Animus7

If I were to blndly guess at an underlying phenomenon, it would be what I've come to call "app pollution" for lack of a better term.

More and more money is being thrown at an ever increasing amount of new apps, and many of which operate on huge losses as long as user numbers remain high. From the other side, entrenched players (twitter, facebook, youtube, big media) are scrambling for ever more aggressive ways to jam themselves into people's lives to hopefully extract revenue and meet the growth shareholders demand.

All of this is being pushed onto a market that has a limited attention span for all of this crap being thrown at them (and a lot of it is pure crap). The result is less and less consumer loyalty, dwindling revenues for everyone, increasing disillusionment on the part of investors, and ever more ridiculous expectations on the part of users: "$1.49 for an app I use every day and that cost at least $50K to develop? I dunno, feels like a premium price."

It's different from the first bubble in that there is actually a lot of non-immaginary value flying around this time, and eveyone is readily embracing the internet and related tech. But there's also more and more crap. There's just too much pollution on the web and in every app store, and it's starting to smell.

Strangely enough, I think there might be a startup idea somewhere in there.

I just realized this:

Companies totally unaffiliated with Windows manage to produce browsers that have bleeding-edge feature parity all the way from XP through 8 (not to mention two other major OSes).

But when the company that fucking makes Windows manages to make their (less functional) browser work with a single version of a single OS they themselves produce and support, it's a news item.

The product itself looks cool, but things like this keep catching my eye:

> HI ! Looking to purchase MULTIPLE REWARDS IN ONE GO ? YES YOU CAN !

> FREE shipping in the US and EU. Add 10$ for all other countries.

> EARLY BIRD SPECIAL !!!

Except, Kickstarter isn't a store, right?

If they allow stuff like this, it is. It's an interesting new kind of pre-order store. And it should be regulated like one.

Consumers may or may not "love windows 8" but this article is swimming in non sequitur.

But I get it.

To frame this post in context, from my stint at Microsoft I saw how serious points are awarded to those who beat the drums. Logic be damned; if your W8 app get 100K downloads and your glowing blog post makes the rounds it's a favorable line item on your review.

So it's hard to comprehend for a lot of us, but when Microsoft says that Windows 8 is the most openly developed operating system in the world, I think they honestly believe it. Believing it brings tangible rewards.

Since you asked, here are the problems I see. Most of these I've learned the hard way working on a similar problem for over 2 years, so hopefully that counts for something.

1- The main cost of third-party software is never the cost of the code; it's the cost of using, integrating, customizing, and gettng support for it. The utility of the raw code itself is often zero. This is why binpress - selling code - never (really) took off, but github - a code community - did.

2- Given no restrictions, the prices people slap onto source code get very ridiculous, very fast. Non-technical people expect well-polished software for $1.99 (see: App Store). Hobbyists and developers often have a case of NIH, and a lot of them think that code should be communal and free (as in beer). The reasons are varied but the end result is that source code (by itself) is not considered a valuable commodity by the market anymore, which means nobody cares about selling theirs - or they try and quickly learn it's not worth it.

3- Licensing. You have a minefield of legal issues of ownership resolve. If you haven't looked into it, you probably don't even realize the extent of the BS that will be thrown at you.

4- I won't sugar coat this. You'll never make any money on a 3% comission of a commodity that's already priced dangerously close to zero by the market (see #2). The costs of dealing with people whining when things go wrong - alone - will exceed your comission.

5- I'm a developer, and I just don't see the value-add here. I have to do my own marketing, I have to do my own sales, I have to write the software, and I have to support it. If I'm going to go through that trouble, why don't I just blast up my own template Stripe page w/download link and cut out the middleman?

I guess what I'm saying is: please don't make my mistakes. Do something different and make different mistakes.

Also, I'm from Waterloo so I understand what it's like to be a tech entrepreneur in Canada. And sadly this means I should underline point #3, which Canada has much worse than the states.

Considering the billions spent on "national security".

Considering all of the privacy violated in the name of airport security.

Considering that it's considered okay to fly across the world to and assault someone's house in an armed chopper because they may have been accessory to copyright infringement.

I don't think an armored car is too much to ask when someone actually could have terrorized an airport with no resistance.

This doesn't feel as much a social network as an unstructured dumping ground of noise vaguely related to "programming", in an insultingly naive sense of the term [1].

Maybe there's some grand plan here, but I don't see it. As it stands no self-respecting "programmer" is going to use this site because it serves no purpose, nor does it solve any problems. We'll use StackOverflow because it does.

[1] see the landing page photo.

Poe's law [1] at work. My bet is on parody though.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law

> I rebutted with a question: do you want a commit every time you type a character in your text editor?

I don't get it. I want a commit every time I say I want a commit, not upon arbitrary criteria the software decides for me. And I want that commit to be irrevocably and permanently immutable, because I said I wanted it and because it might be relevant later. What am I missing?

buzzword buzzword unqualified huge number superlative google microsoft! big data! $X billion buzzword buzzword random powerpoint diagram.

And on top of that, the entire article ends up being a plug for a conference. I have no idea who's upvoting this or why.

Actually, part of the criteria for getting a patent (at least in the states) is that the invention is non-obvious to those in the trade. So patents kind of are about doing things that are hard.

And you could argue that zooming in on an HTML bounding box would be obvious to an engineer developing web browsers.

This argument never made sense to me.

If I were designing a Ponzi scheme intending to defraud people, I wouldn't base it on a 100% transparent network of open source software using public domain crypto functions, where the wealth creation is by design not only randomly allocated, but mathematically capped to a static trickle rate.

It's like the most badly designed Ponzi scheme ever.

I'm getting the same vibe. And I'm beginning to think that allowing this kind of thing will be the downfall of Kickstarter. Yes, I will explain.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the Kickstarter concept. But in practice, their scaling seems to quickly be turning hem into a sales platform that has no controls or accountability.

And I have nothing bad to say about this project in particular, but they are a YC company, and the state of the prototype shows that they already have all they need to make it happen. This project doesn't need money. The campaign seems to me to be nothing more than a simple "I'm making something cool, so give me cash". And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that -- by all means, people should be free to do what they wish with their money, and the Kickstarter campaign will probably work out beautifully for them. That's great.

But this whole perception of Kickstarter being a place for bootstrapping interesting projects is turning into a dangerous myth. Like many things before it, Kickstarter is becoming a place for people with money (and/or obvious ability to make money), to make even more money, though marketing under a vague guise of "bootstrapping", with no checks or balances to keep people honest.

This isn't an accusation leveled at Pixate -- I don't believe they're doing anything wrong and I have huge faith in YC's filtering. But once enough clever people figure out that you can earn a killing or huge bonus on top of anything, just by tacking on a nice Kickstarter campaign, it will become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. And then people will move on to the next thing, and the cycle will repeat.

</bubble-y doomsaying>

Forget ethics; just from a business standpoint, each new piece of legislation like this makes piracy an increasingly better alternative, costing Hollywood more and more money. Pirates don't have to deal with ridiculous restrictions like not being able to legally watch the movie you paid for.

And hilariously, it's not even a matter of price. Dotcom's 15 Ferraris are evidence people are quite willing to pay for the superior piracy experience. This is money that Hollywood could have had if only they gave their customers what they wanted.

Instead, Hollywood's plan seems to be

1) increased litigation and screwing over of existing customers

2) ???

3) profit!

sigh

This is such a powerful and often-(ab)used argument that it genuinely horrifies me. It seems these days just about anything the U.S. government does can be justified under a binding legal ruling of "top secret, we can't hear this in our courts. But trust us, it's cool."

Call me paranoid, but this is the reason I'm frightened of setting foot on U.S. soil.

The reason this has no chance of working with open source software is the same reason DRM doesn't work.

If you cripple your version of the software, the next guy to figure out how to uncripple it will release his version, and everyone moves over to that. And your deliberately broken version dies the death it deserves.

That's on top of the fact that breaking your software deliberately until someone pays is pretty much the opposite of FOSS philosophy anyway.

I think we can assume that either:

a) they haven't figured out the details,

b) the details are underwhelming, or

c) they just don't want us to know yet.

Retina-like resolution on something like this would be a powerful marketing play. I don't think this is a matter of omission.

> The main problem is that if you own the majority of the hashing power, you can rewrite history. You can make all the bitcoin ever mined owned by you.

No, this is completely wrong.

If you have majority hashing power, this allows you to

a) entitle yourself to a greater proportion of the newly minted bitcoins (though you actually can not increase the global rate of creation), and

b) undo already "confirmed" transactions, within a small timeframe. This allows for double-spend attacks, but you can only do that if you owned the coins in the first place. Nothing, not even hashing power, lets you use other people's coins.

In particular, you can't "rewrite history" arbitrarily, due to hardcoded hashes in the Bitcoin clients. You also can't "make all the bitcoin ever mined owned by you".

On the bright side, web server performance, reliability, and maintenance are much more concrete than "amount of spam prevented", and general internet meritocracy has worked well towards ensuring G-WAN's lack of adoption.

So you're implying that if you changed the HTML colors based on mouse events, the claim of "difficult or even completely impossible for robots" would hold?

Such a claim would be no less ludicrous.

I'd put my money on there being hundreds of people on Hacker News alone that could script a DOM-monkeying cracker for such a system. That runs with ~100% accuracy. And in under an hour of coding.

This Captcha strategy is so absolutely terrible in light of modern libraries that I'm honestly shocked you feel the need to defend it.

The "Support" page reveals how they charge $200,000/year for the privilege of setting a header:

> 199,999 [Swiss francs]: Use G-WAN under the brand of your choice (custom "Server: x" HTTP header).

This isn't the most insane upsell I've heard of, but it's close.

pg's reply as to why such threads get killed (and likely this one will as well):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210

>Because in the guidelines we ask people who have questions or complaints about moderation to contact us directly rather than by posting on HN

Basically, because pg said so.

I see psychological parallels between this policy and Microsoft's recent attempts to crack down on class-action lawsuits.

Joe probably cares about Metro, though, which is a far more significant piece here.

And let's not kid ourselves; Microsoft is catching the attention of developers mainly in order to extract money from them once they lock in to the Microsoft ecosystem. It may or may not be a Bad Thing, but it's not doing any favors to the Node or Git communities that they'd like us to think they care about.

> "Looking cool" is the last and least thing they've got to do to atone.

Maybe to us, the 1% on HN.

But most people don't know or care much about Microsoft's tarnished past. Some have already forgotten.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you're saying, but to me you seem to imply that this is a bad move or that it won't work. Unfortunately, I think for Joe consumer "Looking cool" might actually be enough to continue to buy in to the Microsoft jails.

For some reason the driver also requires Visual C++ 2010 as well as SQL Server Native Client 11.0, and includes significant C++ boilerplate which was clearly pasted verbatim from existing C++ codebases, thus ensuring the driver is beyond modification and customization for the typical Node dev.

> The Microsoft Driver for Node.JS for SQL Server is hosted on Github, accentuating our continued involvement with the Open Source community.

Except, this isn't so much openness as it is an underhanded attempt at migrating more developers to their proprietary platforms. It certainly makes business sense for them and I'm not going to make any normative claims, but I wish they wouldn't beat around the bush. The "Open Source" community that they're trying to cater to is more bullshit-averse than they seem to realize.

> Sites have no obligation to obey it and it will give users a false sense of security.

Until appropriate legislation comes into play. It worked reasonably well with the Do Not Call lists.

So don't forge your headers.

I don't see how this would be slippery at all.

The awesome part is how they force you to download an additional signed WGA validator exe before the site coughs up the patch, which itself is signed. If I was the attacker, I'd definitely be MITM'ing this page.

Zombies in the compound indeed.

Indeed. I seriously think this is a sly attempt at crippling DNT and boosting ad revenues (also, remember: Microsoft owns a significant stake in Facebook, whose "Like" beacons would be adversely affected by legislation regulating DNT).

As a bonus, they get to look like a modern, privacy-conscious, I've-got-your-back company while they're at it. From a business perspective, it's really smart.

Disclaimer: Used to work for Microsoft, though nothing web-related.