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bookbinder

215 karma · joined December 20, 2016

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bookbinder··on Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament
Why is ajuc's comment being downvoted?
bookbinder··on Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
> Decentralisation is clearly the end game as long as politics causes problems like this.

Only techies care about decentralization. Most people would rather follow a Twitter feed rather than an RSS feed. Most would prefer a mega forum like Reddit rather than multiple, standalone forums with separate accounts. There are also network effects that give centralized platforms more of a competitive advantage.

I keep hearing people talk about the need for decentralized social media, but nobody knows how to make it an attractive, viable option for the masses...especially when such a solution wouldn't be as profitable (or as frictionless) as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

bookbinder··on There Are Now More Shows Streaming Than There Are on Broadcast or Cable
TNG isn't really watchable until Riker gets his beard (around season 2).
bookbinder··on Ask HN: I'm looking for examples of one-person startups that scaled big
Yeah, but companies like Imgur and PlentofFish reach millions of users without hiring anyone. So for similar companies that do hire, I'm wondering what exactly are all of those people doing all day. Is it just bs/busy work? Or are of the founders of Imgur, PlentofFish, etc. so clever and capable...they're simply more productive than a team of people.
bookbinder··on Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
Honestly, I'm surprised it took this long. I'm assumed Yahoo would have banned/purged adult content immediately after buying Tumblr.
bookbinder··on Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?
No, we simply wouldn't be using tablets or the market would be much smaller.

In the 90s, MS attempted mobile devices using Windows CE (based on Windows 3.1—long after the release of Windows 95) and that went nowhere. Microsoft has always been the first for the longest time they were incapable of building things people genuinely wanted to buy.

If Apple didn't make the iPhone or iPad, all MS could do is rip off Blackberry. They wouldn't have made anything worthy of spurring the mobile industry we have today.

And Apple didn't really need that $200M from MS. Instead the investment had more symbolic value—signaling that Apple was still a viable company that had software support from the biggest tech company of the day.

Also, before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Larry Ellison wanted to buy up shares for a hostile takeover and then install Jobs as CEO, but Jobs talked Ellison out of it.

bookbinder··on America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away
How are U.S. schools failing students? What should they be doing/teaching instead?

Where did you go to school? How did your education differ from what you've seen in America?

bookbinder··on The high-risk, high-reward world of selling random stuff on Amazon
Why is that? What has been your experience?
bookbinder··on [dead]
This seems like a really cool idea, but I'm struggling to imagine what the use cases would look like? Anybody have any ideas?
bookbinder··on Prepare for changes to macOS Server 5.7.1
They haven't used mac servers in more than a decade long before they discontinued Xserve.
bookbinder··on Linus Torvalds apologizes for years of being a jerk
I've never seen anyone work as hard at being an ass hole as Linus Torvalds. He has literally made speeches celebrating his rudeness and insensitivity. His change of heart doesn't make up for decades of really shitty behavior.
bookbinder··on Introducing Votable, the spiritual successor to DMOZ
Currently the site is focused on nonfiction/podcasts, but it will be expanding to include other sections.
bookbinder··on But Rich People Live Here, So We Can't Be Going Broke
Lots of people think like this. During the housing crash there were lots of news reports about people earning mid six-figures losing their homes because they went out of their way to buy extravagant mansions they could barely afford, rather than a more modest-sized luxury home they could have paid for outright in a year or two.
bookbinder··on Surprising Findings About How People Actually Buy Clothes and Shoes
> And can we stop measuring the growth/success of the economy by how many redundant items are bought?

We need people to mindlessly buy stuff they don't want want/need in order to grow our <strike>house of cards</strike> economy.

bookbinder··on Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox
People don't want to pay $100 a month for cable TV either, but they did it anyway (for decades) and continue to do so. Now we're being asked to buy a bunch of streaming services and we'll bitch and moan, but ultimately we'll pay because every major platform will have at least one show that justifies their existence.

I associate CBS with bland procedural crime dramas and awful three-camera sitcoms. CBS All Access would have been doomed without Star Trek: Discovery. Admittedly, the show isn't particularly good, but I'm a trekkie so it doesn't matter. On the plus side, I discovered The Good Fight (a surprising smart, entertaining and well written show) so I now I have a legitimate reason to give a damn about All Access.

And then Apple will offer their own gateway drug (Lord of the Rings?) and Disney (...well they could just offer their back catalogue alone and still be a major player) and so on.

bookbinder··on In 2004, Zuckerberg Broke Into a Facebook User's Private Email Account (2010)
Why include Sandberg? Isn't she generally considered a professional grown up providing adult supervision for Zuckerberg?
bookbinder··on It all made sense when we found out we were autistic
Well done.

I've often felt the same way about the need to label one's self in order to have an identity. But I can empathize with people who have some kind of undefined handicap/limitation and ultimately find solace in a label and sense of community.

For example, pretty much anyone over the age of 40 who has dyslexia will tell you how cathartic it was to be diagnosed when previously they were just regarded as stupid or lazy. A diagnosis meant that they had a medical condition that they could overcome (or at least manage). If they were simply stupid then it meant there was no hope for them. So their new, better, label mattered.

However, one could argue that pretty much anyone who suffers from any kind of limitation...is suffering from some kind of medical malady. Perhaps, in the future, people we will create new labels and therapies for many of the currently unlabelled, but afflicted, people as well.

bookbinder··on An AI app that generates quizzes from a photograph of a texbook
SUGGESTION: When I click on a link labelled "press," I expect to see a page with media mentions, not my e-mail client's Compose New Message window.
bookbinder··on Why Don’t the 20 Cities on Amazon's HQ2 Shortlist Collectively Bargain?
Are you not familiar with lobbying (aka bribery)?
bookbinder··on Airbus buys majority stake in Bombardier CSeries passenger jet business
Looking at the negative score my comment received, I now remember, why I stopped visiting HN. (No sense of humor allowed.)
bookbinder··on Airbus buys majority stake in Bombardier CSeries passenger jet business
For a split second I read "Airbus" as AirBnB and I was like "whaaaaaat?"
bookbinder··on Uber for X Startups that Failed
They're waiting for driverless cars to become a thing...so they can fire all of their non-employees and reap huge profits. They're playing the long game.
bookbinder··on Show HN: TextFilter – Convert web pages into e-books and multi-column PDFs
Yeah, I'm surprised by the speed as well. It's just a WP site with some customized open source scripts.
bookbinder··on Show HN: TextFilter – Convert web pages into e-books and multi-column PDFs
> I love to write blog posts and some of those I'd like to sell on Amazon as ebooks.

Are you talking about a compilation of articles/essay or one post per book (Kindle Singles)?

> For me, it lost my images for some reason

Sorry about that. I have fixed the issue.

bookbinder··on Show HN: Bookbinder – Create beautiful eBooks within minutes
Sorry for the late reply. I fixed the issue. Thanks for the heads up.
bookbinder··on The Hotel Industry’s Plan to Combat Airbnb
I feel pretty naive. When I read the headline, I assumed the hotel industry was going to adapt and innovate as opposed to using legal maneuvers and regulations.
bookbinder··on Apple's cash hoard swells to $246B
$246B is more than a "rainy day" fund. Unless they are planning to buy Disney or a small country, they should return some of that money to their shareholders.

They could pay out half of their fund and still make do with $123B in the bank.

bookbinder··on French Exhibitors Demand Netflix Release Its Cannes Movies in Theaters
>SVOD services have to wait 36 months after a film’s release in theaters to gain access to films in France.

Good lord.

bookbinder··on Show HN: Bookbinder – Create beautiful eBooks within minutes
Strange. You should be able to do that. I'll look into it.
bookbinder··on Bitcoin hits 3-year peak, nears record high on U.S. ETF approval
Sites that support Bitcoin don't usually make a big deal about it. For example, Microsoft.com accepts bitcoin.
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