Hacker News Reader

zimbabweon Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14. His full story.

-5 because he signed his comment with an initial? That's silly. He asked a question that led to a set of useful comments. Signing a name is a little silly, but I don't recall its being against HN etiquette and it's too minimal to be considered spamming.

zimbabweon Why you (probably) won’t be using Firefox a while from now

You put too much of a focus on developers. Most people don't care about development within the browser, they care about development within web sites. The philosophy that the browser ought to merely be a window to other sites with as little chrome as possible has been advocated by Chrome's (and Safari's with the advent of Snow Leopard) multithreaded processes. To date, I have still seen no good reason to use extensions, and the majority of people I discuss web browsing with agree. (The biggest sticking points are Greasemonkey and Adblocker, and they're very minority points, particularly when projects like GlimmerBlocker work cross-browser and allow both extensibility and blocking.)

zimbabweon Why you (probably) won’t be using Firefox a while from now

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Firefox is currently the most popular, yes, but Chrome's been growing (slightly) faster and it's still in beta, not to mention it has the full support of Google behind it. How profitable would Mozilla be if it wasn't being paid by Google? (That's not snark, that's a genuine question that I don't know the answer to.)

You can't offer Firefox as a counterargument when his point is that soon Firefox will begin to slip. Right now, it's arguably at its peak. It's competing with two browsers that really are seen as experimental among Windows users: Chrome is still in beta and doesn't support several things; Safari really only got production-ready on Windows with its latest version, and Apple hasn't focused much on promoting it yet. Firefox, meanwhile, has 6 years' community behind it, and inertia alone states that it'll spread as Internet Explorer disappears, and IE seems to be quickly dwindling.

The real thing to check is what the early adapters are using: Not the pure experimentalists but the people who are "browser enthusiasts", the people who recommend browsers to other people. Three years ago they were all recommending Firefox, myself included, and now we see Firefox is the dominant browser. Now, however, all the adapters love Chrome, and the elitist Mac snobs have shifted from loving Firefox to praising the much more native Safari 4, and for good reason. If we assume "a while from now" means 5 years, his argument is correct: Mozilla can't afford to compete with a company as talented, merciless, and rich as Google.

zimbabweon Why you (probably) won’t be using Firefox a while from now

I've had the opposite experience: Many frustrated friends have abandoned Firefox for Safari and Chrome. Very few of my friends ever use add-ons, either, and that's the only thing Firefox is good for anymore, what with its shitty UI and relatively mediocre speeds.

zimbabweon Hacker Hacker News - see just the programming/math/science links from HN

Newsvine is a good example of tags making a community more focused and easier to handle.

zimbabweon Facebook revenue to be billions in 5 years: board member

I think you're right that over time, pressure will stop people from publishing quizzes publicly. In my own sphere I've seen almost none in the past two weeks. It's like how "tag-other-people" notes got old half a year ago.

I agree with all the stuff you said, good points all, but I don't know if I agree about Facebook's serverfarmrunning-bandwidthreduction. They offer a lot of services to their millions of users and they're rarely down. I don't know how to compare them outside of that, but I doubt they're at all poor at this.

zimbabweon Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14. His full story.

I wish kids were taught this at a young age. I learned it at seventeen; two years later, I'm still struggling with a lot of the things I've needed to unlearn. I have friends my age who still don't believe this, who are forcing themselves on generic career paths because they don't think anything else is an option. I worry for them pretty often.

zimbabweon Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14. His full story.

Holy fucking shit, the guy who made CD Baby wrote this? That blows my mind. Just today I was looking into CD Baby as a means of music publication - never thought the guy who made that would keep a blog, or read Hacker News.

I love this community a little bit.

zimbabweon Facebook revenue to be billions in 5 years: board member

You're thinking kids jumped on Facebook because it was hip. It's not - it's cool. There's a subtle difference.

When MySpace got huge, it was because of the social tail. Big bands joined, lots of kids joined to talk to those bands, those kids' friends joined, till every high schooler was a member. Facebook didn't get to succeed in a void. MySpace pracitcally did, because Friendster was fairly minute when MySpace got big and Friendster was a sterile, inept social network. Facebook entered a stuffed market and beat the company with the monopoly, because they, not MySpace, understood how to make a social network, and they understood what people wanted out of such a web site. Now that they've got it, they're not going to lose, period, unless something happens to disrupt how people live lives. Their monopoly is as real and impregnable as Google's.

I was there at the center of the transition, and I can say firsthand that the approach of high school students to MySpace versus their approach to Facebook was entirely different. They joined MySpace for boredom and to show themselves off. See Ze Frank's episode where he mentions MySpace and freedom of expression: It's something like that. Kids would use MySpace to show off their crappy, unreadable pages, because MySpace wasn't ever about the information on those pages, it was about expressing yourself, regardless of if anybody else really cared, and they didn't.

When people used Facebook, they still used it partly to alleviate boredom, but much more importantly, they started communicating. Facebook's central model is the newsfeed. They had it long before any other site. After Facebook added it, then came MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, and even the smaller things: Flickr's contact tracker and similar ways to follow friend activity. Facebook was the company that realized a social site had to be not just about giving people a way to connect, but about pushing the connections. When I update my status on Facebook, all my friends see it. When I upload a photo and tag a friend, all my friends and my friend's friends see it. In essence it's a bunch of connected pulpits. If a friend of mine takes my picture, I don't need to point it out to all my friends, because it's pointed out automatically. If I post on a friend's wall, other people can join in instantly.

Because Facebook's based on privacy, there's no risk if you're half smart about it. I can do anything you want to and you'll never see it. Hell, I can insult my family members while they're friends with me if I've put them on Limited View and they'll never see me complaining about them.

The thing is, social is not "cool". It's a way of living. For people who use Facebook at all, the site has become a central part of communication, same thing as talking on a phone or texting or emailing. Are cell phones not hip any more? They were around when I was a little boy, and they're still around today. Facebook is a success on that magnitude. It created and defined the methods of communication that we now take for granted, and it's still ahead of the game. Did you know that before Facebook, there was no such thing as "wall-to-wall" view? You'd have to follow a conversation by reading two profiles at once. There were also no social tagging systems in place. Facebook came up with that. And poking got made fun of then and gets made fun of now, but I got hook-ups because of poking and I suspect high school kids are still taking advantage of that.

Facebook is a global site. It doesn't try to be edgy; its only innovations are the enormous ones. It's simple. People miss how simple it is because it does so fucking much. But my 50-year-old mother knows how to upload photos and write notes and post on walls. So does my 75-year-old grandfather. My 14-year-old brother just joined, not because he thought it was cool but because his friends were all talking on it. I have no family member over the age of 10 who doesn't have a Facebook account. Furthermore, I've got friends who all experiment with cutting-edge applications and sites; I experiment myself; there is nothing coming up that's taking on Facebook. The closest is Loopt, and the only people I know that use Loopt use it as a Facebook app. More than half the people I know that use Twitter use it to update their Facebook status. Twitter's not a direct competitor to Facebook, mind you, but a lot of the people who comment here don't remember that. To them, a huge millions-person application must compete with a similar site that offers similar functionality. It doesn't. Twitter is public; Facebook is not.

Facebook's privacy was its killer feature when it started; it still is. Even with its push for public profiles now, it understands that people use Facebook to be part of an isolated community that they care about. The people who go public aren't changing that at all. In a sense Facebook's eating its cake and having it, because it has sacrificed no functionality to appeal to the attention whores, but it's given them what they want, probably because casual users are benefitting. I no longer use Flickr or Vimeo: I link people to my Facebook photos and videos. It's great because I can link you to my photo albums if I want to, but you can't see my face outside the photos I make public; you can read my comments on them, but you can't read comments made by friends. There are no leaks in the system. I can be public and my friends can be hidden and we still use the same site.

Because of the app plugin system, nobody has a thing to gain by avoiding Facebook's walled garden. Digg has a Connect With Facebook button prominent on its site. It loses nothing it had before, and it gains Facebook users; if I'm a Facebook user, I can use Digg without having to get a second account; I suddenly use Facebook even more than I did before. I use Delicious and Last.fm and they both tie in with Facebook. My friends that use Delicious and Last.fm both use it through Facebook. It's brought us closer together online. I made a new friend out of a casual acquaintance because he saw me listening to a song on Last.fm by a musician that he liked that I didn't know he liked.

The point I'm trying to make here is that these things are part of living for me and my friends. It's not something we use because we think it's rad and unique. We use it because it provides us with a convenience. It's no longer addictive, even: With their last redesign, Facebook removed almost all the things that were irritatingly engaging. I don't get app requests or see people I don't want to see. I can block it all off. I can also, however, talk to any one of my friends without knowing their IM address, I can invite them to anything going on (an acquaintance of mine invited me to a hypnotist show he's putting on out of the blue, and thanks to Facebook we're suddenly talking a lot about things because we've found something to talk about), and I can do nearly anything I want to. People use Facebook notes to blog now, they store links on it, they keep their family photos there. We never once think of it as "using Facebook" just as we never consciously notice we use Google instead of Yahoo or Bing. So when those 8-year-olds grow up, they'll join Facebook despite their parents using it, because using Facebook doesn't mean ever once seeing your parents. It means seeing your friends, and being involved in their lives.

tl;dr

I disagree with what you said.

zimbabweon Facebook revenue to be billions in 5 years: board member

I wouldn't bet either way, but remember that profit isn't a linear progression. Right now, Facebook's not making much money per user. If they figure out a way to convince its average user to pay for something, suddenly they'll be in for a shitload of cash.

I dunno if they'll find something like that, but it's not something to be instantly ruled out.

zimbabweon Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14. His full story.

Agreed. I don't know who you are, but I've seen this blog four or five times in the last week and I've liked almost everything I read.

zimbabweon Why do the rich keep working?

"Twist" this? I'm trying to answer your question. It's not worth cheating in an online dick-waving contest.

I'm saying, very clearly, that complaining about being bored doesn't automatically make your life boring, not when you have the choice of being bored or not. When I spent all day reading other people's blogs, I was missing the fact that they were probably spending just as much time online as I was. The instant I started walking out the door in the morning, I realized the only thing keeping my life boring was me.

Let's end this line of conversation here, as neither of us benefits from it.

zimbabweon Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

"If you deactivate your account, we'll kill this kitten."

Actively threatening a life.

"Your friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you."

Suggesting there might be passive harm caused directly by a user's action.

Yeah, those two are ethically correlated.

zimbabweon Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

But your friends all use their service too. What's to say Facebook doesn't have a good reason to remind you of them?

zimbabweon Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

Manipulative? Yes. Tacky? No.

They're reminding you that you have friends on Facebook. Tacky would be them telling your friends to convince you not to abandon your account.

zimbabweon Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

It appears to be completely random. I got entirely different selections on two separate clicks.

zimbabweon Stupider Than You Realize

It's not a trend so much as it is a redefinition of intelligence. When you get older, you realize that somebody can be bright/wise/funny despite being fairly stupid in so-called "quantitative" terms. Somebody who can't read and isn't very logical can still accumulate common sense, mature with age, and become a better person in a lot of ways. So while people are stupider under the strict sense of "Lots of people can't do very simplistic things", they're brighter than the rote negativism would let on.

Put another way, I've got a friend who's a poet and who's training to be a nurse who insists Sarah Palin was a brilliant politician maligned by the liberal media. Online it's fun to suggest that a single stupid thought invalidates a person's entire existence, but - both fortunately and unfortunately - it's possible to think stupid things and still be a smart person, and vice versa.

Isaac Asimov, one of the most brilliant men I've had the pleasure of reading, wrote a short article on this and on the fallibility of lots of intelligence measures. You can find it here: http://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/WhatIsIntelligenceAn...

zimbabweon Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

You can send friend requests directly to email addresses. My middle school brother just found me on Facebook that way.

zimbabweon Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

Connecting people and trying to sell them things they might like is hardly evil.

zimbabweon Why do the rich keep working?

In some cases, I just like being part of the talk. Right now that's Hacker News and Something Awful, because Reddit people frustrate me and the idea of losing days to Metafilter scares me. I'm also a little obsessive re:design. I like clicking every link on every web site to see where it takes me.

In a lot of cases, I like going through a site's history, reading up on its culture. I've spent a day or two going through the YTMND wiki, for instance, and right now I'm looking through the Let's Play Archive, which has quite a lot of fascinating stuff. My favorite moment there so far is http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/OregonTrail/Update%2021/index...., an Oregon Trail run where, to decide a single action at a river, people wrote a hundred or so poems stating their opinions.

zimbabweon Why do the rich keep working?

There's a difference between being bored and thinking, erroneously, that your life is boring. It's much easier to complain about being bored than it is to actually be bored.

zimbabweon Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

That's essentially what I said, but you're nitpicking my use of the word "design". I hold that by how I define "design", Apple's design is the best out there, by several orders of magnitude. There is no user experience more painstakingly crafted. Apple makes it into an art form.

zimbabweon Why do the rich keep working?

Again: I listed the things I did this month, from my house, with a handful of friends. I won't even try to make a list of super-exciting experiences because there are so many things. When the possibilities range from "learn to sumo wrestle" to "take a silent 10-day meditation retreat in the mountains" to "fire machine guns at things", it's stupid to name everything within that range. The point I was trying to make was that I could be satisfied even with the little exciting things for a long, long time.

zimbabweon Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

Even if you read the license the first time (and I don't), how many more times are you going to read it? So Apple can put in the license whatver they want?

It really isn't about that. I just don't want to tie myself to proprietary software. And something like apt is fundamentally impossible with proprietary software, unless you go the App store route (let Apple control everything).

Both of these are issues of trust. I don't think Apple will fuck me over with their iTunes user agreement. I do think the proprietary developers I purchase from won't stop making their stuff better any time soon. So far, I've never once felt that trust broken. I don't think it ever will break, because for Apple or especially a third-party developer to try and fuck its users over would be suicide. A two-man team can't afford to use their applications capriciously if their lifestyle is funded by app development.

Basically, the second half of your post is just nonsense ("Apple never fucks up etc."), but as I said, the first part was OK.

This is an argument that happens here once a week, and not just with my involvement, so I'll give my typical answer: Some people are the type that notices Apple's design expertise, and they're people who don't need explanations; other people don't care enough about design to ever notice, and that's completely fine too. Fact is, I think that my Macbook Pro with OS X is the best thing I've ever used in my life, and I love everything about it ferociously, but the things that make me fall in love likely aren't things that would interest you at all. Similarly, I don't feel your love for free software whatsoever. It's a difference of mindset that's completely cool.

zimbabweon Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

You have to write software to do anything, anywhere. Strictly speaking, with Linux you need to write software just to have a GUI. All of the "trivial things" you can do with your computer are things people wrote software to allow you to do.

OS X is completely Unix-based. All the things you can tweak are things I can tweak, too. I can also treat OS X like Linux if I want to: Getting Gnome or KDE to run on a Mac is really easy. I tried it out by downloading Amarok, which was a huge mistake because the lack of polish in KDE shines through when it's next to Mac stuff.

(I can make an argument about why closed source is a bad thing, but it would be rather lengthy. I'm assuming you'd rather me not derail this thread by providing it?)

zimbabweon Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

Don't apologize for harshness: Your view's completely valid. I prefer a system that's that locked in, because it means I can figure out the computer's philosophy once and then everything gets easier. (The Mac's incredible dragging and spring-loading systems are the best instance of lack of choice making things supereasy.) But that's a personal choice, and one that definitely turns some people away.

zimbabweon Why do the rich keep working?

So far I still find grocery stores incredibly exciting. I find it slightly bewildering that people get bored of a store with hundreds of thousands of products.

You may think that's a long list...but it isn't.

Remember when I said hundreds of thousands of things? That still stands. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life cycling through what I just posted; that's just a sampling of the last month of my life. There are hundreds of thousands of things, but it's ridiculous of you to think I'll write all hundreds thousand down in front of you. Sorry. Not a priority.

Or, put another way: So far in my life I've never gotten bored, my parents have never gotten bored, and my grandparents are still traveling the world every week and getting excited, so I'm not worrying too much.

zimbabweon Why do the rich keep working?

If you're ever worried, do what I did: Make it a goal to take a picture every day of something you did. Could be as small as yardwork. Just try to make the picture interesting, even if you're not doing anything interesting. If you can't get an interesting picture doing what you're doing, try and carve out 30 minutes to do something fancy.

Lots of it is also a matter of difference of opinion. I used to read some developers' personal blogs and every time they posted a photo, I'd feel some weird envy, even when it was stupid photos. "Oh, man, he and a friend went to buy some milk! I hate that I'm inside living a boring life!" The difference between "Damn it, got to buy some groceries..." and "Voyage to the grocery store!" is more one of perspective than it's one of doing exotic things.

zimbabweon Why do the rich keep working?

How many "exclusive resorts" can you stay in until all the ultra-master-upgrade-penthouse suites look the same?

Hell, in Las Vegas alone I have no problem imagining there're a few dozen unique ultrasupersuites in existence. That's enough for a lifetime's worth of rich, excessive vacations, assuming the goal isn't to try out a suite a week or some shit.

zimbabweon Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

But they do have a choice, thanks to the aforementioned app. I have it, yet I'm still using only half my screen for Safari, despite no other apps being open. I like not being forced into this maxed-or-not mentality; on Windows, it was too easy to make every app take up the whole screen, and tab over. On the Mac, I've never gotten into that mindset, which I love.