The way to get selected to submit or comment appears to be ryans buddy or that buddies buddy. Its a really misogynistic way to do it and minoritys and women seem to be under represented.
I am sure if he chimed in here, he would say something along the lines of "We are super excited to open it up to everyone but want to do things correctly and not hurt the quality! With that in mind we are only letting a few people in at a time!"
Which of course means a huge amount of straight white dudes on the site and no transparency about what is submitted or chosen to be on the site.
Whats especially troubling is that this is spilling over to other countries now. I always felt that despite having relatively lax laws in regards to the internet, russia is starting to turn into a seriously unfriendly place for the internet. Being a expat in moscow makes it especially awkward as I have tasted the koolaid on the 'free' side.
Worth noting is that this was essentially number one on product hunt, above all other items.
Meaning, the product hunt results shown are the absolute best result you could hope for and most users will receive a far smaller amount of visits. PH gets a bit of hype because its invite only and people assume it has a big impact, but for most folk it would be much more impactful for their launch to even be on a smaller tech blog like Read/write or recode.
For the average person who gets on PH and gets the normal amount of upvotes (around 10-20 ) you can expect a blistering 250-500 visits. You would get more traction just posting a comment in a HN article. PH seems more powerful because its invite only and has tons of hype around it, but it does not deliver on results yet.
Surprised that HN numbers were so high, but not surprised that Techcrunch was number one. They still have a great share of the market when it comes to initial exposure.
From what I have read, Cloudflare takes considerable flack because they willingly provide services to the websites that let you buy and sell ddos-for-hire services.
Also, I believe their defense is "we are a proxy, not the host, go elsewhere to complain". So, yes- They appear to allow these booters to exist and thrive in a world where they were unable to (at this level) before.
which is kind of ironic, seeing as conway is major airbnb investor and airbnb is arguably one of the largest contributors to the housing shortage in the bay area.
people ellis act buildings and then airbnb them as a way around the law
Sorry to hear that. You must have known that this day was coming though? Basically you were living on borrowed time from Google. If the revenue was that much of a priority to you, you should have laid much lower than you did and certainly not make threats to people who have no issue with doing fraudulent things.
If you lay down with pigs, you are gonna get dirty
If you play with fire you will eventually get burned
Ok, some good news. It might be untrue about them having passport scans. Reason I say that, is the following:
We know from the leaked mtgox crisis plan doc that they have 550,000 verified accounts.
Each user who wanted to be verified had to scan at least 2 documents- a passport+license and a electric bill of sorts.
Assuming both documents alone were only 100KB combined (and its likely way more than that since scans are usually 500KB+ per document) than we can estimate the file size:
550,000 x 100KB = 52.45GB
Thats more than double the claimed 20GB.
In fact, even if we believe that every persons doc is in the DB; and assuming nothing else but passports is in there- you are only allowing for 20KB per document
I had a idea about how to make this type of punishment non feasible.
Replace the standard truecrypt bootloader with one of a design that has a 'self destruct'
What I mean by that is, when you turn on your computer and the boot loader is initialized it actually deletes its keyfile from disk and only keeps it in ram. If you dont enter the correct password in xxx minutes or if you restart the computer, that data is lost and restoring it becomes impossible.
There could be another option as well, a 'extra' unlock code that you could not prove the existence of, which could overwrite the deletion of the above.
Basically its a way to say "The FBI turned on my computer without asking me for instructions and destroyed my data- Its not possible for me to restore it, but this WAS my password"
This seems like a bit of attention whoring. If the guy wants to come back to the scene, which he very obviously does, then just do it. These occasionally cryptic updates should be reserved for the new releases of half life and portal. Not for a Ruby programmer who had a nervous breakdown and has now decided to return to public life. It is annoyingly cocky to be posting what he does and to assume the community will go through the time to behold his crypted messages and even more saddening that everyone is going for it hook line and sinker.
HN is not for this kind of stuff and it should be flagged. Tech news; not personal drama.
Also worth nothing- Jonathan Gillette never vanished into thin air. _why was just his made up character. Like kermit the frog.
I have no idea how they managed to pull that off since foursquare has so little usage today. If I look back a year or more ago, I had tons of friends using foursquare. Now? None.
I am guessing the loan from silver lake makes up 80% of the round and gives them top preference on a liquidity event as well as a 3-5x preference and maybe even monthly interest payments.
As for the convertible debt, I would guess it is likely that comes with a major, major discount on the next financing. That would also means that unless foursquare can completely turn its ass around, it would be super unattractive for any new investor to come in. So it goes without saying that the convertible would also have a short fuse of 48 months or less, which would convert at a some crazy low valuation if they did not raise another round.
If I was in charge over there, I would be thinking very heavily about what is best for my shareholders to get value and that would almost certainly be some form of a exit. However its not known if any suitors would be interested in foursquare at this point.
Awesome product, but holy shit are you guys expensive for anyone who does volume.
3000 'minutes' uploaded for $200 ? Tell me thats a monthly allowance and not a one time fee? You better be using some fancy CDNs and having 10 different versions of my file in different resolutions for that price.
Maybe let people opt for no transcoding to bring the price down? I would never use you guys at the current price. A few open source scripts and a dedicated server at 100tb.com is 500 times cheaper.
It just goes to show how much of a failure what they were currently doing was. The fact they were willing to switch to this shows quite a bit.
They genuinely should have just let digg be and get costs way down. The ad income would have been substantial if they just left it alone. Digg stories ranked high in search and I imagine they would have continued to do so.