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dcurtis

6,259 karma · joined March 20, 2007

https://dustincurtis.com

https://twitter.com/dcurtis

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dcurtis··on Thoughts on thinking
History rhymes. It’s funny that my problem back then was jamming fully formed thoughts into tweets, and now my problem is developing seeds of ideas into fully formed thoughts.
dcurtis··on 4K Gaming on Raspberry Pi [video]
In the live stream version of this video, he does strap it directly on top of the HAT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAlrCFJZlnI
dcurtis··on Ask HN: What Happened to Svbtle?
Simply, and without too many details: the load balancer failed to work properly when one server in the cluster stopped responding, causing a cascade of errors which successively crashed all of the other servers (including, interestingly, the RDS database server -- which even Amazon was unable to explain).
dcurtis··on Ask HN: What Happened to Svbtle?
It’ll be back later today. Sorry for the downtime!
dcurtis··on Screw it, I’ll host it myself
This is incorrect. (Author of that article.)
dcurtis··on Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts
Shortly after publishing, I received a phone call from "Apple, Inc.". When I tried to answer, the call dropped. Then my Apple ID account was suddenly unlocked and I got an email from someone saying they are going to try to call again tomorrow.
dcurtis··on If you miss an Apple Card payment, Apple disables all your Apple accounts
I didn't expect that tweet to get so much attention. I plan to write more about what exactly happened when my accounts are re-activated.

But to clear a couple of things up:

1. I've since learned that the reason this happened could be due to an unusual confluence of events including Apple Card, autopay, and the online Apple Store.

2. The disabling of iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts is actually an Apple Card policy for overdue accounts, and they have a team dedicated to handling these account de-activation issues. (I think this is absurd, which is why I am drawing attention to it.)

dcurtis··on If you miss an Apple Card payment, Apple disables all your Apple accounts
Nope -- iCloud was not past due. It is an Apple Card policy.
dcurtis··on If you miss an Apple Card payment, Apple disables all your Apple accounts
I didn't expect that tweet to get so much attention; I'll write up some more details shortly.
dcurtis··on If you miss an Apple Card payment, Apple disables all your Apple accounts
Actually, Sign in with Apple is one of the only things that still works.
dcurtis··on The Fall of Silicon Valley
As the author of The Best, I am quite surprised and confused by Rhinehart's suggestion that the piece marks the "death" of Silicon Valley. He does not seem to understand me or what I was saying at all.

Also, "my ilk" are the very people he praises, including Paul Graham and YC founders pre-2012. I'm tempted to write a rebuttal, because while I agree that there was a marked change in the startup community around that time, I think it happened for reasons very different from the ones Rhinehart outlines in his piece.

(For reference: https://dcurt.is/the-best )

dcurtis··on Ask HN: Is Svbtle Dead?
First maintenance, then fixing bugs, and finally new features.
dcurtis··on Ask HN: Is Svbtle Dead?
Nope.

Working on it right now, in fact.

dcurtis··on The Svbtle Promise
It's not a marketing gimmick--it's a promise. It's how I want my own blog to be treated.

We announced this publicly so that you now know: if you write on Svbtle, your content is vastly more likely to survive for a long time than if you used your own server (probably) or if you used another publishing startup.

dcurtis··on The Svbtle Promise
Garry and I have the same goals and motivations (and we are good friends).
dcurtis··on The Svbtle Promise
Because it's going to take months to work out the specifics and I wanted to make the promise now.
dcurtis··on The Svbtle Promise
Good idea--we'll add that.
dcurtis··on The Svbtle Promise
No, we want to do it ourselves.

Only in the case of something horribly catastrophic would we resort to using an external service like Archive.org--but unlike other startups, we would work very closely with them to archive all data. And perhaps even give them the domain name.

dcurtis··on The Svbtle Promise
Actually, we do save all user data right now and don't plan to change that--but it's hard to promise to keep that stuff forever.
dcurtis··on The Svbtle Promise
As I mentioned elsewhere, there are certain things that can be done to keep the service running for at least your lifetime--I'm working on a trust that will be created in the event of my death (or the company's death) that can keep the servers running for a very long time to come, even with no paying customers. We will make that public when it's finished.
dcurtis··on The Svbtle Promise
I'm working on a trust that will be created in the event of my death (or the company's death) that can keep the servers running for a very long time to come, even with no paying customers. Will make that public when it's finished.
dcurtis··on U.S. Tech Funding – What’s Going On?
In practice, there are almost always offerings for employees to liquidate at roughly the same benchmarks that an IPO would have reached.
dcurtis··on John Nash's letters to the NSA (1955) [pdf]
From http://www.princeton.edu/communications/services/editorial/r... :

> “Use the title Dr. only when referring to a medical doctor.”

dcurtis··on Amazon’s Echo Chamber
I titled it that on purpose, to allude to the new product. I hate clickbait.

I changed the title anyway.

dcurtis··on Twitpic blocking archive team from backing up pictures
This Noah guy (the founder) is really hard to get in contact with. If anyone can make an intro--hi@dustincurtis.com
dcurtis··on Can Google's search engine find profits? (1999)
Google is definitely an ad company, but its main product is Google Search.
dcurtis··on Replacing the PC
A lot of the supporting data comes from adults 18-29. I include data from teens 14-20, because I think the habits they are learning will continue as they grow older.
dcurtis··on BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees
This is absolutely not true about Nokia.

Nokia took the competition seriously, but made a single fatal error: it tried to evolve its low end platform into its high end platform. While that strategy makes complete sense in 90% of cases for market innovation, in the mobile phone industry--which, it turns out, was going through revolution--Nokia should have done the opposite. People often forget that Nokia still controls more than 70% of the worldwide phone market, and controlled vastly more of it in the mid-2000's. In 2007, they had no idea that 90% of industry profits would come from the 30% of the market that they were not focusing on.

You can't really fault them for that, because strategically it makes perfect sense. They regarded the competition seriously but had a flawed approach/response.

That being said, they had a bunch of half-assed hedges against their fatal strategy, like high-ish end platforms such as Maemo, Symbian's advanced versions, etc.., but in fast moving markets with extraordinarily complicated infrastructure/platforms, this approach does not work. You can half-ass evolution, but you have to full-ass revolution.

They realized this mistake fairly early on, but by then it was too late to develop a platform, and full-assing it would have put the company's core competencies at huge risk. So Kallasvuo was fired, Elop was hired, the company moved in with Microsoft, and, eventually, they married.

dcurtis··on Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose
Interesting that someone took my code, nearly character-for-character, and "open sourced" it without permission.
dcurtis··on A cry for help
Yeah, please don't use the Svbtle design.
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