nameuserc

Is it a coincidence they had to link the term "responsive design" to a Wikipedia entry?

Is it not self-evident what "responsive design" means?

Maybe Johnny doesn't want to "stream". Maybe Johnny just wants video that play backs immediately/without delay, and smoothly. And Johnny thinks that's what "streaming" means. Maybe Johnny thinks that "downloading" means he has to wait.

Does Johnny know that when he watches YouTube he's downloading? Or does he think he's "streaming"? As long as Johnny does not have to wait for playback, and playback is smooth, does Johnny really care about whether he's "streaming" or "downloading?

All else being equal (i.e. speed to fill a buffer or a disk block is the same and in neither case does Johnny have to wait for playback longer than in the other), I'd bet Johnny would prefer "downloading" over "streaming", since then he can watch the video again later. Just like a VHS or DVD rental.

Assuming you have the storage space, all else being equal, "streaming" video when you can "download" it seems "insane" to use the Professor's term.

Unless of course your business model is traditional "broadcasting" of the pre-digital, pre-internet variety.

I am 100% in agreement. I would never make users jump through hoops like that. Or assume that Redis would be their choice of database. That's a choice for the user.

But Lord knows I spend an inordinate amount of time jumping through hoops like these just to try evaluate software. It's just unavoidable.

A small, simple program with no dependencies or assumptions about your software preferences is like a breath of fresh air.

I wonder if there's an easy way to filter all of Github for these types of programs. Say, C programs with less than N LOC, and having no external dependencies.

Definitely. I just wish they would make some changes so that we can use the "70's style command line" more with Firefox. In other words, options and arguments we can pass to Firefox (the xulrunner app) via the Linux/BSD/OSX/Windows commandline.

For example if I have Firefox running in Xvfb it would be nice to be able to issue remote commands (an early version of Mozilla did have something like this if I recall correctly: -remote), such as the commands they are implementing for this "graphical command line". It would be convenient to easily dump screenshots to image files without having to run something like Crowbar.

Anyway at least they are starting to acknowledge that not everyone uses a mouse or prefers using a trackpad over hitting keys. I mean keys as tactile buttons, not images of onscreen keyboard, like the iPhone or iPad.

kernel: a central, essential part of something

paraphrasing the dictionary definition

the meaning is similar in both contexts you mention.

indeed if we asked someone who did not know what an "os kernel" was, they might think of the meaning they do know: e.g., the innermost part of a seed of a cereal or nut

and they might guess based on what they know.

have you ever heard the phrase "the computer program has become non-responsive"

e.g. a graphical web browser such as Firefox

Mozilla developers are not committing "crimes against nature". But nonetheless they do create some annoyances that millions of people have to endure. That's not the developers' problem, it's the users' problem. Some might search for solutions to the annoyances. Such solutions could be quite valuable to users. They might read things that are meant for "web developers" because that is where the annoyances come from. They are created by web developers.

And your response is akin to someone being concerned about the words of a person from the 1700's reading about cell phones and asking what all the fuss is about, and maybe even stating he does not need one.

Why would you care about that? How could this person from antiquity know anything useful?

Interesting.

This strategy of collecting email addresses without delivering anything first never seems to die down.

The reason is simple: it works. Many people will hand over their email address with no guarantee of anything in return. A shockingly large number of people will do that. And then the opt-in spam begins. It's a never ending email campaign for who knows what. Does the spam work? Surprisingly, yes. Enough to be worth paying to keep sending it out. Legalised spam.

Is an email address worth something? Gather enough of them and yes, absolutely it is.

This is all pure speculation. Or is it?

If I had a dime for every site that collects email addresses without delivering anything first...

As if Mozilla didn't have enough data about users already.

Anyway, if you wanna see what this thing is here you go:

http://github.com/mozilla/napkin/zipball/master

Unzip the file and start reading.

Show me an honest company with a solid service or product and I will be more than willing to support them financially.

At the end of the day I think people who work for companies like that feel better about what they're doing than [famous lying CEO] wannabes.

When you rely on lying over and over again, your whole life becomes a lie. Maybe you are worth something to a market, but to many people you are worthless. As a liar you have no value to them.

There is huge value in honesty. Maybe it can't be measured in financial terms. But I personally will pay a premium for honesty. It's of limited supply and always in demand.

+1 for nickoneill

Using Node.js to make "non-blocking http requests" using callbacks and having to reorder stuff after it arrives?

Sounds like he had fun playing with Node.js and writing code.

But did I read this wrong or is he making several hundred individual HTTP requests?

Even when the server he's accessing says it supports keep-alive (5 seconds), and probably a decent number of max-requests (say, 100).

I must have read this wrong.

Ah! Thanks. So if I say "responsive" in relation to a computer, are people now going to think I'm talking about webpage layout?

To me, "responsive" means the amount of time between when I issue a command and when the computer has completed what I asked it to do.

I save ESC2J to a file and my "cls" is simply another file consisting of

cat file1

in my PATH. Only because sometimes printf or some other way to print ESC's might not be available.

The idea of starting up X11 so I can start the super-sized code complexity experiment that calls itself "Firefox", all just to get to a command line struck me. The fact they are calling the approach at Mozilla as "responsive design" I found insulting.

Are they in denial about just how big and complex Firefox is? This is not how you attain responsive design.

Developers want to pretend you[1] do not exist. "All users are idiots." Maybe the problem is with developers[2], not users.

1. The user who can learn to use vi and AWK.

2. In many cases it is they the developers who can't figure out how to use vi and AWK. Their solution is to conclude no one else will be able to use these programs either, because... "all users are idiots".

Non-interactive is far better than interactive. Faster, more efficient, more secure, less error-prone, less repeated effort. It's less work!

But there is an army of UI designers fighting against common sense. I'm sure we'll hear from some of them in this thread.

djb nailed this problem on the head when he wrote about the UNIX interfaces. Quoting rules, special characters... it's a minefield even if you are a "UNIX command line guru". There's a high cognitive price to pay if you are trying to avoid all mistakes using this interface.

Solution: Remove the user interfaces. Programs interface with each other, not the user.

Non-interactive = less work. You start the system. It runs. There is no interaction. No ongoing cognitive price to pay other than monitoring.

And this is only the command line. Dare we look at the price imposed by GUI's?

Imagine a slide show where you had to click each and every time you want to see a new slide. Nice CSS! Wow, that Javascript is amazing! The page is so beautiful! Click, click, click. (Developers rejoice: We can track the clicks!) Now imagine you are the user and the slide show is 10,000 slides. Forget it.

Mechanize? Perl, Python, Ruby? JQuery? Give me a break. Why should people even have to waste their time writing such things?

Hey no problem! The kind developers decide to add an option to run the show on auto-pilot. Hurray. No more interaction is needed.

Think again.

Now imagine you have view 10,000 different slideshows to view and each one has a different way to start the auto-pilot mode based on the developer's own idea of "user experience".

You are right back where you started. Find the auto-pilot button. 10,000 times. Interaction.

A "slide show" is just a random example. You can apply this almost any sort of information intake where "interfaces" like GUI's are involved.

Go to a library and watch people trying to use various computer databases. In almost all cases, you will see them spending noticeable effort just to find things to click, and reading onscreen instructions. Every database is different. Every interface is unique. End-users: make 'em work.

The entire web is like this. Every web developer wants users to interact. Why? It's too much damn work. For users.

Will it ever change? Doubtful.

There is an entire industry built around forcing users to interact regardless of whether it is truly necessary.

For every person working to build an automated system there are two more building a system that forces user interaction.

Sometimes nerds, e.g. those familiar with Lisp or Scheme, say "everything is a list". Can mere mortals who know nothing of "programming" make lists? Is there any literate person on the planet who hasn't made a list?

"List processing".

Too _boring_. (It certainly isn't too _difficult_. Even the grandmother who can't use a computer can still make lists just fine.)

I know, let's build an "interface"! For humans!

Good grief.

So if I do this:

wget http://example.com/file.flv; sleep 5; mplayer -cache 8092 file.flv

am I "streaming"?

In answering that question, does it matter what I do, or only what the guys at example.com are doing?

What if my system is diskless and file.flv is downloaded to a RAM disk? What if I turn off the system after watching? What if I don't? What if I save file.flv to a USB stick and watch it later? What if I loan the stick to a friend?

What if I do this:

ffmpeg -i file.flv file.mp3; mplayer -vo null file.mp3

Can the guys at example.com prohibit me from doing that? Based on intellectual property law? What if some user owns the IP rights to file.flv and uploaded it to example.com and the guys at example.com do not have any IP rights in file.mp3? What if the user did not give them any of her IP rights?

What if I never put file.mp3 into "iTunes"? What if I never put it into "Dropbox"? What if I never send it to "the cloud"? What if I just leave it on a USB stick? What if I play it back from the stick? What if I move it from the stick to my RAM disk and then play it back?

OK, enough.

Enjoy your media.

To get the most from the experience, it may be necessary to stear clear of people who willingly conceal the truth or, in the worst case, lie to you in order to suit their business model.

Assuming what you say were true (i.e., that I "have a problem" with 37Signals), do you "have a problem" with me "having a problem" with that?

Do you also sell something people do not need? And does it make you uncomfortable when people who do not need it mentions that to an audience via HN, the same way 37Signals keeps working to make mention of itself, or have others do so, in publications with large audiences.

If I have no need for a service someone is selling and I never hear about that service, then I have no reason (maybe even no ability) to to state what I think about that service. But if in the course of reading the "news" I am continually reminded of the service's existence, I may be inclined to comment. That is the risk you take with PR and advertising, or internet-based hype in general.

So it seems that 37Signals sells the use of their forum software (constructed from Ruby on Rails, i.e., free software), hosted on 37Signals' computers. I am getting a clearer picture now.

It has been said on HN that Xerox got some pre-IPO Apple stock options so it's all good.

Yeah right. By all accounts Steve Jobs was a weasel.

Of course, all those accounts could be wrong.

But I'd bet those blue-collar folks would not mind being written about like "startups" get written about. A little hype could do them a lot of good.

What makes a company "newsworthy" is a good PR firm!

Forget what I say. It's just me. "5,000 companies sign up every week." But "keep all project discussions, emails, and stuff in one place" just doesn't draw me in. I don't have a problem with "keeping all project stuff in one place". 37Signals appears to be aimed at solving a "problem" I do not have.

I have looked at their website several times. It just never grabs me. And I'm not inclined to give them my email address to try out their amazing "solution".

Of course there are people working at TC who are not douchebags. Just like there are probably people working at Pool who are not douchebags. But these are not the founders the company nor those who are responsible for setting the standards and the course for the company.

This is a fair point. Journalists are just using available public information.

37Signals' numbers are not public. "Talk is cheap" as they say.

I don't disagree with what he is saying in the quotes - that people focus too much on raising money as "business success". This is without question. But then again I still do not understand the value of 37Signals (compared to any other software company with aggressive marketing), at least not from the press they get. How are they being any more transparent?

All I know from recent reports is employees supposedly work 4 days a week and they have some sort of brainstorming sessions to come up with new ideas. What does the 37Signals software do? Specifically, not just some marketing buzzword. What does it do that I can't otherwise do without it? Are there some YouTube videos showing the software in action?

How do I know it's not just a Ruby on Rails consulting business for a few steady clients (who have an inseparable attachment to Rails), as opposed to a "unique" software company with amazing products? How do I know they're not just selling a Rails framework? So I have to install Ruby, Rails and a gazilion of their custom scripts to use their "product"?

Unfortunately this is true. I'm not sure all that many people know where the founder came from, i.e., the type of stuff he was doing before TechCrunch, and the company he worked for - a company responsible for a very large portion of some of the purest douchbaggery to be found anywhere on the web. The lowest of the low. They do some very dirty work. I'd even guess there are "innocent" people working at TC who do not know the history.

I wanted to see TC as some sort of redemption for this guy, a stepping away from the sort of douchebaggery he was doing previously. But, after watching TC for a number of years, it clearly was a progression to an even more potent form of sleaze. If people are using underhanded tactics with TC, then I can only conclude that they've succeeded in attracting the very same type of people which they are themselves (excluding anyone working there who is naive and unaware).