skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's possible that in the wireless space tiered access might make sense. I'm not a wireless engineer but my understanding is that wireless access suffers from overcrowding a lot more than wired access simply because the overall bandwith within a given frequency band is a lot lower than a bundle of optical fibers.

Given this limitation I think we should be very careful in saying that a given solution should not be allowed. I can imagine scenarios where tiered pricing models would be very beneficial to most people.

For example, imagine a business setting up wireless security video cams. Thoughtlessly, they set them up to record and send video in HD. A few of those pointed at a rapidly changing scene (eg, a road) can chew though a lot of bandwidth. The owner of those cams doesn't care - why should they? They just pay a flat rate and the fact that everyone else's access is bad isn't their problem.

If an access provider could charge extra for that traffic then it would give the cam owner motivation to fix the problem.

(Yes, there are other solutions - a price per Gb of traffic is an obvious one. But my point is that I'm not convinced other options should be outlawed yet)
They weren't promoting a tiered internet by advocating it as a good thing; they were against regulating things just yet. Those are two very, very different things.
what was your methodology or general strategy?
Point two: see http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/05/is-calif... . Also http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/05/should-w... .

Some major problems: California's state constitution is a mess; its initiative process is out of control; conventional tax increases are impossible; Prop 13 distorts incentives. Many of these are structural issues. A bunch of articles have appeared on HN lately about how powerful, complex societies and institutions fail by being unable to flexibly adapt to change. That, in a nutshell, appears to be California's problem, which has been papered over to some extent by Silicon Valley Hollywood, agriculture, and weather. But even those rich sources of income can eventually be exhausted by the infinite demands of special interests and others.
I don't have any specific scientific papers to cite (although I have seen them), I do have personal anecdotal experience and this article that I read a while ago about it: http://www.integrativepsychiatry.net/adrenal_fatigue.html

My personal experience was this: extreme fatigue during the day (it was difficult for me to stay awake and not nap when doing anything sedentary), daily allergies that fired up (very badly) for no allergic reason, and a general sense of sluggishness.

Once I cut out stimulants (it isn't just caffeine, but the amphetamines in decongestants, ADHD medications, etc...) and started taking pills with desiccated adrenal gland tissue and thyroid boosters I could stay sharp all day long without ANY caffeine or naps. I slept really well every night, and a general sense of well being came back.

This coupled with my improved diet in general (paleo diet, no grains at all, high in animal protein and vegetables) made my life so much better. My body feels good, finally.
See my reply to the previous commenter.
Pens don't have that same gritty resistance on paper like a pencil. And although most don't do this, you can buy pencils in varying degrees of "hardness" beyond the #2 you've been using since grade school.
Perhaps Gladwell never said 10,000 hours = mastery but plenty of other people have made that leap of logic so I think we can forgive the OP his mistake.

Logical mistake or not, it shouldn't detract from what IMO is a great article with important, little discussed, insights.
Yea, we're currently lacking much users, but we're hoping that as we attract more users, more insightful conversations and connections will be cultivated around shared searches. Here's one quick example of a conversation cultivated from a shared search: http://seekier.com/roosh/seek/248
For the record, the papermate erasermate worked with any eraser, not just the one on the end of the pen itself as the article describes. It would get harder to erase after a while, but not this dramatic, so kudos to sharpie, this is an improvement!
more informative than multiple submitted posts about techcrunch's fascination with foursquare.
+1 on that, current design is kinda fugly, which won't impress designers.
Absolutely. I find it really helpful as a technical founder to alternate between product mode and customer developer mode.

Tearing myself from the one context to the other is hard at times but generates a lot of insights.
Getting more common every day. Clearwire is covering 1/3 of the population now and offers a small hotspot device.

http://jkontherun.com/2010/08/04/clear-ispot-4g-hotspot-for-...
http://gizmodo.com/5192430/review-clear-spot-portable-wimax-...
I've thought that before too...

Actually, maybe I'm being a little bit too hard on the greens. The thing is: human beings respond to hygiene problems by creating religions with moralistic prohibitions.

By the 50s, pollution had started to get bad. It's basically a hygiene problem. So we made up a religion. We did the same thing when we figured out that having sex with too many people made it hurt when you pee.

For some reason, we need this. Rational arguments are not good enough. Arguments from basic self-interest are not good enough. Having the air smell like burning tires and having rising cancer rates is not good enough. We can't change group behaviors without cults.
And there are oystrovegans. Who eat vegan food and oysters. Because oysters have the mental capacities of venus flytraps. Incidentally I think this would be a good, mostly sustainable and cruelty-free diet, weren't it for the price of oysters.
Yep. That one is on a different webpage so the HN duplicate check didn't come up.
I don't know ruby but it appears he didn't write a code coverage tool as the title says but rather formatted the output from the built in code coverage tool into html.
Not to nitpick or anything, but this has turned into a pet peeve of mine recently: it's "Moleskine". Not that I'm a crazed die-hard fan of the notebooks or anything, but they appear to be pretty nice. Maybe I'll try using one soon.
it doesn't have to be a great fortune.

the reason most successful companies resorted to unethical things early on, is because they had no resources to play "fair". Once you are actually making money you can afford to take the high road.

yes hacking mail servers is going too far, but scraping and spamming ends up being a necessity.
> When are people going to give up this notion that companies are evil or good? Companies try to make money and crush those that try to stop them.

Trying to crush those that oppose you is pretty evil, all things considered. Particularly for a cause as banal as trying to make more money (usually when you do not even need to) rather than, say, fighting space aliens.
It can create chilling effects that work to inhibit free speech and put the Internet under the control of ESPN, YouTube, and the other people who subsidize your service.
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A team of mercenaries go on a mission to overthrow a South American dictator.
Somehow we started with a tiered wired internet (see, for instance, how AOL worked back in the mid-90s) and now for all intents and purposes have an untiered wired internet.

I suspect Google has faith in the ability of previously unknown players to create compelling new content in the common. And once you have compelling new content in the common, no ISP can long succeed that fails to provide decent access to said common.

The worst outcome from the wireless question mark is a revisiting of the net neutrality debate, with the successful example of the wired variant to spur the debate.
The thing is, we can't talk about any result yet. So far, we only have a paper which didn't even underwent peer-review. I'm sure it will get enormous media coverage, but not sooner than it gets published.
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A team of mercenaries go on a mission to overthrow a South American dictator.
But I think you are confusing things. There is no question anywhere as to whether people who use more data can be charged more for that use. The fact that most home plans are all you can eat has nothing to do with net neutrality. So in your example, hopefully the security camera company would be charged a higher fee than a competing company who streamed non HD video. Youtube pays a hell of a lot more to hook up to the internet than I do.

The question is whether Verizon can charge a separate fee to prioritize one company's traffic over another. My understanding is that this recommendation partially closes that door for wired traffic but leaves it wide open for wireless traffic. Now fledgling startup security video hooks up their cameras to the web and find their bandwidth artificially restricted compared to the entrenched competition because they aren't paying for the super deluxe plan, or because Verizon has an exclusivity agreement with the entrenched player, or whatever. That is what seems to be left possible in wireless land with this recommendation, and that is frightening.
what's the matter with you?

I ask that seriously. Obviously their goal is to build a great product, and to get people to use it.

They posted that article on the AdGrok blog because it drove a shit-ton of traffic and it received a ton of inbound links. Why wouldn't they capitalize on that?

As far as the product is concerned, it's fantastic. I've been using it in private beta for a few weeks. I would bet on these guys in a heartbeat.

Startups drive traffic and signups any way that they can, and their company name was hitting mainstream media before they even launched.
By not reliable I mean were much more likely to need to be shut down to avoid something really bad happening. The second reactor allowed them to easily return to base (or even continue their mission) if they were forced to shut one of them down. An American sub with a reactor failure would be more or less stuck, and if it were under the icecap or something like that would be in big trouble.
True, but as (sometimes) thinking members of the startup community, we blog about things only tangentially connected to our product, but that we think the startup scene as a whole might find of interest.

The amount of press we got on those posts was completely unexpected (cf. my follow-up post about our imploding blog server). A happy bonus maybe, but we'd rather people love us (or hate us) based on the product.
Other than blaming illegal immigrants (a dubious politically motivated response)

Reference? I'd like to see what percentage of California's population is the result of post-1960's immigration, the total tax input from this segment and their costs in government services.

I only point this out because some people I've come across on HN who think a Canadian-style immigration system is racist seem to think that public display of their own good intentions is much more important that looking up the numbers.
It's hard to stay more ethical than your competition - tactics that would never occur to you become pretty tempting when you see them successfully used against your own company.

That said, for every startup that did something a little shady to succeed, there's got to be another that went off the rails because it spent too much time focused on and fighting with its competition. Ninety-nine percent of my own 'competitor-focused' activity could've been much better spent on my own business.
If these guys really cared about their cause, wouldn't it make more sense to provide a text field like YouTube does to embed the ad on your own site, rather than, or in addition to trying to raise money to pay for it?
Can't it just be text? Why would you want it to be an image?
They've always been able to do that. They agreed to:

Consumer Protections: A broadband Internet access service provider would be prohibited from preventing users of its broadband Internet access service from--
(1) sending and receiving lawful content of their choice;
(2) running lawful applications and using lawful services of their choice; and
(3) connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or
service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service. Non-

Discrimination Requirement:In providing broadband Internet access service, a provider would be prohibited from engaging in undue discrimination against any lawful Internet content, application, or service in a manner that causes meaningful harm to competition or to users.
Prioritization of Internet traffic would be presumed inconsistent with the non-discrimination standard, but the presumption could be rebutted.
I have the Zody chair and I have to say it's pretty fantastic. I was going to buy an Aeron, but even with the size C chair, the lip of the seat dug into my thighs. The Zody on the other hand has an adjustable seat pan so I can move it out so the edge is under my knees.

The adjustable arm rests are also pretty cool and nearly worth the price of admission by themselves. They adjust up/down, forward/backward, left/right and rotate around the vertical axis.
They do not see the past. They do not see the context, or the trajectory. They are Heisenberging the valley at some snapshot in time.

Can't wait to use Heisenberg as a verb in some idel conversation. Pure win.
The only way I can outline a good presentation is with a sharpie and sticky notes. One concept per note, you can rearrange them easily, have an idea of what the presentation will flow like, and then turn each concept to a slide.

I'll probably stop doing that once someone writes software that can replicate this workflow and integrates with presentation software.
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Investors that don't understand your vision from the beginning will fail to support you at tough times, and this is what happened with Notion Ink, too.
Err actually I think this is the exact opposite of the Google situation, where Google would be paying MORE to deliver their stuff.

Lol?
There was AppDrop - http://github.com/jchris/appdrop - but it doesn't look like it's being maintained anymore.
The relativistic comparision is not to what they used to pay, but what their competitors will pay in the new reality.
What Does Carmen Electra, Cyber-Terrorism and Meg Whitman Have In Common? eBay
Requiring someone be in a certain place for a certain amount of time is pretty stupid, but it's worth pointing out that it's very difficult to point to successful startups where the founders were telecommuting in the early days.

I only care about output, but I think you get significantly more output in certain situations by being in the same room and informally bouncing ideas around or asking for help.
Sacrificing some IDE capabilities
Oh, I'd say it's well within the guidelines. Interesting new phenomena are allowed to be frivolous.
They have 38% of the global smartphone market. How is that a success when iphone and Android both have over 1 billion app downloads each?

That must be like 1 app to every 5 smartphones Nokia has out there.
I understand your argument. Did you see my line Yes, there are other solutions - a price per Gb of traffic is an obvious one. But my point is that I'm not convinced other options should be outlawed yet?

My point is that it may make sense - and be good for consumers - to deprioritize and/or discourage some kinds of usage over wireless. http://danweinreb.org/blog/google-and-verizon-a-new-hope references the story http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Government-IT/The-Truth-About-Googl.... I hadn't read this when I made my original post, but it makes a much more compelling argument based on the same ideas.

It makes the point that for VOIP to work properly over wireless you can't have jittery delivery. One way to solve that it to use QOS to increase the priority of that in comparison to video. That isn't "neutral" access, but it is good consumers.
The way everybody thinks it will, I guess... Instant access to knowledge and people. I haven't really thought about it, since I can't predict it...
If a person's morality is flexible enough to permit bank robbery, then a very weak justification is probably adequate.
That's because http://github.com/gitpan hosts 21,000 mirrored repositories.
I was not coming down either way. I was just stating that if people perceive this as "evil" they are certainly going to call Google on it. Not that I think Google cares.
Problem solving is not the same thing as brainstorming. Brainstorming is deliberately loosely structured and undirected. A group of engineers huddled around a whiteboard or a monitor are exactly the opposite: highly focused on the details of a single problem.
Only in the short term. If you stay in the same place for 20 years, home ownership becomes much more cost effective.
almost? it still doesn't exist yet
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One thing that's not mentioned, is the tax implications of each.

In a cash-flow business you're going to wind up paying out ~45 - 50% in taxes on the income (especially if you live in CA!!!)

In an equity business you wind up paying on capital gains, which if you hold your stock for more than 1 year can be as low as 15% (in the US, anyways).

Once you do the math accross 3 - 5 years it often makes more sense to build an equity valuable company for sale.

For cash-flow heavy businesses, a strategy to reduce tax and increase equity value can be to pay modest salaries and pump the bulk of the cash back into business expansion.
I made a little mount for my ipod on my bike handlebars. It shook the ipod to pieces in short order. When I used to ride a lot, I had trouble finding a watch that would survive on my wrist for the same reason.

I carry my ipod in my pocket. I can't poke at it there while riding but its life is much improved.

I'd be the first in the market for a product that cushions the ipod from the worst jolts of being on the bars and still lets me access it. (This is where everyone responds with fabulous links to products I've never heard of...)
Moleskine user/lover here too. I carry a pocket-sized Moleskine, pen and iPhone almost everywhere I go. It's faster and more enjoyable to write notes in the notebook than in my iPhone (the latter increasingly freezes with iOS 4.0 and even without that has lots of annoying UX quirks), and I can easily go back and forth between text and doodles/diagrams, unlike the iPhone (built-in apps anyway, admittedly.) If you just want the cheapest paper possible, Moleskine is a bad choice. But if you want the best experience as a writer/reader/geek, Moleskine is a no brainer.
Significant portions of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil would disagree with that assessment.
How embarrassing that this is a Canadian export. I got one of these things in the mail (from "Domain Registry of Canada", cunningly decorated with a red-and-white icon to look vaguely governmental). It was so well done that it took me a few minutes to figure out that it was bullshit. I was so angry that I wrote to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority to complain, not so much on my own behalf as for all the non-technical website owners out there who don't stand a chance of figuring out that they're being hoodwinked into transferring their registration over to crooks at 3-4 times market rate. The agency wrote me back saying "unfortunately" the scammers weren't technically registrars -- whatever that means -- but that they thanked me for my complaint and would add it to their pile.
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When are they going to do anything about domain kiting, then?
The best pen I've ever used is the Pentel RSVP BK91 Medium point. I love them so much I buy them in bulk, both to save money and to ensure I have a large supply in case they ever stop producing them. They are that good.

And I don't care that they can't be erased. I can always linethough/overwrite, and I'm not an artist, just a writer/notetaker.
Can Google really compete in the social space?
The Happiness Formula: H=S+C+V
The problem with human societies is that there's no mechanism for reducing complexity. Each feature of a complex society has a stakeholder, someone who would lose out if that feature were reduced or abandoned. So societies grow in complexity without bound until the complexity collapses under its own weight.

A key here is that we don't have an ethic of just buying these people out.

New York City taxicabs operate on a medallion system where there are always a limited number of licenses to operate a cab and the right, once granted, is permanent. If the city could buy out every medallion holder and charge a fee set every year, it could control the number of cabs and gain more revenue in the long run. But it is politically impossible to persuade the public to pay a million dollars each to buy a medallion back that was given away for free. So the insane permanent-medallion system continues.

The same sort of thing happens with local municipal monopoly franchises, subsidies, agricultural supports in unsustainable regions, water rights, and some public employee deals.

Eventually accumulated special privileges can strangle a state.
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Here's a thought to ponder:
The intense x-ray/gamma radiation given off by the above-ground nuclear tests may very well be the most powerful indicator of intelligent life on this planet that has ever been broadcast into outer space, purely in terms of signal power. It's kind of sad to think that the first message received by E.T. (if they're out there) could potentially be, "Yes, there are sentient beings on Earth but, unfortunately, they're a bunch of war-mongering a-holes."
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I'm really excited to have people in that first situation (the 10 people there and one person far away) try using our robot (anybots.com) That is exactly the problem we are trying to solve.
Impossible might have been hyperbole on my part. I recall a discussion about a different, simpler HTML5 drawing app (no layers) here on HN in which someone claimed that HTML5 is no alternative to Flash based solutions since layers would be – and that’s how I remember it – impossible with Canvas. It is possible that he just said hard, not impossible.
I think you and me are using different definitions of smart. You think a person is smart only if he goes to school. That is not what I mean by smart. So that you understand I'll use potential education ability as my definition for smart. A person from a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as anybody else. A person from 2000 years ago has the same potential to get a phd as anybody as in our time. Now, what is the potential for a dog. Its potential is that he can learn a couple of hundreds of words during his life time. You cannot increase your potential to learn when you are born the same way that a dog cannot increase his potential to learn so that it matches that of a human. I would say the majority (99%) of the human population today as with those of 2000 years ago have the potential to earn a phd.

Please read this article: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/08/09/beyond-the-10000-hour-...

A person with far more education than you and me and by your definition much more smarter than you or me pretty much agrees with me. If you want to become great- i.e. get a phd and do great research - you have to work harder than the other person. Notice how much "work" is emphasized.

Honestly if you still don't agree with me after this than I give up. Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart. You cannot convince the person that simply refuses to see.
Paul Bucheit is lucky, however, that neither of his two big projects (Gmail and then FriendFeed) has ever had to sell anything.

In it's fair to say neither have been profitable (Gmail is a loss-leader to Google).

Now, I'm not dissing him or downing on his achievement. I'm just saying, he's done well out of building + propositioning free products.