davewiner

At first I thought that Apple's new scripting language had an object storage system built in. ;-)

Academics of all people should understand the value of having a wide open Internet tied together by search. I don't think that's where they went wrong. I think they let Facebook do their thinking for them, and Facebook has a fairly limited vision that's not at all friendly to the knowledge-building power of the web.

I'm sure that really improves performance.

Oy I didn't see that. Oh man.

They renamed the icons. They don't just break apps when they do that, they break users. At some point things like the names of icons should be frozen. I love Font Awesome of course. But please!

Not at all! :-)

I am a total bugger about formatting code.

The outliner approach is pretty good but not perfect.

If-then-else is the sore thumb, for sure.

Along with try-catch.

But overall, outliners are a huge win for writing code.

Let's be hardasses about this stuff, but also understanding.

I think your approach is perfect.

I think the programmer was just getting comfortable with coding in an outliner when he wrote that code. I would consider that indentation a bug, when and if I work in those areas, I'll fix the indentation there. Thanks for pointing it out.

It's only a problem if you edit in a flat text editor.

If you look in the opml folder of the repo you'll find the source files for all the js and css files.

And most important, no gratuitous incompatibility or user lock-in based on formats. Commercial developers esp ones that raise huge money, tend to try to lock users in. If that's their plan, they can write their own outliner, should that situation ever arise.

And littleoutliner is an instance of Concord as well. ;-)

There are links to two demos in the readme.md file in the repository.

https://github.com/scripting/concord/blob/master/README.md

That's why you should be careful about adding concepts because you can't remove them without breakage.

The piece was written in the middle of a presidential election campaign where there were a lot of idiots running around saying we should eliminate government for all kinds of reasons that didn't make any sense. If it attacks anything, that's what it attacks.

No that's not why I write. You don't have any clue about it.

Actually if they interfere with our ability to get information on our own, without having it fed to us by Facebook and Google Now, then the bugs are political, not just technical.

The browser is our gateway, all our information passes through it.

Thanks for encouraging the OP to read the text, btw.

The hypocrisy is this.

How could anyone give you constructive criticism...

If we don't know who you are! :-)

That's right! :-)

He didn't start Xanga, he started Blogger.

Come on say who you are! I bet it you'll feel better after.

That's a little constructive criticism back atcha. ;-)

Funny how when you get trapped in your hypocrisy you get "tired" of offering what you call constructive criticism.

There are a lot of lurkers here, that's what I learned from that link to Fargo. It was good for business. The commenters are mostly bizarre aliases for people who are too cowardly to put their names on their rants. There are a few real people and many of them manage to say what they have to say without getting personal. Hope that helps. :-)

Very poetic, but what does it mean????????

How would you know you've only been here 165 days! ;-)

At least you got it! ;-)

Those are great questions, and I've wondered about it myself.

In movies for example, teams form for projects that last in total a couple of years, but for individuals, their work might just be a couple of months. I've often wished programming worked like that, at least commercial projects. I know a lot of programmers I'd like to try working with. But we don't do it that way.

Also, there is a sense of history in most of those activities that isn't present here. A young basketball player can tell you about all his role models, going back many generations. I've seen it (thinking of Iman Schumpert on the Knicks).

They listen to each others' music, eat each others' food, I'm sure there's a lot of pettiness to the discourse, but in software, it's not uncommon for people to compete with products they've never even tried. I can see that in competitive products!

I think it will eventually get better. It is getting better over time. When I was starting the idea of an individual creating software was VERY radical, and there wasn't much support for it. Until I came to Calif, and met other people who believed in the idea. Nowadays, they make movies about people doing that. I would have told you 30 years ago that day would come, and people really didn't believe it. Esp programmers. :-)

So it is getting better. I just wish it would get there faster.

What's so impressive about screwing in a lightbulb. I don't get it.

If you had done all that, I wouldn't have blocked you. :-)

Hacker News is going through a predictable evolution.

In the early days it's a wonderful community of supportive collaborators. These are the people who start unmoderated mail lists and discussion groups, at least the ones that grow to the next stage.

It attracts people who want to be part of an unmoderated mail list or discussion group. It doesn't matter what the topic is, they always show up. They feel a sense of empowerment. They have arrived at the place where decisions are made, and they have an equal voice! They will express themselves.

Then it becomes about governance. How will we make decisions (even though the decisions are about nothing).

Then even those people leave, because the atmosphere is so poisoned by the negative people who say they hate everything and anything.

The good folk who started the community are long-gone, probably dreaming about new communities where everyone gets along and is supportive and has good ideas and doesn't get in anyone's way! Only to do it again, and again...

Is this you?

https://twitter.com/bowerbird

BTW, the only reason I block people on Twitter is if they tell me to shut up (directly or indirectly) or if they make personal comments.

I've now read several of your rants here, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that I blocked you on Twitter.

You're a very inspired writer, but your inspiration is very very dark! Maybe you should write gothic novels with your fabulous writing tools. ;-)

Blocking isn't something I have to answer to anyone for, it's a feature in Twitter that's useful to help keep down the flamage. I think it's one of their greatest innovations.

A little feedback -- you read a lot of meaning into things that are a lot simpler than you think. For example, the markdown support was added because it was coming up a lot in feature requests from users. It's just that simple. Nothing more to it than that.

I've always used MORE and its descendants to write. I wrote every DaveNet piece in MORE or Frontier or the OPML Editor. I write Scripting News in the OPML Editor. Outliners are good for writing.

Like I said, I don't dislike you, or even know you (as you point out). And it probably doesn't matter if you contribute to the mail list, but I don't see how it could hurt. Whatever.