WordSkill

Wasn't it a SendGrid developer evangelist who got a programmer fired from his job because he had the bad luck to sit in the row behind her at a Python conference?

She overheard and misunderstood some dumb joke he made about "forking code", took his photo, used Twitter to "out" him for sexism and he got fired.

I don't know what their "evangelist strategy" is, but I always remember that incident when someone suggests SendGrid, it revealed a pretty nasty attitude towards developers, so, I deploy Mandrill instead.

The EU commissioners would prefer everything to remain as it is because the UK government has promised an in-out referendum on the EU and, quite simply, they figure there is more chance of the in vote winning if Scotland is still part of the UK at that time.

So, the EU commissioners will say all they can to keep the UK together.

However ... the tone will rapidly change if Scotland does go independent. There is zero chance that the EU will risk forcing a prosperous, educated country that is already compliant with EU laws out and make them spend several years re-applying, especially when there is a real chance that England will be leaving.

The EU is a business, a very lucrative one. They need the rich countries to pay for the poor, uneducated, mafia-riddled ones to the south and the east. They already lost oil-rich Norway years ago, they won't make the same mistake again.

Just watch, the EU will arrange for "special status" to kick in on the very first day of independence, nothing will change.

It is something of a red herring to suggest that the pound, and the right to decree monetary policy, belongs to England alone. The Scots have done just as much to make it what it is, with Scottish oil being what made sterling a stable petrocurrency and, therefore, allowed the UK to become a power a financial powerhouse in the Eighties.

Realistically, after the bluff and bluster of campaigning has passed, the UK will strike some sort of deal with Scotland because, quite simply, they don't want to be left holding the national debt. If England claims Sterling as it's own, Scotland can legally walk away from any responsibility for the banking bail-outs. None of that will happen, however, because it is in the economic interests of both to co-operate.

REMEMBER, England was furious when Ireland left the UK, and did everything they could to renege on the terms of the peace treaty, including the size of Northern Ireland. The one thing they didn't fuck with was their own economic self-interest. Ireland, as the UK's biggest trading partner, continued to use the pound Sterling for more than 50 years after independence. Think about that.

Worst case scenario, the loonies from UKIP somehow get into power and insist on punishing the Scots for daring to leave. The Scots will simply create a currency that is pegged to sterling, just like the ten other countries who have been doing so for decades, or like the 14 countries that have pegged to the dollar, or the 20 countries outside the currency union who have pegged to the Euro.

You could say that pegging would be bad, because they would not have any control of monetary policy but, actually, that is the entire problem with the current arrangement. The shift from industry to financial services, propped up by Sterling being a petrocurrency on the back of Scottish oil, is what decimated Scotland. Every decision taken in Westminster enriches London and the South-East, the rest of the UK is an afterthought.

Sure, it might be a good thing for the Shetlanders to push for but, legally, the entity which was undemocratically coerced into the union is the one which must leave it. Scotland as a whole needs to become independent first.

As someone who lives here, I have to think with my brain, not just go with my heart.

I can tell you that there is a HUGE difference between any remaining grudges the Irish may have against the English - and, honestly, in my experience, the Irish and the English get on terrifically well - and the extremely dark feelings that most Scottish people harbour.

This feeling of oppression, and the self-loathing that accompanies it, seeps into every aspect of life. When working in the startup scene in Scotland, I was always taken aback, on visits home, by the relative positivity and optimism of the Irish startup scene.

Many Scottish point to the Irish crash as an example of why independence is a terrible idea but, seriously, even after the crash, there was more energy in Ireland than there ever was in Scotland. This is a country in permanent depression.

The natural progression of what you are saying is that Ireland should have remained in the United Kingdom because, after all, they would still be EU members.

I agree that the same principle could bring decision-making down to a highly-localised level, which could actually be a very good thing, but, again, you are just technically wrong to suggest that Scotland is an arbitrary region:

It entered the union as Scotland, legally it is bound to leave the union in the same form. Whether the Shetlanders later decide to push for independence is a separate issue.

As it stands, you've chosen a tough position if you want to argue that Scotland is not a very distinct country. Bear in mind that they already have an entirely separate legal system, consumer laws, NHS, educational system etc. More importantly, they overwhelming self-identify as Scottish, regardless of whether they happen to be voting yes or no in the current referendum.

Wales may push for independence at some point. Perhaps Cornwall might care enough about it too. The most interesting independence question, however, is England: I have yet to meet an Englishman who has a true sense of what his country is or how to square the massive difference between London and the rest of the country.

By the way, you are wrong about the control you think we have. Yes, we get to send MPs down to Westminster, but that did not do a thing to stop the massive moral and financial tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq, which the Scottish, right across the political spectrum, where overwhelming against.

We also have no say in the storing of Europe's biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons just a few miles down the road from our most heavily populated city. No English region would agree to that (would you?), but the Scottish MPs are always out-voted 10-1. That is not democracy.

No, you are wrong on the most basic point. The United Kingdom has always been, from the very start, recognised as a union of separate countries, with Scotland retaining its own legal system. The agreement handed over parliamentary and financial governance, but the country remained separate. That is why secession is even possible.

Salmond. If he achieves independence, you can expect him to do one "Mandela victory lap" in office, but he won't risk his legacy as "Father of the nation" by mucking around for long with the dirty business of actual politics.

I have no love for any politician, but I disagree with your assessment. If he had never existed, his basic pitch of "why shouldn't we run our own affairs" would, in time, have come to the fore anyway. He, personally, is being demonised because the arguments for staying in the union are not sufficiently strong.

I do agree with you that 50% odd will not be a decent mandate for either side. From the start, I have presumed that the No side would win, but that the closeness of the result would force significant change. If it is now the case that the Yes side wins, well, their slim majority will greatly influence the subsequent negotiations. For all the current bluff and bluster, we will end up with something that falls short of true independence, but both the English and the Scottish, and the political discourse of both countries, will be better off.

There are all sorts of reports, including the ones which point out that the oil and gas fields off the West coast of Scotland have remained unexplored because the British Ministry of Defense banned it because the nuclear submarines needed to get safely in and out of the Faslane naval base (Europe's biggest accumulation of nuclear weaponry, just 30 miles from Scotland's largest city).

My belief, based on the most recent independent reports, is that there is a great deal of oil and gas left ... but ... even if there was not a drop, it would still be better for the Scottish people to control their own destiny.

What sort of moron prefers sandwiches to cakes??!!

Just kidding :)

I live and work here, I do understand that the risks are real, but I am also aware that the spirit of the Scottish people has been crushed by the fact that they have not had control over their own destiny. You might be English, in which case this will seem mystifying, but people genuinely do need that control.

People can disagree on individual policies, but this is a meta issue, regardless of where you sit on the usual political spectrum: do we make our own decisions, or allow someone else to do that for us?

I have spent a lot of time interacting and understanding the motivations of No voters. If you are not from the UK, you might be unfamiliar with the UK press, but there is a tremendous bias towards the establishment and they are very good at pressing the right buttons. A complicated system of pensions, benefits and tax credits has created a situation in which most people feel dependent upon the state, despite the fact that everyone is paying substantial amounts right back into the state.

My observation is that the sudden swing towards independence is largely due to an active and highly-motivated grassroots campaign highlighting some of the cruder button-pressing attempts by the No campaign. Voter by voter, they are dispelling fear.

Yes, it was an ad hominem attack, I accept that, but, regardless of prizes he may have been awarded (and, remember, Barack Obama was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize), I am reasonably confident that most people familiar with his work will concur that he has a tendency for buffoonish show-boating on controversial topics. Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, is widely respected for the clarity of his thought.

Yes, the top .01% elite of Scotland had bankrupted themselves and it was they who accepted this deal in return for a bail-out of there PERSONAL assets, it was never put to the Scottish people.

You are buying into the propaganda that is all about Alex Salmond, a politician nearing the end of his career and, indeed, his time on Earth.

The question you have to ask yourself is whether any independent country on the planet, regardless of its currency, would voluntarily had its governance to a neighboring country.

The point is that, today, 100% of the Scottish people are partially disenfranchised. I am entirely aware that no representative "democracy" is fully democratic, but the connection between a people and their government is undoubtedly healthier when that government is in the same country.

Krugman is a known idiot, I have far more interest in what coherent thinkers such as Joseph Stiglitz have to say on the matter: http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/scottish-i...

In common with literally all my foreign friends who, like me, have chosen to make Scotland their home, I am mystified that there is any question of rejecting the chance to become an independent country.

I do understand that change can be frightening but, on every level, the prospects for a modern, self-governing Scotland are clearly better than remaining as comedy bit-players in an exhausted system designed to serve the needs of another country's hereditary elite?

The United Kingdom was not chosen by the Scottish people in 1707, it was a stroke of royal power politics. Today, the UK is still pre-occupied with protecting the privilege and private wealth accumulated by the top 1% during the age of empire and is, therefore, laughably unfit to steer our entire population towards the opportunities of the future.

Can my Scottish friends not sense that something is wrong when the No campaign keep hammering the same obvious psychological buttons, do they not see this for the slick marketing campaign it is when Alistair Darling and the entire UK media straight-facedly suggest that oil is a curse, because of price volatility, rather than the blessing every other country considers it to be?

Is it not insulting when they suggest that, alone among all the peoples of the world, only the Scottish are incapable of democratically determining what is best for them and acting in their own best interests?

Even if Scotland did not have extraordinary natural resources that most countries would, quite literally, kill for, a rich diversity of resources that, per head of population, very few countries in the world can rival (http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bwh9F9LCcAAKBSV.jpg), there is something much more important, and this is what I, an Irishman who has lived in Scotland for 12yrs, and ALL my foreign friends here - Canadians, Australians, English, German, Americans, Thais and French etc - can see so clearly:

A people who gain the chance to govern themselves, who become the masters of their own destiny, they grow. They cast aside of the feeling of being second-best, they lose the bitterness, the chip on their shoulder. Whatever the challenges a small nation might face, nothing is as important as the feeling of pride and self-worth that come with being a first-class citizen in your own country.

This isn't just some abstract, wishy-washy point about feeling good; the future we are heading into is one in which self-confidence, the ability to believe in ourselves and our abilities, will be a fundamental driver of business, trade and innovation. It is vital that Scottish children take on the world with the same natural self-confidence as children from Oxford or London, that they be the ones taking chances and setting up companies, not the ones deciding that, on balance, it is probably best to play it safe and aim for a dull but secure job.

Forgive me, but I must be frank: the Scottish character has been affected by three centuries of playing second fiddle to England, there is more than a smidgen of self-hate and self-destructiveness in the Scottish temperament, and the self-harm that George Monbiot writes about (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/scots-i...) is likely to manifest itself spectacularly on polling day. That is why the No campaign will keep remorselessly pounding away at those deeply embedded fears and self-doubts right up until election day, because fear is how you hold people down.

They will keep pretending that it is about Alex Salmond, while conveniently ignoring real issues, such as the fact it was Scotland's oil which made Sterling a petrocurrency, propping up its value during the Thatcher years and allowing London to become a world centre of finance, all while lying about how much oil they were extracting. None of this is secret, it is all there in government papers released under the thirty-year rule:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/how-black-...

... and this is how the last gasp of empire looks: keep jock in harness by somehow persuading him that he needs the English rather than the other way round. This is the system, it has been perfected over centuries, it is insatiable and, no matter what they or their local sock puppets say, it does not have your best interests at heart.

I think the No campaign will win. Despite the recent dramatic gains by the Yes side, I believe the No campaign, with the entire weight of the London press and the BBC behind them, are tapping into rich and reliable reserves of self-doubt in the Scottish psyche. This saddens me greatly, as I believe the eventual realisation of what has been thrown away will only further poison the Scottish soul.

Despite having been sold to the electorate as a bulwark against change, the United Kingdom will change beyond recognition in the coming years. English politics will continue to be driven rightwards by the UKIP agenda, regardless of what the Scottish people want, and we may well find ourselves out of the European Union anyway, courtesy of The Daily Mail.

Certainly, the age of austerity and privatization will continue to drive down the "Barnett formula" money you are supposedly receiving in return for your oil propping up the London Exchequer, but more devastating will be the growing sense that, yet again, the Scottish have blown it, losing the one chance you had to disentangle and discover who you really are.

57% tax rate. Not much regard for personal liberties, harsh laws on drugs.

It is worth noting that this vaccine merely prevents anal infection from monkeys, it is also important that you avoid sharing needles with them.

I paid for FastMail for about 5 years until they lost a lot of customers' data, including mine, and refused to come clean about it.

Wow, yeah, according to this SSO is free now:

http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/236206-integ...

... that's huge news, when did that even happen?!

Such a pity they discontinued Ranks, that was one premium feature that I had hoped would eventually filter down to free users and really put a rocket under website communities.

I agree, the alternative commenting systems are surprisingly bad, especially when you consider that Disqus is right there, showing them how this whole commenting thing should be done. They should be Samsung to Disqus' Apple, but, instead, they're all Nokias with cracked screens.

I used up all my #s on Twitter.

It is true that Dwolla are not professional but it never was meant to be a real business, it was always intended as a spotlight for Ben Milne.

Nothing wrong with that, ego has driven much of civilization but you certainly should build Dwolla into actual business plans, it won't be around much longer.

Yes.

It gives our individual price in Bitcoin.

Amazon should complement this new transcoding service and their existing media streaming (via Cloudfront) with a full media server, along the lines of Red5 or Wowza or Adobe Media Server, that would allow you to do more advanced stuff, such as capturing video from users, hosting video chatrooms etc.

You can already run Wowza instances on EC2 but the premium on top of standard AWS prices is too high, if this functionality can be commoditized there will be an explosion of innovative new uses.

Nice article but I am Steve Jobs' neighbor on the other side and he has been nothing but a nightmare for my family, especially all the nude gardening.

You would be amazed by how many down-votes my attempt to describe the realities of the situation has gotten.

This is one of those taboo subjects about which people are in serious denial.

Sure I can beat your $220 Android tablet - how about a $499 iPad that you will still enjoy using in a month's time?

Most half-decent domains were registered back in the mid to late Nineties, at the then normal price of around $100 per year, renewal prices only came down to their current levels a few years later. Pretty much any decent domain registered in the past ten years would have been acquired through a drop-catching service for at least $69, probably much more if more than one person wanted it and an auction ensued.

When you come up with a great name for your business, it is natural to be disappointed when you discover that someone thought of it before you and registered the .COM.

It is, however, a sign of stupidity to then allow your disappointment to grow into anger and decide that the owner is a squatter, to allow your anger to distort reality.

.COM domains have always been first-come-first-served, so, by definition, a domain owner cannot be squatting unless someone has a trademark that pre-dates its registration.

Many .COM domains are openly offered for lower prices on any of the hundreds of online marketplaces but if a domain has NOT been listed for sale and you want that one specific domain, you want someone else to give you their property which they have been renewing for years, a low-ball offer like $250 is ridiculous.

Think about it: most domains were originally registered, purchased or bought at auction for a lot of money because someone, much like yourself, had an idea for it. Like most ideas, it didn't happen but the owner continued paying the annual renewals, aware that the name had value. The chances are that the owner has been paying annual renewals on at least a few dozen names, because most idea guys have dozens of ideas over the years.

Now, in mid-2011, you come along, all excited because the same idea has now occurred to you ten years later, and you say "Gee, thanks for keeping this lovely domain for me, here's a couple of hundred bucks, bye!".

If he doesn't jump at the chance to let you cherry-pick the best of his domains for probably less than he originally paid, he's suddenly a "domain-squatting parasite"?

Should he spend his valuable time "haggling" with some idiot who has no idea of the actual value of a good domain?

Or should he just wait for a real business person to come along, someone who understands and is willing to invest in a good name, someone who, unlike the no-clue, cheap-ass kid, will probably be organised enough to actually complete their project and use the domain?

If you are serious about your business and manage to find, as late as 2011, the perfect name for under ten grand, be glad that it has been kept for you by someone that is actually willing to name a price.

To be remembered down through the ages as the Great Vaporization of Brooklyn, August 3rd, 2011.

Sadly, not everyone has the determination, tenacity or communication skills to drum up the necessary attention.

Corporations have learned that, with the vast majority of people, you just have to fob them off until inertia kicks in.

The irony is that the victim in this case probably wouldn't have been a problem if they hand handled here a little more professionally in the first 24hrs. Given all that was at stake as they entered a funding round that valued them at $1.3bn, Chesky should have gone to see her in person the minute he became aware of the situation and put her straight into a five star hotel while he organized and paid for a complete deep clean, fumigation, redecoration, refurnishing and whatever else it took to soften her. Then he should have tactfully proposed that he give her a reasonable sum, perhaps ten grand, in return for her signing an NDA.

In three or four days he would have saved his company from $100m in longterm damage, possibly much more if this starts a meme of wariness about Airbnb that derails their IPO plans.

I am not saying that there is not a future for regular people renting out their excess accommodation capicity.

I am saying that the $1.3bn valuation is based upon a serious misconception of the viability of the market and the extent to which Airbnb can build an unsullied brand.

In short, this is not the clean, scalable industry they are trying to tell you it is, they are pulling a bait and switch, please see my other answers for a fuller explanation.

It is flawed, on two important levels.

Airbnb's Unique Selling Point, the factor upon which its notional $1.3bn value rests, is the claim that it is a marketplace for real people to rent out their own homes - that is to say, the properties in which they themselves live - while they are away or individual rooms in their house while they are present.

This is an intriguing idea and, if you don't think it through, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that most of us have homes, most of us have spare rooms and most of us have vacations, during which our homes lie empty and unproductive. Hotels have been screwing us for years (who hasn't, at some stage, been personally offended by minibar prices?), wouldn't it be great if we could all somehow route around those archaic hotel monopolies?

So, that is the Airbnb pitch, it would clearly be of interest to investors if it could be shown to actually work and, at first glance, it appears that Airbnb has done this - over 2 millions nights have been booked through their system, each raking in a healthy commission of around 15%.

Unfortunately, Airbnb has a dirty little secret, and any of you who have used it will know this: the vast majority of the properties available are actually the same vacation rental properties that have been available for years and are still available through all the other websites, provided by professional landlords with multiple properties - the only real difference is that these landlords charge about 15% more if you book through Airbnb.

Now, when I say majority, I don't mean overwhelming majority but certainly more than half of the actual beds per night. There are, for sure, lots of people new to renting out their places, there are lots of people renting out their actual homes but the point is that they do not represent very many of those two million nights - the two million nights that supposedly prove that Airbnb's unique angle - real people renting to other real people - is a moneymaker.

On closer observation, you will notice that of the many real people listed in a given city, you can look at their photos and read their endearing bios, but their beds are not actually available anywhere near as often as those offered by the pro landlords.

This is because they are real people with real lives - they listed their room because they figured it would be a handy way to make money and perhaps they even bought into Airbnb's charming message that it is an excellent way to meet good-looking hipsters from other countries but, whatever the initial motivation to list, people with real lives often find themselves too busy with real life to deal, right now, with fricking guests.

Also, when they do accept guests, it often doesn't turn out to be the sun-dappled cultural exchange that the Airbnb promotional video so artfully and persuasively suggests. So, very often, upon learning that accepting guests is less about receiving cheeky blowjobs from stunning French models, and more about changing sheets besweated into by fat Greek geeks, a lot of the real people owners tend to drop out of the system by simply blocking off their calendars for months at a time.

So, the supposed point of Airbnb actually represents only a fraction of their actual bookings and perhaps you can see the longterm problem with that. As they reach greater scale, it becomes clear that, actually, the market there are depending upon, the bookings that are bringing in actual revenue, are not some virgin territory, exclusive to innovative Airbnb, but the same hard-bitten professional vacation rental landlords that all the other companies are chasing after.

Certainly, there is nothing there to justify a $1.3bn valuation and if you know anyone who is seriously considering sticking some of their savings into the Airbnb IPO, do them a favor and slap them to their senses.

Now, the second bomb fuse, happily fizzing away, lies in the essential difference between real people who are dabbling in rentals and those hard-bitten pro landlords: the pros know that, while most people are lovely, a regular percentage will surprise you by turning out to be complete scumbags. Pro landlords know this, they've experienced this and they accept it as an unfortunate but inevitable part of doing business.

Now, the real people owners, they aren't necessarily idiots but, certainly, compared to the pros they are sitting ducks. As yet, Airbnb has been fortunate to have been largely of interest to tech hipsters such as ourselves. As a general rule, such people are what is technically known in the industry as "nice", meaning they are unlikely to smash your toilet cistern while in a meth-induced frenzy. Unfortunately, as Airbnb grows and, more importantly, as word filters down to the criminal underclass that all these Macbook-owning fools are opening their doors to anyone, you are going to all sorts of interesting guests turning up and, inevitably, a good old-fashioned crime wave.

You are also going to see some rapes. I am sorry, I don't mean to be crude, but this is going to happen. If you look at Airbnb properties, you'll notice that they are selling the owner as much as the place. This is endearing and I have stayed with some lovely people, but I am always struck by how vulnerable young female owners are. Just for a moment, go to Airbnb and search for rooms within homes in any city. Look at a few and, in particular, take the time to look at the owners - read their charming bios, read the nice things that previous guests have said about them, click to enlarge their photos and admire their young, beautiful, trusting faces.

No, ask yourself this question: given that we know, for a fact, that there are some truly dangerous men out there. And given that we know that rapes occurs in every city, every day. Ask yourself, would you be happy if one of your sisters, needing a little extra dough to cover her mortgage, decided to start renting out a room in her apartment to a different stranger every night?

So, okay, I don't want to dwell too much on the awful implications, the all-too-likely disaster waiting to happen, so, let's think about it as investors - if just ONE person does get raped ... or .... if just one owner CLAIMS to have been raped ... what happens to Airbnb?

Well, obviously, it tarnishes the brand, that much is obvious but, more importantly, it effectively means that far fewer young women will continue to rent out rooms and, you'll notice, women in their twenties make up the majority of the real landlords. Even some who might be willing, themselves, to continue, they will be under tremendous pressure from their family and friends to quit.

So, suddenly, Airbnb's loincloth of real people landlords becomes far smaller and, suddenly, the difference between them and HomeAway is a lot less clear. Suddenly, the IPO become a much harder sell.

And that, my friends, is why Brian Chesky and Paul Graham have gone nuclear, because these two major flaws are slipping beyond their ability to control the story and, after so much hope, it is turning out that Airbnb might not be the next ebay after all, it might just be the next Pets.com.

No-one is blaming Airbnb for the actual act of vandalism.

They are different from Craigslist because they take a percentage of the transaction. This makes them a participant in the transaction and this is important in legal terms.

The heat is mostly because young, inexperienced and overconfident executives overplayed their hand and then tried to salvage the situation by blatantly and very obviously lying about what their position had been 24hrs earlier. It was astonishing to watch and caused quite a feeding frenzy.

Absolutely, I couldn't agree more - the devious way they've tried to manipulate this whole situation, I would honestly be shocked if normal victims (i.e. people who don't have the energy and determination that EJ did) ever got to see a cent of that $50,000.

Effectively, what we will see in the future is that Airbnb will make quick assessments and zoom in to shut victims who have the potential to attract publicity, while the less savvy will be swamped in insurance red tape until they give up and quietly slink off.

The $50,000 means nothing - after the incredible amount knocked off their value this week, Airbnb was obviously going to have learnt the financial wisdom of paying off some people, that is the only real change.