toadstone's comments

Predator/prey is also a metaphor. People aren't actually being eaten. They are voluntarily sharing data that is used to provide them with a service that they want. I'm so depressed that I have to spell everything out.

It was a predator/prey metaphor, not a individual/group metaphor.

I don't understand this community. I thought you were wolves, but here you are taking the part of the sheep. Instead of being outraged, you should be trying to get your own piece of the data pie. Every single web startup is doing exactly that.

By definition, being social means doing things other people are doing.

I'm more curious about what the alternative is because this is my default mode of programming. I don't see what's backwards about it. You establish what you need in the module first, then code. What else can you do?

I think the analogy was stated poorly. Here's my take:

1. Big company A sees small company B getting rich off a new market. A forsees B disrupting A. With MS, it was the fear that the web would become the OS. With G it's that social will become the web.

2. A builds a copy of B's product and gives it away while tying it into their main product line. A's main competency can subsidize it. In the G/Fb case, G+ won't need a cut of developer revenue or to show ads.

3. B can't compete and folds. Now that A is dominant in that space it pulls resources from its product back to its main competency. The space stagnates for years. This hasn't happened yet with G/Fb of course, but I don't doubt that G will lose interest in social as soon as they feel safe.

What's the point? He'll never beat LuaJIT. I'd rather see a new language with a "slow, slow, and slow" implementation that had interesting semantics than another python/lua/js cut-down LISP.

I know they did shady things in the beginning. A lot of businesses have to do that, and many don't stop. That's just how the game works.

As a user, of course you don't have to take it. Just don't buy what they're selling. There's no reason for outrage. Let them scam people dumber than you, and with that money maybe they'll develop something you like.

Current Zynga games aren't that bad. The production values and gameplay are a lot better than the werewolves/vampires style games that they started with. Given a few more years, their games might even be comparable to traditional, non-social games.

I think the HN set is unfairly hard on companies like Zynga. The entrepreneurial of mind should know that a start-up can't always afford to act nobly or to invest in quality. Sometimes the right strategic decision is to make cheap crap and spam now, and reform later once you're out of mortal danger.

There's a lot of wishful thinking in these G+ posts of late. People hope that G+ won't have to make the painful compromises FB has, though without much justification. The two are so very similar, if G+ catches on most everything people hate about FB is going to reappear in some form.

Regarding the post, I expect Google to be even more restrictive than FB with 3rd parties. They'll refuse to have their name tarnished by crappy apps. iTunes app store style review wouldn't be surprising to me. Spam free feeds are a selling point for G+, after all.

Facebook already has the exact same functionality in friend lists. They're only a small ui tweak away from parity in that respect. As for the drag and drop into circles, it's cute but realistically it's not a big part of day to day use.

I find this absurd. I don't even call them bugs when I get compiler errors. They are typos. They are trivial to fix, and I'd much rather fix them at 3pm before I've checked in the code than at 3am when it's live or 5 minutes before a presentation. If you really want to sketch a function, just make a stub that throws. It will only be 3 lines long.

Every single story about facebook has a post like this, and I'm so tired of reading them.

First of all, why would you even consider competing with Facebook? You do realize that outside of the valley, there are companies not packed to the gills with ruthless nerd geniuses that would be much, much easier to disrupt? Facebook isn't even ossified like Google or Microsoft. They'd just reimplement your killer feature in one of their hackathons.

P2P social network won't work because it's way too hard to do any analysis on the data of the system as a whole. How would you implement a newsfeed? It would be a nightmare.

Regarding having two categories of friends, it's already doable with friends lists. You can do exactly what you are saying with a friends list for acquaintances/grannies/whatever. Or you could just not accept so many friend requests.

I think you know you've cracked when you prefer bad C# to clean Haskell.

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever written a program that doesn't use containers, manage memory, and handle errors.

Are you really saying that the time and energy you save coding and debugging by using high level features aren't worth a few minutes of compile time? It won't even be a few minutes except for the first time because of separate compilation.

I think http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/08/06/on-seeing-like-a-cat/on... is a more insightful analysis of the cat/dog dichotomy. There's nothing particularly cat like or dog like in the roles described in the linked article.

I remember it being a rare event when 212 created a FP enthusiast. Are the students in the new course liking it or just enduring it?

I'm sure the author wouldn't mind especially if you copied the article into notepad and deleted the first two sentences before reading it.

Sometimes articles are over my head too. Sometimes I work on figuring them out and learn something. Sometimes I give up because I don't have the time or energy. However, I don't blame the author for my ignorance.