edd_dumbill

Exactly! It's a very cynical view of the media and unfortunately one I encounter too often among tech vendors. This statement makes everything else seem like sour grapes, regardless of the facts of the matter.

Just one nit: tell us more about who you are.

When dealing with something like health insurance data (or really any service, to be honest) I like to know there's a human or corporation behind it. Your contact page just lists an anonymous email address.

Knowing who the team are that built this thing would give some assurance — particularly because your signup page asks quite a lot of information, way more than you give away about yourselves.

This is a somewhat ungrateful perspective, just after the Eolas patent case was thrown out.

Yes, the W3C process takes about half the lifespan of many HN readers. Yup, it's not ideal.

But it's the only game in town and it's been going on so long because it works. Because it successfully brought Microsoft into the fold and conversation at a time where, had they decided, they could have broken everything.

It's worth exercising a little perspective. Can you think of any endeavor that has so successfully united vendors to create something as broad and interoperable as the web, over such a relatively small period of history? The W3C has been fundamental to this.

- What has the W3C ever done for us?

-- Well, HTML.

- Oh yeah, they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.

-- And CSS you could view source and copy.

--- Yeah, you remember how scared we all were of Microsoft Blackbird?

- All right, I'll grant you that HTML and CSS are two things the W3C have done...

(you get the idea.)

Working here. Try again? It's hosted on Tumblr.

Thanks Lio. Let me know what you think. Also, I got rid of the background. Seems my evil plan to hypnotize the population of HN might not actually work out.

This came out of me needing an excuse to write some Clojure, and wanting to model a simple coin-tossing game. What started as a guide to Clojure for busy programmers probably makes a right-sized holiday hacking project.

They're not out yet. I'm waiting eagerly to see what degree of openness they offer. My bet is that in this first release they'll offer a compromise between openness and Google's desire to keep Google+ a service that works well for its users.

To me, that's the biggest challenge in an open interoperable social layer: preserving a good user experience.

It is a long bet, but I think the inherent advantages (in both improving search quality and in declawing Facebook) for Google of making the social features commodity will lead this to happen. It needs to happen slowly, as there are lot of unknown unknowns. The first release of the G+ API will set the tone.

#5 is a catchy way of saying there's an excellent complement of open source libraries and support. Though I sure get that for many HN readers the fact that many people are doing something is a cause to question, not follow!

Line-based processing is still important! This work reminds me of an article I wrote 11 years ago covering Sean McGrath's work on PYX—a line-based format for XML—see http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/03/15/feature/index.html.

That work derived from that of Charles Goldfarb on SGML, dating from 1989 on ESIS, ISO 8879.

We'll always be downsampling to something we can use with sed, grep and awk. They're too handy not to.

Yes, planning to.