They do communicate, it's only CA law that sales tax on phones are for the unsubsidized price; it's not like either party is unaware of this.
You also don't ostensibly pay a 'subsidy', they're 'giving' you the $400 in exchange for a 2 year service contract, not explicitly baking the subsidy into the price (e.g. after your contract is up, you do not start paying less just because you've 'paid off' the phone). That's also not the imaginary cost of the phone; as someone who's lost an iPhone, there's nothing imaginary about that $400 :)
Not so sure about that, Matt Taibbi is pretty well known for being up on his shit, regardless of the fact that it's published in Rolling Stone. I think the actual distribution of the publication is more of a limiting factor than any potential stigma attached to it.
In my humble opinion, it doesn't matter so much where you sleep as much as where you hang out/hack/work (you are an entrepreneur, yes? why are you sleeping?). I presently live in NOPA, and for me, it's easier to find cheap housing, and a quick bike ride or bus ride on the 5 to (or 24) to downtown (SOMA'd be a few more blocks' walk).
natemartin's right, though; north beach probably wouldn't be the best fit.
Ok. Normally, the articles on HN with similar titles about quitting this or that are an exposition having to do with some technical or moral appraisal of the service; this is just a complaint that he no longer finds himself needing or wanting what the service provides. And that's perfectly fine.
Re: the hockey stick--m..maybe? This is entirely anecdotal evidence, but the "San Francisco" network spreads pretty far across the entire Bay Area (which is pretty quick to adopt services like this, obviously), and you can still find yourself within the top 1,000 checking in once or twice per week (e.g. using the service). Back of the napkin with those figures, I'd estimate regular usership between 10k-20k. Granted they're branching out to new areas and new devices all the time, but I'd still say they're just getting to the blade of that hockey stick.
There are also a limited number of players, and those players are employed only by the good graces of the league. In the case of broadcast, there are a very limited number of distributors, and they distribute live images of the game. In the case of Youtube, a larger number of people are broadcasting delayed images of the game. The ban, by comparison, affects millions of users describing, textually, what is happening.
That's like the RIAA attempting to sue you for humming a song being played by the performers in Miami tonight. I'm not saying it won't last, just that it won't stick.
Not the same at all--the HN title is a little misleading. Membership (pricey!) buys you access to $500,000 worth of tools and facilities, not just outlets and comfy chairs/wacky furniture. I've been complaining for years about not being able to do physical projects because I don't have access to a machine shop, and, well, now I can, for $125/mo. Excellent idea.
That's not being fair, that's being contrary. If StackOverflow was a stupid idea or poorly executed, no one would use it. Yes, they announced it from a pretty tall pulpit, but if no one cared what either of them had to say--for or against--no one would care to read their blogs, either.
“I think it’s not a technology problem,” he said. “I think it’s a human problem, that there are very few people like you and me.”
While I can certainly sympathize with someone whose dream goes unfulfilled, blaming the Internet at large for not 'getting it' rather than acknowledging you were solving a problem no one apparently had is pretty haughty.
This was my first thought when I read the entry, as well. I felt somewhat silly sharing it for its own sake, but I found that line to be very poignant.
That actually makes a lot of sense, in context; I was wondering why/how Rich had enough time to pore over some random guy's implementation of ants, not knowing much about Pascal (until this HN thread). I think if people ignorant to his own accomplishments, it's because many F/OSS project mailing lists or IRC channels see messages from someone new to the project claiming a more naïve version of Pascal's email every few months (or weeks).
I completely agree with this statement. Further, what scares me about this article is that he's basically reasserting every programmer's mindset in a different context: "Writing new code is awesome! Maintaining this giant mass of code sucks (regardless of if it's good or bad code)!" I don't have anything against the article or its ideas, but yeah, that maintaining a company of 86 of even the most self-sufficient employees is less fun than creating a web application you have complete control over is unsurprising.
I'm also confused by their own summary: "According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out."
That seems to me to describe the psychology of non-adopters, not peak adopters who drop the service/item quickly.
Long after the point, but I explicitly stated, ".. not in that it shouldn't have been posted, .." The line 'having much to do with tech' was also referring to the human capital he was talking about, decidedly _not_ the article itself. I agree with the premise of the article, and agree that the signals being missed are germane to all entrepreneurs and businessmen, but I expressly meant that it isn't as if in the reshuffling of human capital we'd see another massive influx into the technology sector as in the first dot com bubble. That's what I was talking about, not suggesting HN turn into Digg. Apologies if the first line was misleading.
I'm not sure how relevant this article is to HN; not that in the sense that it shouldn't have been posted, but it's focused squarely on human capital as it relates to Wall Street. A perfectly fine approach, and relevant for Yahoo Finance, but it doesn't have much to do with tech. I suspect that what speaks to those who were wooed directly into investment banks following college isn't the same impetus that drives 'rock star' developers. Or regular developers who love what they do.
Awesome write up! We're evaluating moving from m1.large software load balancers running HAProxy, and the newer EC2 services go woefully underdocumented for periods of time.
Came here to post the same. What a wacky assertion.
Incidentally, I searched for "alan sugar ipod will die" (no quotes), and this page was the #1 Google result. The IndiaTimes article was #3. That doesn't make me confident it was an accurate quote, either.