btipling

The data-mining aspect could be troubling depending on the details, but the parallel construction isn't. They're not planting the drugs on the suspects when they stop stop them. But the hysteria here is thick so one can't even begin to have a reasonable discourse in this comment thread. The paranoid one-sidedness of the discussion is mind boggling.

Look at these downvotes for disagreements. There's nothing I've said that warrants the downvotes.

I disagree. RSS readers have a significant long tail expense per user. I worked at Bloglines. Pretty much every one of those free users have extra little RSS feeds that nobody else subscribes to that you have to crawl, handle invalid rss/xml for, update and keep unread status on. At scale, that is the most expensive part of operating an RSS reader, and it's not worth it.

> The idea that because it's free it's above all criticism is simply unreasonable.

Solution: shut down the free version. Addressing complaints from free users who demand things captures absolutely zero value when you're a struggling startup with too much else to do and limited resources still trying to make a viable business. Freemium doesn't work unless you're swimming in VC money and only care about user growth, not MRR growth.

I don't know how reliable Google Trends are but:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=rockmelt#q=rockmelt&c...

They couldn't have paid too much for such a downward trend.

"I would not have let them in." No you should not get in their way. Don't give them permission if they ask if that is your desire, but don't get in their way. For what it's worth police don't need a warrant to enter your house, they just need probable cause a crime is in progress. If you try to stop police as they attempt to enter, you may find yourself arrested for getting in their way.

It doesn't exactly put it in a good light. It's quite stomach turning actually. Having said that, I'm a little tired of HN's never ending ability to find something to be outraged about, so despite this particular thing pushing everyone of my buttons I'm going to pass. The internet is a big place, filled with lots of people doing things, and there's probably enough material out there to always be outraged every day of your life if you really want to be.

For what it's worth Medium has a really top notch team, and they are still iterating and exploring. This feedback will probably be valuable to them. I have found the Medium UI to be very good.

This kind of stuff actually happens:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/18/sex-bloggers-coul...

Very nice, I like the flat design, but I don't think you're charging enough.

You see this too across device types. Some commentators trivialize "marketshare" when talking about iPhone, but when talking about iPads in separate posts, it's all about marketshare. Mental gymnastics.

The remaining goal posts by the way are where apps get built first and general app quality. The time that developers move to Android after first making their app on iOS is probably shrinking. The disparity of where apps get made first is also probably shrinking.

Another point about why is Android doing so well: Apple seriously needs to get better at services. They are amazing at hardware, they are great at software that runs on devices, but they have bombed again and again on software that runs as a service in the cloud. This severely limits them. Maps, mobile me, icloud syncing, they have trouble keeping their developer portal up, etc. I believe this is a problem with Apple's culture and what they value. Server software isn't pretty, and it's iterative. That is you bring up something that works, then make it better. Apple's culture is to wow with the first try, but they've been disappointing when it comes to software as a service.

2008-2009 I dealt with the Facebook API and they often broke things. The breaking changes notifications have improved things, but they still break things. Their insight analytics was broken for about a year. They just don't seem to care about their API.

Rackspace is worth about $6bn, so I doubt some new startup with a tiny market share is worth more than twice Rackspace.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RAX

A price that's probably worth it in many cases.

America would be so much more beautiful if we had fewer billboards and cables were underground instead hosted on poles. I think it's patriotic to oppose billboards and telephone polls.

Axis and Vortex are interesting stories, but very different from the first one. They become maybe a little bit less interesting with each iteration, but are still entertaining. The first book is full of mystery and the personal dynamics of a few people over a large section of their lives and none of the other books are like that, although some amount of mystery is a piece of each. I definitely didn't regret reading Vortex or Axis.

I think he probably means he has a distress password that will destroy his encrypted data if he was put under duress to disclose anything. I don't believe he is saying he can withstand pain indefinitely.

> " Gentoo also provides some fantastic tools for maintaining your system. ‘eselect’, for example, makes it easy to symlink your kernel,"

This whole post could have been sarcasm. I know it isn't, but, this is exactly what I never ever want from the computer I use for daily tasks. I just want it to work.

I'm an atheist and I still think porn may be a valueless, happiness destroying exploitation of the way the human brain works in a way that makes zynga appear to be an angel of virtue. The less of it there is, the better.

A cool write up and good discussion but looking at the home page can maybe be insightful too. The home page can probably be improved to see a minor tick in conversions.

The "Online Inventory Management without the suck" is not a great intro. It stresses an absence of something negative instead of stressing something positive and uses the rather crude and unprofessional word "suck"

You also have no sign-up form visible on first page load and no call to action (one has to scroll a little, at least on my mac).

The "not interested" inversion of "contact us" is also pretty weird and announces that you expect people to not be interested.

The pricing link does not look like a link at all.

Then as you scroll it's just a wall of text all the way to the end.

> The cobalt blue color comes not from the reflection of a tropical ocean as it does on Earth, but rather a hazy, blow-torched atmosphere containing high clouds laced with silicate particles. Silicates condensing in the heat could form very small drops of glass that scatter blue light more than red ligh

Are they using something in addition to a spectograph to know this?

Disagree and commit is a better strategy. Having done a short stint as an engineering manager, sometimes there's disagreement, not everyone agrees on what the right thing is, hopefully not everyone goes and does their own thing and waits to get fired. This is not a good strategy for collaboration and compromise. If you say the right thing is to know when to collaborate and when not to, you've created a tautology.

iamtherockstar you are hellbanned. Your comment appears as dead. I tell you because you made an informative comment. Looks like it happened about a month ago.

Not saying anything would say a lot. It would be enough to affect consumer confidence in that products are not being accessed by the NSA.

> "It's the law" has never held much weight as an argument in my book.

It will when you're standing in a courtroom in front of a judge regardless of what's in your book. I'm not saying laws are always right, they clearly aren't, but to build a business on it and then be outraged when it gets shut down?

> "collection directly from the servers"

So either Snowden has incorrect slides, the slides are falsified, or everyone has been lying. Actual evidence of direct access would be better than these slides. I would like someone from Google, Facebook, et al to testify under oath that there is no direct access. Or maybe even the NSA, but we know they share inaccuracies under oath, so maybe that isn't worth so much.

And what do you think an "unvetted startup" is? Who decides what is vetted and isn't?

Scripts are copyrighted. The dialog is just the script, so of course it's copyrighted. It doesn't matter how you sourced the script. If you thought crowd sourcing dialog was legal then you were simply wrong, and I'm sure there was some level of interaction required where takedowns were issued before the police were willing to get involved. I'm not outraged, I just think the site owners were clueless. You can't invent your own laws or ignore existing ones no matter how passionate you may feel about your cause.

You only have a few short seconds to keep a user's attention. So optimally probably not to have anything that requires clicking or scrolling or is out of view or hard to read.

I hope we see a proper event loop for 7.5.

This random generator is found in some versions of Windows:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/dual_ec_drbg_a...

I don't know if it's in Windows 8 or not.