Yes there has been lots of bike shedding. A lot of people, myself included, have lobbied that ! in CSS is already an abomination (because in normal programming it generally means 'not').
Currently the discussions/draft/etc don't match or agree on what the syntax or capabilities will be.
Our :-hitch-has is based on the original :has proposal and the existing implementation in jQuery as we feel that this is the best (and clearly the most powerful since it allows you to express more).
The representation of this move as a gateway for 'glory hunters' or wantrepreneurs is surely at odds with the intentions or the likely implementation (not that many of the applications no doubt fit this).
I don't imagine the interviews to be along the lines of "Do you really want this? Do you reckon you can make something awesome? Great, you're in", rather that this is more for successful teams 'in between ideas' or great combinations of proven individuals. Otherwise I find it hard to see what the selection criteria could be.
Different people have different aspirations, and not all them involve Sr. Moskovitz' opinions of 'success' or 'impact'.
While many jurisdictions hold the same, that 'facts' can't be subject to copyright, there is often a (lobbied for) grey area surrounding compilations of facts.
The usual suspects in these cases are recipes, Geodata and my personal favourite - Premier League Football fixtures. The latter is in the final stages of a European court challenge that is rightly claiming licensing such a simple set of data for thousands of pounds is absurd: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17218968
rπ is a great project, but it's hardly out of left field.
There have been plugins for years, at seriously affordable prices. You can buy a netbook for $100 these days and run Windows/Linux on it happily.
rπ is interesting because of its positioning as a learning platform equivalent to the BBC Micro which nurtured David Braben and many of the other backers. Not because it holds some magical quality over Gumstix, BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, CottonCandy, GuruPlug, DreamPlug, Arduino etc.
I think that purpose designed hardware at the $25 price point is a radically different proposition than a second hand netbook for 4 times the price (because you sure can't get a new Intel netbook for that price).
It does hold a magical property over all the platforms you've mentioned: price. At $25 it's close to disposable, whereas I'm going to look after a $90 BeagleBoard.
I once walked into the Arduino IRC and asked if it could run maxima. The response was that I'd be lucky to get it to run Linux. The arduino costs more than $25. Everything you listed there costs more than the utility value it has for most people.
For $25 a pop you can do innovative prototypes on the kids-allowance cheap. The size is an extra bonus. There is no end to the number of ~$50 projects I've thought up that consist of a pi and peripherals. To say that those other projects you mention are somehow comparable is ridiculous. They all cost multiples more money than the pi.
The pi is really going to speak to my demographic: Teens in their basement who have no money to spend on flashy prototyping equipment. But have tons of ideas they want to try out.
EDIT: And continuing, for doing a "production run" having multiples lower production costs is a serious advantage for cash strapped endeavors. Not sure if the pi foundation will let you order enough to do that though.
This perspective is interesting when applied to communications.
Parlay.
Courier.
Pigeon.
Mail.
Telegraph.
Telephone.
Transatlantic Comms.
Fax.
Early Internet.
Email.
Text Messaging.
Live Chat.
Voip.
Twitter.
Facebook Messages.
Video Chat.
It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat, VOIP, Videochat - there are fundamental reasons to stick with certain technologies (Fax, POTS, FB and Twitter excepted). There is disruption to be had, but there is still massive value in some of the oldest methods, with some evolutionary shifts.
The services need to adapt, and incumbents do restrict progress, but the 'email killer' notion is not well conceived. Most people don't use email as a 'todo' - that's an extension, not a replacement. This is why Rapportive has a market, but is not _the_ market.
> there is still massive value in some of the oldest methods, with some evolutionary shifts.
Yes, and newer protocols often carry emulation layers for older protocols, so we have things like POTS running on top of TCP/IP, when just several years ago most of us still had TCP/IP running on top of POTS via dialup modems.
The other day I needed my insurance company to send a fax to my bank (banking regulations mandate the use of faxes rather than electronic formats to share documents). The insurance agent did it by hitting a few keys on her computer. A piece of paper didn't leave her office, but it arrived on cue at the bank's fax machine nonetheless.
Sidenote: One of the interesting side effects of the internet disrupting traditional retail is that the losses in traditional lettermail delivery are being offset by massive gains in package delivery. The USPS has pilloried itself by doubling down with huge new investments in the part of its business that is shrinking instead of pivoting into the obvious growth opportunity.
Some would argue Email is little more than USPS over IP.
I think the most interesting aspect of modern communications - accidentally in the 90s, deliberately in the post-twitter-era - is the simple addressability of people.
There was a tradition of letter writing for centuries (visit the British Library), but it required some level of introduction to connect. The academic roots of email broke some communication boundaries (to the time-detriment of prominent academics), and Twitter has opened the same addressability to celebrities and field-leaders (with a more voluntary twist I would say).
Yes, but this addressability of people also means that the sender must have some value to provide.
Being able to self-create a platform of value that you can offer to people you wish to network with is crucial (I created a magazine to accomplish this objective).
> Yes, but this addressability of people also means that the sender must have some value to provide.
If only that were the whole of it. The sender must have some value to provide in the eyes of the recipient. But the recipient will actually have to look at the message in order to determine if this is the case or not. That decision alone makes many messages that were sent with value '0' a net negative to the recipient.
Hence all the spam. If the 'providing of value' would be a thing we could determine in advance then the low barrier would not be an issue.
Effectively a spam filter determines that the value of a message is '0' to the intended recipient to avoid them becoming negatives.
The breakthrough in your comm analogy will come with the translation of thought to word.
We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation, then send that to the recipient.
This will be wired-telepathy - the recipient will get a message which they can receive any way they choose; visually (email - they read it) audio playback, or thought-injection. It is played back on the nerves and is "heard" in their head as a thought. (evolutionary results to be sure)
As a life long Cyberpunk enthusiast who, at 37 years old, has been using computers daily since I was 8, I really have concern over the mental health of the yet-to-be digital world.
I.E. the ADHD that will result in direct cerebral access to information 24/7.
What will be the impact on the (generally) serially wired brain to vastly parallel inputs?
I suspect massive upheaval on the social level. There will always be adopters of immersion, as there will be the future Amish who will eschew all digital, but the median social reaction will be a result more of our true, and unknown, innate biology that we wont even be aware of until this happens.
> We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation
Since this thread is presumably being read by entrepreneurs making bets on the future of technology, it needs to be said that this will never happen with the current imaging technology. Brainwaves implies EEG, and the research in this field strongly suggests that it is information theoretically impossible to extract this information through the electrical activity on the scalp.
For this vision to become reality we need a new imaging device that has both the temporal resolution of an EEG, and a spatial resolution that probably needs to be better than an MRI.
In summary: Certain things are impossible. I can say with certainty that no algorithmic improvement will allow this to work using an EEG. I don't know whether it is physically possible to create a non invasive imaging device that allows such a signal to be detected reliably, but it certainly does not exist today, and it seems like a leap of faith to assume that it definitely will exist at some point in the future.
I can key morse code at 40wpm with two muscles. With one hand I can chord at 120wpm. On a stenowriter I can transcribe about as quickly as most people can read - 250wpm.
I've invested an extraordinary amount of effort into improving the speed at which I can interface with a computer; I think the practical limit is about 300 baud, half-duplex.
Of course, we're trying to establish an interface with a bafflingly complex lump of grey meat, but are we really daunted by the idea of outpacing a V.21 modem?
Your judgment that present technology is inadequate is based on the assumption that computers need to learn to read the human thoughts.
What about the inverse, that the humans learn how to think in a way that a computer understands? That will be much easier, as humans learn much better than computers, and also much safer - I will have complete control over which of my thoughts the computer can detect and interpret.
The human learning to adapt to the machine has been the way EEG-based brain computer interfaces have been made for a couple of decades. Using machine learning to adapt the machine to the human is a much more recent development.
It is possible today to make EEG controlled devices. They typically differentiate between a small number of real or imagined movements in the user. This is awesome, because it can allow severely paralyzed people to communicate, control a wheelchair. etc. Nevertheless, the algorithms used to do this are perfectly useless when it comes to distinguishing whatever words the user is internally vocalizing.
The keyboard is not very good at determining which words I'm internally vocalizing either, still seems to work.
The point I'm trying to convey is that maybe we can learn to transmit words using some form of brain reader, but that measures something else than vocalizing.
Doesn't have to be "brainwaves". The brain has a few outputs that can be highjacked (e.g. a computer with a neural interface that appears to be another muscle in the body). I don't know whether the bandwidth of these outputs is sufficient for interesting communication; we've evolved to take in far more data than we produce.
Asher's Gridlinked supposed a limited set of society [operatives & wealthy] who could manage this fulltime connection, and even then it was perceived as unhealthy.
Wikipedia has undoubtedly changed how our generation views knowledge, but it's still a pull-technology. Outbound messaging will still be a push-technology (nobody wants to compose an email of their stream-of-consciousness, and brains are poorly wired to retain full structure in mental 'RAM')
Wetware doesn't add significant differences to the existing protocols - merely a more rapid input mechanism than checking your phone. Assuming contact is voluntary, people will not opt for the PubSub model for comms. If you choose to use it for trivia, caveat emptor.
Sure, but I was not saying that there will be compulsory receipt of info... though, given human nature and the already prevalent propensity for people to be overly responsive to the flood of alerts - I see a negative impact on conscious.
It will be very interesting to say the least.
Personally, I am already overly unacceptable to the karma endorphin boost from reddit, quora and HN. I was thinking about this just the other day; I was originally against karma being hidden on posts, but now, I like the fact I am less enticed to for bias based on that number.
We already continually scan for karma upticks on all our primary sites. This is bad...
You are contradicting yourself. On one hand, you state that a "killer app", i.e. something that everyone would use is cryptography. On the other hand, you state that the vast majority of people trust a squiggle on paper, rather than actual crypto. If the average joe doesn't care about crypto, why would a crypto email be interesting?
You'd need to find a way to make crypto interesting. Lots of email don't have crypto, so if you sell something that does crypto well, then you can corner the newly created crypto market.
A peer-to-peer system for sharing music/films that does good strong crypto (and faster than tor) would do the job.
I don't seem to understand why did you put "Facebook Messages" in a line of great inventions. Isn't it just another "Live Chat"? Am i missing something?
Facebook (and Twitter to some extent) solve one of the biggest problems of email which is the concept of verified sender.
I add it to the paradigm shifts as it resolves (in its own [large] namespace) a longstanding problem with email.
I add it to the 'transient' list as its solution is purely driven by network effects which leaves it vulnerable to the next player sideways market dissolution.
It's a bit of a stretch to say they solved it. I'm not on FB and so FB to me don't matter. On the other hand, I'm part of an Active Directory of my company, so AD solves this problem for me at work.
But none of them guarantee that the email came from the particular person and not from a dog.
A sidenote, but it's interesting that your comment drifts into the 'fallacy of the now' which is the antithesis of the essay.
You posit Raspberry Pi (flippantly or not is not clear) as the 'next Steve Jobs' response...
I love what Upton's trying to achieve, Braben is a hero of mine and I cut my chops on the BBC Micro in the early 80s, but it still stands that this is just the latest in a long line of interesting forays into the minicomputing sphere.
Jobs' post-NeXT vision was fascinating in that no steps were widely anticipated. No betas, no early release, just pure visionary product. I'm a linux guy, no Apple fanboyism here, but I see what pg is trying to reference. From nowhere, blow away your competition _and_ create new markets with singular product vision. The Anti-Lean. There's a Jedi aspect to this - the next one will arrive, we just have to hope (s)he doesn't turn to the dark side.
There are very few successful futurists in the literal sense.
The long bets are not on the current startup ideas which will still mould the world 5 years from now. YC's view of investing in those with the wherewithal to effect change - not those who necessarily have the answers to hand - bleeds through the ambiguous edges of this essay.
pg's reticence to put his full belief behind a specific idea due to the evanescent nature of the current concept-du-jour is good guidance - tackle the extant problems and retain half an eye on the bigger picture.
Sports fans have been using live P2P streaming for many years, the most obvious being Sopcast (sopcast.org - even the website is copyright 2007). The quality is pretty good, and the 'danger' posed was made clear with some of the first domain seizures being the stream aggregators - myp2p, rojadirecta etc.
The difficulty with this technology 'replacing TV' is that realtime is only truly relevant for a few things - sports, maybe concerts and awards ceremonies - beyond these the on-demand paradigm is much more attractive.
That's not to say that at scale a certain amount of bandwidth offloading couldn't happen to equivalent-timecode peers, but I suspect the biggest challenges to the complete overthrow of the cable networks model right now involve the notorious impossibility of negotiating agreements with the content owners, not the bandwidth/hardware cost of server-client streaming.
a) Trusted space for collecting backed pledges. Try doing that with PayPal and see how quickly you get shut down.
b) Well branded name with first-mover advantage which brings higher CTR on social campaigns.
c) Centralization of PR - contacts with traditional media which increase chance of mainstream coverage.
d) Volume of curated content makes it interesting to third-party developers, increasing 'virality' (see Twitter's media-in-post for any posted KickStarter link.
...
I could go on. It's pretty easy to build the same strawman argument against many businesses by focusing on a weakly analogous service and conveniently ignoring the laundry list of benefits. The whole 'socially interesting causes shouldn't be for-profit' argument is completely unsupported and drowned in pseudo-intellectual non-sequitur, which incidentally appears to be the raison d'être for this blog.
Name me another form of fundraising for arbitrary projects which doesn't require giving up significant equity at such an early stage. If you want a real target for a poorly-balanced funding arrangement maybe take aim at Dragon's Den. People who KickStart their projects are fully aware of what they're giving up for their seed capital - 5% of cash and no equity. Sounds pretty damn good to me.
I hardly see it as gouging customers when they are happily, voluntarily entering into the agreement with full awareness of the terms and alternatives.
All of these poor souls were perfectly capable of setting up 'bobsdiyproject.org' and attempting to get popular support. Individuals trying to do this would have fixed up-front costs for developing all the 'little' stuff that KS does, zero access to an existing base of people interesting in paying, and no access to mainstream media to promote their idea.
The curation aspect is a large part of what creates value in KickStarter. The notion of 'SelfStarter' proposed in the blog completely misses the benefits to the community provided by centralised screening. If any and all projects were approved it would be chock full of scammers and opportunists with poor ideas - the SNR would be so low as to drive interest away.
Would I pay 5% of all cash raised specifically from HN members donating through a 6-week link to my project with no money upfront? Yes, absolutely. Zero-risk, $0 down traffic which only pays out if you hit your own projected goals?
Is Etsy a scam? Is eBay a scam? I'd say KickStarter has more favourable terms than these (still valuable) sites as they require money upfront regardless of the success of your listing.
I hardly see it as gouging customers when they are happily, voluntarily entering into the agreement with full awareness of the terms and alternatives.
This seems like the exact same defense the banks were using when they were foreclosing on homeowners. Of course such behavior is "allowed" by a free market. The question is: is this behavior morally defensible?
There are plenty of free chars that wouldn't expect to cause conflicts with things like sass, or appear at a glance to be a variable reference.