pstack

I was an engineer at Netscape through the period this documentary covers and it's one of my favorite (though bittersweet) documentaries. I wasn't involved in the development side, so my involvement with most of those featured was quite limited, but . . . what a great piece. I'd also couple it with (what I'm sure has been mentioned elsewhere, but I've not read that far, yet) Revolution OS ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjaC8Pq9-V0 ).

Or, instead, think of this as a way to stop being an attention whore and instead of having 19,000 "friends" that you broadcast every thought and event in your life every day, consider it a way to be more discrete and thoughtful. Beginning with who you feel necessary to include in your "social graph".

Agreed on the social aspect. My response to anything relating to "social music" has always been "I listen to music for me - I don't want social anything. I don't care what you're listening to and I don't care if you think what I'm listening to is cool. I have zero social interest in music".

And then they figured out a clever new/old way for music to be social in a very natural, obvious, useful way.

I hate Facebook, so I resisted joining the TurnTable.fm beta. I've had a FB account for years, but I don't use it. Just squatting my name. I certainly refuse to tie my account to anything else. However, I made an exception with this site, to try it out.

Man, was I surprised. It's everything I despise. It's hip. It's about music. It's about popularity. It's social. It's cute. It's flash-based. And yet, damn it, I am having so much fun with it. Even in rooms built around specific web communities that therefore cause music to run anywhere from techno to hip-hop, to 80s music, to Smell Yo Dick to . . . yes . . . tracks from Steve Martin's banjo performances.

I've participated in multi-hour long "songs with a space theme" mixes. I've participated in 90s night. I've participated in bouts of idiocy where we just try to drive a room full of people (and ourselves) nuts playing the most obnoxious songs.

And it's just a damn good time. The best part is that even if someone plays something I don't care for, at least I know it's something a human being who likes the song chose as opposed to the automation of every radio station on earth.

Over time, I hope they improve how you build your playlist. Maybe given you the option to have multiple lists and a better way to search and organize them. Maybe improve the chat function. Make the interface better (it's just so tiny and limited, right now). Maybe move to HTML5 or something other than Flash. Add some hotkeys, instead of mouse-only.

Over time, there will be just a handful of very targeted rooms and then lots of tiny rooms build around communities that have less musical coherence. I think it's bound to get better over time. If not, the next person to come along will surely improve upon it. Either way, it's clever and it's kind of hard to imagine nobody did this before now.

Oh . . . and I'm sure they'll be bought by Facebook, anyway. Great way to keep eyeballs on your controlled content.

From the site: Where interesting people say: "Ask me anything."

You know the author is interesting, because there's a giant photo of them in a dress cut down to their navel, right above the questions about interviewing dozens of attempted suicides.

Even if privacy weren't a concern, I don't see the point in using either one. People have email. If I really need to talk to or share something with someone, I'll email them. Or occasionally, IM them. Or maybe even call them. Or if they're nearby, maybe go have lunch with them. I don't need to share everything every day at all times with everyone. Nobody is that interesting. Nobody is that interested. And nothing is that vital.

Since corporations are considered private citizens, it's a shame that they don't take on the same responsibilities as private citizens. You know, lobby for civil liberties and privacy, because it's the right thing for a citizen to do and all.

Germany sounds delightful, but I enjoy playing video games. Including violent ones.

Which, of course, goes to show the whole problem. Simply saying you're taking your ball and going somewhere else doesn't really deal with the problem that everywhere is pretty much under the same sort of absurd situations, in one form or another.

I'd rather enjoy what little life I have left than spend it avoiding all the things that are supposedly going to shave years off my life and spending the entire day standing. I got a nice cushy knowledge-worker career precisely so I wouldn't spend the entire day standing while flipping burgers or digging ditches, thanks.

Besides, I'm in pretty poor health due to my own lack of attention to it and of all the things I could bother with, "standing all day at my desk" is pretty far down on the list of what would actually make an important improvement.

Plus, you know, I'd rather spend thousands of dollars on something else. A desk of any useful size that is able to bear any useful weight load on it and is also adjustable in ranges enough to go from sitting to standing are incredibly expensive. I'd rather use the money to pay three or four months of my mortgage.

It's hard for me to have sympathy when people choose to develop for Facebook instead of for the Internet. When you are contributing to the problem, you have to accept a certain level of potential downside and lack of control. There's a massive internet out there. You know, everything that is not facebook.com and you can do pretty much everything on it, but without being subjected to the rules and whims of anyone else.

"The Idea: Every restaurant menu item in the world is searchable by its ingredients."

I'd settle for accomplishing the first, most basic, step. As Rick Emerson said on Twitter a week or two ago "Would someone please tell all the god damn restaurants out there to stop only putting their menus online in PDF format?!"

Does it count as an account if the only reason I created it is to keep others from creating one in my name? Mine just says "I don't use FB. Email me, instead."

If you can't be bothered to reach me outside of FB, then you don't care enough about either the subject matter or me.

I would say approximately 99% of the people on Twitter and Facebook are so self-involved and full of themselves that they'd wet themselves at the proposition of even a virtual "museum" of themselves. I've said it many times - you can't go wrong catering to people's self-centeredness.

No, you guys. You don't get it. Bitcoins are going to take over the world. We're ALL going to be part of an economy of Bitcoins, just like we all universally adopted Swatch Internet Time[1]!

[*1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

No, in my opinion a system thrives when it is challenged. An immune system, a legal system, an enforcement system, or a security system. The challenges provoke adaptation. Evolution. I'm not a fan of illness, but some degree of exposure is necessary to build up the human immune system on both local and global scopes. Likewise, I'm not a fan of network penetration and security breaches, but they reinforce the re-focus that which they attack as a whole.

And note that we're talking about screwing with a couple articles on a web page and getting some passwords. Sure, that's bad, but it's not shutting down the power grid that feeds a hospital or stealing social security from elderly women. Likewise, I tolerate colds and cold season as part of reinforcing the immune system while I would probably not be so tolerant of small-pox unleashing itself across the population.

Meh. While I don't support this behavior without some sort of an understandable cause to compel them, I view the overall activities of "oh noes; posted something on your website!" and "oh noes; got yer emailz!" as an important part of boosting the immune system. Imagine what kind of shitty police department you would have if they never had any crime to pursue and just ate donuts all day? These small fries keep people on their toes just enough to almost justify security specialists and keep funding security efforts in corporations from being automatically crossed off the list to save a few bucks.

I'm more shocked that John Markoff still has a career, when he hasn't had anything sensationalistic to tie his opportunistic bylines to since Mitnick.

Why is this a problem? How many of you actually stumbled onto Hacker News via a google search? People put way too much emphasis on their listing on Google. If you're selling doodads, then I guess that's important, but otherwise word of mouth is your overwhelming winner. In fact, I would say that goes for almost every site I visit regularly.

I use Google to find tidbits of information. One-off questions. I can't think of a single site that I have ever discovered via google that is something I visit regularly.

You probably did. The major failing of Netflix is content churn. I can count on at least 20% of my queue disappearing every month, before I get around to watching it.

I have no intention of ever owning a smart phone. When I buy a cell, I look for the phone with the best battery and highest call quality. That's it. I don't need to surf the web, watch videos, listen to music, or send text messages. I'm not against the idea of using my phone as a payment device, but I'm not going to get a data plan or a new phone for it.

Further, I'm not going to use a company for my money transactions that doesn't seem to have any way to reach a human being to get help when something of theirs that you use goes wrong.

If Amazon did this, I'd be all over it. When I have a problem with Amazon, I can call them directly with little or no hold time. Or I can email them and get a reply within hours.

In American schools, you have three months off over the summer and a week off over Christmas and a week of for Spring Break. Then you have all the little holidays here and there throughout the year.

His comment seems fairly self explanatory, to me. If you have five things to do every day and you do five things every day, you keep up. If you have five things to do every day and you don't do them for ten days, you have 55 things to do on the eleventh day.

That kind of sounds like a metaphor for more training rather than vacation?

Thank you. I am my work and I live to work and I'm tired of people treating me like some sort of pariah, because of it. The only thing I will spend more time doing in my life besides working is sleeping and that thing I do and how well I do it greatly defines me. I am not just the man who exists between the few hours after work and before bed and if others are, then I'm sorry for them. (I understand that isn't everyone - many people do love what they do and care about the work they make with their lives, but still enjoy the lengthy break now and then).

I don't necessarily think that lack of vacation makes you more productive (though I am still not convinced that taking ten days away from the office somehow makes you more productive for the other 255). I do, however, think that most employers will notice when you're gone. Especially for long periods of time. They may not necessarily notice that you're the guy who never is out of the office, but sometimes it's better not to be noticed at all than to be noticed as the guy who always triggers "OUT OF THE OFFICE UNTIL" autoreplies.

Of course, that depends entirely on the company/industry. I don't even know that "most" American workplaces start you out with any vacation. In professional fields, they mostly do, I'm sure. My mom has worked at the same place for around twenty years and she has zero vacation. The only way I would be able to get her to come for a visit where I am is if I subsidized the time (ie, paid the money she would otherwise be missing out on, on top of the expense of the travel) -- because either way, she still has bills to pay.

I find that I take a lot of what I have in my daily business life for granted and am often surprised when I'm struck by the reality of how few benefits positions in other places in this country give people.

I don't think people so much "choose to live in pricy areas" as that's where the jobs are. As a result, that's where the people are. As a result, that's where the most expensive living is. You can find a cheaper place to live, but it's likely cheaper, because there's less of a job market there.

When I was just starting out, I lived on one side of town and my work was on the other side of town. My home town has extremely well-regarded public transit. Still, it took about 2.5hrs to get to work. Another 2.5 to get back. That turned a 9 hour day into a 14 hour day. And if a bus or train was just a little early, it could screw things up even further.

We have this idea that Americans don't use public transit, because they're infatuated with their cars. To a degree, we are. However, we also hate the work commute. The reason more don't use public transit is that it is not feasible for the average person to spend so much time sitting on a bus or train and making two or three transfers every day twice a day . . . on top of work. Especially if they have a family.

The idea of tighter communities where people work near their home is fantastic. Too bad we've already built our cities and roads and housing tracts, though. It's a thought for another bustling economy that is just starting to build out their infrastructure in the 21st century instead of the 19th and 20th century to do, though. We've already built our mess.

Whoa, I've never heard of that before. In my experience, there are company holidays and vacation days and "sick days". All are at the discretion of the employer as to what are observed and given, but I've never heard of them overlapping (ie, if your company observes ten holidays and you have ten vacation days, you get 20 days off that year).

It seems like something you should be able to take up with your employer, because you requested vacation and they're counting holidays (something different) against them. That sees like a bit of a rip off.

Of course, I know that even two weeks of vacation is considered a lot in this country and my mom works in a job where she doesn't get _any_ paid vacation, so . . .

At the end of that twenty years, you can keep renting for another twenty years. Or you can spend the remaining thirty or forty years of your life in the home you own clear and free without paying rent or mortgage any more. I sure as hell don't want to still be making out a monthly check for a place to live when I'm 50, 60, or even 70 (not that I seriously think I'm going to live to any of those ages).