HN user

mmacaulay

51 karma
Posts0
Comments21
View on HN
No posts found.

Considering HN's minimalist design (a good thing IMO), and the readership, it should be no surprise that we're seeing these "redesigns".

There are a few mobile apps for reading HN - also not made by Ycombinator.

Great post. I've been "bored" of Facebook for some time now (as I suspect many are). There's another thread on the main page where people are discussing whether or not Facebook is on the way out - I think it is, we're just waiting for something to replace it with. Twitter? Nope. My less technical and/or web savvy friends are never going to be interested in it. Diaspora? Maybe. But it seems like the purpose of Diaspora was to replace Facebook from the outset - that's just not how these things happen. More likely is that it will be something completely out of left field.

As someone who just recently bought his first house, it seems unrealistic to have saved up that entire amount within any kind of reasonable timeframe. Obviously, you should buy a house (and other things) that is within your means, which is more what the housing bubble was all about IMO.

But I do agree with your general premise.

Reputation and other points systems are designed to attract people because it's like a game - in fact, this very site uses it!

Obviously there's the problem of people "gaming the system" to earn more reputation and you do whatever is possible to prevent that, but there's no reason why people can't be there for both the reputation points game AND to spread knowledge. The problem now for Stack Overflow (as I see it) is that it's reached a level of saturation where it's difficult to do either.

Right on the money.

I was there in the (relatively) early days where it was exciting to ask and answer questions and contribute to the site, while scoring points(!)

Nowadays I often encounter SO links while googling things, and it has certainly become a great resource in that sense. But I rarely have a need to ask questions there anymore as everything is covered, and trying to answer questions isn't worth the effort for similar reasons.

As new technologies emerge, I can see there being waves of increased activity as those topics are explored, and if you're one of those people on the forefront of said technology I could see it bringing back some of the original charm.

I've never heard of fossil before. There's a lot of noise around Git and Mercurial these days (I just recently transitioned to Mercurial from SVN), but fossil sounds like an interesting concept - and indeed, once I've got an SCM, the next thing I go looking for is some kind of bug tracking system to integrate it with. Nice!

You can only ad-hoc install apps that have been signed for your device specifically. So if Alice and Bob want to exchange apps in this way, they can, but it prevents them from distributing their apps to just anyone.

"Dangerous geek warrior mode" is much more akin to Jailbreaking.