RunUO here too. I'm still in touch with many of the people I met between the RunUO and UOGamers communities, and lots of us have gone on to work in industry. Don't know where I'd be without it honestly.
166 karma · joined October 8, 2011
Unless you mean that they don't place any importance on the diff at all, which I might be inclined to believe, but that leaves a lot of the onus on accurate, well-written PR descriptions… which not every developer seems to be capable of.
Emoji can certainly stand in for text, and I see plenty of comments and text messages that consist primarily of emoji. But just as often they will accompany text to add personality or mood the way ASCII smilies or textual kaomoji always have on bulletin boards.
The main Uber service depends on the existing market to some extent but I think it also has the potential to grow it.
This is a highly ignorant statement.
Sampling recorded music is in fact a very musical process, from the first 20th-century musique concrete experiments to the more modern intricate, multilayered compositions of artists like The Beastie Boys, DJ Shadow, Public Enemy, etc.
Musicians always take inspiration from other music. Build a song around a chunky 'AC/DC-style' riff. Channel Quincy Jones in the drum sound. Sampling was very important in the democratization of music production because it allowed artists without access to a studio and a host of instruments to work from a baseline of recorded sound. It quickly developed into an artform unto itself.
Yes, there was and still is a contingent of artists who sample lazily and with disregard for the original music, but Dr. Dre's productions--especially his early stuff--are full of musical reverence, high-quality engineering, and even improvements over the source material. Not to mention that after the NWA days he was increasingly bringing in session musicians to replay and reinterpret source material rather than actually sampling it digitally.
edit - And to expand a bit more on the last sentence, that is exactly what music producers do. It's only in recent years that the end-to-end musician, producer, recording engineer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer has come into fruition. And that democratization of the recording process largely stems from technological advances like digital sampling.
Ultimately, you've lived long enough at this point to know your shoe wearing habits to some degree. If you're the type to wear a particular sneaker day in and day out and are disappointed with the way it falls apart, it might be worthwhile to invest in a better shoe. If you wear a pair of leather shoes once a year, it might make more sense not to splurge, but if you wear a cheap pair often they're going to wrinkle and dull very quickly.
Do what makes sense for you, but there's no point in trivializing high-quality goods because you don't "get" them.
I guess reddit just feels 'diluted' to me. It facilitates a broad range of discussion and does so fairly well, but I can't think of a subreddit that is actually the best place to discuss any particular topic. It's generally my second or third stop.
On HN, we have a small-ish community of people (who are often experts in a particular domain) and an expectation of on-topic, high-level discourse. Comment history is worth a lot here, as it's been vetted by an intelligent, serious community.
On reddit, you have a huge number of people and a very low expectation of what's acceptable to post (in general, of course--specific subreddits are often different). The relaxed atmosphere promotes users who tell jokes or pander to the large userbase, making it harder to identify users whose posts are worth actually reading through. Of course once you have identified a quality poster, it's nice to be able to go through their history. It's just that signals like karma score end up being meaningless at that scale.
Then there's 4chan, with opt-in identity. You can't inspect most users' histories, which means you have to take a submission at face value. And for serious, constructive submissions--admittedly hard to come by sometimes--this rivals the HN model for intellectually honest discussion. You're not just nodding along with well-known users, and you're also not ignoring submissions from people who may have simply slipped up in their past. But users can take a name if they choose, and there are 3rd-party archives which catalog their submissions.
And when these services are widespread, people will be free of the necessity to expend energy "planning" their access to the essentials of life. Then we can focus on bigger and better things.
Granted, I'd recommend doing a L*THW or something before going to SICP, but you don't need a ton of programming experience to get something out of it.
Beyond just lamenting the quality gap, they were trying to understand what it was that open source projects of this nature are missing. Is it lack of research making its way downstream? Poor media quality? There was no blame placed on contributors.
Understanding the answers to these questions can even help someone like the parent find an 'in' to contribute something themselves.
[1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1272118...