scott_meade

They were missing two, directly related things: a revenue model and paying customers. (Not meant to be snarky or to point out the obvious, but simply factual.)

Don't you mean $1.051 Billion?

Is there anything to the strategy in aquihires of terminating a competitor? If you hire employees away, the competing company might still exist. By doing an aquihire get the option to remove a competitor from the landscape as well. See: Sparrow?

"intellectual death" is a little hyperbolic, I think. I too know people who spend little to no time on the internet and seem to be quite intellectual, informed, functional, and happy.

It's the people that get their "information" from daily doses of "I saw it on the internet" that worry me, to be honest. Some people I know that spend the most time on the internet seem able to tell you a lot of stuff they read and saw, but are not able to apply much intellect to it.

"little fixed investment cost"

? I think you underestimate the costs for a company like Apple to go through the design, test, review, tweak cycle over and over again for each of those pixels. The cost to get it just right is not "little".

The extensive costs from the required multiple iterations required to arrive at such designs before they are seen by the public explains why companies like Samsung would prefer to save money, skip the iterations and simply jump straight to the end result by copying.

"But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas."

Sorry, but Notch has it backwards. Patents are designed to for sharing - not for preventing sharing. (Patent holder shares information on how they implemented something in exchange for being granted temporary rights to deliver on the method implementation.)

I know I'm being naively simplistic in that statement. Yet so is Notch in his analogy. I've found no one who claims that "it's beneficial for society to not share ideas". Setting up a straw man makes for juicy debate, but not great argument.

Using your vast and deep pockets to terminate a threat vs. competing against it simply doesn't sit right for many HN readers. There are some parallels here to the outcry against patents-as-business-strategy.

My current grammar peeve is when people end a question with "... or no?" "Are you coming over tonight, or no?" "Do you like this outfit, or no?" "Do I sound like a teenager, or no?" What's up with that?!

Do any of you find yourselves talking like that, or no?

"I’ve yet to learn all of the passions of my coworkers, but I have gotten the chance to learn many, and every one of them surprises me."

It's surprising to me the number of recent posts trumpeting the realization that programmers have a life away from the keyboard. I must be doing it wrong.

A lot of commentators missed the point: "Sometimes a cheaper product is actually better. But consider removing price as the default decision criteria."

It's simple and good advice.

http://tomdoc.org/ makes comments the perfect bridge between "documentation" and "code"

The motion does not say that Internet access is a human right.

The gist of the motion is captured in the affirmation that "the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice" [http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c6/19/64/51/6999c512.pdf]

The UN is simply affirming that the media through which a expression is conveyed should not change the understanding that freedom of expression is a human right.

"it’s very hard to truly question your beliefs if everyone around you shares them."

This gravitation toward a shared belief makes it not surprising that living where most peoples' belief is that God does not exist would result in one sharing that belief.

Thanks for the article. It's always great to see other perspectives on the world.

Agreed. I've found myself too many times watching my kids' activities through the viewfinder of a camera or holding up and iPhone between them and me. When staring at a device, you're seeing them but you're not in the moment with them. (The other option of course, would be to stop acting as if everything needs recorded and shared.)

It's no coincidence that several of the companies which recently found themselves hurt by being locked out of APIs did not heed:

"Rule #1: Sell something" - several had no evident source of revenue and as the article says "if your company isn’t selling something, you have a project, not a product"

"Rule #7: Avoid products that rely on a community to exist". As these projects found, when the community (or truckload of data) is taken away from you, you no longer exist.

A good article with pragmatic tips.

That is a good question, seeing how I don't know how Pealk made any money at all.

"the general consensus among HN users is that the best product wins and that's all that matters"

That's human nature. Users in marketing communities conclude that it's the best marketing that wins. If you're an executive you think the best management team is all that matters. Designers think it's design. PR folks think it's press. Financiers think it's money.

I have bad news for everyone. The world does not work in the way our echo-chambers would seem to model it. It's almost impossible for the human mind to process such a fact. Yet, it's true.

One online self per service is enough. I can't recall a recent situation where I felt I was acting differently in public depending on who was around. Certainly not differently enough that when I'm sitting at my computer I'm going to try to recall which persona I want to wear at which time. Perhaps I don't get out enough.

Part of the "Big Five". 'The extent of the power that the Big Five had was considered by some as equivalent to an oligarchy." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_(Hawaii)

Or use Plugable's UGA-2K-A USB to VGA/DVI/HDMI adapters for Multiple Monitors. I've been running three external 1920x1200's off my MacBook Air. http://twitpic.com/9yr3tr/full Not Thunderbolt nor 2,560x1,440, yet multiple monitors nonetheless.

"What apple did wrong is that thy judged a person’s Intentions and residency by a spoken language." That sure is how the article makes it seem. And that sure would be wrong of Apple.

Yet the customer was planning to send the iPad to Iran and I wonder if that intention didn't some how come out in conversation such that the Apple employee knew of that intention? It would be interesting to have more details and it's difficult to tell when we have only the customer's recollection of events. It will be interesting to hear Apple's response.

The lukew eye tracking study is for forms, not dialog boxes. And not just any forms, but it looks only at forms which have a list of left-aligned items which the user is working and scanning down. As stated: "the alignment of actions with a form’s input elements provides a clear path to completion that helps people complete forms faster."

This article is about dialog boxes. They are different. Dialog boxes usually have no form input elements and usually do not have a list of items all aligned on the left like on the lukew tracking study.

Greg says "there is not that much utility in having this piece of paper [a college degree]". Yet almost everyone on the Stripe team attended college and most of the team attended a top-tier school such as Harvard and MIT.

Is Greg saying there is not utility in finishing college, but there is utility in attending college, perhaps? Does the higher education level of Stripe's current roster just happen to be a side-effect of the network by which current employees knew each other?

Hope I'm not a customer of the commentators declaring they don't have time or resources to help all customers who ask. If you don't, you're not holding up your end of the bargain.

_“how will they make money?” isn’t an interesting question. The answers are all obvious._

Reminds me of the famous misquote: "Everything that can be invented, has been invented."