Respectfully disagree - Compete and Alexa both depend on toolbars, and no techie in his right mind wants to install such a thing. Quantcast doesn't use a toolbar, but it's heavily biased towards Quantcast-aware publishers who place the QC script on their pages. Long story short: these sites are bad for measuring traffic, but especially bad for measuring tech / power user / early adopter traffic.
Compete and Quantcast (if not "Quantified") are not good measurements of actual traffic estimates but they can usually report trends somewhat accurately. However, you make a great point about the tech/early adopter crowd which are the primary users for Quora.
45% might even be understating it. Android's share of the smartphone market is already around 30% in the US (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Android-Tops-iO...). That's a bigger piece of the pie than either iPhone or RIM. Unless Apple aggressively targets the low end, a majority Android share (50%+) of the smartphone market shouldn't surprise anybody.
Not only that, but there are legit reasons to include a keylogger as part of a laptop build out. Every computer has, or should have, this kind of auditing capacity. The question is a) whether it's turned on by default and b) whether any information is being transmitted on the sly. In all likelihood, this was either some sort of mistake, or the keylogger is intended for use by the computer's owner -- not by Samsung.
EDIT: Sorry for scaring people. Listen, I HATE keyloggers and other invasive software. Here:
My point was that I can see a legit need for low-level auditing by whoever owns the PC. Including such a package that's turned off by default, might be better than forcing a worried parent to sift through 12 keyloggers on Google, half of which are malware, a quarter of which don't work, in order to find out if her 12-year-old is composing YouTube dances and uploading them to 4chan.
Great point, but I wasn't aware that there are "usual, legitimate" reasons for downvoting, and that these are well-known enough that you can call them the usual reasons. Seems like everybody just uses their best judgment.
That said, I didn't downvote him, I simply didn't vote. I don't feel a need to vote on everything, and that extends to downvoting.
(A clear deviation of the guidelines deserves a downvote, a clear compliance does not. Like any law, there is a grey area in between requiring some amount of judgement. But these guidelines still stand to ground the discussion around what is/isn't a "usual, legitimate" reason for downvoting.)
Meaning can be inferred from the down-voting. I think that was probably the meaning behind most of the negative votes.
I actually believe that it's okay to use voting to express whether you agree or disagree with a point. Where's the harm?
I think that the experience of reading HN is enhanced when there's contrast between popular and unpopular ideas. If a post is unpopular, it doesn't mean that I don't read it. If anything, I might pay more attention to it.
In some cases its lack of popularity might spark more debate; like it has in this case.
I actually believe that it's okay to use voting to express whether you agree or disagree with a point. Where's the harm?
This is a bad point of view and is what is leading to the degradation of HN as a place for people who see the world through a different lens. We have already lost a lot of beautiful minds due to heard voting. Downvoating is for items that do not belong on HN, nothing more nothing less. If you downvote because you do not agree with an idea you are actively suppressing discussion, no matter how strongly you disagree. Many time from people more brilliant that ourselves.
The voting mechanism is a tool. People choose to use tools in whichever way they see fit. A culture will develop and form according to the norms which are set around group usage.
On HN people I've found that many people use voting to signal whether they agree (or disagree) with something. If that wasn't the case, I'd see my karma rise - rather than rise, fall and fluctuate.
As far as I can tell, if something shouldn't be on HN, we have the ability to flag a post.
I can agree that a post shouldn't needless be hammered into negative space, just as a person's point of view shouldn't be needlessly trampled on in meat-space. But I think that down-voting in general has found a place.
We can say that it might be better to never down-vote - but many users have the ability, and it's a regular practice. Neglecting the fact is a little like ignoring the fact the emperor is wearing no clothes.
As far as I can tell, if something shouldn't be on HN, we have the ability to flag a post.
You cannot flag comments downvoting is there to discourage, trolls and abuse.
We can say that it might be better to never down-vote - but many users have the ability, and it's a regular practice. Neglecting the fact is a little like ignoring the fact the emperor is wearing no clothes.
I am well aware of that and it has lead to a decline in the standard that HN used to be (while my account may not reflect it I have been around here for a long time, and witnessed the decline first hand). It has been complained about on HN ad nasium. No one is neglecting the fact that it happens, I am just stating that doing so makes HN a worse place the results are obvious and have already lead to some valuable people leaving.
To flag a comment, click on 'link' and then 'flag'.
I think the decline is largely due to a rise in meta-discussion about HN and a rise in articles which are mainly designed to self-promote their authors.
I apologise for playing my part in the first ... ;P
Apparently it has to do with how much karma you've accumulated. I magically got the ability to downvote some time last week, without any effort on my part.
The harm is that the voting system is designed as a step towards hiding (or at least not highlighting) posts which get downvoted. So downvoting prevents the experience which you yourself agree is desirable, that of seeing both popular and unpopular ideas represented.
That being said, I strongly believe that if a system is being misused, it is the system not the users which are at fault. In this case, my first suggestion (doubtless in need of refinement) is that there should be prominent agree/disagree buttons on every post to allow everyone to express their opinion, and then a separate "flag" link for people to mark spam or useless comments.
I think this is a promising line of thinking, the idea that there should be more than one kind of vote. There is confusion as to what the single up/down means, and this is not helped by the fact that the single karma value actually matters for things (the ability to downvote at all or the level of obscuration of the comment). It is certainly not helpful if everyone has a different opinion of what that arrow should mean.
From a UI perspective, there are tradeoffs. Multiple vote options means better sorting, more thorough meaning. It also means more confusion and more work.
Also, instead of single vote tallies, has there been social experimentation with preferential voting systems on comments? (This still has the problem of needing more than one flavor of preference.)
Yeah. But maybe with multiple votes, we already effectively have this. The problem is that those votes are counted internally not as preference order but as total number of votes, adding to a user's general karma score.
Well, that certainly elucidates your point of view: thank you.
But although the system never makes posts inaccessible (to do so would, I'm sure, elicit complaints of "censorship"), it does, if you're using a normally configured browser, grey out negative-voted comments so that they require deliberate effort to read (by -4, you need to highlight them with the mouse). It moves lower-voted posts down the page: even if you have time to read every post, which many people don't, you probably lose focus and pay less attention by the time you get down there. And it reduces the karma of people who make downvoted posts, which some people probably care about (e.g. because they lose/don't get the ability to downvote) and some people probably don't, but which is clearly intended as discouragement.
I think it's clear that the system is designed with the assumption that posts that get downvoted are posts that it intends to discourage. (And I think it's agreed for purposes of this discussion that spam and useless comments are deserving of discouragement in a way that comments one happens to disagree with are not.)
I think the voting system probably provides some interesting metrics about users personality types; e.g. whether they have brutal/gentle personality traits etc.
I wonder if this kind of metric is used in ycombinator interviews?
In my view, it's ok to downvote something you something disagree with until it gets back down to 1 point. Then downvotes start to censor it and I think it harms discussion unless that comment is one of the things the grandparent commenter was talking about.
I respectfully disagree. Notice how I'm replying instead of downvoting. Downvoting something you disagree with is just pure laziness. You're too lazy to reply so you just downvote, which contributes to burying the opinion of someone else.
You should focus on upvoting. Downvotes should be reserved for abusive, trolling, or spam comments.
I don't personally downvote things I disagree with (If it's presented well I sometimes upvote) but I think it's acceptable. If it wasn't supposed to be that way, it would be "flag" with no downvote option. I also personally think downvote should be removed from the UI completely but...
Then that's what someone should say, and then promptly get upvoted. Some questions need to be asked, alternative points of view made, and then shown to the world why it's a bad idea; we shouldn't hide them from view to be missed so someone else can make the same mistake.
Someone who desires to keep track of a user's key strokes, for example a corporation. This is coming from someone who consents to monitoring every day.
While I agree it is not good for the singular, non-ignorant person, I'm sure there's a massive market for "Corporate Consumers" who'd like to save a buck instead of spending effort configuring a system.
About having the capability of auditing, I suppose it saves production costs to have one laptop with a switch, as opposed to two laptops with slight hardware or software differences.
Right I could see this being part of some child usage monitoring package. It may be part of some crapware that comes with the computer. I bet Samsung is scrambling right now to find out which crapware vendor included it and will find out it part of a net monitoring suite.
Or those who fancy sex on the dinner table without spectators? That's a relatively crass example (sorry), but the privacy implication is clear when you put it in those terms. My home is my home, and what I do behind my door is my business.
I'm surprised you're getting voted up. As much as I disagree with most of the privacy agenda, a lot of their fights are the only thing stopping us from turning Orwellian.
Nothing to hide is pretty arbitrary, too; you mean you have nothing to hide under our current laws. So sure, let them bring the cameras in. Then they'll rewrite the law and you'll suddenly have something to hide.
Maybe, and if that were the case, the number of people the sarcasm is missing means it could have been communicated better. Watch his karma swing around -- I'm not the only one that missed it, apparently. It certainly wasn't a good spot for it, because he's responding to sarcasm.
Ha, I posted that I wondered if I was going to come back to a -4 or a +4 karma :)
Yes it was sarcastic. As other commenters said, it's a very common and senseless rhetoric used by anti-privacy politicians. Applying it to an extreme example (like camera in your home) was meant to demonstrate how daft such a stance is.
But I disagree, I think it was a very good spot for it: In my mind, some of the best irony is when it's nearly indistinguishable from truth. So I will take the swinging karma as a complement :D
It's also a worrying illustration of how far the anti-privacy agenda has progressed, when people can think you're seriously advocating surveillance cameras in private homes.
It's a popular mantra made by politicians any time they want to introduce a new anti-privacy measure. This mantra and his version especially is so farcical, I think it's obvious to the majority of readers that his tongue is firmly in his cheek.
Nobody is scared, don't flatter yourself. Your attitude is simply invasive and pointy-haired. Couple that with using a URL-shortened blind link where you are supposedly establishing some kind of safe-computing credibility, and I can only LOL.
Worried parents?! Now you're really getting dangerous. I hope you think long and hard before having children if this is the kind of treatment you expect to give them. If you have a 12 year old who is already uploading "dances" (?) to YT/chans, you have much bigger problems than a computer or the internet (hint: mirror).
I had a chuckle at this. The use of "pointy-haired" was at least creative. And yeah, I believe parents have the right to spy on their kids, especially when it comes to the net. Largely, I'd add, because of people like you (trolls).
Difficult to see how publicizing this stuff could be beneficial for Mr. Allen. At that level, and sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar fortune, it almost never behooves you to say anything negative about anybody -- least of all one of your former partners. I also think complaining about not getting a bigger share of MS stock, when you've got 14 billion in the bank...not exactly the stuff of which Jedi are made.
He isn't doing it to benefit himself. He probably doesn't care whether you like him or not, and he definitely doesn't need your money or respect.
I guess Paul just wants the world to know that the image of Gates as our benevolent patron of philanthropy is itself revisionism, lest anyone forget that Bill Gates was one of the least loyal and trustworthy friends a person could ask for.
It doesn't surprise me that HN sides with the victor in cases like this, but I would argue that any serious business person should watch and learn carefully from the lessons of two close friends who changed the world and ended up disliking each other.
People change with time, and are not necessarily the same as they were in the past. Forming a collective of ones entire life and cherry-picking various moments simply gives you highlights, both good and bad. They don't speak to what the person is right now.
Probably your best bet to gage someone is to look at what they've been doing recently, going back maybe no more than ~5 years. Here you'll see someone whose learned from their past mistakes, likely acting differently due to life lessons, and are essentially the most authentic "version" of a person they currently are.
You are absolutely right, but just because he has changed and the world has forgiven him doesn't mean we should forget his past self. There are still lessons to be learned. And, his philanthropy doesn't justify his past bad behavior.
Yeah, I completely agree. I'm sure he doesn't need my or anybody else's money or respect. But I wonder if the message he's trying to get across is the one that's actually getting across. Looking at it from a gaming standpoint, can his play here can ever have a positive expectation?
By what measure? If Paul Allen wants people to remember that Bill Gates used to be a dick, and people read his book and do so, maybe that's all the positive expectation he needs. Even if it hurts his own reputation maybe it is worth it to him.
I don't doubt Allen's claims, but years and experience can change a man. The person Paul was complaining about, probably doesn't exist anymore except in distant memories, albeit rather painful ones. People can change for the better.
I have always thought the relational dynamic between Jobs and Woz was instructive for similar reasons.
(Not that these two founders aren't friends anymore, but I think it's pretty obvious that it isn't what it was)
"least loyal and trustworthy friends a person could ask for": citation?
Are you referring to the discussion Gates and Ballmer had about diluting Allen? That seems to be a way to dilute a founder who was slacking off. The word partnership is used several times; this may imply that everybody was 100% vested already. If so, this is the only thing they could do to somebody who wasn't pulling his weight.
Are you seriously asking for a citation to show that Bill Gates is (was?) a ruthless person with questionable ethics? Forty years of ripping off other people's software, berating and humiliating his own team, buying and shutting down competitors, and impeding progress in the name of vendor lock-in, plus the newly-published "insider" memoir of his co-founder isn't enough for you?
I've met Bill Gates, so I'll stick with my personal opinion. You're entitled to yours.
The parent claimed "least loyal and trustworthy friend".
Where have you supported that claim? If you've "met" BG, I invite you to post some already-known anecdotes etc about his conduct as a friend, which is exactly what I asked about.
That comment was based on Allen's account of Ballmer and Gates plotting to dilute him – a dick move by any measure, esp. after Allen showed his good faith on a number of occasions.
Gates and Allen were friends at when they went to school together. I went to the same school some years after them, and drew my own opinions based on first and second hand experiences with both of them.
No matter what you believe about the quality of their friendship, there's a teaching lesson for co-founders in their story.
Heartless as it sounds, it is absolutely fair to think about how to protect the business and yourself in the event that a fully vested founder were to be unable to do the duties one has reasonably assumed they would do.
Ownership shares are not like salary (imho): they're not just for past work, but also for future contributions.
Without specifics on to what extent exactly they were planning to dilute him, I am not prepared to condemn BillG. YMMV.
Jobs' actual cheating through a straightforward lie to Woz wrt how much they got paid for Atari's contract job they did is FAR worse than a planning conversation BillG had. IMHO. http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/hackers/steve-wozniak/
He wants to be acknowledged. Everybody knows Bill Gates and sees him as the smart and great computer guy, while Mr. Allan is an unknown. It's like 2 brothers where the lesser talented uses all his life to proof he's just as good and therefore never gets to create something.
Who destroyed Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland and Netscape? Who swore under oath that the browser is part of the operating system, and couldn't be removed? Why are 9 out of 10 desktop computers running Windows? I think only one man gets the credit. :-)
Hopefully, he can ruthlessly solve a few of the long-running problems in the world.
I don't see Gates as the great computer guy. I look at him as a ruthless evil genius that made Microsoft what it is. Of course that's partly because he's also a "great computer guy".
To make an analogy with Apple, if anything, his role at Microsoft was more like that of Steve Jobs, rather than that of Steve Wozniak; he provided the vision, he made the business calls that made Microsoft. Bill Gates does have a different style than Steve Jobs and doesn't have the same distortion field and attractiveness, but his speeches at Ted are great nonetheless (which makes me think he was bored at Microsoft :)).
This is a very interesting article. I am myself working on a project and considering good friends to be co-founders in that. But based on what Paul Allen is mentioning here and based on few other stories of startups which made it big like Facebook, few thoughts came to my mind:
1) Is it that to make it really big, to the likes of Microsoft, Facebook a founder has to play games and trick his own friends in a way that the founder owns majority of stake in the company. I am not necessarily saying it is bad, it is just a observation and want your opinion. It is totally possible that one of the co-founders is so passionate about the idea that he works hard by twice or thrice as much as other cofounder and in the process somehow manages to get hold of major equity. What do you think? Is it necessary to be evil to make it big? Does your passion blind you somewhere in the process where one cannot distinguish right from "not so much right"?
2) I dont see and havent heard about Steve Jobs being great friends with Steve Wozniak. So is Bill gates with Paul Allen. Facebook Mark Z and other cofounders have some fights between them too. Given this and stories from similar or smaller companies, it makes me think, is it possible to have a good and healthy friend ship like relationship with your co-founder after a period of time? Or with the turn of events in the company it is bound to happen that the relationship will go sour?
What do you guys think?
Another example: the beetles. Perhaps one of the greatest creative partnerships of all time, churning out two records a year for 7 years, and then were sick of each other and broke up.
The story is part of a very good publicity campaign for his book, which has been written as a memoir. He wants his legacy to be remembered as 'Paul Allen' rather than 'that other guy'.
What is the risk for somebody with 14 billion in the bank to call out other when he/she feels they've been wrong (regardless of whether it's perception or reality). Allen could have called Gates they antichrist and he'd still have people lined up around the block to take his VC money or sit in the owner's box of Trailblazers game with him. 14 billion is definitely "FU" money.
Companies buy reputation all the time (branding, association ). Doing things is not enough. People must also know about what you did and that takes publicity.
> At that level, and sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar fortune, it almost never behooves you to say anything negative about anybody -- least of all one of your former partners. I also think complaining about not getting a bigger share of MS stock, when you've got 14 billion in the bank...not exactly the stuff of which Jedi are made.
At that level, money is more about points than bucks. He's not upset he can buy fewer baseball teams, he's upset that his status was being lowered and he was being disrespected and treated as prey/
As far as the former partners go, Cringely claims Allen has been dissociated financially for a long time:
> Maybe that�s just the sort of fiduciary discussion board members have to have, but it didn�t go over well with Paul Allen, who never returned to Microsoft, and over the next eight years, made huge efforts to secure his wealth from the fate of Microsoft. He sold large blocks of shares on a regular basis no matter whether the price was high or low. Then in October and November of 2000, just as he was finally leaving the Microsoft board, Allen did a series of financial transactions involving derivative securities called �collars,� that are a combination of a right to buy and a right to sell the stock at different prices such that both his upside and downside financial potential are limited. By the end of 2000, though Allen technically still owned 136 million Microsoft shares, his wealth was for practical purposes separate from that of Gates, Ballmer, and the rest of Microsoft.
Inasmuch as Cringely reported essentially the same anecdote as in the _Vanity Fair_ excerpts, I'm inclined to take him at his word when he writes about Allen's finances.
It's an interesting type of discrimination at play here. The rich have just as much right to free speech and human emotion as everybody else. If someone feels that they have been mistreated, it is not appropriate to belittle their concerns based on their net worth. Whether their net worth is very low, or very high.
At that level, and sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar fortune, it almost never behooves you to say anything negative about anybody
I've never understood that. At what point do you make enough money to say whatever the hell you want, without any fear of repercussions? What's the point of having all that money if you have to worry about what other wealthy people think of you?
If you are a billionaire you buy a news network and then hire a pundit, heck a whole panel of pundits to say whatever negative things you want to say about anybody.
It would add a little oomph if you could add some sort of subtle visual tracking (in the CSS for example) to highlight the stuff that moves. Between refreshes it's often hard to see what's changing.
I think most blog comment forms have a "website " field for a reason, though. There's a tactic quid pro quo there. Leave a comment, add value to the discussion, maybe a few people will click on your link. And the vast majority of bloggers I know are happy to get comments. A well-placed comment on an unknown or up-and-coming blog can make the author's day.
The impression I got (and the impression I get as a blog owner) is that he was leaving a link within the comment body, as opposed to the URL field. People do this all the time on my site and it sort of immediately invalidates their comment for me.
Not until well after their IPO and the bubble bursts on the absurd 40, 50, 75 billion-dollar valuations we're seeing now, IMO. Entering search actually brings on some risk, because if they screw it up, or if it doesn't take, a lot of Facebook's future equity goes up in smoke.
He's publishing online; of course he wants eyeballs. But not many people know that the Nook can do double duty as an entry level tablet, with access to the full Android market. Given the cheaper price, I'd say this is a worthwhile article, in the sense that it will probably steer certain people away from overpaying for designer tech they don't need.
