codingthewheel

I think hatred is a strong word. Most advertising is simply brain-dead. Most marketers are Internet-clueless. Mainstream sites (who ought to know better) are the worst offenders. The people handling ad inventory for mainstream sites (cough cough NYT YouTube Huffington CNN cough cough) should simply be fired and repeatedly beaten with a rubber chicken.

Encourage people to:

- Use an adblocker (always). Never turn it off for any reason.

- Use plugins like Readability.

- Prefer RSS feeds to front pages (less ads)

- Shun and avoid sites that carry obnoxious advertising

- When you come across a piece of advertising obnoxious enough to make you angry, send the site owner an email. These emails matter. Site owners obsess over them.

We want to get to a point where the ads-for-content business model is broken. If your company (let alone your personal blog) can't figure out how to create useful, compelling content with tasteful advertising, your company doesn't deserve a place in the new market.

One more thing: if you ever see a site that uses double-underlined hyperlinks that spawn an obnoxious floating popup dialog from hell on hover, simply navigate away without reading another word. No legitimate content provider uses this hellishly offensive advertising form, and authors who use it deserve not to be read.

I think it would be a pretty rare squatter who'd turn down say $300 free and clear for an obscure domain, provided you don't clue him in to your interest. As one of the other commenters said, just approach it casually and don't clue him into the fact that you want this domain badly enough to post on HN about it.

Being friendly always helps; don't seem annoyed by the fact that he's squatting, don't say stuff like, "well, you're not using it anyway", etc.

That's point #1. The second point is: why do you really need the .COM anyway? Do you anticipate a lot of people typing your domain in directly? Won't they use Google? The competitive advantage of .COM vs. .XYZ is nothing like it used to be IMO. Take 4chan.org and 4chan.com as a colorful example.

The bottom line is that if your product is useful and your website is indexed, people will find your site. They're not going to hit the parked page and think your site doesn't exist. I mean, if you were selling lolcats it would be one thing but for an SaaS product with tech-savvy users?

Also, don't go through the automated "make an offer on this domain" process that some registrars (eg Godaddy) have. In my experience that increases the perceived value of the domain, because the guy on the receiving end gets a nice colorful email, etc, "ooh! somebody's interested in your domain". Just send a short, boring three-liner to him directly.

If you look at the timestamps and the tweets, this was one of the first sites to publish the "scoop". A few others followed eg:

http://news.google.com/news/search?hl=en&q=wikipedia+is+...

It's obviously been years since we've seen a story of this magnitude.

Asimov was a great popularizer of ideas that most people never come face-to-face with in a lifetime. And though some criticize his style, I always find it to be servicable and effective; he stays out of the way of his story.

On a side note: if you enjoy galactic timespanning of this sort, Alastair Reynold's "inhibitors" (a "race" of machines forming the backdrop of most/many of his novels) makes for some fascinating reading from a working astrophysicist. I found myself impatiently reading through the story, trying to get to the next bit of exposition where the Inhibitors are discussed. I wish he'd done even more of this. Ah well.

I see your point, but by that logic: "Governments provide services, and consumers consume them."

But seriously, are you really saying that it's natural for hospitals to speak of their customers as "consumers"? Do you have kids? You provide services for them? Are they consumers?

Not once they realize how hard it actually is to make any money on the platform.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/06/full-an...

What platform are you talking about? The App Store is one of the (by the numbers) worst places to actually try to make real money as a developer. Average app price, by the numbers: around $1.90. Average sales $ per annum: around 3K. Half of all devs will earn less than $700 per year.

The App Store is in a bubble and that bubble will burst, not because the App Store is evil, but because it's in the nature of bubbles to burst.

You'd literally have gotten better traction developing ActiveX controls for IE5, back in the day.

As a freelance developer who sells software and services on the side, I can say this would hurt. Badly.

First, the clerical and administrative requirements. It's tough enough to set up e-commerce as it is without also having to track purchases by whatever state's perverse and Byzantine tax infrastructure. My God. But let's assume the payment gateways handled this at their end. Fine.

Next: the $$$. I don't know about you, but I'm not a good enough marketer (or developer) to overcome yet another 10% vig on my productivity. I already get to keep less than 50% of what I earn. If margins are razor thin at the equilibrium price point without taxes, then the addition of taxes simply causes business to fail. Not everybody's margins are this thin, but small businesses often are. And that's who this bill would ultimately hurt.

Not to mention geolocation issues. We already can't say with any certainty where a particular IP address hails from. Oh we can get it 80% of the time. But proxies, dynamic IPs, mobile connections, cloud the issue. What happens if you're actually in California, but your cellphone is talking to a relay in Nevada, and you live in Texas, but you're buying a product from a company based in Florida, but of course the actual product's not in Florida, it's at the warehouse in Missouri. The last person in the world I trust to make sense out of this is a politician, or a politician's trained IT monkey.

Ranting aside though, I don't see any way to change this. The government will have its due, and there's a notion of "implicit collusion" among corporations: which is that incrementally and over time, competition can be squashed by raising the barriers to entry through taxation and regulation.

The Internet threw a screwdriver into the gearworks, but rest assured, they'll get you my pretty. And your little dog, too.

Searchable full-text databases of political speeches. I've done it. You'll find both words used all over the place, with roughly the same meaning.

I see "consumer" used in place of "citizen" all over the place where it shouldn't be and frankly, I find it a little disingenuous that you're even arguing this point.

Obama: "And we created hospital report cards, so that every consumer could see things like the ratio of nurses to patients"

Americans/Westerners are widely seen, referred to, treated as, and labelled as "consumers" the world over. This is common parlance. This is accepted. "Citizen" is becoming synonymous with "consumer" and this is a Very Bad Thing. You're welcome to disagree, and if so, I'm welcome to tell you that I think our education system has failed you.

Do a search in any political speech database for these two words and you'll find they are interchangeable.

Ah, but you're forgetting: with the rise of cheap, portable atom assemblers and reality compilers you can just construct your virus or your three-legged banana from the ground up.

What is really shows that people will use bad science and anthropogenic global warming (AGW) fear tactics to influence policy. What is shows is that this has been going on for 50 years.

The argument for emissions controls has never been that the science is ironclad. It's not. Any honest scientist (whose tenure and/or publishing life doesn't depend on AGW being "real") will admit this. Off-camera. :)

The (only) argument for emissions controls IMO is that, all things being equal, better to err on the side of caution and cleanliness. A rational society would simply live and produce cleanly because, for a number of reasons which have nothing to do with the flimsy science of AGW, that's the best way to "live".

We don't live in a rational society. So what we get are ineffective controls for a poorly-defined problem that may or may not exist. Worst of both worlds, really. I've never understood why AGW needs to be "true" in order for us to mandate, say, cleaner emissions. AGW is just one possible reason on a laundry list of reasons to go green.

(Of course, when I say "green" I mean "nuclear".)

Right.

"Facebook unveils one of history's most powerful recommendation engines"

This article is an attempt to garner eyeballs by making a loud statement full of dramatic words ("unveil", "history", "powerful") at a time when Facebook vs. Google is considered a hot topic. Nothing more.

This article is a supposedly impartial discussion from one of the web's (supposedly) informed sources that consists of nothing but value judgments. This article, though it rambles mightily, manages to say almost nothing about Facebook privacy issues, nor does the author seem to be aware that the few "recommendation engines" that exist share one thing in common: they all suck, they don't inspire users, and nobody has figured how to change this. Including Facebook.

So when I say it's "misleading", what I mean is that what the title promises, the content doesn't deliver. The headline reads (no offense to the author) like a high school newspaper editor's first attempt at a headline that "grabs".

That's all I really meant.

[Lengthy rant edited into oblivion.]

Y'know, not that there's anything wrong with turning a profit from bereavement services but...the best thing that can be said about these legacy.com vultures is that their receipt of a Webby Honoree award is proof positive that the Webbys are full of shit. Hopefully somebody puts these predators out of business.

Uh... and you think that ridiculously misleading title is anything other than a press release? The "it sucks" comment was thrown in as an afterthought.

Apple's has a minority share of the mobile device market. You are drastically overestimating the importance of a vocal minority. iOS already doesn't support Flash; won't support Flash; can't support Flash because that would threaten the closed App Store. And the rest of the world has gotten along just fine. Indeed, the only people Apple's refusal to support Flash hurts, are Apple users.

I agree, because this kind of thing is very common. I'd have taken it a step further: if you provide an answer to a question, you shouldn't be allowed to downvote other answers to the same question. And if you downvote an answer to a question, you're not allowed to post an answer to that question. So get rid of conflicts of interest, and always allow people to upvote other answers, whether they've provided an answer or not.

Good point, and it all comes down to whether Oracle wants to play hardball. I saw a good discussion of this a while back, even touching on the disposition of some of the MySQL forks. Can't seem to find it anymore.

We're running a project on it right now. I'm not sure why my comment was downvoted-- shoot the messenger, I suppose-- but how is this relevant to the disposition of MySql as a payramp into commercial Oracle licenses? Or are you saying MySQL users have nothing to fear because Oracle already has a free "express" DB?

Oracle is paving the way to turn MySQL into (essentially) SQL Server Express: a free hobbled version of an otherwise commercial database, designed to do one thing and one thing only: pressure existing MySQL developers into moving to (and paying for) a commercial Oracle license. MySQL is nothing more than an onramp to Oracle. This was obvious when Sun was acquired. It's obvious now. Every word I've heard from Oracle regarding MySQL confirms this.

This is what Oracle means by "integration".

You think the number one commercial database provider in the world is going to help build and improve a free, robust, industrial strength database for the good of the open source community? Like they could care less whether you use a free DB or shell out for an Oracle license? Please. Oracle sees MySQL as a huge potential market, nothing more. And this is how the evisceration begins.

Does anybody know if there's an RSS reader that allows regular expression tagging across feed content? Eg, show me all RSS posts that contain "iPhone" or that match the regex "(?:iPhone|iPad|iPod|Apple|Android)" etc, as a simple example.

Well actually I agree. Well-stated. Open may form part of the ultimate successor to FB. It's 100% true the average Facebook user doesn't know, and doesn't care, about "open". But what being open wins you is support of the community, and in particular, "developers, developers, developers".

Take the (by no means parallel, but similar) case of iPhone vs. Android. The typical user could care less about whether iPhone is "open" or not, provided their apps work and their calls don't drop (heh). Still, Android makes a compelling case to developers and to handset manufacturers. Android gets huge points for being "open", and over time, I think that creates a head-leads, body-follows scenario where early adopters, tech evangelists, and people who surf sites like HN move to the new platform (whatever it is) en masse. Some time later, "normal" users then gravitate to that platform because the thought leaders have gone there, that's where the hype is, etc.

To put it another way: being open doesn't necessarily win you normal, everyday users. But it can win you the power users, the early adopters, and the thought leaders; and where they go, "normal" users tend to follow in time.

As for the "how do users host their own node" issue, I agree. This will never happen if people have to (my God, the horror) sign up for a web hosting account to have a Facebook page. But in an Internet where "websites" are torn off from the cloud at will, and where creating a "website" or "web identity" is as easy as pressing a button -- easier, in fact, than it is to create a Facebook page currently -- I think that's when you'll start to see user-controlled nodes become a real possibility for the mass market. Not before.

You're right, and I think they are starting to sense it. This presents an interesting parallel universe in which Microsoft actually starts to channel some of that famous "underdog" energy that Steve Jobs himself channeled.

Lately I've actually heard sympathy for Microsoft in areas that used to be viciously anti-MS. It seems some of the hatred for MS has been transferred to Apple, and to a lesser extent, over to Google. But that's probably my subjective experience. I do think to the extent Microsoft can go lean, hungry, and humble, it will go better for them in the years to come.

Facebook could die a slow death when the world figures out how to create an open, federated version of Facebook.

Instead of placing central control of our social graph with an organization that believes people are essentially targets on the great Advertising Dartboard of the future, you could distribute control of that graph.

Instead of logging into Facebook to connect to your friends, you'd simply have your "profile"--your web page or other net identity--and things like status updates, tweets (because this is also how you "kill" Twitter), likes, groups, friends, etc., would be handled by the protocol.

In short: you kill Facebook by building an open protocol that does the same thing.

The only problem with this argument is that Windows and Office are both more popular than they've ever been and industry-wide, people are purchasing more desktop/laptop/notebook PCs per year than ever before. So if by "dead" you mean "more popular than ever" then I guess this argument holds water.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/

It's true that of late the focus has been mobile, mobile, mobile, and Microsoft missed the boat here to a degree, but only in comparison to what Apple did, which is start a revolution around the idea of easy, mobile devices. This is a completely different market than the desktop market, and the popularity of one doesn't mean the death of the other. By the way, people have been calling for the death of the desktop since the 80s. 90s. 00s. Hasn't happened yet. Down the road...who knows.

I agree it's kind of silly to put forth a visual web demo and exclude 90% of browsers (especially when these same effects can be rendered in all browsers, with the proper browser-specific tweaks), but does there need to be a practical value? I think the point is "Huh. Cool." Demoscene for CSS. These demos are also good for putting new features/techniques through their paces.

Wow. You are completely misinformed and, I suspect, just trolling (and presuming to instruct others) based upon events you had no connection with and only understand second-hand from others. By the way, your allegation that Microsoft "stole all the simple-sounding names" is just laughable. I'd dissect the rest of your argument but frankly, I got tired of swatting flies like you years ago. The only accurate statement in your entire rant? MS-DOS. And even that's slanted.

Building the Digg bar: $50,000

Removing the Digg bar: $15,000

Website redesign: $82,000

Never having alienated your users in the first place: priceless.

Never be daunted by job-posting lingo. Half the purpose of that lingo is to rule out people who are uncomfortable with the terms. Learn a popular web development framework and start building. Today. With or without a job.

Then parlay that into your interview process. Do NOT get hung up on "gee, I have no idea how to scale to ~1 million users." Almost nobody entering web dev for the first time knows how to do this. Many who've been doing web-related work for years don't know how to do this. Scalability is just one aspect of web dev and for a majority of projects (corporate IT projects with 1 - 100 users) it's a complete non-issue. Nevertheless, they might still say "experience building scalable web applications". Do NOT let this stop you from interviewing.

You have one huge advantage while seeking a job in web dev as opposed to the desktop world: your work is immediately visible to anybody in the world. Every website you build is a portfolio piece. And if you can discuss these in the interview, and communicate above all your enthusiasm for the work, you'll get the job. Somewhere.

Good luck!

Right, I have that same ongoing beef (embedding images is another area where PDFs are completely brain-dead) but if you're scanning pages direct to PDF to produce a professional e-book, you're fighting an uphill battle anyway. On the other hand, scan the material into inDesign, clean it up, typeset it appropriately, and then export that to PDF. This is the way to beautiful PDF typography and it's an area where the PDF format really shines. (And this is coming from a guy who hates PDFs as a rule.)