philk

I'm not really sure the direction they're taking the iMacs is optimal. Yes, they look lovely but ultimately they're a desktop and not portable in the first place. With a notebook I'll sacrifice upgrades for portability, with a desktop portability is irrelevant.

I suppose they're doing it largely for the style but surely Jonathan Ive and co can make a beautiful iMac that's a couple of centimetres thicker.

Because I'm functioning on little sleep and managed to miss that.

If one of the mods could change the URL to point to the original I'd be grateful.

I agree, being a good salesman is fantastic. Good products don't go anywhere without good sales. Hell, bad products can go places with good sales. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Balance)

However, HN is fairly engineer heavy and sales carries a pejorative connotation, so when I read your posts they seemed (to me) negative, as in "Aha! You can't fool me! I'm wise to your game to sell stuff on HN!". I was responding to that.

I suspect we're basically in agreement, if you look somewhere on the page I'm effusive about Patrick's sales letter and I agree that by turning up, answering questions honestly and not trying to sell to people he hits the HN demographic dead on. My point was he may not even be trying to make sales here, just trying to interact with a community he's part of and the two look indistinguishable.

It seems to me he's doomed either way.

If he comes on here and says I built this and you all need to buy it right now, well then he's obviously just a salesman.

If he comes on here and says I built this, don't buy it if you don't meet these criteria, I'm not even going to try to sell it because I don't want to turn HN into a sales venue, well then, he's a obviously just a particularly crafty salesman.

So while I see what you're saying I'm not sure how you expect patio11 to discuss this on HN without appearing like a salesman to at least a few people.

I prefer reading too but most people will pay more for a video than they will for an ebook regardless of the value contained within because they've been trained repeatedly that books are cheap.

That is a really nice sales letter and I've bookmarked it to read through repeatedly when I need to write one. It nails the long form sales format and manages to do so without sounding sleazy[1].

I particularly like the Do not buy this course section which qualifies potential customers.

[1] To be fair depending upon the target demographic the sleaziness can be increased without causing problems. If you were building a product for hard core sales guys Your Customers Can Still Afford Branded Groceries: Learn How To Capture This Wasted Revenue Today! might do brilliantly.

If their security is as good as their blogging it's time to consider travelling by bus.

Also their "20 layers of security" chart[1] is an unintentionally hilarious masterpiece. Note the arrow they've drawn circumventing every layer of security apart from passengers. So really, we can't say they didn't warn us.

[1] http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/layers/index.shtm

This is why so many men find "getting laid" very important in their lives.

I hate to be That Guy, but speaking as someone who's actually had sex I can attest that there are actually other reasons.[1]

Enough so that in the middle east women who reject a man's marriage proposal might find themselves doused with acid or gasoline and set on fire.

Equating harassment on the internet with middle eastern acid attacks is baffling and offensive.

Finally, and I know this'll be unpopular, but there's some great stuff on Reddit. The comments are never as good as HN, but some of the AMAs are phenomenal. It's a bit tiring seeing it get bashed without respite over here.

[1] Like (and I can't believe I'm typing this) it's fun and makes you feel closer to the person you're doing it with.

This would be fascinating. It would be great if you did this.

The worst thing about working yourself to death at Zynga would be knowing you were toiling to produce shoddy little pseudo-games. At least when, say, jwz was putting in insane hours at Netscape he was building Netscape Navigator.

Also those Farmville character cutouts in the photo are possibly the creepiest thing in the universe.

If there's one thing that makes me want to pirate steam games it's being charged a large premium because I'm not in the US.

The money is immaterial, it's the feeling that I'm being taken advantage of.

It's times like this that I wish there was more scrutiny of the media itself. We've got a reporter, Soledad O'Brien, who is cynically exploiting an issue so she can get a good story and she doesn't have to answer questions about her behavior because she's got the bigger megaphone.

I agree that nobody owes the world comments but the point of a conciliatory blog post is to make people stop hating you. If they're still hating you to the point where you've had to turn off comments then your post isn't doing its job properly.

(I also agree with your earlier post that if you're selling web hosting for $3/month you'll have to deal with quite a few difficult customers. Often the people who pay the least are the hardest to deal with.)

I would like to remind people that contacting us with abusive e-mail messages is in fact illegal and we will be taking the appropriate steps to forward these messages and information gathered to both the relevant ISP’s and law enforcement agencies. Sadly it is the people who post such messages that are causing me to disable comments on this blog post.

Having to disable comments on your conciliatory blog post is a sign that you should go back and make it more conciliatory.

I know this is going to be unpopular and I know Sam has been remarkably tone deaf[1] when it comes to dealing with people but I'm disturbed by how much damage one stupid, somewhat douchey action is going to do his reputation.

[1] Yes, and even this latest pseudo-apology is poorly handled. He should have just stuck to a simple "didn't think that through, sorry to those I've offended, I've cancelled the auction and will return the money to any starbucks card Jonathan nominates" message but sometimes it can be hard to admit you've screwed up, particularly when you're getting a kicking for it.

I think people can take what they want from Top Gear, it's entertainment, not factual TV.

Part of the entertainment is that it's presented as though it is factual TV. Sure if you look at a lot of their antics you can tell they're staged but a large portion of the viewing public doesn't realize this and their impressions of the car will be tainted by what is essentially a misrepresentation of the facts.

That said, the real blow to the PR firm is not that it looks sleazy but that it looks incompetent.

Being known as a sleazy but effective PR firm will get you plenty of customers. Being known as sleazy and incompetent will not.

What's missing in these cases is context:

ie "Fail fast" vs "be persistent"

"Be persistent" applies to your overall goal - business success - whereas "fail fast" applies to methods you use to achieve that goal.

I'd rather someone was deterring Telstra from levying such exorbitant charges in the first place than wasting my tax dollars locking someone up for such a minor crime.

Nowadays I have trouble looking at any mainstream news sites without being incredibly disappointed.

I'd be willing to give actual money to an organization that a) actually understood what they were reporting and b) reported facts rather than PR, hyperbole and human interest angles but I haven't been able to find one.

It's not that TechCrunch comments were great, it's just the way that Facebook seems to produce really stilted and artificial interaction:

a) Half the comments in my news feed are dull trivia. ("I just ate a ham sandwich").

b) The other half are thinly veiled bragging ("I just ate a ham sandwich in Paris")

c) Weirdly, even friends who are funny in real life tend to be afflicted by the same condition.

Now, it could just be my selection of friends but I think it's actually people self censoring.

Finally, the idea of my posting on an internet site following me around until the end of time is revolting. I don't say anything particularly out there on HN, but if they switched to Facebook comments, I'd leave.

Edit: Looks like you've responded to my previous iteration of this post. Sorry to reword it all on you :)

Maybe I'm not being the authentic me when I don't make dirty jokes to my Grandmother that I would to my friends but I'd view that more as simple respect.

Fantastic. Another part of the internet that can be as bland and humorless as my Facebook news feed.

Interesting if it's true but ultimately Coke's strength lies in its worldwide brand[1] and distribution rather than having an unreproducible taste.

[1] Of course, being able to say only two people know how to mix the 7X flavoring ingredient is part of that brand.

She's incredibly melodramatic:

It made my heart bleed.

A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping. I couldn't follow conversations. Words swam.

Reading the profile was like plunging into an icy pond from such a high distance it felt as if I'd slammed into a wall. And then the sensation of drowning.

I can't help but think there are people out there dealing with real, serious problems who bear them with much more dignity.

It's the internet. Almost anything controversial and widely covered will net you death threats from weirdos.

It's a bit unpleasant if you're on the wrong side of the equation but it's just market forces. Mobile application developers were scarce while normal developers were plentiful.

The big lesson is that you should continually refresh your skills and develop new things on your own time.

It's a great idea (from the point of view of virality) but it seems like it would be poisonous to the atmosphere in most teams. Would I want to stay back late to help someone who'd ranked me lower than my coworkers? I'd love to say yes, but probably not.

The sad thing is even though the study has been thoroughly discredited[1], it continues to hang around and be cited by anti-vaccine activists.

[1] Even sadder is that they cite Wakefield being exposed as a fraud as evidence of tampering by "Big Pharma".

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, Professor Rees and his colleague Dr Ryota Kanai at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL (University College London) analysed the brain structures of ninety young adults who had reported their political attitudes on a scale from 'very conservative' to 'very liberal'. They found a strong correlation between an individual's view and the structure of the brain, particularly two regions.

Maybe someone can correct me but this also looks like "we MRIed a small number of students and then compared so many brain structures that we'd be bound to find some sort of correlation with their dubious self reported political leanings."