Hacker News Reader

pstackon Gates took credit for my ideas: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen

I could possibly swallow this accusation if only there were an established history of this behavior. +cough+

pstackon Internet Entrepreneurs Are Like Professional Athletes, They Peak Around 25

Because young entrepreneurs are more creative and imaginative, and are willing put 100% of their lives into their startups, he said. “It’s not a guess, this is a data driven observation,” says the VC.

The article is unclear as to whether this applies to startups seeking venture capital or all startups, in general.

It also states that it's not a matter of opinion, but data-driven fact. If I'm not reaching out to a VC or engaging with a VC in any way whatsoever, what data is he going to have on me? Isn't he only going to have access to data about startups that are reaching out for capital?

I'm in my thirties and I know that very few startups actually need millions of dollars. I still haven't figured out the justification for such ridiculously huge investments and expenses in most internet startups. Anyway, I digress. Being in my thirties, what I need are ambitious partners who can fill in the tech or business gaps I personally have as well as inspire, invigorate, stir ideas and share in the glory and the gloom.

What I don't need are millions of dollars to get started. Or even hundreds of thousands. Whatever I need, I can almost assuredly take care of on my own (and with partners, our own). I suppose that one reason I don't need this is that I'm not just a year or two out of college and $200k in debt from my education. I'll never reach out to a VC and he'll never know of me, unless he comes sniffing around.

By the way, it would seem that investing in someone younger is a lot wiser, because you'll get a lot more potential years of return if you're investing in "people" and not "product". Why invest with a stubborn middle aged guy who won't put up with your shit? Come on, honey! Sign on the dotted line and we'll make you a rock and roll star!

Anyway, this all seems like a lot of navel-gazing. I could sit around arguing if someone is too old to do something all day, but I'd rather go prove it.

pstackon Midnight Hacking: How to form a doers group.

This would be an awesome idea, if I knew anyone that stayed up past 10pm (besides myself -- I'm up 4pm to 10am) and didn't have to take the kids swimming every weekend. Being the only single workaholic daydreamer with ambition in your circle of associates and friends and coworkers pretty much blows. :)

pstackon Why You Should Think Twice About Opting-In to the Delicious-AVOS Transfer

Really, I didn't figure "I'm a stickler for privacy concerns, but this example doesn't particularly bother me since it's on par with others of its kind, especially when they may be trying to make it an even more social service than it already is" was particularly meandering. If you're baffled by the idea that I can be generally concerned with privacy and bad user agreements, but not take any special exception to this one over others, then I don't know what to tell you. Some stuff is worth losing your shit over and some isn't. This isn't.

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

As dangrossman points out, above, you can be fired for any reason whatsoever, on the spot. I believe the only protections are sex, race, gender, religion, and age. And as for sex, that means you can't be fired for being a male or a female. It has nothing to do with sexual orientation, for which you can still be fired in something like two or three dozen states. (Look into the ENDA which has been repeatedly proposed for the past 17 years, but never passed -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_A... ).

And for those things which are protected, there is often little you can do. Prove that they fired you for being too old and not just because you smelled bad or performed poorly at work or pissed the wrong person off.

It therefore isn't really concerning that someone would not want to deal with the hassle of some jackass and would just ask for him to be fired, instead.

pstackon What's new with Diaspora?

I donated immediately, signed up as soon as they went active (even though I don't do social networks), and never went back. I wanted them to succeed, but I think one has to be fairly honest with themselves and acknowledge that Facebook is not likely to go the way of MySpace. I will be surprised if Facebook undergoes the same sort of churn in usership that we traditionally thought was inevitable for all sites and services.

Facebook reached critical mass and now the majority of the people who keep them going are the same majority that don't see what all the fuss about HD is, don't want to buy a computer more than once per decade, are still satisfied with WoW, and think the current console generation is just fine as it is for another five or ten years.

In other words, they are people with minimal demands, needs, and expectations. They're happy with what they have now and aren't likely to move to the next big thing, like the rest of us always have.

Diaspora always had a significant uphill fight. Maybe they can use the project to bootstrap another effort in another arena at some point, but I think this is all a big effort to stand on principal. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Principal is important. It's just that principal isn't going to displace the reigning king. We will never ever see Diaspora Connect fueling the "likes" and "forums" of the web, everywhere you turn. And, unlike other services, social networking is one that really does necessitate a critical mass.

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

Google is not a branch of government in any way whatsoever and, like any other business or private organization, can tell you how to speak and how to dress and how to behave without it being censorship.

My company requires that employees not speak with the press unless they are granted direct permission to do so and that they should, instead, refer them to an internal rep who will speak with them. That is not censorship. That is my company looking out for their best interests so that some dumb ass like me doesn't say something stupid that misrepresents them. My company also has the right to tell me to watch my crude language while working for them and not to dress like I'm attending a beach party.

There are already whistle-blower laws and protections to address what you are referring to, which is the exposition of unethical or illegal business practices by an employee.

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

Of course! What kind of traction would his insinuations have if he hadn't baited them for termination and he had to end the "expose" with "we had a sit down where I explained my intentions and we sorted it all out and had a beer and a laugh". The "and they fired me!" that is intended to add to the suspicion. It causes most viewers to ask "wait, if there was nothing to hide, then why'd they fire him?".

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

The only reason I kept watching the video, was because I expected him to drop some huge bomb. It definitely had the "surveilance footage obtained during one afternoon of filming clearly shows two yellow badgers being violently sodomized by the white badged employees, behind the building - viewers of a weaker disposition may want to turn away, now" vibe.

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

I was responding to the suggestion that it "deserves exploration" simply because some disgruntled contracted employee was trying to cut his teeth on what he tried desperately to make into a juicy expose.

Simply making an accusation or insinuation doesn't in itself warrant exploration of something. Insinuations about anyone can be made by anyone and they don't all deserve a response or an investigation. This guy has no particular credibility and with is particular attitude, under the particular circumstances and with the distinct lack of . . . anything . . . that he has to back up his concerns . . . falls into the category of "not worth the time".

Now, if some employees come out tomorrow -- even under anonymity -- and start sharing the tales of terrible treatment to some SF Chronicle reporter or something, then you might have something.

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

To put it bluntly, he was the employee of a company that Google hired to do some work for them and he was bothering employees and then he become someone else's problem up the chain and it then become his direct employer's problem who value their contract and the employment of their other employees over the personal project and whims of someone who was hired to do some film work and not to conduct an investigation into the socio-economic makeup of the campus.

Now that he's no longer employed, he can go ahead with his pursuit without doing it under the advantage of his employment or his employer and I'm sure that if his insinuations are remotely true, then there are sure to be a bunch of people beating down his door for the opportunity to speak with him about their work at Google, under journalistic protection.

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

That is incorrect. He was not given permission by his supervisor to record conversations with other employees.

He only asked for permission to videotape yellow-badges leaving the building. Nothing more. Unless someone wants to show me where I am missing a statement, I don't see any point at which he even claims that he was given permission to film and interview employees - much less about the issues he has taken it upon himself to "investigate".

That it was done on his own lunch break and supposedly using his own tape doesn't seem very relevant. My free time is my own, but my company wouldn't appreciate it if I was using my lunch time to bother my employer or one of their clients.

From the video/transcript: "Eventually I asked a superior on my team if I could borrow a camera to go out in the parking lot and videotape the yellow-badged workers leaving the 3.1459~ factory."

If he had asked permission to take a camera out and videotape interviews with people leaving the building so he could investigate the socio-economic aspects of Google employment of Google's ScanOps team, I think it is safe to say that his employer would have told him to STFU and get back to his actual work and there would have been no problems. He took advantage of the situation to push an issue his employers were not aware that he was pursuing which then put them and all of their other employees and their contract with Google in a tenuous position. Not necessarily because "ooh no, he's going to find out we have lots of people of a certain race working in that building", but most likely because they hired some guys to get a job done and not be a thorn in someone's side.

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

I don't think it's highly concerning that a badge has a number for employees to call if someone starts asking questions.

The last three companies I've worked for are very big heavy hitting technology industry names and every single one had a policy that employees are not to give interviews and that if anyone asks you questions, you should refer them to the PR department or other relevant division within the company. This is to avoid situations where some random employee says something unintentionally stupid and it gets promoted to the top of all the sites as official company line. Or to prevent things like, you know, everyone claiming that "Wozniak wants to return to Apple, if they ask him!" when he never said any such thing.

Additionally, you're supposed to report anyone suspicious on the campus, whether they're trying to coat-tail into the building after you badge-in or whether they're snooping around outside and asking questions.

Imagine you hire a big pool of people who punch in a bunch of 10 key or flip pages on a book and press "SCAN" on the machine all day and someone comes snooping around to ask questions about a project (the digitizing of books) that is currently in litigation and some random jackass employee mouths off about something they haven't the slightest clue about and now it's headline news on all the tech industry rags?

Anyway, it's not peculiar or unusual practice. Its' very common. And from what I've seen, this is all speculation. And not even by an employee (or journalist). It's all speculation by a guy who was hired by a company who was hired by Google to get some footage who didn't like the racial makeup of the people he saw walking out of the building for a few days and then started to ask questions of employees who don't know him from any other random guy on the campus filming stuff and asking strange questions.

The way the accusation is made and the whole "expose" is presented is just absurd. Almost surreal, it's so silly. I can't help but think of it in the same light as the internet meme from a couple years ago, where some guys used Glenn Beck's techniques against him by starting up the website "glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com" and then posted the following:

"This site exists to try and help examine the vicious rumor that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations?"

Except, in this case, it's "This video exists to try and help examine the vicious rumor that Google is classist and racist and abuses its employees. Why won't Google deny these allegations?"

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

Except this guy wasn't a journalist and he wasn't a whistle-blower and he wasn't a documentarian. He was an employee of a company providing a service who was exploiting the access (and presumably paid-resources) to pursue his own agenda. They don't owe him an explanation or benefit of the doubt or anything else and he doesn't raise any questions and there isn't anything of interest in his commentary that suggests it's deserving of any followup. This smells of someone wanting to play 'Morgan Spurlock'.

Google might be evil. They certainly aren't pure of heart and all that. But there's nothing in this ten minute monotone "expose" that really gives any legitimate concern.

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

If I hire you to film some promotional company material for me and find that you're using the access we granted you and the time and resources we're paying you for to play documentary-film-maker/sociologist, I'll probably fire you, too.

pstackon Workers Leaving the Googleplex

Was the voiceover being done in a closet in a Google lobby or is there another reason for the depressed monotone? I mean, I understand we're trying to be moody and ominous here, but the voiceover could have been retelling the story of the Human Centipede and I'd have probably fallen asleep (or wanted to shoot myself).

I'm not defending Google, here, because I don't know anything about them beyond what everyone else knows from the outside. However, what do you expect the reaction to be when you are an employ for a company contracted to provide services to a client who grants you certain access and privileges which you then abuse to pursue your own interests and investigations outside of the scope of what you were employed to do?

Hell, at the end of this video, I'm still unclear what point is trying to be conveyed. Is it just "the racial balance of the employees that I saw exiting the building for two days didn't meet some proper balance I had in my head, so I decided to start doing a socio-economic documentary on my employer's dime and after everything went to shit, because of how I was conducting myself, I put together a ten minute video to explain myself to future employers"?

I saw a lot of smiling faces exiting the building and getting into nice cars. I don't see what the big deal is that people who are temporary or part of menial data-entry labor are not part of the greater events and benefits and festivities of the company. I'm sure it's that way at most companies. I'm on the development side of things and I don't get to go to the big sales-team getaways in Cancun or wherever else they go. And I doubt that the janitorial staff and security staff are sharing in the staff-bonus compensation that I am. And none of us are getting the several million dollar company loans to buy our mansion that CEOs have gotten.

Perhaps this will be an unpopular sentiment, but I just got a strong vibe of "this is my chance to be a documentary film-maker".

pstackon Facebook takedown followup: what happened and what FB needs to fix

I can definitely see Facebook being an additional tool, the same way buying ads on AdSense is. I just think that if one is losing all of their traffic and community because something happened to their social networking element, they're doing something seriously wrong. The goal of the Facebook presence should be to funnel people into the real service or community or information on the real site and not to supplant it (and once they're on the real site, not to have all your services like forums handled by Facebook Connect service widgets which places you in a similar situation, too).

I'm speaking from limited experience, of course, and with a service that established itself long before social networking even existed. I think the premise is still sound, though.

pstackon Facebook takedown followup: what happened and what FB needs to fix

I don't think I buy the argument everyone makes about a Facebook presence being obligatory. Are we to believe that the only way people hear of new sites and services is through Facebook? If that's true, then how do people hear about your Facebook page, to begin with? Or is it that they'll supposedly only interact with your site or service if it's via Facebook? You don't need a Facebook page for people to pass your URL around or mention it in their wall feed thing.

If the idea is that people will no longer bother going to a website or surfing the web in general unless "facebook.com" is somewhere in the URL and/or that they will only communicate with you via forums, wall posts, messaging on Facebook itself and nowhere else, then . . . well, I give up. That's not a world in which I want my service or site to exist and I'd rather not do it at all than do it as some sort of trivial Facebook Serf on their land, by their rules, and with their citizens. If we've come to the point that the entire success and popularity of a service and its continued lifeblood is owed to existing on and interacting via Facebook, then we should wave the white flag and admit we have lost the internet.

pstackon Carol Bartz's paycheck reduced by 75%

Kudos to parth16 for selecting the Yahoo! Associated Press page for this particular link. My first chuckle of the evening.

pstackon Why You Should Think Twice About Opting-In to the Delicious-AVOS Transfer

No, I agree with the fear-mongering. I guess the author needed to fill article space, this week.

I'm a privacy-nut type of person and I hate restrictive and absurd licenses. I'm a fan of telling the man to eat it. Note that I'm not justifying restrictive or broad legal agreements, either. I think it's stupid. I just don't think it's any more stupid than similar agreements for similar sites that provide similar services that most of you (including the author of that article) already use every day.

However, I don't see anything in the agreement that you wouldn't normally see on any other social networking site. Unlike some other online bookmarking services, Delicious is a social-networking/bookmarking service, which would explain the concern over content and age and so on. It would perturb me if I was having to agree with something like that for a service which was only me saving bookmarks with comments and tags for my own use that only I would see or access via my own account for myself, but that isn't what Delicious has turned into. Very possibly, they may have even bigger "social networking" ambitions for the service after the purchase, which may further necessitate such stringent clauses.

Besides, if one cared much about that sort of thing, chances are that they wouldn't stop using Delicious now, because they would have already stopped using Delicious when Yahoo! bought them, for similar concerns over privacy and agreements.

pstackon Why Everyone Should Take 30 Seconds to Opt-in to the Delicious Data Transfer

I'm confused. The article says that it's important that I do this, because my "data exhaust" is going to be the future currency of the web. In exactly what way? They never explain how I'm supposed to use this currency to benefit from anything. I can only assume they mean that it's someone else's currency that they can use for their benefit, which I couldn't care less about.

Also, I already migrated my Delicious data -- to pinboard.in -- where the emphasis is on anti-social bookmarking. I just want to have a great way to archive and organize my bookmarks and access them on the most devices with the least difficulty in doing so and maybe have a few great features like saving cached copies of the web pages I bookmarked and doing fulltext search of the entire contents of the pages I've bookmarked. I couldn't really care less about my bookmarks being used for everyone else's benefit.

pstackon Facebook takedown followup: what happened and what FB needs to fix

This sucks and everything, but this is just the kind of garbage you're going to have to put up with when you put such an emphasis on using a proprietary social networking site as your main presence online for yourself or your organization. Now, imagine you were also using Facebook for all of your communication (chat, messaging, forum, group, etc) needs. You'd also be out of all of those services until and unless they restored them for you.

This is why my advice remains: Do what people have done for almost twenty years. Make a website. Do your stuff on your website. If you have anything worth while, people will come to your website. Stop handing the keys to the internet over to Facebook both by using their services directly or spamming your own site and uglifying it with Facebook Everything widgets.

Using Facebook as your web presence strikes me as about as professional and makes you look about as serious as using Angelfire or Geocities, anyway.

pstackon YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious From Yahoo

I can use pinboard (and similar) on any browser and any platform, including a simple API to do custom stuff, if I want. Much more portable.

pstackon YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious From Yahoo

I don't know what "social" has to do with it. It's a service that let's me save and archive my bookmarks online, with tags, fulltext searchable, with a long description, accessible from any system and browser and a number out-of-browser interfaces. And in the case of pinboard.in (which I switched to when all the delicious BS went on -- sorry guys, you lost this customer), including an archived version of the actual page, in case it ever goes down.

I've been using delicious (or similar) for at least five years. My first reaction when people ask about it is sort of the same reaction I feel when people say "I can't understand why anyone would want tabbed web browsing; can't you just open lots of browser windows?" :)

pstackon Milk Completes $1.5 Million Angel Round, Packed With Valley Names

As the article points out, Kevin says they're likely "done hiring".

pstackon People reject info on existence of a prob if they object to possible solutions

I'm not going to comment on the particular facet of contention here. I do, however, think that there is a severe deficiency in critical thinking skills in modern society. Especially in America. It lends toward making many assumptions and accepting many claims on everything except facts and it encourages leaping to conclusions simply because it's better than an unanswered question.

I am not a well-learned student of critical thinking, either. I'm just another public school cretin. I do value knowledge and evidence, however. I despise when people are reaching a conclusion or supporting a claim in a clearly disingenuous way, though. I don't think I ever participate in this, but I'm certainly not immune, I'm sure.

The greatest way we could benefit society and advance mankind in a single generation would be to embrace critical thinking and teach the skills to every student and then allow them to draw conclusions to things instead of jumping on one bandwagon or another, based on variables unrelated to facts.

pstackon Joel Spolsky is doing an IAmA on reddit

I don't have the time, energy, or resources to address every single social injustice or well intended cause. I might donate cash and possibly even time toward a cause after I have taken care of my job and mortgage and family and other immediate self-survival needs, but there are just too many causes that are worthy.

I can, however, give the slightest nod of support to promote countless causes that I may appreciate, but not be able to do anything about. Or I could smugly tell people how smug they are (believe me, I do that, too!).

Edit: Not that I don't agree there are far too many cause-whores out there who have stickers and shirts and web-buttons for a bunch of trendy causes that don't contribute toward anything in the world and that there aren't a ton of people who feel they directly had a part in the recent middle east uprisings, just because they followed activists in the thick of it, via Twitter.

pstackon The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything

I don't know that I will be impressed when that happens. Something tricking you into believing it is sentient is interesting, but inevitable. I want to live long enough that my toaster is an emotional roller-coaster.

pstackon Subscriptions work? $1,800 in donations during live podcast

Do you really feel that it is a superior idea to give it away for free and rely on donations, though? Both options are essentially the same thing, but one says that you're doing it for free and hoping someone will toss you a buck here or there while the other is establishing a value on your content and saying that if you want it, you can pay for it like you pay for anything else. It seems like one says "I do this for a living and I should get paid for what I do for a living" while the other seems more "this is a hobby, but it'd be nice if I could make a living out of it".

I know one is far more common than the other, today, but I also know that there is almost nobody actually making a really good living with the free model or even the advertising model (with a couple exceptions). I also know that I consume a lot of content and would consume almost none of it if I had to pay $5-$10/mo for it. But many may.

It almost seems ripe for the Netflix model to step in, where you pay a flat monthly fee for a whole catalog of content and then the creators get paid as a result. That that I'd actually want that sort of a giant singular wall between myself and accessible podcasts and video streams, mind you. But I'm surprised it hasn't been pushed, yet.

pstackon Showoff

When I see new projects and ideas that take off, my response is usually a curmudgeonly observation about how stupid and pointless it is or how it's so obvious and trivial that I can't believe anyone would waste their time making it.

This is not one of those. This is one of those cases where I'm not a bit jealous because something so obvious or inane or dumb took off and became Twitter, but because it's just so damn fantastic. This is one of those things that is so elegant and smart that it makes me feel like a complete idiot.

This is going to do very well.