Canvas is one of the easiest browser APIs to implement because most of it maps 1:1 to PostScript-style 2D APIs.
It was created by Apple as a wrapper for CoreGraphics back around Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. (IIRC, Canvas even debuted in Apple's Dashboard widgets rather than Safari? I'm not 100% sure.)
I remember writing my own Canvas implementation around 2008-2009 using JavaScriptCore and CoreGraphics. It took maybe two days. I used it for a video application where JS plugins needed to render 2D graphics but I couldn't provide a browser engine because that would have been too slow and unpredictable for render functions that get called in the video render loop.
I'm not claiming I implemented everything from scratch. Since it was a Mac OS X Cocoa app, it would just call the APIs available on that platform, like Apple's original Canvas implementation in WebKit.
Also since this was a video application running custom scripts written specifically for that host app, there wasn't a big worry about exact compatibility with any other Canvas-using code.
Anyway, here's the old code that doesn't look like there's anything interesting going on:
The body text is also quite hard to read because the font has a tall x-height and line spacing is very tight.
This makes paragraphs look very dense, almost like it was set in uppercase only, because the lowercase letters don’t create a varying flow between lines for the eye to follow.
The model may be good, but the web design doesn’t win any prizes.
There’s also the time and effort that you need to invest.
You can buy a lottery ticket every week and it costs $2 (just guessing — I don’t buy them). With that minimum spending over three years, you get 150 shots. You paid $300, but no time or effort.
A typical startup takes three years, and you pay for it in both real money and opportunity cost.
Let’s say your chance of getting funded is 1:100 (assuming you don’t have an existing network). And then your chances of success are 1:30 (a more realistic figure for first-time founders than one in ten, IMO).
That means the odds are 1:3000 with great personal investment, versus the lottery where in the same timeframe you get to take 150 shots at a 1:1,000,000 chance at no personal cost.
Looking at these numbers, it does feel a lot like lottery.
Of course I’m downplaying the career growth value of a startup. You learn nothing from the lottery, but going through the startup grind offers experience that you can’t get elsewhere.
Let's say I grant (though I don't believe it) that a startup is also a lottery ticket. What are the factors that make an indie app a lottery ticket? That's my question. Is it just that, absent the funding gate startups have, that there's a lot of competition?
Apps as a platform are at a disadvantage. The bar for entry is roughly as low as creating a website, but for users it’s a higher bar to install an app.
Yet the app doesn’t offer any intrinsic advantage in discovery or marketing over a website. (You’re not going to get any organic traffic from app stores, unless maybe if you have contacts at Apple who can get your app into their promotions — unlikely for an indie dev publishing their first app.)
So if you’re making an app, you need to be sure that users in your niche will see enough benefit that they’ll want to install an app when your competitor is probably just a website.
This is an interesting take, because whilst I agree, generally what I've heard from the market is "we want an app not a web app/pwa"
Whilst I'd rather not have to install <random overly specific app> to go to a sporting event or whatnot, that's the reality, and also generally what I hear businesses want.
Is my perspective just different as a techie or are businesses misreading what consumers want?
The anti-state people often like the idea of an authoritarian leader figure who will fix things by their genius and power of will. Some really do want monarchy (see Curtis Yarvin), but others believe that the dissolution of state power needs to go through an authoritarian phase to happen at all.
It’s not so different from the old-school communists who claimed that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” is a necessary step towards the true freedom of mankind under proper Communism. Conveniently they were the ones in charge of the “temporary” dictatorship in this picture.
Libertarianism and communism are ideological siblings. Both fail time and time again, but to the believers it’s always someone else’s fault and the proper implementation of the ideology simply hasn’t been tried yet.
“When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in”
But surely there’s a million reasons why these were not True Libertarians, they were just doing it wrong, and the ideology is actually sound. Just like with communism.
IMHO, Libertarianism fails not by collapse but by success. Any movement in the direction brings economic and social freedom, but in turn creates soft times in which a society's pendulum shift back to larger government is inevitable.
It’s well known that TikTok uses human curation and weighting to a far greater extent than other social media platforms. The others primarily try to hide and remove unwanted content, but TikTok actively picks what gets shown.
(Twitter apparently now has a patchwork of hacks like the famous “author_is_elon” multiplier that slipped into their public source code release, but that’s nothing like TikTok’s meticulous selection process for algorithmic boosting.)
It would be good to have more visibility into this process because it wields massive influence among the 13-28 demographic, roughly.
This HN comment section with showdead enabled reveals that Ms Graber attracts trolls and misogynists like moths to a flame.
Sometimes I think that the efficient moderation on HN hides the extent of the problem in this community. When Trump won the election, the HN ‘new’ page was briefly filled with posts saying things like “Eat shit n**s and f*gs!!!”
But since the efficient moderation quickly hides all this for users who don’t go out of their way to enable viewing dead posts and comments, we can blissfully go on discussing the finer points of tariffs and whatever, ignoring the fact that a growing number of people around really just want to see minority scapegoats suffer. It feels a bit like frogs in a boiling kettle.
Yes, I don’t suppose there are cities in America that are both walkable and cheap enough that a jazz fan could own a small commercial property for this purpose (if they didn’t get rich from something else before).
Seems like a possibility in smaller European cities though.
Hm, maybe! I guess depends on the European city as well? It's like a perfect balance for Japan where the average age is very old, so a lot of retirees who just sip a cup of coffee for a couple of hours. But also, a cultural acceptance of flying solo, sitting by yourself at a table, basically doing nothing and listening until it's your time to go home.
To be fair though, all the places I went to were much less busier than actual local bars or designated cafes. A couple of places were just full of regulars (I went to a couple of them multiple times, and it was exactly the same people) with clienteles with average age of 60+. Obviously I have extremely limited amount of data points, so might be very wrong.
I suspect print magazines are undergoing the same kind of cycle of destruction and resurrection as happened to vinyl records.
In the 1990s, vinyls were the clunky old things that your mom gave away in a yard sale. Now they’re produced again as a high-end tactile media experience and sales are increasing every year.
Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.
> Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.
This has been attempted in the outdoors world for 20+ years. E.g., Alpinist[0] and The Surfers Journal[1]. It works, kinda. Alpinist now has more ads and is a smaller physical size and lower-quality paper than it was at the start. I think it's also had a couple close calls with bankruptcy. I wasn't reading TSJ over a long enough time span to tell if they had similar issues.
Totally agree! I subscribe to one magazine which is published once a quarter, it costs me about $40/year for the subscription but is well worth it to me as the content is not available anywhere else. Definitely a niche market but the rag does a very good job of catering exactly to its market. There’s still some ads but only a handful per issue that normally has 60-100 pages total.
Just a nit, but PowerPCs were not used in Thinkpads except for very limited production runs in the mid-1990s. The problem was that IBM didn't have an OS for the platform. They had AIX, but it didn't make sense on a laptop. The idea was that OS/2 would provide a PC desktop of their own, but it barely shipped for PowerPC before IBM pulled the plug.
However IBM did design and build x86 chips in the 1990s, and these were used in Thinkpads.
I think it's probably more accurate to say that a version(s) of AIX, Solaris, NT ( and I think a beta of OS/2) technically existed briefly for some models. While some commercial software might have been ported, I doubt it was ever officially supported. Except perhaps some AIX software? I assume it was binary compatible with PowerPC AIX.
Checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_20 implies that that's a perfectly reasonable price for what it was? The more interesting question is (relative) sales volume I think.
> but PowerPCs were not used in Thinkpads except for very limited production runs in the mid-1990s. The problem was that IBM didn't have an OS for the platform
Doh. You're right!
> However IBM did design and build x86 chips in the 1990s, and these were used in Think-pads.
Yep! Those were fabbed by IBM Microelectronics, along with a lot of server SKUed x86 chips back in the 2000s.
It was created by Apple as a wrapper for CoreGraphics back around Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. (IIRC, Canvas even debuted in Apple's Dashboard widgets rather than Safari? I'm not 100% sure.)
I remember writing my own Canvas implementation around 2008-2009 using JavaScriptCore and CoreGraphics. It took maybe two days. I used it for a video application where JS plugins needed to render 2D graphics but I couldn't provide a browser engine because that would have been too slow and unpredictable for render functions that get called in the video render loop.
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