Terribly bad judgment to post that. Like apparently numerous others, that bit caught my eye and made me pause and reflect on the downside of SaaS.
Even looking at the filename seems pretty suspect, as an aside. What if the filename was BankruptcyPreparation.docx, or TerminationOfBobDobbs.pdf, etc? The metadata about a file should be confidential as well.
Plenty of other services have shown indiscretion about their client's data. That doesn't validate this case, especially considering that many of us look to 37signals as essentially the poster boy of leading behaviors.
We expect more from them.
I am not trying to be argumentative but want to respond to a point you made as I think it is critically important for many HNers running or aspiring to run SaaS solutions-
"If you're that protective of your data, then it's up to you make wiser decisions. For starters, don't name your files SuperSecretPrivateInfo.doc and then give them to other people to store."
For real? I guarantee that 37signals would not sanction such a ridiculous statement. Most SaaS companies wouldn't touch such claims with a 40' pole.
The industry lives and breathes on the feeling that the data is confidential. We're currently looking at some hosted helpdesk ticket solutions, and I can tell you that if there was even the slightest hint that the vendors casually browsed our data we would rethink the whole adventure.
With all due respect, both of your responses have been completely obnoxious. You seem to be taking some unmerited grizzled vet position that might sell to children, but here it reads like a junior developer talking tough.
See, we actually sell software as a service. Data security
for our clients isn't marketing, it is the absolutely lifeblood of the company (just as it is a critical principal for this industry). 37signals knows that it was a foolish oversight to casually comment on content trawling, which is a good sign. Your ridiculous arguments in their favor do no one any good.
>Have you ever supported a product that has external users?
And if an apartment dweller had a plumbing leak, the landlord would enter their apartment and fix the leak. They would access on a need basis. They wouldn't do casual sneak and peeks and then post analysis on the entry door that seven residents have bongs in their living rooms.
Seriously, though, mechanisms to deal with exception situations, such as customer support, has nothing to do with "looking because it made for a fun blog post".
I only engage in this conversation because this is important for many HNers -- spin all the justifications you want, or blame users (a good attitude that guarantees business failure), however this was a serious blunder that other businesses should look to avoid.
Even if you do casually trawl the data of your users, for the love of all things unholy don't talk about it.
Rather, they did "SELECT filename WHERE row_num = 100000000".
They're the ones who have repeatedly described it as "looking at the logs". That struck me as weird -- to have a log that ordinally attributes every upload -- however that's how they describe it and is hence why others describe it so.
Honestly, if you're concerned about something like this then you should not be using a third party solution to store your files.
I engaged in the prior argument, and there too this was the common last line of defense.
It misses the point.
Everyone knows that SaaS vendors can access your data and files, so it is bizarre that this keeps getting mentioned like it was unknown. Yet critical businesses engage vendors to hold their most confidential files -- the sorts that auditors grill them over and various bureaucratic organizations monitor them on.
Because they know, or at least believe and hope, that the organizations they entrust with their data use discretion, and have standard policies and standards -- if not actual data security and auditing controls -- to ensure that data is only used on a need basis. For instance for support purposes.
Writing a blog post that flippantly mentions a customer's data sends the wrong message. While we all know it is possible, it gives the entirely wrong impression to customers. Data security is the #1 impediment to the adoption of SaaS.
SaaS depends upon the trust of customers, and DHH is approaching this in the right way. It is quite a contrast from the many laissez faire responses on here.
This is what I marvel at when I read such (poorly justified) piracy screeds.
Are people insane?
I might not have ultimate faith in Microsoft, but comparatively I have zero faith (and a lot of suspicion) of what are essentially bands of thieves among piracy groups.
I engaged in casual piracy when I was a teen out of necessity, though I never felt the need to invent justifications. In my adult life, though...pirating executables is the domain of the naive or the ridiculously trustworthy.
It's worth noting that banks and similar organizations put safeguards, controls and extensive auditing on the data that limits the data tourism that any employee can engage in. You trust the organization because the organization knows that humans are fallible and essentially doesn't trust its own workers.
I don't think anyone is really ready to call the race. And despite being an Android booster, I am very pleased to see Apple continuing to do gangbusters.
The worst thing that could happen would be a marginalized Apple.
We need competition in this market. Android made iOS better, and iOS makes Android better. It is fantastic that we are past the point when iOS can't essentially coast on the fact that it has the network effect and the app base -- Android is now a compelling choice for Johnny Regularperson, with all of the big apps you want and all of the big services.
I suspect that many of those minutes are playing Angry Birds or minesweeper. While it might cut into Facebook gaming time, I don't think it really is competition for what most of us see the web as providing.
It really is all very temporary anyways. Native apps took off because the web wasn't ready for mobile (most sites were horrendous, etc). I am finding more and more sites offering up excellent mobile experiences that rival or exceed what their parallel native apps offer. Just a few stories away from this the fogcreek crew say "Apps provide things we can’t get out of the web: better speed, offline support, smooth animations, push notifications, and a native look and feel". Of those the only item that legitimately is an advantage of native apps is look and feel.
"Have you ever seen a 4-year old try an iPad? Such experience was just not thinkable 10 years ago."
Have you seen a 4-year old try a Windows machine?
Honestly, I'm unsure whether people are just grossly underestimating children, or they never bothered giving them the outlet before. My four year old is a master of Windows 7. He has no problem with Vista before, going back to when he was two. He loads the browser, knows his favorite sites, uses YouTube, plays games on CBC Kids, etc. As did my two older children. My one year old hops up on the PC and moves the mouse, clicking on things of interest on the screen.
I just don't get the notion that kids and the iPad are some magical combination. Kids are brilliant, at a very young age, and the only reason the kids and the iPad/phone/pod stories get play is that it plays into the mythology surrounding Apple.
"Those engineers got compensated for their work, now Apple wants to be compensated for its work."
For real? We're discussing the company that just announced the largest non-energy profit in history, right? That has $100 billion in the bank? That is almost certain to continue growing that profit for at least a few years to come?
My heart breaks for them. They just want to be compensated.
The argument that it is difficult to hold Apple as a victim when they're rolling in enormous success.
But yes, as a society and culture there is a natural disdain for excessive success ($100 billion in cash reserves? That is deeply unsettling), and as a natural course both the government and the courts are going to be less favourable to Apple.
You are replying to a different person than the original poster.
Secondly, no, emotional situations don't excuse the delivery. Unless he was literally writing a cry for help from confinement somewhere, he can take the time and respect readers by putting in some semblance of appropriate formatting. If it's just a rant then so be it, but it doesn't belong here.
Thirdly, HN isn't a support group. I'm not going to bother with comforting words because the parts I could decipher give the image of a very naive, assumptive, flippant person. So many mistakes were made -- on their part (at the very outset by proclaiming a right to enter another country -- that I'm surprised that they spent the effort seeking sympathy.
Recall that the 9/11 terrorists came via the US/Canadian border.
Not one of the 9/11 terrorists entered the US from Canada, and it is a startling indictment that there are people still so incredibly ignorant to make this claim.
Further the US has one of the most porous borders on the planet, with some 12 million+ illegals within its confines right now. They didn't get there from Canada -- they flew directly in from overseas, or walked across the land border from Mexico.
It is an incredible mistake to make, so yes it does bring your perspective into question. Especially given that this story has absolutely nothing to do with "catching terrorists" -- even the most paranoid interpretation wouldn't go down that route -- and everything to do with immigration thinking he was going to be a lazy layabout who would end up working illegally in the US (or worse would end up resorting to petty crime to support himself)
Not only is the observation that P&S cameras are going to decline obvious, the author posted this after various P&S manufacturers reported on said decline. This is like predicting the Superbowl champion on Monday.
In other news, alarm clocks, MP3 players, GPS units, and voice dictation devices are all going to decline at the hands of smartphones. News at 11.
There is a certain class of problem that often appears on the web presentation layer -- the interaction between the browser and a cornucopia of back-end sources and systems -- where nodejs is often a very good fit, and it is almost always what enthusiasts of the platform are speaking of.
That's it. Nothing more.
I've seen various angry retorts that opine that become it isn't suitable for various very unsuitable purposes (see - calculating prime numbers, etc), it sucks. Such misdirection has no place in this industry.
If you've spent any appreciable amount of time on Hacker News, you'd know that there has been pretty big hype behind Node.js
A considerable percentage of HN's visitors deal in exactly the realm that node.js serves: that gooey layer between browser and back-end systems. This is like complaining that coffee enthusiasts are interested in burr grinders when it's entirely unsuitable for chipping tree branches. There is no surprise that many HNers find node.js interesting and exciting.
The fact that you have only been a member here for 22 days is plainly apparent.
How utterly obnoxious. I suspect that few of the HN community would embrace your inability to accept your error.
You latched on to one part of my original statement - which particular terrorist it was that crossed the border - and missed the overall point.
You claimed that all of those responsible for the worst terrorist incident in the US history came through Canada. Only none of them did. It's a pretty egregious claim.
The rest of your boring story is irrelevant. Terrorism has nothing to do with this situation. Nothing at all. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
All else isn't the same. For one, this event-based, single-threaded "asynchronous" execution environment running on a dynamic language uses javascript, which is a surprisingly powerful functional language that just happens to run on the other side of the web server conversation in the context that we are discussing.
Being able to standardize and coalesce the two sides of the web pipeline -- regardless of what magic happened at the other layers -- has obvious merits.
My interest in having a boring argument with a language bigot approaches nil. But yes, aside from the very namesake of functional programming (a vague language grouping with no disciplined definition), yeah there's nothing else there...groan.
>Every thermostat I've seen that can do half of what Nest is doing is covered in about 50 buttons
Remove control and it's easy to remove buttons. There is no brilliant design or innovation there. Whether the removed control is logical or beneficial, however, is a completely different matter -- there is absolutely zero evidence that the Nest delivers on the farfetched promises it makes.
I personally can't believe it has gotten as much attention as it has. It is a non-solution for a non-problem. The single and only reason it got coverage was the Apple angle.
Not really, unless your world is binary. There are a lot of extremely refined, slick implementations out there. You don't know about them because they couldn't be called the "ipod of thermostats" (with leading comparisons with the ugliest, most rudimentary thermostats, as if the giant industry doesn't exist).
As for Nest's claims, I assume you're talking about energy savings and, if so, are so very, very wrong...I'm rather confident that the average American...
It is interesting how you arrived at such an energy claim with no clear avenue between the beginning and the end.
Why bigot your statement with such a ridiculous lead-in?
On my Gingerbread device the browser right now, in the background, is using 67.15MB. What does that demonstrate? Nothing, given that the RAM was available and web browsing is one of, if not the most, complex activities you can do.
Decoupling the browser from the OS is one of the best things that could happen for android security going forward.
Decoupling everything but the most rudimentary services is the best way forward for both security and user satisfaction. Despite the laser focus on the underlying operating system version by so many, tens of millions of Android users, across makes, models, and carriers, are seeing endless updates of mapping and navigation, the search functionality, the mail applications, the Android market, and so on. Decoupling the browser adds it into the bin of "no longer need to care about the underlying OS much", and goes a long way to make the fragmentation issue a non-issue.
Fortunately iOS already did most of this on its own.
By pushing everyone to apps? iOS is no shepherd in the movement to standardized, cross-platform solutions. It is probably the greatest setback the open web has faced in over a decade.
Same experience -- Flash works close to perfectly on my Galaxy S II.
This isn't a technology move, however, but rather is a revenue move: Adobe makes no money from Flash, but instead makes money from authoring tools. The lack of an iOS target is killing the authoring tools on the Flash side (who would build a new site or delivery mechanism using Flash when you know it cuts out a huge portion of the market?). So Adobe is refocusing on HTML5 tools.
Even though Flash is useful today, Google doesn't want to inherit the cost and risk of developing it on mobile so....no more Flash.
Kind of hard to believe, given that iOS was and still is the only mobile OS with a browser that does not suck.
Yeah, I see John Gruber likes to say that.
It is, so to speak, horse shit. I apologize for the language but it's all that satisfactorily delivers my opinion on that. Have you ever actually used the Android browser?
And webkit derived from KHTML (loosely), the project coming to public attention as Apple came under criticism for taking but not giving.
Apple's original plan
And Google's original plan was don't be evil. I would never -- even if I ever got some screwed up idea that I need to defend a corporation online -- reference that to defend their honour.
The point you were making was that the iOS browser is so superior to its competitors that it demonstrated Apple's commitment to the web.
Only the Android browser doesn't actually suck. I've never, ever heard someone actually describe why it sucks, they just repeat that going meme and smile and nod at each other. Yet despite all of its CSS chrome, many mobile dev projects abandon the effort and switch to an app after facing the less sexy, but deadly deficiencies in the iOS browser.
People are sure the iOS browser is great because they never actually use it. Instead they use apps.
But even there, no one actually reads those permissions lists, and apps routinely ask for far more than they need.
Lots of people do read those permission lists, and they are one of the most commonly referenced complaints in app reviews. A firestorm arose when an Angry Birds update inexplicably added the ability to send SMS'.
Further it focuses a spotlight when an app does request a permission that seems out of place. Ideally when Google evaluates app for their "staff's picks" (the "optional curation") they consider threat surface area.
Depends on Modernizr.js, underscore.js, jQuery 1.7
Is the JavaScript library thing getting a little out of hand?
The functionality that this offers is but a few lines of unencumbered code with zero dependencies (obviously gracefully not doing anything if the browser supports it).
The myth he talks about is specifically startup life, so it can't possibly precede it. It is perhaps a bit aggrandizing to compare, for instance, the general day to day operation of Stack Exchange or Reddit or any other "startup" style site with two of the greatest in human history.
There are a lot of very successful organizations and individuals who don't commit themselves to the demonstration of heroic effort. You don't hear about them because heroics is a nice narrative, and the lack of heroics is seldom worthy of mention.
Can you give examples of some of these companies "swinging for the fences"?
Often it comes down to execution competence. I've seen self-titled startups put in incredible effort...and then come out with something that should have been a weekend project. I've seen casual weekend projects turn into brilliance.
I would offer up that many of those who have to work "24/7" do so as a poor alternative to competence/ability. Some of them, on the flipside, barely put in fulltime hours of real work, but maintain so little self-control and discipline, so focused on the display of heroics, that they seemingly always need to work.
Perhaps that's cynical, but I've never read a story where people legitimately put in an incredible effort and yielded a corresponding output.
Imagine what would have happened if there were 40 competing companies in the market looking for user support.
Popunders, exploits, bring-your-browser-to-a-crawl ads that spurred a massive move to ad blockers.
This submission is poised to bring out everyone with a chip on their shoulder about Google or Adwords, but the reality is that Google's ad quality control is one of the primary reasons they have been successful. Further I am skeptical of the innocence of so many.
In this particular case, the outcome seems obvious -- it was an abuse of the free ads coupons. Simply thinking through it made the end result inevitable.
I don't think Google has any illusions that it's the same person. Instead they see it as the same beneficiary.
If this weren't a problem we could have a Hacker News "free ad" board (with "free" meaning "at the cost of other advertisers". Due to the bid system free ad coupons cost Google next to nothing) where people could post their pet site and hundreds of people could use some or all of their "free" $100 to yield tens of thousands in free ads.
I have indeed heard the whiny, victimized rants of some low-level employees ("Woe is us!"), however by and large I think it's nonsense. The restrictions and oversight the DoJ put on Microsoft were well known and are public record. They aren't secretly restricting them beyond what we all know.
Microsoft did get but a slap on the wrist, and rightly so. Though it's worth noting that had Microsoft received the punishment so many sought -- the breaking up of the company -- the parts would almost certainly be worth much more than the whole right now.
Microsoft's problems are Microsoft-created. Like RIM, Microsoft was more focused on entrenching the status quo than planning for the future.
Reading the various horror stories in here, clearly there is an opportunity for a startup to make lots of cash and clean house in this space. It sounds like Google arbitrarily are jerks just for the fun of it. Displacing them should be a piece of cake -- post your new ad network on HN and see the network effect kick in as it takes over the net.
Or maybe Google actually has a difficult problem they are dealing with, which is a market with endless ranks of scammers and shady con artists (some of whom will colour their story to make them a victim, posting it in HN).
The aggressive dismissal of the concerns are unwarranted and a bit ignorant. The concern is not, per se, vendor extensions -- such a mechanism exists for a reason -- but rather that many users of those extensions have lazily taken to only bothering with webkit extensions. Most of the time for no reason other than an IE-only like "suck it" attitude (many demos front-paged here on HN only work in single browser, despite often needing just trivial changes to work elsewhere).
Dismiss the W3C and the purpose for standards at your peril. Webkit and its offshoots have the ability to innovate on the edge because that body and its impact kept the web open.
EDIT: It's worth noting, with sober consideration, that exactly the same argument was made to support Internet Explorer during the ugliest days of the web. This could have been cribbed verbatim from something a Microsoft advocate would have said in the late 90s.
and Apple is not in the ads business, hence, they have no use of your personal data (as opposed to Google).
Aside from the fact that Apple is in the ad business (to limited success and motive thus far, though if the hardware sales profit train slowed down you can guarantee they would grow more interest), even if they weren't they still are incredibly interested in data about their customers. All businesses are interested in slicing and dicing and categorizing and maximizing sell through, etc.
It's completely SFW if you have privacy. If you don't have complete privacy it's SFW if anyone who might possibly catch a glance at your screen will unrealistically spend the time understanding the content on said screen.
In most workplaces random passerby's will only get a quick glance and then try to decipher what they saw from visual persistence. Almost anyone will assume he's looking at porn of other workplace-questionable content.
I thought it sounded like an interesting submission. While I am hardly a prude, 15 seconds into it the stench of "Bro!" was too overwhelming and the Back button drew my focus.
Maybe without football, we'd be closer to finally decoupling youth sports from the education system.
Going off track, but by finally are you saying that's a positive thing?
I'm a nerd. I've always been a nerd. I had the absolute minimum mandatory participation in sports during school. That is one of my biggest regrets. Sports have incredible importance in so many ways.
To add to your point, of the original six NHL teams, four were American. Hockey is a very American game, at least for the upper half of the country (it is a big country).
This means it's perfectly legal to blindside someone as hard as you can, often helmet to helmet.
Intentional helmet to helmet hits are forbidden. Indeed, blindside hits are a pretty dangerous ground, with any hits touching the victims head or neck yielding significant penalties. Further there's the concept of a "defenseless" receiver, again bringing major penalties.
They constantly amend the rules to try to make the game safer, while still physical and exhilerating.
The post I replied to opined that "Maybe without football, we'd be closer to finally decoupling youth sports from the education system.": Their issue wasn't just with football, and instead football was the beachhead to try to excise physical activity.
In my high school there were a large number of prominent sports, with participation covering a hefty percentage of the student base. Wrestling, basketball, football, swimming, badminton, track and field, volleyball, among others. There was something for almost anyone, and it was a fundamental part of the social, learning, and physical wellness recipe. The school heavily promoted and celebrated academic excellence as well (and, contrary to the common bigotry, many of the academic leaders -- the ones who I competed with -- excelled at sports as well).
If a particular school focused only on football, then of course that would be a problem.
Few of Apples products have the latest, best hardware in them.
Whenever Apple launches a new product, they do generally have the latest, best hardware in them. The "everyone else is chasing specs" argument seems to appear a bit later in the product cycle when competitors have jumped ahead.
With all the potential an Apple TV has, with the iOS-ecosystem, with Siri-voice control, streaming media from your Macs (the list goes on), I'd be very scared if I were Samsung.
I have a Samsung TV. My smartphone acts as a remote with a cute little app. I can "throw" pictures, videos, and music to it. I can't run Android apps on it, but it is one of their "Smart" models with a bunch of apps on it.
I use zero of that functionality. Instead I just use the on and off button and the functionality of my cable box. If Apple thinks they're going to disrupt the content business, har de har har.
Sidenote -- my cable box is from Motorola, which is now Google. So Google just reentered the TV business in a very, very big way (after the rather dismal failure that was Google TV).
Are people on here aware that Apple already makes Apple TV? By many of the comments I have to guess no, given that many seem to miss that Apple has already demonstrated what intelligence and ease of use they bring to TVs.
The TV industry is a massive, hyper-competitive industry with extremely tight margins (I can buy a good quality 46" LED 1080p smart TV for less than the price of an iPhone 4S). TVs have -- by design -- tried to focus on the display side, leaving the content side to whatever myriad of boxes you have pushing content to it, and that's how customers differentiate.
I don't see Apple being successful at TVs at all, or even why they would want to be beyond what they offer with Apple TV.
The same can be said of PC's. Apple came in and changed that.
The iMac turned around things for Apple because they were cheap, all-in-one computers. I considered getting one at the time just as a kitchen computer.
Apple played the existing game with the iMac. Even now in their computer products if you spec out a comparable competitor, the pricing is very similar.
Apple makes big money in nascent new markets -- tablets and smartphones. Tablets because they can draft int the pricing of computers, and smartphones because most of the cost is hidden by subsidization (if everyone had to pay the total upfront cost of the device things would rapidly change).
Even looking at the filename seems pretty suspect, as an aside. What if the filename was BankruptcyPreparation.docx, or TerminationOfBobDobbs.pdf, etc? The metadata about a file should be confidential as well.