4,676 karma · joined March 4, 2021
Oh maaaaaaaaaaaan do I despise hearing variations on this "non-pology."
It's never "Wow, we fucked up by doing something harmful to you." It's always, "My bad, I failed to explain exactly why you're wrong to think this is harming you. I take total responsibility for not explaining why this is actually good for you. I'll try again."
The diving in Five Fathoms Marine Park is exquisite, and it’s a short drive from Lion’s Head, which has absolutely stellar rock climbing.[1] We’ve taken the kids on the ferry to Manitoulin Island[2], and from there driven over to Sudbury.
I recommend trying that ferry at least once, it was a lovely experience.
Having also written a book about things to look for and abhor in an interview, I consider this question a strong red flag.
"Hi this is Arnie from CHewemup'n'Spitemout Staffing, is this Bob?"
"Hey Arnie, what perfect timing! I just started looking for a new opportunity, and I'm really excited to— CLICK."
Ring ring.
"This is Arnie, we seem to have been cut off."
"Oh Arnie, right, thought you hung up on me."
"No, not me, must be a bad connection. You were saying?"
"Yes, I was saying this is a great time to talk about opportunities. I just finished a major Java Enterprise JavaBeans project, and I'm— CLICK."
Lather, rinse, repeat, as the meme used to go before we called them memes.
As the length of a thread about software design increases, the probability of someone mentioning a "general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory" approaches one.
Including the act of quoting Thor's Law.
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The next step is to applaud the essay because the reader feels it “feels right.” Of course it feels right if you mentally fill in the blanks, and if it says nothing that can be empirically falsified.
If it motivates someone to not give up because they don’t seem to fit the existing templates for success, that is necessary, but not sufficient by a long shot.
What’s missing are concrete tactics for succeeding with the strategy of “make your own niche.” Lacking specific tactics for replication—at any scale, in any field—its primary value IMO is as an exhortation to go out and research how to succeed with this strategy.
It’s only a short essay, so it really has no more weight then the preface of a book. And that’s what it reads like: An anecdote at the beginning of a book about succeeding as a niche or specialized entity…
Only the rest of the book—with specific chapters detailing the strategy at finer levels of detail and laying out tactics to thrive—is missing. We are left to either fumble around blindly, frustrated that we are unable to “paint the target around our arrow,” or go out and do a lot more reading and learning to assemble the rest of the book by hand.
If anyone does find this inspirational or thought-provoking, there are entire books touching on the subject that provide a lot more value. If this motivates people to go out and read such books, it’s not a complete waste of time, but it is incomplete and fails to say “Hey, this is just to whet your appetite, this is the beginning of a long journey. Bruce took decades to discover what worked by trial and error and working with others, you can read these books to get you started on the right road.”
I’ll contribute one book recommendation: “Marketing Warfare” by Reis and Trout. It’s also lightweight and easily digestible, but it contains a simple model of competition that divides business into four different strategies (offence, defence, flanking, guerrilla) and then details specific advice for success in each one.
What they call “guerrilla” is closest to what this essay espouses, and readers may find their advice a little more actionable. But even then, that book is not a complete how-to. You have to keep learning and keep researching.
1. Why was HN founded, and;
2. Why did Reddit create the subreddit?
Unnecessary hint: Both questions have the same answer.
If it is too difficult to prevent your customers from being defrauded when they do business with you, find another business model.
No business has an inalienable right to exist, much less an inalienable right to choose whatever business model they like and then shrug their shoulders at whether they are complicit in crimes against their own customers.
Nobody ordered Amazon to allow other merchants on their platform. Nobody told Amazon that comingling goods with third parties was an acceptable way to cut their costs and become more "efficient" at a business.
They chose to do these things, and it is on them to find a way to stop stealing from their customers, or face criticism from people like me.
I do not accept "It is too hard to police fraud" as an excuse for making money from fraud. I also do not accept "everybody's doing it" as an excuse.
Maybe the two of you have different definitions of "irrefutable." If I say, "They ship packages with cards in them that offer a gift card in exchange for a five-start reviews," I would personally call the presence of such a gift card offer, irrefutable proof.
True, my testimony alone is not irrefutable proof, but let's compare to a science paper. It says they have proved that light's path can be bent by gravity. Well, science papers have included outright frauds before, so the paper in and of itself is not "irrefutable proof," but the claims within it can be refuted by attempting to replicate the experiment.
And so it is with the gift-card-offers. A single report or tens of thousands of reports are not irrefutable proof, but they explain how to replicate the result, and if Amazon choose to ignore these reports rather than attempt to replicate what they describe, that is on Amazon.
Ultimately, everything a customer reports can be faked. Businesses that ignore customer complaints because they might be faked, and do so when it "happens to" make them money to ignore customer reports... Are not suffering from being unable to prove that the reports are correct.
They are suffering from making too much money to want to know whether they are complicit in fraudulent behavious on the part of their partners.
Yes it is work to find out if the customer is describing an irrefutable way of discovering whether the customer is telling the truth. It is not the Universe's responsibility to make cracking down on fraud easy: It is Amazon's responsibility to organize their business around not making easy money at the expense of their customers, and if cracking down on fraud is too expensive, it is on Amazon to change their business model.
"It's too much work to crack down on fraud" ought to be rejected as an unacceptable thing to say about any business.
And it's an even worse business model if you rely on social media for your business model and one day Twitter (or any other platform eventually) decides that if you're going to make money sharecropping in their fields, you need to start turning over revenue to the landlord in the shape of checkmark payola for reach and gatekeeping fees for access to the API.
It's the classic platform enshittification end-game: Social media embraced companies like Buzzfeed for providing the content that they used to build critical mass, then turned around and viewed them as ATMs to be plundered. Same story as app developers in walled gardens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
I think HN understands the difference between a charismatic leader who is good at laying out a vision and generating a tremendous amount of hype around it (like Steve Jobs) and someone who is an expert at actually realizing a vision (Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook).
They may both be necessary for success, but if you are praising the rocket's engineering, you're praising the person who works tirelessly to manifest the vision.
I am curious about is the origin of 'rap' as an informal discussion: I want to rap to you today—lyric spoken by Maurice White of "Earth, Wind, and Fire."
I believe that's the origin of the noun Rap as a music genre, which is now mostly known as Hip-Hop.
I believe both descend from "rap" as a form of rebuke, in one case synonymous with criticism, in the other synonymous with a conviction in a court of law.
This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving Twitter.
I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know that. I do not have a "disdain for Musk's political views," to put it like that is to suggest that white supremacy is a view no different than believing in universal healthcare.
Your rhetoric is a shallow and obvious attempt to invalidate and dismiss other people's concerns.
And while you have a right to your beliefs, no matter how much they lack empathy, no matter how much they are divorced from a belief that other people are not NPCs and are truly entitled to their own world views...
This type of talk is not in the best traditions of Hacker News, a site that yes, has a far more Libertarian slant than I personally hold, but also yes, attempts to hold its discussions and debates to a higher standard than you display in this comment.
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[1] Other people of colour take a different view on whether to use Twitter, and that's the entire point of not dismissing other people's views. They have their own strategies for making the world a better place, and I don't have to dismiss their choices as posturing, I can respectfully make different choices for myself.
That's an ad hominem tu quoque. If what you want to do is criticize the character of people criticizing Musk, carry on. But even if the person criticizing Elon is a serial murderer and leaves the toilet seat up, the truth or falsity of any statement they make is independent of their character.
If you have some argument to make about "Twitter" doing it and not "Elon," make that argument and we can discuss it. Speaking of which:
You can believe whatever you like about whether Twitter before Elon would or wouldn't have done things like ban Elon's Jet tracking account (they didn't), Bring white supremacists and Trump back (they didn't), ban journalists using a flimsy pretext of doxxing (they didn't), fire the trust and safety team (they didn't), &c. &c.
Point being, I am not giving you opinions, I am giving you facts about how Twitter under Musk is not like Twitter pre-Musk, and these are not trivial changes.
Then you add the fact that Musk himself brags to high heaven about how HE is changing things, and to boot, people talk to him on twitter and he says he will make changes.
All these things point to Musk personally taking responsibility for Twitter's actions. If he turns this around and the company ends up being worth $250 billion (his claim), do you think the world will say "That was Twitter, not Musk?"
So why when the company shits the bed shouldn't we say "That was Musk?"
But for many applications, the semantic difference between the two drives different patterns in the calling code, and when that is the case, having an easily visible difference between the two predicates makes the code more readable and prompts people to write it more correctly.
Example: What happens when the answer is "no?" For many bog-standard applications, it's a NOOP. Let's say there's a feature: You can edit a message that has already been sent.
If you are wrapping that in a flag for gradual rollout or early access purposes, you wrap both the client-side edit control and the server-side API endpoint in the "can X do Edit" test, and if the answer is no, you don't show the control in the client, and you 404 the endpoint on the server.
Whereas, if editing messages that have already been sent is a feature only available to a special class of users—let's say they are paying $8 a month for an orange check-mark on Hacker News—then on the client we still hide the control if our user is not authorized to edit messages.
But on the server side, we typically don't want to 404 the endpoint, we want to give some semantically appropriate response such as a 401 "unauthorized" status.
If you use one construct for asking both FF and auth questions, it's hard to see at a glance whether the code is doing an appropriate thing with the answer.
This is grossly oversimplified, but the thesis here is that yes, if you use both FFs and auth in exactly the same way, it's reasonable to consider using one way to ask the question. But the definition of "using them the same way" should also include what you do with the answer.
In your case, you very likely always do exactly the same thing with the answer regardless of whether the answer is derived from FFs or auth. But for those who do different things depending on which question they're answering, I suggest having different ways of asking the questions provides better affordances for writing and maintaining the code.
Both my email provider and I agree on what constitutes spam. It does not decide to block my emails containing a link to a competitor as “spam.”
It does not modify my emails to insert a “warning, this link is dangerous” page for my recipients.
If it does send an email of mine mentioning a competitor, it does not block my recipients from searching for my email.
If it did any of these things, no I would not use it, and yes I would lambaste such a company and its CEO.
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Addendum:
But even if someone did use such an email service, and didn’t criticize the company or its CEO, that would have no bearing on whether their criticism of Musk was valid:
What is being discussed here, however, is whether using Twitter‘a web client to post a tweet containing a link to content on Substack is “abuse of Twitter’s API.”
Elon absolutely did this, and there is no “pretending” going on.
Musk’s foundational approach is that he will decide who gets reach and who does not. And for myself, someone who identifies as anti-conservative, I’m ok with that. Let him refashion Twitter in Truth Social’s image, but having paid $40+ billion for its audience.
Musk has decided that white supremacy gets reach, competitors do not get reach, news outlets that do not pay protection money for a check mark do not get reach, and people who like articles written on competing platforms do not get reach.
That is perfectly fine with me. Let him play God-King, he bought it, he gets to do as he likes with it, provided he stays on the correct side of the law.
I just wish he wouldn’t whine like a man-baby about advertisers kowtowing to the woke mob. He gets to decide whose reach to support for whatever reason he likes, so should they. He gets to make whatever business decision he likes, provided it’s legal. So should they.
Selling aspirations is a pretty good business model.
They eventually pivoted to supporting the web (and PHP!), but this story predates all of that.
4th Dimension was orginally called "Silver Surfer," and it is the centerpiece of a story Guy Kawasaki used to tell about how big companies work. Apple was trying to get everyone to write software for the new Macintosh, they gave free hardware and engineering support to Ashton-Tate to port its popular PC database to Mac, &c.
Meanwhile, indie companies like Aldus (who would go on to literally rescue Apple when they released PageMaker) and ACIUS (A company Guy formed in partnership with the original developer to distribute 4th Dimension) shipped software that people actually bought and actually used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_Dimension_(software)
Apple would have done better if they'd told people like Ashton-Tate to "Ship or GTFO," but the history of technology companies is one of people skating to where the puck has been...
So yes of course the ads were public, you could pick up a free copy of the newspaper at any gay bar on Toronto's Church Street. But the details about the customers placing ads were extremely sensitive.
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Oh man, the stories I heard... Many extremely sad to me, when I think about why people felt the need to be closeted and so on.
But while my memory is imperfect, I believe that I hardcoded that feature to only work when running on my personal Mac SE/30, and also changed the feature/name to have a tossed salad metaphor.