> musk’s historical behavior I assume he won’t consider breaking something like accessibility to be bad or problematic. I don't see why would he spend more to make website less accessible. Not fixing bugs - yes, just about everyone does so. But breaking it intentionally costs money. Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is.
> Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is. SpaceX is... an accessible EV? What?
> musk’s historical behavior I assume he won’t consider breaking something like accessibility to be bad or problematic. I don't see why would he spend more to make website less accessible. Not fixing bugs - yes, just about everyone does so. But breaking it intentionally costs money. Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is.
Accessibility is not a by cost thing, and you aren't paying to break accessibility, you're paying to break scraping and maintaining accessibility when doing so costs money. It also requires having engineers working to keep the site accessible, but musk fired them.
Scraping is much easier when sites are more accessible.
> musk’s historical behavior I assume he won’t consider breaking something like accessibility to be bad or problematic. I don't see why would he spend more to make website less accessible. Not fixing bugs - yes, just about everyone does so. But breaking it intentionally costs money. Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is.
> Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is. SpaceX is... an accessible EV? What?
I'm pretty sure you know exactly what the poster meant ...
This is why I will never build a company based around a free API from a for-profit company. I'd never be able to sleep well at night knowing that years of work and all the employees/families that depend on the business is dependent on someone who could wake up one day and decide on a whim to end access.
By the same reasoning, one shouldn’t build a company based on any API, regardless of whether it’s free or paid; the existence of a paid API does not automatically guarantee any future pricing or even availability. One could build a company around a paid API only to have the pricing jacked up 10x or the API shut down or neutered in some critical way and end up in, functionally, the same situation.
This same reasoning could be expanded to include using any product from any company. There is always a chance that a component will be discontinued, priced out, etc. Definitely need to analyze risk vs reward when using another companies product. However, in my opinion, a free API represents a substantially increased risk unless that free API constitutes a major portion of the business. For example, using an Azure API is probably fairly safe while using an API to gather data on FPS Multiplayer Game X match stats may not be.
A huge concern that no one seems to be mentioning is that pretty much all academic data sets that used the Twitter API were required by the TOS to only be released publicly with the tweet ids, not the content of the tweet. Some of these have hundreds of thousands of tweets, and the only way to check the work of the researchers, or to build on it, is to use the api to reseed everything yourself. With this new policy t…
feel free to get in touch How? I am not a full-fledged network scientist, but I know a whole lot of academics in this space and am good enough to swap tips/find minor math errors. I know quite a lot of people staring down the exact problem you describe.
From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.
If charging for API usage amounts to developer alienation, then why is Apple the most successful business in the world? Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their…
Accessibility is not a by cost thing, and you aren't paying to break accessibility, you're paying to break scraping and maintaining accessibility when doing so costs money. It also requires having engineers working to keep the site accessible, but musk fired them.
Scraping is much easier when sites are more accessible.
Correct, which is why making something accessible and not scrapeable is harder/more expensive than breaking accessibility.
> Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is. SpaceX is... an accessible EV? What?
I'm pretty sure you know exactly what the poster meant ...
> I'm pretty sure you know exactly what the poster meant ...
No, I don't. It obviously is trying to say something about accessibility and SpaceX, but I don't see how the sense of accessbility being discussed in the thread even applies to SpaceX, much less what claim is being made.
@dang wondering why this rather major tech story doesn't make the front page, when stories with fewer points that were posted much earlier have. The lack of transparency is actively hindering HN's news functionality.
I was offline last night and didn't see it until now. It was downweighted, I assume as yet-another-Twitter-drama story, but I agree this was above the line for significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) so I've belatedly turned off the downweight and re-upped it.
p.s. @dang doesn't do anything - I only saw your comment by accident. If anyone wants to ask or tell us something, the reliable way is hn@ycombinator.com.