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.
I don't think you understand communities. People acting in a group will act similarly and be derided by you as 'sheep.' It it is the type of thing that motivates group action that determines whether you think group members are 'wolves.'
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.
And in these threads where you call us sheep, we are deciding that the data price is too high for the service rendered.
We have the right to use government to nationalize these programs if they are going to be so deceptive and intrusive.
Facebook falsely advertises their service as free. They don't tell their users that they are collecting unnecessary amounts of data to violate people's privacy, and that this data is payment for the service.
You can be mindful or mindless in "doing things other people are doing." Many people choose to mindlessly "do things other people are doing." Leaders take a step in a direction, and the crowd may or may not follow them. If they do, it's because people tend to follow, rather than to lead.
Which is interesting, considering that many of us are here because we want to take some risk as entrepreneurs, to step out and do what people are not doing. Does that mean entrepreneurs are not social?
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?
The way I'm most comfortable programming is a sort of head-first approach. You have a feature you need and an idea of how to design it and then you just start writing. It should compile at any time (within reason), and you'll see the bits and pieces of your feature come to life. You'll catch bugs quickly because you won't have written much at any one time.
It's usually messier, though. An hour of just cleaning the code really helps as I always end up with a method that should have been broken up into 2 or more.
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.
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.
I'm ok with apps on G+ if they provide an option to turn off all notifications / spam. You can "turn off platform apps" in Facebook but still have to hide the posts individually. I've probably manually blocked 30 apps at this point, which is annoying.
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.
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.
No, they cannot in all cases. But they can afford to not steal from their customers or direct them into a trap where they'll be stolen from on a recurring basis. It's not about the quality of the apps as the majority will be shite anyways, it's about the ethics of the people involved.
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.
A trivial example is always trivial to fix. And you can raise an unimplemented exception in just about every language.
But what I'm talking about is usually when the code works correctly at first. Then you come along 6 months later to this code that you didn't write and know nothing about to add some new feature. Along the way, you change a few things. And that breaks something subtle. A parameter becomes nil that used to be something. Or a key in a map is no longer created.
Static type systems would say, "if a parameter or map lookup may be nil, you must wrap its uses with a case to handle it". Which makes a lot of sense in the scope of this one function.
But if I don't care about the case when the parameter is nil -- when it is, it usually means something much bigger is wrong or I simply don't care about having that feature working anymore -- why should I spend the time to track it down to handle it? It's not something trivial like a method is undefined. It's more like, a method is not defined on the specific instance of a class, whose methods get defined at runtime with metaprogramming, so it takes some tracking down. Sure when it's just you, and your entire code base is 300 lines, it doesn't matter. But when it's a large project and you have shit to get done in order for your company to get paid that day, whether or not your function handles the nil case that no one ever uses simply isn't so important.
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 have a... secret wish? private fantasy?... where I take a moderately complicated problem and outsource it to a known bad outsourcing company, but rigidly require that they write it in Haskell. Just to see what pops out.
