No, the people who buy their app are "idiots". Either way 37signals makes money from glorified simplicity, which is both a marketing trick and a good idea.

theflubba at gmail dot com

http://debate-zone.com

Very interesting work with the Four Color Theorum, but the BSOD isn't exactly "banished", at least for me.

I haven't encountered a BSOD anywhere in all the machines I work on in at least 5 years. But I did skip Vista entirely. 64 bit Windows 7 seems mostly excellent stability wise, although I could list a few exceptions to this (Super (video converter) seemed to bring down my internet connection yesterday until I killed it), and I could make a huge list of usability gripes with it that I can't for the life of me figure out why MS doesn't fix.

But generally speaking I'm pretty happy.

Indeed. I had a BSOD just the other day (in Vista).

Which seems like it just gave Posterous publicity. Trendiness + Reinventing the wheel = Success?

Kind-of like Tumblr too. Every article seemingly focuses around the trendy, hipster founder and not so much on the site.

that's because normal readers care about founder stories, not features.

I'm curious: are you being sarcastic here?

I honestly don't care about the founder stories (good for them, sucks for them, end of story). But the articles do really focus on the founders more than features, and people are known to be silly (hence the never-dying market for tabloids).

This was a new feature, a real rework of the blogging platform and not just another blogger or wordpress clone. Innovating on the wheel + Trendiness = Success

Do people really spend their time making sites like these for attention? We get it, you're good at using Photoshop and maybe CSS. These sites are useless, why would anyone waste their time making them?

Do people really spend their time criticizing others on HN? We get it, you're too busy and smart for such tomfoolery. :)

Seriously, whoever made this did it as a fun exercise. They probably have to make boring forms at work and wanted to see how extreme they could go in making something attractive (whether it's actually attractive is open for discussion). Maybe they learned something they can use; maybe others will be inspired.

Haven't you ever tinkered with something that wasn't strictly necessary? If not, how do you learn what's possible?

human after all

+1 for heroku. What exactly is RDS? I know its a relational database, but I couldn't figure out exactly what it was from its site.

It is MySQL running on Amazon. I like it because you can scale a hot database up or down.

Seems like they are actually following the mantra of releasing a dead simply product quickly, and the slowly adding more features so that in the end, the users might as well have signed up for WordPress or Tumblr or similar sites in the beginning. Clever.

It definitely looks like the mouseover content is manually inputted, but since Microsoft acquired Powerset (http://www.powerset.com) last year, they could also pull some information about topics from it.

Trying to get node.js working on webfaction, and then attempting to create something with it. sigh.