ary

I liken it to (in the United States) one gas station advertising at $3.00 and another at $2.99. The latter will get more people to pull in based on lizard-brain impulse.

Young men are (mostly) going to have their attention snap to where ever there are young ladies. Just human nature.

You'll notice I didn't make a specific suggestion regarding technology. I merely suggested that what he is strongly advocating is archaic.

Markup, not layout.

> That's basically the majority of developers, in any language.

You have a point there, but I'd argue that on a platform like the web the impact of skill stagnation is much bigger.

I stand by my comment. A few things to note.

  > Some people write crappy code in CFML.
  Yes. But people write crappy code in [your preferred language] too.

No, I said CFML code is universally hard to understand. Even more so for people already familiar with more popular languages.

  > OMG can you believe some people still use TABLES???
  view source.

That example was given to make a point about dated skill sets. I didn't imply that your Tumblr blog was table based.

Edit:

To InnocentB's point about HN's HTML. Does anyone here think HN's markup is meant at all to be inspirational? My take has always been that pg has priorities, and a layout for HN firmly based on cleaner HTML & CSS isn't high on that list.

Cold Fusion? No, no... no.

> CFML. I really like programming in CFML (a programming language, “ColdFusion Markup Language,” as opposed to ColdFusion, a commercial CFML interpreter made by Adobe). I know it’s not "cool" like Node.js or Clojure or even RoR.

Doctors used to bleed people with leeches to get out the "bad humors". They stopped using that "tool" for a reason. It was a bad tool, and better "tools" came along.

Not only is CFML not cool, it is hard for most people not familiar with CFML to understand [1]. The syntax mixes in with HTML markup in such a way as to make it very difficult to distinguish the two apart. With a syntax highlighter your mind still has a hard time as there isn't enough of a difference to make a subconscious context switch easy. Also, the need to cram logic constructs into HTML/XML-like syntax makes for some screwed up code. My understanding is that you can put the attributes for the tags in any order, and that means that things you'd always expect (in other languages) to appear in a certain order, like conditions for statements, are instead a matter of style [2].

> It’s got an old vibe. Not just because it was the first made-for-web programming language (tho it’s modern & updated frequently), but because whenever I meet other CFML coders, they’re always old dudes.

My experience with CF developers is similar. This is not a good thing. This is nothing like the C and C++ graybeards you occasionally meet and develop immense respect for. These old CF developers are, in my anecdotal experience, the kind people that learned one type of development and stuck with it for a long, long time. They've not really improved their skill sets beyond what was popular practice when they first learned Cold Fusion. These are the kind of people (I kid you not) that think HTML tables are a great way to get your page layout just right.

Why did the OP take an entire blog post to say what could have been posted to Twitter ("you darn kids and your twittin'!")? The whole post boils down to what appears to be proud, willful ignorance.

A lot of "you're a developer, but you really should learn about business" stuff gets posted to HN. This case looks to be turned around and we have a business person doing double-duty as a developer. My advice is to learn something more current, and not because it's cool. More current technology has business value in that it's easier to find people who can work with/on it, and you will be able to find more of those kind of people for longer. The underlying tech will also (usually) be supported for longer, and by a wider range of companies. The reasons are too many to comprehensively list here.

I wasn't laughing at your back-end, by the way. It made me a little sad.

[1] http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/coldfusion_tutorial.cfm

[2] http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/tutorial/coldfusion_loops....

This coupled with the abandoning of Places makes me think Facebook is undergoing a serious narrowing of focus. While I'm clearly not a fan (as you can probably judge from my comments), I'd still like to see a company that gets lots of press do something innovative or, in absence of that, just new and different. The pessimist in me thinks it will be yet another web platform play.

Sudden love for Gundotra's favorite authoritarian? Sounds more like a sigh of relief.

Vic Gundotra at Google I/O 2010: "if Google did not act we faced a Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice"

Should I feel better about Facebook trying to crowd-source their developer support? This doesn't address any of the real concerns with usable documentation or proper API deprecation. I get the impression that this is an attempt to spin past bad behavior into acceptable future bad behavior.

Never, ever be embarrassed with how long a work of creativity takes you. Most of these weekend projects you see on HN are simply minor derivatives of existing ideas or twists on web API usage. The implementors usually work with the involved technologies on a daily basis and have built up a decent body of knowledge before attempting a "weekend" project.

The old adage of the artist/locksmith/doctor/plumber/whatever that can create a new work or fix your problem in 15 minutes stands up. It didn't take them "just 15 minutes". It took them N years and 15 minutes.

Edit:

Let me add that you made a product. You didn't just throw a project out there for other hackers to gawk at. You made something to sell. Something that requires the polish and preparation that creating a consumer product demands. This is more work than can reasonably be done in a weekend, a week, or even a month.

Bravo.

> Seriously: Android needs to hire a UX designer, although I will say that 3.x is getting much better.

You're not familiar with Matias Duarte then?

http://allthingsd.com/20100527/exclusive-palm-loses-mobile-d...

That's hardly true. iTunes is/was based on SoundJam which Apple bought. Before iTunes was available on Windows Apple recommended a third-party package (the name of which escapes me) for using iPods on that platform. The iTunes Music Store had (nascent) competition, and it arrived after iTunes had been released for a while.

Asking for features "before I buy" is lame, I know. These are merely suggestions.

1) Avoiding the verboseness of something like LittleSnitch is an admirable goal, but there's too much work for the user in your case. How difficult would it be to detect when applications perform network operations and then auto-populate the list so that the user can decide what to do about it? Some kind of categorization of traffic would be good too (ie, listing common protocol utilization [DNS,HTTP,SSH,etc]).

2) A simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down on applications would be great. That way the user could toggle the app for when they, say, want to pull some updates from Steam. From the screenshot it looks like you can only add or remove apps.

The website looks great and $9.00 feels like a good price point. I'll second the idea that $19.00 was too much. I hope it sells well.

Given that so many books have been written about Apple and Steve Jobs with nothing but tea leaves for sources I'm interested to see where this goes.

It is stated that Jobs cooperated with the author, but requested no control over the content (bravo). You can bet he had something to say about the previous title and cover [1] though.

[1] http://www.redmondpie.com/isteve-the-book-of-jobs-official-b...

That's exactly what I was talking about.

The last line stood out to me.

> ... passing by along the way the idle fiber infrastructure that the FCC set aside nearly a decade ago.

Can anyone elaborate on what exactly they mean? Is this dark fiber sitting around somewhere? Did the FCC sanction the deployment and private companies built it out (and then ignored it) or was government money spent to lay the wires?

You could make roughly the same points about the iTunes / record label relationship. If it were enough of a strategic advantage it might happen. I wouldn't cross your fingers though.

> Think back to 2006. Name one site...

Salesforce.com was founded in 1999. They've had some of what you quoted for some time. Also note that the Facebook API features you mentioned (FQL & FBML) are now deprecated. I imagine in large part because they were difficult to pull off reliably.

> ... they kept pushing the ball forward rather than to stop and polish what they had...

An API is a contract with your third-party developers. They could have slapped the "beta" label on it (à la Google) and then pointed at that, but they didn't. They put this stuff out there so as to establish a platform for others to build on. It's hard to argue that the foundation for said platform was solid. In school my teachers never gave me better grades when I insisted that my last paper sucked because I was working so hard on making the next one awesome.

> ... but they invented the newsfeed!

So gut check yourself. Is that worth 50+ billion dollars? Novel information displays warm my heart, but this isn't giving anyone a new way to peer into the human body or discover never before seen patterns.

> Their SOA and pipelining of requests is also the first of it's kind.

Have you seen a single thing about Google's infrastructure... ever?

> What they do at scale with a dense social graph seems much much more challenging that what Google did coming up.

Now I think you're trolling. You think it's more challenging to throw together a stream of updates based on a graph that's handed to you versus having to correlate millions (shortly after, billions) of semi-structured documents to answer loosely worded questions?

Mark? Is that you?

Having interfaced with the Facebook API when FQL and FBML were all the rage I'm left scratching my head at your comment.

> Actually the Facebook API has been pretty impressive functionality-wise, over the years.

What's your definition of functionality? To serve a purpose well, or the range of operations supported? In my experience neither of those things has been true of the Facebook API (granted I haven't touched it in the last ~2 years). "How much you can do" has actually been rather limited throughout the life of the API, and what it did do it didn't do very well. I have not-so-fond memories of dealing with orphaned state data that left the app I was working on irreversibly broken for the user.

Saying that the documentation never kept up is being too kind. The documentation was never in a complete form to begin with. I had to write a large amount of 'discovery' code just to tease out how much of the API really worked. The worst part was not being able to trust the code Facebook themselves shipped to interface with their own APIs. I had to patch the PHP library they provided just to get it to work at all.

> Now, however, Facebook has hit an inflection point in growth

Again, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but if you're implying that they're now so big that they've got to start taking shit seriously I think you're again being to kind. Smaller startups (including many in the YC crowd) do a better job with less money and employees, and with much smaller user bases. Facebook dicks around with their APIs without concern for developers because they can. The growth rate and size of the user base is the problem, not the reason they need to clean up their act. Besides, Facebook has been huge for a long, long time now. Their culture clearly doesn't value outside input or concerns.

> I believe Facebook has found the core of what it is

You sound like a Facebook PR person, but I'll humor you. Let's say they have found their core. It certainly isn't a genuine respect for their users (consumers or developers). The easiest way to evaluate the company (for me) is to take away the popularity aspect and look at two things: the valuation and what they're actually making/producing/creating (insert favorite verb for what companies "do"). At 50+ billion dollars I see a company that makes a lot of noise about innovation, but does very little that is different than what it did when it launched in 2004 (at scale, granted). If that beginning kernel of "innovation" (which is arguably no different than MySpace with better design) justifies said valuation then so be it, but many other social networks with roughly equivalent features have come and gone. It doesn't seem clear what "core" they were searching for, or what (if anything) they found. Facebook has the network effect on its side and that's about it.

The hype is almost too much to watch sometimes. The media loves (needs) attention, and Facebook has a lot of it concentrated on its site. The media wants a piece, as I can vouch for having worked with a lot of ex-newspaper types, thus fueling the cycle. The reality is that the loyalty of people's attention is grossly over-estimated, and so is the value of that Facebook "does".

I'll paraphrase a thread I saw a while back here on HN. It depresses me that some of the best minds of my generation are working on how to make more people look at ads.

Edit: Minor point clarification.

That was my first thought too. We're mostly adults here, but the name is seriously terrible. Please, please change it.

It's always been my belief that one should try to stick to the browser's native behavior when possible. Web browsers (on personal computers) have pretty consistent pointer states for links (which take you to another page) and form elements (which activate an ability on the current page [with the exception of 'submit' buttons]).

In this regard it seems like Google is doing the right thing. Only run against the user's previously acquired assumptions if there is a very good reason.

Perhaps he's come up with some novel ways to deal with the dishonesty of his students. Time will tell.

Preventing cheating ultimately comes down to changing the incentive structures in the university system in America. Allowing students to take revenge on their professors by basing financial rewards and promotions on student evaluations is clearly wrong. The metric by which professors are rewarded should be as independent from what their students think of them as possible. Outside exams by an unbiased third party is one idea, but I'm sure there are others.

What surprised me more than anything was the lack of mention of any sort of organized protest on the part of the professors. The faculty at many colleges throughout the U.S. has protested a number of issues very successfully. You'd think there would be a more unified voice on this matter, but perhaps I'm overlooking an incentive that guides most professors to just not care.

I saw your comment before it was edited and calling someone to the carpet (in your case by calling him a coward) isn't the kind of name-calling that should be frowned upon here. He is a coward. He comes out and plainly says that it's in his best interest to go along with the incentive structure in front of him instead of standing up for academic integrity.

Let's not let the cultural politeness here get in the way of calling it like it is. "Coward" may be a strong word, but it sometimes does apply.

This is a clear case where 'Exodus for Google+' would have been a much better name.

For reasons that are entirely based in my own personal tastes the Pandora UI has always been a turn-off. The service has been great (aside from hearing the same Home-Depot ad 5+ times an hour). Tip of the hat for the great work on this new design.

Now, why can't I use it right now? The current site scales just fine. They know how to scale the service. What's holding it back? Is it not ready?

To be fair the Gawker redesign absolutely ruined the usability. If you don't like the look then ok.

ayounce

Will do.

Could we link to the full version instead?

http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2011/05/31/the-top-5-regrets...

The best I could find on the fate of this factory was from Wikipedia [1].

"NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993 and the company was renamed NeXT Software Inc; subsequently 300 of the 540 staff employees were laid off. NeXT negotiated to sell the hardware business including the Fremont factory to Canon. Canon later pulled out of the deal. Work on the PowerPC machines was stopped along with all hardware production."

The choice of storage technology always seemed to me to be the reason it didn't take off. Kind of a bummer that it didn't work out (some would say it did, à la Apple).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1993.E2.80.931996:_NeXT_So...