skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A while back, there was this pie-in-the-sky idea which was really interesting but not too practical, called Semantic Web. It didn't really pan out because it turns out that annotating your sites with metadata is boring and tedious and nobody really liked to do it, and anyway, search and Bayesian statistics simulated the big ideas of Semantic Web well enough for most people.

The ideas behind it still stand, though, in the idea of microformats. These are just standardized ways of using existing HTML to structure particular kinds of data, so any program (browser plug-in, web crawler, &c) can scrape through my data and parse it as metadata, more precisely and with greater semantic content than raw text search, but without the tedium that comes with ontologies and RDF.

Now, these ideas are about the structured exchange of information between arbitrary nodes on the internet. If every recipe site used the hRecipe microformat, for example, I could write a recipe search engine which automatically parses the given recipes and supply them in various formats (recipe card, full-page instructions, &c) because I have a recipe schema and arbitrary recipes I've never seen before on sites my crawler just found conform to this. I could write a local client that does the same thing, or a web app which consolidates the recipes from other sites into my own personal recipe book. It turns the internet into much more of a net, and makes pulling together this information in new and interesting ways tenable. In its grandest incarnation, using the whole internet would be like using Wolfram Alpha.

The #! has precisely the opposite effect. If you offer #! urls and nothing else, then you are making your site harder to process except by human beings sitting at full-stack, JS-enabled, HTML5-ready web browsers; you are actively hindering any other kind of data exchange. Using #!-only is a valid choice, I'm not saying it's always the wrong one—web apps definitely benefit from #! much more than they do from awkward backwards compatibility. But using #! without graceful degradation of your pages turns the internet from interconnected-realms-of-information to what amounts to a distribution channel for your webapps. It actively hinders communication between anybody but the server and the client, and closes off lots of ideas about what the internet could be, and those ideas are not just "SEO is harder and people can't use curl anymore."

I don't want to condemn experimentation, either, and I'm as excited as anyone to see what JS can do when it's really unleashed. But framing this debate as an argument between crotchety graybeards and The Daring Future Of The Internet misses a lot of the subtleties involved.
Yeah, the rotating jog wheels on VCRs were the inspiration, but the touch wheel itself was pure awesome.

Don't forget, other companies were still scrambling to find a legal way to clone it right up until the day when Apple released the iPhone.
totally agree - if using hashbangs provides the best experience for your context, why not use it?
Thanks for responding! I do have a couple questions. What type of site are you running on your MediaTemple account? If just a standard website or blog, why MediaTemple over, say, Dreamhost? I would personally compare Dreamhost to a honda and MediaTemple to a Rolls Royce when thinking of hosting, say, a design blog, but that would be solely based on price. For just standard hosting, $97 can get you a year's hosting at Dreamhost or many other similar hosting companies. Do you have any idea what they offer to make it worth double that for basic hosting?

Thanks again for your time and for replying!
Facebook had an outage some time back (I think this one - http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=431441338919), and when everything got back to normal, the hash-banged URLs were gone. Was it related?
Came here to post this. Although MT was a far more mature and better product, the licence shenanigans just drove everyone away. It was as though someone in MT just thought, "Hey guys, how can we alienate every non-paying user?" and ran with it.

Matt and co were very shrewd, had a 'good enough' product and got a few high profile bloggers to switch (and be vocal about it) and WordPress became the common blogger's tool. By the time 2.0 was released it became fairly ubiquitous for blogs, and people added stuff from there to make it a fuller CMS.
Try http://upstartly.com/
I imagine that if Apple is seriously planning a future where the iPad is the only computer that 'normal' people need then the iTunes requirement will disappear soon. I imagine that some sort of iTunes in the cloud is currently in the works, where all your music and videos are stored by Apple (for a modest fee) and you can either stream directly or sync a subset of it for offline use.
Paul Krugman: The Theory of Interstellar Trade
You know IOS basically is OS X right?
The difference between IOS and WinMobile/CE is that microsoft tried to take the desktop paradigm and shoehorn it onto a phone, whereas apple took the strong core from OS X but started from scratch with the UI to build a touch and mobile friendly OS.
Very interesting points, but there are couple of errors which undermine part of your point: 1. If the application follows the Google proposed-convention or similar, the crawler doesn't need a full-stack JS implementation; it just needs to do the (trivial) URL remapping. 2. Nothing in this hash-bang approach requires a HTML5-ready browser.
well it looks like they are emitting crap like this

<a rel="nofollow" href="/#!about/" title="Click here to go to About">About</a>

without the hashbang shit, that's a nice normal link that any normal http client can work with. you can still layer on ajax to bind to that link, and use the fragment for the benefit of browser state and user interaction should you think that is a wise thing.
I've often wondered this myself when designing login forms, but doesn't identifying which field failed expose a security issue? A malicious user could use the feedback to determine if accounts exist or not. This seems like a concern to me.
Actually, I'd summarize this as "data is the new SMS".
Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?
Whether project managers get higher salaries than programmers and business analysts at all exist as a class depends squarely on the software world you live in.
It wouldn't be the first time an app acts as a front-end to a foreign web service. Take all those editors which save to Dropbox, for example.
Oh come on. Smart phones in general still only make up a small percentage of the over all subscriber base for the big phone companies. The rest of their subscribers still burns through minutes and text messages every month.

I welcome the day where I can have data only phone plan with iphone.
Where name of the countries come from [Image]
I have been working (coder, project lead, product owner) in the gaming industry far too long now. I hardly ever play computer games, I hate most of them, and some of the products I was involved in were, simply put, just very very bad concepts.

Yet, I derived motivation and pleasure from the technical challenges and the creative atmosphere created by the crazy geeks I have the privilege to work with. Besides, the rather short development cycles with hardly any maintaining after release make for fun projects: Code and forget.

Something else to consider: If you don't like their product, you may be able to help them to turn the product into something you can enjoy as well, and with this they may be able to open up to new audiences. Sometimes, the naysayers can actually be useful, or so I like to believe.
Yeah, I've tried the whole stock market thing twice now. Put $1,000 in as a tracker against the market index, expected a decent return; of course, I put it in on Sep 10, 2001.

Never got that money back.

Thought I'd try again a couple of years ago, so I bought shares in Lloyds Group. On the eve of Lehman going south.

Never got that money back, either. I think I'll stick to 3% savings accounts, thanks.
>I have friends that have worked in the recruiting industry for a long time and one has to realize that though there are some bad recruiters out there, a lot of recruiters are subject to their companies internal performance metrics, incentives, policy and company culture. So some recruiters behave a certain way because they have to.

While they have my sympathies, I fail to see why I should care about that. It is their job, not mine.
The didn't miss it (as you have pointed out). The just did Orkut really bad - and wasted the opportunity and the first-mover advantage.
As a quick test, you might want to go back and see where that disaster investment would be today if you'd left it in? Check again in 2041 and see if it beats 3%/year. You might be surprised.

And a quick word to the wise: Never "invest" in individual stocks. That's speculation, and chances are most of the time you do it you'll lose. "Invest" in a fund that tracks the S&P 500, and don't even think about taking the money back out until you retire.
I think you mean OODA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
This is largely true. Bitcoin is a brilliant idea combining a several innovations that in and of themselves would be laudable. Still, it is most likely true that expecting Mr. Satoshi Nakamato to have a perfectly formed working model of a new financial system at one go is unrealistic, even with his obvious brilliance and dedication.

As a corollary to your point, other world currencies are going to be considerably more inflationary than Bitcoins the longer this experiment last. Then converting bitcoins to a national currency with a more profitable interest rate is an inevitability. bitcoins will be sucked into financial services rather than building out a viable economic platform for the currency.

That strikes at the heart of it, IMHO. The current currency distribution model is good at least in the sense that the newly "printed" currency is allocated for the most part by banks with (ostensibly) some degree of investment saavy. Here, we are asking "network operators" doing the proof-of-work algorithms to essentially act like banks and distribute bitcoins into larger circulation. That seems likely to cause problems.
You take it into the Apple store. You know, the stores with great tech support that don't exist for PCs (yet).
Opportunity to work in global organization with high quality school education
pg2?
this statement is why I love HN, and it is also the reason why I take most business feasibility ideas given here with a grain of salt. The intelligence and community here breeds people that become so disconnected with how the other 99% of people work/think that they fail to see how a normal person would have NO idea how to even go about setting up a PC to watch TV on a projector.

That said, I do love my 1080p projector hooked to my i7 xbmc computer :-)
"Most of the time you only need to load a little bit of data anyway" - that's highly questionable as a general statement. In a rich UI like GMail, yes. But in examples like the new Lifehacker, you load a whole story, yet its locator is behind the hashbang.

Not every website is a web app. Just show one article or item or whatever the site is about under one URI.
How does this differ significantly from self-mutilation (cutting)? Sure, if you feel your life is hum-drum it's easy enough to hurt yourself and to hurt others. To indulge in your violent instincts. It'll pump endorphins into your system and make you feel alive. So will cutting, and bulimia.

But these are very unhealthy outlets.

I see the fight club mentality as an indication of the dysfunctional nature of modern polite (or "politically correct") society which tends to write off violence and risk as aberrations and taboos. We see this in the ongoing trend of dis-empowering individuals (often in the guise of protecting them) and shifting responsibilities (and power) to organizations and corporations. The perfect example of this is the commonplace fear and hatred of firearms amongst most urban professionals.

This subject is too large to be addressed completely in a mere post or two. Suffice it to say that I think these "fight clubs" are a trend of men attempting to ape some perverted ideal of masculinity. A twisted masculinity of violence, domination, and disrespect.
Your iris doesn't leave prints on your gun.
I've proposed sort of possible solution here, in a related discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2197064
Gummy Bears: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0205.html#5
TC: A Listed SocialGO Raises $2.2m On $24m Valuation Ahead Of Needed Re-launch
ASUS F5RL Driver – Why the Correct One Is Essential for Your Computer
Your ASUS F5RL laptop is one that has received a lot of rave reviews because of its superior performance when compared to its low price. You will therefore surely be surprised if this computer starts to malfunction.
That might be the case for LifeHacker (don't know; don't use it). But the example in Tim Bray's post is Twitter, which definitely needs to load a lot less data than it's full interface markup on most navigations.
They are still there in IE, so I guess they have started using push state where available.
That list is pretty close to my list with the addition that I find the iPad to be an excellent device for video content (mostly BBC iPlayer but also stuff through iTunes).

If I want to watch with more than one person I use our 50" plasma - but if its just me I'm more likely to just sit on a comfy chair and get comfortable with the iPad. Watching extended videos (i.e. more than short YouTube clips) on a laptop or desktop just feels wrong to me.
Simplenote (YC 10) uses a similar throttled API http://simplenoteapp.com/premium/
I use Spotify too. I'm a user from back in the days when they shared their friends music libraries. I kind of like Spotify, but I think it is important not to see any of these services as the be-all and end-all of digital music distribution solutions.

That is exactly how Spotify is presented here in Sweden. While Spotify is losing money, the politicians brag and tell us how they suddenly found the "cure" for illegal filesharing.

We have to be realistic and not place all our bets on one horse. There is no single solution to media on internet and Spotify is no different. The internets = multitude. And, therein lies the beauty.
Lifehacker kind of looks nicer only loading reloading the story and not the whole page. I gives things an application feel rather than a collection of pages and saves a heap of extra processing, why run the code again to generate a header and footer and side bars constantly when the version the user is seeing is perfectly up to date.
Wow, what a lot of misinformation. I found two mistakes right off the bat...
WSJ: The Streak 7: Bargain Tablet From Dell Is No Real Deal
I have contacted the FSF on one occasion ( regarding a patent problem ) and they weren't very responsive.

I have already decided on the Apache license 2 for this version of the project. But it's just a quick and dirty release that is intended to showcase the technology. I might in the future have to port it to a another language ( the project is too dependent on a library that's not actively being maintained and I might have to write my own version ). If I do this I will definitely look at the GPL license.

Again, Thank you for the reply.
Did you actually read the comment you're replying to?

In this particular anecdote, the nearest Apple store would have been in San Diego, 3200 miles away. The nearest internet connected computer capable of downloading iTunes was a mere 150 miles away in Buenaventura, a 2 hour motor launch, followed by a (weekly) night boat from the village I was in.

It was meant to illustrate that sometimes you take your mobile devices away from civilization. Suggesting that the solution is to bring them back to civilization sort of misses that point.
Vodafone here in Australia offer unlimited calls and text (to any number) plus 1Gb data for $45/month

http://www.vodafone.com.au/personal/plans/infinite/index.htm
I don't think Google is completely hopeless. They understand the need for the passive watching default mode of operation. See http://www.youtube.com/leanback
How To PROTECT Your IPOD - a knol by Alina Matei
I agree. I've worked with MAX and Maya, and my experience is that Maya is at least as different from MAX as Blender is from MAX/Maya. The different programs have a different workflow.

I found MAX very easy to use. Maya was harder, and Blender (before 2.5) was extremely difficult to learn. With the 2.5 release, though, they really improved usability of their program. I'm really surprised, and am now trying to use Blender for everything as I enjoy it most.
I like your nice light design and UI.

Designers on Mac wheels? )
Performance for Silicon Valley 2.0 as of February 09, 2011
It's definitely something that at least in the north of England would be hurled around as a playground insult.
Ran into another interesting shortcoming of hash-bang URLs last night looking through my referrer log. Loads of referring URLs of http://gawker.com/ and http://kotaku.com/ to my blogpost. But no mention at all of my blog-post or a link to it on the homepage.

First I thought they were referrer log spamming, then it dawned on me that fragment identifiers get stripped out of HTTP referers, so making hash-bangs useless as a means of joining up distributed conversations on the web.

Somewhere on those two Gawker media sites there's a conversation going on about the use of hash-bangs. But nobody outside knows about it. It's a big black hole.
Infrastructure:
github, heroku, linode, dropbox

Team:
skype, google voice, googleApps,

Development:
stackoverflow

Customer Understanding:
clicky
Isn't the underlying problem that web applications are often displaying combinations of content that doesn't have a natural URL?

Take New Twitter, for example. If I click on a tweet in my stream, it shows related tweets. If a drill down a few of those, at some point it becomes impossible to represent the address of the current state in a sane manner.

I think URLs are particular to the web (desktop apps don't have them) because the web is traditionally about content. Web applications are increasingly breaking that. Perhaps web applications and URLs don't go together all that well.

Don't get me wrong--I love URLs, and it's crazy for content sites like Lifehacker to break them for so little benefit. But maybe the reason for this hashbang trend is that URLs aren't expressive enough for some of these sites.
A less expensive payment network is one reason bitcoins might be used. Ask ten people why they use bitcoins and you'll get ten different answers. For some, it will be the ability to send money without needing a bank. For another person the reason might be related to the anonymity that bitcoin offers. Bitcoin's benefits range from supporting micropayments to supporting large transfers with no chargeback risk.

But for the long term, When the list of payment methods reads:

Visa / MC / AmEx / Bitcoin (receive 2% discount)

which button do you think most consumers will choose?
"greatest things that has ever happened to the internet"

What a bold bold statement. Care to elaborate why?
Codebase: http://codebasehq.com
for Git/Subversion/Mercurial hosting, tickets, wikis, time tracking etc. Cheaper and more flexible than Github (though I also love Github for public projects). And they have a new version out in Q1
How does it compare to Windows Live Mail 2011?
Nokia Said to Be Near Software Partnership With Microsoft
Yes, they do.

From what I recall, they are developing version 2.0 in parallel. Relevant post from their blog: http://blog.macromates.com/2010/why-2-0-is-not-developed-in-...
Still you have to wait for the page to render. When you are turning a page in a book or a printout you are doing something that requires some kind of activity from your part, but when you have clicked the button you are just waiting for things to happen.

I don't mean to say that this is a big problem, and I haven't been using E-ink readers that much. But when it comes to digital reading, I appreciate the snappiness of scrolling fast through pages and also the "jump to" functions, whether it's via links or "go to page" actions.
It is using crossover to be able to run the windows code on a mac. So it isn't a native mac port.
Yeah, HN is on the crazy smart scale. I have this theory that once you reach a certain level of 'intelligence' you become so smart that you're actually dumb. What I mean by this is that you've lost touch with how everyone else lives their lives that your ideas are ahead of the curve and you actually need to hold off on implementing them because the timing is not right.

Somewhere between the Newton and the iPod Steve Jobs lost enough intelligence that he's now a visionary where as in the 90s he was being mocked on SNL for the Newton. The alternative is that he stopped producing computers for producers and started creating them for consumers.

Woz on the other hand is still so crazy smart that he rides a Segway.
<plug>

Visual Website Optimizer http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ for A/B testing

</plug>
At the risk of sounding foolish, what exactly is a Wordpress network, and what is it for?

(not a troll, genuinely interested)
Despite all the FUD around hashbangs, the genuine problem I see with them is that they optimise for internal page loads, not the entry into a website. For example with hashbangs, requests to twitter when logged in go like;

1) HTTP GET http://twitter.com/some_account [~500ms for me]

2) 302 redirect -> HTTP GET http://twitter.com/ [~600ms for me]

3) HTML tells browser to download some JS -> HTTP GET bundle.js [~500ms for me] (concurrently here we start getting CSS)

4) JS reads hashbang & request actual data -> HTTP GET data.json [~500ms for me]

... only after about 2 seconds can we start(!) rendering data. Now there's about another 2 seconds for all json data & CSS calls to complete. It takes upwards of 4 seconds for a twitter page to render for me (the Load event lies as it fires well before actual data shows. Try it yourself with your favourite browser inspector).

When not using hashbangs, a single HTTP request can get all the data for the page and start rendering it. One blocking CSS call (possibly cached) is all that's needed for styling.

Hence when I see an external link with a hashbang it frustrates me (barely perceptively) because I know that when I load the page it's going to take a longer than a normal HTTP request. Significantly longer. While subsequent page loads are faster, it's not these you want to optimise for if you care about bounce rates. This issue affects every new link you click into a website, so it affects an even larger number of requests than normal bounces.

Hashbangs are a good solution to an important problem, but I don't see them as a tool to build entire websites upon. Fortunately I see the performance issue as one which will result in people voting with their browsers and choosing sites which only use hashbangs when they genuinely improve the user experience - especially since they're easily visible in the url.