Open source Rails apps to study and learn from - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chrislowis.co.uk/2010/05/31/five-rails-apps-to-study-and-learn-from.html

<comment><USER2> I don't agree with this list. Spot.us, for instance, has completely non- standard controller code that goes against widely accepted conventions. I also haven't looked at lovd by less in a while, but last I checked they relied on widespread monkey patching of core Ruby and Rails classes just to avoid writing a couple characters.

Also very notably absent is gemcutter (<http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter>) which is actually clean, modern and adheres to conventions.

<comment><USER3> Even though I haven't heard of it, just from the 439 watchers and 96 forks on Github, I'd probably look to it as an example of at least decent code.

This is why I <3 Github - really great way to learn good coding conventions.

<comment><USER2> There are only a handful of active lovd by less forks and none of them have apparently removed the pervasive, unnecessary monkey patching.

If you don't know what I'm referring to, start reading the code, notice that there are a bunch of weird, non-standard methods that don't seem to be defined anywhere and notice that core classes don't work the way you expect. Then, maybe you'll end up needing to do what I had to, grep the project to find all the monkey patching here: [http://github.com/stevenbristol/lovd-by- less/tree/master/ven...](http://github.com/stevenbristol/lovd-by- less/tree/master/vendor/plugins/less_monkey_patching/lib/)

That mostly undocumented plugin, which introduces changes used extensively throughout the app, is not the kind of thing that should be presented to new Rails developers as a good practice.

Aside from the monkey patching, lovd by less does provide some very good examples of how to approach a variety of things in Rails, but the monkey patching is so pervasive that it's unavoidable.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great point. I'm the author of the original article, I'll update to link to specific concerns and also add a couple of the projects that some other people have suggested.

The article was in no way meant to be a definitive resource, just an attempt to continue helping new Rails developers learn how to work with the framework. The many useful comments I've received will help improve the article a lot.

<comment><USER4> Take a look at Ruby on Rails Tutorial (<http://www.railstutorial.org/>). The sample application, a tiny Twitter clone, is designed to be fully up-to-date in coding style (though of course it reflects some of my particular idiosyncrasies). I just finished the Rails 2.3 book last week, so a definitive version of the source isn't ready yet, but there will be one eventually. (I'm focusing on the Rails 3 version first.)

On the other hand, if you want to _follow_ the tutorial and make a definitive version of the code yourself (preferably with tags for each chapter end), I'd be happy to throw it up on GitHub. And you might just get a nod in the acknowledgments. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gitorious is an open source alternative to github.com hosted on it's own site <http://gitorious.org/gitorious>

It was recently ported to rails 3 as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> Anybody have a good list for python?

<comment><USER7> For Django-based apps - you should definitely take a look at Pinax <http://pinaxproject.com/>

Satchmo has some interesting approaches to solving certain problems in Django (like allowing to override general site settings in admin) - <http://www.satchmoproject.com/>

For examples of more lightweight WSGI apps using Werkzeug:

Zine (blogging engine) - <http://zine.pocoo.org/>

Solace (forum similar to StackOverflow) - <http://opensource.plurk.com/Solace/>

<comment><USER8> Another canonical example is Everyblock: <http://code.google.com/p/ebcode/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> also check out <http://communityengine.org/> as an good, open-source alternative to lovdbyless.</comment>


Chicken safety fear as chlorine washing fails bacteria tests - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/26/chicken-health-fear-chlorine-washing-fails-bacteria-tests-brexit-salmonella-listeria <comment><USER2> The tests were done on spinach, not chicken. But, I would certainly pay more to get chicken that did not require this. Seems like irradiation would be safer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hearing "chlorine washing" in the same sentence as any food puts me off that food in s big way.</comment>


How an Immutable Object Can Have State and Behavior? - <AUTHOR> http://www.yegor256.com/2014/12/09/immutable-object-state-and-behavior.html?2014-49 <comment><USER2> How about ByteArrayOutputStream? Where would it keep that bytes?</comment>


Effect of General Anesthesia in Infancy on Long-Term Recognition Memory - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/vaop/naam/abs/npp2014134a.html

<comment><USER2> My son, who's now 2 1/2, has had endoscopies every six months starting from when he was 9 months old. (He suffers from eosinophilic esophagitis, and the only way to accurately determine his eosinophil levels is to biopsy tissue from the esophagus.)

So, this study obviously worries me a great deal. It's definitely something I'll want to ask his doctors about ... but I have a feeling that the answer will be that it's a downside we'll have to accept.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting to me on a personal level. I have a recently born son who underwent surgery at 2 months. The procedure itself is incredibly simple and safe; the anesthesia was the part that actually concerned us the most, (and my father is a trained anesthesiologist to boot).

There was a non-surgical alternative to what we did, but it was recommended against. It has a much lower success rate and is the difference between a day in the hospital and several months of carefully measured feeding.

Even equipped with this knowledge, I suspect that I would make the same decision. It is more important to me that my son be physically healthy and thriving than anything. I am curious if others would make the decision differently.

<comment><USER4> Without knowing any of the details,

 _> several months of carefully measured feeding._

That doesn't sound that bad, at least as a temporary solution to an otherwise permanent problem?

I've been through this before - any time a doc recommends surgery it's worth getting second and third opinions. Sometimes the first one is that guy with the hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't sound bad when taken by itself. Infants, however, are interesting things. They may be sponges, but if I've learned anything in the last couple of years since my wife and I had our first child, it's that their development occurs in weird, non-linear ways, and requires a lot of effort and practice on their part. Stressing them out severly can (and does) impair development.

Aside from that, I suspect I know what condition the original commenter is talking about--or at least my wife and I had a child who, at roughly 5 weeks, was given an almost identical choice for a condition he had. This particular condition is such that food either cannot pass out of the stomach into the intestine, or can only do so in quantities insufficient to provide adequate nutrition. It comes with a variety of nasty side effects, such as severe projectile vomiting when the stomach-digested food accumulates (hence the "carefully measured feedings") that, long term, will also damage the esophagus. I can only speculate about the kinds of developmental problems an infant may incur when he is stressed out over basic sustenance for the first weeks or months of key developmental milestones, but to me the choice was a no-brainer for the surgical option. I would do it again, even given this study, without hesitation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's time to stop causing amnesia along with unconsciousness. They do that to keep people from having traumatic memories in case they wake up, but it's starting to seem like it causes more harm than good.

See: [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/nightmares-after- th...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/nightmares-after-the-i-c-u/)

<comment><USER7> Unconsciousness and retrograde amnesia are two different things. If you're unconscious you're not going to have any memories. There are procedures where you are sedated and those are the ones they try to induce amnesia about the event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the abstract, it looks like an interesting paper to read but unfortunately, it's stuck behind a paywall and my searches have been unable to find a freely available copy.

<comment><USER9> Your taxes (if US citizen) paid for the research and it was peer reviewed for free by (I believe) academics in the public service but we all know the immense burden and expense involved in typesetting and publishing the results in print or on the internet. At least that is how it appears. The solution to this scandal lies with the researchers themselves.

The price of information [http://www.economist.com/node/21545974](http://www.economist.com/node/21545974)

<comment><USER10> Where does it say that this research project was funded by the govt.? But I agree, important research, even if privately funded, ought to be freely available.

<comment><USER11> It's a safe assumption for essentially all biomedical research, but specifically, the senior author's website:

[http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/Labs/Ghetti/PWT/index.cfm?Sect...](http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/Labs/Ghetti/PWT/index.cfm?Section=20)

<comment><USER10> It is a shame that life saving research sponsored by the govt. is locked down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting hypothesis. I've been lamenting, especially lately, my own memory problems identifying faces, scents, and sounds. My first surgery which had me placed under general anesthesia was at 1 yr.

</comment><comment> wes-exp I believe there are similar issues with children and x-rays to the head/brain.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Is Totally Out of His Depth - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-12/mark-zuckerberg-is-totally-out-of-his-depth <comment><USER2> I have thought a lot about this over the years, in particular because I went to high school with Dustin Moskovitz, who was Mark's roommate and cofounder at Facebook. Dustin and I are only the barest of acquaintances at this point, so nothing I say should be construed as inside information.

Mark started Facebook when he was 18. Being the CEO of Facebook is the only real job he's ever had, and it's been a rocket ship since Day 1. Kudos to his brilliance, but it doesn't change the fact that this is literally his first job.

It's a very unique situation he is in - running a company that took over 1/6th of the world being the only job you've ever had. Perhaps that does deserve some sympathy.

But you learn from being exposed to a variety of situations. You develop tremendously more perspective by getting out and doing different things. You are forced to consider things you never would have considered if you had not moved onto something new. It gives you a much deeper view of how most of society works.

If this were a mom-and-pop grocery shop, it wouldn't matter so much if the boss had been doing it since 18. There are other competitors who can step in if you suddenly start selling all of your customers' purchase information to the local banks and real estate agents.

That isn't the situation with Facebook, though. They are too powerful at this point. The author of this article is correct in saying it would be best for society if someone more civically minded were running the company.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I agree Zuckerberg is out of his depth, I think there is some magical thinking in this article that there are just a cadre of imminently well qualified people waiting in the wings who could save the day if only given the chance.

These people, by and large, don't exist. I may think Zuckerberg has some issues, but I don't think there is some hidden group of folks who could do much better of a job than he could.

<comment><USER4> That was my thought, too. The problems aren't personal, they're structural and regulatory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Assuming that there is a more intelligent, more capable person available is the _optimistic_ outlook. What if the reality is that the current crop of CEOs _are_ the best-equipped people available to deal with this problem and it's not enough?

<comment><USER6> That was my point too. If such people can be found then by all means this is a testable proposition. I had another idea though.

Give these journalists what they ask for and attach betting markets to news articles as bets on media bullshit - then we'll see what happens next. I'm sure it will be illuminating.

The bets could come in many forms from "Is X true?" where X is measurable to more complex bets like "If X then Y result" where Y objectively measurable. This incentive will balance against the clickbait incentive of journalists and the bookmaker will make more money if more people accept the terms of the bet - so the third party has an incentive to resolve for good quality propositions. Sports bookmakers already slice up complex scenarios into betting proposals so I'm sure this can be accomplished in a way reasonable to all partisans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mark is 34. Sure must feel good to be all pedantic about his maturity, but that's not actually the problem. The problem is that the CEO of Facebook or Twitter, whoever it is, is in a Catch-22, they can't solve the disinformation/hate-speech/trolling problem without massively increasing costs on moderation, decimating some growth/engagement metrics and in the process destroying a ton of "shareholder value". If they don't solve the content problems, the platform will slowly die anyway as users start to flee the toxicity. So we're all hanging on as these guys try to awkwardly walk some impossible to find line between the two paths. The last FB earnings were a step in that direction but barely an inch, and things will get much worse.

<comment><USER8> You're spot on. And I would add that if and when they finally succeed in removing Zuckerberg from the throne (I'm convinced they're working on that; bad press is step 1) just to make space for another king, Facebook won't change a dime because making it better would make it also less profitable, so it's just a matter of taking away his seat for someone else in exchange for X (votes?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looking past these "issues" with Zuckerberg & Facebook, Jack whatever & Twitter, and the whole "social media" space in general, I find it totally hilarious (in a deeply tragic sense) that we as the "enlightened west" have been collectively blowing our trumpets about "free speech" ever since the start of the Cold War - free speech always having been rolled out as one of the arguments of our social and moral superiority over the "enemy".

That was all great for exactly as long as the People in Power had the direct and indirect means to control this "free speech". Now we have the technical means to allow anybody anywhere to exercise their free speech in a manner that is actually meaningful, we are all freaking out and looking for ways to shut them the fuck up, as soon as fucking possible.

Appears to me that free speech is fine, as long as you are sticking to the rules about what is acceptable speech, which is deeply hypocritical, if you ask me.

<comment><USER10> I guess it is a slippery slope on a path towards someone yelling "fire" in a theater when no such threat exists and as a society we determined that that is not acceptable. It would have something to do with intent to mislead, harm or knowingly distort some truth. We see "truthiness" and its damaging negative effects on society. Also "free speech" in the constitutional sense is to protect you from government prosecution but it has limits. It is not a license to say anything you want in any context anywhere. Society imposes editorial control through law and order. And by order I mean through organized groups of individuals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm sorry but I just don't buy it. There is no indication that Zuckerberg wants to change anything about how Facebook operates or that he has regrets for how things have turned out. On the contrary it seems he has no respect for human rights and doesn't give two shits about privacy, except his own of course. I can understand that running a multibillion corporation turns you into an unsocial prick but the problem with Zuckerberg isn't how he behaves towards those who are close to him (see Jobs) but how he treats society. For him everyone is just an audience for an advertisement. Just last week we read that he wanted access to bank accounts. There's obviously no such thing as remorse for him, everything is up for sale.

<comment><USER12> He said during the Congressional hearing that he would take measures substantially impacting FB's profitability, and a few months later profitability fell (in a very surprising manner). If this is not evidence that has prosocial motivations -- what is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As much as I agree that what we currently have at the head of most big tech companies may be ill-equipped to handle the current task at hand regarding the political minefield that big tech has stepped into, I really believe that they are, simultaneously, probably the best-equipped people that can be found.

I mean, to say they are not the right people for the job is one thing. I'm saying that there probably _isn't_ a right person for the job of internet censorship. What we need is to increase education regarding critical thinking so people don't take literally everything they read on the internet at face value.

<comment><USER14> I doubt that we'll ever have a New Internet Citizen; we have to presume current levels of cupidity/ignorance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can loathe the actions of these companies and also think it would be hilariously worse if typical 'leadership' were tasked with solving these very obviously novel, unprecedented, and truly challenging problems.

A good first step would be to get rid of the perverse incentives these companies have to manipulate and surveil their users due to their business models. I don't think these problems can be solved as long as the way these companies survive is by charging for the ability to manipulate people's views and actions.

<comment><USER16> Agree in principle. But in practice, what is the alternative business model you propose?

Also, changing the business model away from surveillance capitalism, in my eyes, is not a first step but a massive and complicated (though perhaps very necessary) end goal.

<comment><USER15> Yeah I didn't mean to imply this first step would be easy or result in the survival of these companies. To me it probably looks like the government stepping in, either threatening legislation or imposing it immediately that forces companies to transition off these business models if they meet some criteria which defines them as a public forum of a certain scale. (Of course this is full of potential negative unintended consequences, like cementing their dominance, so my guess is things will end up worse before they get better if this happens.)

Hopefully companies do this on their own accord before we get there. A model where a subset of users pay for the services would be a healthier model. This would likely result in a major loss of market cap and head count for these companies, but I'd imagine it would be sustainable in terms of keeping the services available and would enable these companies to charter a positive future for their users without having a conflict of interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A bit of nerd-hate there, eh? Financial types must really hate that nerds have taken over 1/2 of the stock exchange.

There's a solid argument past the flamebait though. When your company becomes the _de facto_ public commons, a _forum_ , and isn't, de facto, just a private brick and mortar shop(the usual concept of a private space that you can arbitrarily ban people from) anymore, what is the appropriate response? That requires some education in history, political science, philosophy, etc.

<comment> Digit-Al I agree. I have long said that they have a very difficult problem. The trouble is that too many people just say "oh they should do something about it" without having even close to enough knowledge to see what a hugely insurmountable problem it actually is to 'do something about it'.

When you consider the vast amount of words, pictures, and videos that are posted constantly, to check everything for 'bad' content would take a huge army of people working 24/7.

And then of course, people don't realise that checking everything means some stranger going through all their posts and making a decision as to whether to allow it or delete it.

And with these sites reaching so many jurisdictions, whose model of decency and legality do you use to decide what should be censored?

And finally we have the looming issue of 'Truth'. Who decides it? Truth can be a slippery thing in some cases. It is not always easy to ferret it out. Hell, if there was a law that journals could only publish established truth, every newspaper in every country would have to shut down immediately.

<comment><USER14> Oh, it's a terribly difficult issue, requiring a deep education in the humanities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That article reeks of bitterness, hatred, and wealth envy. Really, it's not worth reading. The content is irrelevant, it's an incoherent rant against rich nerds.

<comment><USER18> This thread is very defensive.

Being angry at the hubris of zuckerberg and other tech bros is completely appropriate and justified. When rich nerds try to solve large complex problems from within the algorithmic confines of their solipsism, they inevitably run into the endless irregularities of the real world until the only option they have left is to destroy every irrelgularity with force or implode because they can't.

<comment><USER3> Referring to any successful male technologist as "tech bros" is just condescending on the face of it and really weakens your argument.

People (rightfully) don't go around referring to Sheryl Sandberg and Meg Whitman as "tech broads".

<comment><USER18> from what i read, facebook was literally a frat house until they brought in a grown up to clean up their graffiti and beer cans, so i think the term is appropriate here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Who is the correct person to trust with censorship?

</comment><comment> Digit-Al Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

They had a utopian vision, but like all those before them they failed to take into account that there are a lot of 'bad actors' out there, to be polite about it.

</comment><comment><USER20> >As their fictional mom, I'd like to offer some advice. Retire, step aside. Maybe find a new hobby. Ask someone smarter and more educated, thoughtful, and civic-minded to decide on the future of your companies.

Trash. Really, who is the author to speak so condescendingly? I don't look up to these "tech bros" any more than she does, but this just reads like the results of a writing exercise rather than what someone would actually think or believe...

</comment><comment><USER21> > Ask someone smarter and more educated, thoughtful, and civic-minded to > decide on the future of your companies.

This would basically mean admitting failure. I can't imagine any of the guys mentioned in the article to be ready for that. They are looking for answers and solutions, but they want to be the ones solving the problem, and won't hand their power over to anyone else.

</comment><comment><USER6> The people on Capitol Hill are situated at the correct depth?

Isn't it nice to have some positive news for a change!</comment>


Fun with WiFi naming . . .  - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/22/funny-wifi-names-the-most_n_432712.html

<comment><USER2> Why is there no "all on one page" button? :( HuffPo fail.</comment>


How dynamic array access work? - <AUTHOR> In C if i declare int x[4]
Which tells me its an integer array with each array element size fixed of size 4.
So after initialization when I access x[3] : address of array +element size which is 2 * index => (x[3]=2000+2*3) Assuming 2000 is the array address
In Javascript
We have
var a=[3,"rohan",6] //Dynamically typed
Here array elements are not equally sized for eg.a[2] is a string whose element size is different than a[0] which is an integer
So how does the array access work? <comment><USER2> The simple naive way is to indirect through a pointer, so your array elements would each be say 8 bytes pointing to things of various types.

In practice you can play a lot of tricks to avoid the overhead.

One example would be NaN-tagging. Another would be to speculatively store the array elements "unboxed" as long as they all have the same type and fallback to pointers when the array actually becomes heterogeneous.

I'm not up to date on what today's javascript JIT do for storage optimizations but when you add in sparse arrays etc, I'm sure it's quite involved.</comment>


Playing with FB Messenger Python Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://www.hontecillas.com/toying_with_facebook_bot.html <comment><AUTHOR> I would be glad to know about other open source python libraries to make facebook bots, that are not for any specific web framework!</comment>


Hipmunk CEO: Yeah, Entrepreneurs Think It's Getting Wacky, Too  - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/106152/hipmunk-ceo-on-todays-climate-yeah-entrepreneurs-think-its-getting-wacky-too/ <comment><USER2> Hipmunk is a cool startup, but if you want cheap airfares, <http://matrix.itasoftware.com/> is the best kept secret on the internet. Since itasoftware (now part of google), sells a flight search service, they don't advertise their search engine and purposefully keep it ugly.

<comment><USER3> ITA's site actually predates Hipmunk and the Google merger.

The reason ITA keeps it a secret is because ITA is a middleware company and not consumer facing. Bing, Hipmunk, Kayak, Orbitz, Hotwire, and many more are all customers of ITA[1] and it takes pains to not compete with its customers.

That's also why everyone was freaking out when Google offered to buy ITA. Google could have easily pulled the plug on all of those sites and taken over the industry. So Google had to commit to tons of concessions to ensure that wouldn't happen in order to get approval for the merger. Basically, Google has agreed to ongoing audits by the Justice Department for years after the merger. [2]

[1] <http://www.itasoftware.com/about/customers.html>

[2] <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/technology/09google.html>

<comment><USER2> For a long time matrix.itasoftware.com was password protected but bugmenot/bugmenot worked. I am not sure when they made the search service non- password protected. I imagine if it gets popular, it will go back to being password protected, as it is rude to compete with your own customers.

<comment><USER4> The older version of matrix - currently available at <http://matrix1.itasoftware.com> \- had a not-so-inviting page asking you for a login if you had one, but never required it. There's a "Log in as a guest" link that gets you to the same page you'd have as if you had registered as a typical user.

The new version, <http://matrix.itasoftware.com/>, has no such login requirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They need to change their background, that scrolling effect really is not nice.

<comment><USER6> Ugh, it almost gave me a seizure.

<comment><USER7> It's always been like that, sadly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good stuff Hipmunk. Looking forward to when I can modify by fare class and further customization. I've used itasoftware.com almost since they started with a beta and I like the fact that I can do /f bc=w for example to price a specific fare class.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand Hipmunk. I see a simple user interface. But that user interface doesn't help me search anymore than any other site. I live in Sydney, and I use this api-mashup here destmapper.com. It opened my eyes!

</comment><comment><USER10> How do you get invited to Foo Camp when you are just in high school?

I am awed.

</comment><comment><USER11> That sites background is terrible on the eyes.</comment>


Terrestrial sensory ecology provides a selective benefit to planning - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3H-5Z3-6gM <comment><AUTHOR> An interesting talk about how organisms when they left the water could see far further, it is suggested this was the main spur for the advantage of intelligence.

I was just wondering if building telescopes making astronomical discoveries has taken this a step further?</comment>


Sorry, Steve: Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2001-05-20/commentary-sorry-steve-heres-why-apple-stores-wont-work

<comment><USER2> I hope people reading the article realise this article was written before the iPad, iPod and iPhone. We have the benefit of over a decade of hindsight.</comment>


Google now shipping 60,000 Android handsets per day - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/16/google-android-shipping-60000-per-day/

<comment><USER2> Android phones will pass the iPhone within 24 months in monthly sales. Android is simply creating a bigger market by being free and multi-vendor.</comment>


AngelList Style Guide - <AUTHOR> http://fundable.co/2011/01/angellist-style-guide/ <comment><USER2> The "executive summary" has evolved. Remove hockey stick financials, inject social proof / traction.</comment>


Proposed new tag: IMG (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html <comment><USER3> The thread is fascinating. What I love about it is how the discussion quickly became a variety of proposals for other generalized--and more complicated-- constructs. Lots of discussion on making a generic Mime-based embedded object for example. The worst was "<!ENTITY ICON6 SYSTEM "[http://blah..">&ICON6;"](http://blah..">&ICON6;") Then Marc just ignored the comments, put the  tag into Mosaic and it became canon. Would HTML have been so easy for the masses if it was horribly generalized? I'd argue the simplicity of tags like , ,  made it so popular.

<comment><USER4> Some suggestions are horrible, but some of the suggestions are pretty good and forward thinking. Allowing img elements to have fallback content would have have the introduction of new image formats (jpg, png, svg) much more painless. We later got the alt-attribute for fallback text, but just using the content for fallback would be both simpler and more powerful.

It is probably a case of worse-is-better. They chose the simplest possible solution and shipped. Introducing the img tag is what made Mosaic dominant.

Later Netscape went to far with worse-is-better. Remember they introduced the <SPACER> tag to allow designers to control whitespace, at a time when Internet Explorer already had shipped with support for CSS padding and margins. Worse- is-better only works when you ship features before the competition, it does not mean worse features will win out over better features.

<comment><USER5> A generic <include> tag for text/hypertext could have been interesting, particularly if it could be used with link anchors. Although the potential for abuse when including remote content would obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did this go far enough? Imagine if we'd had a gallery element instead:

<gallery type="slideshow" autoscroll="true">   </gallery>

If we'd left that sort of functionality up to the browser imagine the bandwidth saved on tbales for image galleries, javascript carousels, slideshows, etc. Not to mention having more control over elements like autoscroll behavior. Browsers seem to have added just enough functionality for web developers to abuse the document format into an application layer but not enough functionality for a good one.

Also, the first reply to that message ([http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q1/0183.ht...](http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q1/0183.html)) sounds like the creation of the favicon.

<comment><USER5> Most of the bandwidth for image galleries comes from the images themselves, not the code that runs them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's fun to read through this history, while I'm listening to "Where Wizards Stay Up Late".

In reading through the thread [1], I noticed Marc and Jim Davis used an example audio file from the NSA that no longer exists: [http://nsa.gov/pub/sounds/gorby.au](http://nsa.gov/pub/sounds/gorby.au)

Anyone know what the story behind that was? Was that a common example?

[1] [http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q1/0196.ht...](http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q1/0196.html)

<comment><USER8> Interesting catch!

From the filename and context, I'm going to guess it had something to do with Mikhail Gorbachev?

Searching for that filename yields almost exclusively links to that conversation.

Wayback machine didn't have anything for that URL but they did have a snapshot of the splash page for the NSA website circa 1998: [https://web.archive.org/web/20051104005542/http://www.nsa.go...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051104005542/http://www.nsa.gov:80/)

Archive.org is truly a treasure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting that the example in the proposal uses the file: protocol rather than http. Was that a mistake? Today a browser would handle such a tag by looking for a local file, rather than "attempt[ing] to pull over the network."

<comment><USER10> It was probably not a mistake. It was to separate Hypertext from other files. The file: protocol still works in the a browser with a hostname as well. IE: file:///10.1.1.10/files/example.xlsx

<comment><USER9> I can't believe I didn't know that until now! I've personally used file: only to test local copies of static files/sites, and haven't had a need beyond that.

I wonder how the browser distinguishes between a file residing on a host addressable at 10.1.1.10, and the local path /10.1.1.10/files/example.xlsx. Maybe it tries one and then the other if the first doesn't work.

<comment><USER11> They would be different URIs. file://10.1.1.10/files/example.xlsx - remote vs file:///10.1.1.10/files/example.xlsx - <USER2>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Crazy to see Guido van Rossum comment too:

[http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q1/0259.ht...](http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q1/0259.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> It will never catch on -- just look around HN.

<comment><USER14> Except spacer gifs. Those are totally necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "I think the IMG tag will really drive the web's growth because you could use it for porn."

</comment><comment><USER16> I remember this. Yes, the web was in black and white for a few months, while Mosaic only supported XBM format.

</comment><comment><USER17> this is amazing

</comment><comment><USER18> wonder if firstname.lastname@example.com still works??</comment>


Facebook's stock: The bleeding just won't stop - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57485704-93/facebooks-stock-the-bleeding-just-wont-stop/?source=email_rt_mc_body&ifp=0

<comment><USER2> And yet, 50% down, its still over priced!

This is a 10-15 billion company at best.

Much like Zynga its the lower ranked staff that will suffer most from this =(

</comment><comment><USER3> I won't be surprised that FB be under $5 when the common employees finally get's their turn to sell (after all the VCs and founders who get's to sell first).

<comment><USER4> Sounds about right -- that would put their P/E ratio somewhere around 22, which seems a hell of a lot more in touch with reality than the 111 that it's at right now (or the 200+ that the stock debuted at).</comment></comment>