derekreed

Thanks for all the insightful comments about how this "didn't work for you" or "I'm paranoid so I survived this"?

It works. It works enough of the time and on enough browsers to be very relevant to anyone who cares about the privacy/security of internet users at large.

This is an impressive proof of concept, and an important thing to be discussing, yeah?

[EDIT] To clarify, I tested this on Firefox 8.0.1 on my 2011 iMac with Lion and it worked flawlessly one by one as I visited the sites "Facebook, Reddit, Flickr", they turned from gray to green in each subsequent test.

"Build a search engine" == "takes on Google" ? Well ... I guess so.

Yes, those are all problems, and they will require work to get around. Good point.

"This will never work." << lol

I'm surprised there isn't more discussion (in general, on the internet) on the relationship between the autistic spectrum and programmers.

I agree completely.

Well thought out and sound reasoning.

And the effort is probably hopeless, but maybe it will at least draw some attention to facebook's abhorrent practices. But they get plenty of negative press already, doesn't seem to slow them down.

I figure it's going to take a lot more efforts like this, to stop the abuses when portals gain monopoly power on user's attention.

User's will put up with it, (and probably put up with much worse), there is no alternative to facebook for what facebook does and is. Chickens and eggs ...

"some say it's time for the law to change".

lol, "some say", just "some", really?

I think it's interesting to see the ways the predictions had some right in them.

- What doesn't run on Amazon these days?

- WoW is as profitable as ever.

- Mobile has gone through the roof (what percent of your traffic is mobile, eh?)

- Internet video has gone mainstream (I used have normal friends who would pay for cable, not anymore.)

- I'd forgotten there was a time when google didn't alter my search results for me specifically.

- And of course, China is taking over the web http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/mary-meeker-internet-trends-2...

Fun stuff.

I really like the "will work on interesting projects" idea, I feel the same way generally myself.

Kind of surprised there's so much "do something besides this" feedback in the comments here, I can't see why this isn't an awesome way to find projects?

There's some amazing ideas out there that people have, why not tap into that gigantic resource pool a little deeper, eh?

Yeah, Joel is dead on for how to learn to program. Unfortunately, I think we need to question that question more.

What folks are often asking when they ask "how do I program?" is something entirely different.

How do I learn how to make a website? Use wordpress or yola or squarespace.

How do I learn how to make that website look better? Read design blogs, some starter tutorials on html and css and start diving into the CSS. It's not that hard a standalone thing to learn.

How do I learn how to make that website do something fancy like fade things out? Start diving into the javascript in the same way.

How do I learn how to make that website do something functional like send an email, or save a session? Pick a modern framework (Ruby on Rails, Node on Express), read/watch the starter tutorials on it, and dive in.

How do I learn how to make that website do something functional and NOT have it be a horrendous hack job? Time to start reading those programming books :D

Just sayin' it's not always step 1. Depends on what you need to get done, and what you really want to learn how to do. Yeah?

I think it's hilarious that most of the comments I'm seeing here so far seem to be doing the exact over analysis that this article is trying to dissuade us over-analytical types from doing ... maybe?

Just build it motherfuckas?