cypherpunks

Notice how you automatically assume that the person pointing out bigotry is in the oppressed minority. This is not always the case.

If you expect a Christian on a site full of atheists to have to be thick-skinned, then by the same logic, you should expect an atheist in a high school full of Christians to be thick skinned. I don't think either of those conclusions is acceptable.

I was not proposing censorship. Reddit, as well as slashdot, HN, digg, etc. have a community process developed with the intent that the best comments make it to the top. The structure of that process determines what makes it to the top. Changes to that process can, very substantially, cut down on amount of certain classes of degenerate content. When bigotry began to appear on reddit, the reddit founders did nothing to combat it (and, indeed, slightly encouraged it). At the time, I think it would have been fairly easy to contain.

At this point, I'm not sure what can be done, since now bigots form a substantial portion of the reddit community.

For example, there was this guy named Lou Franklin who was probably the biggest bigot in the history of the site, and they took YEARS to finally ban his account.

I read reddit, but I would never buy a gold account. The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.

The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one. The reddit founders, however, have shown no interest in finding ways to improve site quality from this perspective, and indeed, appear to support the bigotry.

Anyway, I bear a huge grudge against the site because they banned my account for sockpuppeting and harassment, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.

I might go back to Firefox when it no longer consumes gigabytes of RAM after a few hours of operation. Until then, I'm with Chrome. I don't care about speed as much -- so long as it's reliable, and doesn't grind the rest of my machine to a halt, it's all good.

I've seen swarms of employees get screwed in ways similar to this. It's not uncommon in Silicon Valley.

I kinda wish Google had better versioning in their infrastructure. While I used neither of these products, their disappearance makes me reluctant to adopt Google products for any core infrastructure. If I buy a program from Microsoft, and Microsoft discontinues it, I get to keep using it forever. If I do the same with Google, since I'm not managing my infrastructure, at some point, it just goes away. It shouldn't be that hard to fork off sets of servers to run frozen, legacy applications, or older versions of non-legacy apps.

I am aware of the current opportunities.

I think you (and most people here) underestimate what the "old web" could imagine, though. We had all sort of ideas for agents that would go out and grab and analyze data for us in all sorts of clever and interesting ways. Search engines got built, as did one or two other things, and then the web just got too complex.

Hell, even I had a simple app that went out and grabbed all my favorite comics and showed them to me, nicely formatted, and without ads.

Which only works for pre-intended uses, or standards that have substantial market share.

Again, read the literature on agents from the nineties, and see how diverse a technology tree was killed....

I'd love to see that extension. If you write it, I will use it. I use Chrome too, so it should work here.

As to what should and shouldn't be part of the browser -- the way to figure that out is experimentation and competition. When you make technologies and standards simple and easy, people will make independent implementations and try things. The vast majority will be dumb, but some (often unanticipated ones) will turn out to be useful, clever, or brilliant. That's how the technology improves.

When you make standards big and cumbersome, progress stops.

I'm glad. Thank you for taking the time to read and understand. Hacker News is starting to go down the decline that hit reddit 2 years ago, where people don't bother to try to understand different viewpoints, and just downvote anything they don't agree with. It's nice to see good people still on here...

Did you read what I wrote? I mentioned Google Maps as one of the two places I found AJAX useful.

The applications on my mom's PC do have much better UI standardization than the web does. Microsoft releases UI guidelines. alt-f4 does the same thing in every application I've used, and the menu structure is roughly the same too. Apple is even better.

> You mean bookmarks? Add a scroll %, assuming they're not nice enough to use anchor tags / IDs meaningfully, and you're golden.

Bookmarks in books work okay. You move them. Book marks in browsers don't. You have to remove the old one, add the new one, and the overall process is too cumbersome to be useful for the application I mentioned.

Not just scraping. Any sort of non-human parsing of web pages. Look at the 1990s literature on web agents for lots of applications.

The Google Spider grabs pages from other servers. That's a web client. It's a web client that was easy to write when Google was started, but is almost impossible to write today. If search engines hadn't been invented 20 years ago, they'd be impossible to invent today. The only reason they still work is tremendous work on Google's end to have its spider be able to spider complex AJAXy pages, and that content creators engage in SEO and develop to Google.

No. I haven't. I've noticed maybe 1 or 2 web apps I want to use (Google Docs and Google Maps). Beyond that, I don't see anything that couldn't be delivered more effectively without JavaScript that I want or need.

Usability is not up. Each web site has its own, custom, non-standard user interface. I could teach my mom to use the web circa '96. I cannot teach her to use it today. It's too damn complex.

Usability would be up if the browser knew more about what to expect. You can look at things like Readability. The browser ought to know more about the content, and be able to present it in a coherent, usable way. The server-side shouldn't dictate presentation.

15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine. Myself. 1 person. In a few weeks (modulo bandwidth and server farm). I write a program that grabs a web page, and reads out keywords. Today, if I grab a web page, quite often, that web page has nothing except for JavaScript code. That code grabs the actual content from the server, lays it out, and animates it. To write a web search engine, I need to write a complete JavaScript library.

At the time, we were talking about developing all sorts of agents. Things that would shop for you. Things that would find parts for you. Thinks that would remember what web sites you visited, and let you search them. Things that would track where in a long set of pages you were (blog, comic, etc.), and let you keep reading from there. It happened for a while, and then it died when the web became too damn hard. Writing anything that can reasonably see and parse web pages now takes many, many web years. There are only four or five organizations with that kind of resources (WebKit, Mozilla, Opera, IE, and internally, Google). There are countless things we just didn't even imagine.

It's like the DMCA. You notice all the innovations that happen, but you miss all the innovations it made impossible.

Google is a big organization in the business of developing web software. Most organizations are in other businesses. If I'm running a construction company, it doesn't make sense to have IT consultants come in each time a new version of something comes out. If it works, it's best to leave it alone, modulo security fixes.

Do you feel the need to upgrade your house's plumbing system and electrical each time an innovation happens? That's how most people feel about software.

As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look slightly better, but the client side dies a little bit every time. In the web circa '96, anyone could write a web spider or web browser, and everyone did. There was tremendous innovation both client-side and server-side. Client-side innovations included things like search engines and Google. With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. I don't think this is a net win for the world.

This is what really irks me about Google Apps. You don't have any control over this kind of thing. They can (and do) yank the rug out from under you whenever they feel like it. A while back, they forcibly transitioned all accounts to also be normal Google accounts, with no user input. They did this before they figure out how to transition users who already had Google accounts, so now my users are split into first class and second class citizens.

It really doesn't feel like it should be the hard for Google to have some infrastructure where the user can control version transitions. Google makes a new version, but barring security issues, keeps all old versions in their cloud. At that point, you transition when you're ready.

Your math is weak. You should go back and study.

Anyone know of the equivalent of Stroustrup for Python? If anyone's not familiar with Stroustrup, his book on C++ explains the language in-depth, and gives clear rationales for the design decisions made, so you understand not just the hows but also the whys. It's not a reference manual -- it emphasizes depth over breadth -- but it's also not a tutorial.

He's an exceptionally good communicator and has very strong soft skills, and applies them to self-promotion. He's also good at politics (as in convincing crowds of people -- not so much at interacting and making long-term connections with individuals). A lot of this has to do with feeling out crowds, and telling them what they want to hear. He's also got a slightly underdeveloped moral compass, which always helps (he was willing to be a little bit sleazy and subtly undermine competitors). That's mostly what it takes to get famous. He was also the only person, after RMS, who was arrogant enough to take credit for the whole movement.

I'm not sure if I trust much be ESR. He's extremely eloquent, so what he writes always sounds convincing. In practice, he's a pretty bad developer, or at least he was at the time he wrote most of his stuff (at the time, the most serious technical accomplishment he had under his belt was a refactoring of fetchmail). When I've applied the things he's written, more often than not, they've lead me astray. He has, more often than not, messed up in contexts involving technical interaction with other people (e.g. CML2). This is in stark contrast to e.g. RMS, who usually puts people off, but whose writing tends to be dead-on correct (if you don't believe me, read almost anything he wrote 10-30 years ago, and see how it panned out -- the guy's almost a prophet, cursed to know the truth but not be able to convince people). So I take everything ESR writes with a very large, maybe unhealthy degree of skepticism. It's too easy to be convinced of something incorrect (many eyes make bugs shallow, negative attitude towards RMS, etc.).

I'm looking at his page now, and he appears to have written or contributed to more software since, so I'm not sure if this still applies. I suspect it does, but I'm not ready to pass judgment until I read his more recent essays.

My experience has been the opposite. Best employees aren't desperate to work for you. They're gainfully employed, and you have to poach them. No one I know who is productive would give up this much time to something. Almost everyone I know who is unemployed and desperate would.

The key to finding good employees is to do what Google does. Find successful people. Don't have them come to you -- go to them. How do you do this? Talk to professors and see who top students are. Read publications and books in your field. Hire whoever wrote them. Find neat free software projects, and hire the authors. The list goes on. People like that generally won't want to work for you, and the trick is to recruit them somehow.

You are correct -- there are a few exceptions, and the Playstation was definitely one. Therein lies the difference:

1960-1985: Sony is the gold standard for quality

1995-2010: Sony makes crap, with a few exceptions

Out of context, this may seem like a small difference, but the difference is huge. In the late 50s and early 60s, Sony did not ship a color TV for over a decade because they weren't convinced they could get the quality good enough. When they finally shipped in 1966, Trinitron had brighter pictures than the competition, and the TV sets never broke. The things were expensive, but they were built like a tank. Until the mid-90s or so, every Sony CRT had a full metal cage. You paid a premium, but you got quality.

Today, the majority of Sony products shipped are overpriced lemons. The Sony of yesteryear would never have shipped them.

Oh come now. Their products mostly suck. Their support sucks. The Playstation, they did okay on, only now it turns out that if you bought one, crooks have your personal information. They cut corners on consumer security.

Their laptops have tremendous numbers of mechanical failures. Their eReaders are slow, have glare, and have serious usability issues -- e.g. the page turn buttons are located in a spot where you can't comfortably press them. They bought Minolta, and ran it into the ground -- they've been promising a successor to the a700 for close to 5 years now without being able to ship. The lower-end cameras are innovative, but have serious, serious usability issues. The Minolta 5D was a wonderful camera. The early Sony successors copied and improved on it (a700 was the most usable camera ever made -- and the only one with a useful auto mode). The current ones made a new, broken interface. The support is gone -- warranty issues don't get fixed, and if you buy from Sony direct, heaven help you if you want a return.

Your TV and Blu Ray aren't bad, but a bit overpriced and slightly lower quality relative to the competition.

But that's not the point. 20 years ago, Sony was like Apple or Trader Joes. You couldn't go wrong buying from them. The quality was spectacular. Sony products didn't break. Today, you go wrong buying from them 95% of the time. 5% of their products are market-leading. They ship known defective products. It's a very different company.

In terms of bringing gaming to the masses, you're thinking of the Nintendo, first with the NES, and many years later with the Wii.

I would call this a huge leap backwards. It is the first version of Debian or Ubuntu in 15 years that doesn't work. Wireless broke. Wired broke. Unity caused windows to randomly turn white. No obvious way to turn off visual effects. The UI feels like a clone of the Mac without a real understanding of what works and doesn't work on the Mac. A lot of the Mac paradigms come from a world of much lower resolution than modern desktops. The Mac-style top menu bar doesn't work well for modalless, Unix-style applications where you have several open at the same time. Focus-follows-the-mouse is slow and broken. Most of my favorite configuration options are gone. Clicking a second time on the terminal button brings up the first terminal, not a second one.

I'm waiting for 11.10 on the rest of my machines, but considering switching from Ubuntu.

You should have no problem finding a job. Unique skillsets are unique, so there will be a small number of people who truly want someone with yours, but you'll be very valuable to them.

Things to do:

1) Make a resume and cover letter. Have many people look over it and give feedback. Take the feedback.

2) Do some practice interviews. Either a friend can do this, or second-tier employers can do this (start by applying to places you would consider as backups, and then apply to the first tier where you really want to work).

The major problem I've seen from people with your type of background is failure to understand what the employer expects and wants in terms of job application and interview. On a very high level, your goal is to convince them that you'll make them more money than you'll cost them, but you have to be fairly subtle about it in a bunch of ways. You also need to make sure you don't subtly convey things that will imply you'll cost them money (arrogant, hard to work with, needs babysitting, etc.)

I'd like to see more back story first. Medicine is about risk management. There are places where you need 1/100,000 reliability, and there are places where you need 1/1000, and there are even places where 1/10 is good enough. There are primary systems, and there are auxiliary systems.

Without any background, it is really tough to tell where this fits. You can't blame the people for making the wrong decision until you know what the risk profile for the failure is.

What's right, though, is you can implement an interpreter in a weekend. That makes it usable in a lot of places. Once you add exceptions, that goes away. File encodings and character sets are nice, but short-sited. R5RS was eternal. No one predicted the move to Unicode 35 years ago when Scheme was created, and that lack of definition let it make the transition fine.

I'm all for recommendations on things like those, so if you chose to implement them, there's a standard way, but I'm not in favor of making those part of the standard.