iamgilesbowkett

I believe this is absolutely correct.

http://www.edmunds.com/mercedes-benz/m-class/1999/consumer-r...

where the guy talks about spending $5K in one particular year, which appears to be the first year he had it.

likely an exaggeration on my part, mea culpa, but the reviews on that site are full of maintenance complaints:

http://www.edmunds.com/mercedes-benz/m-class/1999/consumer-r...

it's entirely anecdotal but I had a friend who had two BMWs and both were constantly in and out of the shop. this was a long time ago, though. ymmv (literally).

I don't even think it's a power user thing. I think it's just a you thing. I'm a power user and although I did slow down using my iPad when I got my 11" Air, I didn't stop at all. It's still an hours-daily device for me. Mostly for Words With Friends, Twitter, and web browsing; the laptop's for writing code, making music and video, and most email. I also find the iPad superior for outlining, and if I'm doing a presentation without any live coding, Keynote on the iPad wins on convenience. It's also very handy to have two displays while hacking at a coffee shop, for the same reason it's handy to have two monitors on your desk.

It's even possible that for me buying an Apple TV bit into my iPad use more than buying an Air did. Not sure about that one, though.

Notice also how there's like no "brogrammers" in here giving us their side of the story? Almost as if they don't really exist? Or if they do, it's not a life or death to them, like it appears to be to the OP?

Funny to me because I wrote a rant about how Rails was no longer fashionable and Node is more fashionable these days. A few people dissed me for paying attention to tech fashion in the first place, but now HN is all up in arms, ready to break out the pitchforks and torches, over whether or not you wear a polo shirt.

that's what I find funny about the whole thing. "we're hiring programmers! no nerds." that's an unlikely strategy for success even when programmers are easy to hire -- which they are currently not.

Similarly, you can usually pick up a Porsche Boxster for only around $10K once they hit the 50K miles mark, because Porsche recommends an expensive scheduled servicing at the 60K miles mark. I think it's about $12K. (In actuality the car doesn't need all the things they do in that service, just some subset.)

But still. It just offends me as an engineer that "better" cars have higher maintenance costs. If Mercedes is so much better at making cars than Honda, why can't it make cars that don't break? Honda makes cars that don't break. Why is the "best" car company out there unable to solve a technical problem that the "crappy" company solved twenty years ago?

Not trying to troll the Merc fanboys, it just gets my goat. I had basically given up on ever owning a nice car, because of sheer nerdrage, but I found out Honda's S2000 has a fantastic reputation for reliability. So that's my plan.

Please excuse the threadjack.

http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/scott-forstall-...

Absolutely. I coded up a replacement using the GitHub API:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/10/node-miniapp-minima...

It broke when they changed the API, but by then I had found http://defunkt.io/dotjs, which allows you to execute any code in a ~/.js file for a given domain.

So I put $("div.news").hide(); in my github.com.js and instantly had a more relaxing, comfortable life.

I completely disagree with this part of your post:

Facebook has done a really good job solving the problems of information overload and would provide a good model.

But I do agree with these:

The most important step is to group updates from each project. Right now half of my news feed is comments on a single repository. Those should take up only one or two slots. The next step is to filter according to some metric of "interestingness."

My advice is do it and share the hack. I think the best way to find trouble spots in your UI is to find out what people are writing hacks to work around.

However, although I think Raganwald is basically onto something, it's not entirely deliberate. It never occurred to me that after complaining how Bundler breaks convention over configuration, people would tell me that configuration options are the solution to "bundle exec foo."

This is the kind of thing Reg might refer to as a trap, but there's a simple general principle that generates traps. Trace your idea from a specific to a principle and watch how few people can follow you there.

Also, I've actually blogged that Alan Kay quote many times, and I try to hammer the point whenever I have a chance, because I think it's one of those overlooked bits of genius that really helps anyone who gives it the thought it deserves. For instance: anything which is driven by fashion is going to go in cycles. What does that mean?

Clothing of course is driven by fashion. Lots of fashion designers raid thrift shops to get new ideas from old clothes. Fashion drives music. Bands re-record new versions of old songs all the time, dance music constantly samples and recycles itself, rappers sample old grooves and bring them back to new life and put them in front of new audiences. So maybe if you work in an industry driven by fashion, a pop culture, you'll want to dig into the past and find "new" ideas to steal. Like the revolutionary idea that GUIs should use MVC, for example. The big "new" idea in client-side JavaScript is literally the oldest idea there is when it comes to UI.

I mentioned this in another thread, connected to my actual rant, but I'll say it here again: I predicted JS MVC (eg Backbone) in 2005 or 2006, and built my own crappy version in 2007 or 2008. It's not magic future genius powers. When you know it's fashion, and you know fashion is cyclical, you can just watch the wheel turning.

But I don't think the Alan Kay thing is the only thing in there worth thinking about. I basically put in stuff for arguers to argue about and stuff for thinkers to think about. Some people love arguing and hate thinking! That's not my style, but I don't mind if they have fun too.

But here's the thing. How many technology choices does fashion dictate? I've seen fashion determine huge amounts of technology choices, and wheels get reinvented constantly in this industry as a result.

In 2006ish I did a talk about MVC JavaScript at a tiny FooCamp in Albuquerque. At the time people were all excited about Rails MVC, and I was like, "hey, initially MVC was for GUIs, and Ajax is headed towards GUIs." Because of that, it was easy to see that this particular wheel was headed for imminent reinvention.

It's easy to sneer at individuals for making technology choices based on fashion, but that's petty. Take a minute to look at communities making technology choices based on fashion. The periodic re-invention of wheels in programming mirrors the cyclical nature of fashion in terms of what people wear.

Embarrassing fashion confession: I used to be a raver in the 90s. I wore big baggy jeans. In the disco era, people wore pants like that. They called them flares in the UK and bell-bottoms in the US. Clothing fashions cycle, and programmer fashions cycle too.

If fashion is dictating an entire community's technology choices, you can learn something about the fundamental problem they're solving by asking yourself what wheel they're re-inventing, and looking into the history of computer science a little to see how programmers solved it last time.

And it's basically true. Not in the sense that this is new to me, I did a bunch with node and jasmine-node (etc.) in 2010, maybe earlier, but I went to a Ruby conf and was shocked how many people hadn't heard of it. even heard people saying you don't have to test JS because it's hard. so I decided the Ruby community needed to have a look at all the stuff that's already been going on for quite some time in JS-land.

https://github.com/gilesbowkett/dotjsfiles/blob/master/news....

there's a lot you can do browser-side these days which would be insanely masochistic without client-side MVC, but that doesn't change the fact that lots of very useful apps run on the ordinary web pages model.

I'd like to hear more about this, ideally in a blog post or two. I think a lot of people were waiting for Cinco's release, certainly I was, because we wanted to see what you'd do with it. The fact that you have Basecamp Next running without it certainly says something, but I'd be a lot more interested to find out what the specific tradeoffs were.

DHH, I think you misunderstood here; I believe Jeremy's referring to the blog post where you said Basecamp Next had almost as many lines of CoffeeScript as lines of Ruby. I think that's where the 50/50 number came from.

I'm less curious about the performance here than I am about the maintainability. I saw a tweet where somebody said he'd done things the same way and encountered a maintenance nightmare -- he mentioned nested caching and pjax specifically -- but without context or detail, I'm taking that with a grain of salt. I think disregarding it completely would be a mistake too, though.

It's also kind of tautological that DHH is going to have a more pleasant experience developing in Rails than he is in other frameworks. ;-)

I filter HN with http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/, which pulls RSS, filters it, and reformats it on an hourly cron job. I mainly did it for the typography -- I disagree with just about every visual design decision on Hacker News -- but added very primitive filtering after the fact. I throw out any story from TechCrunch, Zed Shaw, Steve Yegge, and Jeff Atwood, because I just got tired of them, and any story with "YC" in it, too, because I got tired of seeing job ads for Y Combinator startups. (In fact it was the job ad for a Curebits marketing manager right after their scandal that did it.)

When Apple launched the iPad, I went in and added a simple regex to filter out any story about it. Hacker News is a great source for skimming but occasionally gets fixated on topics. I get like a hundred uniques a day so it's not exactly a huge hit, but I've thought about making a commercial version with customization. It got featured on Mashable and somebody created an iPad app which looked very, VERY similar, which I'm going to take as validating my design. But whether or not I ever startupify it, anyone who wants a customized version can just fork the project, deploy their own version in like ten or twenty minutes, and tweak regexes to their heart's content. It's on GitHub (https://github.com/gilesbowkett/hacker_newspaper) and only requires the most basic proficiency with cron, ruby, and python.

I also want to add comment-scanning. Right now I don't use comment links at all. The code extracts them but then simply throws them away. I don't want to add comment links back in unless I can also set it up to alert me if the comments thread contains comments from raganwald, patio11, jashkenas, amyhoy, etc -- basically automated comment elitism. I'm not trying to be a dick with that, I'm just a busy dude.

Anyway, when I set out to do this, I planned on doing a bunch of Bayesian whatnot, but I found that I got most of the way there just tweaking regexes occasionally. Likewise there's a lot of rough edges I could clean up, e.g., text encoding is a bit of a mess, and summarization in the style of http://tldr.it/ would make it way more useful.

But I recommend it because making deliberate decisions about what info you want to get from HN makes it a lot less like watching TV and a lot more like doing actual research into topics which interest you. It's surprising how much more enjoyable HN becomes when viewed through a customized filter.

apologies if I'm being pedantic.

This is why the answer to the OP's question is "never." "Experiences" were very popular before movie theaters even existed.

I think the "replace" part of the question is silly. Movie theaters never replaced live stage productions, in fact given population growth and increased leisure time there are probably more of those going on today than there were in Shakespeare's day. Likewise we actually have more hobbyists, archaeologists, and students making Stone Age arrowheads today than we had actual hunters making Stone Age arrowheads to hunt with during the Stone Age. Replacement is a myth in my opinion. But even if replacement were a logical model for this sort of thing, if anything it would be movie theaters which already replaced "experiences," back in the 1890s or something.

That, combined with 'you should follow me on Twitter here', has me tempted to filter out everything this guy writes. (I won't, but I'm tempted.) The 'you should follow me on Twitter here' meme started when somebody A/B-tested 'follow me on Twitter' phrases. Tons of people who read that post adopted the phrase which that one person found most effective.

Problem is, A/B-testing is extraordinarily context-sensitive, and quality is much more important than quantity on Twitter. It's not a video game where the person with the most followers wins. If anything, it's a video game where the person with the smartest, least annoying followers wins. So "you should follow me on Twitter here" is cargo-culting in the service of a goal which is questionable at best.

I basically think that meme is stupid beyond words, and I very much disagree with this blog post, but despite all this, I'm not trash-filtering this domain (I use a custom HN viewer app I wrote which trash-filters a lot of domains, e.g., TechCrunch, anything Zed Shaw). Reason is, the Aaron behind aaronsw.com also wrote a terrific Twitter conversation viewer. So, I might disagree with the guy, but I love the tool he wrote, and I use it all the time, which is really the most sincere, practical form possible of respecting somebody's idea.

rant rant rant ramble ramble ramble

"Why is money the sole metric of wealth."

is a) ungrammatical and b) basically a tautology. money is the sole metric of wealth because wealth, quantified, is money.

not trying to detract from the point you raise, just getting a bit OCD about logic and grammar.

Musicians use social networks to reach existing fans and acquire new ones. Speaking as a musician, ten years ago we were all about Myspace. These days we're on SoundCloud, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. We don't use Myspace because nobody else does either. We use YouTube, FB, and Twitter because everybody else does, and we use SoundCloud to share new music with hardcore fans and with each other.

If you're looking to share your music with as many people as possible, you put it on YouTube, not SoundCloud. If you want people to go to a show, you talk about it on Facebook or Twitter, not SoundCloud. If you want to get a label to sign your new track, or you want your hardcore fans to be able to hear your newest music right away, that's when you go to SoundCloud. If you're on SoundCloud, you're either a musician, a hardcore fan, or, more often than not, both.

What I'm basically saying here is that a social network for musicians gets something very fundamental backwards, because of the four social networks musicians use, SoundCloud is the least important, the least promoted, and also the only one which was actually built for us.

I'm not trying to denigrate SoundCloud, it is in fact awesome and incredibly useful, but it's so much more important for a musician to be where the fans are. Also, if your goal is to occupy a smaller niche like SoundCloud does, you're still more likely to succeed building tools which make it easier for a musician to graduate their fans from the "hitting Like on YouTube" level to the "downloading everything on SoundCloud" level.

I think this is kind of like, "I want to make a social network, what's a topic, musicians, ok go." Rock on, it's good to stay focused and keep shipping, but it's better to make stuff people want, and believe me, what musicians want is to be able to make music as much and as often as possible, and that means making money from music, and that means either fans or students.

Point is, it's always been a fight.