zimbabwe

The Kindle is absolutely worth buying. Just break the DRM on the books you get, take back-ups, and remember that The Pirate Bay is your friend when Amazon does something stupid.

(http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5003507/1984_-_George_Orwell, for people in a rebellious mood.)

I don't know who downvoted you - you're absolutely right regarding the human ability to influence others. You didn't word it well, but the core of what you're saying is completely correct.

I've never been able to watch any Bill Hicks routine because that's the first one I saw, and it shocked me with how needlessly ugly it was. I can't find that stuff funny. Suggesting people kill themselves for their profession... That's fucked up.

Yeah, that's the joke.

TechCrunch also gives YCombinator sites tons of write-ups. It's not anything underhanded, just a relationship that both sides benefit from - at the cost of the people who think Hacker News would be better without Arrington's peculiar brand of self-righteous yellow journalism.

Facebook is wonderful - but I use it with only 23 people and disable Highlights, so I only see what I want to see.

What I love about Facebook is that if you want to use Facebook "responsibly", you can, and when you do Facebook doesn't nag you to be more supersocial or anything. Ditto Twitter, actually, though I have no need for Twitter myself. It gives you control.

Compare that to other sites - Tumblr comes to mind since it was mentioned in this article - that attempt to force users into contributing more. I've even heard some sites show a leaderboard of their "Top" users, and inherently pressure their users to post things that the largest amount of people will agree with.

I respect him for that. He's trying to express his beliefs to people he thinks might benefit from it. That's a noble thing to do.

Hell, that's half of why I'm a user on this site. I don't think that time spent encouraging people not to waste so much time online is necessarily a bad thing.

Upon reading the diss of Marissa Mayer I found myself liking Twitter a little more. But then, that's a very geeky reaction coming from somebody whose friends imitate the Marissa Mayer laugh for fun.

As much as I'd love to see this happen (more power to VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb and, hell, even Mashable), Paul and Mike are friends so it's not happening. As much as I get my hopes up every month when this debate comes up, the guy who controls the bans has been pretty consistent on his position here.

For the curious: This is available on the 99¢ Classics app on the iPhone, and it looks beautiful there.

The previous conversation:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=706403

I agree with the thoughts on the other story more. Palm hacked the Pre in a bad way, tried to make it emulate an iPod. I think that Apple ought to open up iTunes more, but I understand why they don't, and because they offer an alternative syncing method for other devices, Palm's being underhanded here was unprofessional.

iTunes stores all of its music in neat folders. It's not hard to sync that folder directly. It's created in the same directory every time. Couldn't Palm just use that? What's the advantage to doing it through a proprietary program when the current storage system is open and doesn't need hacking?

Sorry; I wasn't trying to offend. For what it's worth, I didn't downvote your original comment. You were at 0 and I thought your post was worth a debate.

It was smug of you to suggest that we didn't like Zed because of feelings of inferiority, but my response was not intended to be a personal insult in any way.

I'm sorry, I didn't know that there was a better term for the guy that suggests people don't like Zed Shaw because he's better than them and they're jealous, when the man in question used to title his site "ZED'S SO FUCKING AWESOME" and spent his time telling people they could suck his dick.

Responding to multiple people with the snide "I guess I'm a smug prick" doesn't help things either.

Let me respond as somebody who was the target of one of Zed's rants. When Zed gets into one of his little rantboxes, he absolutely refuses to listen to the other side. He's very often right, but he's not comprehensively right, which is to say, he makes good points and he makes shitty points, and he frequently refuses to acknowledge his errors. Furthermore, he's got a holier-than-thou stance in which Zed is on the cause of Good and Sanity and the person he's decided to rant against is scum.

The man is incredibly immature when he gets into those states. He ignores all evidence going against him, doesn't listen to his debaters, and proceeds as if everybody on the planet other than him is shit-filled. I think he's very bright but do wish he'd learn to act his age.

While you sit and fuss over his words and his public outbursts, I wonder what open source software you have written that has half the impact that his work has?

People's having done certain things doesn't exempt them from being judged. Did Zed stop from insulting DHH during his whole Rails rant? Because I'm pretty sure Rails is used more than anything Zed may have added on to it. I'm not blaming Zed for attacking DHH, but the whole "I did shit" defense is paltry and lame.

Is it because he says things that hit at the core of their insecurities? Or is it simple jealousy?

A lot of smug pricks like to use that word, "insecurities", as if every time somebody gets pissed off at them for being a blowhard it's due to insecurity. Myself, I don't write for open source, I'm not a huge fan of the open source community, I'm not much of a programmer at all. I just think he's a prick.

I may be a jealous person, but let's be honest, I'm jealous of people who are far more successful than Zed. He's a minor Internet celebrity at best. I reserve my jealousies for 37signals-level celebrities at the least.

A well-written satirical post knocking some stuffing out of the guy is A-ok in my book. Zed's obviously bright, but he's an asshole about it, and as much as he says he writes the stuff he writes just to get change happening, he revels a bit too much in the controversies he causes.

Huh! Perhaps it's a fault of the virtualization software, then? I'm using a Macbook Pro, the drivers of which I'd assume are in fairly common use, but I can't get audio to work properly. Would virtualization have anything to do with that?

Apple's ad responding to this philosophy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZRcYS88BwQ

Facebook degrades quite gracefully, actually. I'm surprised their site looks as good as it does on IE 6.

I'd have thought you could install the window manager along with everything else.

I get that argument a lot here, and I've written lengthy counterarguments before, but that's not at all the case. Look at the features that Facebook introduced to the Internet. They introduced the public feed in the first place, they introduced status updates, peopletagging, granular privacy settings, friend metadata, a whole slew of features I'm certain I missed or am hesitant to credit Facebook. Without Facebook, you don't have Flickr's photo privacy, you don't have FriendFeed, you don't even have Twitter.

The idea that Facebook thinks it has to "beat" Twitter is ludicrous.

What makes this different from any other theme? Why submit this one to Hacker News? Because attempts to dupe OS X have been around for a decade now; the existence of this one isn't newsworthy unless it's a nonshitty theme, but that's not the case.

Except for the fact that all the theme files of OS X are modifiable and hackable to your heart's desire. The fact that no large theming community exists for OS X is that Aqua is a very, very satisfying theme.

Can't you run Gnome/KDE on OS X?

That and the gradients, the look of the graphite buttons, the folders, the log-out button where Spotlight ought to be (there's no launcher bar equivalent that could be themed to look like Spotlight?), the spacing on the dock, the theming on the dock, the glowy ball, the spacing of the scroll bar on the Finder, the unnecessary Finder chrome (for people who don't know, all side and bottom chrome on OS X Leopard is 1px unless otherwise specified, and I don't understand why some developers are stupid enough to re-add the chrome Apple did away with)...

It's not worth it to go on. It irritates me so much that people would make an attempt like this in the first place. Every small detail irks me.

What is OS X86?

I booted up Ubuntu just now. I support the JWZ quote. Ubuntu is the best Linux has ever been, but there's no competition in any way with OS X, and I'd probably choose Windows 7 over it if it didn't instantly support all my drivers.

This is attracting a lot of downvotes, but I'll restate what I said in more certain phrasing: If your operating system doesn't support my drivers without my having to do work, then you have failed to make your operating system easy to use. Say what you will about Windows, and I'll say a lot, it has never failed to give me audio/video, which Ubuntu has failed to give me every time I've used it.

You're one of a few hundred thousand people who think that in the midst of a sea of a hundred million who are just getting used to Facebook.

Luckily, the Internet is free so everybody can use whatever they please. You can even Tweet your Facebook status messages if you don't want to disappoint anybody.

I agree with you. Perhaps Facebook does too - we never know. Facebook's decided over the years that it ought to try out a new feature first, get feedback later.

I think this move is a big mistake on their part, but I also think Facebook will revert to their old idea the minute users get pissy. I almost don't mind, since it's fun seeing them mess with things and because they never make it impossible to avoid their changes.

The New Yorker would have said more things than could have been fit into a paragraph. Say five pages of use and four of tripe. Here it was a good 95% garbage and another 3% quoting other people saying garbage.

Funny. I thought that the idea behind being a geek wasn't to learn arbitrary and unnecessary skills. My friends and I'd always thought it was about taking advantage of our intelligence to learn things we thought we'd need to know or like to know in the future. All the stuff we learned - including the rare overlaps with this list - sprung from that need to know.

I've met a few geeks who feel like there's some sacred path to being a geek that means you've got to know all the dwarves' names from the Hobbit, and I've wanted to hit them all across the face. Smug dipshittery is just as bad when you're a geek as it is when you're an athlete.

That all makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to reply!