adgar

My new goal: come up with someone clever enough that Apple rips it off and I can ride their coattails. That's the best I can ever do, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law

Snarky comments have always existed on HN. Whether they are downvoted or upvoted is up to the community.

So the word "fanboy" is not an accurate term to describe anyone or the level of discourse about a subject?

You think that everybody on this website is engaging in rational, high-minded discourse?

It's easy to assume every mind is a willing convert. It takes a realist to understand that many minds are already made up based on bullshit and bad logic and you will never change those minds.

You're just as closed-minded as the "fanboys" I decry. Don't take the easy way out.

You seem to have misunderstood "mere accusations."

Takedowns due to "mere accusations" to me means that I can fire off an e-mail if I see a kickstarter project that looks sketchy and have it taken down post-haste.

To me, that is highly suboptimal.

> Some level of proof is still necessary, though. Not just an accusation.

Is anyone arguing that mere accusations should result in kickstarter takedowns? You make a good point... just a sort of obvious one.

This is clearly a hard problem, and neither extreme of "proof beyond reasonable doubt" or "accusation = takedown" works. Maybe that's why this space is so unexplored! That doesn't absolve Kickstarter from having to discover the palatable middle ground.

Hard work is hard, and I think today's announcements are part of that hard work. So I say: keep it up, Kickstarter!

> I'd say so, yes.

Proof beyond all reasonable doubt is a lovely standard for a criminal justice system. Note that it is not used in civil suits in America - only criminal cases.

We're not talking about taking away people's freedom here. We're talking about an investment website.

> Can we actually prove fraud in any of these cases, though?

Is this the standard we want?

If you used an investment service which said "we require proof beyond all reasonable doubt of criminal endeavors before taking down [some UGC]," how much would you trust those investments? What if the standard for takedowns was a bit higher?

If you think iOS 6 maps are in any single way an improvement over Google Maps, or anything other than a power play in general, you're pretty damn likely to be making a worthless fanboy comment.

Nope! They're just bad at their jobs.

Just look around this thread. Apologists abound. HN isn't immune to worthless fanboy comments.

Android's google maps have been better by features than iOS's google maps for a couple years now, since Google could update the Android app. Vector graphics since 2010, local integration (reviews, including zagat now), more advanced directions options, and so on.

I've got the same opinion. It's amazing how so many entrepreneurs love the idea of crowdfunding their next project. They don't see how their crazy startup idea is just another insanely risky investment alongside scammers and people who have no idea what they're doing.

Do you think that it is possible that the kickstarter model leads to press-than-sufficient sure diligence by lowering the barriers to investment that have traditionally driven larger investors to do more sure diligence?

Is it possible that kickstarter might be predicated on lowering inhibitions to invest below the levels necessary to consistently make sound, rational judgments?

> If anything it sounds like maybe Git itself violates this, but I thought that Git hashed the difference between all the changes of a commit to get the hash. Some of the others sounds equally obvious at first glance.

Git creates hashed objects for individual file revisions, as well as tree objects referencing many individual file objects and commit objects which reference those tree objects.

> That's like saying HN is just full of college kids who think making a social web app with geolocation and a REST API is going to turn them into gazillionaires when they pivot to something useful (after all, the idea doesn't matter, it's the people who count) and then get acquired by Facebook for the GDP of a small country.

A lot of us get that impression, here. Some of us were underneath founders exactly like that and have good reason to be suspect.

> It is possible to write sane CoffeeScript that is lexically scoped and not subject to misinterpretation.

Possible is an extremely low bar. We hold ourselves to a higher standard these days in computer science, including language design.

It is possible to write sane INTERCAL that is (however INTERCAL is scoped) and not subject to misinterpretation.

You might be wondering why people think that. Here's why: it's the entire point of CoffeeScript. According to the first two intro grafs at coffeescript.org:

> CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all those awkward braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.

> The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly from CoffeeScript (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript runtime, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript.

> Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.

All that says is "we're not pressing charges."

You've added nothing to the discussion!

People don't press charges for lots of reasons. You are picking one and ignoring all the rest because it fits comfortably in your worldview.

it must be nice to put your mind on cruise control.

This is a Google project. I'm refuting the idea that we're loaded with "java developers" who can't step outside their skillset.

My 5-engineer team at Google all write java day-to-day. But we've all needed to write python, especially scripts, and have it properly checked in and maintained. Not sure how you could get by most places in the company without being able to do that. Besides, skill in other languages is an asset; I've written C++ client library code to push for broader adoption of my project.

30,000req/minute is 500qps. That's... just not a lot for a large service.

200 LOC is miniscule. Like, not worth discussing. 200k? Now we're talking about a medium-to-large project.

> There was a cost, they paid it, now they can reap the benefits.

Quick example of how you're wrong: their version history is now trashed. They're going to pay the price for that for years.

> Improve the codebase (make it small, cleaner, more easy to read, and fix issues of pastime) is NOT a wasted time. Not necessarily the BEST USE of time at a given moment, but dedicate some time to refresh the code with better tools, better syntax, better libraries, etc is a excellent way to move forward.

And as everybody has been repeatedly pointing out, switching from JavaScript to Coffeescript isn't what you're describing.

Tools? The tools aren't even close to what's available for JS.

Libraries? Libraries aren't even relevant since Coffeescript can call out to JS and vice-versa.

Translating to Coffeescript sacrifices tooling and a codebase you know for a prettier syntax and reliance on the much smaller, much more insular community driving the language. And I'll say it: syntax is a stupid reason to abandon code you KNOW for code you're about to write. A stupid, stupid reason. Engineers need to be more mature than liking to type fewer characters for an anonymous function or because list comprehensions are 3 lines fewer than a for loop.

By rewriting in coffeescript, their version history is likely trashed. They need to relearn the entire codebase. They need to develop new tools to replace the old ones they relied on, or more likely, will just live without those tools.

For a prettier syntax and a couple fewer gotchas. And if a team of 3 can't avoid the common JS gotchas in their day-to-day, I certainly won't trust them to rewrite an entire codebase in a language with different semantics just to get better syntax for what already works.

IMDB data has serious licensing restrictions. I would be extremely surprised if it were used as a source for this.

Why? It seems like a complete waste of time to this typical software engineer with 100x more objectives than time.

Why not convert all your Java code to Scala? Because you have real work to do and reskinning your existing code provides no benefits, that's why. If it works, don't rewrite it, go make more stuff work.

Maybe the dropbox folks don't have anything else to do, though. Not my place to judge.

> hell, even twitter was down recently

You seem to think Twitter has a strong reliability record.

It's entirely plausible that you work for the FBI and are trying to discredit talk of the FBI's involvement by proposing relatively poor arguments to the contrary.

See how ridiculous you sound?