This rings eerily similar to the state of the Gnome foundation and other long-in-the-tooth FLOSS projects. Sad to read but I really don't know how one responds to "no innovation." Is "come up with good ideas" really a thing?
I think there is a much bigger issue here than the theoretical storage solutions. Everything you said is indeed entirely possible for most HN-readers and tech people but I sure can't talk my mother into switching to dynamic DNS and rsync.
The only reason there was a happy ending to this story was that this guy was connected enough to know how to contact someone at Google, what about the other 300million users who barely know what OS they are running? There needs to be some kind of restructuring to protect the public, whether its simple awareness or legislation.
I have sat on organizational committees and name-blinding would not work for some of us for one key reason: We use speaker's name/identity as a criteria for talk selection. Two main examples are whether they have presented before and how "strong" of a speaker they are.
We DO use names to discriminate but that often allows us to have "fresh" speakers and keep the lineup somewhat varied. It also allows us to filter for all the other spam-talks; i.e. marketers.
It is an issue of priorities but I would easily place quality of presentations over guaranteed blinding to prevent gender-bias selection.
This debate is entirely moot without context. I imagined/read it as something like:
>"...Ah, and this absolutely brilliant woman started that trend. Just look at her, a beacon blahblahblah wrapped in that cute hat."
If neither of us have been there, its pointless arguing the statement. My point is simply that when I do such talks I frequently inject humor into it, just the way he had. Reading it as a completely isolated comment seems highly unrealistic to me.
The APIs are a super nice touch. Running through tutorials can get really monotonous but the API stuff gave me a burst of excitement to play with the software I use every day.
I'll assume that's sarcasm but I haven't personally noticed that trend. The only way I made my cr-48 useful was by flashing the BIOS, adding a bigger SD, and running ubuntu on it.
I tried the WinXP thing but Bootcamp doesn't support XP anymore and it all starts getting difficult without a optical drive (find drive, rip, copy image to usb,...). I ended up just pirating it out of sheer annoyance and since it was the only way I could get Win7 working.
I found quite a bit in the original article that seemed to point to a misunderstanding of the site for someone who hasn't used it. Karim doesn't even mention one of the most valuable areas: the practice area. It isn't just about watching videos, and maybe I'm alone, but I use the practice first and the videos as supplements. Furthermore, the actual videos seem to often feature explanations in a clear way that does not merely point to following a series of steps (see "why division by zero is undefined")
I recommend checking out the "Simple English" wikipedia for more complex topics. It breaks those sentences down even more and is fantastic for math articles and the like.