Hardly, HN only covers world events with real global significance. I enjoy reading HN users takes on this kind of news as I find it interesting to discuss this kind of news but comments on mainstream news sites are terrible and I don't really have the time to invest in other sites with quality comments who cover this stuff in far higher volume.
Agreed, the tone and community here provide interesting discussion and insights on the really big turning points such as these. Comparably on reddit there is a lot of chaff to work through to get to the interesting kernels.
I've highlighted the sort of discussion I'd like to see more of in blue, and the ones that I'd like to see fewer of in red. The unhighlighted comments provide no value to me but I don't mind their existence. Under this scheme, my own comment would be red, because it's meta and off-topic.
Why not, if there is something smart to discuss about them, something gratifying our intellectual curiosity[1]. I vaguely remember even pg referring to Lady Gaga as hacker in clothes space in (I think) Hackers&Painters (anyone have the reference? I can't seem to find it :/).
I'm personally very happy that such articles appear here. I got used to the fact that HN covers only significant geopolitical events, so I can ditch every other news service and be sure that if something of actual importance happens, it'll be covered here as well.
Also, I'd be hard pressed to find such quality of discussions anywhere else.
I flagged it too. I don't know why you're downvoted. I wanted to say sth for myself, but maybe I'll stick to quoting the guidelines:
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Can we get over this? This "LOL He's calling himself an HTML DEVELOPER of all things!" mentality isn't helping anyone. You don't see spiders belittling us for calling ourselves "web developers," do you? You especially can't do this now that WHATWG and W3C have started to confuse and redefine what HTML/HTML5 is and the technologies behind it.
So, let's breathe a little, and accept that if professionals can get called shrinks, we can accept that people have different vernacular for what we do. Hell, we don't have a single unifying title either. So, unless your proposing to call me by my professional title of "Interwebz Spin Doctor", take a second to realize that "html developer" isn't that bad.
I really cant believe that we're discussing this, the most stupid, simple language in the world!
I respect HTML coders and am aware of that they do fantastic job on frontend.
But nobody has to be talented HTML developer to build websites. It's stupid easy to do it. I'm a guy who never learnt HTML and am considered as a coder good at developing good websites.
Nevermind. I don't like this kind of pointless discussions. I don't like HN anymore.
Question: what happens when a guy copies pinboard (in other words, the old delicious) and open sources it?
A community evolves. And some of paid pinboard users switch to the free one because it's open source, some people implement some cool stuff periodically, it'll be maintained forever.
Another question: What happens when pinboard makes less money?
These questions were answered 30 years ago by OSS community.
Sure, the code will be open source. It will still have to be hosted somewhere. Who'll pay the bills?
Pinboard's long-term income is primarily from the archiving users. The storage and full-text search index would be even more expensive to host for free.
I search my bookmarks with grep thanks to a local, plain text copy of them. It's so fast and can be programmed in a way that I can search I bookmarks before I open my browser.
There are way better architectures to have an unsocial bookmarking service. Pinboard has the worst one and because its focus is to copy Delicious and make money. In other words, it creates the problem first, and gives users an expensive solution.
An open source solution that can kill Pinboard may be based on even DropBox. OSS community is good at solving real problems.
Sounds like Pinboard isn't the solution for you. However, it evidently appeals to many, myself included.
I don't think I ever have my browser not open. I use something like four different computers, not including mobile devices, and appreciate the central copy without having to think about syncing it. I don't worry about setting up scripts on my local machine or updating my local plain text copy so that it can be searched. For the archiving users, they don't have to manually save the files of each website they'd like to search later.
If you believe you can do bookmarking better and free, then do it. If it matches what I'm using Pinboard for, and is better (and doesn't use Dropbox), I'll switch.
I use delicious for 5 years and keep a local, sync copy to make it possible to program, so that I can develop my own desktop tools.
I mean, a free Pinboard was a solution for me when I was looking for a good alternative of delicious, 2 years ago.
But it's not free. The owner claims that he'll keep maintaining forever but he will not when he lose a considerable percent of his customers.
And he'll. As I said, pinboard solves the wrong problem. An online bookmarking service can be structured in a way that will cost nothing. Couple of scripts that manipulate a text file on DropBox was the solution came to my mind in 3 seconds.
Another thing to keep in mind, that DropBox might be a big success now and have plenty of financing, but Dropbox keeping free accounts free is also not guaranteed. People who choose wrong file storage startup will lose out that much is certain.
Kind of ironic, that I am still bookmarking this on Delicious.
The other problem with your quest is that the sign-up fee is one-time, so competition won't cause him to lose that, and archiving users won't switch to a service without archiving and full-text search no matter how free and open source it is, so he won't be losing the ongoing revenue from them either.
I don't expect Pinboard to be around forever, but it's useful enough while it's alive to be worth the money for me. When it's no longer useful, I'll still have a copy of my data to grep to my heart's content.
See the irony: pinboard is a clone of delicious' initial version. it copied the idea, the visual design and started selling it.
In every success story of pinboard, I'm very surprised to see how people are impressed from a carbon copy.
Let me introduce myself: I'm a guy who bookmarks everyday for 5 years, on delicious. After the Yahoo acquire, it was redesigned.
And I was annoyed. I started looking at the alternatives. Most of them were crappy except Pinboard. It was a good copy of old Delicious.
And I decided to use it just because it was a good copy of Delicious!
Then, I noticed that Pinboard is not free. And what it provides is nothing but keeping some text on a database. Same idea, almost same design but it's not free. Let the owner explain why it's not free: it's unsocial. and it'll be online unless a 90% percent of users keep paying it.
It's not ethical, Pinboard. If I think that it's not a waste of time, I'll code some scripts to store bookmarks in Dropbox for your users. It'll be under WTF PL license so that you can sell it.
let me summarize the main idea for you: A bunch of people pay me because I store their a few hundreds lines of text, save their ass from the sites full of annoying ads like cjb.net or freeservers.com.
no need for the user friendly, smart business models. no need to develop a new vision. this is the hack.
