The Best RSS Feed in a While

This might not be news, but if you haven't seen Spurious Correlations, I recommend it.  The RSS feed is consistently the best thing on my reader.

(Sorry, but I have to take some credit for it).

The things we miss

There's a hacker news comment that has stuck with me through the years:

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

This was posted in 2007 regarding the fledgling Dropbox.com.

In the echo chamber of hacker culture, it's easy to dismiss new ideas for bad reasons.

Stop Trusting Startups

We have some exciting news that we wanted to share with you. Loom is now officially part of Dropbox, and we couldn’t be happier to join forces!

… 

As of today, we are no longer enrolling new users. Existing Loom users can continue to use our service until May 16, 2014.

When a service shuts down, it's not only bad for users.  It's bad for startups as a whole. 

 Why adopt a new service when it might not exist in a year?  Worse yet, why trust a group of people that will walk off with millions of dollars and leave you S.O.L.?  

I wonder if this-- not talent or user acquisition-- is the driving force behind some of the recent mega-buyouts.  It certainly benefits the Big Players to shake up confidence in small, independent companies.

And if you're not playing already, I encourage you to try the post-acquisition drinking game.