It's exactly this kind of sarcasm I avoid when replying to someone I disagree with (HN has definitely helped me mature comments-wise). It antagonizes the opposite party, preventing a rational debate.
There are plenty of smart people who disagree with you. Assuming the answer is obvious harms your argument. (I have a personal exception for tea baggers.)
Your attempt at an aura of wisdom is rather sullied when you tar half of a country with a crude sexual epitaph. (Or are you perhaps one of the apparently large number of people who are unaware of what "tea bagger" actually means?)
I suggest that your "maturity" is still perhaps not to the point where you should be lecturing others quite yet.
Given that "teabaggers" is a moniker that the Tea Party adopted for themselves, it's not "tarring" anyone. Moreover, the Tea Party astroturf group clearly does not command anywhere near half of a country. I don't think that neonfunk in any way sullied himself.
Yes, a mostly right/libertarian protest movement adopted a crude sexual term of their own free will. That makes lots of sense, for "those sorts of people", they're all about the crude sexual innuendos. (Given the likely way you feel about "those sorts of people", that doesn't fit at all.)
The politics of the tea party are not my concern here. My point is that you shouldn't claim to be open to disagreement, except for that thing over there that commands the "support" of tens of millions of people. That's simply called not being open to disagreement. Honestly, that's fine; I doubt there's anybody here who is actually open to every argument you can find 25% of a country or world to agree to. Just don't pretend otherwise. As that link shows, there's no obvious "well, that's just the stupid people" argument available, either.
(I do draw the line at the "supported by millions of people", though of course I can't draw a bright shining line, because there are practical limits; one need not spend a lot of time pondering one guy's theories about the Time Cube. But dismissing entire quarters of a country at a time isn't anywhere near the line.)
If they actually had a coherent policy position to disagree with, that'd be one thing. I will happily be dismissive of a group that has no coherent stance on any issue. That's not being dismissive of disagreement, that's being dismissive of patent madness.
By analogy, should I also not be dismissive of creationism, which fails to postulate a single verifiable claim which has not already been disproved? If I am to be rational, then I must also be able to expect at least some baseline of rationality from those I converse with.
In summary, yes, I am open to disagreement, but I'm not open to be respectful of groups which have nothing with which I can even in principle disagree.
I'm not, actually. Check my messages again. I'm arguing about claiming to be open minded while dismissing large swathes of people.
Apparently, it wasn't a favored group of people by HN standards, because if someone had come on and said the same thing about Democrats and I had been standing up for Democrats, I guarantee I would have been upmodded to the sky. But "not the favored group of people" is exactly who you need to be listening to if you're going to be "open minded". Smacking someone down for merely suggesting that if you are open minded you shouldn't be insulting the people who disagree with you is demonstrating the very sort of poser open mindedness that I'm speaking out against.
And I choose and emphasize the word "poser" quite deliberately. Everybody knows they're supposed to say they are "open minded". Few actually do it, but everybody sure does claim it!
Looking at my comment again, I think you're right. I'm succumbing to the same cheap temptation. Morals for me intertwine much more with politics than with tech -- and I feel strongly enough sometimes that I can't contain myself. How to constructively debate with people who seem as if in another world? That I would even say that surely indicates I haven't figured it out yet; it seems impossible that we could see things so differently -- it's almost painful to think about.
This is not a religious war, at its core. Anyone making it out to be is confusing the issue, but I haven't seen much of that on HN.
The owner of a platform is making a very clear and calculated business decision in order to strengthen their position. This comes at the expense of the thousands of businesses that are attempting to profit from the platform.
Just because Mac vs PC, Android vs iPhone etc from a consumer perspective gets lost in endless, meaningless, irrational internet debate does not mean that you can't have rational, in depth discussion about issues related to developing software for these platforms.
You are right. At its core the dispute is not funny at all. And I'm not against rationality. I'm affected financially by Apples move myself (before anybody asks: no, not flash). I stand by my point that it's a religious war since it's not about technology _at all_. There are fundamentalist on both sides and they don't and won't care about any argument.
Endless, meaningless, irrational internet debates don't mean that you can't have a good laugh.
I have to agree with the laughing part, and I might say that calling this a "religious war" is going a bit too far, but I'd say that for emacs vs vim fanatics as well.
I'm frustrated with Apple for their choices, but I expect that developers will work with it, and Apple does have some good points to their aid. Overall, Apple will happily bicker with their developers, but in the end they will always be trying to support them. On the sarcasm part, I think anyone coming across this and missing that won't think too much about it, and no harm done will be remembered.
"There is no room in this factory for levity, no matter how weak." --I Love Lucy, 1952.
I'm up for satire, but to qualify for my admiration, I'm looking for the satire to address both the action and the motivation of the party being skewered.
In this case, making fun of the "no other languages" clause is totally fair game, but by characterizing it as an attempt to weed out wimpy developers it is attacking a straw man instead of addressing Apple's desire to defend control of their own platform against encroachment by Adobe and others.
Sorry, but your reasoning is just plain wrong in a number of ways.
I saw news about plans for Creative Suite being able to export to HTML5 months ago. Adobe knows that that Flash is going to lose market share, they're smart enough to see the writing on the wall and prepare accordingly. Their designer tools don't have to be tied to Flash's fate. I think it's beautiful that the same tools can theoretically target Flash Player, HTML5, native iPhone, Android, etc. Everything is just an abstraction to ones and zeroes in the end.
The first effect of Apple's clause has been to brew up a shitstorm among developers who understand how computation works and how arbitrary business practices aren't aligned with technical reality.
I'm no Adobe fan, but give them some credit. They may be influenced by Apple's position, but whatever we're seeing from them now has surely been under development for a long time (i.e. months, not days).
I realize this is supposed to be satire but I think it's not too healthy to obsess/rage over something you can easily avoid. Go download the Android SDK, BBOS SDK or WebOS SDK. Unlike almost any time in the past the barrier of entry to different platforms is ridiculously low. My personal theory is the success of the App Store and iPhone OS devices is creating this ethical rift in people who used to be able to see the computing world in very black & white terms. Suddenly they are confronted with the idea that maybe there are deep issues in an open platform that generally make the user feel stupid, confused, and frustrated leading them to be less likely to actually use the device and put money into developer's pockets. It's the only reasonable explanation I can come up with to understand why people obsess over everything iPhone OS related. Otherwise they'd just man up and go write Android apps?
Excuse me, where can I download the significant investment I've made to the iPlatform (_not_ the only platform i was targeting).
My consequence is to leave Apple and its customers in their walled garden. Indeed I'm going to write for Android and Maemo...
Fascinating. The above post should act as a reminder that Sarcasm on the internet is really not a good idea.
Don't feel bad, it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious, that's always the fault of the writer ( usually the mistake is to employ sarcasm in first place ).
Sarcasm on the internet is really not a good idea.
it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious
I completely disagree on both counts. First of all, just because some people get duped doesn't make sarcasm a bad idea. In fact, getting duped by sarcasm can be an educational experience.
Second of all, there is a lot of sarcasm and satire out there that is so obvious that it is a clear reading comprehension failure to miss it. If there is enough appropriate context, voice, and tone in a piece of writing and you fail to detect any of it, it may not be the fault of the writer. You can't just take a whole style or mood of expression and say it's not appropriate for written form. The most you can say is that it should be used with care. In this particular piece, the proposals and ideas put forth were very obviously constructed to be self-contradicting. If someone didn't mark this as satire when reading through it, they have a reading comprehension problem.
> Sarcasm on the internet is really not a good idea.
Then sarcasm in print must not be a good idea either, because if you can't convey tone and emotional nuance in text on the internet, certainly text in a dead-tree publication suffers from the same problem, right? What's fundamentally different between the two? The level of possible distribution? The ease at which one can be a publisher on the internet vs. in a print medium?
Or is there another reason why internet sarcasm is a bad idea that I'm not seeing?
> Don't feel bad, it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious, that's always the fault of the writer
Preposterous. Some of the best sarcasm I've read isn't immediately obviously sarcastic. If you don't get it, you don't get it. Sometimes the writer sucks at being sarcastic, and sometimes the reader has a poorly-developed sense of humor. But that's ok! An ability to understand well-crafted sarcasm isn't a prerequisite for living in the world.
Frankly, my biggest complaint about the article was that the sarcasm was far too obvious to be funny. Not that I disagree with the idea that Sarcasm on the internet is really not a good idea.
Yeah, that was my only complaint. Satire is so much better when halfway through you go, "Oh, I get it!". This is just simple, if fun, sarcastic ranting.
And I am extremely surprised there's a person out there that didn't get it.
Given the volume of idiotic blog writing, I hope I'm forgiven for giving up on this one after the first three lines (and subsequently wondering wtf all the HN comments were about).
Thoughtful analysis trumps cheap shots even when you're in the right.