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I think the Internet hasn't significantly changed since those days. I think the difference is that now it's on the publisher to get things in lots of places, vs before it was on the reader to aggregate all the sources that they cared about. You still have decentralized publishing, and you still have lots of disparate reading applications. News Aggregators like Something Awful, Slashdot and Fark have been superseded (for me) by Reddit and HN. IRC has been somewhat replaced by Slack, Gitter, Discord. AIM/MSN/ICQ has been replaced by a dozen other non-interoperable IM systems. BBS systems running on phpBB and other similar self-hosted tools are still massively popular. Email still chugs on, almost completely unchanged. I feel like Facebook solves the issue of a single, curated application platform that a user isn't expected to leave - what AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe used to do.

I agree, I preferred some of the old technologies, as they seemed more open with a lower barrier to entry, but I don't think the future is particularly bleak.

The outsourced login is the default, but it's optional. You could easily set up email/magic link based login on both Oasis and the self-hosted version.

I can't say for certain why, but GlassDoor is significantly lower than reality for positions in my area (Boston, MA.) Of the jobs I see advertised for Senior developers, most of them are in the $140-$170K range these days. Assuming that glassdoor is accurate, perhaps the issue is that people who stay in positions more than a few years fall behind new hires because yearly raises don't keep up with market rates.

My wife and I have had 3 kids (now 8,6 and 1), all 3 were C-sections with extended hospital stays and all 3 births were covered, in their entirety, including pre-birth obstetrician visits, my wife's follow-up visits and initial pediatric appointments for the kids with zero co-pays. Literally we paid nothing to the doctors or hospitals for the entire year. We've had various flavors of Blue Cross/Blue Shield "HMO Blue" Massachusetts. This is not even the top tier plan Blue Cross offers from my employer - that's the "PPO" plan which has significantly better out of network coverage.

Also, yes, replacing wireless links with cat6 where possible is certainly the more reliable solution. Fixed location high bandwidth devices shouldn't be using wireless if it can be avoided at all.

Regarding the first and last statements contradicting, I mean that when my family uses the network in the ways I have anticipated and built around, it works consistently and without interruption. This is different than saying it just works for everyone and anything they want to do. I think "just works for everyone doing anything" is what people want, and expect when they spend hundreds of dollars on a product, but I don't believe that's possible when you're dealing with the current state of the art in computer wireless networks. You need to take into account the environment and the requirements.

Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses. This includes:

a dedicated network router and dedicated access points. The placement of the access points is key. They should be in the dead center of the area they're meant to cover and not be near any radio absorbing materials. You pretty much can't do that if you have to put your access point at the place where your internet comes into your house. I use Ubiquiti Edgerouter and AP equipment[0]. I had to wire cat6 between my basement and my entryway closet to get good placement of my access points.

testing and optimizing frequencies for the environment. I live out in the suburbs, but I still have to contend with my neighbor's RF noise. I use a tool for MacOS called Wifi Signal [1] that identifies clear channels and regularly suggests improvements.

Understanding the differences in the technologies available. I have a large house, and lots of high bandwidth equipment, as well as some low bandwidth equipment. The low bandwidth equipment (eg. Nest thermostats, raspberry pi garage door controllers) stays on the slower, longer range 2.4 ghz access point and I don't have to particularly care about placement. The high bandwidth equipment (laptops, desktops, set top box) is set to prefer the high bandwidth short range 5ghz network, and I placed my access points close to their points of use. Equipment like phones and laptops that move around are set to prefer the 5ghz network, but accept the 2.4 ghz network when they're too far from the access points. Newer access points allow you to specify minimum signal qualities to encourage clients to switch networks sooner when their signal quality drops too far to be useful.

I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time. When we visit other people's houses, the wireless is bad and that's just something that is weird about other places. I want to say guests in my house get good wireless coverage, but if they do something with their devices that my family doesn't (like try to stream movies from a hammock in the back yard), or get on the "wrong" network, I can't guarantee much.

0: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ 1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=1...

In the east we have high speed roads that aren't long stretches of straight. For example, the parkways around New York (Taconic, Sprain Brook, Northern/Southern State, Cross Island, Merritt) are 2 lane 65 mph highways with no shoulders and narrow, winding lanes. The drivers also tend to be aggressive and not give you a lot of space. Handling matters on those roads. Lots of rural highways in New England are also high speed, narrow, single lane winding affairs through wooded mountains. I don't think those roads are unique to New England, but that's where I have experience with them.

If your experience with driving is sitting in traffic or driving around suburban streets, you're right, handling (mostly) doesn't matter.

contacts irritated my eyes if I wore them for more than 12 hours. I'd have to decide if I was going to go out in the evening or not, and if so, I'd wear glasses during the day. If I wore them more than 12 hours, I'd have to wear glasses for the next few days because of the irritation. Don't get me started on what happened if I fell asleep with them in my eyes.

the last 4 or so years before lasik I mostly wore glasses except for special occasions where I'd wear contacts.

Had lasik about 5 years ago (at 30) and still believe it was a great decision. Yes, I don't have great night vision, but wearing glasses or contacts had the same effect (but much, much worse), so overall it's a win. Not having to deal with glasses or contacts is such an improvement, it was worth every penny.

As a sysadmin, if I had limitless IPv4 addresses, I'd still use NAT on servers and clients because it's a useful security layer. There's little reason that individual devices need globally routable IP addresses.

Both Microsoft and Apple's www sites use Akamai's CDN, via a cname to a CNAME to something in akamaiedge.net, which support ipv6. The apex record of a domain (that is, the root record, microsoft.com or apple.com) cannot be a CNAME, it can only have an A, NS, MX or TXT record. A records make dynamic infrastructure hard, because they require API coordination between your DNS provider and your CDN. So Microsoft and apple host their own apex domain records via A records to static IPs in their own IP blocks, and have these servers issue a permanent http redirect to www.

We need to re-think passwords. Password re-use is a big problem for technical and non-technical users alike, because managing a unique generated password between devices is hard. Dealing with password managers and syncing password lists back and forth is super frustrating to users. None of the existing tools work quickly and easily on all the different devices a user could be using, so at some point everyone that uses a password manager is going to be stuck fighting their password manager to log into a website. The user will likely perform a password reset, which will send an email that allows the user to bypass the password entirely.

Why not provide people with a quick and easy "login by email", since this fallback is almost always available anyway? Slack does this https://auth0.com/blog/how-to-implement-slack-like-login-on-... and allows people to have accounts with no password memorization. You're not making the login any less secure - any attacker with access to a user's email can almost always perform a password reset anyway.

As an android user, I've tried 1password and it's pretty much the worst password experience on the platform. The Android client can't generate passwords, and it also can't cache my passphrase for any amount of time if I'm using the 1password keyboard (which is, as far as I can tell, the only way to make 1password fill a field.) After typing my fairly long passphrase 10x a day on the fiddly 1password keyboard with no feedback for the past few weeks, I'm switching to pass.

I understand that 1password on iOS doesn't interact as a third party keyboard, and 1password is an iOS/mac app first and foremost, but that's no excuse for making their Android UX so incredibly frustrating.

I manage a wordpress installation for a school community site - wordpress's greatest strength (and biggest source of frustration) is it's flexible and popular plugin ecosystem that gives me useful plugins, including a shopping cart system for fundraising, an events calendar and photo galleries, all managed from the same WYSIWYG interface as a blogging engine and a decent CMS.

I could re-write all those plugins in another CMS, but the fact that wordpress is so popular and so flexible is the reason I don't see myself replacing it any time soon.

The lifespan of the average car sold today is significantly longer than in the past. A new car can be sold as a used car several times before it ends up being recycled. I don't think it follows that there is a 1:1 ratio of used to new car sales.

http://press.ihs.com/press-release/automotive/average-age-li...

Sorry, that's bullshit. Automatic updates are one of the worst ideas about IoT devices, because the updates almost always remove functionality. Manufacturers have been known to remove key functionality, or just straight out brick recently sold devices when they have liability concerns or their business plan changes and they don't want people using the old devices anymore.

  - http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/4/11362928/google-nest-revolv-shutdown-smart-home-products

  - https://nest.com/support/article/Nest-Protect-Safety

I think "Facebook" here means "Whatsapp", which is owned by Facebook.

Ubiquiti's Amplifi is $199 for 3 units.

I use github every day for professional and personal projects, and typically like what they've done, but Sourceforge.net was the github of the early 2000's, where almost every developer had an account and where you could get free development and distribution tools for your project. Look at what it is now (or was before it was re-opened a few months ago.) People's open source projects were being leveraged to push malware on unsuspecting users. We might not think it's so great to have all this centralized code storage in a few more years when the new hotness replaces github and everyone's zombie products are being used maliciously again.

It would eat into their enterprise "behind the firewall" sales, but github.com's biggest asset is that it's where people already have accounts and already have development tools integrated to. That doesn't change when you open source your platform.

I hate this sudden desire to have every account keyed on a phone number. I know 3 phone numbers - mine, my wife's and my parent's. Oh, I still remember my friends from elementary school's parent's phone numbers too, but honestly, I haven't had to think about learning a new phone number in over a decade. I'm honestly about an inch away from shutting off my own phone number, which has been a google voice number for 6 years now, because the only calls I ever get on it are spammers asking me about my electric bill. People who I care about email me, or use google talk/Hangouts. I know all my friend's email addresses. Email addresses are customizable and easy to remember. We don't need to keep working around a 100 year old call routing problem by memorizing area codes and routing exchanges. Hangouts, or Google Talk used to support people signing up with whatever their email address was, and you could reach them by knowing their email address. Why am I being asked to think about 10 digit geographically segregated numbers again?!

It doesn't? The point of the article was that people shouldn't be allowed to build things like IoT candles because they're not necessary. Not "this isn't useful to me", or even "this thing is ridiculous, they're not going to sell any of them!", but: "These are people with real skills and entrepreneurial spirit, investing a renewable resource (money) and a non-renewable one (time) into products that really aren’t going to move the needle."

The GP even says "How much positive impact could those people be having if they were just pointed in another direction?" This isn't being critical of their interests, this is saying they shouldn't be able to choose what they work on.

Here's a community of people who make things that you probably find useless for fun: https://makezine.com/

Here's a company that makes money off this community, which is probably made up of people who think making random crap you can control with your smartphone is fun: https://www.adafruit.com/

Things you don't understand can be fun, including make interesting gadgets that you don't find useful.

Why is this so important to you that it's one of your "saddest things"? People should be free to work on what they want to work on. Maybe these brilliant people you want to subjugate have no interest in whatever it is you deem important.

"Only things that are directly useful to me should be made. Nothing else is permitted!"

Trying to cross international borders legally with a firearm for self-defense is really difficult if not impossible. If you talk to Overlanders or international ocean cruisers, almost none of them carry weapons. Trying to sneak or bribe your way across a border with a weapon is a pretty serious crime.

[1] http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-65646.html

"bots" lack any standardized discovery interface, which eventually causes frustration for users. Two popular bots - Siri and Google Now, won't tell you everything they can do, and give such useless answers to most requests that people use them as a gimmick once or twice, maybe memorize a handful of key phrases, but otherwise won't use them.

They're also typically not extensible - I haven't come across bots that allow you to string multiple bots together to accomplish complex tasks. It's all the bad parts of a CLI with none of the good parts. No one wants to memorize a bot specific query language along with it's capabilities for something they interact with very infrequently.

Instead of sinking money and effort into natural language processing, services should be building responsive, discoverable websites with all the capabilities of a customer service agent. Work on better on-site search, and expose available actions to Google.

4 years ago I did a strict no-carb diet for about a year and lost 40 lbs. Then I started eating only starches I had cooked myself - potatoes, rice, beans, some pasta, etc. I gained it all back. I'm doing it again now and have lost 35 of my original 40, but I have no intention of re-introducing starches into my diet afterwards. Aside from the weight control benefits, keeping starches out of my diet makes me feel so much healthier, it's insane. I eat lots of green vegetables, nuts, meat, eggs and a small amount of full-fat dairy. Cured or salted meat doesn't seem to be any worse than fresh meat, but most of what I eat is just plain fresh grilled steak or chicken.

My guess is that when you call them on the phone, they ask for your password to validate your identity. Which means it's stored in plain text in their database so that customer service can verify what you said is correct. Maybe they don't want their employees to have to be cursed at by customers.

I can't think of a good way for a business that has an online interface and frequently handles phone calls from customers to validate that they're talking to the correct person. Asking for other personal information can be used by an attacker to compromise multiple accounts via social engineering: http://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/