Oh I love that. I program on my phone as well using LÖVE, though games aren't really my interest. My devlog at https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog is about recreating the feeling of typing in programs from magazines in the microcomputer/PC era. Only, you know, with copy/paste instead of typing in by hand.
2008 is good! Now I want to know what was the first comment saying HN was going downhill.
A few years ago I did a thorough search for "HN is turning into Reddit" posts so I could link them at the bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. These 4 predate your July 2008 link (the first one by only 6 days):
Ask YC: HN submissions feels like submissions on reddit post sale, do you guys feel the same way? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=225134 - June 2008 (10 comments) (<-- wow, we allowed titles that long?)
How do you separate (1) HN is going downhill, from (2) the world is going downhill, from (3) people always think things are going downhill? It seems hopelessly undecideable. (And yet, being human, I do think that HN is going somewhat downhill. Relative to the world though? not sure)
HN has always had sucky bits, just like human nature. Everyone who thinks it's going downhill is just one of today's 10,000 [1] to discover some sucky corner of human nature.
I'd say the world has gone downhill much faster and is making HN look good in comparison.
What's your universal "value for money" index that should apply to everyone ?
For instance why should a touch support or better port selection be less valuable to me than let's say battery life ? Does supporting multiple OSes have a defined value to money ratio that I'm not aware of ?
It's still the same kind of argument. What you mean by "build quality" is probably mainly the unibody frame ? Why not include repairability as litteral build quality ? and what about weight or shock absorption?
Same way "performance" can't be a fixed set of measures for everyone. I care about GPU speed in VR games and macs doen't give me much of it.
My point is we can't throw around "X is better performance wise" with no context, it makes no sense on its own.
I watched some of their (iFixIt) recent videos about Framework laptops, Mac Neo, and Lenovo laptops. What I love about them: They are not haters. They just want companies to get meaningfully and incrementally better at repair. 10/10 rating does not mean perfection -- it means "great" (very repairable). In a modern world of so much unnecessary manufactured drama on social media (including YouTube), it is nice to see a high quality company batting away the opportunity for unnecessary manufactured! The most recent Lenovo laptops have a bunch of minor complaints -- still they got 10/10.
It's actually not bad? "The most repairable MacBook in years" means practically nothing. And for someone who might be comparing with a Framework, it's probably an insult.
I have been rocking _smaller_ tablet PCs with better reparability score than the Neo in iFixit since practically the 2010s. My current one is a 10/10 from HP. This to say nothing about upgradability.
The Neo doesn't clear the bar. It just barely improves over recent macbooks, which is next to nothing. Specially to someone comparing to the Framework!
Sure, but a 6/10 for "the most repairable macbook in 14 years" is still a 6/10. Lenovo ThinkPads range from 8-10 and even the Microsoft Surface 7 got an 8
Security industry going to be okay - someone will always pay for 0-days. If vendors wont pay its just gonna be US agencies, Israel resellers, China or Russia.
If you don't feed your army, you will soon feed someone's else's.
These days corporate security treats these workstations like a dummy terminal. No secrets live on the workstation. You have to re-auth with sso constantly with biometrics and are basically editing data that is in a cloud. So the risk to a corp is minimal where even in the worst case they are insured.
Zero days like this are being disclosed regularly so the idea of securing a windows workstation is tantalizing but you'll never feel satiated trying to drink that water so don't even try.
So yea there's plenty of windows users but we're certainly not hosting anything important on those boxes and would frankly be aghast at the suggestion.
> These days corporate security treats these workstations like a dummy terminal
Correct, "zero trust" is the buzzword but this is how Microsoft even recommends you set up your endpoint infra. Assume breach, treat every endpoint as if it is currently compromised or could be at any time. Laptops are basically ephemeral, when set up right, and can be wiped and re-imaged within an hour or less.
That's not unique to Windows either, that's how all employee/user endpoints should be managed.
Not to mention all the startups being founded right now. Sure, github's still the default, and maybe you can still monetize stars or something, but it's also a clown show from an availability, feature roadmap and company policy perspective.
Is it really fiscally responsible to tie your company's future to that?
I wonder if anyone tracks metrics for this stuff. Percentage of stuff with a repo there is probably still high, but what's happening with stuff like github actions, and are devs directly pushing to github, or are they just mirroring an internal / other provider's git repo to it?
Why is it that every criticism of gemini/gopher throws the baby out with the bathwater?
When you browse to a pristine html page containing zero adtech it contains links. Those links you might click on without first thoroughly vetting them for behavioral exhaust.
Hyperlinks are a vector for contagion. A new protocol creates isolation. What's wrong with both existing? Defense in depth at all levels, I say. You think https can't enshittify, maybe you just haven't waited long enough.
You'd have to prove these things are possible in the face of the ingenuity of the entire adtech industry. The limitations you point out, on the other hand, have easy solutions:
What makes you think the adtech industry won't just embed ads in text if this becomes popular at all. You don't need any kind of technology for ads, only eyeballs.
Adtech isn't about showing ads. It's about targeting ads. And yes, if Gemini gets wildly popular maybe they'll think of something. Good problem to have! New mistakes instead of same old ones!
If you want to support cat pictures that show up without clicking a link, but prevent any behavioral exhaust from tracking pixels, that seems to be an open problem. Every new feature is like this: a risk surface until proven otherwise. So to reduce risk you have to limit features, i.e. jank.
The claim was, "Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech", but adtech cannot prevent you from making a jank-less, universally accessible page or site about your cats or whatever you like. IMHO, one really can't be part of the solution if one's left the protocols mainstream for the digital equivalent of an off-grid cabin in the woods.
You're right from the perspective of a website author, but the original comment I responded to is from the perspective of the protocol designer. There is no known way to design a protocol that can be used to create polished experiences without also letting some ingenious website suck up behavioral data.
> One can still be part of the solution without leaving the modern-standards-based mainstream altogether for the digital equivalent of an off-grid cabin in the woods.
So many judging words there. A new protocol is an off-grid cabin in the woods, but building a non-janky universally accessible website isn't? You'll have to prove you can get a random new website more traffic over https without doing nefarious shit and letting the big adtech companies crawl it.
Astute observation. Gopher is in fact a portal that lets you teleport from one off-grid cabin to another, all around the world. And some people like that.
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