This is a good point. I'm not in the target audience for McDonalds either, but even if I were and I really really liked McDonalds, it wouldn't make it any healthier or more substantial. I would still be better off eating something else.
The whole "Oh god, Zynga is morally and creatively bankrupt" line is at least 6 months old at this point (and for a company that's only 3 years old, that's a pretty long time).
So what is your point here... It doesn't matter how long ago something like that is said; does it have any merit? Also, I think the first time I heard that kind of observation was a lot earlier than 6 months ago, and I actually still hear it.
Great point. I hope there's another way of getting rid of anonymity than having us all have Facebook accounts, because that is a great value. Having your real name and ties which connect back to your social life can hopefully be achieved somehow else... albeit probably through other sorts of centralized profile stores which might have the same stigmas as Facebook with some people. I think the key is in having many options for where you can have your profile kept and what level of data is there. As long as a profile provider's minimum level of profile data is sufficient to do away with the amount of anonymity that is necessary for a service (say Quora), it becomes a matter of how accurate the profile data is, i.e., how easy is it to create a fake account on the profile service?
The problem is, in order to know that Quora is good enough to force you to use FB Connect even though you don't want to, you have to use FB Connect... I'm certain this slows their growth.
Or maybe it makes sure that the only people who go the length to sign up are aware of the benefit of Quora, and therefore likely to be quality users contributing the the quality of Quora. In a sense, Quora uses Facebook as a filter to get great users.
Much agree. I see how you want to have a unique url for each year. I think that's a cool idea too, though each time you slide I think it's fine if the url doesn't update. Maybe unique year urls are only for inbound links.
What's with the buddhist bent YC? What does it have to do with hacking or business? I realize intelligent minds are attracted to buddhism and hinduism, but it's still pretty off topic, in addition to the idea of reincarnation being offensive to the scientifically inclined. At least feed the hackers some serious philosophy. We're smarter than this.
I am an atheist (not the annoying kind) and I feel that this short story has an interesting philosophical perspective if you can get past the literal interpretation of "god" and "reincarnation".
"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."
56 (as of now) people thinks this gratifies intellectual curiosity.
Smarter than to take everything in the most crassly literal way possible? I would hope so.
I don't much like the story, and I don't believe in reincarnation, but to suggest that serious philosophy cannot be contained in a story that involves reincarnation is a pretty shallow view. At any rate, the whole "learn to become a god" thing that's the ultimate crux of the story is much more closely affiliated with Mormonism than Buddhism or Hinduism as far as I know.
While I find Rowe perfectly charming and don't agree that he's disingenuous about anything in the talk I do agree in general about people being indulgent with the "right" question appended at the end of every statement. I've noticed this in many forms ("right", "yeah", "eh", "okay", etc...) for years and have basically the same analysis of it, that it conditions for agreement and is a cheap tactic, even if the speaker is relatively unconscious of it. There must be a term for it in linguistics. Going to look it up.
