114 karma · joined March 6, 2014
I share the same "bias" (I would actually refer to it as "normal thinking", but hey…) and think it's a shame people in Silicon Valley have collectively decided it's fine to break the law as long as you can get away with it and get a high valuation out of it.
To take one example, AirBnB has clearly had a negative impact on many local rental markets via units being taken off the normal market and instead being turned into unlicensed hotel rooms, but their response has been basically complete and utter defiance to anyone to stop them, and this attitude gets applauded here on HN and elsewhere.
Not to mention the games market for the iOS App Store is very saturated and most of the money has likely been sucked out of it for the time being, so now Apple finds they don't have much to lose by allowing the possibility of OpenGL-based games for iOS which bypass the App Store.
In case anyone is quick doubt or dismiss the above criticism, just recall that for years Apple's iAd framework officially supported WebGL, but Safari and UIWebView did not. This implies that Apple could have released WebGL support in Safari and/or UIWebView any time they wanted; they simply chose not to for for non-technical (i.e., business) reasons.
How about people drop all the BS and just learn how to properly run a meeting? The gimmickry of the standup is a covert way of saying "no one here trusts anyone else to exercise restraint and common courtesy, so instead we have to come up with these harebrained schemes to enforce it".
Uh, yes they do, quite well in fact:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/11/apple-itunes-radio-pa...
Already bigger than Spotify just six months after launch.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/11/apple-itunes-radio-pa...
And yet it's easily shown that Google highly values MetaFilter in its results:
http://www.metafilter.com/134827/New-Spammer-Panic#5333774
The problem is it's kind of a niche-topic site, a bit like NPR. It needs lots of external support to keep going.
http://www.peteearley.com/thomas-silverstein/
A court recently ruled that his conditions did not constitute a violation of the 8th amendment:
http://solitarywatch.com/2013/09/25/federal-appeals-court-co...
It is scary to think that while this article start out with an example of "almost 10,000 hours" in isolation as something horrific, here is a prisoner in the US who has been in isolation more than 20 times longer than that, and the courts have upheld this treatment as legal.
Take for example the story from today about Apple supposedly buying Beats. When the subject of Apple trying to compete in the music streaming space came up, everyone only talked about Spotify. Pandora, which has more than 3x the user base and is still growing? Not a mention. IHeartRadio, which was founded two years after Spotify and has more than double the number of paying subscribers that Spotify does? Never heard of them! It's as though Spotify is the only streaming music service that ever existed. In reality, they are near the lower end of the scale when it comes to customer traction, but they have mindshare on HN that is completely out of whack with that.
Screw car dealers. Consumers deserve choice, and cowardly attempts to sneak in and remove it in the dead of night like this are horrible. May they all end up out of business and starving in a ditch.
http://gawker.com/5853754/the-seedy-spammy-past-of-airbnbs-c...
[1]http://inventor-labs.com/blog/2011/10/12/what-its-really-lik...
[2]There's also Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org, however that is focused on Steve's original tenure at Apple, not the "comeback" from the late-90s on.
So why doesn't AirBnB simply disallow listings from SF? Worried that will impact their valuation?
http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-...
There's the built-in command "sips" that comes on every Mac and has been around since at least OS X Lion (10.7). The name stands for "scriptable image processing tool", and the tool appears to use CoreGraphics to do its work.
More info here:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...
As with the professional athlete situation, sometimes the only way to stop salaries from being artificially suppressed is to band together to stop it. This is what the recent class-action lawsuit against Apple, Google, and other big companies is about. If things get really bad, programmers may have to form a union or a guild to continue getting paid anything close to what they are worth. Forming such an organization will no doubt be very difficult due to the fact that many programmers exhibit a strong (and in many cases, misguided) belief in their own rugged individualism and in Silicon Valley's meritocracy. This belief wrongly leads some programmers to conclude that they don't need to protect themselves, thus leaving them open to collusion from their employers.
For a cautionary tale about what happens when people miss out on the chance to organize when they really should, look no further than the Hollywood visual effects industry. They are the only major aspect of feature film production without organized labor, and consequently their work is routinely underpriced to the point of VFX studios going out of business as a matter of course during a film's production. The same thing could easily happen to typical Silicon Valley programming work. (In fact, it's already quite close to that situation when it comes to programming in the games industry.)