271–280 of 315 posts
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> RSS aggregator Why do you still choose to use them today?
What alternative is there to rapidly scan through sites that have interesting content? For the most part, I use RSS to read HN. Every now and then I will go to the home page to see if there is something I missed that didn't gain enough traction to make it to the feed.
The problem that gets touched upon by the article but never really explicitly stated is simple - these people are using a retail business as their office space. And they are doing so without a contract which guarantees the business owner any income. They are basically left running like a charity, in the hopes that these poachers will be gracious enough to throw enough money at them so they can stay afloat (which then…
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What alternative is there to rapidly scan through sites that have interesting content? For the most part, I use RSS to read HN. Every now and then I will go to the home page to see if there is something I missed that didn't gain enough traction to make it to the feed.
Have you tried http://skimfeed.com ?
How common is it for people to do actual, regular, serious work at coffee shops and the like? I've tried a couple of times and I always feel like such a pretentious wanker when I pull out a laptop and start working on stuff, like I'm somehow broadcasting "oh look at me, I work remotely, aren't I special?"
Am I the only one who wishes for the return of the Internet Cafe? If even better, the Lan gaming cafe? There's something so nostalgic about back in the early pc gaming days, when my high-school computer club would do a lockin and we would eat pizza and have surge or blue balls and game the night away. More on subject, the real problem IMHO is most coffee shops just don't have much room. The Internet cafes were always…
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Well, except that laptops are a plague upon the industry. Its not in the same league as reading a book.
Yeah, the laptop user might actually break out and MAKE something. Quelle horreur!
It changes the vibe and the mood.
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You are either young or have lived your life in a dystopian movie. :) Friends and Frazier are accurate portrayals of how cafe culture used to be. People used to go to coffee shops for hours, drink coffee and other stuff and just shoot the breeze. It was pretty great, and in a lot of ways better than a bar. The one by me growing up had a big leather couch in front of a fireplace that we liked to sit at, and it was pre…
Interesting. I guess it must be a product of my age (born in '91). Thanks for the insight.
I feel really old...
This is such a bizarre stance. "Finish up what you’re doing and close the laptop, please" would have me leave a venue immediately and never return. In the UK the concept of people taking up space in coffee shops and not spending enough is not limited to people on laptops. You're just as likely to see an entire crowd of teenagers with one drink between them, or a group of mothers with pushchairs hanging about for hour…
My question is how many cafes really make money off of people who come in and sit for an hour or two and order more than one drink. Don't most people just stop by, grab a cup, and then go on their way? I've never seen a cafe a-la 'friends' where people hangout and constantly buy things. In my experience the only people who DO hang out at cafes and order multiple items are those doing work for extended periods of time…
I'm becoming an old, so I'll chime in with the others.
Before laptops and - maybe more importantly - before cellphones, the coffee shop was the place to hang out and meet up.
From 1993-2000, I practically lived in the coffee shop downtown. We had one main shop in a city of about a quarter million. We didn't get a Starbucks until 2001, of you don't count the Barnes and Noble.
It was awesome.
It was the nerve center of our music and art scene. It was the only place where college kids and lawyers downtown could get a latte. It was the only place where kids who couldn't get into bars yet could hang out, and the people who could go to bars would pregame there with a cup of coffee. There was a lot of cross-pollination.
I met every single one of my close friends at the time at that cafe. We would sit there all day long and talk, smoke cigs, play chess, venture out into the park or the rest of the city, then meet back up at the cafe.
And it was packed - in the summer, there would easily be a hundred people hanging out in and around this tiny place. We'd spill out onto the sidewalk. It was almost like a daily block party.
But back to the whole pre-cellphone pre-laptop thing - absolutely no one was there to work. It was where you went after work, to do your socializing.
And without cellphones, it was a rallying point - everyone got out of work or were at their home phones at different times, so if you wanted to meet your friends, you had to hang out at the coffee shop because the odds were high they'd show up there too, uncoordinated. This concept is foreign to anyone in their 20s.
The 90s coffee shop culture was real, it was awesome, and for better or worse, it'll never come back. Sometimes this makes me sad, but the upside is that I don't waste half of my day alone hoping to bump into friends.
But - so many good memories!
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Yeah, the laptop user might actually break out and MAKE something. Quelle horreur!
It's more a case of too many laptop users in a space, transform what was meant to be a social space into a work space. It changes the vibe and the mood.
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> I've tried a couple of times and I always feel like such a pretentious wanker when I pull out a laptop and start working on stuff, like I'm somehow broadcasting "oh look at me, I work remotely, aren't I special?" This though can be turned around easily: that the one feeling that way is self-centered and believes unknown people in a cafe care about what he "broadcasts" when he uses his laptop. What makes he believe…
Yup. I find that people complaining about different habits of others are usually the one with problems.