I agree with chuk, of course.

One does the business they way he wants. If customers don't like your way they are free to leave.

If the business survives this kind of bleeding, then the business model was right anyway.

Andrew got it right, it is a problem of survival bias.

I have been lucky two times.

I have been an entrepreneur, I was succesfull enough but not enough to cover the risks (i am italian, doing business here is risky).

Then I set up myself to find a job, in a time where there aren't many and in a country in full recession. And found a good one!

I can say it was hard. But even if I had been told that i could try and fail, I would have tried anyway.

Sometimes, you really have nothing to lose.

He does it right. Customers are not to be listened too much, they are to be taught to use the product the way the producer intend to.

Less support trouble, less costs, and the troublemakers go away.

Of course, I would never tell straight to my customers that if they don't like a feature they can go to h3ll, but guess what, thet are not going anywhere else.

Yes, I understand people might leave. No, I do not work at facebook. The key is - in fact - people leaving. People who complain are a cost.

Now, if the service is low margin and low volume you can't afford losing customers. But if you have high margins, high volumes or a combination of both then a community that gets to vocal becomes a PR problem.

Think about gaming communities like Eve-Online... would you want your business be dictated by too angry and too vocal customers?

Those are not customer anymore, are a cost and costs must be purged.

Of course being frank about it makes one look like a bad guy, things that is happening here.

Nonetheless you have to break eggs to make an omelette.

Do you understand that alternate options exist, and people can easily move to other services?

While you're looking at the alternate options, try to look at it from the user's - long time user's - perspective.

Do you work at Facebook?

nice "click me" title, but looks like neutrinos will not be superluminal in the end.

The second anomaly discovered is statistical in its nature. Scientists don't know precisely when the neutrino is generated: at the beginning or at the end of the pulse.

Scientists are going to reduce the lenght of the pulse because this will make measurements more reliable.

And even that, GPS receivers at OPERA are not considered that much reliable by many.

Nice point of view. Actually, it is ok to spend some time on social networks, the point is we collectively spend too much of it trying to boost our ego.

Why pointing pinteres as illegal right off the bat?

Let's wait what happens when the first copyright complaint is filed to the company.

Inertia is a good thing, but necessarily have to switch tasks from time to time.

Better would be, decide beforehand what are you going to do in the next hours/days, then do it relentlessy and leverage the inertia.

When the time is up, however, move on.

I play Eve Online. The reason I play it is exactly the community of 300000 users sharing a single universe.

It allows social dynamics to emerge, thus translating a gaming experience into a learning experience.

It is a nice read. The funny thing is, when it comes to host a web application people still think the hardware is just an utility and price has necessarily to be the lowest possible.

They do not think about the volumes the application will have to serve and which compromise on computing power and redundancy they will have to make to ensure their application will run.

Most of the time it all boils down just to the price. Weird.

Actually, with the sort of knowledge you have in your bag, you could not be considered a script kiddie anymore.

Learn what you want because it moves you in the direction you want to go and don't care too much about the others.

It is all about your ability to hack a problem and the having fun while doing it.

cheers.