zimbabwe

I might forgive you for being an asshole if you were particularly witty about it, but you're not. You're sniping for no reason.

Remind HN: Meaningless sniping may be useful on other sites, but here we all try and contribute to the discussion.

Richard Dawkins has a quote along the lines of, "Why do we have to look at a beautiful planet and demand a reason behind its being here? Can't we appreciate it for what it is?"

So it is with life. Perhaps in the long run we'll all be dead and the universe will cave in, but in the meantime the things we do and say matter, and there is beauty in the world to appreciate. So I went to the boardwalk with my father and brother and we all had a terrific time, and having a good time was reason in itself to do it.

Once you give up the religious/gamers' view that everything you do has a score, you can appreciate things for what they are rather than for any ultimate result.

Stick to sites that use flat displays rather than threads. Threading almost always leads to crap. Flat displays have disadvantages but the linearity of the conversation leads to there being some focus in the community.

Metafilter and SomethingAwful are my two drugs of choice. I'd argue that SA's community is better than this one overall, though it's not as focused. It's also good for promotion: A company I did some work for used SA to launch their product and got a few thousand sign-ups, though they had a damned good piece of software to launch with. Metafilter's got ups and downs, but its community is terrific.

I find that it helps if you distance yourself from your account somewhat. When I posted under an account related to my name and my activities, I felt pressured to think and act a certain way and I monitored my karma a bit closely. Using a blank-name account stopped me from worrying so much.

Every single time this is posted I read it and it is still as good as I remember. Thank you for reposting this, volodia.

You're not allowed to love free source and also love incredibly beautiful closed-source devices?

I didn't know GNU was an us-or-them system; sounds a bit closed-minded to me.

Objectivism is terrific in a few ways. I still reread The Fountainhead once or twice a year. But the more you learn of it the shallower it becomes. The Fountainhead works because it's an incredibly contained world; Roark is essentially a loner. But Rand makes that out to be some ideal in and of itself. In truth, lots of brilliant people are radically social, and have had convoluted lives entirely unlike the straight path Roark takes. If you ignore that, and ignore the biological imperatives that explain it, then you're creating a fantastic type of human that doesn't really exist, and in some ways you belittle the people that Rand drew inspiration from to create Roark.

It wasn't a Bible quotation. It was pretty specific and relevant to his time period. I'll try to find it but I haven't had success yet; apologies.

I'd be worried if Harry Potter was replacing Holden, but the two can stand proudly side-by-side. The alienation in Harry Potter may not be as overwhelming as it is in Catcher, but it's probably even more pervasive in how it illustrates the world as a relatively amoral place where few people care about others for the sake of caring. The Goblet of Fire marked a moment when a whole generation of kids suddenly got a lot older.

It's depressing to see Catcher In The Rye continually misinterpreted. Salinger's fault for being so obscure, perhaps, but I blame English teachers for not explaining the book well.

The "Catcher In The Rye" is a snippet Holden Caulfield mishears from a poem about two children growing up and having sex. He thinks it's about catching children who are falling out of the field, protecting people from growing up, when in fact it's the opposite. His sister points this out to him when he takes her from their home.

The point of Catcher is that Holden is wrong. He thinks he's being bold and brave and telling the truth and rebelling, when in fact he's too young to know anything. The moral is supposed to be that we all make mistakes and think we're the heroes, but that eventually we all grow up.

But that's not taught anymore, so instead we have a bunch of whiny kids idolizing that book and a bunch of people who ought to appreciate it all thinking it's whiny. Salinger's better than he's given credit for. Again I blame schools.

I don't know much about Naggum, so it's entirely possible you're right. Apologies if I misinterpreted his relationship with the community.

A quick Google search isn't returning much, but it's hard to find a good set of terms to search for. I recall spending a lot of time in a class talking about it, though. At once point we were given quotes and asked to identify them as being either MLK or MX, and, not surprisingly in this context, all of the quotes about avoiding violence were from Malcolm X, and all of the ones demanding violent revolution were Martin Luther King.

Also remember the duality of those two people: Martin Luther King at times called for violence and Malcolm X was mostly a peaceful protestor. It's easier to put them into categories but nobody is so bluntly one way or the other.

Just as I hear Paul Graham's name blasted frequently online, for a variety of reasons, I'm certain Naggum inspired as many people as he scared off. Never assume an internet personality is the whole story.

I've heard this argument - the "if a large company ignores a small percentage then they're still doing awful things" - to justify a hell of a lot of griping. If Facebook was doing this willfully then I'd agree with you, but as it is they're an enormous company dealing with possibly the most complex consumer site (interface-wise) out there, and I'd be willing to bet they've got a few dozen priorities that are messing up for more than a percentage point, and that all those priorities are really tricky problems.

Microsoft is stuck in a bad place. I don't doubt they've got some brilliant people working for them, but they made a bunch of tasteless products and now they can't even scrap it all and start again because they have to offer support for all the crap they've made. So they take the only viable path, which is continuing to force crap into crap and making everybody unhappy.

Point. But I was talking about outside of bundling, since I figured it was a given. I'm guessing Microsoft here is trying to retain that hold, at a time when many people download Firefox or Chrome or Safari first thing on bootup.

Citing The Fountainhead - not exactly the best way to make an argument. I'm a supporter of Rand and her ideals but her writing regarding human relationships is detached from reality.

From everything I've heard of him that's right. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I rarely judge people on their personality. I know nice guys that are absolute shits, just as I know one or two nice guys that are incredible people. Similarly, most assholes are just assholes, but some are very brilliant people with short fuses. I've found that of the people I associate with, the least consistent variable is personality, and I find that as I grow older I lose ties more and more with the people I only liked because of how they acted. Those cliques dissolve to make way for groups of people united by interest and motivation, where personality's got less to do with it.

(I also find, incidentally, that the more ambitious your goals the more likely you are to be an asshole. Jobs is certainly the archetype again. But on the other hand you've got great people like Jeff Bezos, so I don't agree with the folk that think assholery leads automatically to greatness.)

But it's hardly surprising.

The media really doesn't care much for web browser competition. Blogs, do, but the blogs that care are the ones read by people who already know IE is bad.

Microsoft isn't doing some clever targeting with this. It's pretty obvious that they're going after ignorant people with an ignorant tactic, and let's face it, they couldn't attract users any other way.

It's marketing bullshit. There's lots of that in the world. It's not worth paying attention unless somebody in this community still uses IE by choice.

It's insane not because it's cynical, but because we've now seen twice that when Steve Jobs is gone, Apple falls back on TimCookPhilSchillerEddyCueJonathanIve and every other one of its other brilliant, beauty-minded industrialists. Jobs once said that he views Apple as his lasting triumph, not the Mac or the iPod, because with Apple he took his ideals and embedded them within the company upon his return. The result is that any one of the people at Apple is as brilliant as Jobs is. Some would argue that Tim Cook is a better Jobs than Jobs himself.

I've developed my own code of ethics, which says... that Steve Jobs is a better man than most of us will ever be. He pursued the things he was curious in, made sophisticated pieces of technology readily available for consumers, was enough of an asshole not to have to conform much of his work to standards he couldn't bear to conform to, developed enough business acumen to deal with lots of people he probably didn't want to deal with, funded the most brilliant animator of this generation out of his own pocket, created not one but two companies with a greater reputation for excellence than any company that's existed before, and he did it all with a flair for the dramatic. In the meantime he got married and had kids and survived cancer and talked a lot to kids about loving life and survival.

When I use a computer or listen to an iPod, when I prepare to upload my music to iTunes practically hassle-free, when I look at the Mac-using companies that have developed beautiful products, I'm aware that Steve Jobs stands as a symbol for all of the things I love about this community. A lot of us have that feeling. It's not celebrity worship like gets slurred around a lot. It's more that Jobs was the first pro-aesthetic guy in computers, and he's remained an inspiration and a hero to those of us that like beautiful product, and revolutionary product, and annual dramatic revelations on-stage.

Yeah, we know it has a material effect... but that's not why this is here. Apple's stock isn't interesting Hacker News.

This is here because it's really fun talking about Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, and because the man's the archetypal startup founder along with Woz. That's totally fine but let's not kid ourselves.

You've just offered what may be the ultimate gripe.

"It would be really nice if I didn't have to pay Shaun for the two (three?) years he spent developing. And also, it would be cool if it used a completely arbitrary and somewhat lame browser hack rather than using the feed import standard that every RSS program has used for years."

Do you think feed importing is new? Or that solutions don't exist that aren't complete gimmicks?

An excellent article from a magazine known for excellent journalism and mediocre fiction and poetry. I wasn't expecting a read this good.

I personally don't think creative writing is something that college teaching is suited for. A few courses, maybe, but a full major in creative writing is not only a risk, it is largely a waste of class time for the student. Since most of a creative writing major is just plain writing, followed by critique, the classroom rarely adds more than what students could get in a focused extracurricular group.

Please elaborate. If you want to have a discussion on this I'd love to, because I'm sure we can get into a lot of interesting topics from here. But you need to explain yourself a bit more, or else this is going nowhere.

That's why my belief is it's useful to see Atlas as a personal guide rather than a social one. Rand's treatises on doing what's right for yourself and never doing things that you don't respect, which actually appear better in The Fountainhead, are terrific guides for living honestly with yourself and with others, once you get over the intial I'm-a-dick-because-I-read-Ayn-Rand phase. Socially her argument falls apart, because she ignores a lot of evidence that proves her points wrong. (For instance, she denies global warming because she refuses to say that mankind should be limited by nature, which is a little insane.) But man-to-man, her work is a great guide about how to function in society without giving in.

That's what I was trying to say. Rand's books are very limited in scope, but if you treat them as such then they're not harmful books to read and enjoy. However, she does very specifically mention looters and inheritants as being the evil sort of rich, that which doesn't create but merely uses. So my initial point still stands: She admits that there's a problem there, even if she never really explains what she'd plan to do about it.

Rand actually does take that into account. She looks down on people who inherit their wealth and on people who earn money through scams rather than through producing a good service.

She never once talks about how to address these people. Perhaps she was hoping it would be possible to enlighten people enough to make them look past such scammers and dilettantes, but if she was then I'd have to disagree severely with her position.