Success is not validation of an idea and we should be ashamed to think so.

Cigarettes are one of the most successful consumer products on earth. Inhaling a lungful of carcinogenic smoke several hundred times a day is undoubtedly a stupid idea. Tobacco has made a small number of people incomprehensibly rich, to the great detriment of humanity.

Personally, I think nearly all of these 'social' startups are bad news. Not as bad news as a lung cancer epidemic, but bad news nonetheless. I think they feed a culture of passivity and attention deficit. I think they fragment human interaction into the smallest possible dopamine-inducing units. I think they're essentially Skinner boxes in disguise - apps that dress up an intermittent schedule of reward as meaningful activity.

The startup culture talks the talk about "changing the world", but in truth most of us couldn't care less so long as we get our next funding round. For every Watsi, we have a hundred bullshit companies with bullshit products, providing yet another means of idle distraction for indolent westerners. We can hardly distinguish between what is worthwhile and what is popular or profitable. It has hardly occurred to Curtis or anyone in these comments that an idea could be both successful and stupid.

Is Pinterest really an innovative sharing tool, or is it merely a collaborative exercise in commodity fetishism? Is Vine really a radical new way to communicate, or is it merely the nadir of audiovisual culture, fragmenting the world into six-second shards of nothingness? Do we even care?

> But the casino had been suspicious, and Kane didn’t collect the last win

Bad move!

This reminds me of Louis Colavecchio. He made quite a lot of money off Atlantic City casinos using counterfeit slot machine tokens. The casinos KNEW they were being ripped off by a counterfeiter, because their token counts at the end of the day were coming in consistently high, but they were stymied because they could not tell which tokens were counterfeit. That made it hard to even get started tracking their origin. Even the token manufacturers were not able to determine which of a set of tokens were authentic and which were counterfeit. [1]

Colavecchio's downfall came one day when he was playing a machine, and it jammed, eating his token. He simply moved to the next machine, and continued playing. That caught the attention of the guard watching that row of machines on the security camera. These machines were something like $10 or $25 per play machines. When a legitimate gambler has a token of that value eaten by a machine, they don't just let it go and move on to another machine. They report it and make a fuss until they get their money back. The guard realized that one person who would just move on would be the counterfeiter--he would not want to draw attention to himself by making a fuss, and psychologically would think of his tokens as only worth a few cents and so would not be upset at losing one.

With that lead, they were able to watch Colavecchio and get enough evidence to nail him.

[1] Years after Colavecchio was caught and convicted, his counterfeit tokens remained in circulation in Atlantic City casinos, because they never did figure out a way to tell which were real and which were Colavecchio's.

(I used to work on Chrome.)

When we sent the very first Chrome out to reviewers, one reviewer sent back a draft of a review that said Chrome seemed like a nice browser but it had the strange additional feature of popping up ads inside the pages as you browsed.

The reviewer was so accustomed to their existing browser simply blocking pop-ups that it didn't occur to them that the pop-ups were caused by the pages they were visiting, and instead thought it was some Chrome monetization strategy!

Because of this, the feature was scrapped at the last second. There is still some "constrained window" code left over in Chrome that is still used for e.g. HTTP auth prompts. Because the ports came later, I seem to recall we didn't bother with implementing all the draggy window management stuff on Linux and instead centered a dialog over the page content without the window manager controls.

You can search on http://cs.chromium.org for [constrained_window] to see some of the remaining code.