Recent Comments

I guess you are right.

I had interpreted the "number of votes" as "the number of voters" (actually: I considered filling in several boxes as one vote, but that has the same result) and assumed the results were normalized over the number of voters.

It would be nice if the results would also show how many voters there are.

Hrm. I think "locking things down" can only be a serious problem in languages that compile to bytecode (a hard case of The Java Trap ), or languages that undergo regular breaks in compatibillity (I don't think I've ever been aware of a case of this, because that can cause languages to disappear rather fast, if only due to ruining the language's library ecosystem). It can be a problem under other circumstances as well, if the only compiler costs money to buy or it only has a working compiler for certain operating systems. That said, these are lesser problems. The former I believe has generally been recognized as incredibly unwise for anyone seeking to promote a language, and the latter is a problem that will solve itself if the language actually gets used outside of niche domains (in addition to being a significant hurdle to language adoption in its own right).

This doesn't apply to google's languages. This *can* definitely apply to Swift, if they are ultra aggressive about keeping their compiler running on apple-operating systems only. If the API is fully published, and not subject to copyright (Oracle just needs to die), then only (deliberate) implementation quirks, breaks in compatibillity and feature creep can keep someone (especially google) from creating a perfectly fine, working compiler for android, linux, and windows. But if apple doens't delibrately sabotage their language, then that language can really only be good for us.

Finally, to address a side-issue here; ultimately I'm not sure community (especially if run like a standard's committee) development for languages is necessarily the best way to make a language. Sure it has advantages, but I have no problem with someone unilaterally deciding the features of a language as long as I don't have to use it.

And that's why the polls ha ve comments sections :)

I'd say this site, and similar sites as well, have more in common with reddit than a list of recent news stories. Sure you get the news, but the important thing here is the groupthink's reaction to the news. If you wanted an RSS feed, you'd use an RRS feed. But then, that's just how I use the site.

I don't know how and why you would have 200%. That makes no sense at all. We are talking about percentages and not about individual votes.

The votes are normalised so that the total is 100%. The sum of 99% that you see is probably the rounding error. 14% of the total votes is "operating systems'.

This is what you would expect and this is the usual way of representing similar data.

The symbols we use for all of them matter an awful lot, though. Would we recognize an alien love song, or their expression of even the simplest equation?

I should say, re: link to the poll. I arrive at this site from the RSS feed, and land directly in the article. So I don't see the poll on the front page.

Maybe polls should be added to the RSS feed. But certainly a link to the poll from the article wouldn't hurt.

Hah, your password is "hunter2"! I bet you just saw asterisks...

If you can read this message your existence is too close.

Nope, it didn't work
Sigh.Try again with my password: *******

Some languages are universal

If you talk about a poll, link to the poll.

Ugh. I can't vote - not because it doesn't work, but because they are not boolean answers.

I want to see all the things listed on the poll. But by "politics", I mean a really really small subset and I mean only quality articles. For example, I don't want to see who is suing who - it takes nothing to bring suit. I want to know when there are meaningful decisions, or meaningful decisions are about to be made.

The same is true on all the subjects.

Astronomy fan, does that count? I too would like to hear from the hobbyist astronomers. I gotta say, I love how they manage to eke every last drop of data out of these missions - here's a dying probe, let's make sure it drops into the atmosphere so we can get a closer look before it stops transmitting. This seems to be habit with these teams, and it's encouraging to see how damn smart they all are. Gives me hope for the future!

The article on the front page makes it clear how to participate in this vote.

Do I also have to be logged in to comment? (We'll see if this post works)

At this point 101 have voted, the highest count is "operating systems" with 14%

I'm a bit surprized, I would expect it to be far over 50%, the same goes for some of the other categories.

I added the percentages, they add up to 99%, which is not even 100% - I would expect a sum closer to, say, 200%.

Why come to this iste if you're hardly interested in the subjects discussed around here?

The only explanation I can imagine is that voters do not realize they can vote for more than one option (or even all of them) - maybe that needs to be made clear in the header. Or is the |. approval vote system bugged?

That's kind of the way it's working right now - as volunteer editor I can assure you I'm posting almost everything that comes in, thinking anyone who went to all the trouble to post something deserves to have it hit the front page. Later when the number of submissions picks up we can begin filtering. "Too many articles" is currently not one of our problems. Soylent typically has 14-18 submissions in the queue, but the times I've reviewed them I've found a lot of stuff that wasn't really that great.

The volunteer editors here have also gone to great pains to take even barebones submissions and make them into something interesting and newsworthy, when a post needs a little love and care.

I think pot luck (no drug reference intended) is a sensible approach right now. People can submit stories they find interesting, and see whether they can convince the editors to post them and then get people to respond to them. That's their feedback. Trying to put together a submission content policy right now would probably be counterproductive.

I agree with everything in the above post. Some political stories fit in, but politics isn't why I come here.

Ultimately, that comes down to the users. I sent out an email to every one of my friends I thought would be interested, and hope others do the same. It eventually comes down to word of mouth. Bryan has put in a Twitter thingy that allows articles to be announced via Twitter too, with hashtags and the like. If you like the site, get the word out - we could certainly use more people around here, and given what a great interface this thing has, it's getting easier and better to participate.

I however have to say I prefer "slow/steady" growth of the site, where the place grows organically and interesting people discover it and stay, to a wild-west clusterfuck like Soylent where everyone arrived at once and it turned into a huge mess sorting out how the site work, before it finally seemed to calm down. Slow and steady gives the site a chance to grow naturally and a chance for users/community to grow. "Build it and they will come" or something like that.

I happen to agree with you about the politics. I get really annoyed when I go to tech sites expecting a break/relief from that kind of news, and find it on the tech site too. I hate politics, don't want it on my tech sites, which are kind of like a refuge to me. Exception only if there's a tech angle, like busted Diebold machines, or something like that.

Yes, and this too is the problem:

"No stories in the pipe!"

Simply engineering a loopback cable between the "feed" and "pipe" sections of this site would do wonders for the article selection, discussions, and user base.

Pipedot is far and away technically and esthetically the best of the three. The editors are doing a fine job.

Subject choice is not the problem. No one paying attention is the problem. Nobody knows pipedot exists.

'cause I'm an anonymous coward, but glad to see that Politics has zero votes so far. The rest of the current tally is more or less in line with my own interests, minimal gaming and maximum tech, maybe some general science. I don't mind mobile news at all.

That "feed" link is quite helpful, showing tech news from various sites. I didn't know about it. I think we should be discussing various stories from that feed directly on this site, without waiting for one to be reposted to the "Pipe".

A mix of LWN, OpenBSD Journal, Ars and Physorg is fine. But cut down the mobile section, I don't want to see yet another site that does 50% Android/iPhone "news" that doesn't interest anyone.

The Pipedot feed is a good starting point for the day