Agreed. The focal range is something like 90KM to 1400KM based on this image and other off nadir images that have been shared by DigitalGlobe/Maxar, and it really makes you wonder what the focusing mechanism is fully capable of.
No. Countries of the world have been imaging each others satellites for decades. The only thing that has changed recently is that now companies can do this commercially in an unclassified manner.
I quite like the inclusion of the help needed section. I work for a publicly traded company so I don't know if it has much application for our size, but for a pre-IPO company it seems like a great opportunity to leverage the skills of their smaller investor base.
I also like the transparency of sharing it with ALL investors, and would add that it needs to be shared with all employees as well. Our publicly traded company is in the midst of an acquisition and a lot of detail has been shared with our investors. The issue is that most employees are not signed up to our investor alerts or monitoring SEC filings. It has resulted in some employees remarking that they felt left in the dark by leadership because they hear about acquisition details from the press (who pay attention to IR and SEC docs) instead of their own company leaders.
Some founders do actually share these updates with the employees! With some redactions of course. Wouldn’t want the employees to know about impending layoffs or what inspired them.
It's not about being asked for an email.
It's about being lied to.
You wouldn't be OK with the New York Times writing that Putin died of a heart attack when it's not true. Why would you be OK with this kind of deception then?
If I click on your link, I took a leap of faith on you. If I then find out that you lied to me, you made my day worse and innocent bystanders like the next guy who actually did have a free ebook will get take the damage.
He could have truthfully said: Show HN: Ebook here but you'll have to enter an email address. Then I wouldn't have clicked and we wouldn't be having this discussion now. I suspect the link wouldn't have been upvoted enough to appear on the front page either.
Also note that if I use a burner account from some spam catching service, I'm externalising my damage on to them. They might be OK with that but it's still shitty behavior on my part. So I don't use throwaway accounts. It's a moral thing. You don't litter in the park. You leave it cleaner than how you found it.
First, the word free is most frequently interpreted as not costing money, which in this case is completely true. Second, your comparison to a false claim by the NYT is absurd.
All you had to do was close the tab and move on. I can't imagine getting through life making this big a deal on such a minor inconvenience. Good luck out there.
