rodp

I played basketball as a teenager. One year, I was in the starting lineup. The coach believed in me and was vocal about it. He gave me clear feedback, both positive and negative. Overall, I played well and was improving quickly.

Next year, the coach got replaced. The new coach benched me and gave me no feedback. Though he didn’t say it, it was obvious he didn’t believe in me, for whatever reason, justified or not. I started playing worse, which only reinforced his view, and then my minutes went down, which gave me less opportunity to improve, which reinforced his view further, etc. I was still on the same team but I wasn’t the same player. I was but a shadow of the player from last year.

Whether the new coach was right about me or not, I will never know. Was I falling behind because others were improving faster or because I internalised his lack of trust? Maybe I wasn’t as promising as I had thought and he merely saw it or maybe he was unjust. Whatever the reason, he ended my basketball career that year (though it would take a few more years for me to realise it).

As a young basketball player, your window of opportunity to develop is small and, if you miss it, you’re basically done. As a young software engineer, you have more than enough opportunity to find a better team and, more importantly, a better coach.

Same in Slovenia.

Aardvark

You have basically described most economies.

True, that issue has been raised before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23176527

I will probably just get rid of the features that require write permissions. They aren't essential.

Thanks. If it takes off in any shape or form, I will definitely make the best debates more easily discoverable.

Thank you for the honest feedback. I don't disagree. I see social media as a complex system that is based on a few simple rules that have allowed it to evolve quickly, but not necessarily the way we would like.

Since ancient times, two philosophers would often have a debate by exchanging letters. The goal was not publicity, though many of such correspondences eventually became public. The goal, as I see it, was simply searching for truth. I wonder if it's possible to build a platform for something similar today. Even if it never becomes as popular as social media, I hope it could at least create a clear distinction between entertainment and actual conversation.

Thanks! Debates are public and accessible to anyone with a link. Since the app hasn't really had any promotion until now, the first users are just signing up and there aren't really any noteworthy debates yet. If and when more debates are started, I'll find a way to make them discoverable.

Thank you for this feedback. To be honest, there aren't any noteworthy debates at the moment. One recent tweet and this comment on HN are literally the only promotion the app has had, so the first users have just started signing up. If and when debates appear, I will definitely think of a way to make them more accessible.

What you are (correctly) describing is the status quo. But that is precisely what motivated me to try something different, even if it does end up utopian.

Thanks. I will look into it. And let’s just say I’m not too proud of the test coverage :)

Thanks! I’ll definitely take you up on that offer.

Very interesting, thanks.

Thank you for the positive feedback. That's pretty much where I'm coming from: "likes" have created an unhealthy dynamic in online conversations and I was wondering if there could be a hack around that.

Thank you for your compliments! And best of luck with Taaalk. I am also a fan of chess :)

My hopes exactly! I use Twitter a lot and its toxicity has been the main driver behind Debubble. Thank you for your support!

Thank you for the positive feedback!

I've registered this Twitter account: https://twitter.com/DebubbleMe. There is nothing on it for now, but if Debubble takes off in any shape or form, that's where I'll be posting the updates.

Thanks for the tip. If I end up keeping that feature, that seems to be a smart way to go about it. Due to time constraints, I was trying to keep it simple. Perhaps too simple.

Thank you!

Thanks!

The app lets users send tweets or DMs and I didn’t find an obvious way to narrow the required permissions down to just that. But a few people have now pointed this issue out and I think I will just remove that functionality and require only read permissions.

https://debubble.me

Frustrated by filter bubbles and the general state of online debate, especially on Twitter, I made Debubble.

It’s a publishing tool that will let you challenge another Twitter user to a debate. If they accept, the two of you will be able to engage in a public but distraction-free conversation. Debubble will make sure you wait for your turn before you can deliver your arguments. It will also limit each response to 1500 characters (roughly one page) and the entire debate to 12 turns. Instead of cheering for their side like sports fans, registered readers will be able to signal the value they got from your conversation by starring the whole debate.

I haven’t properly tried to launch it yet, as my day job and kids are keeping me very busy at the moment.

While I agree Node.js isn't the right tool for any job -- just like anything else, really -- after reading his description of the problem, I can't shake off this feeling that the main issues he has with performance in this case have very little to do with Node itself. Parsing a huge JSON string in any language would block CPU for a while. This JSON then becomes a huge hash table in memory, so no wonder each process uses up a lot of RAM. I don't know how these rules are then used but it seems to me he might be better off trying to rethink how to do shared memory in this case before he simply blames Node for blocking CPU and wasting memory.

That said, I can imagine other languages (like Java or Go) could still end up being more efficient than Node.

I was in Beijing until a few days ago. One morning, I saw some of the hotel's staff lined up in front of their manager, reciting something in one voice. Later on, I asked a girl at the reception desk what that was but she couldn't understand me. Now I know. Thanks :)

I believe there are many A players who perform on B or C level because they are managed by B or C players. Steve Jobs was an A-level CEO, who knew how to inspire his employees and ignite their potential to be 50 or 100 better. Not many CEOs are like that.

If an A-level developer can perform 50x or 100x better than average, I'd guess that an A-level CEO can perform 500x or 1000x better.

I respect Ryan and usually enjoy his advice, but I must say I disagree with most that's written here.

Having freelancers who have 0 emotional attachment to your vision build the first version of your product and then replace them with someone else is a really bad idea in my experience. Your #1 employee should be someone who is almost as excited about the product as you. Furthermore, they should ideally have substantial skills and experience and complement you and the rest of the founders well. Most important: they should be a culture fit. Competitive salary and benefits shouldn't be cruical for the first employee. Vision and stock options should. Trying to save money by hiring someone less experienced or indifferent to your vision does not pay in the long run.

Ryan's advice is more about economics, but I feel that, since we're talking about hiring the first person, it should have been about vision and personality.

Bravo!

When Twitter introduced annotations, I thought that was the beginning: soon, we would have Twitter classifieds, Twitter marketplace, Twitter as a data firehose for anything... All I was waiting for is annotations in the Search API. I'm positive that's all that was needed to provide the initial infrastructure for semantics -- the community would take care of the rest. Unfortunatelly, not only has it never happened, but Twitter took an entirely different course.

I can understand them, though. They had to start making money fast and took a less risky road. But I can't help thinking: bugger, this could've been so much more than celebrities and hashtags.

My basketball coach once said that a team that spends 12 hours each day practicing will lose the championship to a team that only has one hour of practice a day. "We all love this sport", he said, "and we could all practice all day long, which is fine, but if you want to win the championship, you have to be smart and pace yourself". To me, this lesson applies to any organisation that values long term results.

What I didn't like about Require.js is having to wrap so many portions of my code into callback functions and not being able to merge and minify code on the fly.

We ended up using Browserify instead. It's a Node.js module that lets you use CommonJS-style require in your client-side code. Browserify scans your code for all requires, figures out in which order the dependencies should be loaded and merges the code. Optionally, it lets you compile CoffeeScript on the fly or use filters, such as UglifyJS (to minify the output). Another great advantage, IMO, is that Browserify can package most Node.js modules for client-side use. Instead of downloading & distributing JS libs, you can manage them as modules via NPM and require them as you would in Node.js apps. Browserify will grab the code from the module and package it for you.

However, if you can't use Node.js on your server, Require.js is definitely the way to go.

Macroeconomics, German, Italian, wine making, sailing, playing a guitar, auto repair. I feel like I've scratched the surface on most of these and wish I had time to dig deeper. But I also have this constant feeling that what I supposedly do know well isn't enough and must improve.

Ontologies have been used for quite a while in enterprises for things like information integration (EII). It also depends of how strict your definition of ontology is. If you ask me, RSS standard is the most widely used ontology on the web. IMO, the reason why FOAF, DC and similar standards never took off is beacause, unlike for RSS, there were never really any "killer" applications that utilized them.