iamgilesbowkett

the sheer number of possible answers is overwhelming, but pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email. (I can't be the only one who's afraid to find out what their cars are like.) so I'm going to say the reason Google Wallet failed is because it was neither search nor email.

I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple isn't going as badly as the constant catch-up game Google Plus (and Wave, and whatever they called the other one) plays with Facebook.

but seriously, business failure can happen for so many reasons, it doesn't really mean anything at all, unless of course you see a string of people failing at the same thing.

"Why are you going back onto a diet that you clearly can't sustain?"

Who are you kidding? I stayed on it for a year and a half and then got bored. It wasn't a struggle, I just stopped making it a priority. It's a pretty gigantic leap from there to "clearly can't sustain."

"Crash diets work for a few people, sure"

It's not a crash diet. Re-read the pages I linked to, and the comments I made. I don't have time to continue this conversation but it's nothing personal.

I think that's fair. I think plenty of people would describe a dramatic change in diet as an intense thing, and I certainly don't think there's any harm in intensity, as long as it's intelligently applied, and it's different from some kind of demented obsessiveness.

Sure. Basically just this guy's work:

http://www.drfuhrman.com/

I eat beans, fruit, and vegetables, and that's basically it. No starchy vegetables (i.e., potatoes, squash), and occasional nuts and seeds.

No meat, grains, salt, sugar, alcohol, or pretty much anything other than fruits, vegetables, and beans.

In addition to losing weight, I lost 100 points of cholesterol and also saw improvements in my blood pressure, my teeth, my skin, and other areas.

I went off it because I got bored, and I got all the weight back. I went back on it about a month ago and I've already lost 16 pounds or so.

I have to disagree with this part:

"do it with drive and intensity or don't expect results"

I made a pretty radical change in my diet and dropped 82 pounds. I think the first 70 or so came off in 6 months. It required some focus, but not a lot. I had done a lot of reading about habit, and was already professionally trained as a hypnotist, so I combined habits with hypnosis and made a fairly dramatic behavior change with pretty minimal effort.

Likewise, at the same time, I was going to the gym every day, but because I had a severe health issue, I was working out very, VERY gently. I was basically walking on a treadmill at 3 miles per hour for an hour every day. It's more active than not exercising at all, but I couldn't call it a "drive and intensity" situation.

I think this whole "drive and intensity" myth is the major problem with Hacker News as a community, in fact. I abandoned hacking entirely for almost a year, during which I just sold how-to videos and coaching on my blog. I made decent money and there was not a lot of drive or intensity involved there, either.

Drive and intensity can be great things, but I've definitely had a great number of experiences which point to them being inessential to success. I'm happy to go so far as to say that neither are of equal value to research, clarity, good logic, or sound strategy.

I wrote about it on my blog a couple years ago too. I'm just glad some voice of reason finally surfaced on here.

Besides the cargo-cult idiocy of it, the other thing I don't like is the idea that Twitter's goal is maximizing follower count in the first place. I often block followers from communicating with me because what they have to say is inane or negative. If you're going to count any number, I think it should be the number of worthwhile conversations.

Product people should keep in mind that any time you show your users a number, you're turning your site into a video game. There's a lot of accidental gamification out there.

"I do believe that the plethora of instant stimulations is having a major impact on our cognitive processes. Some good, some bad. The bad I see is that it seems that people have a much more difficult time quieting down their minds or enjoying peace. If you watch people, there is a subtle but strong constant desire for stimulation. In fact, its almost odd to see someone waiting for anything without pulling out their smartphone and poking at it."

This. PG did a good blog post about this a while back, "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" or something like that. If you're building stuff, and what you make is habit-forming, you win. So people build habit-forming things and create habits in other people. So most people have habits that are not necessarily beneficial for them at all, but which are beneficial for whoever built their favorite app, or game, or gadget.

How many people check Hacker News more often than they really want to? I regularly uninstall my Twitter clients because they're too habit-forming. This is my third or fourth Hacker News login; I get disgusted with the sheer amount of time I spend on here, I sign out, throw away my password, and then come back anyway.

Porn and video games make better link bait than Hacker News or Twitter, but the truth is that habit-forming entertainment is a serious problem.

Also, as an aside, I fucking hate how people use the term "addicting" when they really mean "habit-forming." The technical meaning of addiction requires a physiological change where the body cannot function without a given substance. I think I'm on the losing side of this battle, but I haven't made peace with it. I'd even agree that "addiction" in the more general sense is a bigger problem than pure addiction in the literal sense, but it still just drives me fucking nuts.

I think you're absolutely right. I'm sorry to say it, but I also believe that all the comments to the contrary are just people who haven't bothered to learn anything about the subject.

"don't use your employer's computer off-hours when working on your own projects"

California law protects individual side projects extremely well. I am not a lawyer, I could be wrong, but I believe these concerns are absolutely irrelevant in California. Relevant elsewhere, but not here.

There's a great infographic that pits human lifespans against this old idea - that investing in the stock market is always a good idea because it goes up in the long run. There were many, many times in the last 100 years where "the long run" was longer than a normal human lifespan.

Jesus, dude, why not just talk to OP instead? Any lawyer will tell you that if you can resolve your differences peacefully out of court, you should. This seems to be some kind of hair-trigger litigiousness thing you've got on going here.

Do you really think the OP had SEO as a priority?

Likewise I disagree with the idea that these two projects share the same space. A Java ORM and a Rails metaframework for avoiding ORM are not things which have a lot in common. I think the last time I observed a Rails hacker saying anything about AppEngine was 2007 or something.

hey man, re:

"If you look at Rails itself (it's great Ruby code, I highly recommend really reading it)"

I've worked with a member of Rails core, and frequent committers. I've spoken at 10 Ruby conferences at least, maybe 20. I'm familiar with the Rails code base. I once rewrote a few small pieces of ActiveRecord from memory for a stupid project because my wifi was dead.

I agree about it being worth reading, I just want to slow you down there for a second. Otherwise we're going to end up pulling things out and measuring them. I took the time to check your links, although I'd seen most of them already. I'm familiar with concerns and although I think your links are germane I'd have to disagree with this part:

"Deciding what things would fit well into external modules and what modules to create is a new skill to be learned"

As I think I've learned the skill.

What I'm saying basically is that I think you missed the mark in terms of guessing my background but I believe it was an honest mistake.

Egos aside, I agree that modularity matters. And I must admit I had a painful reminder about that skill recently when I built something around ActiveRecord and then refactored ARec out of the picture for performance reasons (the gains were staggering). It would have been less painful with better modularity, but I don't think the pain relief from using concerns would have been particularly great in this instance. Non-zero, but insignificant.

I don't care that much about OOP theory, but the pragmatic issues Objectify addresses seem to come up for people all the time. A year ago Steve Klabnik and a few other people were talking about this and I noticed it then how it was echoing James Golick's (the OP) posts about limiting ActiveRecord's role from a few years before that.

There basically seem to me to be three trends in discussion of scaling Rails: 1) "Rails can't scale" FUD, 2) DHH saying "just add hardware and/or caching", and 3) this idea of decoupling persistence from modeling, basically, reining in ActiveRecord, which I've heard from people like James Golick, Steve Klabnik, Gary Bernhardt, and I think Xavier Shay. Paul Dix wrote a great book about making Rails apps service-oriented, the Thoughtbot guys touch on it in their antipatterns book as well, and it's not exactly a coincidence that for many Rails apps the only gem more crucial than ActiveRecord is Delayed Job or Resque.

I have a prejudicial assumption that if you don't know the problem Objectify solves, you haven't worked with a Rails app which has A) a large code base B) a large, active user base and C) a bunch of different features.

The vast majority of people who scale Rails sites (as far as I can tell) do so by breaking their apps into services. ActiveRecord god-objects do not make that step in an app's life cycle easy, and separating persistence from business models is likely to be your first important step when refactoring for scalability. Fragmenting a User model bloated beyond all hope of sanity is almost a rite of passage at this point.

I often think the only Rails developer who hasn't found ActiveRecord bloat to be an irritation and an obstacle to scaling is DHH, and although that makes his opinion on the subject even more valuable than it would normally be, he doesn't talk about it enough in my opinion. Pretty much everyone else, as far as I can tell, responds to Rails scaling issues by creating services in Sinatra and/or divorcing business modeling from persistence logic.

I want someone to challenge my prejudicial assumption here, most of all because I appear to be saying "Rails can't scale," which is BS, but also because I'm very tempted not to take this discussion seriously at all if it doesn't address this point. It's just the crucial point in my opinion. I like the whole OOP thing but to me the decision to use something like Objectify is all about scalability. That doesn't just mean performance; it also means retaining readability when you have a lot of code. Single Responsibility Principle makes code readable.

re "That's very possible," anything which has happened is as possible as possible gets.

Sorry to be that guy. This is a very cool hack.

This looks great, but the edit feature is not actually something you can't have in IRB. Both my own utility_belt gem from 2007 and another person's sketches gem from 2009 enabled the same functionality.

I think Pry is great, I wrote a little console with it recently for a simple back-end app, and the edit feature looks like your most advanced option for this kind of thing. But for the sake of accuracy, it's not actually 100% brand new functionality. A lot of people have been doing that in IRB for a long time.

"Speaking as a kid (19 y/o), we like rejecting things that are uncool. Nobody my age uses Google Plus, for example."

Come on, that doesn't prove anything. Nobody else uses Google Plus either.

"Facebook is passe because 1) it's got too many ads 2) everyone's parents are on it.

It's possible that this is just the lifecycle of social networks - they gradually get infiltrated by money and adults, and the young people move on, causing the network to stagnate and die."

I've considered Facebook a nightclub for a long time, but somebody (I think Mark Susser) said that the difference was timing, and Myspace and Friendster were simply too early. That made me pause to think, and I have to admit there may be something to it.

So my opinion these days is that there's a small chance he'll turn out to be right, and a much stronger chance that these things are nightclubs - "nobody goes there because it's too crowded" is the beginning of the end for them, and it hits all of them sooner or later.

"I'm convinced that the only people who can tell and even care about the performance difference between Path and Facebook's native apps are software developers...most people don't care"

the story you're commenting on presents evidence which contradicts what you're saying. unless you count a brief introductory paragraph, it is literally the first point they make.

the article says that the app has nearly 12K one-star reviews and an average of 2 stars, indicating that people don't like the app. the writing is not 100% clear, but it appears to be saying that the app only has a little over 21K reviews total, which means more than half of all reviews for the app are one-star reviews.

how could you possibly square this information with your belief that most people don't care? they counted the number of people who care and not only are there thousands of them, but more than 50% of the reviews are as negative as it is possible for a review to be.

seriously, dude, "people hate it" is the first point this article makes, and it does so with plenty of compelling evidence.

if you're paying attention to Apple rumors that you see anywhere other than Jon Gruber's daringfireball.com, you're just wasting time. if you do read Daring Fireball, you know press on Apple is wildly inaccurate. Gruber sometimes even runs quotes from the same people at the same publications making similar erroneous predictions over and over and over again, year after year after year.

bottom line: if an Apple rumor isn't on Daring Fireball, there's no point even paying attention to it at all.

very much agree. apart from anything else, the inspiration is so obvious that if you don't credit you're basically just asking for a fight. and if you get it in the app store he might even be in a position to hit you with a DMCA takedown. my guess is it wouldn't happen, but why take the chance when all you have to do is give credit where credit's due? it's the right thing to do anyway.

+1 because I want access to the library, because I want every app out there to buy it from you and use it, and because I think the real goal of a project like this (just like the design prototype which inspired it) is to get Apple to recognize that this is how all text should work iOS-wide.

"I have never heard of Glancee before today. Going to their announcement page tells me nothing about what exactly did, or do now, except a generic blurb about bringing people together."

I absolutely hate reading TechCrunch. This is how much I hate reading TechCrunch: I actually read Hacker News through my own customized filter site (http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/), and one of the biggest benefits is that I hard-coded a TechCrunch ban (along with several other sites I don't ever want to read).

However, I have to say, this logic is completely sound. I hit this Glancee blog link and was left wondering A) what on earth these people even do and B) why people on HN are talking about it in the first place. For once, I wish I'd seen the TechCrunch link!

"52% set aside $0 for marketing despite 91% believing that marketing is necessary for success."

pardon if I'm grumpy, but doesn't this imply that 50% of the devs contacted in the survey were not serious about being in business in the first place? if the main lesson here is "hobbyists are mostly not making money with their hobbies," it's not really such big news.

"Yeah, but he misses the next step in logical thinking which is that the changes will apply to everyone."

no he doesn't, not at all. he "misses" this step because while it might be logical over the long term for the world on average, it's irrelevant to his business.

if you've got a deal in place, based on existing expectations of the number of upvotes, and Google changes how upvotes happen, your existing deal is threatened. it's like if you agree to work for an hourly rate right before your government devalues their currency.

I believe what's happening here is he has a certain number of upvotes which he needs to obtain if his show is going to continue. for instance he might have a deal with investors, or he might just want to compete with pre-existing vidoes whose upvotes (achieved under the previous system) are already secure. Google made it harder for him to get upvotes, thus disrupting his business.

it's cool to disrupt businesses but if you set yourself up as a platform and then you disrupt businesses built on your platform, that's less cool. that's an unstable platform and a dangerous place to do business.

"While I appreciate the sentiment and agree with his point of view, his simply telling Google 'go fuck yourself' doesn't really offer an in-depth critique of why these changes [are] wrong"

what you said is literally false. here's his in-depth critique:

"I’m going to lose a crapton of potential upvotes for Tabletop, because the core of my audience is tech-savvy and may not want to “upgrade” to yet another fucking social network they don’t want or need...

Those upvotes are incredibly important to us, because we need them to earn another season of our show...

[this] will negatively affect how users can interact with us on YouTube."

translation: "we might lose the ability to do our show, because this G+ +1 button introduces friction and a sign-up process we don't expect our users will bother to complete."

"It'd be great if we had multiple review sites."

we do. if you use Google as well as Yelp, every other site on the Internet which mentions the business you are curious about effectively acts as a separate review site.

Well, between this, getting caught stealing user data, and the aggravating unpology which followed, I think if you're surprised to see Path getting negative PR, you aren't familiar with Path. It's kind of what they do.

I hate to say it, because it's nearly an ad hominem -- it is an ad hominem if you believe Mitt Romney or the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision -- but the only time I ever see that company mentioned without negativity is when their ads show up in my Twitter client.

I don't need help finding a book, and I don't appreciate your condescension.

"Worth mentioning is Yelp's long (alleged) history of using review filtering as a de facto racket to 'encourage' businesses to sign up for their paid services."

EXTREMELY worth mentioning. If you've yelped Yelp, so to speak, you know to take their recommendations with a grain of salt and then some. Caveat emptor.

While I'm on the topic, the idea of a single company managing reputation for any given space is silly beyond words. Downright moronic, even.

Reputation is an aggregation of multiple opinions. No aggregating entity can aggregate without their aggregating principle spinning the results. Yelp is notorious for a corrupt and indeed outright criminal aggregating principle -- "we'll suppress bad reviews if you pay us and good reviews if you don't" -- but the same is true for any aggregator, whether they're aggregating based on good principles or bad, because aggregation is a form of authorship. I mean look at Hacker News vs Reddit vs Digg vs Slashdot. They all aggregate, and each has a distinctive voice.

Because of this, yes, Yelp is a useful resource, but no, don't use it for a serious purchase without going on Google. If you use Google and Yelp, you're at least polling multiple sources, so you're doing something which can access the fundamental aggregating dynamic which powers reputation in the first place. A single point of failure for reputation is a contradiction in terms!