antitrust

That's an insightful analysis.

For me, the question is knowing what exactly I'd do differently. On a lot of crucial points, I don't know and don't know how to find out (except experimentation).

The weird thing about online communities is that at some point they transition from being promotional opportunities owned by the promoter to online communities owned by the users and promoters alike.

Part of the role of Reddit, HN and other social media is to motivate you, the collected developers out there, to write your own version and fix all the problems you see in the system (software + admins + "culture") as it is now.

That includes me. Maybe after the wedding, kid's baseball game, co-worker's going away party, and stuff this weekend.

Another option is a middle path:

It will turn out, how it turns out.

Sounds tautological, but it preserves the idea that multiple real world forces determine the outcome, not wishing or feeling. That might save us from paranoia.

I have learned distrust. I distrust anything that makes me feel good without having achieved something that merits that sensation.

Alcohol is like being wrapped in a comforter. You are warm, the world is soft, and like a child, you trust in everything turning out alright.

This has no relationship to the real world.

While I have enjoyed alcohol many times, and both drunk to excess and been a social drinker, I find that it distracts me. It distracts from what I should be paying attention to, while I'm busy feeling good and safe.

Once, deep in a meditative trance, I channeled Perl. My friends took me to the hospital after I refused to stop speaking in regular expressions and hashes of hashes.

Keep pushing, Google. We're all waiting. Is the future of Gmail that it will be manipulative corporate bloatware, or a cool hacker innovation that changed email by streamlining it? Looks more like the former today.

Your second mistake might be assuming that rationality, logicality and common sense are one and the same.

> the structure of a persuasive essay is a non-fancy, workaday model that works just fine.

I agree with this, but would like to point out that grey-area's point was that there are other forms which fit other uses:

> There are various ways of structuring an argument - as a dialogue, as thesis, antithesis then synthesis, or treating it as an oration like Cicero's with 6 parts ending in a peroration.

The five-paragraph comp works very well for a standard argument.

Anything that doesn't fit the thesis requirement, like a list or synthesis, might not do so well with that format.

> the habit people have of making a list (as the OP does) as if this is a substitute for properly structuring their thoughts - to me that's a cop-out and not far above no structure at all.

Speaking as a language professional:

If there's no direct association between the parts, present them as a list.

Otherwise, you're going to impose narrative structure that does not add meaning and thus is extraneous.

> I object to a huge, creepy advertising company having that much access to me and my data, I think it’s unwise to use many proprietary, hard-to-replace services in such important roles, and I think it’s downright foolish to tie that much of your data and functionality into proprietary services run by one company in one account...

He makes a good point.

Absolute power gets abused absolutely.

Unless the person to whom the power is handed is some kind of Zen master, it's likely they'll use that power for personal agenda.

The groups they like will become elites. The ones they don't will get lined up against walls and shot.

That's just how it is.

Even though Google says, "Don't be evil," they aren't Zen masters.

> And who says that big government stifles entrepreneurial innovation?

"A brilliant exploration of new ideas in business argues that government is behind the boldest risks and biggest breakthroughs"

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/32ba9b92-efd4-11e2-a237-00144...

I don't have much of an opinion on this topic, since it seems to me that any large concentration of money and smart people produces innovation (so do lone geniuses). But I thought this article was interesting.

BRB, need horses and guns.

This is great news. Thanks for posting it.

To me, Perl represents the most organic language out there. It arose from a collection of traits in other languages and macro vocabularies. It's held together by a series of lexical assumptions that work because they mirror our intuition.

But even more, it's kind of the anarchy zone. You can write whatever type of code you want. However, the people who make readable, clean, efficient, and functional code are the ones who rise.

With CPAN, and the ingenuity of millions of Perl hackers, there's nothing it can't do. If you've never tried it, play around in it awhile. You might like it... and stay forever.

You should come to one of our local PerlMongers meetings (http://pm.org/).

I think it would change your mind about a number of things!

> In my view, the "walled garden" of iOS is just the next step in what Apple had already intended to establish for the original Mac.

I imagine this is a quandary that shows up not in computing, but anywhere that users interact with a single source of definitive rules.

For example, it might be easier for government to erect certain walled gardens... or for companies to do this with their employees, parents with their kids, etc.

It's not that I don't understand their position or view it as probably the best way to herd cats (I mean, "consumers").

But hacker-friendliness is what gets you the top echelon of users drifting toward your hardware and software. As a result, it's a huge (but invisible) business draw.

I agree. Perl is great and often the fastest way to git 'r done, especially across multiple operating systems.

Perl got a bad rep for two reasons. First, writers of boutique languages wanted a reason to feel good about themselves. Second, certain segments of the Perl community (I won't name names) insisted on writing obfuscated, baffling code that read like line noise from a modem.

The Perl community counteracted this, but there were still enough of these people out there to give it a bad rap.

In the meantime, if you're a Perl programmer who can write functional, efficient, clean and readable code, there's no shortage of stimulating work.

> the Internet as a new Wild West

I thought that idea died, was buried, exhumed, and reburied back in 1996.

> I don't know how to improvise in conversations.

This is hard for everyone. It's why people make so many references to television, movies, music and sports in their small talk.

I wish they'd taken a middle path.

Having BASIC (or another language) built into the machine was a big plus and encouraged people to see continuity between the OS, the hardware and the code.

If that BASIC had to use built-in functions and data-types instead of simply POKE-ing and PEEKING-ing as a de facto interface with the underlying machine code, that would still have been hacker-friendly without being inflexible.

It was such a weird relationship between desktop machines and UNIXes back then. It's like the desktop designers had to re-learn the lessons of UNIX in the small. So much was forgotten.

This was my experience exactly. I loved the open Apple //, even though it had limited growth potential. I found the Macintosh to be confining (and still do, although more in an interface design sense now).

The Apple //e was the hacker-friendliest machine ever. It's probably the ideal learning platform for anyone looking to go into computer science, although perhaps not app programming as a career, which requires a narrower skill set and more focus.

This is great advice. I have a long list of projects I wish I'd done with the intent of accomplishing and then telling people about, as it would force me to get them done and make them into contributions.

Many are small, others would have made me wealthier.

In all cases, I didn't engage them because I didn't feel they were significant "enough" or lacked the confidence to simply dive and do them, and missed an opportunity as a result.

Almost all of them would have been accomplish-able in a weekend or afternoon, with another half-hour spent writing a blog about it. You don't need much detail, but it takes some mental work to distill the project to a simple statement that people will enjoy reading.

Regrets? Sometimes. More so for having failed to cultivate in myself a culture of getting stuff done and pushing it away from my desk into the world at large, so others can build on it.

"I could have done more" is the statement of someone who realizes in retrospect the value of his time.

> spending more time writing documentation in the internal wiki than doing actual work

I have to disagree that this isn't actual work, as long as he's documenting something important.

But this:

> organizing meetings with no purpose, where he appears to be making decisions

That does sound a bit like a narcissistic personality complex, doesn't it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disord...

You could separate out the behaviors that aren't bad from those that are, and document the bad ones, then bring that to a manager and ask for some help.

You've got to fight ... for your right ... to -- Oh. Ew.