skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're used in some subways - boston & new york at least - though I don't know if these are just trials or if they've perhaps ended. You definitely can't walk into a merchant and expect a contactless payment though - I'm pretty sure merchant roll outs so far have been limited to pay at the pump trials.
There isn't enough scale or leverage to make this anything like the dotcom or housing busts.

This "bubble" is mostly in early stage startups, doing $2M-$5M rounds, and there aren't enough of these deals to add up to the size of investment in public dotcoms or housing. At worst we're just going to see mediocre VC returns and a lot of busted angel funds, but talking bailouts is hyperbolic.

This quote characterizes the difference:

“Back in the ’90s, companies got funded for five times
the amount that Tumblr raised and didn’t have anything
close to a business model,” said Roger Ehrenberg,
founder and managing partner of IA Ventures. “People
were getting $50 to $200 million a pop and it brought
down an entire industry.”
Columbia University Reverses Anti-Wikileaks Guidance
Picasso's Guernica in CSS3/HTML5
Ask HN: Twilio Spam Control
I would like to hear from anyone who has experience using Twilio for a service which has high SPAM potential.

For example: Let's say I want to create an application which lets an event staff manager upload his list of available part-time employees, and then for a given event, will auto-call those folks, sequentially until he has enough people signed up for an upcoming event.

Great idea, right? But the potential for some unscrupulous person to turn this into a voice SPAM machine, violating Twilio's TOS and the law, is very high.

Maybe the issue could be solved by connecting to a no-call database API, but really Twilio says "no unsolicited calls", so that's not enough. Perhaps the only solution left is to make the price per call high enough to dissuade spammers.

I'd love to hear from anyone with direct experience in this area.

Thanks!
None of them make it particularly easy, but some manufacturers have a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" towards rooting. For example, the Samsung Vibrant is trivial to root, and the SIM unlock code is stored unencrypted on the device itself.

I'm still going to get a Nexus S, though; Google keeps their software more up-to-date.
They're not entirely new to this space--they started Google Books back in 2004.
Depends on your definition of "fine", here's the first 7 results from that URL:

- Library of Congress 1993
- Library of Congress subject headings 1980
- Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series 1962
- Mezzofanti's System of Learning Languages Applied to the Study of French. (Close, but no cigar)
- Wildlife and oceans in a changing climate
- Occupational outlook handbook
The design is quite amateurish. The curvature of the header crowds out the (overly-busy) logo and makes me gag. The drop shadow for it cuts off abruptly at the sides, instead of fading into white. The 'S' for Nexus S is flimsy and generic. In fact, all the icons on the site are pretty ugly.

The site does have simplicity going for it. Apple just seems to execute so much better in this area.
I'm guessing the transition period can be made much more tolerable with a little effort. For example take a bottle of shower gel, and every time it's half empty fill it with water.

I'm tempted to try it. Last time I didn't shower for over a week (hiking trip) I remember my skin looked and felt surprisingly healthy. Hair too.
Curious - why did you opt to launch on a Monday? Everything I've read says Monday is a bad day to launch products.
And what if sites continue to track you using browser signature techniques? This is not about having an "arms race" with every internet user, but having a default policy in place.
love it, had an idea for the exact same service over here in ireland, would you be open to franchising it outside the US?
If I was a savvy consulting salesperson, I might be thrilled to "pair" with client staff; it's an automatic staffing multiplier. "Oh, your team has 3 people already? Well, we'll need 3 developers right there to pair them with the consultants... and, yeah, you'll definitely want one pair from our team too, so that's 5...".
I suspect that tracking is important enough to online operations that if more than a small percentage of people opt-out, sites will start requiring users to opt-in to view content. There's no free ride, after all.

Carr believes that this turn of events would be an improvement - instead of the current unwritten trade of content for information, everything is out in the open and users can make informed choices.

I think it'll be a disaster - I doubt many users want to take the time to make this decision multiple times a day. People will continue to click through agreements without reading them, but since these agreements will now be opt-in, publishers will be more and more comfortable loading them up with intrusive terms. Law of unintended consequences in action.
The average user is not sophisticated enough to implement most of the steps you are comparing with a mute button so the comparison isn't really that great. It's more about being a matter of "freedom of choice" for everyone and not just those that are technically savvy. Anyone can fill out the form to get a phone number on the do not call list, not everyone can install and maintain an ad blocker, cookie blocker, flash blocker nor manage to get those turned off when they actually need a feature on a site that isn't related to tracking them but the service that is provided.
According to this http://www.tmonews.com/2010/12/nexus-s-product-page-goes-liv...

US pricing is $529 unlocked and $199 with two years on T-Mobile
Twitter: We Are Not Keeping WikiLeaks Out of Trending Topics
I don't see how having more than one app for reading books on a kindle would help me, the user. I want to read books, not juggle apps.
I am not offended but it was just gratuitous.
Founder Control
That's what I would think, too. I was surprised to see that it was the one complaint he couldn't make:

> And as far as pairing is concerned, I know for a fact that I'm not as productive as when I pair-programmed at Pivotal. We got some amazing results, just chugging through the feature list.
They are using external partners to literally get these phones in people's hands. Consumers really want to touch phones before taking it home and Google seems to have taken this lesson to heart. Also having an army of blueshirts to provide setup help at purchase will make the less technically savvy happy campers.

Buying the Nexus One without feeling one first definitely was a little weird for me, but the return policy assuaged my misgivings.
Congrats Patrick, looking great!
If this all goes through, I suppose it's only a matter of time before websites detect your Do Not Track preferences and essentially limit the content you can see like the pay-walls some online content providers have now. "Add this site to your Do Not Track exception-list to view full articles."
I don't know. I've kind of fallen in love with the hardware keyboard on my droid. Hard to imagine using android for the applications I do now without it.
One of my favorite books of all time, fogus.

The "*" joke, and the ";" joke pop up in my mind whenever I see one. :)
I am non-American, too. Apple will let me buy English books as long as I have a valid US Apple ID. Go to Ebay, buy a US iTunes gift card, and you have one. Amazon will let me buy English books as long as I have a US credit card. That one is harder to get a hold of. You need friends. Google now needs a credit card and an IP address. The latter can be done easily and legally through services like socksify.com or even tor.

You can get technical literature from PragProg or OReilly from anywhere. There are plenty of good small ebook publishers out there.

It should come as no surprise that Google searches for ebooks rate piracy-related sites higher than ebook shops. It is currently way harder to buy an ebook than to pirate it.

But book publishers suck in the same way record companies suck. And they will go the same way record companies went.
This year I mean it -- it's a bubble (2007)
You actually touched on another issue with memory and information retention with respect to the current chemical state of your mind. If you study with caffeine then you need to also take the test with caffeine. Basically you want to come as close as possible to recreating your study environment for the test.
Honestly? No major reason. It wouldn't have been ready on Thursday, and if I had launched it on Friday then I would have had to be up to the wee hours on Saturday and I had a dinner party planned on Saturday and wanted to spend the day cleaning.

I wasn't planning a big splash media launch -- getting it to you guys is sort of the highlight of my day. Tomorrow, I start contacting individuals who I've promised accounts to. After that, the real work starts. My strengths in marketing are more towards the slow-burn acquisition strategies than the burns-bright-fizzles-quickly launch strategies, which makes me care about as much about launch day numbers as Zynga cares about their SEO. (i.e. not much)
If you count in binary, you can count to 31 on one hand.
I respect and admire the ingenuity and initiative HN hacker-types have, but also recognize that those qualities tend to lead to feature-y tech-y solutions to every problem.

The problem we're having isn't technical. It's simply bad-faith comments: comments made to advance an agenda (along the theme of "what's the point of a silent boycott", ie, "yes, we're protesting, not discussing the actual topic") instead of a topical discussion. In the WL case, the fact that WL approval trends 3-1 in favor means those bad-faith comments get jacked up in rank.

This thread is also a non-topical digression from Amazon Route 53, but the whole HN item is a lost cause and the meta discussion about how HN is mishandling this is more valuable than what's actually leading here --- again: arguments about Joe Lieberman.

If I were a different sort of HN user, I'd post a "Tell HN: Please Stop With The Wikileaks Stuff". But we all know what would happen if that got posted: two Lieberman discussions.
So....
downside: books are more expensive, no support for the Kindle, "yet another eReader"(TM) for all my devices, minimal support for common formats, blah blah

upside: it syncs where you are between all your devices!

am I missing something here?
IANA expected to run out of iPv4 addresses in 3 months time
Thanks for that. A lot of good information in there.
I read somewhere it was Adobe's.
Soaking your face in scalding water is relaxing and easy?

I'm surprised this has so many comments (it seems to be #3 by comments on the first two pages), but I guess I'm not surprised that programmers don't wash their hair.
There more to life than money. It's thought provoking and inspiring to see someone putting this into action.
getting it to you guys is sort of the highlight of my day

Good plan! :) Thanks for the reply.
Yes, we are, because for the most part (in my experience owning both an Android device and an iDevice), there are more options on the iDevice, but most of them replicate functionality of already existing Apps.

An example, if you have a working VNC client, you don't need 9 other working VNC clients that do the same thing but look slightly different.
last time I checked, the USA has pretty much people from all races.

Most US companies will launch something in English only with the domestic market in mind to test the waters, then when it becomes economically viable to do so expand licensing and other issues out to other countries.

I'm sure the companies that innovate in your country do the same.
I'm on the record as an iPhone partisan, but I am very happy that Google is doing this. The world needs more phones designed for people and not for carriers.
I assume by CPV you mean CPM
I also found it "ended twice." Patrick wraps it up, says "thanks for listening" and then still goes on for another 20-30 seconds. It felt a bit long-winded.

Also, the actual phone call was really hard to hear at first. Sound quality/volume was inconsistent throughout.

Personally, I'd probably take the five minutes and re-record it now, even if it's going to be professionally done later.
I, too, tend to believe that the soaps, shampoos, and other smelly things we all buy and take for granted in modern life may not be the healthiest things for us. However, in my household, we've addressed the problem (as we see it, anyway) by: 1) Making our own soap and shampoo; and 2) Only bathing on an as-needed basis (which equates to about twice a week for me). I also don't wear deodorant/antiperspirant.

Seems to be working out so far. I have long hair (for a guy, anyway), and I have a tough time not using shampoo. I suppose, in theory, if I stopped using long enough for my scalp to stop over-producing oils to replace what's routinely stripped out due to washing shampoo, then it wouldn't be a big problem (that, or I'd simply get accustomed to the feeling of my hair with natural oils). Frankly, though, I'd probably be more inclined to simply start shaving my head to avoid shampoo.

Different strokes for different folks, and all that. Everyone has their boundaries when it comes to personal hygiene, and we should all respect those boundaries. However, upon close examination, the daily bathing/hygiene rituals modern (US, Western, ???) life does seem a bit excessive. If we didn't coat ourselves with so much "stuff" (deodorant, conditioner, hair spray/gel, perfume/cologne, etc.), it seems intuitive that we wouldn't need to clean ourselves as harshly or as often as we currently do.

Interesting topic, nonetheless.
Actually, you can. You can buy software to do this for you. I believe Norton does this, as do other internet security software available for home users (not entirely sure here).

DNC was different: People called you. On the internet, web sites don't call you; rather, you "call" web sites.
Privacy is hot in the echo chamber. Most of the world isn't scared by Facebook; it owns its market utterly. Similarly, nothing Amazon does vis a vis WL is going to make a dent in its numbers. A substantial chunk of Amazon's market thinks "Wikileaks is a traitor"; they may pick up yardage.
Zynga Founder Mark Pincus - Control Your Board http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0lUNFHD-iM

(from Startup School 2009)
Finally I no longer need to use my clunky Nexus One trackball to pick text to copy/paste. Finally!
Currently the best approach is to just serve the pdf. You will not be able to get a direct translation. There is a very good forum for TeX now at http://tex.stackexchange.com/
In Jewish folklore, this is I guess a hundred or two years old, and is called a goat or a sheep:

A man complains to his Rabbi that they have a tiny house and they can't manage with their wife and three kids all in the same room. The rabbi tells him "take your goat and put it in the room as well". The man does as advised, and comes back to the Rabbi two weeks later, complaining even more. The Rabbi tells him "take the goat out". The next time the man sees the Rabbi, he thanks him "We have so much room now that the goat is out".
Comparing NYC to Beverly Hills is apples and oranges. The only likeness they share is, perhaps, that they are both independent municipalities.

Exhibit A, NYC: The most populous city in the US with the highest density and having the highest economic output. It is considered the world capital for finance and is a world cultural center for fashion, media, art, theater, food, and music. More people live in the city limits of NYC than 40 of the 52 states.

Exhibit B, Beverly Hills: An affluent bedroom community with around 30,000 residents and a suburb of Los Angeles.
If you are talking about dozing and rebuilding, well, there's not much incentive to do this anyway, since existing investments are often so profitable that it's pointless to incur risk.

How to make money:

1. Buy up a row of those five-storey brownstones which seem to cover most of Manhattan (say, a hundred apartments)

2. Knock 'em down, build a 30-storey tower (say, a thousand apartments)

3. Sell 'em off as condos.

That doesn't sound all that risky to me. In fact, it sounds like a great way to make a crapload of money very quickly and I would happily invest my money in a scheme like this. The fact that there's virtually zero new high-density condos being constructed in NYC means there's some kind of regulation seriously screwing with the system, because high-density construction should happen naturally when medium-density housing gets insanely expensive.
The formats are open, ePUB and PDF. It is doesn't appear to me that you can actually download the files.

• Android and iOS have dedicated reader apps that support offline reading. Something is downloaded, but it might well be DRM wrapped.

• Web browser based reading appears to be online only. No mention of downloading and using your own native reader on a laptop.

• The interesting one is the nook. For nook the book is transferred into the native nook reader. Sounds like there might be some way to get the book in that process, or maybe they have already DRM'd it with B&N's blessing.

Please, I already have a book reading app I like. I don't want your vanity take on what a book reader should be. Just sell me the book.
Read it last year at Zed Shaw's recommendation. Very terse writing, but a great deal of valuable information.
> Do you use any hair products at all like gel or wax?

I do not. I'm guessing that if you use gel or wax you pretty much HAVE to shampoo your hair.

I've never thought about my hair very much, but now that I am thinking about it, the entire industry of shampoo/styling/shampoo seems... profligate at best, and predatory at worst.
Have you worked with Busted Tees? How do they pay out? Do they pay out after each purchase or each shirt or once a month?
And you still can't order it in Germany :(
Perhaps. It would depend on the particulars. Send me an email if you're interested in talking more about it later.

I'm really looking forward to first-class support of Japanese by Twilio, although I won't realistically be in a great place to exploit that for at least 6 ~ 8 months.
I'm disappointed nobody seems to be discussing the curved display. Are there any other touchscreen devices with curved screens? If so, have any of you had any experience using one? I'm quite curious to find out out if that's a useful feature or not.
Komputer Cast: Vintage synth-funk for the modern nostalgic individual
Wow. I've had nothing but great experiences with the no-contract option on T-Mobile. Signup was completely trivial, have had no complaints about the service. It's been a very real savings.

What do you mean, you can't sign up for a contract? They're actively turning down more money for the same service?
I can't speak to the most of these pieces of software but things like Norton don't do any good. They don't block ads and they allow you to remove cookies after the fact during their scans but not during sessions so you are still being tracked during any browsing sessions you may have between scans.

While you "call" websites you aren't telling the advertisers on those websites that you want them to follow you around the Internet you are interacting with the site you chose to visit and it's operators. That seems very much like an unwanted telephone call to me. They are both unwanted interactions with third parties that you should be able to opt-out of.

edit: These software solutions are still not even close to being comparable with the mute button used in the first example and barely comparable to the DNC. More importantly they are of questionable effectiveness.
This is retarded. In the same way that the "vertical farming", lets grow all our crops in skyscrapers idea that was spreading around a few months ago was retarded (http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/08/16/towering-lunacy/).

Simple logic from first principles can prove this. How much does food cost per pound? Somewhere around $5 a pound seems like a roughly good estimate. How much of this is transportation costs? Somewhere around 10% is a figure that is commonly cited. Even ignoring the fact that most of this transportation cost is "last mile", which the tubes can't solve, you're still envisioning a plan in which tubes can transport goods at 50 cents a pound and still break even.

If we were able to transport goods for 50 cents a pound then, guess what, we've obsoleted a whole lot more industries than just food. People, for one, are a lot more valuable, even mail is more valuable. There's a reason why we don't have subways running through every one of our cities and that's because digging tunnels is freakishly more expensive than what this plan is envisioning.
I am not a fan of social buttons, with the sole exception of Delicious on geek-friendly authoritative reference content. If Facebook wants my help promoting their website, then they can turn some virtual cows into burgers and use the proceeds to pay my consulting rate.
The attractiveness here is not the store, IMO, but the eReader access to their deep back catalog of books they've scanned. Amazon and B&N keep their catalogs full of paid content. Google's seems like it will have a great depth of their own proprietary scanned material, which is appealing.
http://developer.android.com/sdk/images/2.3/selection.png

This looks familiar...

http://www.christian-kalmar.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/i...
Discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1975555
AeroFS - Unlimited P2P File Sync
This isn't in the programming domain, nor does it originate in private enterprise, buy my cousin retired at... about 52, from a county health department, with full health benefits through to Medicare eligibility (as I understand it).

They can now work as much or as little as they wish (including in private enterprise), where they wish, on a contract basis, and not worry about health care.

It's not a cash benefit nor one you can buy with cash (other than being wealthy enough not to have to worry about such things), so I see it as a significant "non-cash" benefit.

Recently, they were working in an office where the management and politics were wearing them down. When their commitment ended -- even though the organization wanted them to remain -- they were free to decline and look for something more comfortable.
Funny, because I walked into a T-Mobile with my N-1 store and the franchisee set me up in about 20 minutes with their pay-in-advance plan. I had one problem, where they tried to bill me at the outset for 3 months' service in advance instead of one.

I called them up and said they had better refund it. They said it was standard policy where there was no contract. I pointed out that I brought my phone to them, the account was profitable from the moment it was opened, and that it would make for a more than usually compelling internet consumer tantrum. I got a crawling apology and a month of free service to substantiate it.

I pay $70 at the beginning of each month. I get unlimited data and have never hit the 600/mo. minute limit, if I did the next rung of the plan is $75 or $77. It's reasonable and more importantly, predictable.
at what point does it change from "backing" to "having influence over" or "affecting design decisions"?
Congratulations Patrick!

I'm wondering, how did you put together the image with the cartoon characters? Did you have it designed? Do it yourself?