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I see nothing wrong with this post. They're sharing something they've made and getting valuable, constructive feedback. I appreciate HN being one of few places that still happens at.
Gmail is the only product you listed that Google started itself.
Google Maps was built on the acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash.
Chrome is based on WebKit, built at Apple.
Waymo's hardware came from the acquisition of 510 Systems, and the software came from the acquihiring of the team that developed Stanford's self-driving cars for the 2005 and 2007 DARPA challenges, who brought their code with them.
Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free, taking much of the money out of the market that allowed that product to be built. Without Google giving away the one winner they chose to acquire, you'd have options again.
I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.
From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
I remember that fondly, that was the time period when I first got online and made my own GeoCities page. I first learned HTML from a page in the Athens neighborhood, on lot 2090. 30 years and I still have that address memorized.
I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.
A date picker widget I tossed on NPM 13 years ago gets 32,000 downloads per week. 510 a week is background activity, that's indexing bots or one org's CI system.
Confinity is the company that developed the PayPal website that survived that merger. Elon Musk was not on the Confinity side, he was trying to pivot his x.com bank into a PayPal clone and buy users ($30 per signup) faster than them until they merged to avoid running each other out of cash. The two startups were operating out of the same building at the time. After the merger, Musk was named CEO but ousted from the company just 5 months later, in part for being absent much of the time (including at the time of his firing), and in part because the PayPal engineers had circulated a petition to the board asking them to remove him. The board agreed.
> "While 5 CFR 315 does permit immediate termination, it does not permit arbitrary termination. The termination must be related to unsatisfactory performance or conduct (section 804) or conditions arising before employment, which usually means something from your background investigation (section 805)..."
I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only list products that run their billing through Shopify and give Shopify a 15%+ share of all associated revenue.
I just got rid of my 2013 Microsoft Surface Pro. It was still being used daily in my workshop, 11 years old. Core i5 processor, running Windows 10. I only got rid of it because the battery decided to become a spicy pillow one night, expanding until it cracked open the case and pushed out most of the touchscreen.
You can filter this list to see 200+ GDPR fines assigned to sole proprietors, the smallest of small businesses, individuals that haven't even registered a separate entity for their business:
They're only cataloging the (2500+) publicly known ones, most of which have a link to a news article. As an example: some guy in Croatia emailed a couple websites he thought might be interested in his marketing services, and provided a working opt-out link in his cold emails. One of them reported the email to the Italian Data Protection Authority who then put him through an international investigation and fined him 5000 euro.
"Assuming here that the reasons expressed in the aforementioned document have been fully recalled, [individual] was charged with violating articles 5, par. 1, letter a), 6, par. 1, letter a) of the Regulation and art. 130 of the Code, since the sending of promotional communications via e-mail was found to have been carried out without the consent of the interested parties. Therefore, it is believed that - based on the set of elements indicated above - the administrative sanction of payment of a sum of €5,000.00 (five thousand) equal to 0.025% of the maximum statutory sanction of €20 million should be applied."
I followed the "Launch HN" of Yotta 4 years ago and deposited some money.
Evolve Bank says "we have determined that we are not holding your funds and you will not be receiving a payment from Evolve" (reconciliationbyevolve.com)
Yotta customer support says "According to the Synapse Trial Balance Report, your funds are with Evolve Bank & Trust".
It doesn't appear I'll ever be getting that money back. It's not enough that I'll hurt, but it'll make me think twice about trusting a non-bank fintech startup and their "FDIC insured" claims.
Maybe I have? Could you explain your understanding of it? If it doesn't extend past the software the hardware vendor directly wrote, then it doesn't result in hardware owners being able to continue running the hardware after the manufacturer goes bankrupt, which was the purpose of the proposed "fantasy law".