> Set a deadline of 2-4 weeks to ship the first version of the product.
I blame this kind of mentality for much of the derivative rubbish the startup ecosystem is polluted with. We don't need any more photo/video sharing, link voting, or file sending apps.
I'm all for validating assumptions early, but some ideas (the ones that matter) are much, much bigger than 4 weeks to an MVP.
What amazes me is how Microsoft consistently explains design with obviously aliased images using nasty, bandy palettes.
I hope the explanation is that their web publishing framework just sucks and has no oversight, because it would be troubling if the designers/bloggers missed this.
Force everyone in the country, by law, to buy the solution.
I'm not even talking about the latest TSA BS; are we all forgetting that our taxes -- our money -- has been literally purchasing the TSA's nonsense from the very beginning?
I'm doing a (tangentially related) twist on this sort of thing, so I'll ask you the questions that haunted me for months until I could answer them about my own project:
Who's going to use this?
I mean, what's the intersection of people that are computer-articulate enough to know what to ask for ("convert this file for me"), but don't know how to do it, and/or are willing to spend the extra minute or two to post and manage the "favor"? Especially when "know how to do it" means "google for the free web app that does it"?
And who is going to spend their time doing these favors, with no reward except some ethereal concept of "points" that can only be redeemed for doing the things I can already easily do myself (see above)? Realize that you're competing for attention from facebook/twitter/HN. And MTurk, which actually pays.
Though since this is going through hashing, the number of matching bits has (by design) zero correlation to how close the P/W is. In which case, yeah, I think the binary indicator would be more useful and intuitive.
> My guess is the machines could be modified to change the background color behind the scanned person's silhouette.
For a billion dollars, I would have demanded, at minimum, that modifications to make the machines actually work be included. That they weren't just underscores the idiocy at play.
> The quote from the TSA ("Any guidance provided is to caution reporters not to generalize...") is merely saying "don't jump to conclusions on the basis of some activist's blog post/video," which is quite a reasonable "cautionary" statement.
It would be reasonable, if this were a citizen petitioning the media. Except this is the government, funded by the people, telling the media on their behalf what should and should not be discussed. The most charitable analysis is that my hard-earned tax dollars are being flushed on unsolicited media curation. A less charitable (and I believe, more likely) explanation is an attempt to sidestep the first amendment with no repercussions because it's not censorship, just chilling effects which nobody can be held accountable for.
So at best, complete incompetence, and at worst, conspiracy. Either way, I think the outrage is justified.
About as much of a stretch as using a unicorn for "delete", because unicorns don't exist.
I'm getting increasingly concerned that web UIs are trading away usability for design in Apple's wake, forgetting the part about "design is how it works".
> There are a number of publishers on this list, including my own publisher. If the consensus I get from readers is that we should boycott publishers, I'll support the boycott even though it hurts me.
As much of an asshole as he is, I've always respected the guy for his shocking lack of hypocrisy.
If movie producers had the decency to make this kind of public stand, things might be different.
> I remember when one of the pro-SOPA speakers countered an argument against the feasibility of this legislation with "Google's got the technology."
If I remember correctly, the argument was that since Google is effective at taking down child pornography, detecting something as simple copyright infringement should be a breeze.
When a Google spokesperson explained why that made absolutely no sense given that often not even the copyright holder can tell what's infringement and what's not, legislators scoffed, ignored what was said, summarized it as "we have the technology", and for lack of time pushed to move to other issues so that the bill could be passed ASAP.
> I'm pretty sure that if you just "connect the uploader's POST to the downloader's GET" then the Node server would have to buffer the entire file from the submitter before sending it to the clients.
Not at all. Use stream.pipe(). I've done it countless times and it works really well.
> The prospect of being bankrupted by a civil suit or thrown in prison is enough to stop most people.
Yes, but... if you're good enough to be hired by these companies, leaking source code without being traced isn't going to be hard for you. I've thought about this before and I'm actually surprised it doesn't happen more often.
I blame this kind of mentality for much of the derivative rubbish the startup ecosystem is polluted with. We don't need any more photo/video sharing, link voting, or file sending apps.
I'm all for validating assumptions early, but some ideas (the ones that matter) are much, much bigger than 4 weeks to an MVP.
Incidentally,
http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html