The title of this story is over the top. The document confirms nothing. It says "someone claimed some flying saucers have been recovered. We decided it's a matter not worth pursuing."
This law basically says that if you do e-commerce, you better not have your service hosted in France. If you're not hosted in France, you might as well not pay any taxes in the country. Nice playing french government, genius move.
Notice that many of these services offer copyrighted contents online. I think the primary issues they had with doing business outside the U.S. is that there are less copyrighted laws to adequately protect the material and that sort of business in those countries. It would also be notoriously hard to sue people who abuse them.
Other services such as telecom have to deal with Canadian collusion and protectionism towards the readily established telcorps. It's an uphill battle. One that Canadians have been paying the price for, with high wireless phone bills, high internet fees and the recent attempt at imposing Usage-Based Billing.
I'm not a typographer, but I am a reader and I don't agree with his opinion that the list with hanging bullets makes it more legible. I find them slightly confusing. Maybe it's my programming background, but it just makes sense to indent something positively to emphasize context.
I do agree though that the hanging bullets add sophistication, but when I write that's not really my primary concern.
I had a reply that said a few things along those line, deleted it. Yours is much better.
Just wanted to add a few things:
1- some contributions in this world are only accidentally world changing (see various open-source software). They were not done with some zealous ambitions. Their instigator merely had an itch to scratch and it turns out that the rest of the world appreciated it so much that it just took a life of its own.
2- I am a notoriously trashy person, yet I love a clean space, but I'm also notoriously slow to clean stuff. There's this little lady who has a business cleaning apartments in the neighborhood and she comes once in a while to clean up my place for 30$ (takes her about 30-45min). By some people's standards she's only making herself happy with her business. But I'll tell you, when she leaves my place my brain starts functioning again. The place is spic and span. I produce some of my best code and sometimes throw in new features for my clients for free. I'm pretty sure it might make their own clients happy. This is the butterfly effect of small contributions. You don't need to change the entire world to make a difference.
In this context it is. There may be some serious implications when saying that x or y pattern in language z is considered harmful.
In Java accessors are almost mandatory if you intend for your object's properties to be publicly available (even the IDEs imply it, by automatically creating them for you). Whereas in languages such as Python and JavaScript, the implementation of this "pattern" makes them optional. You don't have to use accessors if you don't need them right now, since you can always go back and create them later without affecting client libraries.
What the article shows is that, surprisingly, JavaScript's native feature to do this is actually slower than the Java way (what the author called old-fashioned). Is this really a reason to revert to a clumsier pattern because we're optimizing for speed?
Saying that it's "harmful" might get many newbie JavaScript programmers run to start peppering their code with getter and setter Java-style. What happens later when the different scripting engines fix the bottleneck.
Also, many (not all of them) designers don't understand the difficulties of usability, and sometimes mistakes it with "shiny". Usability of a desktop application is way more complex than a website[...]
I think usability is a blend of user experience, usefulness and intuitiveness. I have a hard time associating the latter with either the programmer or the designer.
My experience, as a programmer working often with designers, is that many of them (not all) are more concerned with the visual appeal of an interface and to a lesser extent its intuitiveness and usefulness.
For example, I've built quite a number of web management systems. Most times, when I team up with some designer they'd want to make pretty icons. However, I've come to the realization that we get more praises when the client can just look at his system and recognizes what he asked us to build and can easily guess where to go next. And that more often happens with text buttons. I believe that visual cues have their place, but I also think that many graphic memes have gone beyond useful, which probably doesn't help the relationship between programmers and designers.
On the other hand, I remember a time when I would build some quick ass functionality, but presented in such a convoluted way that only other programmers could understand the prowess and usefulness of the feature. You had to get up up early to get me to change them!
Programmers tend to be very minimalist, whereas designers are often very expressive. I think there is an effort to be made on both parts to reach a middle-ground. Designers need to learn that pretty doesn't necessarily mean useful. And programmers need to realize that just because their work is useful doesn't warrant that it's usable.
There's hope though. In time I've learned and now strive to make features as intuitive as possible. I now also favor very pretty, text-only, icons.
[...]and the current trend of "removing functionalities" is not always welcomed by developers...
In my not so humble opinion, graphic interfaces should be designed with the Pareto principle as a guideline (80-20 rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle). Is the feature useful? Yes. Will it be used often? No. Lets put it in the "nice to have" list.
If the application caters to a broad audience with varying levels of expertise and usage, it should present interfaces with varying degrees of complexity. I've seen this applied in real life successfully (e.g. in Ubuntu: dpkg >> apt >> aptitude >> Software Center). I definitely agree with you though, that too many software nowadays try to make things too easy without offering a way to go beyond the basics.
Zed Shaw has some guidelines about that http://learnpythonthehardway.org. You'll learn some basic programming in a very good and versatile language. I learned web programming a few years ago. In my opinion, I gained about a 3 weeks head-start in productivity by choosing PHP, but I ended up making up for it for the next 3 years. There are other commendable books geared towards beginner programmers, but only a few that also target web enabled languages come to mind.
If I were to begin programming with the goal of working in the web today, I would love that someone pointed me to any of these 3 resources.
Like I said there are other beginner books and online tutorials using languages that aren't usual for the web like The Little Schemer (Scheme). It's always a plus.
You'll need to learn to use a good text editor or an IDE. I'm biased toward Vim, it takes time, but it's a good investment.
You'll need to learn HTML and some CSS. There are countless lists of recommendations out there for best books on x. Just checkout StackOverflow with similar queries for JavaScript, CSS and HTML. e.g. http://blog.reybango.com/2010/12/15/what-to-read-to-get-up-t...
You'll need to learn to interact with databases. You'll need to learn some SQL. However, I've been doing this for quite some time and I've only recently been playing with document oriented databases (aka NoSQL), it is my opinion that there are very few situations where they might not be suitable. Seeing that nothing prevents you from mixing solutions (SQL + NoSQL), I would frankly recommend to a beginner to invest in NoSQL first. Redis, MongoDB, CouchDB are the NoSQL DBs I've played with and would recommend.
How about having a news thread dedicated to articles considered off-topic, that yet still manage to garner enough interest from the HN crowd. That of course does not nullify the guidelines, people should keep posting using their best judgment while abiding by it. The only difference now would be less ambiguity about the nature of a post. Is it off-topic? yes. Are there people still finding it interesting? Lets put it on the off-topic, yet relevant thread.
Maybe the voting in such topics would be symbolic. It would be visible, but would not really affect karma. StackOverflow addressed their similar concern with Community Wikis.
Looking at that thread, I think I understand what's going on, which was really not very clear from your intervention. I thought you were being petty about terminology.
I could not understand why you were bugging me for my use of the term good hackers, when the obvious main point to be made was, if yes or no the article was, in fact, HN material, which I felt and continue to feel it is.
Many of us haven't been around this site as long as some of the people raising their concerns in the thread you pointed me to. We don't know what it was like in the old days, our only compass for what makes a good HN post is the guidelines, which can be interpreted subjectively in many situations ([...]That includes more than hacking and startups[...], [...]anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity[...]). Some of the best articles that I've found on this site snuggly fit within those characteristics (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978295). I believe the current one to have some of those same characteristics, because it highlights an out-of-the-box approach to a problem so very uncommon in the mainstream. 4 days ago I was chatting about homelessness with my business partner, and we were discussing hypothetical solutions to fix it, or at least make it less of a problem and reasons why they would or wouldn't work and some of our solutions were pretty much along those lines and also raised some ethical/moral questions. We're both programmers and though this is arguably not hacker material, we're also entrepreneurs and our ideas often stem from these little discussions that help us look beyond the status quo.
It seems from the thread that you posted that some old timers are trying to get HN to fit back into its old box. I'm still unsure if it would have much appeal to the kind of topics I'm referring to. If their veteran status grant them a say in the direction of HN, I can only suggest to push for clearer guidelines.
Btw, I cannot remove the good hackers from the original post to the thread, it appears that the "edit" timer has expired.
I just told you I was not trying to be literal. I used the term because the assumption is that HN is for good hackers in the sense that it is employed in the guidelines, intellectually curious people. Obviously this is seriously bugging you. Would you be happy if I remove the term?
As far as the article being off-topic.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htmlOff-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.