obviouslygreen

Yeah... poorly phrased. I understand that there's more than a kernel and a shell; I started with Gentoo and worked quite a bit with RedHat/CentOS/Fedora before moving to Ubuntu and then to Debian.

The point was that what you get without selecting or installing anything else via a package manager is still apparently far less than what you get with a "base install" from a BSD (at least according to the article) and that that starting point is what I'm used to.

So your contention is that there is no basic installation... followed by the assertion that the basic installation, which does not exist, is larger than that of any BSD. Sorry, I'm going to have a hard time taking this seriously. And, frankly, your statement about the "full OS" is meaningless, as unless you consider the "full OS" to be only the base system, it includes every possible package, which very obviously is NOT going to be smaller than anything you could consider a basic Linux installation.

I meant small in terms of packages. The kernel, a shell, and not much else unless you specify it. Obviously you will specify something else, but the point was that I'm used to specifying exactly what else I want, so I have that habit to break/relearn.

The point you ignored or missed is that as a Linux user with no BSD exposure there's a basic difference in philosophy that creates several kinds of tradeoffs that I find compelling and interesting. I'm not "bringing up" anything in terms of absolute pros and cons, I'm highlighting what I consider noteworthy differences in terms of learning more about things I have not used.

As a Debian user who started on Gentoo, I think the linked article was very interesting in terms of at least getting an idea of what the differences in design are.

I've never used a BSD or even looked into it... given what I read there, it seems like it'd be a lot nicer in at least one sense, since Debian releases die off and release-upgrade can be either perfect or very painful.

On the other hand, I do love how small and unassuming a basic Linux installation is, and -- as the author repeatedly and correctly stresses -- I'm used to doing things the way I currently do them. That's not good or bad, it's just momentum.

I do hope I'll get the chance to work with a BSD at some point, but much like my attempts to really get into Clojure... well, unlike the Stones, most of us do not have time on our side.

Never listen to anyone saying that.

Better suggestion: Be careful when listening to anyone making absolute judgments based on generalizations.

Some operating systems, just like some applications, are better for certain purposes (often because they were designed and built specifically to be suitable for those purposes). "You can do anything with anything" is a very idealistic oversimplification that's implied by the idea that no OS is ever better than any other.

Google throws its weight around just as much as Microsoft ever did, they just smile while they do it.

I think it's less a matter of attitude and more a matter of being really, really good at doing it either unobtrusively or at least in a way that people won't mind or won't understand.

With so many years of experience with how users interact with information, they have the potential for unprecedented insight into the realities of UI interaction.

I'm not saying it's a good thing, and I agree that Google isn't doing us as users any favors in this regard (any more than Microsoft ever did or does), but there's more behind the fact that they're getting away with it among less user outrage than simply public image.

Absolutely agreed on the great knife bit. As for the bread... I think ditching the expectation of perfectly even slices is a good start. Cut a piece and cut it in half; there, half a sandwich (assuming your bread maker spits out loaves with a square cross section). Want another half? It may not be the same thickness as the first one, but as long as you're a little bit careful, your pieces should at least be consistent with themselves, so there you go.

I can respect your aesthetic reasons for running OS X, but it's entirely subjective. I'm exactly the opposite: I run Mac hardware because, for my requirements, it's the only option. I run Debian on it because, for my requirements, looking pretty is the very last thing on my list and whatever doesn't run from the terminal is a few easy clicks away.

"Lukewarm" with respect to a "desktop experience" depends entirely on what you want from your desktop. I have the same "why does this software hate me" while attempting to use OS X. It doesn't make either of our experiences more or less valid; it simply means that different people have different tastes and requirements, and that any given mix of hardware and software might be great for you but will be totally inappropriate for someone else.

There are two fairly consistent benefits to running OS X:

1. It usually comes installed on great hardware.

2. It's less vulnerable to most things than Windows.

Beyond that, if you choose to build a Hackintosh, in my opinion you (for whatever reason) enjoy OS X enough to depend on it but don't like Apple enough to run their OS without paying their hardware premium (entirely understandable from the price perspective but a little illogical if you take it a bit further).

Frankly, I can't see any reason for the Hackintosh middle ground other than people who can't cope without the OS but can't afford the hardware. The software is little more than a neutered and compromised version of BSD that lets you part way into a walled garden (cue It's a trap! meme).

Granted: There's also the requirement of a Mac for iOS development... but guess what? You're still stuck with the developer program membership fee. Save $500 here, lose $100 a year there, along with probably being in violation of half a dozen usage limitations.

Why does "we're taking it down while we figure out what's going on" not qualify as a valid approach? Shouldn't safety be a higher priority than "well someone might want to look at the home page so we'll put more effort into a crappy default landing page?"

It's easy (and often correct), in hindsight, to say that some things should be prepared for in better or different ways. However, that's a different animal than "crap, something is up, we need to react in the best way we can now."

Yep, the recycling/trash system is nightmarish. Furnishing a new apartment (they don't typically come with anything, including a washer or fridge) results in a huge amount of packaging (the Japanese absolutely love to box, rebox, bag, rebag, wrap, rewrap, etc.) which makes your first month a very nasty lesson in how trash pickup works and doesn't.

There's nothing wrong with that for people who choose to use it that way. But it kills discoverability (well, more accurately, there is no discoverability) for people who may hear about it without being given the direct link to this particular site or the page itself and attempt to search for it, only to find... they're not really sure what.

I've been using and (for the most part) promoting Android ever since the G1... but after 2.x the rate of UI change has, in my opinion, been terrible from a usability experience.

Pretty much all software (whether that's apps, websites, programming languages, or anything else) past a certain complexity has quirks. Getting used to the quirks is part of learning the software.

Massively changing large swathes of your built-in software is bad for users! I get that it'd be suicide to say "OK, permanent feature freeze... now," but big changes to the UI on apps that are (to many normal users) fundamental to using Android break the user's understanding of their use, often amounting to months of acclimation down the drain.

It's very frustrating.

For Chris “Douggs” McDougall, his definition of insanity is a lifetime of boredom, comfort and caution, wasting away on the sofa and hiding from the inevitability of danger.

I'm too exhausted to go look up the exact fallacy, but this is something like a straw man. And, whatever it is, it's the same one the article's title makes.

Not everyone takes pleasure from doing fundamentally stupid things in terms of lifespan. If they did, as a species, it's extremely unlikely, statistically speaking, that we would have survived this long.

Espouse your insane idea of fun all you want, but please, don't pretend it's somehow objective or intrinsic to humanity.

While I agree, I don't think attempting to perfect a ranking algorithm is useful beyond a certain point. At least for the topics I checked, it's reasonably close; there were a lot I didn't agree with, but then if it yielded my exact personal ranking, a lot of others wouldn't agree with it. So it's a bit of a roll of the dice, which in a way is nice, since there's just no ideal algorithm to be found. Getting close, which in my opinion they have, is pretty great.

That's an interesting and potentially useful idea, but if you go down that road, I think it'd be immediately relevant to also go into available subtitle languages. It also really depends on where this site gets its data from, as the "from [country x]" filtering can yield some questionable results.

I love the UI and the results! I'd just say that I have two concerns; while the click-to-add nature of the genre list is great, I don't think it's immediately intuitive. Perhaps I'm just part of the old "if you click a link it takes you to a page" demographic, but clicking to add or subtract -- while in my opinion the right mechanic here -- isn't immediately obvious. Making it more clear how this works could save you some traffic by avoiding requests from people who don't immediately understand how the UI works.

The second thing is that, on browsing movies "from Japan," I immediately get Band of Brothers, Kill Bill, Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai, and the latest American reboot of Godzilla. If it's intended to show movies set in a particular country, that's potentially a really cool gimmick, but as it is it seems inaccurate.

Love the site, though! Great work!

Inescapable? Sure, if you ignore sample size. There aren't enough countries period, and I don't think they're all similar enough in meaningful ways, for any subset to be considered a representative sample for just about anything.

I don't know enough about the debate to form an educated opinion one way or the other, I just can't stand hyperbole like this, especially when the underlying assumptions are so fundamentally flawed.

Edit: And over all of eight months. Wow, yeah, now I'm convinced...

This meshes with my impression that the separation here is almost nonexistent; the zones are more a matter of density than category. The lower residential zones can't have quite the same type of commerce in them, but I think most people in Tokyo live somewhere in the quasi-residential/neighborhood commercial/commercial row, so the more limiting zones aren't something you necessarily see a whole lot of.

Yep. I really, really dislike cities in the US (where I'm from), but now I live in Shinjuku, and it's great! Being able to just stroll down any alley and find an incredible amount of varied restaurants and shopped stacked on top of each other is brilliant. Definitely one of the reasons I like it here.

Why? That's a bit like saying a back end development framework is only a starting point, and you should start working outside of it as soon as your product is mature.

I don't think the name carries the explicit rejection of ongoing use that you believe it does. That you can use it to get started quickly does not mean you can't use it indefinitely; it's often necessary to tweak or hack Bootstrap to fit your specific visual requirements, but for a project that can actually use it without serious modification, I don't see a reason to throw out the convenience and consistency it provides arbitrarily, simply as a matter of course.

"Localize your app" is a serious overstatement for what's covered by this article. To actually localize an app, automation is not an option, nor is just getting your keywords and descriptions done.

If your target audience is international but you can reasonably expect them to speak your language but to search in their native tongue, OK, this makes sense. But that's a large target for a small segment.

Localization is a process that involves your translator understanding your product, the terms it uses, the context in which it uses them, and how those terms can be transitioned into their target language. That's a far cry from keywords and descriptions, and it matters in many cases. Those cases never stop at $300.

It's often worth doing (this is totally dependent on your goals, though) but in the case that it's worth doing for you, it's also worth deciding whether you want to actually do it or whether just making sure people find your app is OK or whether you want them to be able to use it in their native language. Huge difference.

Sort of tangential, but my first job was working in a Barnes & Noble, and it's still the one I miss the most. More than that, while I do believe electronic distribution is both more ecologically rational and practically efficient, I'm one of those people who was raised on physical books as an avid reader... and there really is something very significant lost without that tactile experience.

I suppose it's positive that more and more people will grow up without that, so we can cut down on the number of trees we cut down, but it's still sad in a way to see that experience going away. The feel (and even sound and smell, in some cases) of a book can be very intimate.

I'd say it's exactly the opposite: Early on is exactly when comments about "the new direction" can most reasonably be expected to have an effect, assuming anyone is listening/reading.

If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

This is trivially incorrect. If the problem is the creation of a magnum opus, then the solution is creating a magnum opus.

Failure doesn't have anything to do with it. It's not necessary to fail at all to improve your process; that this is the approach that's often most effective has nothing to do with the approach itself, it's a reflection of our poor models of the problem space.

If we had a thorough understanding of the problems surrounding human-powered flight, we'd be able (or much closer to being able) to create theoretical solutions that could be effective.

I don't know if Mr. Macready actually stated that "the process" was the problem, but if he did, I disagree with him as well. That the process many people use is sub-optimal and you find a better one does not mean their process was the problem. It means it was one of their problems. Further, that it can be much faster to iterate on experimental results without a solid model of the problem does not mean iteration is somehow "the answer." It means it's one way of getting to a solution without an accurate fundamental understanding of the problem.

In many environments, expectations don't have to adjust. With corporate clients, expectations were never reasonable in the first place, and many common requirements that have been around for decades still aren't reasonable.

Clients often demand idiocy like "pixel perfection," specific fonts, custom scaling behavior for size (including application-controlled zooming), and other things that simply aren't part of the paradigm for accessing websites through web browsers.

Between that and the fact that going "beyond the basics of CSS" is a pretty common thing, browser interfailure is still a real problem. It's not as bad as it used to be, but the problem is still there, and many of us are still dealing with it regularly.

You can continuously fail while acting irrationally/irresponsibly. You can also fail despite having done everything right.

Platitudes like this don't help anything, they just detract from actual discussion of reality, which is vastly more complex.

There is not "a problem." Not even relevant to this issue. Perhaps many Americans don't understand how authoritarian the nation is becoming, but that is a far cry from a defining or singular problem.

Propaganda is propaganda, as you rightly point out, but equating one regime to another based solely on the fact that it uses propaganda is not valid. Degree is important, and there exist now governments both better and worse in more than degree than that of the US. Ignoring that distinction in your rhetoric makes it hard to take you any more seriously than the propagandists you oppose.

You're also a little far off the deep end with your insistence that the US is somehow blinding the middle and lower class to... what, anything outside of the US? They don't have to do that. Americans in those situations don't have the time or resources to spend that much time looking at or caring about those things, nor would it matter to them in any material sense if they could.

So yes, many Americans would be better informed if they better understood the nature of their government. But no, it would not materially matter to them, they would not end up doing anything about it, and your assertions don't actually end up being meaningful in any useful way.

Response to corollary on #7: "Anyone else" deserves about as much respect as your cat.

The idea that a creature that enjoys destroying your possessions, arbitrarily ignoring you for most of its life despite depending entirely upon you, expects total obedience despite no contribution or investment, has never earned a dollar in its life and has no concept of what a dollar is or why that might be important to it, intrinsically deserves anything so important as respect is ridiculous.

I'm not suggesting you leave your cat or your manager out to rot with the garbage (though I wouldn't argue, in most cases). But to suggest that either of these creatures, by default, deserves any measure of respect is hilarious to me.

This is why I skipped the high priced crap and went straight to a pedometer. It's not perfect, but it is engineered to serve its purpose and does so in a predictable way.

What is this high-price-point, high-maintenance appliance worth if it's broken for significant portions of its audience and requires constant updates that don't actually happen to run or keep running?

I have friends who use and love these. Frankly, for the headaches they deal with, my ~20USD pedometer sits in my pocket and reliably estimates both my distance traveled and calories burned. No fuss, no muss, no upgrades, no OS issues. It does one thing and does it pretty well; I'd rather have that than have an appliance that attempts to do a lot of things and manages it rather poorly.

insert snarky comment about the time it takes to learn to set up a hosting environment that can survive an HN self-post here