The fact you say people may lose it because you may have "a bad [hairday]" says so much about you. Which is: an inconsiderate ass hole looking for glory/karma points.
> Looking forward to more positive contributions from you in the future.
This might be my favorite comment by you of all time Jacques - very elegant way of dealing with that nonsense. I don't need a subdomain, but much respect and cheers for doing this. And jeez, I guess there'll always be critics no matter what - "inconsiderate ass hole looking for glory/karma points" - that must be ever so enjoyable to see after devoting a few hours to setting people up and helping them out.
You know I have been watching these with interest. I think someone is trying to beat the turring test. The always seem to be in context, but don't seem to quite jive with the conversation. I have seen some that are pretty decent. I wonder if someone is using the voting system as feedback as to how well the bot is parsing the conversation and developing a convincing response. It is the only logical explanation that I can think of, They are never a good troll, they don't pitch viagra or some other crap, but obviously someone has put the effort to get it onto the board. The question is why. My thought is the kind of guy that would be trying to beat the turring test would be lurking on HN. Just a thought.
Update: well ok maybe not for this guy I see he posted later on down in the thread. But his first post did follow a pattern that I have been noticing in other threads.
Take it for what it is and use it to your advantage. If you find it useful or are grateful for the contribution then vote it up. The fact of the matter is that you are a hater. Here's another fun fact for you. Haters are the lamest kind of fans, because they're too proud/unaware to admit their love. Did you realize that by posting in the thread you're making it more popular? Threads with lots of comments get more views. Consider the outcome of your actions.
I guess you have not read the mantra around here, according to PG and I am paraphrasing here so forgive me if I don't do it justice. He does not want it to prosper beyond it's core focus. My understanding is that he is not interested in creating the next Slashdot or Reddit. As a former Slashdotter with a extremely low user id, I understand why, I witnessed it happening over time. With that prosperity comes a watered down environment where memes, on liners and +5 funny's, and flaming trolls such as yourself are the rage. It kills the brand and drives people like myself away. I lurked here for a long time before deciding to join, and the reason I finally did was the fact that there is a concerted effort to keep HN from becoming Slashdot.
I gave it a go back in 2000 .. I've never learnt so much so quickly and had loads of fun and hair pulling moments. One tip, when you get your system up and running to "init 3", modprobe your soundcard driver and spin up "Orbital - Halcyon" .. If you're a fan of the Hackers film that is ;)
I never done anything else with my build at the time, but I did join the Arch Linux community which is a distro based on LFS with a package manager. So I effectively went from knowing very little about Linux to being a package maintainer for a distro over the course of a weekend.
NNTP is alive and strong. Google groups includes most usenet groups for example. Yeah, most ISPs don't give out free access any more but just google for "news server access".
"Apple designs for #2. No other mass-consumer products company puts as much attention to detail into the fit and finish of the box—let alone the out-of-box experience."
I'm sorry but no they do not put as much attention to detail into their products as you would think. They didn't even have multitasking in the iPhone until recently! And what was the antenna problems all about?
All I see is just enough attention to detail to make people go "wow, shiney." and that's it.
This actually holds true for Macbooks/Mac OS X as well. I've been using a MBP for over a year now, and "attention to detail" is hardly the first words that comes to my mind.
A few examples:
* Different shortcuts in different programs.
* "Home"( * ) and "End"( * ) mapped to different key combinations in different programs. (No, not just 3rd party apps, apple apps too.)
* Holds true for hardware, too: ctrl is positioned differently on small and full size keyboards.
( * ) Of course, there are no home and end, but one of <fn>+<arrow key>, or <cmd>+<arrow key> or <ctrl>+<arrow key> will usually work. The only text movement combination that works almost in all apps are <alt>+<arrow key> which jumps by words. Of course, being unix, <ctrl>+a and <ctrl>+e works everywhere (?) but they can't be used together with <shift>
I'd actually argue the opposite; Apple pays so much attention to detail that they figured out that multitasking isn't really important, so they could just do it later. Copy and paste is awkward, it isn't absolutely necessary, they could just do it later.
Even the antenna thing: only the tech press knows anything about this. Apple said that just under 2% of people returned an iPhone 4. During that whole scandal, I asked my friends that haven't ever heard of HN, "What do you think about the iPhone 4 antenna problems?" and they had no idea what I was talking about. Even among those of my friends that have iPhone 4s, only 2 out of 5 even had the issue at all, and lately, my Nexus One's antenna has been acting up...
Apple is good at making MVPs, and then improving upon them. Eventually.
Being a curious one, I had a look round your site as listed in your profile. You say have a Nexus One, yet your personal site, Watch.Steve, releases the tutorials in "iPhone + Apple TV" format and the filenames have iphone in there.
Just an observation ;-) Prompted mainly by the strange pointless dig at the Nexus One which had no relevance to the conversation or OP.
Yep. The site was originally a copy of the code for Railscasts, which does the same thing. I'm a life-long Mac user, but I do own a Nexus One, because I absolutely refuse to do business with AT&T.
I don't think the dig was pointless. I'm not an EE kind of guy, but from my understanding, basically all modern cell phones can have their antennas interfered with through touching the bottom of your phone. But the way that the iPhone 4's case was designed increased the severity of the interference... my Nexus One does the same sort of thing. Just yesterday, I was talking on the phone, and when I tried to hold it with my shoulder rather than with my hands, I was told that I "sounded like I was underwater." This is almost 100% reproducible.
> I'd say 99% of Apple's target market were fine without multitasking plus it's a nice battery
I disagree. I think they put up with not having it believing it would come soon, or didn't realize how bad not having it would be (I know that last one describes me).
Have you checked out Hacker Evolution? Might be a good source of ideas. It also strikes me that £20 may be a tad much to ask for an interactive fiction text game.
The fact you say people may lose it because you may have "a bad [hairday]" says so much about you. Which is: an inconsiderate ass hole looking for glory/karma points.