Well that may be so. But as you get older you get less patient with people wasting your time.

Let's say you're 90 years old. You're using a webmail system which does everything you need it to do. Then some manager has a brainwave and suddenly all the functions are somewhere else. How much of the 3.99 years the actuarial tables say you've got left do you want to spend dealing with that?

It's not just 90 year-olds. Take a poll of working-age users and find out how many like the MS Office Ribbon; how many people are cool with the regular UI reshuffling that takes place in Windows just to prove you're paying your upgrade fee for software that's "new"?

I was working as a developer when the news of the Therac 25 problems broke, so I remember it well. You actually have it backwards; it wasn't bad UI design at all.

The thing is mere functional testing of the user interface would not have revealed the flaw in the system. What happened is that people who used the system very day, day in and day out, became so fast at entering the machine settings the rate of UI events exceeded the ability of the custom monitor software written for the machine to respond correctly to them.

If the UI was bad from a design standpoint the fundamental system engineering flaws of the system might never have been revealed.

This is the idea I came up with a few weeks ago on another Uber thread that would fix everything: registered destinations. A driver registers a destination for their trip, and only then are they shown potential "customers/fares/ridesharers/etc"-who have also registered a destination-along their route within a slight variance depending on trip length (driving across a city it might be a block or 2, across state several miles). They can only pick up a new passenger once they have reached their original destination and registered a new one or, if they had a passenger get off during their previous trip, a new passenger registers with an applicable destination.

This kind of system would ensure that you are in fact ridesharing, ie. picking up passengers who are going to the same general area you are or a place you will pass along the way as opposed to working as an unlicensed taxi. Throw in a "fare" based on mileage/depreciation/a little extra for your time as opposed to Uber's surge pricing and you get rid of the issue of people taking this on as a job because it suddenly is not worth the effort. You still get compensated enough to offset the gas and depreciation of your car that you would be doing anyway, and at the end of the week you might have enough money to go out for a good dinner or maybe even enough for a trip for 2 to the movies.

Which is necessarily true in any kind of fashion, even if it's anti-fashion. Hipsterism is a kind of contrarianism; the attraction is having things that most other people don't even know about. But strict contrarianism is morally indistinguishable from strict conformism.

Now outside of major metropolitan centers like Manhattan when people say "hipster" they mean something else; there's not enough of a critical mass of non-conformity to cater to an actual "hipster" class. What they're really talking about is "kids taking part in trends I'm not included in." In other words its the same-old, same-old grousing about kids these days, only now by people who've spent their lives as the focus of youth culture and can't deal with their new-found cultural marginalization.

As you get older the gracious thing to do is to age out of concern, one way or the other, with fashion.

Considering the safety record of teenagers, they are absolutely the last ones that should be driving a gypsy cab like Uber.

And as for the part time job thing, well, there are plenty of people that sell a little pot on the side or do some escort work on weekends, but those are still illegal, just as operating as an unlicensed taxi is.

No, those things are actually anti-hip. As soon as something gets big enough for Buzzfeed it's for a different audience.

"Hip" implies arcane knowledge possessed by a select few. A great band with a small local following is "hip"; when they make it big they're no longer "hip", although they may still be "cool". The iPhone is pretty much the antithesis of hip, no matter how cool it may be. If I were to guess what hipster phone model might look like, it might be something low-cost Indian android phone manufactured for the local market and not intended for export -- very rare and hard to get outside of India. Or even better, hard to get outside of Gujarat. Or even better only a few hundred were ever manufactured then the company went bankrupt and the stock was sold on the street in Ahmedabad. Provided that the phone is cool. Cool plus obscure is the formula for "hip".

It follows there is no such thing as "hip" retail chain. It's a contradiction in terms. A chain may position itself in its marketing as "hip", but it's really after what the tech adoption cycle refers to as "Early Majority" adopters.

Hipsters reject being the leading edge of anything; as soon as something becomes big, it is no longer hip. This means they're not economically valuable on a large scale, which some people see as self-centered and anti-social. Compare this to cosplayers; the media always adopts a kind of well-the-circus-is-in-town attitude when there's a con, but while they're condescending toward cosplayers the media can't afford to be hostile because those people are the important early adopters for economically valuable media franchises.

Let me give you a more authentic hipster trend than the one you named. Last year there was a fad for hipster men to buy black fedora hats from Brooklyn shops that cater to Hasidic men. While as soon as something gets big enough to draw media attention it's dead to hipsters, this fad illustrates the elements of hipster aesthetic: (1) resurrecting obscure and obsolete fashions; (2) exoticism or syncretism; and (3) authenticity.

Now from an objective standpoint there's no good reason to favor or disfavor fedoras as opposed to, say baseball caps. It's just a different fashion. Likewise there's no practical reason to value a hat from a owner-operated store in Brooklyn over an identical one purchased from Amazon. But it does add rarity value, and that's the key. Something has to be rare and unusual to be hip. As soon as hipness is productized it appeals to a different audience.

[... 5 minutes later...]

- Hey, how come I can't run Excel anymore?
- Excel doesn't run under Linux, but here, you can use OpenOffice instead.
- Screw that, I need to run Excel! Put Windows back on!

Hey, I could always have linked the forum post where a guy made a AK-47 out of a blank kit and a shovel. I'd take a shovel AK over a "Liberator" any day.

Works very well. You can set it at any height you like. Not too expensive either, at least as compared to other motorized adjustable desks. I'm pleased with it overall.

As someone who transitioned from standing on a hard concrete floor wearing steel-toed boots for 8 hours a day to a desk job: that was one of the best days of my life, and I am in no hurry to go back to standing up all day. That being said, I do try to walk around for a bit every now and then during the day, even if it is just across the building to talk with someone for 10-15 minutes.

The "foreign interests" most likely to use this (ie. people without the industrial capacity to develop their own covert weaponry) are more likely to just blow up said metal detector, along with anyone in or near the security checkpoint.

I don't know which country you're posting from, but in the USA it is definitely illegal for a business to discriminate -- there are anti-discrimination laws explicitly saying as such. For example, if a black person walks in to your restaurant and you refuse to serve him because he's black, you can expect to get sued, and lose. The only thing new here is that the courts will probably now also side against you for turning away a gay customer as well; however the principle is well established.

Right. Because in countries where you can trade a goat for a fully automatic AK-47 or even an RPK, people are instead going to download and print a flimsy, crappy piece of plastic that can shoot maybe 10 rounds before blowing your hand off. And in any case, they make much better weapons in caves than what this guy is making.

... and the real Shakespeare was also the result of millions of generations of a genetic algorithm. It seems the experiment has already been done :)

No. Because the "good reason" usually is "most people aren't doing that anymore." The article is about things that *never* become cool, not things that were cool in grandpa's day.

The real problem with being a hipster is that the ideal of non-conformity is inconsistent with the idea of fashion.