HN user
Window-based task management is "Windows", App-based task management is "Metro".
We spent the last 25 years of computer history teaching both the users and the computers how to multitask, only for the most recent user designers to try their damnedest to take it away from us.
Could you elaborate on the evidence for people willing to pay for good content? I also don't understand why Game of Thrones supports your argument.
I know almost no one who pays for TV a la carte through iTunes or Amazon.
You now know of me. I spend around $50/month downloading content from Amazon, be it music or tv. I would buy Game of Thrones as it came out if I could, but I can't.
Absence of evidence isn't the evidence of absence. Especially if you've done no investigation.
I am skeptical they'd pay even if it was available for $4.99 an episode.
$5 might be a bit steep for some, $2-3 is just about perfect. But honestly I'd still pay $5 for content created at this level, if not just to encourage the people creating this quality of content to keep doing it.
Your skepticism is powered by your lack of knowledge and research. Do the work, then come back and comment.
This fact is why newspapers are dead, and online content continues to blossom. In the information age, there's absolutely no excuse for the content they produce to cost $1500/year per subscription.
In fact, that's where we hit the real problem: the kind of content that is covered with advertisements is usually not very good content to begin with.
This is especially true of content aggregators and meta sites such as Reddit and to some extent, this website. The content isn't even theirs: they are simply hosting a discussion forum about the content. A new-agey one instead of the old BB sites, but it's nonetheless exactly the same.
What content providers should be learning is that people are willing to pay for good content. Quality absolutely matters. The 90s and 00s were all about quantity, but now we're up to the rafters with disposable content. Look at the shows with the best ratings today: Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. Exceptional content quality, heavily pirated because the content creators have failed to adapt to new media distribution. The fact that I can torrent GoT more easily than I can view it from HBO is tragic.
So there's your dose of education for the day.
Infinite scrolling like this works pretty well if you want to do scrolling for, say, search results.
It's all around horrible for something like Twitter, IMO.
The problem with Twitter is that it's conversational, and it's showing the newest part of the conversation at the top. So instead of having a nice conversation history:
Hi!
Hello to you good sir.
How are you doing today.
I'm fine.
I'm fine.
How are you today?
Hello to you good sir.
Hi!
tl;dr: don't copy Twitter's UI. Please.
The first time I see an email from this service, they will meet my permanent blacklist.
This is absolutely, brutally intolerable. It's hard enough maintaining spam-free email without this nonsense.
Why do we have to imagine this? This is reality for software engineers on LinkedIn.
Whole program optimization is really the killer feature for static linking today. It's possible with dynamic linking, but a static compiler can really go to town shedding weight since lots of libraries have common code structures (see every sufficiently complex C library and its own implementations of various data structures).
you most certainly do not "cut down on file load time."
Surely you must be joking eekee.
I know SSDs have made us all forget, but Disks (you know, those spinning piles of rust that most of us still have in computers to permanently store our bits on) are incredibly, painfully slow. Average times for any action on a disk are in milliseconds. That's millions of computational cycles.
I'm sure someone could invent a system where the dynamic linking process is slower than loading a static executable from a disk, but I've yet to find it. I'm also certain that our assumption that dynamic linking is always the way to go will be more and more challenged by the speed of SSDs, which are becoming much closer to RAM in speeds every day. But for today... no way.
Sigh, another string library. And this is the reason why I prefer C++ over C. You don't end up writing another string library for the 300th time.
You say that, and yet every C++ project I've ever touched in my life has had its own string class with various levels of horror attached. My favorite was the one that stored everything internally as 32-bit characters to be Unicode safe, and was never used in a codebase that had to deal with Unicode.
Good luck finding a congressman to buy who will accept bitcoin as payment.
Is it actually proven that the costs are passed on (i.e. that the price would be lower in absence of credit cards)? Because, again, in theory that only works if the demand has enough inelasticity.
Go buy something at your local No Name Shoppe and compare it to what you were paying 3 years ago. Adjust for inflation. Be shocked by the random ~3-4% cost increase.
My best personal example is the place where I play Magic the Gathering increasing the price of packs to adjust for the processing fees (and struggling to do that for fear of sending the regulars back to buying packs online, which would shutter their business permanently).
I predict Amazon will take BTC within the next 2-3 years.
I'm willing to bet a hundred doge this doesn't happen.
I find it humorous that Tiger Direct and Newegg are promoting Bitcoin mining with GPUS.
Why wouldn't they? They both sell GPUs and have a large backlog of them. Somebody who isn't knowledgeable enough about the topic and wants to get in on the latest fad is likely to see that ad and jump on it.
If I sold video cards for a living I'd be pushing them just as hard as I could too. "Bitcoin mining, OpenCL, desktop virtualization, they can do it all, come buy your video cards from me and not the other guy!"
Credit card companies do not charge 4%. I worked in credit cards about a decade ago, so unless the marketplace is less competitive now than before, I assume this still holds true. Furthermore, the fees that do exist are not necessarily passed on the consumer, but taken out of profit.
This isn't entirely accurate. Most credit card companies now tack on a 30c + 2.9% surcharge for processors that do fewer transactions than some arbitrarily defined limit, well known to most small companies as the "PayPal tax" because they started doing it first and the credit card companies realized they could get away with it too.
And it's usually passed completely on to consumers, because eating it as a business owner with a low-margin business is pretty damned hard, and because the little guys are doing it, the big guys get away with doing it too.
Or haven't you heard about the recent record profits being made by Mastercard et al?
How about the fact that the banking system charges huge fees for the use of their networks and technology?
Yeah that sucks. But the only thing that's going to change this is regulation, not non-existent competition.
Do you mind paying $15 to send money to relatives overseas?
Most of us don't have relatives overseas. And for the most part, if we did and we were sending money over seas, it'd probably be in denominations that make $15 a pittance.
This is disruptive technology. Credit card companies and international money transfer companies are panicking right now.
This is hilarious and bullshit. Nobody's panicking. I doubt if most bankers even know what Bitcoin is. If they were scared, they'd go to their favorite lawmaker with a quarter billion dollars and tell them to make Bitcoin go away, and guess what? It would - "Silkroad"-style shutdowns would happen to all the Bitcoin companies, the value of bitcoin would plummet and this shanty economy would disappear overnight.
It's a strange world where we're saying 1080p is "low res".
I give it 8 seconds before it's all penises and people saying various things are dicks.
Well it's $200,000 today, $386,000 tomorrow, $120 the day after that...