808 karma · joined January 23, 2012
What the hell was that ? That's just an article full of bold claims "If something is physically possible then you can achieve it if you try hard enough" and self gratification.
I hate people like this who, because they have been lucky in life and because they have worked hard think they can give general lessons about life.
My gosh this article was obnoxious.
Two things:
The biggest threats are probably coming from private companies and private initiatives such as Google, Facebook because of the extent of the data they gather about you. The most worrying part about these kind of threats is that they can be kept secret and can be passed by just one manager.
These bills are backed up or even pushed by the companies mentioned in the previous point. It's not the result of some crazy politician trying to restrain your freedom on the internet but these bills are very often the result of lobbying. It's because the government is not implicated enough in the internet that this happens. Private interest with (relative) little efforts can go in this breach and push for legislation because the politicians are very mildly interested and think it's not a big deal.
If you want to win this war, it's really necessary to identify the real threats and enemies without any knee jerk reaction of typical internet crowds.
The only satisfying part is that everybody takes a good taste of their own medicine, Apple included.
* If you call yourself a hacker you are very likely not a hacker. If you are convinced that you are a hacker without saying it there is also a strong probability that you're nothing more than a wannabe hacker.
* I couldn't stress more ethics. The term hacker has been watered down to a point where it's impossible to relate it to the mentality of the first hackers. Here is a very small world but the way I see self proclaimed hackers on HN is a bunch of people who want to build something to make money. They don't care about ethics, about privacy, about their users. It's totally contrary to the ethics of old-school hackers.
Anyway I am not a hacker and I'm happy not be one, and wanting to be one is pretty laughable, you're just called a hacker by your peers, the rest is a pride problem.
I am under the impression that the advent of a globalized internet culture has fostered the nostalgic phenomenon. If you are a regular reader of any social websites where people can publish content you can see the extent of this among people from "Generation Y": clothes, old games ( Prince of Persia on Apple 2 anyone ?), actors, movies, music, etc... It doesn't even have to be good, it will be put on a pedestal anyway.
What enables us today is that these old things which use to be forgotten by previous generations can now be accessed at will: old videos are put on Youtube, old pictures are backed up everywhere, memories are slowly becoming immortal.
I am absolutely not a nostalgic person myself so I don't feel the impulsive to think about oldies but I think it's a very interesting thing to analyze, maybe it's even a bit worrying: Could these fond memories hold us back?
I get really mad at share buttons because there's no way to know beforehand if you are going to get to a page filled with those.
From observation I came to a simple law about these share buttons: the amount of content is inversely proportional to the number of share buttons on the page.
I don't mean that people willingly steal the money / promise impossible things but the very nature of Kickstarter pushes you to do that. Think about an election, what's the biggest problem of politicians nowadays and why people are very angry at them ? Answer: broken promises. Because you need to attract votes you will need to make strong, nearly impossible claims in order to be seen, no matter if they are truthful or not. That's one of the weakness of a democratic election. If you transpose that to Kickstarter people have to "editorialize" their propositions and product features because they need to be seen. A funding pledge is like a vote and will very likely create the same dynamic as in an democratic elective system.
I don't buy the Kickstarter Kool Aid from a consumer point of view, because I think there is a lot of deceptions ahead and it has a "mob-like" mentality that typically develops around websites like Reddit or Hacker News (and you can see here just how strong kickstarter resonates in minds with a post every other day). From a developer point of view that's way better because you can fund your projects on (almost) thin air, however I can foresee that honest developers that will try to follow their claims will have a hard time completing their projects.
The benefit of funding via VC or other non-democratic mean is you have HARD deadlines, business plans, your money is on the table, it's not just an idea thrown in the air which you hope the wind will catch. I strongly believe that product innovation and creation will remain an aristocratic process.
I would be delighted if somebody can prove me wrong!
If you look at very CSS-heavy website around + JavaScript it brings to its knees my poor old computer (it's ridiculous, it's only 2 years old), it feels bulky and laggy, prevent me from copying sometimes even looking at things...
Doing complicated things with heavy CSS animation is (relatively) easy, but bringing to end users a simple yet elegant and useful design should be a webdesigner's job, not these hacky-scrolling features, stuff that swirl around making it impossible to copy or even to look at. For your nice CSS tricks leave it as easter eggs for your most attentive visitors, they'll love the feeling of having discovered something hidden.
In CSS animations, less should be more.
Sadly this article illustrates also the hypocrisy of these claims because down below you can see "Post your comment with Disqus" and not a single alternative... Ironic isn't it ?
In the top 9 most awesome Open Source projects in the world 6 out of 9 are ruby projects. Linux or Apache projects are not in the lists. Yep, seems about right... (I am sarcastic of course)
Plus, but it may only be me, rating open source projects by "awesomeness" is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of Open Source and the contribution that everybody can bring into this world.
This read is part of the big family of "self-motivation" seminars and "find your inner strength "bullshit. I hate to break it this way but drive is something you cultivate yourself, no generic "method" will do it for you. The irony is in those lists and methodology is most of the time people are motivated to do the setup for it: buy the books, the special furnitures, plan on organizing their time and in the end, when it's supposed to start the method falls flat and you realize that you aren't changed. Slacking is still a big part of your life, losing time on the internet, looking at Facebook etc... still eats a large portion of the time you get everyday.
Oh and please can we cut down on the term "hacker" ? I know it's called hacker news but it's a bit presumptuous to name it that way for almost everything that is posted here.
I silently deleted my facebook account about two years ago because I didn't like losing my time looking at stupid stuff. I found out that falling into the Facebook time vortex was too much of an inconvenience and the only way around that was to delete Facebook. Now when I say that I don't have a Facebook people ask me what's wrong with me, if I have things to hide and plain and simple tell me that I'm some kind of social pariah...
What bugs me the most is that people are judging me before even hearing my concerns about time wasting, privacy. Facebook has become a token of having a social life.
I am not saying you all should delete your Facebook, that's a matter of personal choice but people should think about what they add to the "standards" of life. In my books Facebook should really not be in the standards.
It's a nice gesture, but... this could have been handled way before and from the messages in this thread it seems like a very common occurrence. As somebody who wanted to use your services in the future that thread totally changed my vision of Adsense and I am exploring other companies for ads.
We need you guys at Adsense to fix the problem after it happens, of course, but also beforehand because holding money for too long can kill a business.
Thanks
I know people like these kind of studies, perhaps it conveys the feeling that "after me there won't be anything" and that we are the last generation but it's simply to complex to model. People have been saying the same things for generation and so far, so good (with some exceptions of course).
I am not saying that it's not going to happen, just that you have to be very careful with prediction such as these, take them as "work of fiction". Also don't forget a possible bias. Apocalyptic vision have always fascinated populations and men around the world but how many have happened?
On the other hand, Chicago business is full of bugs. Ghostery block 13 (!) calls to different websites such as: Quantcast, 24/7 real media, Outbrain etc... I won't visit this website again. I wish I was warned of that before hand not when I go to the website, I value my privacy more than going there.
How will AWS/RackSpace/SaaS software handle legacy data/ code in, let's say 10 years? I have no answer to that question and I bet few people have it but time is a tough mistress for computer software and data. The good thing when your data is not in the Cloud, especially when you don't control the inner mechanics of a database like SimpleDB is that you can migrate, change it the way you want at the moment you want. When you have no control over your data, well bad things could happen in the future.
Be smart, be patient.
I respect you point of view but... it won't hold for high level education. Let me explain why:
* I just wish people could forget the idea that Math is fun. It is not. It's interesting, but it's not fun and can be totally counter intuitive, thus there is no "fun" way to demonstrate it. You are mentioning about Geometry but the geometry you are talking about is a very very very tiny subset of what geometry is at a higher level. It's not an topic from Geometry but for example how do you demonstrate that the ensemble of invertible matrix is dense in the set of R(n,n) matrix in a visual manner? These concepts are so abstract that they become too hard to demonstrate. Achilles tendon of most american students I have known and I have worked with is that they are extremely dependent of a representation of what they are dealing with and they struggle with very abstract concept while in the Russian/ French/ Chinese education teachers teach very early to student to manipulate abstract objects (4-D vectors, advanced algebra etc... are often seen in high school).
* The "get less point if you hand back the report late" is actually a good thing for your students. Read one of the Dan Ariely book that showed that this pace helps students study and in the end they end up having better marks. That's the sad human psychology.
* For the theorem you need to learn to be a programmer I agree, you don't need them to be a decent coder. However... there's a say among lawyers: "A good lawyer knows the law, an excellent lawyer knows the judge". If you want to be a great programmer sometimes tools at your disposal fall short and... it's your turn to create. This is the moment where theorems become really important and a great programmer will know how to leverage them whereas a decent programmer will fall short. "A good programmer knows the tools, an excellent programmer knows the theorems" !
I was hoping the compiler inside everybody's brain would be able to detect this minor inefficiencies and correct them on the fly. And yes, I was using Python2.7, I wanted to use 3.0 but the sexist libraries haven't been updated. (Just joking).
But thanks for pointing that out!
As for the effects, I personally don't have the answer either, even if I try to draft possible outcomes (in another comment in this thread taking the finnish school example). From what I have read in the tech crunch article the encouragement had a weird effect in the Y Combinator selection: they may have managed to introduce "femininity" in tech but not "women". As somebody pointed out in another comment none of the women are technical founders...
But thanks for staying open minded, I believe that's how solutions are found: everybody listen to each other and a better understanding begin to take shape after a while, hopefully my indigenous perspective will help :).
Well as a matter of fact I really answered rationally... Well at least I hope I did. If you want to read my real motivation, beyond the immediate answer here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3779310
I am French, and I tell you what, I'd just HATE an article that would say "Some French that are really good in tech.". I want to be integrated in the society, I want people to simply ignore my country of origin, I'm not ashamed it's just not relevant to the fact that I am an engineer or an entrepreneur, just as being a women, black, chinese or anything different than white american male!
I believe it's part of a broader problem in the US. I come from another culture in Europe and that puts me in a position where I am able to analyze things from very close but still with a great deal of distance. Also forgive me for my english mistakes it is hard to develop long thoughts in a language which is not your mother language!
In the US there is a culture of the celebration of differences. It's true at every level in every aspect of the organization of the society here (I live in the US). I can take a very simple example: schools. In the US the "different" students which happen to be defined by the school administrations as the smartest students have it very easy: they are put aside from the rest, put in special classes, get incredible scholarship. The "normal"(again, by the definition of the administration) students are ignored.
Now take the example of the Finnish schools. In these schools the rule is: everybody should be at the same level: equal. [http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...]. They have no standardized test to set the "normal" and "different" kids apart, they are very little homework.
Guess what happens next ? US pupils are just killed in the tests and Finnish students are far ahead.
This example can be extended to the case of women and to many more. By celebrating the excellence of some you only reinforce the sexism because of very complex externalities, that are not fully understood from the point of view of social sciences. I truly believe that creating role models is a curse, not a cure for the problem of women absence in technologies. This subject would merit a bigger post than mine but that's my thoughts put simply.
Sorry for the digression, thank you if you read until here :).
How is this fair? Doesn't it qualify as "sexism"? You know the thing that was heavily debated on HN in the last weeks when some people were treated based on their gender? "I mean these people are put forward because they are %s, and if they were not %s they would not even qualify to a full page article. Based on that story %s seem to have an easier time because of their gender" % ( "women", "women", "women"). Sorry for the Pythonic syntax but if you saw "men" instead of "women" you'd have totally different stories and the big S word: sexism.
Plus, the ideas might be good for business but it's very very "girly". If I were a girl I would certainly feel kind of weird that out of the 4 ideas 1 is directed towards women, 2 are directly relevant to "standard" feminine tastes: clothing. Also the journalist is a woman... I want to see women promising us Big Data analysis or the new portal around cars, not some stuff that reinforce stereotypes!
I am sorry but I will say that sexism is gone when EVERY trace of it will have disappeared, and there won't be any "X women that succeed and they are awesome" but the title will be "Z ideas that will help you buy clothes" with guys and girls in the same article.
Good luck anyway.
Net neutrality is the safeguard of many things but for entrepreneurs it guarantees they get the same treatment as big companies. In other words what matters most is the quality of your product and not the ties you have with ISP.
It works and guarantee pretty much the same thing as the antitrust laws. Fair competition is a huge source of wealth but requires constant care.
My leitmotif is always: Think about the [negative] externalities!
First I don't see how it's relevant to Hacker News in any way.
Second, it should be established that quoting Twitter postings is the lowest level of journalism possible for one reason: a twitter posting caries very little to no information. There are racist people are everywhere and I am pretty sure they were pissed when they put Will Smith in I Am Legend: So What ? Is it worthy to report that?
Just a tiny point ... About the drawing of the triceratops, he has very mmmmm.... "developed" crotch area. Once you've seen it it's hard to not think about it every time. It's just a little detail but it's a little bit weird!
Good luck !
But seriously thank you for saying what other women in the office where I have been working in the past have said: there is generally no problem. I don't know where the people I have read were working, but seriously, if it's that horrible, switch jobs.
And about the thing getting out of hand, this is the internet, people circle jerk problems ad nauseum, and Hacker News is not an exception.
Sexism is a subset of stupidity and a great deal of the latter is shown here.