ender7

(disclaimer: I work for Google. My words are not theirs)

At first I thought "oh. Google fan fiction. This is what we have come to." After a moment, though, I realized that this article isn't really any different from the other hyperventilating blog posts that have appeared all over HN recently. I'm not saying that these aren't important topics to discuss, but everything I've read recently has come off as a prurient privacy daydream. Whether it's people writing polemic screeds about Glass despite knowing nothing about how the devices actually work (which they make up for by imagining a host of capabilities and features that it doesn't have), or things like this that manufacture a Lovecraftian monstrosity that has as much in common with the Google of today as a pineapple, they're not really saying anything interesting. Every argument is trivial to win if you first convert your opponent into Mecha-Hitler.

Is privacy a central, unsolved challenge for the next decade? Yes. On the one hand Google (and Apple and Amazon and ... ) need to innovate, or we'll soon see posts on HN describing how "Search has stagnated" and "Google is done for". Keyword search isn't good enough anymore, but to do anything more you need to start understanding the user's context. The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere. Sadly, no one's really talking about that.

(there's an equally interesting discussion to be had regarding public privacy and cameras, but villifying Glass isn't going to make that problem go away.)

This video of a talk they gave today is a pretty good introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g0oOOT86NY

The author assumes that there is a linear relationship between the amount of money that a creator has at their disposal and the resulting "production quality". So, once Jenna Marbles starts making some real bank, out come the camera crews and director and post-production effects and...

No. There is no path from Jenna Marbles to the traditional kind of television that the author is used to. They're just...different. Jenna has a specific way that she likes to create things and more money doesn't necessarily change that.

To make the kind of TV that the author imagines, you need to drop some money up front. Let's be charitable and say $300,000 for a pilot. Needless to say this is out of reach for almost 100% of the content creators on Youtube, so it's unsurprising that the content that has risen to popularity within Youtube has its roots in methods that cost essentially nothing.

Now, there are some interesting exceptions. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries [1] was nowhere near a "real" TV show in terms of budget but it had writers, production staff, and hired actors. Vice produces a lot of content that seems like it could fit into a normal TV program [2] -- almost. There are some other interesting shows that are sort of half-way there (well, more like 1/10th of the way there) in that they actually have production crews and do things like post-production (see: Wil Wheaton's Tabletop series [3]). I'm sure there are a ton of other examples.

So, the community is sidling up to high-quality content, but it's still unclear exactly how they're going to get there. By my estimation, to create a "TV-ready" drama, you'd need at the very least 100k subscribers paying $3/mo. Obviously no one is going to sign up for something if they're never heard of you, so you've got to make some free content that people love, then maybe make the jump via a Kickstarter? Or will true "channels" appear that bring the money and the subscribers and that then fund the shows of their choice? This is a really fascinating time for video content -- I'm excited to see how the economics end up playing out.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KisuGP2lcPs&feature=c4-ov...

[2] (Warning: NSFW) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsUH8llvTZo

[3] http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4F80C7D2DC8D9B6C

It is up to them, but the parent is arguing that it's a bad business decision, and I agree. Even their "student" versions are wayyy too expensive for people to dabble with (especially penny-pinching students).

Making mocks is doing something. I don't think it's healthy for programmers to discount the efforts of designers or vice-versa. Now, it's easy to make mocks that gloss over the real challenges or nasty corner cases, but it's also easy to write garbage code that will never be useful to anyone.

The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people out there with lots of engineering ability and not much design ability who might jump at the chance of implementing something that's been thoroughly mocked and product-ed out.

Note that the "download" attribute is extremely useful when the href is a data or blob URI [1]. This allows you to construct the file that the user is going to get in Javascript, rather than server-side. For example, if you wanted to write an image-editing web app and didn't want to round-trip to the server to allow them to download a copy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

"Inheritance" doesn't really exist in JS. We use that word because we don't have a better substitute, but what Javascript has is simply code sharing. You can share code between multiple objects. This is accomplished by using prototypes. An object has access to all the code defined on its prototype (and its prototype's prototype, and...). If two objects have the same prototype they will have access to the same methods.

Now, unfortunately, the native Javascript way of saying "please set the prototype of this object to X" is not very intuitive. So again we reused an existing word -- "class" -- and defined it to be "a thing that creates an object and sets its prototype to be what I want".

However, actually creating these class things is painful and verbose in vanilla Javascript, so everyone uses a library to do it for them. I use classdef [1] because I wrote it and it works just the way I want it to, but seriously there are a million options out there. Go find one and use it.

[1] https://github.com/7sempra/classdef

Really? Really? Has Hacker News become this childish? I'm sorry, but this is getting a little out of hand. I know people are still upset about Reader's cancellation but come on.

If we're at the point where everyone just shits all over whatever Google does, regardless of whether it's a good thing or not, then that really doesn't say much about us as a community. If Google does bad things, let's point that out, but if, on the other hand, they come out with a product that is clearly of benefit to users, respects their wishes, and offers a feature that no other service providers do, then perhaps we should recognize that Google might have done something good for once.

I don't know, he/she didn't really "make a case". Read it again -- the OP doesn't actually say anything in the grandparent post besides "they used to be great, but now I hate them". Why does the OP hate them? Who knows!

The fact that such a contentless diatribe is at #1 is depressing. That too should be beneath HN's standards.

Your post is wonderfully self-righteous but not very helpful or insightful, unlike some of the other comments below. This makes me sad. I hope more people vote the latter up some more.

The fact of the matter is that someone is always unhappy when it comes to spam control. If the restraints are too loose then suddenly everyone is screaming about how "spammers are ruining Google" and "Google is doomed because of spam" (this was very true right before the Panda rollout). However, if Google starts to crack down, then you get more false positives and more people upset for different reasons.

Unfortunately, no pattern recognition system runs at 100%. That's not a hard problem(tm), that's an impossibility. Relatedly, I don't really see what's wrong with assiging a "reputation" to a domain name. As the article states, it's possible to climb back up to "good" status, it just takes some extra work. Kind of like in real life.

This just seems to boil down to well-run meetings vs. poorly-run meetings. Standups are meant to be light-weight meetings where everyone gets back on the same page. If that's not happening, then someone isn't running the meeting correctly.

Nitpick: I'm not sure that append() will trigger a reflow for every call. That will only happen if you interleave calls to a reflow-required property such as clientWidth. Anyone have a definitive answer?

The best Thanksgiving turkey I ever had was not brined but was salted and then roasted at an incredibly low temperature (~250) for many, many hours. The result was delicious, but it ties up an entire oven for most of a day, which is simply not practical for many families.

All right, so I have a slight bone to pick with Marco. This is actually a fairly well-written article and I'm glad that people are engaging with it elsewhere in the comments, but I'm just a bit confused that he's choosing to write it now, and about Google Reader than about, say, Reading List. Remember? That product that Apple released for free and that was a direct competitor to Instapaper? Or iCloud, that product that Apple released for free and that was a direct competitor to Dropbox? Or Ping, that product that Apple released for free and then shitcanned after not enough people used it?

Marco's response to Reading List (and its integration into not only OS X but iOS) wasn't "this is predatory pricing! Regulate!" but instead "this might be good for my product" [1].

So, I don't really know. I didn't use Reader, but I understand that people are upset that it's getting cancelled. That does suck. Of course, this is apparently what everyone deserves for daring to use a free product? But actually it's okay because we'll all be better off because of the great RSS reader renaissance that is upon us? Oh god I can't keep this straight any more. Go find a new RSS reader. RSS appears to have weathered the predation of Facebook, Twitter, and G+ admirably so far; I doubt that its days are numbered.

[1] http://www.marco.org/2011/06/06/safari-reader-and-instapaper

    “I’m too stupid to know that what I’m doing is stupid”

I agree that the OP's smartass writing style is more annoying than anything else, but I really didn't like the quoted phrase above. Calling someone stupid because they don't know the ins and outs of what is, let's face it, a particularly byzantine system, is just, well...mean.

However, if you'd prefer a critique on the substance of the actual article, I have one of those, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401340

I was a little surprised to hear "use document.createElement, it's faster than innerHTML" since the conventional wisdom was exactly the opposite a few years ago.

Someone has already written a decent JSPerf to test this out: http://jsperf.com/innerhtml-vs-createelement-test/16 (see also http://jsperf.com/innerhtml-vs-createelement-test/4 for a slightly deeper dive)

Based on the Browserscope results (and my own testing), it seems that document.createElement is faster in Webkit but slower in everything else (Gecko, Trident). So, a bit of a wash there unless you're targeting mobile.

That said, in my experience HTML (template) parsing isn't the main bottleneck to getting an app to that smooth 60fps feeling. Usually the big targets you want to focus on there are avoiding cascading reflows/repaints, using smoother animation technologies such as requestAnimationFrame or CSS transitions/animations, understanding how to trigger hardware acceleration and what its limits are, and keeping careful control of your CSS special effects (border radius, box-shadow, gradients, etc). I recommend checking out http://jankfree.com/ (especially the I/O talk) if you're interested.

(edit: I don't really like the original article's vitriol, but he's right about a couple things. Manipulating your nodes outside of the DOM is much faster, although you don't need to be inside a DocumentFragment to do this (don't get me wrong; DocFrags are pretty useful). Also, yes, please don't keep running those jQuery selectors over and over again. Store the jQ object that the selector returns to you and just reuse that)

Regardless of one's stance on animal rights, this seems like a clear case of corruption. It makes me angry and ashamed that these politicians appear to have been bought and paid for. I can't think of any arguments that could convince me that "less information" here is a good idea or a defense of democracy.

Does the title of this article propose a false dichotomy between two equally unlikely outcomes, or was that a giant waste of 15 paragraphs of my time?

Look, JS is a lovely language, and it's fun to write things in Node. However, no one thinks that JS is going to become a "universal language", even though all the cool kids are writing the next great todo list web app using Node-powered hyper asteroids. Nor will Javascript "die out" for reasons that should be obvious to anyone. Some people will write backends in Node, but most people will write them via one of the other myriad backend languages available. Huzzah! Choices in backend development. Rejoice!

For the lazy, here's a summary of the claims that LV/DN is making:

Some icons appear to be heavily inspired by LV.

Here are three icons (circled) from Flat-UI: http://i.imgur.com/xDDULcG.png

You can see that the gears and news icons do bear some similarity to LV's versions: http://dribbble.com/shots/800428-LayerVault-icon-set-for-del... and http://imgur.com/rli5IVU (the latter via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5332741)

In addition, LV claims that Flat-UI ripped off a number of other icons from dribble.com, such as this clock and map (Flat-UI above, originals below): http://cl.ly/image/3Q181w0b1u2K (original dribble links: http://dribbble.com/shots/695458-Nasa-Playbook-Icons and http://dribbble.com/shots/877061-Map-2013).

Finally, the color schemes have been claimed to be identical: http://pixxel.co/feed/layervault-issues-dmca-takedown

LV appears to be confused as to what constitutes copyright infringement. None of these icons are actually copies of the original, and even if they were LV would not have a right to issue a DMCA takedown for the ones they didn't own.

This seems to be a massive PR blunder for the LV guys. They could have put up a blog post enumerating how many of their (and others') designs were ripped off (which is not the same thing as copyright infringement) and probably garnered some internet sympathy. Now, by misusing the much-hated DMCA takedown notice they've positioned themselves in the same camp with all the DMCA bullies we have grown to loathe.

The OP was incredibly lucky to find a mentor like Jurgen. Being handed a thoroughly "proofread" review of your work is perhaps the best way to improve at almost anything. Unfortunately, creating such high quality feedback demands more time than most people are willing to spend, especially if it's above and beyond their normal duties.

Some random anecdotes:

I went to Pomona College, which was a very different place than the one described in the Crimson article. While I'm sure cheating did take place, I was never witness to it, nor was there any cultural expectation that it occurred. Students tended to view cheating as just screwing yourself over in the long run (paying that much money to avoid get an education is a waste of time).

Harvey Mudd College, which was right next door, had an even more aggressive stance on cheating and honorable behavior -- one which was woven into the way pretty much everything was structured over there. Students were endowed with a huge helping of trust and were expected to act responsibly (and the actual student culture seemed to actually reflect this).

Both institutions provide excellent educations. However, PC and HMC are both small and neither of them have graduate students or research faculty. The faculty that are there are very accomplished in their fields, but their focus is on teaching.

I've also been the equivalent of an RA at MIT, where things are obviously a bit different. I don't think they're as bad as at Harvard, but it's clear that for many faculty the priority is not on teaching. Combined with the large size (~200 students) of many intro classes and this can create an environment where students do not feel that their success or failure is either cared about or monitored, which I'm sure makes it easier to cheat. However, MIT's technical focus may help to alleviate this problem since all of your later classes will depend on the stuff you're supposed to be learning now, so you'll be screwed later on even if you cheat. Sadly, I don't have a ton of data here -- all I can say is that out of the population of 40 on my hall there wasn't a culture of cheating. Getting bad grades was a shocking right of passage for many first-years.

Finally, my mother taught at a large research institution for many years. There cheating in the form of copying papers was rampant and the university seemed loathe to actually punish students caught in the act. My mother eventually gave up trying. These problems were worst in the large intro classes -- once things got down to smaller (<30 students) seminars and classes, cheating became both extremely easy to identify and rare.

I wish I could upvote you more than once. People will look at this video and think "oh, they've solved the big problem!" when in fact they've solved half of the big problem. Distinguishing between intentional and unintentional gesture has been the academic elephant in the room for many years now, and no one has come up with a good solution yet.

This Time article seems particularly apropos:

http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medica...

As I tried to make clear in my comment, I was taking issue with his/her method of delivery, not what he/she was objecting to. His/her point is a perfectly valid one, but that's orthogonal to whether he/she chooses to be nasty.

No offense, but you've managed to wrap up a perfectly decent thought with a wording that makes you look like an asshole.

This video seems fake (despite its high production value) for a variety of reasons.

1. Google's ads are usually made by Creative Lab and this is not at all their style. Or the style of any other Google ad. It bears more resemblance to an Apple ad than a Google one.

2. A laptop "completely designed by Google" might be something that its fans want, but I doubt Google would ever say something like this in an ad and risk antagonizing its hardware partners.

3. Speaking of hardware partners -- who made this? Even when Google makes Nexus devices the manufacturer's logo is quite prominently displayed. Again, I doubt Google wishes to finance a non-partnered piece of hardware.

4. Also, yes, touchscreens are on laptops are stupid. This is a stupid idea.

My bet is that this is the final project of some kind or a demo video from some upstart ad company that wants to show what it can do.

http://archive.org/web/web.php is a very common tool for such things.

The parent's point is that she is a target because she is a woman, and society gives such people more tools to abuse women than to abuse men. This makes it a sexist act.

There are significantly more males in this industry with significantly more popularity. Yet no evidence is presented that these figures also have received this level of harassment.

When the OP says that "[women in technology] are scared" it is because they feel that they are in an environment that targets them for harassment and abuse. At this point, we hear arguments like "this could have happened to a guy just as easily" but the fact is that it doesn't. In a world where such events happen with equal frequency across genders then yes, this might be a silly discussion, but we do not live in such a world.

Engineers tend to find it disconcerting that an action's goodness or badness depends on its context. After all, shouldn't we be able to tell just by looking at the inherent properties of the action? What if we can't read the context correctly? Well, the answer is that we frequently do, and the result is these inane argument over whether posting fake porn pictures of a woman is a sexist act.

The fact of the matter is that women in tech are targeted because they are women. They are overwhelmingly more frequently attacked than their male counterparts, and if you think this is silly, then I suggest you go make friends with some women in tech. This attack is another outgrowth of that pervasive sexism, and the fact that it uses a medium that is traditionally associated with denigrating women [1] just makes it even more sexist.

[1] Yes, there is some non-misogynistic porn out there, but it is the exception rather than the rule.

I don't know the details, but at any institution that large it would be an administrative dean of some kind, or the principal counsel for the university.

The first two sentences of this article are quick, concise, and accurate.

To call Aaron Swartz gifted would be to miss the point. As far as the internet was concerned, he was the gift.