codingthewheel

A bit extreme? "Google is a sexist pig?"

For an email usability glitch?

That kind of language is completely out of line.

To call it "sexism" cheapens the word sexism. Never mind the women who suffer from actual, honest-to-goodness sexism, of the truly ugly variety. No it's this lady, with her email usability glitch, that's the one being discriminated against.

Please. Cry me a river.

Or the problem could be that the decentralization hasn't been taken far enough. Why should comments be tied to a particular website at all? Comments can be federated in exactly the same way people are talking about opening up Twitter and turning it into a "distributed service" or even a "protocol". Even without true federation, you can still extract comments from the major aggregators via their APIs. So the notion of where a comment ultimately "lives" starts to get blurry.

The largest two oil spills in recorded history:

Lakeview Gusher: around 9 million barrels, est. Gulf War Spill: around 6 to 11 million barrels

Deepwater Horizon has a ways to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spill#Largest_oil_spills

The security industry appears to be a tightly focused oligarchy of bullshit in which the AV firms and other commercially beholden interests fart out controlled bursts of FUD, in collusion with irresponsible media, in order to convince their not-very-technologically-savvy consumers to bite on solutions that don't work, for problems that don't matter, while all the while little Bobby Tables goes about his merry business.

Brilliant analysis.

But why? Why doesn't it give me the results where someone says, "hey, anybody else notice their feedburner counts fluctuating?"

"FeedBurner" hasn't been searchable on Twitter for months. It's not just a temporary glitch or outage. I also don't think it's a conspiracy per se. The question is why Twitter search mysteriously & continuously fails for this very common one-word term.

I didn't find it at all offensive; if anything I thought you were (somewhat) preaching to the choir. Still, I think it's important to have these sorts of ego-checks every so often. My only question is whether David Hansson is actually going to read the open letter.

Well here are a few of the things that bugged me:

- The Title. "The End of Men". Sensationalistic. Aggressive. Inappropriate. Simply reverse the title: "The End of Women." OR: "The End of Blacks." Or: "The End Of Jews." This is not a worthy title, though I understand it's a catchy one.

- "A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way and its vast cultural consequences." Vast is a weasel word. Used here, an attempt (in the "hook" paragraph, and just above the fold) to dramatize what's to follow, which is well-written but (let's face it) mostly devoid of hyperlinks or factual supporting evidence. Opinion piece stuff at best.

- "Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing, and with shocking speed." There have been and are many matriarchal cultures around the world, many of them predating and enveloping the dominant male patriarchy she refers to. But what I object to here is the use of the word shocking.

- "As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest." Bad rhetoric. Sophistry. You can't argue that men have forced women into a subservient role of child-rearing-and-raising while at the same time arguing that we as a society haven't leveraged the "talents" of the female half of the population. Bullshit. Back when it was tooth and nail, men fought and hunted, women gathered and took care of the kids. As our powers to control the world around us improved, so too improved the plight of women (and of men). Universally. Across the board. In a process that is still continuing to this day.

- "With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success." Correlation does not imply causation, and it especially doesn't imply reverse-causation. This should simply read: "With few exceptions, the greater the country's economic success, the greater the power of women. And men. And children." I can take any two correlated statistics and assign bidirectional causation to them too, if I want. A and B are correlated? Well obviously B caused A. Or A caused B. Depending on whatever makes my article sound better.

- "As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye." According to what official source? Stereotypes like this need to be backed up with hard numbers, and from better organizations than the OECD.

- "Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination." A tired old chestnut. Most companies today are deathly afraid of being perceived as discriminatory. There may be an "old boys club" around the upper echelons of the corporate power structure, but it's not just women who are excluded. I'm excluded. And you're excluded. Far more important is the fact that women don't seem to be interested in certain occupations or positions at all. Take computer programming as one example.

Well, whatever. I didn't intend to write a book on it. She came across (to me) as self-satisfied, smug, and sure, very "sympathetic" towards us broken and outdated Men 1.0 models. I read this type of material in the 60s, and in the 70s, and in the 80s, and in the 90s, and the "shocking" effects that are prognosticated never actually happen. So what's the point of this article? To take a recent employment statistic and weave it into a sermon of the marginalization of men. I found it tiresome, and there are feminists out there who actually have original thoughts (take Camille Paglia as an example).

This article is okay, somewhat sexist. I'm surprised it passed the first round of editorial review. Imagine the uproar if a man published an article flirting with "the end of women" in a major publication. This is a feminist claptrap with a lot of anger behind it, and intended to push buttons. It amounts to "girls are better than boys HAHA!"

I'm quite sure men will do just fine over the coming decades, thank you kindly, Ms. Hanna Rosin, and sorry to disappoint. :)

In the meantime I'll make a note not to do any more reading over at the Atlantic. Sad for me; they were once a great rag.

(edited for tone)

Such a valid and too often overlooked point. Simplicity and ease of use are great, but you've got to have sufficient complexity to get the early adopters (power users, all) excited and talking about your app. This is especially true in the freelance or smallscale development world, and for most developers looking to "break in" to a market. The trick is in concealing functional complexity behind (sometimes literally) a simple UI. For example, the tried-and-true route of burying complexity along the Z axis, so that power users plunge "into" the app to deal with settings (via dialogs or panels or other UI canvas), whereas the normal users swim in the shallower waters towards the top (or the "main screen"). And etc.

"The truth is, most US academic prose is appalling: pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead."

[David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage]

This applies to modern business prose in spades.

That someone is "people" and the axe they have to grind is "stop trolling the personal data you unscrupulously collected from us in the first place by hoodwinking us into thinking you actually MEANT the meaningless drivel in your privacy policy."

I beg to differ. It's exactly the thing to do. Our only option is to vote with our proverbial wallets, and in Facebook's case that means leaving the site entirely, and not just deactivating, but DELETING, Facebook accounts, and encouraging others to do the same.

How To Delete Your Facebook Account: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

Believe it or not, there is a social web beyond Facebook.

Here are the relevant FYIs:

1. Microsoft is one of several companies behind H.264. To the extent that H.264 succeeds, they along with Apple et al. benefit directly.

2. zdnet.com is owned by Microsoft.

3. The above article is a piece of thinly-veiled MS propaganda.

4. H.264 is NOT an "open" standard. This is a patently false assertion.

Sure; every last podcast. And Joel does have the expertise on the financing/startups side. And maybe I am underestimating his role on the strategic side.

But in terms of who has the bigger "voice", there's no comparison. Atwood is a great popularizer of tech-related topics; he writes short, sweet, lozenge-like posts that appeal to programmers as well as technical non-programmers; whereas Spolsky's focus has always been more narrow. And going by any metric you care to throw out there (Compete, RSS, Alexa, whatever) there's no comparison in terms of traffic.

Fair enough. But don't you think the coverage in this particular article was a little Spolsky-centric? I agree they're a team (equals), and don't mean to imply Spolsky was a Johnny-come-lately, but the RWW article really just mentioned Atwood in passing. I thought it was a little strange that his name wasn't mentioned til below the fold but, no big deal.

This article makes it seem like Spolsky had way more to do with the founding/creation of StackOverflow than he actually did. Jeff Atwood was the visionary behind Stackoverflow / StackExchange, and (as a far bigger "voice" in computing than Joel ever was) the guy who built initial consensus/mindshare. Spolsky was (at best) just along for the ride, at least initially.

Call me crazy, and I'm not a particular fan of Yahoo, but this little attack piece by TC came across as snarky and unprofessional. I didn't think any of Carol's comments were particularly out of line, definitely not given the kind of hubris we see out of Jobs and Schmidt etc. on a daily basis. Even if her comments were somewhat marginally out of line, the whole "pass the bong" thing wasn't really called for, and is a complete cliche besides.

Also: bongs, being large and filled with water, aren't usually "passed". They're usually set out on a coffee table and each person takes a turn at the trough. Joints are passed. Get your drug lingo straight, geeks.

rbanffy is still an Apple shill.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rbanffy

Silverlight is fairly irrelevant. Look for it to go the way of all the other MS cast-offs, here in a few years.

Great ideas: check. Decent writing style: check. Spell check: Houston, we have a problem.

I heartily approve and endorse your downvote of my comment. I posted a knee-jerk response and I paid the price for it (PWNed like a n00b in a first-person shooter). Nevertheless, it was satisfying to call some one a "shill", and I DO detect traces of shillery in every Apple-vs-Adobe polemic to be waged on this site in the past fortnight.

As much as I dislike Apple's current philosophy, most of Jobs' complaints are on the money.

rbanffy is an Apple shill.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rbanffy

Right. Like that monument to best-practices software development, iTunes for Windows.

You should familiarize yourself with the technologies.

Adobe has been trying to get Flash on the iPhones since Day 1, and has been unable to do it because of some honestly pretty shitty business practices on Apple's part. Now you may love Flash or hate it, but the bottom line is this: the iPhone can never be considered a best-of-breed gadget when it still provides a second-rate web browsing experience in which about 40% of the Internet is forever closed to you.

The reason that Apple does not, will not, can not support Flash is simply this: it would gut the App Store like a week-old fish.

Kindly remove the blinders from your eyes, then get back to us. :)

Looks like Robert Hodgins, et al, has graduated from the world of Processing. For those of you who aren't familiar with Hodgins/Barbarian Group, he's the guy behind the original Magnetopshere visualization, which was eventually ported over to iTunes.

Easily the most likable thing Kevin Rose has ever done. Not just the killing of the DiggBar, but the unbanning of banned sites, and this little bit:

Also with the launch of the new Digg will be unbanning all previously banned domains. While we will apply automated filters to prevent malware/virus/TOS violations, no other restrictions will be placed on content.

This actually gives me hope for Digg.