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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

Oh, it's I/O time again.. HN for the next few days will be nothing else than blogs crying about not getting in (and various reasons for why it is not fair). Oh well..

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I'm not really bothered by the fairness (or otherwise) of it, I'm just amazed that Google keeps getting this so horribly wrong. I thought they might have learned after the Nexus 4 mess that they need to improve their purchasing system, but no.

Their 'fix' appears to have been handling page reloads for us, and making sure it's only done every 30 seconds- rather than, say, addressing the underlying weakness in their system.

and about students wanting free stuff leaving the good longtime cutomers in the dust... or something like that

I would wager that a fair chunk of the demand for Google IO is people wanting to be showered in gadgets and then there are people who legitimately want to learn stuff. Maybe I'm just being cynical. I have never been to Google IO so I don't really know. Any previous attendees have impressions about this?

I've never been, but given that the tickets seem to sell out long before the list of panels/events is even posted, I'd say that Google is as much at fault as the gadget-grabbers.

I'd love to know what, exactly, I'm trying to spend a cool grand on.

yeah well, my response was a little tongue in cheek. i tend to watch the videos online. people don't go there just to watch stuff. they go there to network, and get free stuff.

contrary to what the current conference/technology trend may dictate, technology is not a rockband where the live show is better than the studio recording.

The online videos are great. Although it would have been beneficial to sit down and talk some of the teams in person. Anecdotally I have heard that in talks with engineers on different teams you can learn a lot of little tips and tricks that aren't made widely available to the public because of a lack of interest and/or ability to make the information useful, or because they are little quirks in the system that can be helpful if you know them, but if everyone does then would cause problems.

Yes, I've been to several prior events and the number of folks that used to be Devs has certainly migrated to folks that are in for the free goodies.

I have to believe eliminating the "free goodies" will definitely return it to a dev conference vs. an Oprah event. Maybe this will be the year. This year the system said they found a ticket (actually several times), but apparently they were just dangling it in front of my nose, because I couldn't get through payment gateway, Google Wallet.

Each year registration is like a game of Google Plinko.

I'd be curious to know the # of user requests that brought the Wallet to its knees.

I've always thought it would be interesting to see how long it takes tickets to sell out if you had to write a bit of code first. Something simple like fizzbuzz perhaps. The architecture from code jam is there.

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