HN user
Most businesses prioritize what people pay them for (or they run out of money). Gitlab is accumulating enterprise features because enterprises are paying them for those features. Most places I've worked have used GitHub and it's good enough. Some also had Gitlab for "secret" stuff but if you trust GitHub with your main code then you already trust them with a lot so might as well just use them for all code hosting.
I have an XPS 13 and an XPS 15. I have linux on 13 and windows on 15. I've been pretty happy with both.
Humans require salaries and Google is a giant machine for turning attention/intent into money. Adding humans into the loop just creates friction for the money printing part. And as you noted, they care when the person spending money is rich enough. It's everyone else that loses with their system.
I've been reading these stories for as long as I can remember knowing about HN. People don't seem to quite learn that Google is a machine for printing money and unless you're paying them they don't care.
I think this is because programmers have very specific and personalized workflows for all the tools they use so they assume other people are the same way when in reality a browser for most people is just a tool to get what they want.
Imagine all the semantics you could extract from lists that people curated. The early web used to be human curated content and then Google came along and extracted all the associations they could out of those curated lists (links) and became the juggernaut it is today.
So your theory about Google wanting to run a bookmarking service I think is correct. Human curated links continue to be the only source of semantically relevant content. Everything else is algorithmic extraction of the relevant associations created by humans.
I don't get the hate in this thread. Every time I've interacted with Ammon I've never sensed any ill intent. Dude legitimately wants to help developers get jobs.
I got the same email and just cleaned up my profile. It took at most 15 minutes. A lot less time than however long all the haters have spent commenting on the issue.
The feedback from HN could have been better. Dogpiling is a very low form of feedback.