I couldn't upvote this enough. The lack of objective comparison in comments is astounding, and it fits a pattern.

This story reflects most poorly on the author himself.

The strange barb at music synthesizers was uncalled for.

His point was that it is common for a "new" technology to be used just ... because it's there. There was a lot of very bad music made in the early-80s when digital synths became available, and IBM using an AFM to make an advertising blurb could be considered in thie vein.

Compared to many other institutions, Stanford does a good job of dealing with that issue. 85% of students receive some form of financial aid. There is no family financial burden for incomes $60k/year and lower.

Taller, flexible buildings are much better at distributing shock waves.

Right, but you can't build those everywhere. There are chunks of the city that are landfill (old ships, gravestones, etc) which are seismically unfit to hold a large building, even with pilings.

As a kid, my wife grew up always wanting to live in the Marina. Now, you couldn't pay her to spend a night there because of the landfill.

You might want to consider naming your pricing plans differently.

There is a plan offering standard definition streaming called "Basic", and a plan offering high definition streaming called "Standard".

Those two words are often synonymous.

That's actually an AB test we have in the pipeline, hoping it seems more straightforward.

Yeah, they really seem to have taken it up a notch this year.

I was presented with a refund that was only possible if I purchased a small business plan. When I declined, the UI reduced my refund by $2k and also said I'd have to re-enter my personal information it had saved from last year, basically penalizing me.

Curious, I went to H&R Block and began to file my current-year taxes from scratch. Lo and behold, HRB's basic service level calculated my full refund.

Here's a little taste of how things have turned out since SCE and SDGE decided to give up fixing and maintaining San Onofre:

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/aug/03/counting-customer-costs...

There are more than 2 million "farms" in the U.S. Snag "One in Three" of those as paying customers (at nearly $1k/year) and it's very unlikely you'd need to use TechCrunch as a marketing and PR platform.

You have a strange way of congratulating someone who achieved what they consider to be happiness.