Hacker News: bobwise

New comment by bobwise in "The Yale Problem Begins in High School"

bobwise — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 19:23:59 +0000

Do "Women in Tech" conferences and workshops help to close the gender gap by actively working against the legacy of a male-dominated industry, the same way affirmative action works against the historical disadvantage of minorities?

New comment by bobwise in "Now on Twitter: Group direct messages and mobile video camera"

bobwise — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 15:04:20 +0000

This sentence grossed me out:

"The Twitter you experience today is rich and immersive, full of images, gifs, Vines, audio files and videos from some of the world’s most recognizable figures and brands."

New comment by bobwise in "[dead]"

bobwise — Fri, 26 Dec 2014 13:55:43 +0000

https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/548140622826459136

New comment by bobwise in "Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation"

bobwise — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 16:59:48 +0000

This explains the strangely-located hyphens I've been seeing in a book I'm reading currently. This must be exactly how the book was submitted.

New comment by bobwise in "Bizarro World: World Record Tetris (2007)"

bobwise — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 15:50:21 +0000

Day comes over to shake her hand. Lori is laughing as Day declares her "the greatest Tetris player in the world," then turns to me to add, "And I must say, she's also the prettiest."

Maybe if gamers didn't think it's ok to casually objectify female gamers there would be more women playing and it wouldn't be such a big deal that this player was a woman.

New comment by bobwise in "No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean"

bobwise — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 15:21:01 +0000

What are the practical consumer-level implications of this? My understanding is that every internet-enabled device needs a unique IP address. If there are no more unique addresses, can no more devices connect to the internet in this region?

New comment by bobwise in "Tweet Showing How Google Itself Is a “Scaper Site” Goes Viral"

bobwise — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 20:16:14 +0000

Ugh why do we need an entire blog post about a tweet

New comment by bobwise in "Here is a thing that happened"

bobwise — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 01:01:13 +0000

Man what a great title

New comment by bobwise in "Google Cancels Netflix Deal for Chromecast"

bobwise — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 16:03:04 +0000

For anyone (like me) who thought the headline meant that Netflix is no longer available on Chromecast, that is not the case.

Google and Netflix had partnered on a promotion to include 3 months of Netflix for free with the Chromecast device, but they've ended that promotion due to overwhelming demand.

New comment by bobwise in "URLs are for People, not Computers"

bobwise — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:39:07 +0000

Well obviously URLs are for people because raw IP addresses are unsuitable, but that doesn't mean that textual URLs as they exist today are our best option. Even well-designed URLs are too complicated. "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5498198 is mostly devoid of meaning even to me. I can tell that that URL is referencing a discussion on Hacker News, but "Hacker News" or the title of the article are not present in the URL.

Hierarchical URLs betray the underlying model of the internet as a series of interrelated documents. People don't care about understanding the layout of files on a web server; they just want to open Facebook, or their email, or perform a search. Nobody types "http://www.facebook.com into their browser. They either click a bookmark or type "facebook" into the search or URL bar. What happens next is up to the browser.

The best solution would conform to the already existing mental model that people have. They don't think of a website as a bunch of documents on a web server (despite the shared vocabulary with printed media - words like "page" and "bookmark"). Their mental model is probably something like buildings on a city block. You can pick one to go into, and when you're inside you can do things and learn things that are unique to that building. Rooms are connected by hallways and doors. There are windows where you can see outside or into other buildings. You can bring things with you into the building and take things out when you leave. To get back to a room in a building that you've been in previously, you can either go back to the front door and follow the path you took originally to get to the room, or you can "bookmark the page", which is like a shortcut directly that room.

New comment by bobwise in "Hacker News Parody Thread"

bobwise — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:57:13 +0000

Got distracted halfway through the thread, came back 10 minutes later, and read another 3 comments before I remembered it was a parody.

New comment by bobwise in "Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd."

bobwise — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 20:48:55 +0000

Like with "Disney's The Avengers"?

New comment by bobwise in "The Amazing iOS 6 Maps"

bobwise — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 21:17:37 +0000

Busted.

New comment by bobwise in "Introducing The App Center"

bobwise — Thu, 10 May 2012 01:20:52 +0000

It's an app store for apps that only run inside the Facebook app. Facebook is a platform in a platform - the "Inner-platform effect".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

"The inner-platform effect is the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using."

New comment by bobwise in "Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt"

bobwise — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:30:10 +0000

I was about two paragraphs in before I realized that this has nothing to do with Lord of the Rings.