unalone

Huh, that's an interesting way to feel! I wish I remember what AIM felt like better; I was so young when I used it that any chance I had to IM people was exciting. I was probably an absolute pain in the ass.

D'you think this could be — at least in part — because Facebook is an always-on environment for a lot of people? They're not explicitly on to chat, so there's more of an unstated barrier to beginning a conversation.

Somebody got aggressive after being detained for hours on end and having their flight cancelled, at expense? Holy shit! Pack your bags, men: we found ourselves a terrorist.

We need better design in the world in general. I'd hate to think only one company gets to be the designer-of-good-and-popular-things at a time.

And putting politics "in front of his art" will probably convince some of the, you know, thousands of people who read his blog posts on Hacker News and elsewhere, that maybe his books are worth picking up and buying.

Regardless, what you said was pretty rude.

The government is not a monolithic entity. The evils of intrusive surveillance doesn't make, say, social programs, or economic regulation, evil just because they're other large government programs. Libertarianism is great if you're already wealthy; it's... problematic... if you're starting off from a position of relatively little power.

> I prefer my sci-fi writers to be dedicated libertarians. So maybe, if you aren't, don't publicize it.

This is astonishingly condescending of you.

Marco's not attempting to communicate clearly in the sense of "push data down foobarbazqux's infohole." He's trying to communicate clearly in the sense of "grab foobar's attention, state his perspective provocatively, and attempt to not only reach an audience but make them think and talk."

Clearly he's succeeded, from the conversation going on in this post. Marco is occasionally pretty obnoxious, and his ideas are frequently not always well thought-out, but I like writers who attempt to be not only clear, but compelling.

Paul Graham has plenty of terrible essay names, and plenty of terrible essays at that. One of the things that frustrates me about him as a writer is that on occasion he attempts to strike an "objective" tone while offering a skewed and entirely subjective perspective. Besides, conveying pure abstract information should not be the point of an essay. Tone, emotion, purpose, and construction should all be deliberate. Otherwise you get Mashable—ultraspecific titles geared to ultraspecific articles which are so drained of anything beyond pure bullet-point content that you could train a machine to read and interpret it. It's such a waste.

It takes you two seconds to click on a link and look at it, ten seconds tops to decide if you're going to gain something by reading it. If you're clicking on so many links per day that twelve seconds here and there is putting a dent in your productivity/well-being, then there is a worse problem here than ambiguously-titled essays, and ironically, it's a problem that you'll start to solve by seeking more challenging pieces of writing to tackle to distract yourself from the constant useless information mill that the Internet so readily provides.

If you think that treating genders equally has nothing to do with accepting variations in social norms, then you're missing pretty much the whole purpose of the "treat women equally to men" thing.

Gender inequality is almost wholly a social problem, not a biological one. And

> It's not a huge sacrifice to voluntarily use the best product in a category. The number of Apple employees who want to use a non-iphone device is probably less than two percent.

You know, I am a huge Apple fan, but I don't like this argument. It suggests there are no valid reasons to prefer Android or even Windows to iOS, when in fact both Android's and Windows's designs offer a number of features that iOS lacks. While I don't think either come within spitting distance of iOS's build quality, there are plenty of reasons to want to use them anyway.

Particularly since Apple is a company which hires plenty of programmers, I imagine there'd be plenty of users who want to use an open-source phone OS. Unless they're all jailbreaking their iPhones, which would be pretty amusing actually.

This is silly logic.

If you were really treating women equally to men, you wouldn't follow a "what's good for one is good for the other" policy. You'd accept that the norms and behaviors of each gender should be held in equal regard, and adapt your own behavior to the person or group of people you're talking with. Acknowledging, in other words, that women have as much right to be in the workplace as men, rather than treating their actions as somehow foreign or alien to the "acceptable" male norms.

I mean, your simple and straightforward logic is the logic that four-year-old boys use when they want to punch girls on the playground and don't feel like being courteous.

Some people are just huggers. As a fan of hugs I approve of people who get down to hugging quickly, though I understand why non-huggers would be squicked out by that.

If that wigs you out, I have a particular friend group for whom kissing becomes a thing almost immediately after they've met you. The first time it happens it can be absurdly disorienting.

What Twitter is awful at – awful – is ensuring you see content from people who don't update frequently. RSS is valuable not for following content gluttons like Hacker News, but for following blogs by people who update only once every three months, or even more rarely.

News gluttonry never needed RSS anyway – generally you only need one source of neverending news as-is. RSS is for more selective reading, and its advantage lies in how it gives equal weight to people who don't publish often as it gives to people who post 50 new entries a day.

Of course you can. Don't be daft.

There are plenty of advantages to relative sizing, and in general it's a good policy, but there are many excellently-designed web sites whose sizes are absolute – just as there are many shit designs that're responsive as hell.

That was my bad. I accidentally doubleposted a comment, and deleted one of the clones.