Thank you. The unintentional irony of people who've completely misinterpreted a very short, accessible paper and then try to use it to make fun of other people's intelligence...
Well this is interesting. Third story from the top is about how Reddit is kickbanning a bunch of sites (e.g. the Atlantic) for nasty SEO, then a5seo submits an Atlantic story, his history is full of submits by the Atlantic, and he has steady stream of submissions with zero comments. Joke? Art? An SEOer not paying attention?
To rephrase what you just said: Mexicans, because of their ethnicity, are less able to understand (for instance) mathematics, even when given the same amount of instruction, than people of the ethnicities that characterize the population of California circa the 1960s (i.e. predominantly white). Did I get that right?
Correct, I'm not addressing your argument. What I'm doing is scolding you for highjacking this thread with your simple-minded ideology.
I've always come to this site for interesting and novel ways of looking at the world. What you're offering is neither. We've heard it before.
Perhaps instead of considering all the negative votes as further reinforcement of your views, how about looking at it this way: maybe it's the wisdom of the crowds telling you that your ideology isn't as revolutionary or as brilliant as you think it is, and maybe it's a sign that using HN as a soapbox for it isn't welcome.
This has nothing to do with socialism (or whatever you perceive to be your ideological enemy). It's about the the intellectual value of what you are bringing to the conversation.
Dude, we get it. You're a libertarian. It's very exciting that you've figured absolutely everything out and can offer a ridiculously simple solution that civilizations for the last ten thousand years have somehow overlooked. It's just too bad that there are shadowy conspiracies aligned against you and other libertarians, and that people are so ignorant and brainwashed that they can't see how effective your exceedingly simplistic recommendations would be if only we could all agree to make vast sweeping changes to how our governments work.
Sorry for the bile, but wow is this ideology, and it's increasing presence on this site, getting tedious to me.
These ideas are not new. They are not as brilliant as you think, and in fact are a sign of intellectual immaturity - a stage that you grow out of once you start to realize how irreducibly complex the actual world is.
Or maybe I'm wrong, and you have figured it all out. Luckily for you we have a system that's perfect for people who know for certain how the economy will behave. Let me know when you've made your billions shorting the US economy. A great way to get past believing in simplistic ideologies is to start putting your money where your mouth is.
Starting launching a startup in this space, but then took a sharp turn and launched Urbantastic.com instead.
The idea was to improve the user experience - basically by putting a Pandora-like system in behind a Google-like front end. We launched it, it worked great. With a few clicks the site would sort everything in the city by what you'd be most interested in, and keep that sorting (without signing up) for the next time you came. But about a month in we concluded that the UI was not the issue. I agree with StrawberryFrog in that the issue is structual.
I think that there's still a big missing piece. Something's got to get event listers and event seekers in one place that adds more value than just finding things to do (and I don't think content like local news is anywhere near enough). I'm half expecting something to evolve out of Facebook events, but it's not there yet.
Also, crunching the revenue numbers from local (Vancouver) weeklies, then multiplying worldwide, it's not the kind of money that you can take a lot of investment for. People just don't spend much time looking for things to do.
Short answer: it's a feature, not a product. But to what product does this feature get added? I don't know yet... There's been a _lot_ of failed attempts already.
I've worked at two social ventures that had non-profits as clients (Web Networks, and most recently Urbantastic.com).
There emphatically is something wrong with non-profits. Just because there are some excellent ones (Sturgeon's law applies) doesn't mean that the field at large isn't ill.
An anecdote: we had a meeting with a guy who worked at a large company with a philanthropic streak. They provided, free of charge, a "dashboard" for planning, along with free training and tech support to any non-profit that wanted it (it cost considerable money otherwise). It was simple but very powerful, allowing you to do sensitivity analyses on projections to determine which courses of action would result in the best returns - both monetary and any other metric you wanted to put in (i.e. the social goals of the project).
It was like he was selling popsicles at an ice rink.
We ran into a very similar issue with Urbantastic. We had a web service that was very effective at getting small things done for non-profits: it's called micro-volunteering. There's no supervision required, you just write down what you want and someone always did it.
When we founded Urbantastic we thought the challenge was going to be in getting skilled people to help out for free. That was not a problem. The problem was that we'd go up to non-profits and say: here's a machine where all you have to do is post your todo list, and people will cross off items for you. For free. And we never got uptake.
People lined out the door offering to help, and almost no one took them up on it. Despite our offers to walk non-profits through it, and despite the recent funding cuts which meant that they needed all the help they could get.
I'm not saying that Urbantastic is perfect, but in our pilot cities this was overwhelmingly the result, and I still can't think of any incremental change that we could have done to get the non-profits engaged. A big part of it was that most of them were still uncertain about the whole email thing. It's not an exaggeration to say that some of them didn't know how to use a spreadsheet.
With our fancy web 2.0 ajaxy website, we felt like we were giving out iTunes gift cards to the lost tribes of Papua New Guinea. They didn't value it because they weren't even close to being at the point where they could use it.
I care about social good - I wouldn't have founded a social venture if not. And twice now I've been floored by the state of the non-profit world. Again, 10% of them are brilliant, but the other 90%... It's a big problem, and it's not going to get better by pretending that it's not there. That world is amazingly backwards. And it's saddening to see such important mandates being handled by such ineffective organizations.
My advice to anyone here planning on doing a social venture: drop backwards compatibility with the non-profit world. (one giant caveat: working exclusively with one or two of the few clued-in orgs might work).
So far, all the HTML that a given page will need is part of the same document. The templates for the dynamic content are all stored inside a hidden div.
I expect that eventually this will cause too much of an up-front load time, so I'm planning on having the JS load bundles of it on demand. Reducing total HTTP requests is a big usability win, in my experience.
To answer your URL question, I use attributes, like this:
Author here. Here's the relevant line in the post:
"[..]web browsers are not the only clients that will use Urbantastic. Mobile devices, search engine spiders, screen readers for people with disabilities, and RSS readers all need the same data but in different forms. Accommodating any of these is simply a matter of dropping a different rendering front-end in front of the common JSON data server."
It's not up yet, but I'm working on a front end intended for non-javascript users. It will also serve blackberry users, IE6 users, and spiders.
It will be a /much/ simpler site, but you'll be able to get everything done on it. I figured it's easier to separate it out than try to shoehorn every use into one format.
The general principle is that I'm going to design for the large majority of the users - and use Javascript capability I can to make it an excellent experience. Then create a simplifed mirror for the minority uses. Gmail took this route and I think it's worked well for them.