I agree with you, but I don't think that's what's happening here - the main content of the article is about an interesting and remarkable approach to customer service from a company that every business can learn from. The format for it is as from from "hn material" as you can get, but the content is there. I agree that you can find lessons in practically any story, but I think it's whether or not the core of the story is relevant to hn that distinguishes what's appropriate to post here, not how it appears on the surface.
I'd agree with you if this were just a link to a local news story covering the event, but since the bulk of this article is an anecdote about two ways of doing customer service -- compassion vs. indifference -- and what a difference it can make, especially when the company stands behind it - there's definitely a business lesson to be learned here.
Haha you just reminded me that we used to do this same trick for tribes 2 at a friend's house. We'd play online, too, so every time the map changed on the server, we'd have to run back and forth to load the new map.
Since it involved a group of people doing it, you can't really know what the true motivation behind it was -- but I think removing the otherOS functionality simultaneously gave the movement behind this 2 things:
1) Motivation, attention, and energy (more people hearing about their efforts, offering their help, more passionately)
2) An area to focus their energy on (jailbreaking, or restoring access to homebrew/otheros as a goal)
Another thing to consider is that as far as I know, you should in theory be able to run the system at it's full capacity with the latest hack, whereas anything running on otheros was crippled by default.
Interesting product idea - could use a bit more explanation on the homepage (maybe a paragraph of explanatory text?), the video was nice but a bit hard to take in (fast paced, talking over music, short).
Your other video "How to use workflowy" was much easier to understand and actually convinced me to sign up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMVtkNrquU&fmt=18 . Specifically, the part after 1:30 where you show the length of a list when it's expanded vs. when it's organized by workflowy. I usually end up with huge word documents that look like scarily similar to the sprawling, expanded list, and when you showed how the tool cuts down on that and only shows the level of detail you need, that hit home big time and made me want to try it.
Thanks, thats really useful feedback. Nice to know the main thing that persuaded you. I wonder if we could capture that in images/text somehow too, for the people who keep saying they don't want to watch a video.
No problem, glad it was helpful! The best thing for people who don't want to watch a video might be just some screenshots of the different states of the list: compacted, expanded 1-2 levels, and fully expanded with accompanying text explaining how the product works.
Another quick suggestion: "A better way to think" doesn't really convey what your product does, maybe something like: "Map your workflow to your brain, not your brain to your workflow." would work better? Something more descriptive might help people tell more quickly whether or not the product is relevant to them and worth checking out.
Was looking for it too, found it: http://www.pagerduty.com/docs/api/api-documentation took a while, though -- in my opinion, a link to the API documentation is important enough to put in the footer, maybe next to or under "integration guides".
Moving from "click to enable technology that usually contains annoying video and sound" to "click to enable video and/or sound" is a better approach, in my opinion. That way if someone wants videos to play, but require permission to play sound, or wants sounds on one site but no videos, they can do that. We move from an all or none solution to something customizable.
Also embedded audio and gifs aren't covered by flash-blockers, though in some cases there isn't much of a difference between that and a video ad. If we have to filter content by type and/or by html tag instead of "wrapper that normally contains type", we'd get better coverage overall.
I think your intuition is correct - that user contributions generally follow a power law, so when you randomize 1-to-1 interaction among all members, the likelihood of a person in the long-tail getting feedback from another user in the long-tail is high. A good essay on this: http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
