From the article, Let's ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have about making a 17 year-old a millionaire. The price tag for this company aside, am I the only one that detects a hint of jealousy in some of the comments that seem to imply "but he's too young to be a millionaire!"?
The Summly deal makes no sense
171–180 of 260 posts
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#172For some who need perspective: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born into an uberly rich family. That child will grow up to inherit millions for absolutely no work. He'll live the good life full of yachts and private jets. Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a party happening full of gorgeous wealthy people who need not lift a finger to attain the luxuries that they have. Their success is o…
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yahoo just paid $30mm for an unknown technology and a fresh face to parade around, they would appreciate it if you didn't start poking holes in the narrative. Thank you
Actually it now looks more and more like some sort of elaborate kick-back scheme for the investors. "Your YHOO stock has sunk below the waterline, so here's something to sweeten the pot."
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#174Bad for Yahoo.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#175In 2005 Yahoo buys Delicious, a bookmarking site, for between $15MM - $30MM. Summly was acquired for a reported $30MM. Delicious had 5MM users, and let's face it how much "CS beef" goes into a bookmark sharing site. Summly claims to have 1MM downloads. The difference between Delicious' 5MM users and Summly's 1MM is a factor of five but the order of magnitude is roughly the same. Joshua Schachter is highly respected a…
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#176For some who need perspective: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born into an uberly rich family. That child will grow up to inherit millions for absolutely no work. He'll live the good life full of yachts and private jets. Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a party happening full of gorgeous wealthy people who need not lift a finger to attain the luxuries that they have. Their success is o…
Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born in a farm house with a dirt floor. That child will grow up to die in a civil war before age 14.
Right now, somewhere in the world, there are people waiting in line to get food from a charity.
Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is suffering from a disease because they can't afford the cure.
Right now, somewhere in the world, a man goes to work carrying bricks for 10 hours a day to feed his 3 children.
Right now, somewhere in the world, a woman rides her bike to work in polluted air at 6am, to a factory job where she will work 12 hours a day putting together tablets that all the "unlucky people who have to work" trying to be dot com millionaires will buy one day on a whim and then discard less than 6 months later. And this is good, because she has a job.
The real interesting thing is these people generally don't complain much, not nearly as much as we do.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's not got a good reputation for communication: http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve...
So he's a teenager?
(I, as someone who is comparable in age to D'Aloisio, would never try this kind of shit, especially to someone affiliated with a major news organization; nor can I think of any of my peers who would. I honestly don't understand why people have such outrageous notions about how young people act, and have such permissive views about they ought to act. It doesn't matter how old he is, this sort of behavior is absurd.)
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that all of the events you've listed are probably happening somewhere in the world, but I disagree that we should all just accept this as "the world we live in" and carry on. Look back across history and consider what would have happened if at any point, the people on the losing end of any deal were to simply keep their heads down and keep working. It's worth talking about. It's worth criticizing. It may not…
It is only worth attention if that attention becomes productive action. So yeah, criticize, only if you think someone influential is listening.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#179For some who need perspective: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born into an uberly rich family. That child will grow up to inherit millions for absolutely no work. He'll live the good life full of yachts and private jets. Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a party happening full of gorgeous wealthy people who need not lift a finger to attain the luxuries that they have. Their success is o…
> unfair It's laughable that a programmer would worry about how unfair the industry is on the top end. Do you get how lucky we are compared even to other engineers? To say nothing of service workers who work much harder for much less.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#180For some who need perspective: Right now, somewhere in the world, a child is being born into an uberly rich family. That child will grow up to inherit millions for absolutely no work. He'll live the good life full of yachts and private jets. Right now, somewhere in the world, there is a party happening full of gorgeous wealthy people who need not lift a finger to attain the luxuries that they have. Their success is o…
> I get down about how unfair that is from time to time, but there's nothing you can really do about it, other than focus on your work. Fairness is a fictional manmade concept. That we expect some sort of fairness in life is solely due to our social contract. It's not fair to me that someone steals my car and thus we have systems in place to address that. However, nothing in our laws, norms, ethics, or philosophy say…
So not entirely manmade.