jwecker

Keep in mind also that Orson has written several books for writers and does a ton of workshops etc. For sci-fi he's a pretty prolific (and good imo) writing teacher. In his response he was specifically targeting literary concepts that he teaches and has written about while trying to dilute some of the ad-homonim attacks that were apparently exploding for the book at the time.

s/G8 agenda/Nicolas Sarkozy/

Not disagreeing with your overall point, but being married to a Google executive is hardly loosely linked or a huge difference from an investment. A company employing your spouse may have far more direct influence on their standard-of-living and social constraints than an investment would.

WRT selling you on centralized VCS after you've switched to and enjoy DVCS:

That was my immediate reaction, but I realized that there is a third thing. In a way, a git-like DVCS in most workflows still retains some of its 'centralized' state - that is, some repositories are the only repositories with certain branches etc. and often there is a specific repository on a server that has all branches "that matter" (such as a github account). As mentioned, Kernel developers need this to reduce clutter/noise and establish arbitrary hierarchies (that are, in a sense, centralized).

This "third thing" is, in a way, even more decentralized than old-school CVS/SVN- in that all repositories truly become equal. I'm not saying it's better than git-style-DVCS- it's certainly not if you need an ad-hoc high branch-volume hierarchy- but I do think that it's an underdeveloped use-case that's neither centralized nor adhoc distributed that might (maybe not as Fossil per se) be very useful to many workflows.

Put another way- how often do git workflows have you push/pull from multiple remotes when you're ready to deploy (or at all)? In the vast majority of workflows that I've seen and used you generally have one authoritative remote. Something like Fossil would make it so that a push/pull to any remote is effectively the same thing.

"The lack of a 'rebase' function is considered a feature of Fossil, not a bug."

It's not as if rebase is commonly used. It's there for those rare instances when you, say, remove a file that it turns out you don't have the copyright for and need to purge it completely, or that huge binary file some newb (ok, it was me) committed a while back that's not needed and makes cloning take 10 minutes.

Fossil looks really exciting to me- I've used git a ton and like it but don't really delude myself into thinking it can't be disrupted. But, seriously, you're missing a critical feature; instead of trying to patronize your would-be future users by defensively stating that it's a "good thing and we're proud of this missing functionality"- you could simply state something along the lines of "In general we think not having the equivalent of rebase is a good thing, but should you seriously need something like it, this is opensource and we'd love for you to contribute..." etc.

[Edit: I'm referring to git-filter-branch etc. to remove those things, not the rebase command per se, but in context of the original page's "Immutable==good" argument I interchanged the two]

While the two variables may be orthogonal for an individual, in aggregate they tend to be the same thing.

To illustrate starting with the most stark case- try to imagine a comment that 0% of HN readers agree with but that 100% feel is a valuable contribution. I can't, and the reason I can't is because usually when I encounter the "valuable but disagree" situation individually, it's actually me thinking "some % of other HN readers may share this misconception, therefore it makes more sense to respond than to downvote." or "I disagree with this, but I know most HN readers won't." Or, rarely, "I disagree vehemently, and feel obligated to make that disagreement known because the 5% of readers who actually agree really need to know why it's [dangerous/silly/misguided...]"

If the poster is the only one in HN-space that agrees, no matter how "thoughtful" (i.e., verbose, in that case; possibly like the comment I'm writing now) it is, it's not important. The fact that some percentage of readers agree* or may agree is what gives it importance. In aggregate I'd suggest that the number and ratio of upvotes to downvotes would match the importance as defined by the community.

In this context I'm using the word "agree" in a sense a little broader than usual. Instead of "I take that position to be my own"- an upvote is broadened to "I can see myself taking that position as my own after further reading/thought/experiment," and finally even "This line of thinking is attractive to the kind of people I like to have in this community."

Where things get muddy is when we take that even further and say to ourselves "Some percentage of people will take that position even though I will not. Therefore it is 'important' and I will upvote it." Kudos to the altruism and social empathy, but imagine if 100% of HN readers thought this way. A position that is shared by only 5% of the community would have the same number of votes as a position shared by 90% of the community, even pithy one liners and mean-spirited ad-homimems. In a more likely equilibrium, a percentage of people will do an "importance" upvote for an item separate from their agreement with a probability roughly equal to the number of people who actually agree with the comment (So, there's a 1 in 100 chance that I'll give an "importance" upvote on an item that roughly 1 in 100 people would agree with). That would keep the proportions more or less sane and only result in general karma inflation.

Whew, hopefully showed my point- aggregate agreement _is_ relative importance- even if the individuals agreeing and upvoting are not the same people. I could go on with a parallel line of thought for disagreement, although with slightly different results (it's probably a lot less likely that one thinks "While agree with this, it's not important." or "I agree with this and it is important, but x number of people probably don't agree with it so I'd better give it a downvote to be fair...") In fact maybe, the difference between the two sides is key to the bigger questions of site quality degradation.

So, to the bigger question: possible reasons for degradation that I've thought about and seen discussed so far-

* People trying to decouple agreement from importance and therefore end up trying to channel the thoughts of others, leading to inflation and biases in all sorts of weird ways due to a social instinct that is, by itself, very positive and healthy.

* The blind leading the blind (avalanching) that pg is experimenting with solutions to now.

* Scariest of all because the fixes are more difficult: The community, in aggregate, is not as valuable/smart/insightful as it was. This compounds the problem with the first point- What happens when some percentage of people (say, greater than 10%) genuinely find "You're a dirtbag" insightful? It trumps the other two points even if they're perfectly solved. What happens when 80% of readers thoughtfully proving comments turns into 30% of readers, with the other 70% just there to "learn" and follow the lead of the 30%?

The last point is the most difficult to solve, but there are several methods- there are tweaks such as the "only posts from old members" hack pg did, the green names for greenies, etc. Then there are more frontal attacks: Doing everything you can to lift the collective thoughtfulness and intelligence, and discouraging, sometimes via use of the downvote, comments that aren't worthy of the community.

With all three happening at once, the system becomes very difficult to understand. Some suggestions:

* Let your vote reflect your degree of agreement/disagreement, AFTER giving it some serious thought. Feel free to not vote either way and to post follow-up thoughts or questions instead first.

* Refrain from voting as an emotional reaction or indiscriminately to simply feel more a part of the community.

* Try not to take downvotes or upvotes personally.

* Never pass up an opportunity to try to crystallize your own thoughts and lift the collective intelligence of the entire community by responding with care, whether expounding or disagreeing.

* Never pass up an opportunity to downvote comments that genuinely degrade the intelligence of the discussion ("frist p0st", personal attacks, almost anything that is a single line and contains no wit...)

* (more I'm sure but this post is getting way too long)

EDIT: formatting

They obviously have a deficient (missing) counter-notice mechanism. I'm not willing to perjure myself, but I would love to see what happens when several dozen politicians get have their pages mysteriously taken down. Actually, not really, now that I think about it. Seems like a pretty serious social-denial-of-service attack vector. A handful of guys working with basic anonymity tools could make vast swaths of Facebook unusable.

Wow, excellent. That's a ton of processing squeezed down to something very fast and light. I'm excited to see what kind of signal processing can come out of this.

Using a 4k minimum was just one of the possible implementation strategies. It looks like there are several ways to get it much, much lower.

Similarly, in my experience great code solves a problem that would seem very difficult in a way that seems very obvious but usually only in retrospect, or as we're reading the code. A corollary would be code that reveals some truth about the system being coded that isn't obvious except in retrospect.

... "for business applications". (and according to a low sample rate). No insights to glean here, in my opinion.

Pedantic-police: The $1-million little pile there has 10 bundles of $10,000 - that's not 1 million. (or are my eyes deceiving me?) Don't have the patience to figure out if that error is propagated to the rest...

The word waffling was too negative, and you're right. I apologize and I'll definitely keep watching. Erlang and Ruby are my two favorite languages as well, so if you do pull it off at some point, you'll have my support (:

I too have been following Reia since he started it up and... well, I'm consistently disappointed. I'm putting this out there publicly because it's come up with co-workers. In the end, he's waffled with so many language design decisions that, in my opinion at least, it's turned into a language that on one end doesn't have the true syntactical flexibility of Ruby, and on the other side has buried a lot of what is most useful in Erlang. For alternatives I would suggest Lisp Flavored Erlang http://forum.trapexit.org/viewtopic.php?p=40268 or Efene / Ifene http://www.marianoguerra.com.ar/efene/ - both of which do much better at being Erlang-(but-with-better-syntax).

Edit: This is referring to its current state only- I reserve the right to change my mind in the future (:

I can almost guarantee it's simply a split test using a cookie, as that's the standard way to experiment (using Google Website Optimizer and others). It's a common bracketing experiment.

Edit: To be clear, if it's flash cookies it could persist after browser installs but still be different per browser.

I have to agree with some of the other posters that the expectations you're butting up against are very likely complicating things drastically. "It’s so hard when I have to, and so easy when I want to." ~Annie Gottlier

The expectation to provide, the expectation to have more friends (possibly, obviously I'm reading into your comment), the expectation to follow-through with whatever you're currently doing...

Life is definitely supposed to be chaotic at this point on your journey- it's genetically built in- it allows you to do things no one has ever done before- it's a steady pull away from mediocrity. Some people let it pull them into prisons and homeless shelters, and others let it pull them into great things. What you're currently doing is basically trying to ignore it as best as you can.

It _will_ pass eventually- that pull to go out and chaotically find your own passion (note I'm not talking about being hedonistic or bumming around Europe - I'm talking about making things or doing things that you feel tap into your very best qualities and things that stretch them). Don't get to the point in your life where the drive to strike out in your own direction starts becoming silent only to think "well, why _didn't_ I?"

I've never met anyone that regretted trying to live life more fully (except for those with poor definitions of fully. Hint- if it feels wrong at a deep level it's a less fully lived life). Sooo.... Channel the urges, embrace the chaos, do something amazing. And, ironically, your family may be fine with the support you end up giving. Anyway, we're looking forward to what you can make of this.

Just posted a comment to it (: Email may have fallen into a black hole or something. Good luck!

Hey Keyframe- so, interestingly, one big difference between JTV and some of the others is we don't have a big producer-outreach department, which would normally respond to questions like these- so sorry we missed it!

You may have already invested time into getting set up w/ ustream etc.- np, but since you mentioned this in the other thread I thought I'd respond real quick (:

* There is no pricing, no cost, even if you have tens of thousands of concurrent viewers (we have several broadcasters in that category) at maximum quality.

* We have fewer ads than the others.

* We're mostly oriented around making it a social experience- this helps you because it means the viewers have ways of pulling in other viewers.

* With JTV your stream will be higher quality (measurably) than others.

Check out http://www.justin.tv/broadcast/advanced for options on getting set up- the forums tend to be pretty helpful as well. We can't really help with cameras etc. (a strategic choice)- but once you manage to get set up you'll be absolutely giving the best experience to your viewers.

Hope that helps (:

sorry, small nitpick with your methodology- try these as more realistic comparisons (still not exactly apples to apples):

http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22justin+tv%22%2C+ustream%2C...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=justin.tv%2C+ustream.tv%2C+li...

Ustream is often higher in unique views (but not always, and not currently), but Justin.tv has people stay on site almost twice as long, and has almost half the bounce rate. It certainly pumps far more video in and out (at one point at least more than even youtube, but I don't think we've measured that in a while). Livestream is a distant third. Ustream spends a lot of money projecting their image, while we just keep making sure that our product is several times better.

Ignore the age. In 10 more years you'll be 10 years older no matter what. You could be a world-class programmer and product designer at that point. Or you could be wishing you had started 10 years earlier. I seriously doubt you'll have starved to death by then unless you make some destructive life choices... I could come up with plenty of examples of people who didn't start their life's work until 33 (and much older)- but it's irrelevant- a distraction at best.

Having said that, I think we have an innate tendency to... acclimatize as we get older. We start to expect that things should come easier. You'll need to counter that if you continue this path. Expect it to be very hard- on the learning side and the self-marketing side and the delivering value to your employer or own business...- and deal with that reality instead of assuming that the difficulty is somehow related to your age or self confidence or how long it took before you got whatever degree etc. etc. Step up.

What's the mechanism that would allow a company to attract highly qualified late-comers via equity- even in the 23rd hour in order to help make the exit happen- without upsetting the fairness? (not saying this is a flaw- just would rather you spell it out since you're a math genius) (seriously, he's a math genius- I saw his CV).

I highly recommend talking to Isaac and the team over at recurly.com (you can guess his email address (: )

Even if you don't end up using them you'll get some very valuable intel.

I remember how surprised I was when a painter friend of mine pointed out that shadows on snow were blue, not gray.

Interesting, but more telling to me is the fact that Microsoft is rarely brought up in Silicon Valley (yes, I'm sure it is some places and I know they have a campus in the valley). That is, rarely brought up in terms of innovation. I don't know anyone who talks about how to get hired by Microsoft, I don't know anyone who talks about what they're releasing or what research they've done aside from fixing vulnerabilities. Occasionally I or someone will boot into Windows 7 to see if something works correctly and say "hm, doesn't look too bad. wouldn't use it for real though."

I ride caltrain into SF every morning through most of the valley. Lots of laptops on the commuter trains. Maybe 1 in 5 is running windows. To me, this is a much bigger indication that, as mixmax put, the company is past its prime.

Some great answers already here, but I'd just add this:

They don't know they want the product- np.

Are they aware of the problem that it solves? Can you make them acutely aware of the problem? (In terms of lost time, cost, etc.) And then, can you show that your solution is "morphine" for the problem? (rather than a vitamin for general well-being). And finally can you show them that (due to ease-of-use etc.) they can be relatively sure that it won't add its own set of problems?

If you can honestly do each of those steps, you're golden- get a killer sales-person and do it. If you can't honestly say yes, you have product issues to work out regardless of your instinct about it's efficacy.

Brilliant. When I opened Rotten Tomatoes I saw a picture of myself, because the site is using the Facebook personalization API... Very eerie actually- not that I'm against the technology- but just noticing it for the first time on this particular movie entry...

I admit I haven't done any research on it, but I've always assumed that it's a pretty easy problem if you're talking about relatively static content-driven pages, but I've always assumed that when it comes to highly interactive web apps it becomes very difficult or even borderline intractable. Is that true? Are you able to use a site like, say, pivotaltracker? And if not, how would you get it to work?

Meh, I was hoping for blog headlines like:

"Cuban Cigars- worth the hype?"

"Western Society - I mean, seriously"

"Now THIS is a hand-made boat you could emigrate in!"

etc...

Hmm... define dead? I see a lot of cool programming concepts and computer science coming together in Perl 6- too much for me to know how to use it effectively or rationally. To me Perl is going from terse parsing and glue language to something more like Haskell- I don't think of Haskell as dead just because it's not used as a quick scripting language- I assume Haskell will keep creating cutting edge stuff that eventually filters down into "lesser" languages.

Now, on the other hand, if I had actually taken the time to become a Perl monk, and good grasp enough of the awesome stuff coming down the line and know exactly how it would fit into real-world problems- Perl wouldn't even be close to dead to me. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that are in that group. I'm jealous but not quite enough to actually try to get up to speed on it.

If it's not dead to you then I would recommend having no hesitations using it. It'll certainly be supported, and libraries... I mean, I don't know of anything that comes close to touching CPAN yet (dunno how Perl 6 fits in there). For me, though, it's dead as an alternative unless I see something amazingly compelling that I can't get elsewhere without similar learning investment.