Horribly written headline on WSJ's part; one could read it and think Facebook's given up on advertising.
26,409 karma · joined March 16, 2009
pius@alum.mit.edu https://pius.me
Wasn't much of the Bing stack built off Powerset, whose core technology was licensed from Xerox PARC?
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/microsofts-bing-powersets-role...
Your "argument" is puerile, privileged bellyaching in response to someone donating his own money towards helping an organization teach kids how to code.
I live in SF without a car and I'd be hard pressed to name three friends who do have a car.
This is just false; San Francisco is plenty walkable and public transit generally works quite well, despite the grousing you may hear from the people whom it has spoiled.
That is, in fact, exactly what you got. I have the same device, albeit not ad supported. In other words it's exactly the same as yours except there are no ads on the lockscreen.
(sidenote: I'm really not a Kindle fanboy of any kind, but responding to your extreme post is making me sound like one!)
I didn't expect to receive a device primarily meant to serve me ads, sorry if this is a naive expectation.
Come on, you have to know you're wildly exaggerating when you say it's primarily meant to serve you ads.
As far as what should or not be posted to HN, I believe that is why there is an up/down voting system.
We're in total agreement here, that's why I flagged it.
Your tone is unnecessarily condescending.
I wrote it that way because you either went to the trouble of writing an alarmist, link-baity post like this without even doing the most cursory research (i.e. reading the product page) or you knew the post was intellectually dishonest and you said, "the hell with it" and tried to score some traffic for your blog with it anyway.
I see this type of thing get submitted more and more here, but usually I bite my tongue in the interest of civility. Today, I didn't. Sorry you were the unlucky author I called out; you're far from the only person to do this.
I guess what bothered me is that the post manages to be nearly contentless, intellectually dishonest, and moralistic all at once. These kinds of inane blog posts really just shouldn't be submitted to HN.
This post really does add zero, if not negative, value to Hacker News.
Thoughtcrime is an absolutely incorrect way to describe this; check your dictionary.
So, anyone who disagrees with you fails to see the value of good credit?
The problem with your argument is that we're talking about people who've already harmed their own credit, probably for reasons out of their control. It turns out that people screw up their credit for all sorts of reasons, even though they presumably understand that it's harmful.
While others are correct to point out that such a law would create perverse incentives, it's worth noting that debtors can already effectively buy their debt for a fraction of the price though settlements.
Says the Internet tough guy posting from an anonymous throwaway account. Please.
Not calling a black person a "nigger" may merely be a trivial moral fashion to you, perhaps, but language has been a very much non-trivial tool of fear and oppression for a long time. That's a fact.
For black people, it matters that a newspaper can't be taken seriously if it uses "nigger" as a descriptor. For women, it matters that men can't walk around at a hackathon calling them "baby" and "sweetie" like it's a Mad Men episode. Surely it's obvious why.
It's OK to disagree with that, but the burden of proof is on you. And linking to http://paulgraham.com/say.html doesn't cut it.
There is baby and there is bathwater in this discussion and it's decidedly not useful to conflate them, which is exactly what glib dismissals of the whole thing as "political correctness" do.
... which was inspired, in part, by Eugene Wei's thoughts on how Amazon's float gives them leverage: http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins
Also, the talks are from speakers at different stages of their careers encompassing multiple facets of the startup ecosystem, so don't worry about being "too advanced" for it.
In fairness, you could give the same advice about practically any technology purchase one will ever make.
Sure, those negotiations would happen before significant money or services are exchanged. And, presumably, we wouldn't enter into an agreement unless we were mutually satisfied. But arbitrarily deciding to withhold payment for your services after the fact, pending an audit of your workplace practices, for instance, would probably land me on the wrong end of an adverse action from you. And deservedly so.
Regarding the label you used: what makes it absurd is the notion that Patrick would be motivated by an urge to justify the actions of a 3rd party business he's barely engaged with.
I didn't (and wouldn't) claim that. I do however think that his well-reasoned, but irrelevant argument for why Paypal feels justified in holding $42,000 of Mailpile's money does indeed serve as apologism in the thread, motivations aside. If you think I'm arguing that Patrick is some shill for PayPal, you're barking up the wrong tree.
Here it pains me to cite Paul Graham's "Things You Can't Say" on the semiotic significance of deploying labels to make arguments.
And it's painful to watch. The argument hardly relies on this supposed labeling and I'd be surprised if you actually believe that. At this point you've already done more labeling, imputing of motives, and purely rhetorical arguing than you seem to think I have.
Your argument might be stronger if it didn't rely on labeling ...
The argument doesn't rely on labeling, though it does call a spade a spade.
A definition of "apologism" is "a defense or excuse, a speech or written answer made in justification." I'd love to hear why this is an incorrect characterization of the comment.
The short answer to your question is that you should concern yourself (not sympathize) with their problems when those problems intersect with yours and guide their decisions.
If I retain Matasano for work, I shouldn't need to obsess over the details of your cost structure or employee benefits packages; our contract should suffice. Similarly here, Patrick's description of Paypal's theory of underwriting is interesting, but irrelevant. Deflecting blame based on these issues is, indeed, absurd.
If PayPal's risk profile does not support doing business with Indiegogo projects, they should cease doing business with those projects rather than seizing thousands of dollars on spurious grounds. Feel free to debate the merits, if you actually have a difference in opinion.