiency gains. I don't think it's wise to try and throw it all away, because trusting another human suddenly went out of fashion.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure the author meant "structures & processes" not "code".

<comment><USER9> It seems you may be correct in what was intended:

> The word "code" derives from the Latin codex, meaning "a system of laws." > Today "code" is used in various distinct contexts—computer code, genetic > code, cryptologic code (such as Morse code), ethical code, building code, > and so forth—each of which has a common feature: They all contain > instructions that describe a process.

[from the article's third paragraph]

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a feedback mechanism between civilization and a societies willingness to commit to code. There is nothing automatic here. People can reap the benefits if they commit, but they don't always commit. We tend to associate the early civilizations with great monuments, but they key difference between early societies and advanced ones is the willingness to commit to process. In different ways, this is a point made by the Legalist tradition in China, the Executionist movement in Poland during the 1400s and 1500s, and then the "liberal" tradition during the Enlightenment in Europe during the 1700s. And it is no coincidence that these periods coincide with the peak of Chinese civilization, and then the peak of Poland's great Commonwealth, and then later the peak of Europe's success.

Regarding Poland:

" _A purely political reformist movement had come into existence at the beginning of the 1500s. In spirit it was very close to the Reformation, since it placed the accent not on innovation but on stricter observance of the law, on weeding out malpractice and corruption. It was known as "the movement for the execution of laws", or simply as the "executionist" movement. One of its first preoccupations was that the law itself should be codified and published in clear form, and as a result much groundwork was done in the first half of the 1500s, culminating in legal reforms passed in 1578 which fixed the legal system for the next two hundred years [[ till the death of Poland ]]_ "

[http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/poland-was- shockingly...](http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/poland-was-shockingly- liberal-in-the-1400s)

<comment><USER11> I don't find this to be a compelling theory. I'm currently reading "James Madison: A Life Reconsidered", and it strikes me that at the beginning of the Confederacy it was surprisingly difficult to get states to actually comply with treaties or laws made by congress. That they were able to actually get the Constitution ratified is truly amazing.

Fast forward to today, and some of the same problems persists - however the level of respect for procedure seems to be similar.

<comment><USER10> " _it was surprisingly difficult to get states to actually comply with treaties or laws made by congress_ "

Yes, exactly, and so they lost the war. It was the more process-oriented North that won the war. Despite the fact that Lincoln violated habeas corpus, the Northern territories otherwise continued to follow the law, raise taxes, obey the draft, obey the courts, and get organized enough to win. The South never had that kind of organization, nor any commitment to building a society where everyone would follow such a process. Indeed, one reason that rebellions tend to fail is they are made of people who want to break the rules, the very rules that might allow their rebellion to succeed.

<comment><USER11> This was long before the civil war. And my objection was to the idea that advanced countries somehow subscribe less to process - I don't see compelling evidence that this is true.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I did misunderstand your use of "Confederacy" although you are right that the USA started off as a Confederacy.

But the point still holds. The notion that a loose collection of small states could survive had been brought into contempt when Britain defeated the Dutch states. Many people argued that the North American colonies were making a mistake by imitating the loose structure that had already failed in the Netherlands. And it also failed in North America. A better organized Britain was able to defeat the Dutch. A badly organized Confederacy almost collapsed because it was unable to manage its debt. A better organized nation under the Constitution was able to pay its debts and start the process of building a cohesive society.

I'm generally critical of anyone who wants to generalize much from history, since history is full of so many contradictory trends, which play out simultaneously, and what actually happens tends to be like the waves we see at the surface of the ocean, which are always the coincidence of several waves crossing the same point at the same time, and often going in opposite directions. But that process-oriented societies have tended to beat less organized societies seems to be a thesis that can withstand a lot of scrutiny.

<comment><USER11> I agree with most of what you're saying. I think I actually may have misinterpreted this line: "We tend to associate the early civilizations with great monuments, but they key difference between early societies and advanced ones is the willingness to commit to process."

I initially misread that as "earlier societies were more process-abiding than advanced ones", but on reflection you were likely stating the opposite. I shouldn't comment before I've had a cup of coffee in the morning ;-)

<comment><USER10> Sorry, that might have been badly written. When I write on my blog I normally hire an editor to catch those kinds of sentences, which can be misunderstood. Maybe the safety net of having an editor has made me lazy. When I write a comment on a place like Hacker News, I should really re-read it to make sure it is clear.

<comment><USER11> As an aside, just grabbed a copy of your book - looks like an interesting read, and I can definitely relate :-P

<comment><USER10> Thank you. I hope you find it both humorous and also educational.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Civilization absorbs technology.

"Learning dominates when technologies are new and not very useful for broad human purposes. If you want to explore a coral reef in 2017, buy a plane ticket to the tropics. If instead you buy "FishWorld, a fully immersive underwater experience for Oculus and Gear" you will learn more about virtual reality technology than you do about reefs. Now cast your mind forward: in 2037, you will not play with or think about "virtual reality". Either it will be defunct, or it will be so useful that we speak of an evening at home exploring coral reefs. The technology will fail and evaporate, or it will succeed and be absorbed, but either way, it will disappear."

[http://www.sampenrose.net/civilization-absorbs- technology/](http://www.sampenrose.net/civilization-absorbs-technology/)

<comment><USER13> Books have been around for quite a while, yet we still generally say we've been _reading about coral reefs_ rather than _exploring_ them.

<comment><USER14> Point valid; video-chat has been around for a while too but in-person conversations still is a higher-quality experience.

When I was in high school we watched about coral reefs thanks to "Laserdisc". VR is the new "Laserdisc".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >> As code advances, higher-level technologies feed on more fundamental technologies in much the same way more complex organisms feed on simpler organisms in the food chain.

This is why it's a bad idea to export your lower level technologies to other countries. You're still dependent on them, but lose control.

</comment><comment><USER16> Civilization is built on communication.

<comment><USER17> More specifically, the ability to record ideas.

It's one thing to simply communicate, but to be able to record ideas and effectively enable cross-generational communication is extremely powerful. Native Americans, for example, had verbal communication and some limited written communication, but much of their knowledge has been long lost because it was passed down verbally. Of course, the United States did a good job at erasing their history by exterminating the native people, but you can still look to the Aztec civilization as a contrast in how recording ideas had an impact in how much we understand about their history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Top clueless moron technotopian article of 2018.

"How did we humans manage to build a global civilization on the cusp of colonizing other planets?"

No, we are on the cusp of climatological, ecological, environmental and economical disaster.

</comment><comment><USER19> Always have to laugh a little at self-aggrandizing nonsense.

Without physical hardware, there would be nothing on which "code" could be built.

Atoms came first. Bits followed. History, people.</comment>


Everything you need to know about a company before deciding to work there - <AUTHOR> http://ambitionbox.com/companies <comment><USER2> Nice concept. Everyone would want to know about companies, but wiki is just too much to read. Your clean UI UI makes it very easier to read company story, team etc. I liked the icons on the map (y). Good stuff guys</comment>


Antivirus Makers Struggle to Adapt - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/technology/antivirus-makers-work-on-software-to-catch-malware-more-effectively.html?hp&_r=0 <comment><USER2> On windows I have been recommending people to use Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free. I understand Microsoft cannot bundle MSE because of that being a monopoly but I really wish they could, With MSE being pre- installed as opposed to Norton and McAfee trials being pre-installed and asking for money after 3 months.

<comment><USER3> Better software exists (for free). A little research will lead you to it.

<comment><USER4> Why the coyness?

What is that better software?

Some people might have weird definitions of "better", so it might also be handy to say why that software is better.

<comment><USER3> Exactly for that reason.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't bother if you're just going to be cryptic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Traditional A/V are broken for the web.

With dynamic languages like JS and ActionScript, their approach is to fingerprint 10 different strains of the same threat. Then the 11th strain can be generated in a few seconds with new obfuscation.

So the A/V only starts working if/when eventually a native code payload reaches the target.

<comment><USER7> no, it really dosent. native code can do the exact same sort of tricks.

a pretty standard tool in detection evasions bag of tricks is to write a custom virtual machine that generates code on the fly, which makes static, signature based analysis of payloads totally useless.

<comment><USER8> What keeps you from finger printing the VM just as easily?

<comment><USER7> the vm is eaiser to modify than the entire codebase, you have to update only one small bit of code, rather than everything. The vm is written with this in mind, and is trival to automaticly obfuscate/transform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _The data security firm recently found that antivirus software programs perform poorly against new viruses._

The remainder of the article provides similar enlightenment.

<comment><USER10> The article basically adds a few interviews and photos to an Imperva press release: [http://investors.imperva.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=247116&p=ir...](http://investors.imperva.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=247116&p=irol- newsArticle_Print&ID=1764440&highlight=)

Aside: this reminded me of PG's article "The Suit is Back": <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html> That, at least, is well worth a read.

So I guess Imperva might be a company to watch - at least we now know they have a good PR firm :)

<comment><USER3> There's anti-virus and then there are the programs that fill in the gap where the AV program lack. A simple google search will yield you the results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought antivirus software existed merely to deal with flaws in Windows...

<comment><USER12> While I understand that Windows' past does make it a convenient target for such remarks, most "viruses" now are not really viruses, but malware that either exploit holes in (mostly) third-party software, or goes after a human factor. Stricter security practices from Vista onwards (UAC, low-privileged user accounts by default, etc.) make Windows no easier target than Mac or *x, if social engineering involved. No anti-malware product will help if user is tricked into voluntary entering their credentials or credit card details.

<comment><USER13> If a site gets you to download an executable, it's now 3 mouse clicks to get it to run on an average desktop setup (As opposed to 0 in the Win2K days and 1 in the early XP days).

In Unixes, it's still "open an xterm and chmod a+x executable". There's still a huge difference.

<comment><USER12> UAC prompts for a password, not a clickthrough.

<comment><USER13> Only if you have a password set up. about half the systems I interact with do not, and the UAC is just a click through on them.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough. This is being more or less mitigated by "file reputation" system though. It's pretty effective preventing user from accidentally running a suspicious file. This, and browser that sets the flag "downloaded from internet" on executable and ZIP files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If I had to think of anti-virus I would trust the most it would be this.

The computer would reboot in to a maintenance mode where it would boot in to a check mode. Hopefully off the network or some other source that couldn't be altered by a virus/malware.

The check mode would checksum all executable content and update its database, reporting all changed and added files. It could also check for known out of date executable files. All files would be checked against a A/V database too. If nothing fails the computer reboots back to the OS, else it is halted until repaired.

This still has two risks I can see, one is the BIOS is altered and subverted there. The other is non-executable content runs transient programs that do not survive reboot.

<comment><USER8> I think that concept would work better as sighning executables rather than stopping the world and validating against a data base. Create a private key from the user's password (which of course cannot be derived from information stored on the computer). When an unsighned binary tries runing, require the user to provide their password to sighn it.

</comment></comment><comment> alok-g Newbie questions (I have searched the Internet a bit, did not find information to answer these):

I understand that anti-viruses (AVs) maintain signatures of viruses (which as I understand are byte patterns present in that virus not present in non- infected software code). They also look for executables modifying others.

Questions:

1\. If AVs have to match byte patterns for a very large number of known viruses (millions??), would this not make scanning each executable very slow? This seems to be O[e*v] operation where e is the number of executables and v is the number of viruses. Since it does not seen as slow intuitively, what is going on?

2\. I presume AVs would also track check-sums of known executables so that these can be safe guarded against new viruses for which signatures are not yet available. Is this right?

<comment><USER15> First I don't really have an idea about security software. But to your first question:

The algorithm that is used is probably a variation of the Aho-Corasick algorithm. This is a string matching algorithm that can match k patterns in O(kn+m).

This is basically linear and doable.

Two your second question I can only point to a flaw in some virus scanner a couple years ago where it detected a false positive in an essential Windows file, removed the file and left Windows in an unbootable state. I do hope that there was some learned lesson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am not trying to be an Apple fan-boy, but does anybody run anti-virus on their Mac's? AntiVirus these days seems like snake oil.

<comment><USER17> I actually have the same question. I just switched to a MacBook a few months ago and never felt the need to install an antivirus (I've always had Avira on my old Windows 7 PC, but primarily for scanning flash drives). But actually, even in my old PC, I never really had major problems with viruses. I've always thought you can only get them by irresponsibly downloading and installing untrusted software, and websites.

<comment><USER18> Generally, my only real reason for running an anti-virus on the mac has been to check e-mail attachments so I don't spread something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Given that these A/V products are only marginally effective, does anyone have any suggestions for what might be the best bang for the buck in terms of protection a Win7 machine? My preference would be just not to run windows, but it's my mom's system, and she needs certain windows based accounting packages...

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe McAfee could come back and save the day. It would make a great addition to his storytale-like-blog.

<comment><USER3> Yes, he can create the next great security product from jail. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> No shit. This isn't news, it's a well known fact.

<comment><USER21> Not sure why you are being downvoted, as anyone who deals with computers will be well aware that anti-virus software exists mostly as security theater. It _can_ be useful against certain types of viruses, especially those who are widespread, but it is a very dangerous thing in and of itself because it states that the user's system is "protected," causing most people to gain a false sense of security and drop their guard.

<comment><USER8> I do not think anti-viruses are pure security theater. They will not protect against zero day attacks, however, once a specific virus hits enough people, anti-viruses will be updated, preventing large scale infection. In order to avoid this, attackers need an attack vector that would allow them to change the virus binary at will. These definitely exist, but A/V does stop a non trivial amount of infections.

<comment><USER3> There is software out there that specifically targets zero day attacks. It would be a conflict of interest for me to mention specifics, but a trivial matter for those interested to find out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Super mario spacetime organ - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/49142543

<comment><USER2> "Code Bending" - Awesome. This can create some really interesting sound and video. Love it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget to read a description to the video, very interesting.

<comment><USER3> This was incredible. Thanks for sharing.</comment></comment>


An Unheralded Breakthrough: The Rosetta Stone of Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/05/21/an-unheralded-breakthrough-the-rosetta-stone-of-mathematics/ <comment><USER2> I think that in their desire to explain this popularly, which is legitimate, they made a rather confused version of both the history and the mathematics. First, neither Weil nor Deligne are unheralded - they are about as famous and acknowledged as mathematicians can be, aside from a few universal geniuses such as Gauss and a few people who have solved a long-outstanding problem and were mentioned in the press a lot (e.g. Andrew Wiles). (Incidentally, Weil once joked that many generations from now, people will probably think that André Weil and Andrew Wiles, both professors from Princeton, were the same person).

Second, it's an exaggeration (to put it mildly) to say that Weil is the first one to think of a connection between numbers and geometry. I mean, this goes to Descartes at the latest. And such sophisticated tools as the fundamental group of a topological surface were introduced in the 19th century.

For anyone confused by the statement that the solutions to x^2+y^2=1 in complex numbers form a sphere: they obviously don't form a sphere in the usual sense, since the solutions are not bounded (since there is a root of every polynomial in complex numbers, you can find a corresponding y for every x, indeed usually two such y's). What's meant is that the Riemann surface defined by the graph of this function (i.e. y=sqrt(1-x^2), which is two-dimensional surface embedded into four-dimensional space, has genus 0, i.e. it is topologically equivalent to a sphere, which is to say it doesn't have any holes in it. I think you are supposed to prove that this is so by considering this surface on the complex plane minus the set [1,+inf], seeing that the function has two distinct continuous branches on the remaining set, each of which is equivalent to a sphere since it's a simple one-valued function over the complex plane, and then gluing the two spheres along the line [1,+inf] like you would glue two regular spheres along edges of cuts made in both. You end up with another sphere (from the point of view of topology).

<comment><USER3> I don't see any place in the article where they say that Weil was the first to form a connection between numbers and geometry. The only thing close they say:

 _Weil suggested that sentences written in the language of number theory could be translated into the language of geometry, and vice versa._

And since this is elaborated upon later on in the article I don't see anything wrong with the sentence.

<comment><USER2> My problem is not with this sentence, but with this passage from the second paragraph:

> ... number theory is the study of numbers [...]

> Geometry, on the other hand, studies shapes [...]

> But French mathematician André Weil had a penetrating

> insight that the two subjects are in fact closely related.

This pretty clearly says Weil came up with the idea of connecting number theory and geometry - or at least connecting them closely - which is very, very wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Deligne's work is certainly impressive and he deserves the prize.

However, it is a real pity that they have not even tried to bestow the Abel on Grothendieck [1].

Yes, he will certainly decline or even not answer but, honestly, they are missing the chance of saying 'hey, we really appreciate his work although he is not going to accept the price'.

Probably neither Deligne nor Atiyah nor so many people would have done what they have without Grothendieck's astounding contributions. But I digress.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck>

<comment><USER3> From the Wikipedia page:

 _He gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed, to protest against the Vietnam War (The Life and Work of Alexander Grothendieck, American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 113, no. 9, footnote 6)._

Wow, just wow...

<comment><USER4> Well, yes he was really special.

EDIT: That behaviour show what having a conscience means when you take it to the limit, which -to me- is really inspiring...

It is not only that. He left the IHES as a protest because it was _partially_ founded by the NATO.

For non-specialists, the IHES is equivalent in 'scientific value' to any Insitute of your choice: Princeton, the Newton Institute, Max Planck, CERN... whatever. It is one of the few 'best of the best'.

He just left.

He became a recluse long ago, but that does not diminish his scientific merits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If ever there was an article in need of some good illustrations... Does anyone have an example of one of these "solutions in natural numbers modulo N give us other, more elusive, avatars"?

<comment><USER6> Here is an illustration I made with Mathematica just for you

<http://i.imgur.com/8JIocR6.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Deligne once built an igloo on the IAS grounds and slept in it with wife. A friend, post-doc there, had to beg him for a week to let him sleep in it, before he relinquished it and let him try it for a night.

I think this is a wonderful example of how someone at the top of his career (this was only a couple of years ago), can still maintain a childlike wonder towards the world around him.

<comment><USER8> Was it an igloo, or a quinzhee? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinzhee>

The latter is easier to build, and the whole process looks to be a lot of fun. I'll have to try it out.

<comment><USER7> Definitely an igloo. He used a squarish paper bin to compress snow and get bricks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This stuff is very cool, and I feel extremely outclassed. Is there a math camp for adults who just made it out of engineering school, but never absorbed the real beauty of math? People post this very interesting stuff, and I see something sparkly and say wow! I must say the writing of Feynman gives me a little hope, but so far most of the language of math is beyond me.

<comment><USER10> I would recommend the Princeton Companion to Mathematics[1]. Its got a broad range of topics in short digestible articles. (though the first section has preliminary material for understanding the later articles)

[1][http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691118809/ref=redir_mdp_mobil...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691118809/ref=redir_mdp_mobile)

<comment><USER11> This is a good reference. It is basically an encyclopedia, so some sections are better than others. I'm not a big fan of Gowers' intro, it is very heavy and could have done much more in the way of explaining how to navigate the volume itself. It is generally assumed that you know integral and differential calculus.

If you are daunted by mathematical formulas and don't have a solid basis in math generally, I would recommend Pickover's "The Math Book"[1]. Very engaging; good short, non-technical descriptions of many of the same topics in Princeton; lots of pretty pictures.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Math-Book-Pythagoras-Milestones- Mathem...](http://www.amazon.com/Math-Book-Pythagoras-Milestones- Mathematics/dp/1402788290)

<comment> alok-g How deep does Pickover's book go? I read in the reviews that each topic is limited to one page only, so I presume the real mathematics would not be covered. In other words, after reading this, will I understand the topics or would just understand things about them?

I also see a Physics book by the same author, but have the same question there too: [http://www.amazon.com/Archimedes-Hawking-Science-Great- Behin...](http://www.amazon.com/Archimedes-Hawking-Science-Great- Behind/dp/0195336119/ref=cm_cr_dp_asin_lnk)

<comment><USER11> IIRC there are a few things that are simple enough to actually explain in a page, but yes, one page per...artifact? Very little real mathematics, you will just understand things about them. It is, however, the best written of these pop-math type books that I've come across. If you are comfortable with undergraduate-level mathematics, the Princeton Guide is a much better book for getting an idea about a specific topic. Pickover's book is more for getting a feel for what topics are out there. They were written for two very different audiences and I like them both for different reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hope the scientific details are a bit more true than the french work day length. It's 7h50 of work/week but we usually have a long lunch break so we end up the day quite late anyways, and we generally work 8h and take some complete or half days off (Friday afternoon is a common choice) to make up for the time

<comment><USER13> _It's 7h50 of work/week but we usually have a long lunch break so we end up the day quite late anyways, and we generally work 8h and take some complete or half days off (Friday afternoon is a common choice) to make up for the time_

As an American, that is such a foreign statement to read. I literally laughed out loud when I read it. The craziest part to wrap my head around is the concept of working during the week, then saying, "I have worked too many hours, I have to go home Friday afternoon". I can only imagine the work that isn't being done and being left behind.

Do CEOs and investment bankers only work 50 hours a week? What about investment managers?

[ADDED question]

So the hours rules only apply to hourly workers? If that is the case, it is similar to America because companies have to pay overtime for hourly workers so they try not to let them work past 40 hours anyway.

<comment><USER12> managers and higher ranking people are paid by the day, so their hours are not counted. I have been paid by the hour only the first 4 months in my ~10years of working carrer.

edit: but on a side note France (and Germany) ranked very high in output per worked hour the last time I checked, way higher than the US. Kind of not messing around in the office people.

<comment><USER14> >managers and higher ranking people are paid by the day, so their hours are not counted

Do you have any more info on this? Are you basically saying that the law is ignored? Because AFAICT the French and EU (working time directive) are both quite strict and there don't seem to be any opt-outs.. their hours would just be logged as '7h' regardless of reality? (and if the employee were to kick up a fuss, they would no doubt win any case?).

(i've been interested in hiring in French jurisdiction, but put off by working time law)

<comment><USER12> ouch, you're going in very specific here. It's going to hurt.

About the EU law : you are not subject to it, it's countries who are subject to it. It work by fining the infringing country. EU laws generally mandate countries to have national laws in this or that way. If a citizen gets a condamnation by an infringing national law, and after having tried every possible national appeals, he can go to the EU court and get his country condemned. I'll stop here on that subject.

So, on a French level, we have work laws (Code du travail), regulations and "collective agreement" (I hope my google translation is correct). In computer science the collective agreement is called "syntec" it has force of law (it's not the case for all agreements). Collective agreements can offer better benefits than the law, but not worse. In the case of computer science, the employees are classified in 2 layers, basic employees (secretaries etc.) and "Managers and Engineers" (Cadres et Ingénieurs) in startups, almost everybody is an engineer. Then engineers are classified with a number, depending on experience, autonomy, degree of skills the job needs, and people managed. This number (coefficient) correspond to the minimum salary you have to pay them, and the other way around, if in everyday work, their job goes into a higher level, their minimum salary have to be increased (if you were already paying them high than the minimum, you don't care). For computer science we are generally way over the minimum, but it's good to have someone check the employment contract before signing it. Employers tend to give lower number at employment, I tend to raise it to their true level, because I value my team on paper too. People whose number is high enough meaning their seniority is high enough are to be paid by the day and not the hour. Those people are paid to work 218 days a year (waiting for some backlash here:) ).

Then you have the limits on the number of hours worked, like no more than 13h in a row, sleep time etc. It's not really about salary, it's about security and well-being. As far I as know it's not a issue in computer science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Practical challenge: automatically generate a natural language plus visual diagram series explanation of arbitrary equations marked up in MathML or similar.

<comment><USER16> Here's a start: [http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/answers-results-of- po...](http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/answers-results-of-polls-and-a- brief-description-of-the-program/)

<comment><USER15> Interesting but I wouldn't call that 'natural language' - I'd call that mathematical jargon! I was thinking more like something that anyone could grasp, optimally visually. So, for example, given some idea about a particular, practical problem (engineering, surveying, agriculture, theoretical complexity of software, etc.) an explanation could access relatively advanced mathematical knowledge and present it clearly to the uninitiated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Deligne's most spectacular results are on the interface of two areas of mathematics: number theory and geometry"

This is very compelling. Can anyone suggest topics or materials of study to explore this interface?

<comment><USER2> Study complex analysis. It is a very pretty field which certainly has connections both to algebra (in fact, complex analysis grew out of the study of roots of polynomials) and to geometry - there are a lot of fascinating geometrical results in it, such as the famous Euler's formula for angles, e^i _Theta_ =cos _Theta_ \+ i sin _Theta_ as one of the simplest examples. There is also the theory of conformal mappings and all sorts of beautiful results for analytic functions, e.g. the fact that a complex function which is smooth (i.e. differentiable) and non-constant must take every possible complex value (except possibly one point) - certainly not true for the real numbers! Once you have a good understanding of complex analysis, you can continue to study Riemann surfaces and topology. A lot of modern geometry and number theory grows out of these studies, e.g. the Riemann hypothesis which is very important in number theory, and Riemann surfaces which are strongly connected to models of spacetime, both started as part of complex analysis. Also the field has a huge number of applied results, e.g. in the area of differential equations and Fourier analysis. Once you have a good grounding in complex analysis, you can decide if you want to move into the later results (such as Weil's), which tend to be very sophisticated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The avatars of algebraic equations in complex numbers give us geometric > shapes like the sphere or the surface of a donut; solutions in natural > numbers modulo N give us other, more elusive, avatars.

If anyone is wondering what those "avatars" for solutions in natural numbers modulo N give, here is my plot for N from 2 to 22 that I made with Mathematica.

<http://i.imgur.com/8JIocR6.png>

</comment><comment><USER18> "no one can patent a formula."

No one _should_ be able to patent a formula. FTFY</comment>


5 Programming Languages You'll Need Next Year - <AUTHOR> http://news.dice.com/2014/07/29/5-programming-languages-youll-need-next-year-beyond/?CMPID=EM_SV_UP_JS_AD_LC_AD_&utm_source=Cheetahmail&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=&utm_campaign=Advisory_Lifecycle&om_rid=AAGso-&om_mid=_BQI8$-B8tYqRPk&dadv&om_rid=AAMksF&om_mid=_BT2hOkB87htKtz&dice

<comment><USER2> Assuming this list was compiled based on the kinds of jobs available on Dice. This seems to indicate that there aren't so many exciting opportunities there. (Unless people are actually excited about SalesForce integrations!)

Sweet hello worlds, btw. ;)</comment>


Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/175#issuecomment-380534425 <comment><USER3> For some clarity:

\- Mozilla's Objection: [https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/175#issuecomment-380771954](https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/175#issuecomment-380771954)

\- Apple's Objection: [https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/175#issuecomment-380534425](https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/175#issuecomment-380534425)

\- Microsoft's Objection: [https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/176](https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/176)

\- Google's Objection: [https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/177](https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/177)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. The TL;DR seems to be that, instead of sticking to documenting what _is_ , the W3C is (either deliberately or through incompetence) trying to push their own "vision" for DOM 4.1 without browser buy-in.

<comment> c-smile That does not mean that it is a good thing to put all bells and whistles from different browser vendors under the same umbrella.

Let's say you are a) owning and b) managing a project that three competing teams are working on in parallel.

If you will not curate the project you will have one team adding <marquee> and another team adding <blink>...

In real world you would invite dedicated architect or team of architects to define the spec that all 3 teams will implement.

All that WHATWG vs W3C flame is about bazaar vs cathedral management style I think.

Origins of the mess: W3C itself has no architects on board - they are just trying to moderate votes of others. Where each vote has an obvious weight (weight(Google) > weight(JohnButSmart)).

In contrary WHATWG has professional architect on top of the construct - <USER2> Hickson. In fact WHATWG was created by him. But Ian is associated with Google and that makes WHATWG legitimacy a bit questionable.

<comment><USER5> the formal complaints of all browser people seem to support the WHATWG

<comment><USER6> The browser people are the WHATWG. There are no other stakeholders in that.

<comment><USER7> Not sure exactly what your comment is saying, but at least one reading is that "browsers are the only stakeholders in the WHATWG", which is not accurate. The WHATWG is a community organization open to participation by all; see [https://whatwg.org/faq#process](https://whatwg.org/faq#process) for more. We receive a lot of participation from users, web developers, and other companies.

There is a formal group, the Steering Group, which represents the browsers that implement WHATWG standards, and serves as the point of final appeal if the community doesn't come to a consensus on its own. But this is similar to the W3C appeals track where if all the paying member companies don't come to consensus, they appeal to "The Director" as the ultimate decider. ("The Director" is nominally Tim Berners-Lee, but recently all Director decisions have been made by W3C management "on behalf of" The Director.)

<comment><USER8> Are there any non-browser members as part of the editors or steering committee in the whatwg?

To me, this is giving browser makers even more power over HTML than they have otherwise.

<comment><USER7> The MIME Sniffing, Streams, Console, and Quirks Mode Standards are all edited by people who are not working for the browser-engine-developer companies. (Streams is co-edited by Googlers as well.) That's 4 out of the 15 standards currently developed at the WHATWG; not so bad, given how few companies are willing to pay people to work full time on web standards.

Of course, we have _lots_ of work to do, and if you or anyone else are able to devote a good chunk of time to standards work, we'd love to have more editors ---no matter what company they work for.

Browser engine developers comprise the steering group, since ultimately we want the specs to reflect what will be implemented in web browsers, so the best way to resolve disputes about what should be in the spec is by asking the people who will be spending their resources to implement it what they think. I think this is probably the right way to go, instead of "The Director" having the final voice.

<comment><USER8> > That's 4 out of the 15 standards currently developed at the WHATWG; not so > bad, given how few companies are willing to pay people to work full time on > web standards.

Thats actually nice to know, but specifically about HTML (which is one of the most important specs the whatwg works on) it's all browser makers. (That too, majority of them from one particular browser maker).

>I think this is probably the right way to go, instead of "The Director" having the final voice.

I think having a better mix of people in the decision making process than just browser makers would be the right way to go. I understand that browser makers have to implement the specs, but the web community as a whole has to use the specs to build the web of the future - and as such, people from non-browser companies should have a greater say in the final voice.

<comment><USER7> Oh, you're right, I forgot HTML! That is co-edited by someone from Bocoup too. So make it 5 out of 15.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _We know that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, consider the WHATWG to be the canonical version. We don 't yet know whether the other 450+ W3C member organisations that represent the wider web platform agree with this position or not though._

Honestly, do the other 450+ W3C member organizations matter? ([https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List](https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List))

<comment><AUTHOR> No.

They could matter, if they built a browser with competing market share. It's not a static equilibrium.

<comment><USER9> Did you look at the list of members? Who on the list is going to be building their own browser and what would the business case be? Out of the big four, only two of them even thought it made sense to build a browser from scratch. Apple and Google started off with KHTML.

EDIT:

To clarify. Who is going to be building their own _rendering engine_ instead of taking an existing one - 3 of the 4 are open source - and building a browser on top?

<comment><AUTHOR> The lineage of the _rendering engine_ doesn't matter. What gives Apple and Google and Microsoft command of the standard is the fact that they mediate access to web pages; they own th actual customers. _That 's_ what matters.

<comment><USER10> Creating a browser isn't the only part of mediating access to web pages. In different senses, Digicert, Comcast, Akamai, and Cisco do that as well.

<comment><USER11> Fair point, but I think it is somewhat orthogonal to the discussion. I don't imagine Cisco cares which DOM spec is used in rendering the application layer bytes of the packets it routes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Serious question: why are the W3C still publishing or trying to publish standards for DOM and HTML and probably a few others, when no one that matters cares about them? Why not rather throw in the towel on those particular standards and acknowledge that the WHATWG has won on them?

<comment><USER13> > Serious question: why are the W3C still publishing or trying to publish > standards for DOM and HTML and probably a few others, when no one that > matters cares about them?

There _is_ a potential legitimate role for the two-track approach, if WHATWG represents a moving target of what browser vendors have agreed to implement and essentially is the vehicle for documenting hmthe agreed future common web platform, and W3C presents a versioned publication of the stable, widely implemented, currently usable state at a particular point of time; the W3C version would then be the target for conservative app developers that need something that works everywhere today, the WHATWG standard would be what people making browsers and other user agents would target, and what more ambitious developers willing to deal with "can I use...?" pitfalls would be guided by.

<comment><USER14> Why cant people just use an older copy of the WHATWG standard as the new "stable" documentation? This is basically how caniuse.com and browserslist work today, allowing developers to precisely describe their compatibility targets and even automate their builds.

It seems unnecessary to have an entirely separate organization to just copy/paste/publish new "versions" of existing archives.

<comment><USER13> > Why cant people just use an older copy of the WHATWG standard as the new > "stable" documentation?

Because the order of incorporation into the standard and the order of implementation and stabilization aren't the same, and some fesutres may be implemented incompletely in some browsers, so that what is stable and usable is a subset of features (and sometimes a subset of functionality within a particular feature) that doesn't correspond to any particular version of the LS. So you'd need manual curation.

> It seems unnecessary to have an entirely separate organization

Perhaps, though the audience and thus interested parties for the implementor- focussed spec and the developer-focussed spec are different.

<comment><USER7> The WHATWG is actually the only organization I know of that publishers a developer-focused specification; see [https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/). (We only do it for HTML currently.)

Anyway, I agree with the grandparent poster that caniuse.com is a much better approach to documenting the interoperable subset than copying and pasting someone else's spec, and trying to delete the parts that are not interoperable by some threshold. We actually have caniuse.com boxes in the margin of the HTML Standard: see for example [https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/scripting.html#attr-s...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/scripting.html#attr- script-type)

Finally, it's worth noting that we only incorporate features into WHATWG Living Standards if they have multiple implementer interest; see [https://whatwg.org/working-mode#additions](https://whatwg.org/working- mode#additions)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's sad to see the relationship between WHATWG and W3C has deteriorated to this point. Trying to wrangle a standard from a "living" (i.e. constantly changing) specification was always going to be tough but I'd have hoped both WHATWG and W3C would be able to maintain a working relationship.

<comment><USER16> Is there an article with the background on this? Why do we have both the W3C and the WHATWG, and why do the W3C just copy and paste work from WHATWG, if that is indeed what happens?

<comment><USER17> The W3C was the original standardization organization for the web.

They wanted to create standards that allow easy implementation by others, and were willing to make some tradeoffs with backwards compatibility for that (see XHTML).

The browser vendors obviously oppose this, and want standards that just formalize what they already implement. As result, the browser vendors created their own standards committee, which standardizes whatever the browsers already do (if existing). This is the WHATWG.

As result, the web standards situation has gone to insanity. The WHATWG URL spec contains 4 pages of pseudocode and algorithm definitions for how Chrome parses URLs, and how you should as well, and the W3C, still being relied on by the other actors on the web that aren't the 4 largest browsers, has to copy the WHATWG spec as base for their own specs, because browsers will ignore whatever the W3C says anyway.

But remember that the WHATWG proposed to the W3C that the W3C should copy the WHATWG specs as base for their own specs: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG#cite_note-9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG#cite_note-9)

<comment><USER18> To offer another perspective.

I'd say the W3C wasted a huge amount of time pursuing quests of purity (XHTML) over actually making the web better for users. I see the value in what they were trying to do, but it wasn't letting people do the things they wanted to do on the web.

As browsers started just implementing features outside of standards in completely disparate ways because everyone was desperate for them (leading to plugin hell, apps rather than websites, etc...), WHATWG was created to try and ensure that the web remained a single thing and not a mess of things that would only work in one browser.

The web platform sprang forward massively as a result of this, with browsers implementing much more consistently and with new features tending to be implemented in compatible ways, with real progress being made.

This lead to the W3C specs becoming totally redundant and the only way for W3C to keep up was to lamely try to copy from WHATWG into a "spec" at random intervals and claim it was something people could work towards, when it reality it offers no real advantages over working to the living standard, because no browser offers better coverage of that spec than any other random point of the living spec.

People want features. We saw what happens with a very slow moving, rigid standard: plugins. Flash was popular because at the time you simply couldn't do good video, animation, games on the web platform. Likewise, mobile phones shifted to apps because websites couldn't do notifications or use location information. You can bemoan a living spec, but _you get one anyway_ , because people will work around the web if they can't do what they want. If you want to use a subset of that living spec, use it, but at least keeping it together and agreeing on roughly how to do these things is better than plugins or abandoning the web entirely.

<comment><USER17> > I'd say the W3C wasted a huge amount of time pursuing quests of purity > (XHTML) over actually making the web better for users. I see the value in > what they were trying to do, but it wasn't letting people do the things they > wanted to do on the web.

Okay, let's make a deal:

We both write a crawler that can fully reliably parse websites.

I implement XHTML1.1, you implement HTML5. We both get 1 month time.

What do you think is going to happen?

XHTML was a worthy goal – with it, we wouldn't have a need to run headless Chrome for tests. We could parse the web, and actually use the data. OpenGraph tags would never have been necessary. We wouldn't need to throw DNNs at rendered output of a browser just to parse data.

HTML5 is amazing for existing browser vendors, developers, and in the short- term, users. But everyone else loses. Horribly.

<comment><USER18> And if we were all using XHTML1.1 now instead, yes, your parser would be easier, except all the richer content would be in flash, and all the web apps would be desktop applications, and you wouldn't be able to parse that at all, even with a full browser.

You are acting like everyone would just stop and wait for you to make your dream implementation that's ideal - that's not how the world works.

WHATWG was an admission that we can't stop it, so we might as well embrace it. Embracing it has resulted in browsers being _far_ more consistent, and new features being a shared part of the web platform, and not siloed off in plugins and other platforms. That's why W3C is irrelevant now.

<comment><USER17> You're assuming XHTML1.1 would never have evolved further, never have gotten more content.

And Flash, despite its flaws, would have been a much better starting point for rich content than the ecosystem we have today.

Many of the features Flash provided are only available in browsers today through babel.js transpilation. As result, we're stuck with a language without stdlib and broken syntax.

We're stuck with a document model that's impossible to work with or parse, and with impossible layout management.

If you want web applications, it'd make much more sense to port the Android layout XML format to the web than to attempt to use HTML5 for it, because HTML5 is insanity for building applications.

> and all the web apps would be desktop applications

I don't see that as anything bad.

The web is for documents, and lightly interactive content. All the rich applications on the web are opaque to any crawler I could write anyway, as I just get "You need JS to view this React app". Desktop applications would be just as parseable, except they would also be less of a resource hog.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea that standards groups exist to push for top-down reconcepting of how the world should work is a common one, and is also a good reason why standards groups fail. Your idea of what the best outcome is won't be the same as every other stakeholders, and no one stakeholder will have exactly the same idea of the best outcome as the market will.

Ultimately, the market _will_ win, no matter what your standards group says.

The point of standards is interoperability, not rationalization. When standards groups try to rationalize technologies real people work with, they cease to provide value, and instead become obstacles that real engineers end up laboriously working around.

<comment><USER17> When I was a child in elementary school, a standards committee decided to change my native language.

They replaced the spelling of most words, and many grammatical rules.

We were forced to obey these changes, any use of the old rules was counted as mistake in school.

Back then, many older books were still using the old rules.

By the time I left high school, almost no books with the old rules were left. All had been reprinted. All newspapers had switched. Autocorrect programs had been updated with the new rules as well.

In a matter of 8 years, an entire language had changed its orthography and parts of its grammar, top-down, and it worked out fine.

I'm sorry, if an entire human language with 120 million speakers can be updated top-down like that, a web spec can as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds horrible.

<comment><USER17> It was amazing. The new orthography is much simpler, and has far fewer insane rules or exceptions. And most people that have seen the transition, but were born after it, or went to school during it, agree.

I know it can work on this scale, I've seen it IRL. Many languages do stuff like this, German has the council of German language, and French has their Academy.

You can do the same on the web. You just need to have all vendors working together to actually do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea that a bunch of standards group officials can decide for the world that web pages are simply lightweight content publishing mechanisms and that real applications should be build exclusively in Flash and that that worldview can be ratified and mandated by browser vendors does _not_ seem amazing to me.

At any rate: the Internet is a market system, not a top-down autocracy.

<comment><USER19> The alternative (and current reality) is that the same things are decided by about four companies in an entirely intransparent manner.

At least the W3C had processes and a wide array of members.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't that just theater? None of them can tell Apple and Google what to put in their browsers; in fact, if they can't convince _just one_ of the big 4 browser vendors to do something, their standards have no meaning at all.

<comment><USER20> It's even more work than that-- check out caniuse for SVG fonts:

[https://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-fonts](https://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-fonts)

They had support in both Safari and Chrome, but never in FF or IE (nor Edge). Chrome eventually dropped the support.

So I'd say if you can't get _all four_ to implement the feature then you might as well call that part of your spec a "living standard." Those features are going to get way fewer eyeballs, fewer bugfixes, fewer reviews, fewer pieces of documentation, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What a monumental waste of time. Why not just ignore W3C entirely? Seriously, what exactly are they going to do? Publish more?

Sometimes it's better to not be nice and just let reality finish the job. So much effort taken from people who clearly have better things to do...

<comment><USER21> W3C attempts to make proper web standards.

Apple Google MS break them and and try to push for substandard specs pushed through W3C.

As a web developer for 11 years, I can state that web development is devolving to chaos of IE6 era.

When W3C allowed itself to be subverted and let big dotcom browsermakers to hijack the process.

A result of that is the continuous bloating of the acting web standard, when you have dozens of new abandonware APIs being showed into the spec on a whim, and no focus on things that should really matter.

It is 2018, and yet browser makers still have open CSS bugs from the previous decade that are banal to fix, yet all they care is how to stuff yet another API useless outside their own business setup.

<comment><USER14> The only "standard" that matters is the one everyone uses. Everything else is a nice wish list for discussion but eventually needs to get out of the way.

The WHATWG doc is a fine standard, backed up by real implementations. Beyond that, W3C is just copy/pasting whatever WHATWG has every few months so what's the point?

And you really think the web is in chaos? We're at an incredible era of possibilities because browsers like Chrome constantly make progress instead of devolving into a bike-shedding argument for years. What APIs do you find so useless or abandoned and why can't you just not use them if so?

<comment><USER21> > The WHATWG doc is a fine standard, backed up by real implementation.

It sucks badly. To begin with, it can't be called a proper standard. It is in their terminology "a living standard" which means it being changed on a whim. It is not being written as an "ideal prototype", but rather it is just a codification of current behaviour of how Google's devs managed to write Chrome's DOM Api, with with all bugs and workarounds.

From standpoint of a person capable of high technical reasoning, this approach is bad.

And... I can't believe that whatWG specs are being written by people hired by Google for 100k+ a year, they are not done on a level of what an any much professional technical writer should work on.

<comment><USER14> Ok, so why does it suck? Because you don't like it? Why isn't it a proper standard when it's the only one implemented? Things definitely do not change on a whim and there's great care taken in the process. The group is very transparent and clearly state the objective is to keep the standard modern and evolving. You can always refer to an archived snapshot or the numerous compatibility tables for historic data if needed.

Chrome has bugs, like any other implementation, but has moved the web forward greatly in the last decade and the vast majority of developers and end-users would rather have modern working tech than some idealistic document that doesn't go anywhere.

Again, since W3C just copies the WHATWG standard anyway, what is the value that you claim is being added? And if you have better ideas, why not just contribute them to WHATWG instead?

<comment><USER21> How it should work:

A standard is written and set in stone at least for 1-1.5 years. Official test suites are made.

Then, browsermakers make their stuff compliant.

APIs must support strict versioning. A user should not be bothered with "your browsers supports version 1 of method b, version 2 of method c, and does not support method d" it should either work with API version N or popup a big error message "API version N not supported, update your browser"

<comment><USER14> For the 3rd time, do you have an actual example of what's wrong?

In the 1.5 years of wait time you mention, the current process will have standardized and released features across all browsers. The web has changed and nobody wants to wait years discussing something. Compatibility is not a major issue because features are rapidly updated and there are compatibility tables that will automatically reference and even build your app for you with the proper polyfills and transpilations.

Sure, sometimes there are bugs and partial features, but this is rare and there's no evidence that W3C prevented this since implementations are not up to them.

However the W3C has definitely failed to make any progress with HTML/XHTML. They failed with SVG. They failed with DRM by completely ignoring the issues raised and causing the EFF to leave. So please state exactly what the W3C has done better and where they have added value because as far as I can tell, they are just wasting time every few months from the very people who are trying to move the web forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's a flamey title. They're objecting to them publishing their spec before the negotiations with WHATWG are over.

<comment><AUTHOR> They're objecting to the simultaneous existence of two DOM standards, to the procedure used by W3C to move forward on the W3C's standard, and to substantive issues in the W3C's fork. Each of the objections refers to the W3C's DOM spec as a "fork". The objectors are members of the WHATWG steering group. The title seems about as neutral a description as can be written.

This is a hazard of posting into message threads rather than articles and blog posts, but "all the mainstream browser vendors object to a W3C standard" seemed interesting enough an event to override that concern.

<comment><USER23> I think it's perfectly fine to post message threads on HN. I would much rather read the source then a summary written by someone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not too knowledgeable on the background here, or on how the politics of standards organizations work, but my understanding is that the EU standards bodies (presumably as well as similar organizations for other governments) consider the W3C to be authoritative. Even if all the browsers prefer WHATWG's spec, won't they be forced to adopt W3C in the same way phones have to support USB charging[0]?

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

<comment><USER25> > in the same way Apple was forced to adopt USB Type-C?

What in the what now?

Apple adopted the latest USB standard as a way to reduce the BOM on it's devices by consolidating ports. They did the same thing with the iMac almost 20 years ago. No one is twisting their arm on it, if anything people are asking them to not jump whole hog on USB Type-C but instead take a gradual approach to adopting it.

<comment><USER24> Clarified; I had mistakenly thought this was the result of EU regulation, but it looks like they were already considered in compliance before that[0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#Reception)

<comment><USER25> That legislation was specific to mobile phones and has since expired. It asked that chargers either have USB Type A Female or USB Type Micro B Male connectors, Apple already offered Type A Female and thus was always in compliance.

It would not surprise me if there were similar legislation around Type C however the industry is still coming to terms with Type C and so I don't anticipate that happening for a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They're (W3C) actually citing the EME precedent as an example of when the W3C went forward without consensus to justify their position on this. If this is the direction the W3C is going then it has ceased to serve the interests of the web and I'm guessing it is on a short path to irrelevance.

</comment><comment><USER27> I see this in another way, and I might not be right but my recollection of the matter was around 2008 and the stale state of the (X)HTML spec(s).

WHATWG came along and was heavily (as I remember it( supported by Google due to the Chrome browser and lack of evolution from W3C and particularly the sad browser state of IE.

Back then Microsoft was sitting on the browser market as Google is today. But Google needed to enforce something different than W3C so it could build a better browser than IE, but with a different (and perhaps a more controlled) spec.

Today, web standards is in a much worse state than they were 10 years ago. And having been developing for the web the last 20 years, it is not easier than it was "in the old days". It's perhaps more fun, but it's not easier.

And some of that frustration is partly due to the disruption of this specification.

</comment><comment><USER28> When is W3C going to formalize their standards?

It's one thing to write down "user agent should do such and such" and quite another thing to formalize it.

<comment><USER29> Never, because there is no W3C-designed standard anymore. Today they just take snapshots of the WHATWG standard every N months, slap their name on it, and call that a standard. The browser vendors roll their eyes at this because they couldn't care less about the W3C and what it publishes, but they've tolerated it as long as it wasn't causing any problems.

The issue here is that now the W3C seems to want to actually make a real standard of their own, and the vendors are going "No. Go away."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Surely W3C and WHATWG would periodically branch and freeze a version of living standard? Possibly defining some elements as optional or extensions much like OpenGL or Vulkan? It seems crazy that they proposal introduced changes to what was already established common practice.

<comment><USER31> The problem is that it is not a fast freeze. It goes through the full W3C process[1] WD > CR > PR > recommendation. When I looked at W3C html 5.2 there had been 10k changes to the WHATWG spec from the date of the 5.2 branch to the date of the 5.2 release.

The W3C allows changes that are incompatible with the WHATWG spec see DBaron's comments in the GitHub issues.

[1] [https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/Process-19991111/proce...](https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/Process-19991111/process.html#Reports)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Jesus Christ this is becoming a hot mess.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anything they object to as a group, I like.

</comment><comment><USER34> I once suggested that W3C base its HTML snapshots on the web developer edition of HTML. In retrospect the full version was probably not a good fit as a W3C standard in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER35> time to use WASM to render the whole thing, ditch W3C. and all the players are there to make the change.

<comment><USER36> Yup, every page looks different anyway, calling megabytes of minified, obfuscated JavaScript. There is probably more in for the user. I guess then you only need <html>, <body>, <canvas> and a subset of DOM.

<comment><USER37> And you'd need to handle accessibility considerations, and font and encoding support, and a flexible layout engine, and multiple input methods, and scrolling, and search engine standardization, and more all yourself.

By the time you handle most of it, all you've done is make a wildly more complicated version of the DOM.

<comment><USER36> Not sure about that. I mean a number of video games have been successfully recompiled to JavaScript, e.g. Doom or Quake 3. I guess you one would need to be able to target some sort of Framebuffer, Frameworks like Qt know how to do that already.

Probably I prefer "native" Web Apps over recompiled "native apps" but like it or not, this will come more and more as people ask for more performance and more variety of programming languages.

<comment><USER37> Well you can already do that with Canvas, and as you said things like Doom or Quake have already done so, but you are basically ignoring the entire DOM and JUST using the canvas as a framebuffer.

And like you said Qt already knows that (somewhat, there have been tech demos showing this but no real applications built on it), but it still means that YOUR APPLICATION must handle all of that, meaning at best you are downloading all the code for all of that at runtime, and at worst you just won't handle it because most people don't want to spend the time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>