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As a college student, I can identify. I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary. I t

As a college student, I can identify. I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary. I think maybe part of this is the community (HN/the startup world) you're a part of. Speaking for myself, I love the ideas that people present here, but often it feels like each website is just another toy. I see no reason to commit to them. I've always been something of a minimalist though, so maybe it is just me.

possibilistic 14y ago
I'm your age, I agree, and I'll take it a step further. I think these toys are causing an irrational exuberance. I'm upset at all the polish, all the ten thousand variations on the same silly theme. They do nothing to advance our civilization. It's disheartening. It's 2012, so why doesn't my OS know what I'm trying to do and solve problems for me? I wish this money and effort had gone into making a desktop environment that automatically tiled windows for whatever mental intent I have, removing any need for me to mentally do that. Why doesn't the environment know the type of task each process represents? Why can't it learn how I like to set windows up in response to any given input sequence and do that? Another problem I have--Why do we need 'blogs' and 'websites'? We just share text, images, and video. Let's make a baseline platform for authoring, reading, commenting, sharing, upvoting, editing. Let's make it a hybrid of federated and p2p; articles get a real URI/URN and can be pulled from any server. No need for readability since it would be 'built-in': read everything in your favorite theme / font. Build an interest graph of users on top of this and you have an extensible solution ten times better than Prismatic; a testbed for every ML algorithm and recommendation algorithm we can think of. And it's software everyone can run/extend! Why the hell didn't we build that instead? Maybe it's just my biology side getting through, but websites suck. Centralization sucks. We got it right with the PC, with the OS, with the internet, with web protocols, but seriously--websites were a step backwards. We stopped making general solutions and began reimplementing the same damn things over and again. Why? Progress just stopped. I'm not smart enough to solve these problems / I don't research in these areas. I just hope to contribute meaningfully to metabolomics research. If this is something that irks you too, I dunno. Maybe we should get in touch. I'm just so fed up with the status quo / present paradigm.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  To be fair, there are some tiling window managers that basically read your mind with a bit of configuration. And yet people here use OS X instead (actually, I know two people using XMonad on OS X, but they're rare). Make of that what you will. Now, of course they don't literally read your mind. Instead, there's some easy to write configuration in a nice language (e.g. Haskell) that communicates your thoughts to the manager ahead of time.
  - semisight 14y ago
    I would very much like to try XMonad honestly. I use OS X because I wanted the portability/power/battery life of a Macbook Air. I tried installing Ubuntu (as a starting point), but I wasn't able to get it to work. I've been thinking about trying to write something similar (a very small subset) of XMonad that will do the same style of tiled WM on top of cocoa, but I'm not sure where to start.
    - kasperbn 14y ago
      Have you tried "Shift it" for OSX: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
    - danieldk 14y ago
      I did use xmonad on OS X a lot, and I liked it. Since I live mostly in terminal emulators and vim, tiling for X11 applications was plenty enough. So, I ran X11 with xmonad fixed to a specific desktop (as OS X allows you to specify that an application should always run on a particular desktop). I used the other desktops for Cocoa applications (without tiling). Unfortunately, Lion switched to Mission Control, and I didn't revive that setup yet. It should be easy to do, since Lion now provides an option to prevent Mission Control to sort desktops by usage.
    - jerf 14y ago
      For ten years, I'd used a series of window managers, but all in the same basic configuration, a non-tiling window manager with about 10 keyboard shortcuts I defined to move around a 2x2 set of virtual desktops copied from when Enlightenment first introduced me to the idea. I wanted to try XMonad after hearing people talk about it so much, but I figured with 10 years of having burned the same workflow into my fingers it would take me some time, so I sort of budgeted some playing-around time on my home computer of a few days before I even considered putting it on my work computer. It really surprised me that by the end of the first evening I was already pretty good with it and by the end of the second day didn't want to go back. I disagree that it's a big productivity enhancer, I think there's some excitement bias there, but even after a couple of days I did find myself preferring it, which was actually contrary to my expectations. It helps that I know Haskell well enough to truly understand the configuration file and configure it using Haskell qua Haskell, and not just copy-and-paste snippets from others (I also added some DBus support to manage volumes using Haskell DBus modules, though it's not tested enough to share), so I would say that if there's a tiling manager in a language you already know (Lua has one for instance, I think), you may want to try that one. I would also say this is not all that great a way to learn Haskell, the subset it uses for config is too small, and opaque if you don't already know what's going on. But tiling managers in general work better than I thought they would.
unalone 14y ago
> I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary. > often it feels like each website is just another toy. I see no reason to commit to them. In between these two sentences you highlight something important. At a certain point, it stops mattering what exists. All that matters is what you need. Technophiles love trying out tools and imagining ways they can put them to use. It's fun, but it's also entirely unnecessary. (The unnecessariness is part of the fun!) If you're not a geek about this sort of thing, though, then all you need are the things which somehow extend your life in meaningful ways. What worries me more than anything about startup culture is that by emphasizing the creation itself rather than the motive behind the creation, it often leaves people with the impression that the point of making a startup is to make a startup. And while many people do find success with that route, its opposite approach – live your life until you find something out of place, then build what you need to fix it – is much more commonplace, and often much more effective. Mark Zuckerberg, he of Facebook fame, built a music player in high school because he wanted music recommendations. Released it for free rather than sell it to Microsoft, because it was about fixing a problem, not making money. Now read his letter to investors [http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/zuck-letter/ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/zuck-letter/]. He emphasizes again and again that Facebook was built to solve a problem: "We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other." Whether you think he's going about this the right way, it's clear that he built Facebook with this intent in mind. Its innovations have all been on this front. He didn't see MySpace and think, "how can I tweak this and steal their marketshare?", like many many other social networks did. He saw a social value in networking and sought to make a service that would fundamentally revolve around that value. I use a number of services; my friends (mostly college-aged) and I overlap and diverge in a number of ways. What matters to us is our friendship. We use the software that'll let us interact in ways that we care about. Some of us even turn off our phones when we see each other in person. It's crazy!

possibilistic 14y ago

I'm your age, I agree, and I'll take it a step further. I think these toys are causing an irrational exuberance. I'm upset at all the polish, all the ten thousand variations on the same silly theme. They do nothing to advance our civilization. It's disheartening. It's 2012, so why doesn't my OS know what I'm trying to do and solve problems for me? I wish this money and effort had gone into making a desktop environment that automatically tiled windows for whatever mental intent I have, removing any need for me to mentally do that. Why doesn't the environment know the type of task each process represents? Why can't it learn how I like to set windows up in response to any given input sequence and do that? Another problem I have--Why do we need 'blogs' and 'websites'? We just share text, images, and video. Let's make a baseline platform for authoring, reading, commenting, sharing, upvoting, editing. Let's make it a hybrid of federated and p2p; articles get a real URI/URN and can be pulled from any server. No need for readability since it would be 'built-in': read everything in your favorite theme / font. Build an interest graph of users on top of this and you have an extensible solution ten times better than Prismatic; a testbed for every ML algorithm and recommendation algorithm we can think of. And it's software everyone can run/extend! Why the hell didn't we build that instead? Maybe it's just my biology side getting through, but websites suck. Centralization sucks. We got it right with the PC, with the OS, with the internet, with web protocols, but seriously--websites were a step backwards. We stopped making general solutions and began reimplementing the same damn things over and again. Why? Progress just stopped. I'm not smart enough to solve these problems / I don't research in these areas. I just hope to contribute meaningfully to metabolomics research. If this is something that irks you too, I dunno. Maybe we should get in touch. I'm just so fed up with the status quo / present paradigm.

tikhonj 14y ago
To be fair, there are some tiling window managers that basically read your mind with a bit of configuration. And yet people here use OS X instead (actually, I know two people using XMonad on OS X, but they're rare). Make of that what you will. Now, of course they don't literally read your mind. Instead, there's some easy to write configuration in a nice language (e.g. Haskell) that communicates your thoughts to the manager ahead of time.
- semisight 14y ago
  I would very much like to try XMonad honestly. I use OS X because I wanted the portability/power/battery life of a Macbook Air. I tried installing Ubuntu (as a starting point), but I wasn't able to get it to work. I've been thinking about trying to write something similar (a very small subset) of XMonad that will do the same style of tiled WM on top of cocoa, but I'm not sure where to start.
  - kasperbn 14y ago
    Have you tried "Shift it" for OSX: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
  - danieldk 14y ago
    I did use xmonad on OS X a lot, and I liked it. Since I live mostly in terminal emulators and vim, tiling for X11 applications was plenty enough. So, I ran X11 with xmonad fixed to a specific desktop (as OS X allows you to specify that an application should always run on a particular desktop). I used the other desktops for Cocoa applications (without tiling). Unfortunately, Lion switched to Mission Control, and I didn't revive that setup yet. It should be easy to do, since Lion now provides an option to prevent Mission Control to sort desktops by usage.
  - jerf 14y ago
    For ten years, I'd used a series of window managers, but all in the same basic configuration, a non-tiling window manager with about 10 keyboard shortcuts I defined to move around a 2x2 set of virtual desktops copied from when Enlightenment first introduced me to the idea. I wanted to try XMonad after hearing people talk about it so much, but I figured with 10 years of having burned the same workflow into my fingers it would take me some time, so I sort of budgeted some playing-around time on my home computer of a few days before I even considered putting it on my work computer. It really surprised me that by the end of the first evening I was already pretty good with it and by the end of the second day didn't want to go back. I disagree that it's a big productivity enhancer, I think there's some excitement bias there, but even after a couple of days I did find myself preferring it, which was actually contrary to my expectations. It helps that I know Haskell well enough to truly understand the configuration file and configure it using Haskell qua Haskell, and not just copy-and-paste snippets from others (I also added some DBus support to manage volumes using Haskell DBus modules, though it's not tested enough to share), so I would say that if there's a tiling manager in a language you already know (Lua has one for instance, I think), you may want to try that one. I would also say this is not all that great a way to learn Haskell, the subset it uses for config is too small, and opaque if you don't already know what's going on. But tiling managers in general work better than I thought they would.

unalone 14y ago

> I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary. > often it feels like each website is just another toy. I see no reason to commit to them. In between these two sentences you highlight something important. At a certain point, it stops mattering what exists. All that matters is what you need. Technophiles love trying out tools and imagining ways they can put them to use. It's fun, but it's also entirely unnecessary. (The unnecessariness is part of the fun!) If you're not a geek about this sort of thing, though, then all you need are the things which somehow extend your life in meaningful ways. What worries me more than anything about startup culture is that by emphasizing the creation itself rather than the motive behind the creation, it often leaves people with the impression that the point of making a startup is to make a startup. And while many people do find success with that route, its opposite approach – live your life until you find something out of place, then build what you need to fix it – is much more commonplace, and often much more effective. Mark Zuckerberg, he of Facebook fame, built a music player in high school because he wanted music recommendations. Released it for free rather than sell it to Microsoft, because it was about fixing a problem, not making money. Now read his letter to investors [http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/zuck-letter/ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/zuck-letter/]. He emphasizes again and again that Facebook was built to solve a problem: "We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other." Whether you think he's going about this the right way, it's clear that he built Facebook with this intent in mind. Its innovations have all been on this front. He didn't see MySpace and think, "how can I tweak this and steal their marketshare?", like many many other social networks did. He saw a social value in networking and sought to make a service that would fundamentally revolve around that value. I use a number of services; my friends (mostly college-aged) and I overlap and diverge in a number of ways. What matters to us is our friendship. We use the software that'll let us interact in ways that we care about. Some of us even turn off our phones when we see each other in person. It's crazy!