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Blade Runner is different because of the attention it received due to the "Final Cut" version that came out in 2007. If it hadn't been for that, references to it would probably be a lot less recognizable with the younger crowd. Case in point: I recently made a "2001: A Space Odyssey" reference in front of a room full of 20-something programmers and not one person picked up on it. It wasn't even that obscure -- it was a picture of the monolith, one of the most recognizable images from the movie (and in science fiction in general). The people in the room generally just hadn't seen or even heard of (really all that is required to get the reference) the movie.

Maybe this speaks to my bias against people who bend reasonable rules for profit.

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.

I don't know why you're being downvoted for that; your interpretation, while uncharitable, is still most likely the correct one, given Apple's history.

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.

There is a big difference between a simple meeting and the overly-gimmicky nonsense ritual that is known as the "standup". I've even seen standups where people are forced to hold a heavy book as they talk just to ensure they don't talk too long.

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".

Why Apple doesn't do streaming...

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.

You wrote all that and didn't even notice that Apple already has a streaming service that is larger than Spotify?

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/11/apple-itunes-radio-pa...

You just described this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y

I don't remember ever noticing it in a search engine result.

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.

There is a prisoner in the US Federal system who has been in solitary confinement for 27 years:

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.

Yeah, and this is the place to read them all!

There is a weird hivemind effect on display here and in other various Silicon Valley discussion circles where there is an unstated but very solid agreement that certain companies are "cool" and thus receive the most charitable interpretation of their plans and financial situations, but others which do essentially the same thing are run out of town on a rail, so to speak.

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.

I've always found a lot of the anti-regulation, pro-"disruption" rhetoric in startup culture to be short-sighted, over-simplified, and at times just outright boneheaded, but...

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.

Yep. There will never be another video or audio streaming startup after today. Doors closed, ladder pulled up behind them, that's it, finished. The ones that exist today are all there will ever be. Sound crazy? Exaggerated? Check back in 10 years and see.

Not bad for someone who started out as a spammer:

http://gawker.com/5853754/the-seedy-spammy-past-of-airbnbs-c...

Stories like this one and Glenn Reid's essay[1] about working with Steve on iMovie seem to be vastly more informative than any movie or book on SJ.[2] One of the biggest takeaways from both of these essays is that working with Steve was an iterative process. Pop culture always highlights "eureka" moments where a problem is solved all at once in a brilliant flash of insight, yet when you read these first-hand accounts, the story is the opposite: that making something great is a slow and repetitive process, with lots of follow-up meetings and gradual improvement towards the final product. Eureka moments look good on TV, but in the real world, great things are built by long-term focus and hard work from highly talented people with uncompromisingly high standards. I have no idea how or even if that could be shown in a movie, but I'm very thankful we have these accounts. I hope more people who worked with Steve during his second tenure eventually put their thoughts down in writing and share them so that we can all gain more of these types of insights.

[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.

"Airbnb's website tells people to check local laws and their leases. A specific section on San Francisco explains the prohibition on short-term rentals and links to various city codes."

So why doesn't AirBnB simply disallow listings from SF? Worried that will impact their valuation?

Well yeah, they've got a valuation to worry about. They are not going to let a little something like the law get in the way of that.

I think it's simply a branding issue. "gfycat" is a catchier name which also hints at the GIF-related features. I have a pretty good idea of what it does from the name alone. "MediaCrush" on the other hand could be just about anything.

Don't worry, he's got his own strategy to keep programmers' salaries down:

http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-...

I used [Homebrew] to install ImageMagick (the only OS X tool I know of where you can resize pictures on the command line)…

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...

The passage you quoted is pretty much the same argument that gets thrown around whenever professional athletes go on strike. Yes, they are already very highly paid, but in the end they have essentially "earned" it by any reasonable definition of the word.

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.)