cjc

my point exactly.

Fair enough, and I agree with that.

but look at the behavior of the community right now. The highest voted comment on this post is basically a "screw you dude" and all of my responses are downvoted without any reasons given.

Below in comments I stated what I personally would like to see change, but that too is downvoted without explanation.

These reactions are reinforcing my original point: Though many precautions were taken, Hacker News is no more immune to large group behavior than were Digg and Reddit. The community has reached a tipping point.

Can the downvoters please explain why you are voting me down?

Glad you asked:

* more news about Startups, less news about things tangentially related to startups

* less churn on the homepage

* a community made exclusively of people actually building websites

* a limit on accepting new members

* less talk about useless academic subjects

* more "review my new project" submissions

And actually, for all intents and purposes, HN is a service being provided to me, whereby I sit and expect it to present me with interesting stories.

How is it any different for you?

Please do not make this a personal attack on me, one member of the community.

I argue that submitting nothing is better than submitting garbage links. Additionally, I am not bringing the site down by voting up egregious headlines.

It's going to be really hard to say no to free beers, count me in!

Careful though - All the time spent researching / cooking / perfecting this food may eat into your ramen profitability.

I recently took up cooking and if you get serious, it gets expensive, specifically in the following ways:

1) Stocking up - Initially buying spices ($4 each), pots, pans, trays (a decent set will run you $400), a good knife($80) which you will eventually need, other staples ($a bunch)

2) Experimenting - You'll get stuff wrong a lot. You'll ruin food. You'll buy more food. Sometimes it's expensive food like steak.

3) Showing Off - When you figure out you can cook something that is noticeably better than rubber, you'll want to cook for your friends. They will like the food and thank you, but they won't always remember to leave cash behind.

4) No more junk food - Cooking the good stuff makes you appreciate good food, and by appreciate I mean spend more money on.

I find cooking to be a lot like programming. There are tons of options and methodologies and evangelists and opinions, but when it comes down it, the thrill of creating something (even something palatable only to you) is unbeatable.

Of course they should NOT remove it! Like facebook, myspace, and real life, follower counts provide a huge service.

The number of followers is a really strong objective measure of an account's (or a person's) legitimacy.

How do you know the guy that added you on facebook isn't a spam bot? If he has 600 friends (or whatever is average in your social group), then he's probably legit. If he has 0 friends, he's probably not.

How do you know if the guy that's presenting you a business proposal is trustworthy? Based on the number of references or mutual friends or the breadth of his past experience (higher = better).

How do you know that THE REAL SHAQ is actually the real Shaq? Because 650,000 people have already verified it for you.

My point is that external opinions of people (or representations of people) are really important. The easiest way to verify this is to look at sheer numbers - "Tom has 20,000 followers. Mike has 1,000 followers. Therefore, I am risking less by following Tom" is sound logic. People don't have time to research every Twitter account they want to follow. Therefore, Follower Count is a really great way to convey legitimacy quickly.

The condescending and closed-minded tone detract from the author's obvious point (startup GOOD, job bad). A more serious consideration of both sides would have proved more useful.

For example, a very serious benefit of having a lowly 'job' is to have a set schedule and be able to make it to every one of your kid's baseball games. The debate is not a clear cut good vs. evil argument so it should not be treated as such.

Can you offer a better one?

Disclaimer: I work 7 feet away from agotterer.

I convinced him to try VIM a few months ago. He tried it for a week but didn't find it productive so switched back to zend. I blame myself for not fully explaining the productivity benefits of a properly configured VIM environment, so I'll try again:

Learning VIM requires a huge time commitment (weeks, even months before it is truly second nature). However, after 'getting it', there is less of a barrier between your brain and you code. I have code completion, good syntax highlighting, syntax verification, and keyboard shortcuts to do anything and everything to my text. My IDE is pre-installed on every sever I've ever seen.

I am highly recommending using VIM as an all purpose text editor, and specifically as a PHP IDE. Knowing it is a skill that be used whether you are an author, developer, sysadmin, or any occupation that requires typing.

This is great, but if you use OS X and need a more powerful solution, I would recommend http://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/.

I keep the DB schema of my current project open at all times. When I change something in the database, I immediately make the change in SQLEditor (and vice versa). This is a recent change in my workflow, but so far it has reduced errors when moving from our development to live environments and reduced the time needed to look up obscure fields or relationships.

Agreed. Specifically, moving the controls from the right hand side to the left hand side was jarring.

Robert Anton Wilson disliked the verb:

I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to expose the absurdities of anti-semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to undermine that neurolinguistic habit which postmodernists call "essentialism" and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word "is."

http://rawilson.com/prethought.shtml

(Scroll down approximately 1/4 of the page for the entry titled "Schrödinger's Jew")

That graph is nearly identical to the distribution of youtube videos with X number of views:

http://christopherhan.tumblr.com/post/61871360/how-many-vide...

(not my blog, it belongs to Chris Han: http://vimeo.com/2519605)

Except under very specific conditions, this is NOT TRUE.

Do not fill your ice cube trays with hot water thinking it will freeze faster.

You're killin' me Paul

Facebook Connect has been a rushed mess. As a developer for one of the launch partners, I have been frustrated with constant instability, lack of / incoherent documentation, fuzzy launch dates, and most importantly - unclear reasons as to why I should spend time integrating Connect.

The whole idea of FB Connect seems to be getting outside developers to contribute to a closed version of openID.

I disagree - this is a great example of promoting your product on the cheap.

I like how I can easily listen to an actual friend's music instead of clicking through random muxtapes hoping to find someone with similar taste.

Great idea / execution.

A friend and I have started working on a solution that allows customizable, simple, hosted (or embeddable) forums. Consider Tumblr's approach to blogging as applied to forums for the general feel.

Do you think there is a market for this? If so, what features would you like to see?

agreed. It fits perfectly on the iPhone. Check it out if you're browsing from one.

hugh, could you elaborate in slightly more laymen's terms? Or point to a good resource to read up on this?

It sounds interesting but is a bit over my head. Thanks!

Thanks. Worked like a charm (as charming as rebooting my phone can be)

how fitting - safari crashed while reading this article on my 3g iPhone. In addition to all those complaints, GPS and other location based functionality have been down for 3 days in NYC. Anyone else seeing this?

9

much much better - exactly what people were looking for :]

mstefff, I think this is a great idea, but I have to agree with the majority of commenters that the implementation is poorly executed in three main ways:

1) the scrolling simply does not work as expected

2) you unnecessarily reinvented the scroll bar (axod elaborates very well on this)

3) needing to sign up before typing in a ticker symbol is a major turn off

These are all easily fixable problems, but you are showing little interest in listening to user feedback. Here are three things you said:

"I've barely had any issues with the scrolling"

"if you're at the top, you shouldn't scroll up, you should scroll down"

"There isn't anything wrong with the wrap-around"

It is easy to become blind to the deficiencies of interfaces you create. Of course the wrap-around seems logical to you because you created it. However, and this is really important, almost every single HN commenter had a problem with it. If you want your app to become popular and maybe even profitable, you MUST listen closely to your users/customers. Even if you do not agree with our collective advice, it is detrimental to openly tell your potential users that they are wrong.

So in a nutshell, open up to this constructive criticism. Your site looks very nice and offers a hefty collection of important financial news. Beware, though, that if developers cannot figure out the interface, suits won't stand a chance.

My father is amazingly computer illiterate. My mom and I have tried to show him the way, but he's pretty stubborn. He can type about 3 words per minute (btw, learning to type correctly is a huge huge huge factor for getting people to explore the internet - imagine searching for something using one finger), but he understands Amazon.

This can be dangerous, but try walking your grandma through one-click shopping. I say it's dangerous because it can lead to impulsive buying, but Amazon introduces new users to search, user comments/reviews, and ecommerce. I think it is a good starting point to being introduced to the web.

side question - My mom is getting better and better using the internet/computer, but I can't figure out how to explain the concept of iTunes/big music library to her. Does anyone have any advice?