Hacker News Reader

noiblon Twits on Twitter are no help in a crisis...

How not to change mass behaviour: insult your audience in the headline, try to influence the lowest common denominator and ignore trend-setters, tell people to stop doing something they want to do without providing an alternative.

People who want to talk vacantly about an unfolding event will do so, and will not read articles like this. If social media adepts see a signal:noise problem, they know how to create new channels. That's the whole point of the internet.

noiblon AOL Asks Us If We Can Tone It Down

"We never told..." "We would never force..." Much stronger language than Tsotsis used, most of whose post didn't even talk about Moviefone. Protesting too much.

Also, I'd love to know how the presence on staff of someone whose job it is to relay concerns from PR agents to journalists from a separate publication "is just one means we have of ensuring editorial integrity on Moviefone".

noiblon Internet Explorer 9 launches tonight, we've got your early look

It looks a bit wrong but it's an effective use of space (creating emphasis and a comfortable click zone while also conserving real estate).

noiblon Internet Explorer 9 launches tonight, we've got your early look

Because it's the stable release, not beta.

noiblon Internet Explorer 9 launches tonight, we've got your early look

> No other operating system manufacturer (outside of the embedded realm) does anything near what Microsoft does for XP.

Who are you including in that category apart from Apple? Compatibility with 30-year-old OS features is often considered a worthwhile goal among current UNIX descendants.

> I see very few people complaining that Apple killed the PowerPC line, and XP far predates that.

Is WinXP compatible with x86 and x86-64? Is Win7 not compatible with those? I don't see what point you're making by mentioning CPU architectures. And the 'universal binary' made this switch largely transparent to owners of either CPU.

> many people hold the misapprehension that XP is 'good enough' in some sense

Leaving aside the accuracy of this, surely if it is a misapprehension then it should cause problems only for those people. Instead Microsoft have made it clear that it's a problem for their own profit growth and that those users need to be coerced into upgrading.

But even that's being done in a half-assed way that makes it more of a problem for web developers. Which other Microsoft titles are being developed to be XP-incompatible? Certainly not Office 2010. Aside: backwards compatibility was largely maintained under Mac OS Classic from 1984 to 2001. The break, coming with OS X, was necessary, not contrived.

noiblon Internet Explorer 9 launches tonight, we've got your early look

That apparently kills both birds.[1] Thanks for the link. :)

[1] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/IEBlog/2011/Feb/uellr-imag...

noiblon Internet Explorer 9 launches tonight, we've got your early look

Is it possible to move the tabs onto their own line? I rarely browse with fewer than 10 tabs open so having them share space with the address bar and buttons would be pretty awkward. Likewise, long addresses are obscured by the fixed width of the 'one box' even when all the space to the right is vacant. Can that be resized?

I would like to be able to just try it out instead of asking basic questions but first I would have to make a Windows 7 VM etc. etc.

noiblon 4chan founder: Mark Zuckerberg is “totally wrong” about online identity

Only one of those people is making moral judgements against people who use pseudonyms ("an example of a lack of integrity") and making phenomenal amounts of money out of marginalising the practice.

noiblon Google to Launch Major New Social Network Called Circles, Possibly Today

Lots of things have had a lot of resources thrown at them only to utterly fail to make an impact on the world. I'm sure that internally, Google keenly appreciates this fact. So although I knew about Brin's commitment to this area I'm still left wondering what the recruitment strategy is going to be, given that it needs to win FB users and not just everybody else. And more troublingly, why RWW is so gung ho about it.

noiblon Google to Launch Major New Social Network Called Circles, Possibly Today

Surely 'major' is premature?

Downvotes.. interesting. What I mean is that I'm not sure what is going to make it 'major' within the near future. They tried converting the Gmail userbase once before.

noiblon The strange story of etherpad

Google Wave wants me to live inside it: it's presumptuous. Etherpad is a tool I grab when I want, and put down when I'm done.

Right. Real-time remote collaboration is novel enough to be able to say that not only interfaces need to be developed for it but also behaviours, etiquette, metaphors -- culture. You could see this with Wave. They were so desperate to hold peoples' attention that they came up with all these new and slightly silly words to help people conceptualise what it was they were suddenly able to 'do'. Too much. Too soon. Too not-for-you-to-determine.

Meanwhile an idea that anyone on the street can easily formulate (shared text editing) is still not widely available in a usable form. It's like promoting the Twitter API and ushering everyone into a new world where everything is a tweet and a tweet is everything, before you have a working tool for personal subscription-based SMS distribution. All these other 'features'... they're not. They're proposed desirable activities. Whether or not they're actually desirable is a cultural development, not a software development. Until people begin to take living, multi-author, simple documents for granted on a large scale, it's really too soon to say if it's a good thing that Bob can embed a sudoku game in the agenda draft or whether a poll and comment thread is a good way to decide where to have coffee or just a bit weird actually.

noiblon I'm Tired of Unhappy People

Saying 'unhappiness is a choice' is a bit like saying 'poverty is a choice' in that the only point of saying it is to rationalise distancing yourself from it. If you feel that unhappiness is like a contagious disease and that you sometimes get infected by it, two conclusions follow: the 'choice' thesis can't be that strong, and it's entirely unnecessary to blame others for the effect it's having on you.

noiblon How HackerNews ruined my morning

The gentlemen market is also terribly, terribly underserved.

noiblon Visualization: Movies Are Getting Worse

I think Moki.TV just redefined 'polarizing'. If you look at the individual bar graphs for each movie (especially the ones on the top right of the main graph), the voting distribution is actually very even ('square' or 'sloped' looking). For the data to be truly polarised you would expect the graph to be U-shaped: lots of 5s and lots of 1s and little in between.

What this data shows is that lots of people are giving these films a chance (and paying money to do so) who aren't really that engaged with the genre, or niche. That's a big validation of the studios' design strategy for the films.

An illustrative example I can think of that isn't in the top 20 is District 9: a very familiar 'niche-y' core genre, a fairly predictable plotline, but with enough influences from other genres to keep a diverse audience interested. The Dark Knight would probably be another.

noiblon The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

To clarify: I know there are federal investigative police (but not as powerful as the FBI, right?) so I deliberately used the verb, meaning enforcement. I didn't know there were federal riot police though.

noiblon The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

Believe it or not, Germany is also a federal republic with distinct regional differences. Germany doesn't even have federal policing.

noiblon Interview with Richard Stallman

'These movements' have nothing to do with protest. They change the world by providing (or at the very least, opening the door to) better user experiences over the long term. (See: Darwin, LLVM, WebKit.)

The vast majority of criticisms like this one are based on short term concerns related to a given state-of-play in the market. Concerns like the ones that killed Linux stone dead back in the '90s, web standards in the mid-2000s, and *ndroid.

noiblon Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

As he admits, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement." A comparison of the two is apples-to-oranges.

noiblon Don't waste your time by cd-ing in the terminal

I was just at the point of making a bunch of aliases for some long paths, to save my tab key from daily abuse. This is way more elegant. Thanks.

noiblon Modern Browsers Ship

They didn't get in trouble for making a browser. They got in trouble for making it impossible to completely switch to a different browser under Windows. There was absolutely no external influence stopping Microsoft from continuing to develop IE as a standalone product. So yes, it was for that first reason.

noiblon Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff

I don't want to go off on a tangent but I think it's a relevant point that the overall usefulness of both technologies is strongly related to having diverse implementations. I'm not saying hype is the issue but rather the trying to get cooperation from the industry and competitors when the feasibility of the project isn't entirely proven.

noiblon Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff

Yes, it's 'spectacular' to you and I. I meant in the broader sense of spectacle, the sense in which people on the street want to try it out because it's like nothing they've ever seen before. And that is possible with NaCl if expectations are properly managed.

noiblon Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff

There are a couple of companies you could be talking about. If you mean Apple and their development of the KHTML engine into something that has been embedded in lots of other software with hugely beneficial effects for the web, then yes, good precedent. If you mean Microsoft and the distribution of Silverlight, the connection is somewhat more tenuous because Silverlight is a solution in search of a problem.

Note the distinctions: open source, platform agnostic, solves a real problem.

noiblon Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff

Just like Wave, NaCl is an inspiring but highly technical innovation that Google started trying to attract community interest in while it was still on the drawing board. Mozilla and others have already turned their noses up at it. What Google needs to do is finish the thing quietly, build something spectacular with it, get lots of people using it, and then casually slip into the conversation that other browsers are welcome to use it.. if, you know, they want to.. (then shrug nonchalently).

noiblon ChunkHost is giving away free VPS hosting

'New signups have a 60 day money back guarantee, no questions asked!' ...so, 8 weeks. :)

noiblon Nissan Leaf

If by 'we' you mean Nissan, well... great.

Counterexample: http://blog.phono.com/2011/02/17/how-to-build-a-voip-based-b... (browser-based VOIP, Flash under the hood)

Bizarrely, Chrome has support for speech input on text-based forms which translates microphone input to text on their servers, but it doesn't expose direct access to the audio. Argh!

noiblon Google IPO? No Thanks (2004)

That argument didn't make a lot of sense then either. The specific algorithms that Google had patented gave it a runaway lead in implementing the kind of index that we now recognise as a crucial element of relevance. Anyone with knowledge of the domain could see that this was a revolution.

Even odder is that there's no mention in the piece about the long-raging battle with Yahoo over the Overture ad-bidding IP, a huge achilles heel for Google at the time which somehow just melted away 10 days before the IPO (but 4 months after this article).

noiblon Google IPO? No Thanks (2004)

If you look at what they actually have in AdWords, it's not easy to see how it could be seriously disrupted. You're right that Google's real monopoly is not on search but on their immense network of advertisers and content sites, which has economies of scale built in that benefit everyone involved. Simply by being the biggest, Google's network is the best. The only thing that has come close to challenging that is the walled garden of Facebook, because of its unprecedented scale. Now Facebook surely has some growing left to do but even they would still need to pretty much cannibalise over half of the web's pageviews to have a shot at usurping Google's ad network.

Compare Microsoft, whose monopoly positions are relatively brittle. As we see with IE9, if Microsoft slips to even 66% market share (that's the current US market share for Google Search[1]), they need to start thinking seriously about interoperability. An advertising monopoly is something much more fluid. I think Google would have to majorly drop the ball to get toppled in the medium term (maybe failing to respond to an extreme price challenge over several years from a large rival network, or some really catastrophic privacy blunder).

[1] http://comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/2/comSc...

noiblon So, this is about the word “so.”

The idea about assertion of logical continuity is interesting.

The rise of “so,” he said via e-mail, is “another symptom that our communication and conversational lives are chopped up and discontinuous in actual fact, but that we try in several ways to sew them together in order to create a continuous experience.”

I hear it a lot in radio interviews, like..

A: And it was around that time that you discovered that 8 is greater than 7?

B: So, next we started looking into relationships between single digit numbers, which...

It's like a disguised sense of alarm that the partner in the dialogue may have ruptured the narrative (which is what interviewers are paid to do, politely) and that continuity needs to be reasserted. It's necessary with technical subjects where if you don't introduce concepts in careful sequence then the meaning completely breaks down.

noiblon How does this not exist yet? "Email Setup Guide" as a service.

Gmail's setup guide is pretty good too: http://goo.gl/IIMgg

And yet yesterday I had someone call me up after I provisioned them with a Google Apps account and the link above (Google Apps's Settings screen links to the IMAP version of it). They thought they had to set up a Gmail account first because all the screenshots show 'username@gmail.com' instead of 'username@myappsdomain.com'. The screens were also alien to them because they showed a different OS version.

This is definitely fixable. I like the idea.