dca

My first program was on the C64 when I was very young. Had it not been available to my parents and me at that time, I'm not sure I would have the same passion for technology and programming I have today. Thanks Jack, for helping bring it to the masses.

under GVR:

"...he has an afro that would make Snoop Dog smile."

LMAO

Tried RSS feeds but it sucks. There needs to be an RSS feed that only shows items that make it at least to the front page. Or maybe beyond some configurable vote threshold.

I ignore posts like this for exactly that reason. Its sad they get as many votes as they do.

Nice. Thanks!

"People built it in Flash because there was no other decent technology from companies like Apple, Microsoft or Real Networks that enabled this kind of content to be created and delivered. To say that all this content should be discarded because Steve Jobs is afraid that people will build Flash content that runs on mobile devices running any operating system instead of building content that will only work on Apple mobile devices is doing a disservice to the efforts of all those individuals."

Interesting perspective I haven't seen in other articles on this topic. By existing for years in popularity, its almost a required technology in order to truly maintain internet history, as would be the case with image formats for instance; though, granted, its arguable whether the majority of Flash content is truly worth maintaining in perpetuity.

While certainly it may be displaced as a choice for new content, can Flash ever truly "die" given that a likely sizable portion of the web will never be converted to anything else?

That's incredible. I've wanted something like that for a while now. Thanks for pointing it out. Are you aware of a vim oriented one anywhere? (I switch back and forth on which I prefer given the time of year / language of the hour)

BP was mining for some toxic gas on the surface of the planet when something went horribly wrong. Now they're pumping out 5000 Bcfe's of it per day into the southern hemisphere and its destroyed the red stripe we'd become so accustomed to.

Is there a market? Yes (edit: otherwise articles that we've seen recently regarding their changes wouldn't cause an uproar)

Will it completely disrupt Facebook? Not likely. At least not soon.

I've been wondering whether it might be possible to charge a small monthly fee to cover hosting expenses for such a service, with a value add being essentially flexible privacy controls, and lack of a business need to monetize in ways that hurt privacy.

Exactly. And flash was introduced 14 years ago. It really has no excuse for not having better performance at this point. I'm glad its dying.

It's not a huge problem. I enjoyed your post and can relate. Thanks for sharing it.

I just found it to be an unnecessary distraction.

It's not that it bothers me. It just makes it more difficult than necessary for me to read. I make an assumption that by posting something on the internet, the person wants me to read it and wants to share their ideas with me.

Why distract readers from one's ideas by not following simple grammatical convention?

Apparently so do their shift keys.

I may be missing something, but why wouldn't they just use the real thing?

Maybe your key difference could be ship people instead of stuff. Kind of like an AirBNB but replacing Taxi's and busses instead of replacing hotels.

How is it so different? Microsoft at least did not control the hardware. Apple has always been worse than Microsoft in that respect - they even wanted to control the printer at one point! The only difference now is that for some reason its working for them now and iPhone is incredibly popular. But they're much more monopolistic than Microsoft ever was, and they always have been, and I would imagine they always will be.

Thats one of the more innovative Tetris oriented games I've seen in a few years. I was surprised how smooth it works in the browser, even though I've seen a few of the other cool things folks are doing with HTML5 these days. Good stuff.

I guess in my experience with this site, the vast majority of folks are capable of viewing life and the world around them from many different perspectives, which is why the conversations are so engaging, and why I keep coming back frequently.

They are interested in generating controversy, which generates buzz, which generates ad revenue.

> Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book.

Agreed, its absolutely excellent. Thanks to Y Combinator for listing it in the book list.

> Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information...

Not agreed. In my opinion you might have missed what I felt was a main point of that book: Always learn the appropriate statistics required to understand the data, choose a correct visualization method to communicate those statistics effectively, and once you've understood it fully, confirmed the results, and removed all the cruft, then publish it.

Apple's terms were never agreeable to me, so I never started developing for it in the first place. I figured something like this was inevitable, so it changes nothing for me.

"If history has taught us anything then that open always wins."

The web and unix-like OS's are the only two examples I can think of off the top of my head where open platforms have done well. Windows was closed, and its much more popular for consumer desktop apps and game development. Video game consoles are all closed and there are no open alternatives I'm aware of.

I'm not saying I don't think open might win in the long run, but I don't think I would agree that history has taught us that it always wins. Not yet anyway.

The only thing scarier than the censorship and reasons for it (i.e. human rights issues, corruption, etc...), is how powerful China would be if they ever straightened up.

Nice. Very similar to something I've been working a lot on recently.

Particularly that one.

Sigh... another golden opportunity to name something the C Object Oriented Language (cool) squandered.

I was hoping he had hacked together some code to apply the diffs to the text to make it more readable.

Fast prototyping lost its edge early on in the competition. Once people figured out the winning formula is something like Flood Fill + Minimax + Voronoi it all came down to tweaks and optimizations to search deeper, and making sure your evaluation function was accurate, not trying out completely new paradigms or anything like that.