This is a critique of the VC ecosystem based on a dichotomy of "inflated" versus "fundamental" value, with a CTA to hackers to "do something about it."
Here's one that better suits the title:
"Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps" (866 points)
I miss the very calming, cold, solid, metal feeling of desktop software.
Log back in after a vacation, and everything's still there.
A window with "maybe" resizable panels and a menu, and that's it.
The Web used to be the "documents."
For a technology that's been built for documents, all the navigation, footer, and header of any modern app feel like a "hack" compared to elegance of what desktop used to be.
In an old-fashioned desktop application, anything that gets "synchronized" is by choice, and rather feels like magic.
In a web app, even the UI is not a given.
We are forced to stay logged to an "Massively Online Revenue Platform Generation" games, and it keeps getting disconnected, and is laggy.
So "Let's replace the Cloud with self-hosted alternatives," right?
-- Good luck with added effort and complexity of config, maintenance, network, db, bugs, updates, and the pain of "admin accounts" in first setup.
We used to have the client and server functionality baked together in any major desktop software that used to connect to FTP, IRC, P2P, Mail, and to each other.
Today it's accounts...
Accounts.
It's accounts all the way "up."
We used to own the data, and the software.
Now it's full-scale surveillance and dispossession.
So, “Let’s build carbon-titanium-foldable bicycles instead of bloated modern cars, and still get from A to B?”
How many mainstream online platform users care about the difference in KB in their experience, anyway?
The sites in the list are hobbyist clubs with a technical point of view, which wouldn’t make sense for a mass media outlet with millions of daily traffic, and real interdepartmental complexity and compliance issues to deal with.
I have came to the understanding that the things that we'd like to keep track of as "todos" are more like "issues," than specific and physical actions.
The "tasks" are only meant for the day, maybe drafted daily and be disposed of and forgotten in a post-it notes fashion.
The issues, then are more like a backlog of requirements, a call to duty, like "briefs on the mission."
The "issues" are the question; and neither todos, nor tasks are the answer.
It is robotic to compile and keep track of a set of "actions to be done" several days into the future, but those todo.txt's as a database can be treated as valuable asset, as a "documentation of scope," for a team-of-one, or many.
Hence the treatment of those not as "todos" as issues, with their shifting nature of requirements and many ways of resolution.
Such a database deserves reinventing because nothing else can be as tailored and as diamond-cut as the one that's been built by you.
> Think of it like a website that is specifically designed for a specific individual to take a specific action, which answers any questions or objections they may have.
OK that’s quite a philosophical description for a platform to conveniently share sales pitches.
> ... , and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
The best use case that I have found for an iPad for is that of a “personal computer,” that is, a computer that is entirely personal without any business.
Use the “Pro” laptop only for professional work and coding, and use the iPad only for anything else that falls into that “personal” categories of newsletters, mail, shopping, gaming, entertainment.
As a traveling remoter, that radical separation of two contexts has brought a great peace of mind.
You can surely sit back comfortably with your iPad for personal stuff, while work asks for you sitting seriously on a desk with your laptop: no blurry lines.
So in my opinion, that “curious” category that falls in-between “mobile” and “laptop” is nothing more than “personal computing” itself!
Isn’t it what that “revolution” has been all about, anyway?
Here's one that better suits the title:
"Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps" (866 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36358754