I.e, he means it has less bang for the buck, compared to something like a VPS on Slicehost.
Which is true (there are several benchmarks in related price ranges), but AWS offers other things, including a vibrant ecosystem and huge scalability opportunities in different zones etc.
A lot of startups can justify the cost, especially as an engineer can cost twenty times more than a couple of machines to start with.
I replied in another comment to most out-of-context quotes of mine used by seliger (a comment which someone already down-voted, because, presumably, the response of someone directly targeted by a post should be hidden into fade-out oblivion).
Now, I'll attempt to reply to his general case, or lack thereof.
One of the main points is that one should only comment only when he has "something useful, unique, original, or non-standard to say".
That doesn't sound like what we call a discussion. Taken to the extreme, it sounds like a dry exchange of scientific papers in comment form: "here's my thesis on this, here's my counter-thesis to your thesis".
For one, all these criteria are highly subjective. One's "useful and original" thought could be an idiotic triviality for another.
Case in point, the "utility of single-use objects". Personally, I don't need anyone to point that utility out to me: I use forks, socks and shaving foam too. And if someone did want to prove the utility of single-use objects to me, a wrist-watch would be a bad example, if he adds that he still carries a smartphone.
That's just one example to show the subjectivity of the notion of "useful and original thoughts".
Want another? Hacker News had for 2+ days a front-page full of articles regarding Steve Jobs. I don't mind, this is what the community voted it wants to see. But does it bode well with the "death to unoriginal/useless content" idea, people seem to want to enforce to HN at the same time?
Before you take it to the comments, have you checked the front page top voted articles? A random example (#2): "Switching Sol Trader from Ruby to C++: one week on".
Is this what is considered a useful, original and non-standard submission? Because it sounds like JavaLobby or WebMonkey circa 2000.
#11 Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr, #3 Login to your Google account by scanning a QR code, #5 AWS Free Usage Tier now Includes Microsoft Windows on EC2 #18 Startup will wash your car wherever it is located,
There is better stuff, but you have to hack your way with a machete.
= = = = =
Now, in the context of a thread, someone has three ways to react when met with something he doesn't like: upvote, downvote and answering.
I tend to answer to comments that I find wrong. I also find that it does not take a full-length essay to prove a weak point. Sometimes you only need a line or two. And sometimes you have to state something unoriginal, if only because you reply to something unoriginal.
A comment like "Python's whitespace made programmers avoid it in droves", does not merit a full response, with the whitespace Dijkstra quote and links to the TIOBE index. If you think it does, then you probably have a flawed concept of "discussion" and/or are unpopular at parties.
A proper discussion should have a balance between interesting observations, arguments, counterpoints, nods of agreement, nods of disagreement, and some light stuff thrown in for good measure. And sometimes a plain "what you wrote just doesn't make sense", is needed too, if only to put bizarro ideas in perspective.
= = = = =
I find the below excerpt problematic:
"""But Internet comments tend to degrade as a website grows; it attracts more people who just comment, often in ways that aren’t negative enough to silence through moderation but still annoying enough to lower the quality of the conversation."""
"Lower the quality of the conversation" by whose standards?
Because, if anger against such "lowering of the quality" is not measured by downvotes or negative responses, then the only quality you are alluding to is in your head.
And it's especially ironic to invoke something like the "Dunning-Kruger effect", whereas "the people who are least likely to provide valuable and non-jerky comments are also least likely to realize they’re not doing it".
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a double-edge sword, it's not a free pass to imply "my stuff is golden, yours sucks and you don't even know it".
[Thanks for your downvotes. Way to prove the point that people use downvotes to kill opinions they disagree with, instead of using them to flag offensive / bad comments].
“”"”The more recent readers don’t, or a critical mass of people is developing who don’t work to contribute substantive material. I hadn’t really thought about the issue until about a month ago, in this comment thread, where I pointed out that single-function devices can still have utility. “”"
You pointed it out, alright.
But:
besides the obvious observation that pointing out that “single-function devices can still have utility” is not “substantive” in itself (gee, we know it already, we use forks, knives, socks, pens, and a million other single-function devices everyday)
you also failed to notice that the topic of the thread (as set by the parent) was not the utility of single function devices, but the notion of “brainwidth”. Of which you said: “My brain is not a passive entity that is ‘being sucked up.’ People either let themselves be sucked up, or they don’t”.
And your proof of your brain NOT being “sucked up” was to …recite your use of every hipster cliche: the inevitable moleskine, the wrist watch, plus an iPhone. You even responded with point 3, regarding moleskine’s variable/declining quality, another hipster concern that lead to alternatives such as “Field Notes”, etc.
Is irony completely opaque to you?
“”" Dextorious has a lot of problems with reason; he tends to post things like “Thanks for the “democratic” downvoting.””"”
Yeah. I have tons of problems with reason. But you seem to have problems with proper identification of the relevance and purpose of a comment and/or comment thread.
For example, I didn’t argue that downvoting is undemocratic in itself and in general, I posted that in thread about how America is not cutting it as a model for democracy. Downvotes to that comment meant that “no it’s cutting it, and we’ll prove it by downvoting contrarian opinions”. See the irony this time?
Have you also missed the general discussion on HN about using downvotes to flag out off topic or bad argumentation, instead of using it to fade into oblivions opinions you don’t agree with? The second can be called undemocratic, in the way it violates the, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” principle.
Or, let’s take:
“”"”He calls Facebook “hyper-valued web crap,” but not in the context of providing real insight.”"”"
Over-valued crap is enough real insight about Facebook. You’ll thank me one day.
But you seemed to have missed the general idea, cutting my sentence in half. Why would you do that now, jseliger? Why?
My quote was: “As if this has worked well in the past for other hyper-valued web crap…”, ie suggesting we learned from the history of other hyper-inflated over-valuations. I even mentioned the flagship example of VA Linux, circa 1999.
“”"I looked through his comment history; there are many one-line, two-sentence comments like this one, which led to a pointless flame war. “”"
How offensive, my two sentence comment. You happened to miss that it was a reply to a one sentence comment, about how: “[Python] made the mistake of making whitespace significant thereby driving off people in droves”.
Which is more insightful,
1) that people avoided Python (a highly successful, widely used language with a huge community) because of whitespace,
or my comment that says that
2) that was a concern (and frequent “religious” issue) in the nineties, nobody really cares about that kind of thing re: python now?
“”"Others tell him that he’s not being very nice, as in a comment where Dinkumthinkum says, “You’re missing the point.” “”"
Someone told somebody else on the internet “you’re missing the point”. News at 11. And this somehow translates to “I’m not being very nice”?
Well, I might not be nice.
But I’m not a finger-pointing, cry-baby, stalking-idiot about it.
“Boo-hoo somebody pooh-poohed on one of my comments, I’m gonna search their comment history, present it out of context, call them names, and make them an example of a general trend in HN. That’ll show ‘em. Nobody messes with the Seligman!”
No, it contains correctly spelled words used in place of other desired words.
"I sea your eyes", "I she your eyes"
If you want to correct these kind of errors, you must now a lot about natural language. Also, the above are trivial cases. There are tons of edge cases and far more difficult distinctions. Here's an amusing one, that can lead to "Microsoft paperclip" like interactions:
"I gave him the new pink dress as a present" =>
"I gave her the new pink dress as a present"
No, idiotic spell-checker, I do mean him. My friend is a cross-dresser, shut up and let me type.
Such a spellchecker would also be useless for poetry. And if you find poetry obscure, so it doesn't really matter, then such a spellchecker would also be useless for irony. Suddenly, you lose all the hipsters from your potential users (except if they start using it ironically).
Anyway, no spell checker in widespread use attempts this --and it's probably a very hard nut to crack, and probably uncrackable in the general case.
"""This is just sugar coating for the crap they're covering."""
Yes, please, do reduce an elaborate article discussing technical and business trade-offs into a silly anti-MS rant that wouldn't be out of place in Slashdot circa 1999 for us.
"""It seems the author of that article doesn't know that spell checking, translating and understanding text are actually major features of pretty new software, too. """
Actually it seems that everybody reading the article got the same WRONG impression.
The author full well knows what it takes to do a i18n full-featured spell checker.
That is BESIDE the point.
What he says is that doing a basic (lame ass) spell-checker in the 80s used to be a MAJOR undertaking, and now, doing EXACTLY THE SAME is trivial.
His point is not about spell-checking.
It's about modern OS, language, CPU, HD and memory conveniences, vs what one had to deal with in the olden days.
"""Oprah has practically become a saint, for opening a school that graduates ~100 students a year. Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with the money they need to send their kids to school, and they are practically the devil incarnate. It's complicated."""
How good of Foxconn. If only they didn't make ten times the money or more off of each migrant worker while forcing him to work in shitty conditions capitalizing on the fact that they are kind of the only game in town and/or have agreements with fellow factory owners to keep the wages down/conditions bad...
"""Most software are outdated after a couple of years."""
You'd be surprised. Tons of code runs in production, even in the latest of shiny systems, that was written 10 and 20 and 30 years ago -- either in whole or in parts, refactored etc.
From 1986's NeXT OS that is now OS X Lion and iOS 5, to Bill Joy's TCP/IP, to Emacs.
And tons of enterprise/banking/financial/military systems use ancient code, even 70's COBOL...
I.e, he means it has less bang for the buck, compared to something like a VPS on Slicehost.
Which is true (there are several benchmarks in related price ranges), but AWS offers other things, including a vibrant ecosystem and huge scalability opportunities in different zones etc.
A lot of startups can justify the cost, especially as an engineer can cost twenty times more than a couple of machines to start with.