rubergly

There's a very big difference between A) being the only person in, with the ability to invite any of your friends in and B) everyone else already being in. Even if you could invite all your friends in, the only motivation for them to accept and actually join is you (not an entire network yet, until they all accept) which is never going to be enough motivation.

With two-factor authentication, what happens if your phone (with Gmail logged in) is stolen?

The only MacBook Pro it is at all fair to compare the Chromebook to is the $1200 one.

Does anyone know of any good books for people that are proficient with Python and want to learn more about the language and come closer to being an expert?

The idea of LPTHW has always seemed cool, but I've looked at the table of contents a couple of times and thought "huh, 80% of these topics seem trivial to me"; maybe I could still benefit by skimming through and reading anything that I don't already know. Also, it's kind of a bummer that there's no .mobi version.

Too bad the same behavior happens anyway because of recognizable names.

Can you elaborate on why penalizing an application when someone hides content is a ridiculous measure of spamminess? It seems like a perfectly fine measure to me, noting that nothing about hiding content based on the percentage of users that hide it implies that it's actually the actions of a few impacting the experience of many.

I agree with most of your criticism, but I think the point they were trying to get across with the "these sizes, when used together, look pleasing to the eye" was that that particular fixed set of sizes was chosen because it looked better than any other fixed set of sizes.

I go to a small liberal arts college, so our CS department is rather lacking in course breadth (although that is made up in 1-1 interaction), and so I haven't been privileged with being able to take classes on web technologies. Are you saying that all courses on things that aren't web-based are bogged down with useless crap?

I would be extremely disappointed and disheartened if it's Zynga.

I just started using Pinboard a couple days ago (mostly because of integration with Instapaper), and so far it looks great. The fact that, even with all this chaos going on, the main functionality of the service is still up and running is really great.

If I recall correctly, Marco prefaced any advice he gave with "speak to a real lawyer if you're actually in the situation, and don't act solely on this discussion," though maybe I'm superimposing that after the fact.

I'm fairly sure you're not alone, but that you're definitely in the minority. So the options are: make the experience significantly better for the majority of users and annoy the minority of users like yourself; or make the experience slightly less annoying for the minority of users (who could have just added the site to a cookie clearing list) and weaken the experience for the majority of users.

In the site's current form, I think the fact that a viewer of any age can watch a history video is actually a bit problematic.

For mathematics, all of the material is broken down into the very basic components, so it's easy for a video to have a set of prerequisites which any viewer should understand before watching (with a set of links to the videos corresponding to those prerequisites).

For a subject like history, the material can't easily be broken down. As the article points out, a statement like "as you can imagine, Japan did not produce a lot of its own oil" may be common sense to someone of high-school age, but an 8-year old may have no understanding of how oil is produced or where it comes for and the statement may make no sense. This doesn't render KA as dangerous or useless, just points out a problem which needs to be solved and which they are certainly aware of :).

If they skip over something like Jim Crowe laws and someone notices, then that someone can mention it to Sal, explain why (s)he thinks it's important, and then Sal (or another instructor in the future) can make a video, and it can easily be incorporated into the curriculum. This process is much easier than it would be to incorporate it into a textbook, curriculum, etc.

I had a very hard time taking the article seriously after reading "penii". I hate when people try to sound smart by incorrectly pluralizing this word.

I don't think the claim is that no book can survive any hostile reading, but that you can always approach a book with enough hostility to ruin it.

I don't agree with Marco's logic here, but I'm glad that he acknowledges that most people won't remember to go review an app. I think the best solution is to prompt users who consistently use the app for some long time period (30 days, maybe?). I agree that apps that ask for a review as soon as or soon after you load them the first or second time are extremely annoying ("I haven't even gotten to use this, how am I supposed to know what to say about it?!"), but I don't think there's anything intrinsic about a dialog box that makes it annoying if it's timed well. I often enjoy when an app asks me to review it after using it consistently a couple of times, and it _improves_ my conception of the app. Anyway, here are the two main points I disagree with:

I think he's greatly exaggerating the hassle of a single dialog box appearing when someone loads Instapaper. The quote he opens with describes leaving a review prompted by one of these dialog boxes as interrupting your flow; it really doesn't. If you don't want to review the app, then you hit "no thanks," and that's it; if you want to review the app, but need to use the app right now, then you hit "remind me later"; if you want to review the app, and this happens to be a convenient time for you, then you hit "review." Sure, this is annoying if you're perpetually hitting the "remind me later," but that means that user really wants to review the app but doesn't have time; if they want to review the app that much, then they probably find it a feature to be reminded! At the very least, perpetually seeing the dialog could make them no longer want to review the app, but I don't think it would hurt their image of the app as a whole at all. And if you don't want to review the app, which is probably a large portion of users, then you hit "no thanks," and that's the end of it; is that really that inconvenient? A one-time dialog box that's easily dismissed? This reminds me of when I worked on a team last summer rewriting https://weather.torproject.org/, and we spent hours discussing/arguing amongst ourselves and with members of the Tor project whether it was okay to send one email to Tor router operators describing Tor Weather or if router operators would be annoyed by the spam. It was my personal opinion that this was a very silly waste of time, since very few people would see one useful email targeted at a specific group of people as spam. Things start to look like spam when they reappear or show up in your inbox when you have no interest in it. If you're a Tor router operator, you'd probably like to know about a service that tracks the status of your router. I digress, because Tor users (especially users interested enough to run their own routers) seemed to be particularly sensitive to receiving spam, so our decision to not email the list of operators describing the service for the most part made sense given the audience. The point is: are owners of an iPhone or iPad on average going to be that annoyed by a single dialog if they don't want to see it? If they do want to see it, they find it useful; if they don't, they close it. Is closing a single dialog box that painful? Really? Also, when you start to describe your app as a great product, you have to start comparing it to other apps that your audience uses. Say all their other apps use dialog boxes to prompt for reviews. Are they really going to think of Instapaper as that much better and solid of an app because it's the one app that didn't ask for a review? I agree that it does seem classier, in theory, to not beg your users for a review, but does any end user who doesn't read Marco's blog ever get that impression? I certainly didn't until I read this post. I use Instapaper a ton, and I love it. But I never realized it didn't ask for a review. I only notice when I'm asked for a review, not when I'm not. So many apps ask for reviews now that expecting your users to remember which apps haven't asked for reviews is basically idiotic to expect of anyone.

Not everyone who buys his app searches for the app by name because they heard the app was so great and is going to buy it without question. Whether Marco wants to admit it or not, he does have competition in the form of ReadItLater (I don't know about in the iPad space, but at least in the iPhone space). It is completely reasonable that a user would, having heard about the two products, compare the reviews/ratings on the App Store before committing and buying one or the other. Personally, I tried both apps before deciding which one I was going to use, but I don't think most people care that much. Also, this is especially important since ReadItLater has a free version. Users who can't decide can try RIL for free, but they have to pay $5 ($2 more than RIL Pro) to even get a glimpse at Instapaper; if Instapaper's reviews aren't better than RIL's, then why would they ever do that?

> Anybody else would be sacrificing too many useful Javascript-specific tools...

What exactly do you mean by this? What is there that you can do in Javascript that you can't do in Coffeescript?

I don't think the point is "you won't need to learn how these work!"; rather, it's "you don't need to worry about using the normal convoluted ways of dealing with these". It's never claimed that => implies (ha, logic humor) that you don't need to know how this works, just that => helps you deal with a common annoyance found with using this.

Agreed. I hardly think that people who haven't used languages like Ruby or Coffeescript (with implicitly returning the last expression) ever forget return statements in a way where everything would be okay if they just added a "return" keyword. When I use Ruby and Coffeescript, I consciously have to think "no, I _shouldn't_ write return this time"; I find it hard to believe that, without using a language like this, anyone would just write an expression and expect it to be returned. I could see an argument that if you're returning the application of a function, but it has always seemed extremely natural to me that I think about what I'm returning when I write a function; I actually always have a little bit of trouble adjusting to writing Ruby-style return-less code.

You can argue that it's a matter of semantics whether "getting things done" implies "smart" if you start defining "done" to mean more than what most people assume from the word, but it's definitely not true that "smart" implies "getting things done" even if you start to stretch meanings. There are plenty of people who are really smart, but who do not get anything practical done.

Is this speculation or confirmed?

Yes, it pays dividends, but there's still a big asset that can never be mode liquid.

In case I wasn't clear, I meant that _Google's_ choice of browser name was confusing, given that it was an already-existing term.

I don't understand anything about the stock market, but giving someone a large portion of stock with the agreement that it can never be sold seems like the wrong thing to do when people need to spend more to bring us out of a recession.

I think you're ignoring the fact that there's much more to publishers than just printing a physical copy of a book and shipping it to shelves. There's marketing, editing, screening, etc. Think what looking for books would be like if there was no quality screening or editing and you had to wade through an online catalog of thousands of books of crap just to have the off chance of happening to see a quality book.

Am I the only one who thought this was some attack on Chrome? Whenever I hear talk about browser chrome I always think that Google's name choice was a little confusing. Probably best in the end, though, since it's a catchy name.

Agreed. Since his logic of "no one seemed to care when I removed the free version" implies that very few people who download the free app would ever buy the paid one, it seems strange that he would compare the sales directly. If the free version is only downloaded 3x as many times as the paid one, then each free user only needs to make $3.50/3 in ad revenue.

  Not only did sales increase incrementally, but nobody seemed to notice.

What does this mean? This "nobody even noticed!" attitude he expresses several times seems very ignorant to me. Sure, very few people heard that Instapaper had a free iPhone app, didn't look for it right away, then a month later searched for it, saw it wasn't in the App Store, and emailed or tweeted Marco personally asking what happened. This is the only chain of events I can see leading to a potential user giving Marco direct feedback, the lack of which is what he seemed to interpret as "nobody noticed."

If you change a bunch of road signs, but everyone from the neighborhood is on vacation and so no one sees the new configuration and exclaims "What is this?!", does that suddenly mean that new drivers won't act differently in response to the new road sign configurations? Note that assuming that somehow "everyone from the neighborhood is on vacation" is not at all an unrealistic assumption to make. People who had already downloaded the free app were golden when he removed it, so long as they didn't wipe their iPhone or upgrade. You could argue that maybe they would've thought "huh, why haven't I gotten updates in a while?" First of all, I doubt anyone thinks like that. I know I certainly don't think about updates until the App Store tells me I have 10 and I get frustrated at it; I only notice when apps require updates, not when they don't require updates. Second of all, they may have just thought the free app would be getting less updates than the paid one.

And there are countless other reasons why "no one has personally emailed me about the absence of this" is a terrible reason to conclude "nobody really cared" and especially (what I think he is implicitly getting at) "no potential future buyers of the paid app were turned off by the absence of a free app." Maybe they only cared a little and got bored once they couldn't find it in the app store, but otherwise would've been engaged by the app or (since he acknowledges that there are few converts) have been interested enough to tell friends who would eventually pay for it. Maybe, and this is _crazy_ to propose, a significant number of geeks went looking for the free app having heard a lot about Instapaper, saw there was no free app, were pissed, but didn't know or think or care to email Marco about it; maybe they thought he did it purposefully and didn't want to bug him, maybe they were intimidated, maybe they didn't know who Marco was, etc.

The latest version of the iOS app has search. Pull down when in a list of articles, and a search bar comes up.