I think that's a bit of a misread. Sometimes ravenous adoption comes from something that legitimately makes 90% of cases easier. Once I tried MongoDB, it effortlessly became my default for projects large and small going forward - SQL would be a lot of extra work. NoSQL scaling well explains companies adopting it, but it doesn't explain the masses of individual developers and tiny startups jumping to it. That's explained by it being really, really pleasant.
That $49 sparked my walk over to Starbucks on the corner to buy one. (I put $10 on the card last night myself, hadn't used any.) By the time I was halfway there it was gone, and I decided to just buy it anyway, hoping it'd gotten filled but the feed hadn't updated yet -- and the barista gave it to me for free, unprovoked. I didn't even have to present the card.
I took a trapeze class a couple months back that was pretty damn terrifying, but I got through it and had a pretty good time.
In January, when I got all excited about Webfinger, I proposed an Ignite talk on it to RailsConf in Baltimore, before I knew anywhere near enough to talk on it. They accepted, so I was forced to learn enough to talk about it well and get others excited about it. Also damn terrifying, but way way worth it.
Wow. This is a model article. It takes two controversial opposing articles about an extremely relevant problem, points to a grey area that's worked in the past, and then, quite insightfully, points out a missing link (self-hosted advertising that is still inherently auditable to third parties) that we should fill in.
Even though I detest advertising, I think a lot of what I detest about them could be seriously mitigated by turning advertising into something a business plans and designs for. Let's get some applicants to Y Combinator next season that try to figure this out.
At least Google's initial rationalization was (paraphrasing) "even though China's censorship sucks, we think we can still benefit people's lives there by censoring the bare minimum possible". They've always acknowledged that China's censorship is a form of repression, and never emphasized the "we're just following the rules" bit over the actual ethical problem they were dealing with.
Finishing up an Android app for Campfire, a web-based chat service. I did the app before they released an official API, and then rewrote it all. I think it'll end up on the Market this week. It's been a lot of fun.
You can't run away from issues like this; they're news, they're important. If HN is gonna survive and thrive, it's gonna have to be tough enough to get through posts like this. Really, the ratio of thoughtful-to-irrational is way higher here than on even Reddit. It's all good.