it's a pretty safe bet that a former Amazon employee has a stronger grasp on why Amazon's not made money with this than does some random dude on the web.
A lot of LA actually consists of semi-independent sub-cities like Hollywood and Beverly Hills. They were once suburbs but are now part of LA the city for all intents and purposes. It's not like New York or Chicago where the vast majority of the city is one legal unit. There are also weird quasi-cities like North Hollywood, which is technically just a neighborhood but is really an entirely distinct municipal entity, and is only a few pieces of paperwork away from becoming so under the law as well.
A taxi company has to be licensed on a per-city basis and multiple-city licenses are basically unheard of. You can take your passenger to a city you're not licensed in, but if you pick up a passenger in a city you're not licensed in, you could pay thousands in fees and get shut down for 30 days or more. Since just about every neighborhood in Los Angeles is technically an independent municipality, this basically means it's legally impossible to hail a cab. At any given time, the majority of cabs are going to be passing through a "city" (neighborhood) in which they are not legally able to pick up passengers. Most cabs you see cannot pick you up without breaking the law.
am I correctly reading the rewards? it looks as if no reward at all includes the actual new hardware controller he wants to create. doesn't make a whole lot of sense that way.
Nobody cares why your site is down, and for most sites 99% of your users will have no clue what is meant by "This site is hosted by Heroku".
What you say is true for a certain type of users and a certain type of business, but not for all the users and uses that a Heroku app might have - big companies, small companies, consumer sites, internal tools, iOS apps, etc. You have to assume a variety of use cases here, because that's kind of the whole point of a platform business.
What about when the user is your boss? "Hey, did you fuck this up?" is not a question people want to hear all day.
Or when it's an internal tool, and your users are a whole bunch of people who work with you?
Or when the site that went down is the system you use to invoice your consulting client, and they know you wrote it? Would you be anticipating repeat business?
A tiny portion of consideration for other people when you write your error messages can save those other people a great deal of stress. 37Signals wrote a book on that in around 2005 or so:
I think people are getting way too angry about this, and geeks get awfully weird (and often oddly furious) whenever you suggest employing simple social graces, but I also think it's indisputable that OP is absolutely right.
And to be fair, I didn't have any apps hosted on Heroku when this took place, so that might even be the reason why I think people are getting too angry about this. Maybe they're right to be mad.
"If you had a setup with a hosted machine at Rackspace and the power goes out, you don't expect a custom error. So why would you expect one from Heroku?"
Because Heroku's not Rackspace. It's a service, and one thing people like from a service business is good service.
I like Heroku, it's awesome, but asking them to take responsibility for their downtime is a reasonable request.
"Thanks, yes, but when the platform itself fails it seems that doesn’t always work. Hence my suggestion they temporarily change the default error message."
"to say Comcast buys HBO in bulk is an understatement. Other cable companies, too, (and satellite and AT&T/Verizon/other telecoms doing video) have profound purchasing power. They also heavily promote HBO to their hundreds of millions of customers. So HBO gets a lot more from Comcast for its $7.27 (or whatever it is Comcast might pay) than it would get from me or you for our $10.
HBO costs $10 per month because it’s bundled. It’s not the fair market price. Untie that knot, and you have to untie everything."
the sheer number of possible answers is overwhelming, but pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email. (I can't be the only one who's afraid to find out what their cars are like.) so I'm going to say the reason Google Wallet failed is because it was neither search nor email.
I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple isn't going as badly as the constant catch-up game Google Plus (and Wave, and whatever they called the other one) plays with Facebook.
but seriously, business failure can happen for so many reasons, it doesn't really mean anything at all, unless of course you see a string of people failing at the same thing.
"Why are you going back onto a diet that you clearly can't sustain?"
Who are you kidding? I stayed on it for a year and a half and then got bored. It wasn't a struggle, I just stopped making it a priority. It's a pretty gigantic leap from there to "clearly can't sustain."
"Crash diets work for a few people, sure"
It's not a crash diet. Re-read the pages I linked to, and the comments I made. I don't have time to continue this conversation but it's nothing personal.
I think that's fair. I think plenty of people would describe a dramatic change in diet as an intense thing, and I certainly don't think there's any harm in intensity, as long as it's intelligently applied, and it's different from some kind of demented obsessiveness.
"do it with drive and intensity or don't expect results"
I made a pretty radical change in my diet and dropped 82 pounds. I think the first 70 or so came off in 6 months. It required some focus, but not a lot. I had done a lot of reading about habit, and was already professionally trained as a hypnotist, so I combined habits with hypnosis and made a fairly dramatic behavior change with pretty minimal effort.
Likewise, at the same time, I was going to the gym every day, but because I had a severe health issue, I was working out very, VERY gently. I was basically walking on a treadmill at 3 miles per hour for an hour every day. It's more active than not exercising at all, but I couldn't call it a "drive and intensity" situation.
I think this whole "drive and intensity" myth is the major problem with Hacker News as a community, in fact. I abandoned hacking entirely for almost a year, during which I just sold how-to videos and coaching on my blog. I made decent money and there was not a lot of drive or intensity involved there, either.
Drive and intensity can be great things, but I've definitely had a great number of experiences which point to them being inessential to success. I'm happy to go so far as to say that neither are of equal value to research, clarity, good logic, or sound strategy.
I wrote about it on my blog a couple years ago too. I'm just glad some voice of reason finally surfaced on here.
Besides the cargo-cult idiocy of it, the other thing I don't like is the idea that Twitter's goal is maximizing follower count in the first place. I often block followers from communicating with me because what they have to say is inane or negative. If you're going to count any number, I think it should be the number of worthwhile conversations.
Product people should keep in mind that any time you show your users a number, you're turning your site into a video game. There's a lot of accidental gamification out there.
"I do believe that the plethora of instant stimulations is having a major impact on our cognitive processes. Some good, some bad. The bad I see is that it seems that people have a much more difficult time quieting down their minds or enjoying peace. If you watch people, there is a subtle but strong constant desire for stimulation. In fact, its almost odd to see someone waiting for anything without pulling out their smartphone and poking at it."
This. PG did a good blog post about this a while back, "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" or something like that. If you're building stuff, and what you make is habit-forming, you win. So people build habit-forming things and create habits in other people. So most people have habits that are not necessarily beneficial for them at all, but which are beneficial for whoever built their favorite app, or game, or gadget.
How many people check Hacker News more often than they really want to? I regularly uninstall my Twitter clients because they're too habit-forming. This is my third or fourth Hacker News login; I get disgusted with the sheer amount of time I spend on here, I sign out, throw away my password, and then come back anyway.
Porn and video games make better link bait than Hacker News or Twitter, but the truth is that habit-forming entertainment is a serious problem.
Also, as an aside, I fucking hate how people use the term "addicting" when they really mean "habit-forming." The technical meaning of addiction requires a physiological change where the body cannot function without a given substance. I think I'm on the losing side of this battle, but I haven't made peace with it. I'd even agree that "addiction" in the more general sense is a bigger problem than pure addiction in the literal sense, but it still just drives me fucking nuts.
I think you're absolutely right. I'm sorry to say it, but I also believe that all the comments to the contrary are just people who haven't bothered to learn anything about the subject.
"don't use your employer's computer off-hours when working on your own projects"
California law protects individual side projects extremely well. I am not a lawyer, I could be wrong, but I believe these concerns are absolutely irrelevant in California. Relevant elsewhere, but not here.