sedev

Stack Overflow has a fairly specific rubric for judging questions, and a central part of it is the requirement that they have a single verifiably correct answer. The example question does not, and it runs afoul of the guidelines in multiple other ways. The example question is something for a conventional discussion board or mailing list - it's not a good Stack Overflow question.

Before I edited this comment, I had a laugh at the expense of people who think I'm in some way misguided for using NoScript and complaining when sites break with JavaScript off. That was wrong. I think that those critics are also wrong, though, and this sort of thing is why. Even if this particular code is a non-starter, the plausibility of this kind of threat, this kind of nightmare scenario, is a huge problem. JavaScript is a general-purpose programming language that's present on nearly every user-facing computer in the world, with all the security issues that come with that. It is in some ways the world's biggest and most-rewarding malware attack surface. A working 0-day attack in JavaScript itself could be worth millions or billions in the right hands.

"You want a lot of things. You want an A in this class. You want a trip to Hawaii. You want a tasty lunch. And you want all of those things ... 'a lot.' Well, I'm economist, I'm trying to be a scientist. I can't measure 'a lot.' What I can measure is - what are you willing to give up in order to get the things you want?"

(for the record, I think that the way Craigslist runs things is both admirable and idiosyncratic: it works very well for them, it wouldn't necessarily work well for others)

Keeping promises is no easier than it's ever been.

[1]: http://www.nycourts.gov/courts/comdiv/newyork_bio_Kapnick.sh...

Bonus points for the documentation brazenly ignoring that they're implementing something that's not spec-compliant and naming it like it is.

The options are simple: implement UTF-8 correctly and call your implementation UTF-8, or implement just the BMP and name accordingly. They did neither: effectively, they lied to end-users. That's deeply, deeply problematic.

I argue that Apple's focus on the user experience, especially in the areas of responsiveness, battery life, and consistency with the general Apple design aesthetic, cause Apple to make choices here that you disagree with, but which aren't necessarily bad decisions.

"You can build music, and video, and game web applications on those devices without these limitations, and it is not a problem."

Actually it is a problem: Android malware exists, and I say that it proves my point: if you hand out capabilities without thinking through the consequences, it will come back and bite you.

The uses that you intend for tools are never the only possible uses of those tools.

As other replies note, the market for domain names has some unique features - but I also think that it's important to note that you're wrong when you say that it's "working properly."

That's a bit rich considering that the iOS app store is where developers can make money. I think that's a far, far more powerful motivating factor than "platform religion." The Blackberry had plenty of fervent followers and advocates: look where that got them.

Also, comparing Mac/iOS users to members of a religion is the oldest, saggiest, most lackluster thought-terminating-cliche in the book. Come off it already.

It also prevents MySpace. I consider that a Good Thing overall - I remember the period of the web where it was trivial to auto-play video and audio, and I remember that the consumer reaction to that was deeply hostile. HTML5 music/video apps certainly are an interesting thought, but you must consider what happens when you let random or malicious developers do those things too!

Now, as a caveat, I'm the sort of person who thinks that modern advertising is 99% toxic sludge in the mental environment: I am firmly in the Kalle Lasn camp. However, here's how I see it working: users come to the site because of the UGC, but advertising, by nature, has to grab attention at some level. You can't design for both "make the UGC, stuff users actually care about, primary" and "make sure that you get ad clickthroughs." Since the latter pays the bills, it tends to win - and users tend to leave because on one level or another, it's obvious that the site isn't about them (and if your site depends on UGC, your users ain't wrong to think that the site should be about them!)

The secondary takeaway is that advertising is not a long-term sustainable business model.

Advertising has a strong tendency to push startups into this insular turtles-all-the-way-down bullshit: social media with ads for analytics, analytics for ad-based startups, startups about how to reach demographics, and so on. They're as familiar an archetype around here as Punch & Judy. But it's all the tertiary economy, it's all flash: the fundamentals of advertising as a business model only get weaker over time. The effectiveness of advertising at all, in any context is debateable, and participating it is participating in an endless arms race. I argue that this should tell us that advertising is not the way to go if you want to build a lasting company: you need to take money in exchange for goods and services (real goods and services: advertising doesn't count, as I'm in the process of arguing).

That's hard! That's really difficult. PayPal, Square, and WePay should show us how ridiculously, gratuitously difficult the "take money for" part is, and taking people's money once you've convinced them that you've got something worth their money, is the easy part! Before you even get there, you have to build something good, and none of us should have any illusions that that's easy. Then between those two parts, there's "persuade users that your cool thing actually is cool and worth paying money for," and sweet leaping Buddhas that's a lifetime of work in itself (the lifetime of work, in fact, that advertising is doing in such a toxic and commons-destroying way right now).

But: you are a hacker. You are a hustler. You are an engineer.

Solving hard problems is your job.

Advertising is not a business model: advertising is a problem to be solved. Advertising is a bullshit legacy of past business models, here to be disrupted. The reason that I hang out on Hacker News is that I believe that its hackers, hustlers, and engineers are the people who can look at the way we do something now, think "that suck! I can do better than that!" and then do the difficult, frustrating, painful work to actually make something better, show people why it's better, and accept the monetary rewards that come from having made something better and proved it.

We can do this.

Peer pressure is certainly not zero - but hackers are pragmatists. If the tool really was easier and made a coder more productive, they'd be making money with it and that would be its reputation right there. The thing you call "cheating" is celebrated and encouraged. Better tools improve the whole community.

>>> "I had to stop using Visual Basic anything just because I knew people would judge me as being a lesser programmer if I took advantage of the easier and more productive tool."

This says far, far more about you than about the people around you.

* a privilege, not a right

* a huge security vulnerability

* a huge privacy vulnerability

You gotta earn epsilon trust to get me to whitelist your site for JS. If your site is 100% broken with JS off? You haven't earned that trust; you've instead told me that you're sloppy. Double points if your site is something that could get its basic functions done with JS - I have seen blogs, sites whose job is present straight text, that completely break with JS off. What that tells me is that I should be deeply suspicious of the technical chops of the people responsible.

It's not like it's hard to earn epsilon trust! Slap in a < noscript > element that says "here's what our site does, please turn on JS" is usually enough. "Please turn on JS" by itself, though, is not.

You don't have to cater to people who have JS turned off - you just have to not give us the middle finger! When site designers let their sites break when JS is off, that tells me that they're not worth my time.