I am not terribly familiar with with this MG author but he comes across as a self-righteous egotistical bigot.
His quote:
"I don’t know about you, but when I read my favorite technology writers, I want an opinion. Is the iPhone 4S the best smartphone, or is it the Galaxy Nexus? I need to buy one, I can’t buy both. Topolsky never gives us that. Instead, he pussyfoots around it. One is great at some things, the other is great at others. Barf.
Fucking pick one. I bet that even now he won’t."
I must be getting old but I thought the job of a journalist/columnist was to give a fair unbiased assessment in their review. No MG, I don't need you to pick one over the other. I have a brain and can reach my own conclusion, thank you very much. I don't need you to tell me what to spend $200-$300 of my own hard-earned money.
He seems to forget his job (I assume he has a job). What we need from journalists/columnists is a balanced honest review with pros and cons, that's all.
Or even more softer/friendlier sounding "Schedule gifts for women" (gifts are usually sent or given and can be assumed as so, and it's assumed they are for women in your life and not random women in the universe).
"I like how HN is often first to criticize, but sometimes you're just missing the point."
Welcome to the internet. Not sure how long you've been here but anything posted publicly will get criticized and torn apart regardless of where it's posted.
I don't know whether this person is trolling or not but if he's not, I doubt he's going to be good at running a business (might be great at running an app/product though).
While all the stated reasons are correct and beneficial, they are only to one party - the developers themselves. And unless all your money is coming from the developer (which by definition is not), you probably want to care more about what your users need and want rather than tell them what you can and will not support.
Running a business (a profitable one) is all about meeting customers' needs, expectations and wants. No matter how ridiculous they are. No matter if they are wrong and you are right. No matter if they are running your app on a machine from the 90's while you only support the latest and greatest HTML5/Canvas/Node.js/blah blah.
One customer that you don't support is not just one customer that you've lost. It's one customer that you've turned away from your product AND incentivized to spread the bad karma to everyone they talk to about your product. The next time they hear someone discussing your product, they're going to chime in "Yeah, I loved using them until they turned me away by not supporting <whatever version they had>. They don't care about me at all." While this statement is false or at least untrue (I'm sure you care about all your customers right?), the reality is that it doesn't matter. They are spreading a negative review and it's only going to fester and grow from that point on.
So whenever you're ready to build a business out of your successful website/app/whatever, remember that you need to support whoever is ready to pay you. That's all that matters.
So I've always thought the YouTube player was subpar, specially to players like Vimeo. I think its a bit bulky and could use some work. The UI I have in place was actually inspired by http://dribbble.com/shots/192404-Reservoir-Dogs-and-experime... and with his permission and help he helped me nail it into place.
While the new UI is by far from better, far as functionality it stays in line with what tubalr is all about, simplicity. I will continue to work on the UI and make it as streamline and user friendly as possible while keeping it simple and clean.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of a normal iPhone user. Many users don't even know how to download apps and therefore never do.
The people who do know to download apps never imagine an "app" can be a "website". Therefore, they look to the "App store" as their first choice whenever they're searching for a solution to their problem (e.g. "oh, I need to know the latest news, let me search on the app store" or "oh, I want pictures of cute kittens, I wonder if they have those in the app store").
Which if you only have a web presence, you're never going to get discovered. That's why many app developers make native app wrappers over their HTML5 webapps - just to solve the discoverability problem.
Is this true? I thought web browsing was one of the primary features of smart phones. I thought it was taken for granted that the phones could browse the web.
Although your explanation does explain the huge number of companies creating stupid apps...
Gruber is like a person who really enjoys eating cupcakes. He knows all about cupcakes, and even goes so far as to think he knows how to make them. He's probably baked a few things here and there. Sadly, he also thinks his 'expertise' on all things cupcakes makes him an all round bonafide chef.
You might have been inadvertently employing the "disarming" technique used by pick up artists. "The Game" is an amazing book detailing the techniques used by pick up artists (and no, it's just for people who want to pick up ladies but more generally about influencing people).
As someone who has met a few of the people from The Game, I can tell you it's mostly crapware with very little to learn from.
The basic flaw with The Game(and most of the games of the characters in it) is that they take this to such extreme that instead of becoming charming and attractive, you become a paranoid insecure jerk.
That said, The Game has helped motivate many to take action in a critical area of their life.
I always wondered what bothered me about these 'The Game' approaches to "successfully influence people" and I think you really nailed it down.
OF COURSE people will find it easier to agree with you if they have agreed with you before - that should be obvious. The question is - what do you have to do to get that? 'The Game' seems to say - "well, anything that is necessary, of course", as though aping people into nodding was some kind of accomplishment and as though that accomplishment in itself was admirable and healthy.
I'd rather have people actually agree with me in small things that we both care about and then be happy to agree with me big time. If you need to bullshit, "warm up" or in some other ways mislead people (and yes, that includes "Weather is great, isn't it?" when you don't really care about the weather), you are building a pile of very tiny lies to make the jump to the big lie less noticeable. At some point, you will just cross the bullshit horizon, the point at which MOSTLY what you do is lie to and trick people - and have fun with your empty soul while you're at it.
It is indeed a cargo cult - you do achieve things with it, but then you sit there in your wooden mock-up flight control tower next to your empty dirt runway wearing your headphones made of straws and wonder why you never seem to actually be happy.
It took me a second too. What the gp says is that the fake relationships are cargo too. The players are mistaking the thing for its description. Beautiful people are not beautiful relationships, and friendships built on lies and partial truths are trustless and empty.
Alright now, let's not oversimplify this. There are billion shades of gray in how truthful we are in our daily relationships. Most people hide stuff from those close to us on a daily basis. Does this render those relationships as fake or almost fake? I'd argue no.
Similarly, while some of the relationships formed from your pickup skills may be premised almost entirely on lies, that is not the norm. I'd actually say most relationships turn out to be much like normal relationships--and most certainly not a type where the other party is thinking you're a millionaire when in fact you are broke in reality.
Actually, no. I think it's correct to oversimplify this - Either you care, deeply, about a relationship or you don't.
"I'd actually say most relationships turn out to be much like normal relationships"
I'm not sure you realize how extremely shady that sounds. Does that really sound satisfying to you? Real and honest? I understand that manipulating people into forming a relationship (of whatever kind) with you can somewhere in the end resemble something like a genuine relationship. But that still doesn't make it a genuine relationship. It either is a runway and you are a tower operator, or not.
If you define a relationship as one where two people occupy the same room and have frequent conversations then a lot of things are a relationship - all the way to a torture chamber. What I'm talking about is two people who really care about each other.
'The Game' is very particularly about getting women into bed. Being in bed together is usually related to a deep, emotional connection, but pickup artists just care about that last bit. To stay in the metaphor: They really, really do care about making those cargo planes appear. Boy do they ever love that cargo. They do everything they have seen others do to provoke the kind of reaction from the planes that they have observed. What they don't care so much about is what those planes are, why they usually care about ACTUAL runways and care about having a very good reason to drop off their cargo.
Because if they did care to understand, they'd very quickly see how pathetic it is to sit in that makeshift straw hut pretending to be an international airport.
So yes, Radix is correct - that's what I'm talking about. What ends up on the runway are either pilots who actually wanted to be somewhere else and try their best to take off as fast as possible, or are other islanders who push their own wooden boxes with straw wings onto the dirt road.
[edit] Maybe the easiest way to sum this up is: The fact that cargo arrives on your dirt runway doesn't make you a proper army radio tower operator. The fact that you score women or get people to do things that you want doesn't make you a good partner or friend.
What I'm talking about is two people who really care about each other.
That is only one type of relationship.
Every night thousands of men and women meet at bars and end up sharing a bed without necessarily the expectation that they each "really care" for the other. So this is the other extreme.
Between our two extremes lie all the other shades of gray.
Well, that may be true (Millions! I would even say). But to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why they bother. To me, that kind of behavior always seems very juvenile and ultimately not very fulfilling.
I totally get that people are into that, but I really don't see them very happy is what I'm trying to say. The ones that find that sort of behavior to be pure bliss very often turn out to be rather shallow.
I also understand that sort of hedonism to be, supposedly, very glamorous - they argue that you only have 80 years, so better squeeze the juice out of every second you get in as self-involved a fashion to satisfy your desires as possible. As long as caring so much about other people is not on your list of priorities, it's very hard for me to make a case against that. I suppose it also comes easy to you when you're very young - the world just automatically cares more about you. What happens after 40 or 50 is a different story. (And yes, I've heard the live-fast-die-young argument where people would rather go down that road and die in their late thirties. Sounds super.)
I would rather spend those 80 years as much as possible with people I intensely care about (and who care about me) and while that may be uncommon in your statistics, I think I'm still in my right to argue that it's healthier. And not just because it carries a much smaller risk of contracting various venereal diseases.
I totally get that people are into that, but I really don't see them very happy
Look, I know a lot of people who are not into that and have super caring relationships and as a result are unhappy. Happiness is such a tricky thing: if you really care about someone and yet a specific part of them displeases you, well, you're unhappy. This doesn't mean you shouldn't care about someone; it does mean that your arguing that caring equals happiness is still gross oversimplification.
But to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why they bother.
You're just looking at the empty half of the glass. If I were to do the same, I would look at the constant bickering of my neighbors in their 70s and the seeming unhappiness and wonder why anyone ever bothers getting married and remaining married.
I would have to correct you in that I think the glass that I'm looking at is really quite full. ;)
Sure, long-term relationships can be a terrible experience. But I have my doubts whether your neighbors really still care about each other. (I know, no true Scotsman, but there really is "caring" and "staying together for the kids".) It's very easy to become unhappy in whatever way, but I think it's easier to become unhappy on your own, independent and unaffected by the concern of and for other people, than it is in a caring relationship.
And you are of course right - you can find unhappiness even when caring deeply about people. I just think that it's fair of me to say that if chances really are so equal, I'd rather live in the world where people try to care.
It's simply easier to turn a net quality of life increase for society from people who are into caring about each other than from people who don't. In fact, I think the second model, while popular for a while, has quite thoroughly collapsed in the recent years.
I think I would say that experiencing that sort of bar culture is part of growing up, as is rejecting it. It's like telling kids to have fun at college--but not too much fun.
It used to be a better world when they just tried their best to get acquired without making public claims to the contrary.