sedev

Well, that's kind of the point. Slack has built a moat. IRC is libre and free, but also can get far more arcane than the RFC suggests and to get something like Slack's feature set, you have to either build or strap together a lot of moving parts. Discourse is targeted at gamers and is not good for businesses. Ryver is way behind. MS' offering is laughable. Slack also has exactly the kind of differentiating features that don't particularly matter to ICs, but which corporate values highly—like auditing, retention policy, and permissions stuff. There's a specific subset of "good product" which has the word-of-mouth marketing result that Slack gets, and that's not the same as being "good" in a vacuum.

People don't use the alternatives to Slack because they're not as good as Slack, on various axes, is the short version. Slack has made themself hard to compete with.

Mr. McKenzie lived in Gifu for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifu_City#Industry Gifu is about half the size of San Francisco, and presumably the members of various trades in that city are just as much a small town as various trades are in San Franciso. Someone as gregarious as Mr. McKenzie certainly did not spend his time there flying solo. These are things Mr. McKenzie has said publicly, and they provide plenty of material with which to make a high-quality guess as to why Mr. McKenzie might be socially constrained and why he might prefer not to answer that question directly.

The crafts that I spend all my time on are about text, and for me that means that they flow through keyboards. I'm absolutely thrilled to see someone taking on the project of making a fundamental tool like the keyboard so much better; it reminds me of how programming concepts from the '70s and '80s took a very long time to reach the mainstream consensus of working coders.

Steam is hugely important in this regard because it shows how catastrophically wrong the old guard in games, video, music, and other media are. By default, people accept that paying for things is right. The challenge is to make paying for things easier than not, and to not actively sabotage the social relationship that makes customers prefer paying for things to pirating them. Steam has actually done a reasonable job at that: by contrast, DRM and MPAA/RIAA-style tactics are, to understate, recent-severe-head-wound-level dumb business decisions; they say to customers "our relationship with you is fundamentally antagonistic." Once that social message has been sent and supremely customer-hostile services like Ultraviolet (and worse earlier systems) established, piracy becomes massively attractive and the MPAA/RIAA-style cartels have cut off the ability to have a reasonable conversation about it.

I think I'm gonna start looking at it that way, since that's much more actionable than what I said.

I wince a little when I read the section titled "Low iOS revenue." The iOS App Store's race to the bottom on pricing (and the parallel problem in Androidville) are very hard on developers. Panic reports that their unit sales are nearly even on iOS and OS X - but that the revenue is on the far side of an 80-20 split, that they make more than four times the revenue from a desktop sale than from an iOS sale! Even if you assume, very generously, that an iOS app can use a smaller project scope and only take half the investment of company time, that's still a heavily skewed ratio. It's a bad situation for developers that can't absorb losses or make their money via IAP (and I'm not sure how long the IAP route will be around, considering the utterly vile marketing practices some entities are using to juice up IAP revenue).

The problem is that this is not that Apple, Google, or consumers are doing something to development houses. It's an emergent feature of the market and the incentives, so there's no simple way to make it reliably financially viable to develop for mobile (subscriptions and IAP are not simple and don't fit all business models).

I hope Panic can afford to stay in the business of writing iOS apps. Their apps are great. But the money those apps are making them, isn't great.

The embedded video does have some footage of an actual plant glowing, but it's tiny. :(

"Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool… that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. […] The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions… the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email."

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

I don't think it's far-fetched to say what tptacek did since it's dang close to what Gruber has always said about Markdown. Note that phrasing: it's not a language, it's a "plain text formatting syntax."

Can't emphasize this stuff enough. What problems does it solve for the user? It's described in very general terms, which I'm going to assume is because it's a general-purpose tool that can solve many problems. Show some of them! Are they problems people already solve in a different way? Show why yours is better.

While those are all suggestions that open up good things, I'd like to suggest that you take a minute to think about those from an attacker's perspective. Most of what you suggest comes at a significant cost. Paying that cost might be on balance correct. But there's definitely a security/user-trust cost to implementing these suggestions.

If you're thinking of Alec Baldwin's "Coffee's for closers" speech when you say "a huge Glen Gary speech," I hope you're aware that most people view that speech as "this is what an abusive boss looks like, if you see this behavior, quit ASAP."

Most people including the highest performers, who are generally aware of not having to put up with that shit.

The market is that because the numbers say that's where the market is. What's wrong with selling your book at Wal-Mart is that the numbers say you will not sell enough to make a living.

As for "what barrier," well, consider a website that is visible on Bing but not on Google. Go ahead and tell them "but visitors have no switching cost!" The cost of not being visible where customers are actually looking for you is very high indeed.

Yes, they do. The `c0 = d3.hsl(d0 % 360, 1, .5).rgb();` line (IIUC) is doing a modulo-360 operation, so the colors cycle.

To my great sadness, TTYtter is currently unmaintained (I sent in a bug report and that's what the dude told me). So I expect it to stop working at some point. Until then, best desktop Twitter client for me by a mile.

I wish Twitter, Inc weren't the absolutely stinking worst maker of Twitter clients. :(

It seems that they're saying that marijuana legalization is like a gold rush, not that Rust is --- i.e. marijuana legalization, Rust, and VR, are all manifestations of Living In The Future, and additionally, marijuana legalization is a gold-rush situation.

That's only an argument that there are some cases where DMS is inappropriate, not that it's inappropriate for all cases. Considering that in general, setting up a robust Nagios install, configuring it, and maintaining it, costs far more than DMS, there are many scenarios where DMS is the rational choice.

I was an Impressionable Teen when this article was published, and by howdy it made an impression.

Yeah, I think we're all pretty clear that the pending-comments feature is a different thing from conventional anti-spam measures, which have fairly reliable programmatic solutions in this kind of scenario.

I didn't know that part, thank you for bringing that up again (I imagine you've had to repeat it). That reduces my worry level a lot.

Prior restraint solutions sit very badly with me: there's a reason that "prior restraint on speech" is near or at the top of the list of First Amendment no-nos (yes, the First Amendment applies to US government entities rather than private entities; the lesson is still valuable). It's a gratuitously bad idea to enable the prior restraint feature sitewide and by default. Besides the principle of prior restraint, that has all the hallmarks of being a feature that scales very poorly because it requires human involvement. Requiring human involvement and discretion is the point, so I'm not sure how one could eliminate that. Further, the part of it that say "if a user has a comment in the pending-approval status, they may not post new comments at all," seems very, very likely to have adverse consequences of large scope. People participate in multiple discussions over time and change their minds about them and behave differently in different contexts in response to different prompts. Holding all of their participation hostage to something they've said in the most contentious available context, seems like a great way to exert a chilling effect on participation as a whole.

I strongly, strongly object to and oppose turning on the prior-restraint feature sitewide by default, and especially to the "if a user has a comment in the pending-approval status, they may not post new comments at all" part of the feature.

That said, the history of moderating large discussions, especially in digital media, demonstrates that giving moderators programmatic tools to enforce their judgment is a Good Thing. So if you consider the proposed feature as "Allow moderators to say that any reply to a comment in the tree rooted at Comment Foo, must be human-approved before going live," sounds like a great tool for a moderator to have at their disposal. It is limited in scope and its effects can be judged and known. I think that's a reasonable thing to add, with the caveat that that shouldn't include the "users who have pending comments can't create other comments" part.

In America, there's a very annoyingly direct correlation between "cities with good public transit" and "cities whose administrators use public transit routinely." So that argues in favor of your point. I wish it could simply be taken for granted that people who don't ride on public transit will do a worse job of overseeing it than people who do.

> The other replies were mostly variations on the theme that Android users don’t pay for apps, they don’t have data plans, you can’t monetise them easily, and designers are all iPhone users and don’t really understand Android users … Socially, excluding Android users seems almost prejudicial. Unlike Android is difficult, this isn’t about about mere convenience; it’s a value judgment on who is worth designing for. Put uncharitably, the root issue is “Android users are poor”.

This position sells the opposing argument short. It's not so much "designers believe a priori that Android users won't pay for good design," it's "Android users have a long and well-established track record of not paying for good design." People are still experimenting, and I think that this is actually a case you can rely on market mechanisms to handle. If Android users start demonstrating a willingness to pay for good design commensurate with the difficulty of producing good design for Android devices, there'll be a market opportunity there. Someone will get rewarded for providing people with what they're willing to pay for.

This leads into how Bowles sells the other argument short: he conflates design and graphic design when he address the "Android is hard to design for" argument. Design is, to borrow a famous phrasing, how it works. Sure, it was tough to do good graphic design for Gingerbread and it's much easier now. Great. However, the fragmentation and glacially-slow upgrades have a real cost here - to design the same functionality, may require spanning multiple API versions. The comparison to the diversity of Web browsers and viewers doesn't work because that diversity, relies on web standards. The equivalent of web standards that would allow an Android app to do responsive design in the manner of a web app, devices don't have or respect.

Fundamentally, it seems like Bowles doesn't get that the answer to his question is "because doing good design work on Android is more expensive and people pay less for it." Sure, you could ask designers to make speculative investments in Android, but I suspect that'll go about as well as asking people to make speculative investments of their professional time and skill usually goes. Professionals who respect their own time and worth, go where they can do good work and get paid well for it. Currently, that means they don't go to Android.

It's been 2+ years since this story was last discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3390719 --- about time to see it again.

I admire that feat at the same time as I have an overwhelming urge to take a cheap shot about which Haskell projects are entertaining practical jokes.

I'm not sure that the current track record supports "Large companies will be better able to resist secret court orders." They have more resources that they could use for that, but they also have more to lose. I don't think we've seen evidence that they are resisting those orders - and certainly have seen evidence that, for example, Verizon and AT&T are just handing eavesdroppers everything they want and then some.

That piece was new to me, and very interesting! Thank you.

That's a lot of "eventually." Uber is a software company that runs cabs, basically. Their competitors - the old school, that is - are cab companies who are now faced with the challenge of writing good software. The track record in general of industries where long-established players find that they have to become software companies and put out a polished product there, in addition to whatever they were already doing, suggests to me that the timeline for old-school cab companies putting out an app that doesn't look like total garbage next to Uber's, is likely to extend so far out that it might as well be never. They may turn around and subcontract the work of creating and maintaining the app, but that has its own problems that we're all familiar with.

I've had that experience: the logins that get automatically assigned at the Big Enterprise Company where I work, are sometimes nonsensical. I've seen some coworkers with just surname@example.com, but many more with an arbitrary combination of their given name and surname. The hash they made of my legal name was to my eyes ugly, and it didn't help that it's difficult to speak. I also have a lot of coworkers whose backgrounds are in Asia or the Indian subcontinent, and I can't imagine they're happier about their names getting mangled.

Coming from San Francisco, but not living there right now, I continue to be dismayed about the city government. They're about average for a local government in most respects, very good in some, and abysmal in a couple of important ways. The one that I see most often lately is about the most basic fundamentals of economics. The city, very broadly, would like to see the price of housing flat or falling - "affordable." Leaving aside the many possible negative side effects, the only way to get to a falling cost of housing is for less of it to be demanded or more of it to be supplied. The city government can't much affect the former, and has resolutely, bullheadedly, stubbornly refused to improve the latter. It's disastrous. It is is fine and worthy to say - hey let's keep the character of our neighborhoods. Great! But in pursuit of that, they've basically given existing residents a veto on anything new, nearly down to the single-block level in some cases. There are many aspects of the current issues with San Francisco. One aspect that is fully under San Francisco's control is, "shall we build more housing or not?" - and the city government is working as hard as possible to make the situation worse in that aspect. Drives me to tears.

But it's also wrong to say that an institution and its members are completely separate. They aren't and can't be. There is no institution without members, and there are no members without an institution to be a member of. You've got to deal with them as entangled, and treat them as such. There are varying degrees of responsibility for acts that we attribute to an institution, because generally we're talking about institutions with internal hierarchies. So for example General Keith Alexander is much more culpable than a random sysadmin. But because of the responsibility-diffusing nature of institutions, no, you can't completely let members off the hook without also letting the institution off the hook.

By the way, about your Mafia/Nazi examples: a zealous prosecutor could easily charge the housekeeper, and the police and FBI would certainly lean on them a bit whilst investigating the boss. That's totally commonplace. Meantime, in the case of the literal Nazis, yes, there were in fact consequences for such people (leaving aside that you've constructed that scenario very poorly).