skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of the examples mentioned in the article (house party, indie concert, baseball game, Woodstock) are constrained by geography. The beauty of the internet is that it transcends geography, just like television does.

Take that concert with 90,000 people (the most people you can fit in a typical stadium). Put it on TV and you can reach 5 million households (like Barbara Streisand did in 1994 http://barbra-archives.com/tv/90s/concert_streisand.html). Put it on Youtube and you can reach 5 million people a week if you're lucky.

The best part about the internet is scale. With 1 billion people using it, reaching just 1/10 of 1% is already a million people.
Higher definition will just reveal the ugliness of ugly people more so. It's called "De-noise": drag slider in the pretty direction.
Motorola 2-Way FRS/GRMS Radio MC220R
I've found I do have to reboot my MotoDroid occasionally. Usually the guilty party is GPS - it absolutely refuses to give fine location unless I reboot the phone.

I've also had issues with airplane mode totally ruining my 3G until I reboot. (I now avoid airplane mode.)
Droid X Questions:

Is it better than the incredible?

Does Droid X have a hardware keyboard? I can't tell from the page.

How does the HMDI thing work? Does it connect to a television somehow? Do I have to pay to do that?
Go register an account at onlinejobs.ph and put up a job posting. Clearly list out what you need done and put together a small test project as their tryout. Base their wage on similar job postings.

Va's aregreat but you need to respect them and do a great job of managing them. They aren't wizards nor are they slave labor so respect them and train them and they can very efficiently help you scale your business.
"Clearly superior product" apparently require in the context of the market point 1, 2 to be present. Nevertheless your point is taken, and i agree with it overall.

All these issues of late, this pact, Facebook privacy, Apple Locks on products, hinge on the premise of an uncaring public as long it gets its fix of the day.

So many times you hear a commentator use the line "the regular user doesn't care". I saw many comments along that line on HN. And you can say this, because it is true, the public does not care.

consumers flocked to a locked relationship with ATT to get the iphone, few left facebook over its privacy issues, consumers will flock to get superior preferential access to the net via Droid's on Verizon wireless.
Web surfing is very similar among similarly-specced phones across all of the major OSes

Actually, not at all.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/07/android-22-demol...
I think it's great. My only complaints are that the camera is horrendous. Every picture is blurry no matter how still I hold the camera.

Also the speaker sounds muffled and too quiet on regular phone calls. (Yes, the volume is all the way up.)

Oh and the battery life is kind of bad. I had to read a couple of articles and turn off all kinds of things off to make it last through the day. I think the battery has some kind of breaking in period too as it's been doing much better lately.
Personally, I'm wary of sharing my facebook credentials with a site that I don't trust yet or don't peruse regularly. I'd rather fill out the details or actually use my twitter id instead as I'd consider that a throwaway compared to my facebook account. This paranoia just goes up considering that the vendor in question is Facebook, someone who doesn't have the cleanest record when it comes to privacy of data.

Have you implemented or thought of implementing twitter's Oauth functionality instead? I wonder how that'll work out for you.
What They (we) Know:  Digital Privacy
If you're at all technically inclined (presumed given your presence here :), getting an ISP that gives shell, email, web is pretty straightforward (and worthwhile). I've been basically happy with PHP Webhosting (http://www.phpwebhosting.com/).
"Slam Dunk Stimulus" – The Natural History of a Rumor
4Chan Founder Moot's Weird Testimony In Sarah Palin Email Hacking Trial
I could but I am looking for a feature rich service like Gmail has offered, not just any email solution.

(oh, and I didn't vote you down)
Shrek 2 might be borderline. The giant gingerbread man bites it, and while he is depicted as a moron, he does speak.
HyperCard
I asked myself the same question, and the best fit I found was zimbra. It's ajax-powered and open source.
I use it for SMB clients and host it for them on a VPS. If you're looking for something simple for your personal mail there are several places that host it for $4-$5 /month. http://zimbra.com
What market? I understand why Google made this agreement, I suspect it might be the best we can get in the current political climate, but I can't believe they put their name on this statement:

>We both recognize that wireless broadband is different from the traditional wire-line world, in part because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly,

The mobile wireless marketplace has basically no competition, except when you compare it to the wired market, where there really is no meaningful competition.
Indeed. Generally speaking, virtualization adoption hasn't set any speed records. But slow and steady wins the race, as they say. :)
Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex
I saw a ridiculous ton of hype for the phone both prior to and after the release of the phone, but I acknowledge that may well be due to the fact that I look in all the places likely to make a huge fuss over such a device.

On the carrier front though, retail stores that were actually marketing to end users, I guess this is as good an illustration of my point as any;

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/11/nexus_one_sales/
It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material
handhold largely clueless end users via their version of the genius bar,

I think it would be great if google created a "genius bar". I'd call it the "let me just google that for you" bar.

Basically, you go to the bar and ask the bartender a question. He types the question into google and then reads you the answer. He might even refer you to the genius bar in the unlikely even that a quick google search doesn't solve your problem.
It's very likely that the AppStore market follows a power-law (or Zipf or Pareto) distribution of some sort. That is, the top 10 take 10% of the revenues, the next 100 take 10%, the next 1000 take 10%, etc. What the scaling exponent and constants are is anyone's guess without detailed sales data.

This is similar to how most unregulated markets work. Consider restaurants. There are a handful of massive international chains, a small number of medium size chains and a huge number of mom & pop eateries, some of which do quite well (relatively speaking) and some of which just fail.

Final analysis: you won't get rich on apps unless you're either A) very lucky or B) efficiently create quality apps at good prices with good marketing. I'd hope that most people on HN would opt for B :-).
Garage hack
No, don't go there. That's the lab page, and only has pre-releases.

Just go to adobe.com and click "Get Adobe Flash Player": http://www.adobe.com/go/EN_US-H-GET-FLASH

You'll get the latest, 10.1.8.76 at present, which is just what TFA said is out.
Ask HN: Who is currently broke due to being in a startup?
I am broke and in debt due to taking in 1/3 of my previous salary and having big delays to our v 1.0. I am married with 1 kid. My wife is footing some of the bill and I am on my fourth debt renewal. Wondering how people in the same situation are coping or getting by.
That kind of "let's wait and see how it looks until it evolves before we regulate" attitude is precisely what caused the current stagnation in the wired market.

The market fundamentally is under heavy regulation; wireless can't work without heavy-handed regulation of who can use what spectrum. We can't just stop at that kind of draconian regulation (which is necessary) and say that a little thing like non-discriminatory access to your absolute monopoly is too much.
> Is it better than the incredible?

it has better tech specs. the rest is subjective, imo.

> Does Droid X have a hardware keyboard?

no.

> How does the HMDI thing work? Does it connect to a television somehow? Do I have to pay to do that?

you plug it in with a type d connector (iirc). its free but only works for the gallery where you can play videos and view pictures.
I genuinely tried Bing when it first came out but it didn't stick. I have been using DuckDuckGo for a few weeks now and I have changed all my default search engines to it. Great features (! search and zero click info, not to mention not storing my search information).

Like you mentioned, Gmail on the other hand is much more difficult to drop. I spent half hour going through http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121269 looking for a decent solution.
Graphene gets even better in a magnetic field
So they gave up after one product, one attempt at shaking up the industry?
Are you speculating, or is this apparent from some data that you have seen and I haven't yet?
Ask HN: Unsexy & profitable businesses
I've been thinking for a while that there are many unsexy but very profitable businesses online.
My main examples are OpenTable, and Email Newsletters. But I guess there are many more that I haven't thought about.
When I say unsexy I refer to not being under the bling of media, among other things.

Which do u think is a business of this characteristics?
best regards,
Martin
Apple has only one single carrier in the US, so how many carriers did they exactly change?. Did they start to sell unlocked GSM/CDMA phones to anyone who wanted?

As the article states

"ban cool apps for no real reason (Google Voice on the iPhone for one), cripple apps to protect business models (Skype on the iPhone) and outright ban data-heavy apps from third parties (Slingbox for the iPhone), all the while promoting their own app (MLB’s iPhone app)."

Looks like compromise to me, all in its best interest of course.
> Except we do get 3G on our Kindles

For a $2 per book fee.
Yeah, it's a clearly superior product for me because I haven't called tech support for about 17 years, that's why point 1 & 2 are utterly irrelevant to me.

And yes, the average end users just don't care, they don't understand, they don't think, they don't even want to, as entrepreneurs we already know this through our own experiences most likely, letalone needing to see it demonstrated writ large in this particular instance. Not having all the enabling features for the modern "consumer experience" equals poor market results, no matter the quality of the underlying product.
I've had great results for projects like these using my team in the Philippines. I recently had a project where I needed information for all websites in a certain niche (~500 sites). I gave them the specs and created a Google Spreadsheet with all of the columns I needed. Within an hour or so I could see the data being populated, and the next morning the project was done.
I'm sure that QA guy loves working with you, too...
IPod touch with two cameras, Retina Display said to arrive soon
No, it does not. I have been running 4.0 for the 3 weeks, sure it is a bit slower, and there are things you can do to speed it up (you shouldn't have to, but you do). But it is not unstable at all. It never crashes.

Is it worth upgrading if you have a 3G? No. You get some updates apps, better email, and folders.
I tried GetFriday and don't recommend hiring out to an agency like that.

Recently I paid $25 for an ad on Craigslist and hired a marketing assistant to do tasks similar to the one you're describing. I'm still pretty early into my business relationship with the person I've contracted. We'll see how it goes.
When did our culture shift to this point that everyone puts their problems on the government?

Everyone complains about Apple's closed iPhone ecosystem, then pesters the government to condone jailbreaking and unlocking, which go against the iPhone's terms of service.

Comcast is caught throttling bittorent, and instead of switching providers to satellite or Verizon or anything, everything goes to the government and demands regulation on net neutrality.

Since when did it become the american standard to complain to the government when you don't agree with the terms of service instead of just doing it the old fashioned way and speaking with your money? If high speed internet is so important to you and Comcast is the only carrier in your area, then you are at their mercy - they paid money to expand their service to your region and service you - you don't get to demand that they service you in the most favorable way.

Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it to, and appealing to legislation just seems wrong.

P.S. If you disagree with me and believe that legislation limiting the contacts that can be signed between two parties is necessary, please reply and explain why instead of downvoting an alternate point of view. This isn't reddit.
The notification bar says how many new messages you have. You follow the notification and get a list of messages. You read them, then they go away. You can press the star to flag. You can click reply to reply.

It's weird that you have to press menu and choose an option to send a message after you've composed it, but it's not really that bad of a UI choice.
Google didn't give it to us Canadians. Google seems to treat their international customers like second rate citizens. If my carrier picked up the N1 I would have bought it no question. $530USD is out of the question after exchange duty and taxes. Granted I don't know if this is due to Google or our carriers but all I know is we aren't getting any good Android handesets.
Raise money in memory of a loved one with 1000Memories and WePay
IEEE VAST 2010 Challenge - RESULTS
Interesting point. In languages like Ruby and Clojure, you tend to use a standardized set of highly-optimized and standard structures as opposed to using generics to spin out a lot of them. They tend to conform to high level protocols (interfaces) much like statically typed languages do.

True, but what happens when you decide you really need a list of maps instead of a list of lists? You better hope you have good test coverage when you do this in a dynamic language.

I made a similar change in a fundamental datatype in a Scala program from a list to a symbol -> string map and once I fixed all the compiler errors the whole thing worked correctly on the very first run.
The fact is that you have still to convince 1.000.000 people to use your product. If Internet was 100 billion just reaching 1/1000 of 1% would be huge.

Because you are in a competition and if more people are there using the net, more competitors you have there trying to attract those people.

And attracting people and convincing them to use your product is a difficult task.

The steps toward one million are many. And IF you arrive there you still have to figure out what to do with your users.

That's why I think having customers win hands down.
You've confirmed my point; yes, advertiser payments can and do influence speech and competition via free newspapers. But it would be insane to say that because of that influence, we should ban the entire business model.

Yet that's what net neutrality advocates like inklesspen above are saying we should do to network providers. They want subsidized-service models like I proposed banned, simply because it could lead to some 'chilled' speech and corporate influence.

Speech and the internet are tougher than that; they don't need 5 political-party-hack lawyer-appointees in DC -- aka the FCC -- to protect them (when there's time between handing out broadcast-indecency fines).
Personally I feel a lot better about Twitter + OAuth than FB, but that's just me.

As for why not use OpenID? Personally, I don't want to tie my Gmail account to a lot of things -- then people have my email! I don't necessarily want to tie my Facebook to them, either, but in the same breath some forms of OpenID can end up sharing more, depending...

This is why I get cranky when people implement Disqus, too -- old comments I made that were supposed to be anonymous but which had my email for the author, etc, are now pulled in and linked to a general identity months or years later. :(
I'm not sure if it's equivalent, but setting up the iPhone to treat your Gmail account as an Exchange Active Sync account gives the iPhone most of the cloud push features (Mail/Calendar/Contacts). I can add a contact on my iPhone that syncs OTA to Google that then syncs to my mac address book.

The contact/calendar syncing is great and in my mind really makes MobileMe a hard thing to justify buying. The push mail is nice as well, but I found the limitations to be a little annoying (but not enough to keep me from using it on my iPad):

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Specifically, deleting a message from your inbox is the equivalent of pressing the "Archive" button in the Gmail webapp.

If you drink Google's kool-aid about never deleting mails, that's great, but I don't. As a workaround I created a tag called "0-To Delete" (so it showed up at the top of the folder list when alphabetized) and rather than delete mails, I apply that tag. Gmail tags the message and removes it from the inbox, and then at some point later on I can actually delete all the mails with that tag.
Which remain?

The advantage of generators as threads is that they work with other Python implementations like Jython and IronPython. It would be nice if whatever Python adopted in the core wasn't still inferior to greenlet based libraries.
Zoho or Zimbra do a good job, I think. Plus will extend your non-gmail ajax-y world beyond just e-mail.

I think a big problem with running your own server is that things can go down! Yes, hosted solutions do too, but I think generally most serious providers have a bigger incentive for uptime than a personal box -- especially if that box is in my garage. I'd use my own machines for FTP and demos, but not for something like e-mail. (Or, if I did, I'd be sure to have a back-up redirect, where something else would forward the mail in and maintain survivability. I do this with my gmail anyway.)
And for television: television is a channel. People are there watching what happens.

Internet is a lot more about choice. If you reach, with a video, 5 million people, kudos to you. Still you have to reach 1 million people using something. Not just looking once at something (and one million would still be a lot).
I'm digging this! I will try it out for my next web project. Thanks!
Maybe you are forgetting what it would be like before Apple? Carriers would regularly disable bluetooth or downloading. You could only get apps from their store. You could only get ringtones from their store. etc...

Apple changed all carriers, since they are less locked down. On Android, you can get apps from the google marketplace, not just the carrier store. Ringtones can be had easily.
I sympathize with a fellow geek... I almost ran out of money trying to get a couple of projects off the ground. Had to run back into the arms of "the man" to get my daily bread:) I need someone to do one of those "stand by the side of the road" ads for my site (www.meshipu.com), don't worry you wont have to ware a costume:) If you are interested let me know, we can work something out that might help you to at least stave off homelessness for now. email: questions at meshipu.com
That's quite some crystal ball you have there! If the internet were that fragile, it would have lost to Compuserve and Prodigy. Do you remember them?

Instead, just like pay-for-placement helped pay for city daily newspapers, free-over-the-air radio and TV, and storefront bookstores, pay-for-priority on the internet could subsidize new last-mile capacity and services. But based on concocted nightmare scenarios, net-neutrality regulators want to preclude all experimentation into such models.
One attempt where it became abundantly clear that the target audience was largely not interested in being saved from the alternative, all the while they were sabotaging their relationship with their successful retail channel by proceeding.

If Google sets out to do the right thing by consumers despite potentially sabotaging their own market success in the larger picture (people still read google ads on android devices, no matter how carrier crippled the experience is, Apple lose the ability to lock google ads out of the mobile space, Google wins) consumers not only reject the product but emphatically embrace the carrier crippled alternatives to the point where Google succeeds at it's objectives largely because of it's relationship with the carriers, why not tell the end users to get lost and deal with the status quo and start playing ball with the carriers?

Google is just a business, and they may make a case for how they'd like things to go, but at the end of the day if the market pushes them in another direction and they have no desire to adjust their DNA to the fundamental level required in order to pivot on this particular issue, and it ends up that with the direction the market is pushing they win anyway, just in a different way than they would have hoped, why not just go with that flow?
> It's the Ubuntu story in a phone form factor all over again; having the clearly superior product does not mean that you end up with significant market share or business success.

Well, you really have to understand that what is "clearly superior" to you is not "clearly superior" to your typical "clueless end user".
I pretty happily use PDANet for some basic stuff.
My neighbor got a Comodore PET around Christmas of 1979.
I was 11, and I knew the minute I saw it that I wanted to know everything about it. When my neighbor wasn't home, I would sneak into their house via a basement window,
and teach myself BASIC by typing in programs from various magazines. A few years later, I convinced my parents to buy me a Comodore 64 for about $600. This was a ton of money back in the day, it was more than our family's color TV cost.

When I got to college, I wanted to be a Electrical Engineer, just like my neighbor, but I didn't do well my first semester.
I switched to computer science because it was easier.
3 years later I was porting VAX Fortran to a Cray YMP and
couldn't believe that people were paying me to do it.
I would have happily done it for nothing, just for the chance to run code on a Cray.
I'm assuming he's talking about using Facebook Connect, which is based on Oauth, so the user wouldn't have to share their Facebook credentials with his site. (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web#login).

I agree with you that sharing your Facebook credentials or your email credentials (especially your email credentials) with another site is foolishly stupid.
I agree, I'm actually much more inclined to use my Google / Twitter accounts over Facebook. Maybe that's just a temporary thing.
I don't think I've ever rebooted my Incredible.
I feel very conflicted about the iPod touch. On the one hand, I know that Apple doesn't really care about it, and is focused on the iPhone. I hate getting the same taste of Apple fascism via app store, etc, everything. However, it's quite compelling as a device for a lot of things, which does appeal. There is no viable competitor (at present) that fulfills the same niche; if Zune HD were updated more frequently and ran Android, that would be something a little better.

One use that really almost swayed me -- or would have, had I known before I left -- was when I was in China for some number of months last year. Touchscreen input + dictionary = WIN for character learning and study! So much better than just drawing with a mouse on nciku.

All of this is, I guess, a long winded way of saying that I am glad that they got around to updating it and if my old Zune 2.0 dies I will probably end up with something like this, bitter as I might be.