Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

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I was wondering what was the year like on HN. Here are some top posts from this year

Aaron Swartz commits suicide (tech.mit.edu)

Heroku's Ugly Secret: The story of how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails (rapgenius.com)

Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown (bjk5.com)

XKeyscore: NSA program collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet' (theguardian.com)

Google Reader shutting down (googleblog.blogspot.com)

I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115 (blog.jenniferdewalt.com)

A spreadsheet in fewer than 30 lines of JavaScript, no library used (jsfiddle.net)

Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5 (bombermine.com)

Tearable Cloth Simulation in JavaScript (codepen.io)

Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling (blog.chromium.org)

SteamOS (store.steampowered.com)

Amazon Prime Air (amazon.com)

Explain Shell (explainshell.com)

Sprite Lamp (spritelamp.com)

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months (microsoft.com)

Ubuntu Edge (indiegogo.com)

FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests owner (reuters.com)

Victory Lap for Ask Patents (joelonsoftware.com)

So, in a summary: some bad things, some good things. JS is getting more and more powerful, NSA, BTC, lots of SV drama.

I apologize to HNSearch for DOSing them with my query

I think it's a glaring example of blinders-via-self-selection of the "tech" industry and "tech" press.

For EE and integrated circuit design it was arguably a very GOOD year with Bluetooth LE coming out, and new silicon like the Apple A7, FinFets coming to TSMC and Samsung, etc. In the neuro area there are all sorts of nifty prototypes with wireless electrocorticography probes, etc. Even Google's various gizmos - while none are shipping products (Glass is a beta preview, right?) they're still pretty impressive.

Tesla and SpaceX had its ups and downs, but you can't argue they've had some spectacular accomplishments.

Biotech: U Penn's HIV-derived lentiviral vector for leukemia, among others.

But these aren't websites that sell ads so I guess they don't count as "tech"

> Tearable Cloth Simulation in JavaScript

Not just that, but horrible, no good, and very bad, too.

Tearable, hoarable, no goad, very baed?

Oh, come now, I thought it was pretty impressive, on the whole.

Hilariously, when I tried to google that exact rapgenius article, 'twas not a direct link to be found. I imagine 2013 has suddenly turned into a "Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year" for them, too.

I think there is a lot in technology we can change to make it more appealing. I hope to help facilitate that change with some of the things we're working on. If you're interested check out what we're doing, and what we will be doing in this next year:

http://www.techendo.co/posts/thank-you-for-a-wonderful-year

If someone has ideas, or wants to help out, reach out and let us know.

No mention of Google's Calico or robotics division? I actually expect Calico to make some pretty major announcements by 2014's end.

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