drats

This is an excellent explanation of the core outrage in this case. I can't believe there are people in other threads attempting to excuse the actions of the prosecutors. The publisher dropped the case, there should have only been a pursuit for a minor ~30 day tresspass sentence if MIT specifically requested it.

There isn't a 37 signals "voting ring" but pretty much we see about a blog per week from them of extremely low/general quality. Often they are of a lifestyle/why we didn't go big and why we are actually better than all the big IPOs changing the world nature. I mean this post boils down to "I love my company (that I own, not that I work for)". I think even if PG posted a blog so vapid, "I love Ycombinator, I can picture working here for years", even he would get a bit of fire. I certainly hope we aren't going to be seeing these vapid posts for a decade or more from 37S. You could randomly select a book from the self-help or business section of a bookstore, select a random page, and have a good chance of getting something more insightful than a standard weekly 37s post.

I seriously have nothing against them, I wish them more success even: just not success getting to the front page here because frankly they don't talk about interesting algorithms, technologies or business strategies. They are incredibly boring. No mobile, no Google glasses, no new computer game, no crafty actionable patio11 strategy, no raspberry pi hack, no programming language hack, no excellent presentation, no struggling story of success, no rejection and comeback, no scaling of servers, no clever command lines, no new SSH shell, no browser plugin, no investment philosophy, just "I love my business".

75% of their posts are simply not HN-worthy and there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this. Please just subscribe to their twitter or RSS because their weekly show here is frankly tragic and they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.

Edit. Just to note I own a DHH book, so I will pay for the writing of this guy when it's actually worth it. I'm just saying this blog stuff isn't even worth free.

I'd also like to second the point regard the advertising of apps. Advertising your own app to me in a pop-up is pretty much the death-knell for my usage of any site.

Irrespective of the guilt or innocence of Assange or the Pirate Bay people there have been massive irregularities in Swedish government activities such that they can only be explained by corruption or incompetence and vindictiveness. While that should come as no surprise to anyone, it certainly damages Sweden's image heavily.

It's a harder technical problem than people think, in terms of scaling and encoding smoothly (and playing smoothly while the rest of the video loads, which Vimeo can't seem to do). Google also has tons of fibre in addition to server infrastructure.

It's also extremely hard to break even, as even a low resolution video in bandwidth terms is many times larger than a news article. News articles often manage to squeeze in more ads than YouTube did initially as well and news on the web is fairly cut-throat and thin margin. With an article you can just examine the plain text to put a relevant advert there, with video it's much harder (although certainly possible). There is also a problem with discovery and search related to this which needs high level machine learning and thus your average "we took a regular service - taxis, maids, food - and make a phone app which uses GPS and calls it to your house for a premium" type startup guys probably don't have a clue about what would be necessary.

There was also a lot of speculation that Google has been running YouTube at a loss since acquisition. If that's true it means that their partner program was paying content producers for a long time out of Google's pocket rather than out of real viability. So a competing site going for just technology needs to understand that they are competing with a distributed stable of talent. The same goes for paying money to music producers. A startup would get legally slammed just as they were taking off (and running out of runway). Perhaps the more aggressive advertising and long commercials at the start of videos is now exploiting this subsidy-created monopoly, and perhaps in turn that will give rise to a competitor.

edits: multiple, "steaming smoothly" to "playing smoothly"

"Dumbblack"

"then proceeds to do what black men always can’t help but do"

"black men always telling which way is up because they feel they are the “authority” when it comes to any and everything, most often when they don’t know shit about shit"

" I know when black people start to speak down to me from their pedatsol which is white privilege, they aren’t listening, nor will they"

"I cannot afford to take black people’s shit anymore."

Those are all quotes from the article, except I put 'black' where the author put 'white', both sets are clearly an unacceptable way to speak. While I am sure this guy has faced real disadvantage from some bigoted people, this post is laced with racism against white people and ridiculously over-the-top statements about colonialism and "neoliberal white supremacy".

Yes, I fail to see what Quora is other than a cliquey silicon valley Stack Overflow Q&A site which actively doesn't want more users because it acts protective over content, demands signups and generally acts in a stupid manner rather than just giving me what I want. I don't see a single thing it does better than Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow is public without the sign-in stuff. Of the 30-40 times I've hit Quora from web searches it's had useful information for me only once. What a load of hype. It certainly seems to stroke some important egos though, so they can play with it for as long as they like while the rest of the world moves on.

Edit: grammar/typos

>No vacation policy

This seems like you'd want to explain it a little more, given plenty of other companies cover flights to conferences and while that's a nice perk nobody considers it to be a vacation.

Also the author missed the point of clicks, subsequent searches and back buttons/bounces: Google sees all of these as data to be mined. So while the Apple engineer is worried about returning the wrong result supposedly (yet they return tons of wrong ones anyway), the Google engineer is saying "we are mostly confident on these ones, lets put them out there and see which ones cause the users to bounce or search again and which ones terminate at that point and then we can upgrade their scores".

>They say Apple's browser and HTML5 support are conspicuously superior to Android's.

Not even remotely true for anyone who's used ICS. And it's not "Apple's browser" it's the rendering engine from the KDE(GNU) world which Apple improved, and Google improved just as much. Safari is so overrated it's not even slightly funny. Chrome, Firefox and Opera are light-years ahead of Safari.

This should be the top comment. Again and again we see Twitter, Facebook etc. being blamed for this type of stuff. But in truth these companies have well established processes to deal with requests from law enforcement authorities, as do ISPs. This situation is scandalous when you see how much time and effort is devoted to revenue raising through traffic and parking violations, but there is apparently no time to follow up death threats.

>so far there’s zero evidence that it’s a good way of providing startup capital for would-be businesses

Flagged immediately for this statement. Troll journalism.

Exactly the hidden issue here is whether you will have the newest version of Android or just be stuck on an old version. People are even still selling ICS capable phones with Android 2.3 today.

This is the kind of ridiculous statement that comes from Slashdot. Yes for a Mars rover or medical device we might want some insane level of reliability. But reliable enough for Google, IBM and Amazon and thousands of other companies is enough to take the title "reliable operating system", the rest is just playing semantics.