181–190 of 354 posts
This always seemed like one of Google's worst decisions to me, and given that I remember the time they tried to spend $6 billion to buy Groupon, that's saying something. It was a plain unforced error. Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sort…
> Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.
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That's what makes it so amazing !!! It was a delicious self-parody. I remember reading it and thinking it made absolutely no sense as a metaphor: just imagine the poor archer being told "instead of having 15 arrows to take with you today, we've decided to give you three really heavy arrows"... that was the announcement that really made Google product management feel like a laughing stock to me, and is what I return t…
The "more wood" is in the bow, not the arrows. A bigger, heavier bow will shoot arrows with more force, but will take more effort, strength, and time to operate, so shoot fewer arrows harder.
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"You missed emails asking for verification" Did you saw the title of the email? "Important Information for your Account". It reads more like an informational email. How many important emails you've received this week? Could've been worded "[Action Required]", "Account Suspension Notice" etc. And they didn't even drop a notification when my servers were shutdown. "This will happen to you again on AWS or any other prov…
Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information". I don't understand how that part isn't your fault. They even tell you that your account will be suspended in the email. How do you not have a special filter to route emails from critical service providers? And I don't agree that GCP is "the only one that will suspend you for things like this". AWS can and has susp…
I get a dozen on those a week, they are never actually important.
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> Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information". Because 99% of emails labeled "Important Information for your Account" get discarded by spam filters including the one in your brain. In most cases it's nothing more than just another bad spam/CEO scam/phishing attempt. Clear communication is important - a proper subject line would be "Your GCE account #XYZ is g…
Again, how is it that an email, that came from your cloud service provider, titled "Important Information Regarding Your Google Account" was ignored because of the "spam filter in your brain"? Again, this really sounds like an excuse for not reading important emails from your provider. It doesn't even seem to have been marked as spam by Gmail and is from Google Payments which should already have sent off alarm bells.…
I'm not the person you replied to. Anyway, I'd expect of a company like Google to not word their e-mails in the same way cyber-criminals do - and for what it's worth, many cyber-security training programs actually teach that vaguely worded but "important sounding" subjects are a key indicator of something being fishy.
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It’s a blessing in disguise that the protocol didn’t go more “mainstream” and get exploited to death by opportunistic assholes.
RSS isn't vulnerable to such attacks though.
There are plenty of anti-patterns to follow in RSS. We just didn't see them because only techies were using feeds.
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and if the arrows are too heavy they're not gonna make it, and if you run out of arrows, you're fucked
> and if the arrows are too heavy they're not gonna make it, and if you run out of arrows, you're fucked Enough thrust will make anything fly: if your bow's range is halved by a heavier arrow, maybe switch it out for a crossbow. It only doesn't make sense if you choose the position that arrows can be switched out but not bows.
I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…
It also coincided with a persistent trend of HN itself no longer featuring random blog posts heavily but rather a) mostly popular news sites like NYTimes that finally started understanding the web demanded clickbait/Twitter-friendly high volume articles (where no one reads the article but shares the headline) and b) blogs that went viral via Twitter/FB/etc. That was the new reality a decade ago. Social media apps was…
The big social media influencers at the time, however, were using RSS feeds to find the stuff they would take viral. So it still had a beneficial effect on the environment as a whole. The tool itself can be niche in its user base but punch well above its weight if the users are influential.
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I just remembered remembered that I had read something about the history of this phrase, and I found it: an answer on Quora from five years ago. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-putti... > The background seems an oft-used phrase in Sun Microsystems by the former CEO, "all the wood behind a single arrow" which means focus on a single product and be the best in it. > When deer hunting .. "Real men…
So actual nonsense
(Of course, if I want to shoot birds the reverse would be true)