HN user
I think the best advice I ever got from my parents about weddings is that you have to have really good food. Nobody hardly remembers anything else, even the bride's dress, but if you have incredible food, people will talk about it for a decade. This may be biased, being from a southern Italian family, but I think it's good advice.
It's articles like these and the responses they engender that I'm very glad I grew up working class, and lived my 20's punk rock. I can appreciate the finer things in life, but I've also got the skills to survive a near-apocalypse.
Getting rich has never been my motivator for being involved in technology, and to be honest, I'd probably be happier if the industry were de-funded (hopefully in favor of something like biotech or alternative energies, instead of url shorteners like bit.ly), and it cut the fat out, of all the people who prefer schmoozing to hacking.
I've had similar experiences. Git has great potential, but the tools seem very immature, and basic things I took for granted with Subversion are huge pita's with Git. And it seems like all that needs to happen is a really solid toolkit to simplify those tasks.
Game developers hate Zynga for the same reason that real comedians hate Dane Cook: Uninspired, unoriginal (borderline theft), and a dilution of the craft.
Sure, you could chalk it up to jealousy of success, but the reality is that there are people out there who are in it for more than money, and sometimes it hurts on a visceral level to see mediocrity succeed wildly.
Sort by Registered Users. You don't even need the Chinese language site (QZone).
Habbo + MySpace + Bebo + Orkut + Friendster + Hi5 = 679 million. Assuming 50% cross-over (which is a very high estimate), that means 340 million unique users, for just six social networks.
And that is nothing to sneeze at.
Tons of working features, a more well-defined roadmap, (much) more experience, and it's way easier to install (LAMP vs Rails). Also, Appleseed is a full social platform, that allows you to build components and extend it. Diaspora is more of a single application, it doesn't have any kind of modular framework to build off of. I don't think Diaspora will ever be dead in the water, but it just has so much catching up to do, and not small stuff, big architectural stuff that doesn't really benefit from the "many eyeballs" advantage of popular open source.
If it's such a useless metric, why is it always brought up as a clear example of Facebook's unmovable dominance?
Let's assume there's total overlap, meaning everyone who has a non-FB account also has a FB account. Now let's assume all of those smaller, but substantially sized, networks started inter-communicating. Who would stay on Facebook? Why would you stay on the centralized network with 500 million people when you can spend all your time on the open network with 1.5 - 2 billion people?
As for active versus registrations, we can't be sure of that from anyone, but rest assured, a decentralized network has much greater potential than Facebook does. Especially in the rest of the world where Facebook isn't nearly as popular.
The combined size of social networks that aren't Facebook is over 1.5 billion people, probably more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi...
Facebook has the most users in one place, but the dust is nowhere near settled on where everyone will end up.
This bodes very well for a decentralized solution. I doubt Diaspora will be the first (I think Appleseed (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org) is much more likely), but ultimately, it will be an easily implemented protocol with mature cross-platform libraries that'll really take it down.
This is a good PR move on Facebook's part, because it willfully misinterprets people's frustrations with Facebook. It's not that you didn't have a local copy of your data, it's that you had no control over your data when it was out in the wild. This will take some wind out of the sails of the decentralized solutions, but the armada is still coming.
Better ability to categorize friends and have targeted "feeds" would help mitigate this.
Appleseed is the farthest along:
Yeah, I think it's definitely different in the U.S. than Germany, regarding Facebook's hegemony. Hardly anybody uses anything else here.
How do you send file attach attachments?
I think a comparison to an oil rig is wishful thinking, to say the least. You have a basically clear and proven business model that's existed for 100 years, based on selling a tangible product that everybody inarguably needs.
Facebook has none of those characteristics, and nobody's proven that there's anything substantial where they're digging.
Also, can we stop to consider the fact that a company that is worth billions of dollars can only barely eke out a profit, despite having access to the personal lives of 500 million people? It's not like they lack the capability to be evil. More likely, they're a paper tiger. They don't have much time to build the killer app that people will pay for before their investors start gettin anxious.
The approach to social networking they've taken simply isn't a particularly profitable approach, the profitable approach hasn't been invented yet. Eventually, people will realize that, and while they're running and begging venture capitalists for another $100 million just to keep the lights on in their server farms, someone else is gonna build the next big thing, and Facebook will go the way of Friendster and Myspace. If we've learned anything, social networks are fickle, and it doesn't take long for a trickle of users to become a flood.
Zuckerburg won't ever starve, and the company probably won't ever fold (heck, even AOL is still around), but the idea that his wealth and any perceived power is in any way stable just doesn't check in with reality.
I think you're underestimating Facebook's social importance. Sure, your friends won't hate you, it won't be the end of the world, but there is a palpable sense of disconnect.
And there are more people who rely on Facebook for social connection, than people who rely on Google for business and finance (especially if you're talking about the under-25 crowd).
Because you can leave Google. You may not want to, and they do a great job of having features nobody else has, but if they piss you off enough, there's plenty of email providers.
Facebook, on the other hand, holds your social network hostage. We'll always resent any site that takes advantage of that.
Oh yeah, it's totally like being violently threatened and abused by terrorists. That's a perfectly reasonable analogy.
Seriously, when you've been programming long enough, you really stop caring about programming languages. I could build a huge project in VB.Net or ColdFusion if I had to at this point. If there's good reasons for why a language should be used (and PHP has plenty of them that are external to the language itself), then it's immaterial to me.
Yes, but in true PHP fashion they're just slightly ugly. :)
namespace my\name;
$c = new \my\name\MyClass;
I've noticed that it's in vogue to bash PHP, but frankly, with the current state of the language, along with its frameworks and libraries, there's no better time to work with PHP.
I've noticed that, too, I think a lot of people who bash PHP may have used it at one point, switched to something like Rails or Django, and assumed that PHP stood still, which just wasn't the case. In fact, while I may not use rails, I'm very glad it came about, because it was a very necessary kick-in-the-ass to other language communities to address common and necessary development concerns.
The thing about new technologies, is that they rarely replace the old technologies, usually they just provide new ideas to make the old technologies better.
Unless you're being more specific than I think you are, PHP5 has basic support for method chaining, I use it all the time.
I've been using PHP professionally since it was called PHP/FI, and while it's a terribly designed language, I've longed stopped hating it. I know all of it's quirks, and I know all of it's work arounds, and the density of support it has can't be beat.
I wouldn't complain if a better server-side language came around (not a big fan of Ruby's syntax, but Google's Go looks enticing), but until then, I've built incredibly complex apps in PHP, and rarely do I run into a limitation of the language. My biggest issue in the past was the lack of namespaces, and 5.3 has those.
I think the best thing you could do to get a new language as popular as PHP isn't to evangelize, or even to make the language dead simple, but make it dead simple for administrators to add support to a typical shared hosting environment.
There is a ton of scholarly work on the effects of unequal funding on public education. Google Scholar is a good place to start:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unequal+funding+educatio...
A good "primer" book, although a bit old, but not outdated, is called "Savage Inequalities"
http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Inequalities-Children-Americas-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities
Another book is "The Shame Of A Nation" by the same author. These are just starting points, though, there's no shortage of studies, essays, books, and scholarly works on the subject. What I'm presenting here, in terms of social critiques of education, is by no means unique.
That's an interesting case, but it's far from representative of the system as a whole. The best you can do in that situation is use that information to criticize that specific school district, but you can't extrapolate that to a systemic critique.
I have yet to hear a better explanation for why public schools can't seem to get their act together.
Unequal funding based on property taxes further penalizes the lower classes. The wealthiest go to posh private schools, the upper-middle classes have public schools with greenhouses and olympic size swimming pools, most everyone else has outdated textbooks and low salaries, and the lower classes have lead paint and crumbling infrastructure.
The result is that, averaged out, we have terrible results. Mostly because there's only so much you can do with money, so the wealthiest who have access to a surplus of funding can only do so much to balance out the disadvantages of the rest.
An equalized system would produce much better results for the country. This is how Finland and other social democracies operate.
I like that there are perspectives that question the Silicon Valley approach to start-ups. Although of course there's definitely good to come out of it, there's also an extraordinary amount of ego and hype. Some might argue more than there is good.
I'd prefer to see people focus on building entrepreneurship in other cities, as well as experimenting with alternative forms of business structures (non-profits, cooperatives, etc), for those who are really adventurous.
There doesn't have to be a one-size-fits-all track for creating a new technology, and a diversified tech economy is a healthy one.
RoR has a lot of advantages for rapid development and prototyping early on. I think over the course of the development cycle, the advantages even out with other frameworks. In other words, for the first 10% of your development, you'll get much more accomplished than if you decided to use pure Ruby (or even Django or Symfony).
However, this "magic" comes at a price, and at some point you will hit a wall, and if you're a very attentive programmer, you'll have been paying attention to what the magic has been accomplishing without you behind the scenes, and you'll be able to figure out a way around it without scrapping your code base. If you haven't done that, then you're going to pull your hair out in frustration.
To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of rails or other magic frameworks for anything other than prototyping, but ymmv, I definitely understand why people like it.
I'm surprised this isn't bloody obvious. At one point AOL was worth $247 billion, and then an open internet steamrolled over it.
The same thing will happen to Facebook with the open web. At least AOL had subscription revenue.
Open source is good at getting the small bugs, the syntax errors, the security holes with clear and direct fixes, etc.
Open source is not good for making use of the "Many eyeballs" for architectural decisions. It's where the wisdom of crowds provides little benefit. This is why most open source projects are not a haphazard bazaar of stone soup contributors, like most people think, but are actually small dedicated teams of talented software developers, who are usually paid.
I think our conception of what OSS can achieve, simply by being OSS, is somewhat inflated.
(Don't get me wrong, though, OSS is fantastic, and I think it's, by design, much better than close source)
of their own creation or as a contributor, on their own time - even if it means taking on a reduced academic load.
But that's why the apprenticeship model would work so well. I've always thought the way union electricians are trained (a four year apprenticeship, which includes a lot of practical and theoretical schooling, until becoming a journeyman) would be a great fit for software development.