irrelative

FWIW, I'd argue they nailed putting both Blu-Ray and HDDVD on there.

Sure, that economic theory doesn't take into account jobs with the same qualifications. But why should it? When assembly line production began being automated by robotics, I'm sure there were stories about how the riveters and welders would never be able to work again. We're still better off because of that automation though - goods can be produced more efficiently and at higher quality.

We can't predict the future, but every previous disruptive technological innovation has resulted in society being richer. It would be quite the shock if the result of the most recent one somehow left us poorer -- something really worth reporting on -- but I don't believe it.

It's certainly true that the job market is going crazy in silicon valley, but the complaints in this article go against some pretty fundamental economic principles - namely that more efficient use of capital results in unemployment.

Disruptive technology often results in unemployment in the short term because it cleans up inefficiencies -- look at the industrial revolution. I think it's fair to say we're richer as a society because we can automate production of goods. Yes, it put a lot of craftsmen out of work, but it was a hugely beneficial change.

And so these days we have itunes putting record stores out of business. And amazon shutting down book stores. There's plenty of nostalgia for these establishments, but the things that have replaced them electronically give us incredibly better selection at less of a cost.

Early adopters are generally the least loyal of any customer. They are much more likely to take a risk on new technology and give it a shot.

Indeed it is not dependent on tornado, but it does use the tornado event loop in this example.

Why the quotes around "donates"? This doesn't seem like a white elephant, or a trojan horse. It's commendable that they gave it up rather than let it rot.

Obviously this isn't meant to be taken seriously, but you could never buy a company for it's market cap. Shareholders wouldn't agree to an acquisition where they make exactly what they have now.

Also, you couldn't just buy up a ton of shares of stock either with the whole supply-demand curve of shares. If you buy 1% of Apple's shares, the share prices isn't going to just hover around the original price.

This sort of data would be beter visualized using line graphs (or sparklines) to easily compare the values. Vertical alignments of data make it easier to compare other values and scan visually.

This is sweet.

Thanks, I appreciate feedback. Looks good to me too, so I'll put that up later today.

Hmm, not yet. Good idea though, I'll see how I can track that better.

More to the point, even if it were "pure css", there's nothing pure about it. Perhaps "only css" makes more sense, but CSS was meant as a way to separate style from content.

Try viewing this page without style and let me know what inherit content is present.

Wow, just terrific. This is the reason I posted my link here. Thanks notahacker!

Thanks for the feedback, good points. Let me know if there are any design cues that would make the data easier to digest.

Yes, the active tabs are a little weird -- they literally match the URL that you've gone to, and should be more forgiving. Thanks for pointing it out.

Great feedback -- I really appreciate it. Will work on fixing some of these soon.

Thanks. Glad that seemed good -- let me know if there's any sort of data that would be interesting to add.

I started to think that it's part of the internet age of journalism, but quickly realized I was just being naïve. The sensationalism of headlines is as old as the headline.

You're completely right. This is the difference between releasing framework code, and releasing code that works for your application. Just because your internal code is extendable and clean doesn't make it worth using by other people. That just makes it good code.

I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade -- I think it's great that the author has released this, and he admits that it's scratching an itch for himself. This just shouldn't be considered a python ORM solution, but rather an python ORM for SQLite that works for the cases the author designed.

Exactly. As a businesses, they aren't trying to optimize viewers but profits.

Sadly this interface reminds me of the parody video as created by The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary...

I'm not questioning the validity of the data point, but why would RDBMS have a cost of 10 times per unit of storage? I haven't heard this reasoning before. Anyone know where this comes from?

Source code theft... right. Tech journalists need to stop referring to source code as the "secret ingredient" or what have you. What could possibly be in the code? A faster algorithm than hundreds of PhDs have discovered? Or a novel approach to something (which of course would be covered by patents)? Maybe Oracle has discovered a new system call in windows that speeds up their file seek time, but for some reason isn't documented by Microsoft.

The whole notion of stealing code being worth anything is laughable. What do you do if you have stolen code and you need to extend it? Or if you need to fix bugs in it? If your engineers are any good, it'll take more time for them to figure out how the stolen stuff works than to build a comparable version.

Seconded. Using distributed RCS, you commit often and therefore have a pretty good log of your daily activities.

Indeed. Old school advertising was sort of like a mystery box. What do you think's inside? It could be ANYTHING!

Sort of like the maxim "Half my advertising works, I just don't know which half." Well, Google let you measure which half, and improve on the other.

Also, decry made up statistics in the post, but then claim to define new trends by using a sample size of 1.

As a UI developer with about 5 years of experience, that seems about right to me. I think I could have written that app given about 8 months. Heck, I suspect that the page turning animation was a relatively small part of the development.

I don't consider myself a fantastic developer either. I'd be suspicious of any developer with a few years experience who couldn't write an application like that given the right amount of time and motivation.

This isn't to belittle your comment, just that I'm thinking to myself "yeah, that sound correct".

I think it's a little harsh to say that I "completely missed the point" of this article. I get it -- Apple products are very polished and carefully designed and the Android lacks that polish but is feature rich. Is that an accurate description, or did I completely miss something else?

Marco is a developer with some very successful products, and I really respect his work. I feel that makes him influential in the hacker community and this post did make it rather high on HN. However, respecting Apple's products has gone too far when I can barely tell it from a PR piece. I don't know what it is, but it's not news.

I really don't want to begin discussing regular Joe's desktop experience -- summarizing people into 2 camps trivializes the actual wants and needs of a computer user. What I can tell you is that on a site devoted to hacker news, this post seems like 'dog bites man' with an easy shot at a strawman.

I don't mean this to be a biting criticism. As a developer, I just wish that I had started using linux earlier because I would have learned a lot more and it would be more second nature. Out there, someone 10 years younger than me is being turned off from using linux on the desktop because of posts like this, and that's a shame.

The hatred of linux on the desktop is terribly cliche, especially on a site targeted towards hackers. Linux on my desktop is the greatest development environment I've ever used, having played extensively with OSX and Windows as well. I can easily install new libraries and "apt-get source" allows me to tinker with existing software easily and immediately build and execute the results. All of the development environment is thoroughly documented.

But now, some influential people start saying how much better their version is. Specifically their closed, sealed-off, experience-driven version. Arguing "ease of use" and "shiny end user experience" rings really hollow to me. I use vim -- think I care about easy to use or shiny user experiences? -- and I use it because it's a powerful tool for its job. I just don't get it when hackers start telling other hackers that they should use a more restrictive environment because it'll make them feel better or is easier to use. Instead, ask yourself: is it the most powerful tool for the job?

So sure, tell your parents and siblings to buy an iPhone. Hell, use your iPhone for anything you can -- it's a fantastic device. But stop telling future developers that it's worth giving up control for rounded corners and subtle shadows. And stop comparing its competition negatively to an environment that I, and others, find superior to any other.

I think this is mostly free publicity to acquire other talent. Engineers like to work with other good engineers. For instance, I'd love to work with Joe Hewitt and Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. Firebug, gmail and tornado.py (respectively) are great pieces of software produced by very talented engineers.

Given microsoft's history of browser releases, I'd prefer an out-of-date implementation that js libraries can wrap to a wait-and-see approach. It would be better than nothing -- websockets solve an important and annoying problem.