If that is the case it should be easy enough to prove in court. Or is it going to be more of the early Facebook, Twitter, Youtube days. Where everyone that played a bit part all of the sudden had great big titles in the founding of the companies.
I'm not sure what what happened but it could also be equally said this guy's code wasn't any good, wasn't used, and so the founders didn't want to pay for it. And the Paypal resolution dispute seems to agree. Something was exchanged but not everyone was happy with what was received.
Were there a number of people saying they did a lot for Twitter? In my opinion from what I've read, Noah Glass, one of the co-founders, really did get screwed over and seemed to have done a lot with his short time at Twitter.
I was thinking more of the Winklevii. Basically, people that play a small role early on then leave (or jettisoned) only to come back claiming they were the idea/backbone/major contributor.
I totally agree Glass got screwed.
Many years ago I wrote the code for an online store. I outsourced the payment processing and photo upload functions. If the store somehow managed to grow to Amazon size who knows what those 2 developers would say. To me, they played a very small, but essential, role.
I see. Did you pay the outsourced coders fairly? I'm sure they would say something but to me that is different from the Winklevii. I do think because FB was able to explode so much and Zuckerberg did mislead them a bit, them receiving what they did, $60M in stock (though now it would be much higher) and some cash seems fair. Obviously they barely did anything for FB and they wouldn't have likely made any big website on their own. But because of Zuckerberg's actions and because FB did become as big as it did, I find what they ended up getting to be fair. Do you not think so?
But hah originally I thought you were including Noah Glass in your assessment and was either going to inquire about why because his story is so incredibly sad to me.
I think this shows one reason it can benefit young people to join a company in the industry they are targeting before jumping into startup life. One of the best/easiest ways to find pain points is to be knee deep in the industry. Obviously in this specific case I am not recommending going to prison, but hopefully you get the point.
Easier is relative here. If you have means to bootstrap or access to capital then yes it is but that's not always the case. Furthermore if you don't have any business connections relationships in the business getting into many industries (outside of software) can be quite the challenge.
I don't really understand the logic behind preventing inmates from accessing internet. It seems to me that if the aim of prison is rehabilitate inmates and reduce crime then giving them access to internet would be beneficial.
I can understand why some inmates should not have access to internet to prevent them from directing their activities outside of prison but I'm sure that those are a small minority.
> I can understand why some inmates should not have access to internet to prevent them from directing their activities outside of prison but I'm sure that those are a small minority.
First, you underestimate how bad it is in prison.
Second, giving internet access some some inmates would expose them to threats and blackmail from their less rehabilitated counterparts. "Send this threatening email to my enemy, or you'll drop the soap." And it would expose them to threats from the outside: "I know you're in prison with my enemy. Kill him, or your daughter will suffer."
Third, you underestimate how bad it is in prison.
The rehabilitation is a noble goal but what these guys needs are psychologists, drug therapy and social workers, not internet addiction.
Inmates can already make (and receive?) phone calls and letters, not to mention visits. I fail to see how are those situations not already possible, even without Internet access. It's not like we can't monitor online conversations.
The situation may not be perfect today, but communication to/from prisons are heavily guarded to prevent these situations and others.
Inmates in most countries can make phone calls only to phone numbers which have been approved, usually only family. You can't make random phone calls. All phone calls are monitored and recorded to prevent abuse.
You can't call an inmate afaik, that would be a very low security facility, which I am not aware of.
Visitors are only by request and undergo security checks before, during and after visits. And yes, visitors are a huge security issue in prisons, but if you deny all visitors to prisoners, you're in Guantanamo, not a normal prison anymore. There are different levels of security in prisons.
Internet access is much harder to control. Encryption is, as you as a HN reader know, very easy to do on a computer, but hard using your voice. Hiding information on a computer is easy, but very hard on a voice phone.
There have been prisons in the world that allowed internet access to inmates and there are problems with that, much as with visitors or phone calls. It's a balancing act to weigh those problems to the benefits. You just have to go into the discussion with open eyes about the problems that internet access would bring. Imagine a pedophile convicted for sexually harassing children online, and giving him/her internet access in prison. What an outrage. Someone in a low sec jail for DUI could be given internet access, no problems. It happends, I've even seen a CEO run his company from within the jail. He was given supervised internet access to his companys financial system once a month, one guard watching pover his shoulder at all times. Not a very scalable solution though.
> The situation may not be perfect today, but communication to/from prisons are heavily guarded to prevent these situations and others.
That's pretty funny. Contraband cell phones are ridiculously common in prison. I had a buddy of mine in prison, was there for four years. At one point he started calling me from jail, from a contraband phone.
He called me often enough and we chatted long enough on these calls that I got the feeling that there wasn't any sort of real scarcity when it comes to communications in prison.
The phones had Internet access, he would update his Facebook page from prison. At one point he even asked me for money so that he could buy his own contraband cell phone. (I said no)
As for scalability... I was thinking that for sure free access to internet would be very hard to monitor, but say you limit it to email: That would be certainly much, much easier (hence cheaper) to monitor than what we currently have.
Every written letter must be opened and read, possibly with an horrible script which takes time to "decipher". Besides, I don't know if they keep copies of all the mail in case something happens, but it would be orders of magnitude harder to index and search than email anyway. Phone calls are even worse, since you need at least as much time to monitor the conversation as the conversation lasts.
Maybe introducing email would shift some of the friends and family to use this cheaper means of communication, reducing costs. Or maybe Jevons paradox applies here and the number of emails would go up to such an extent that the improved efficiency would not make up for the increased traffic.
P.S.: just to make it clear, I'm not advocating for the inmates to have their phone calls replaced for emails.
In this case, it could make sense to give internet access in lower security prison where they are unlikely to be exposed to threats and blackmail?
I agree that psychologists, social workers and drug therapy are needed but I do think that access to internet and the information it contains is a huge help for people to better be prepared to the world as it as evolved.
But you're right I'm rather naive about the conditions of prison, the little I know I know it by having read articles by Michael Santos through HN which while interesting do not provide a complete view of how prison really is.
The thing is from what I've read of reconviction rates in US, France and other countries, the prison system isn't working. It's expensive and doesn't rehabilitate prisoners very well and from the percentage of the population who is convicted in the US, I'm not sure it even works well as a deterrent.
> The thing is from what I've read of reconviction rates in US, France and other countries, the prison system isn't working. It's expensive and doesn't rehabilitate prisoners very well and from the percentage of the population who is convicted in the US, I'm not sure it even works well as a deterrent.
I agree completely with you here. Prisons do not rehabilitate, and they are a poor deterrent. Especially longer stints in prison tends to damage the inmate rather than improve.
There's a enormous difference between what "prison" is in France, US, Sweden, Russia or Thailand. I wish the world would at least move towards the "best practice" of prisons, because there are such things.
Prisons are terrible but honestly does anyone believe the world would be better without them.
> Prisons are terrible but honestly does anyone believe the world would be better without them.
I completely agree that they're a necessary evil and that there's a need for a type of prison. I think rehabilitation is really what the focus should be since this is what will bring the biggest benefits to society.
There's also an argument to be made (and made by a lot of people) that there are too many people incarcerated in the US when it's not necessarily in the country's best interest for those people to go to prison (war on drug, ...).
It was interesting discussing with you and if you have any good references on "best practices" I'd be interested in reading them.
> honestly does anyone believe the world would be better without them.
That's needlessly turning this into an either/or proposition. Prisons are a tool. In many contexts (drugs) that tool is being overused. In some (rape) it is underused.
Those are not really goals of US prisons. We're more into both institutionalizing revenge in order to prevent vigilantism and family feuds, and also protecting upper middle class neighborhoods and tourist areas from robberies and property crimes. Also locking up racial minorities for victimless crimes is a priority.
Some prisoners don't even have access to books... [1]
It reminds of an inmate diary I read some time ago (he was in a French prison). Not only he didn't have access to books. But even clean underwear or blankets were luxury items. I think he could only shower once or twice a week. I can't find the link anymore.
I'm French but from what I've seen and read about French prisons they are not much better.
I know that people see it as being only punishment but it's rather self defeating as proven by the high reconviction rates across countries. In france, 38% are reconvicted [1] and in US, 51.8% [2] (in 1994)
I feel that the way prisons work now is a waste for society in term of money used and results.
Don't forget hair, nails, makeup, massage, personal training, personal stylists, personal assistants, interior design, restaurants, drivers, and prostitution.
Just noticed at the bottom of forbes.com, ostensibly one of the gold-standard names in personal finance, I see 6 "promoted stories" - all of which violate facebook's recent click-baiting standards: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-bait...
Wikipedia [1] suggests that it's accurate as a percentage of people who go to prison, but not as a percentage of people who are in prison. The discrepancy is because violent offenders have dramatically longer sentences. If one violent offender gets locked up for 50 years and then 50 consecutive drug offenders get locked up for 1 year each, then the prison population is 50% violent criminals, but the percentage of criminals sentenced to prison is 98% non-violent.
I clicked the baity headline so you don't have to:
The company provides services that make it easier to communicate with inmates, including "The easiest way to send printed photos to your inmate directly from your computer or mobile phone!"
I thought it was a compelling headline. Just because it's a good headline - doesn't mean it's "baity" - I think the article was well represented by the headline. If you want to do a TLDR - that's great, but you completely omit the full story the author put into the work.
There seems to be a low threshold for declaring something "link bait" over here.
Not long ago, I wrote something called "Never sanitize your inputs" and the content of the article was why you should never sanitize your inputs. And yet it was still called "link bait".
Maybe I should have just called it "Don't bother reading this, I'm not Jeff Atwood or anyone."
This is a fair distinction that doesn't get spoken about here on HN that much. There are a lot of people, seeing the remarkably high quality content and PR, and assuming that being good at communication is somehow duplicitous or manipulative.
The last thing we should do is accept only a community incapable of communication or effective self-promotion. That kind of handicap could reasonably stop a great deal of viable hackers from doing what excites them, and isn't promoting that the entire point?
I agree with you. I think the actual article lived up to the HN link title. I'm impressed by Frederick Hutson - he was sharp to the opportunities that he saw even in prison. Lesser mortals like myself would have been too devastated to even think straight, much less identify such an opportunity.
He went to prison for routing marijuana through his business. I think if you're willing to risk doing something like that, you're probably not going to be "too devastated" if you end up in prison - or, at least, surely you're not going to be too surprised.
Your theory is one would not be devastated going to prison? I think most people don't plan on being caught. Going to prison is a total upheaval in one's life and the fact they may deserve it or should not be surprised is irrelevant.
Now, if this was like his third trip to prison then you would have a point...
True. I don't think I'd be caught routing marjuana anywhere, so I'm going to be more devastated were I to land up in prison. Still, credit where credit is due!
