skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2362592

This is the telling quote:

"Lots of people are trying to create location-based services and using GPS," said Nguyen. "The problem with GPS is that it doesn't work."

This is exactly my pointbelow -- the tech to incorporate all the sensor data you can get from phones has real-world consumer uses -- but it has tons of uses in intel as well.

They will get their patents, they will build the next google of social intelligence and they will license all this to the NSA -- if they havent already.

Sounds cool, yay. But no thanks from me.

Where I said:

"Here is some tinfoil for you...

Assuming they have a back-door API - this could be a freaking BOON for intelligence gathering arms that are seeking to know the surrounds of anti establishment types.

Further - wait until you apply spatial modeling capabilities (what was that MS tech demo called?) where you can start building 3d navigable models of spaces that all the data collected in that 100' radius allows.

Dont think the military is doing CRAZY things with optical intel:

"The system can also be used for general night vision; it can follow bats five miles away in darkness."

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/02/72632

the military now has autonomous robotic helicopters that can visually track bullets in flight.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/02/gigapixel-flyin/

Now they just need the general public to be a part of the larger sensor intel fabric."
I thought I used my thumbs on the space key until one day I noticed groves eroded on my laptop spacebar and paid particular attention to my typing. Turns out that I usually hit space with my right pointer and the fingernail (at that angle) gradually cut marks into the plastic.
ensure that developers/designers can and will get access,
while still ensuring only they do so.

Curious about how that might work - anything you can expand on that?
I guess the VCs think that if Color can get their patents the worst case scenario will be that Color can become a patent troll.

The $41mil shouldn't even be a topic right now because the VCs that funded them are some very experienced betters in the game. If they made this bet they must have seen something. Honestly I don't see anything of value right now, but then again I'm not into sharing photo's with strangers thing.

I also think they are not a social company like Twitter/Flickr but are hoping to generate enough data using their mobile apps to be able to identify various locations without gps and sell that data, sort of like that one company which maps out locations using WiFi access point names.

As for this new bubble debate and Color's $41mil, no matter what the situation you will always have a few people saying the market is good and a few people saying that the market is too weak/strong. It's like the glass half/full debate that can never go away.
Yep. Been living off it since 09.

That's why I formed the Android Developers Union: http://andevuni.org - We need better conditions!
So there's an Onion thing about how Facebook is the dream app of the CIA. I think its been superseded.
So you have to switch from DVORAK to QWERTY to type in passwords then? (I assume you type normally in dvorak)
Step 5: Enjoy months of constant questions from your friends about why this wonderful girlfriend can't ever visit, and why Googling her doesn't seem to produce any results, and how no-one who comes from the same putative town has ever heard of her...

Is this just attention whoring or has does someone genuinely think this is a good idea?
Playbook's Android Support Is There To Check The "Lots Of Apps" Box
OT, but that's gotta be the first progressive-loading GIF I've seen in like ten years. In fact, at first I thought it was an animation.
What do military operation names mean?
Is this serious? After reading my comment did you even bother re-reading the speech? By your analogy, every philosophical, psychological, sociological, et al text relates to the platitude your originally mentioned. The actual meaning of your original comment still has absolutely nothing to do with DFW's speech. This whole thread is like watching a student defend a paper about a book he never read and doesn't understand, but whose opinion is bolstered by yet more students with even less comprehension of the text than him.
Everything you essentially say is ridiculous, seems perfectly reasonable to me. Building a very tall tower, just a metal skeleton with skinny legs, to house your bakup power, seems perfectly reasonable to me. Or even simpler, just build that tower on top of the reactor, in this case.
Does Your Startup Need to Be Massive?
I'm one of the developers mentioned in the article (Eddie Kim). Not sure why they included me because I'm not making millions. With that said, I'm making a pretty decent living from my Android apps.
I'm still unconvinced about the smart cover. The magnets are a neat hack, but I've found that with my various (metal backed) i-Products that if they are out of a full body jacket their metal cases scratch, scuff and loose their shininess very quickly.

Additionally a 'full metal jacket' cough provides some protection from getting wet and that seems to be #1 priority in Apple's product doco that you should never ever do.
How a cyberwar between US, China might look like
I was assuming that the calculation was from the standpoint of all society, considering most free software advocates consider themselves altruists. So our functions are the same in this case, and it is still possible for the project to not be a good idea based on expected value.
Hi pedalpete,

BTW, the video is a spot and not meant to be accurate but highly communicative.

We did that to make it wide opened to all sizes. We thought that the user was the one who should decide, therefore the opened distance. After using the mouse a couple of times, the user should adjust the finger to the best distance according to his/her size. Now a very big finger fit and a small one too. In the future you will be able to shrink the circle or enlarge it and tune it best.

On the other hand there is a visible area factor that made us leave that amount of size avalable to see. For example, when you are selecting content, you need to know what is below, the same when you are just viewing the different elements below the cursor.

A cursor in a point extension of your finger is a good solution but cannot work alone, its not enought to create a real solution. You need to execute, select, mark, etc. We could have stopped there like for example this project did http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkoFlDArYks. They found the offset but stopped there and didn't follow that great discovery, they kept on searching. We, on the other hand focused on that point, the the two regions that now are the mouse buttons allowed us to work on selection.

Hope I answered your question.

Cheers.
This is a great idea! (So long as Twitter doesn't block it)
I was hoping for something I could use as a brand, rather than something functional-sounding.

We're building social software to help people get things done. It's pretty widely interpretable.
GPS doesn't "work" in the same way that he is referring to. For the purpose of identifying a point on the globe, with line-of-sight to the sky - GPS works fine.

But, what is really being talked about here is much deeper spatial awareness based on a range of sensor and relational data modeling.

They are using GPS, direction, lighting, sound and finally - actual images to determine all the spatial attributes of where you are, what your surroundings are and whom else is in your vicinity -- even if you don't know them.

This is stunning.

They will be able to know which parties are groups - where they are in relation to one another etc.

If they are already using all those data-points. I am absolutely positive they are will have audio voice recognition - keyword recognition in the future as well.

There are incredible uses for this, such as "here were some highlights of the parties conversations"

What we NEED is for someone to sniff the backhaul from the client and lets look at exactly what data is leaving our devices.
"Just betcha" - what are you, 12? Who says that?
Scoble: Sequoia's investment in Color is a "Super Bowl ad for VCs."
But they're in a situation where they need a compelling application first. You can't get the data without multiple people opening up the application. Color is really not compelling.

This is a classic problem I have in my own research at a university: in order to test the cool stuff, you have to convince people using stuff they already get. The convincing is way, way harder.

Maybe Color is just one of a suite of apps. Maybe the idea is to license the patents to Apple or Google so it all happens transparently (but the idea that my phone is silently collecting and transmitting data about me all the time makes me want to puke). However, what they've got is going nowhere fast.
That will make the incentive for Twitter users to get rstat.us accounts a round zero. Exactly what Buzz tried, remember how badly that failed?
It's funny that people consider the thought that they are composed of dancing particles depressing.

I mean -- we're made of dancing particles! That's hilarious!
Not joking here:

Wasn't this the premise of the ending of 'Batman: The Dark Knight?'

Scary, hilarious, and amazing at the same time.
I like this part:

One respondent, the heir to an enormous fortune, says that what matters most to him is his Christianity, and that his greatest aspiration is “to love the Lord, my family, and my friends.” He also reports that he wouldn’t feel financially secure until he had $1 billion in the bank.

I think this guy needs to crack open his Bible, and read a bit of Matthew 19:20-22...

[20]The young man said, "I have obeyed all of these. What else must I do? [21]Jesus replied, "If you want to be perfect, go sell everything you own! Give the money to the poor, and you will have riches in Heaven. Then come and be my follower." [22]When the young man heard this, he was sad, because he was very rich.

I can't think of anything more to say. I just hope I didn't just start a religeous flame war.
True - but if the technology behind it works, the money will let them keep launching products until one sticks.
I cant wait until Color data is used in a case to prosecute people.

"Your elastic social graph can and will be used against you in a court of law"
Americans butchered our language, what do you expect?
the irony here is a lot of people will read this...nod their head...and then get busy trying to get rich :)
Well, either really soon or never depending on seed funding :)

Are you with the site or a freelancer with node skills?
did anyone else read this and think that there were going to be 24 actual rooms you could physically walk into at 1 time?
While this is sort-of related, I've been trying to increase my reading speed for awhile now after noticing that since spending most of my time on the computer, I rarely if ever read books anymore.

This is a pretty large shift, considering a few years ago, I did little else but read books constantly, and at relative speed; finishing several books a week.

I picked up on the speed-reading method[1] where I first read about on NP[2]. Basically, you read quicker in chunks and don't use subvocalization[3], which we all do involuntarily.

I've found better success by reading in progressively-sped-up chunks; I comprehend the information better this way and find I spend too much time thinking if I'm subvocalizing or not with the second method.

Of course, the best thing would be to spend less time reading from and using the computer, and more time actually reading IRL.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

[2]: http://www.nuclearphynance.com/Show%20Post.aspx?PostIDKey=13...

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
I don't think this works. The Bill of Rights supersedes everything else. If we took a perfectly strict and literal interpretation of the First Amendment, that would overrule any disciplinary action directed at this high-ranking general, because his actions are protected by free speech.

If we were to apply it with no exceptions, there would be NO EXCEPTIONS, and no other laws, rules or agreements would be able to overrule it.
They look like good articles - will read them over the weekend. Maybe the badge concept is a bit less appealing if its overexposed/overused.
Relevant:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNw5nI_3iE
6 patents pending? Is this all a big IP bet for them & their investors? That could really set back under funded entrepreneurs working on similar solutions.
I haven't looked for the article I am talking about since I last read it (back when dead trees still dominated). So I can't vouch for its veracity anymore. Its essence may be interesting or jog someone else's memory. (I may try to find it later)

The article stated that a group of college (MBA perhaps) students was surveyed and asked "would you work for the highest paying salary once you graduate?", or "would you work for what you want to do and enjoy after you leave college."

The answers were compared against reality and the respondents life after a few years - It showed that whoever chose to do what they were interested in were more successful in monetary and career terms than people who chose to follow just the cash.

It does have further support, in that we generally value passion and drive as key predictors of success over someones ability to choose better paying jobs.
>> There are real data needs and real capital costs.

What real capital costs changed between the $14 million they were getting before Sequoia and when they got $41 million total including Sequoia?
works fine on FF4 on win7 too
He actually offered no defense. I decided not to focus on the interface/user experience because everyone else did. He pretty much compared it to a venue that opened before it was ready. I decided to question them about the tech, because that seemed to be the part nobody was really discussing and I figured maybe all this money was because there was some interesting tech at its core. I think there is.
I'm just referring to the cover's shinyness - it turns the ipad on and off, it has magnets, and it attaches without any attachment points cluttering its body. Simple, but very much something that nobody has done with tablets before.
Hi Darren,

Superb feedback man, great info and very valuable. Taking lot from it.

You know, our most difficult challenge today apart from overcoming the technical issues of compiling in all versions and fixing all bugs, its the learning curve.

The user needs to get to the basic operations at glance and I agree with you that we should show that at front. Paradoxically we thought the video was the best, however an image can also speak million words. I consider your feedback.

Please forward me any more idea you might have.

Cheers.
Mostly, the required fax machine (much less convenient than emailing a PDF) and the really badly timed phone call from their support staff to confirm me (although, admittedly that is probably my own fault).

(I'm also probably a bad data point with Apple, though: I'm sure they took longer than normal considering I am currently somewhat-visibly contributing to Cydia and some jailbreakst.)

Homestly, though, neither was particularly difficult. (Palm webOS was equally pain-free, fwiw.)
Then again, how do most people choose their careers.

- I like video games, so I'll be a programmer.

- I want to be a ballerina / baseball player / rock star / etc.

- Read a sci fi book and now want to do genetic engineering.

- Read My Life As A Quant and want to be a quant.

A friend of mine is a life sciences lawyer at a firm that bills upwards of $800/hr ... his reason for choosing that path was watching the movie Gattaca. Not joking.
Samsung Introduces Completely Solar-Powered, Transparent TV
This isn't high tech. In the U.S. a setup like this would be well under a hundred thousand dollars. It's not inconceivable the moving walls by themselves could be under ten thousand. That's not going to buy you a lot of real estate in a dense city.
I moved passed gold stars on my papers a long time ago, but gamefication will be a huge driver of behavior. Skinner would be proud.
I always took it to mean that atheists were too smart to wind up in a foxhole in the first place.
Bloomberg Game Changers profiles Marc Andreessen
I thought "hard" was meant in a purely technical sense.

But anyways - three smart guys in a garage can build a minimum viable photo sharing application using knowledge and technology obtained from the internet.

You can say "oh, it's hard to do photo sharing right, it's a hard problem", but the fact is there are technological problems out there that are hard to do at all, that are completely beyond the reach of three smart guys in a garage using only knowledge available on the internet.
The Brooklyn Bridge authority is on line 2; they say they have a great deal for you.
Are you agreeing or disagreeing with the post you responded to? It appears that you are expanding on the same point.
Maybe I misread it. The article headline definitely sets that kind of tone though: "Color CEO: The Tech Justifies the $41 Million"
These guys have that going for them: they aren't in the NYTimes

If they get to the point of providing users a viable alternative, then it has worked. It doesn't have to be 10M users.
One could invest in something like Color 5 times in 5 years.
I suggest you change the 'slideshow' on the home page. I was expecting the entire site to be about the white boards and then seeing a 'download app in app store' threw me off. My confusion was cleared only when i clicked on the products page to see that you see the whiteboards and the iphone apps.
This is a great idea and I know it is going to be successful. Please fix your typography though by using balanced ‘single’ and “double” quotes and right-single-quote for apostrophes such as in it’s. It does not look professional to have typewriter style quotes.
Another way to think about it: Color is "Bump" without the need to bump phones! Using various sensors, it can tell who you are next to, and then you can exchange contact info, photos, and set up an ad hoc connection. Another use could be to figure out what store you are in and offer you relevant coupons...
Saying that they can do is not stunning. Doing it is.
What if this is a solution in need of a more interesting problem?

I don't remember who said this, but hidden gestures in a multitouch device have the exact same learning curve as command line: they are equally magical, efficient, and completely insane in the eyes of people who haven't learned them yet.

That's not to say that the command line is hard (it's not), or that Bash is arbitrary and random (it has definite syntax and conventions).

But you're betting that people will use these new gestures to do the things they're already doing. Maybe they're actually more interesting for drawing or something?
Cuil was trying to solve a problem that was already solved, and they were so arrogant in their media briefs you could just tell that they were on another planet

Color, on the other hand, if they at least solve the problem of figuring out where somebody is I can see someone paying 200M+ for that (fb or google)
That's funny. I got a few dev groups to update their documentation by comparing it to a recipe: list everything needed, first. List the things which can be done ahead of time. After that, preparation steps, and then the actual time-critical steps.

It is working out quite nice.
Google closes Android 3.0 Honeycomb source to prevent use on smartphones
We can pay anything reasonable, but I'll just go for some other name rather than overpay.

That is to say: it depends on how awesome it is.
" The pricing is right"

Sure. When they ship it might be different.

" it excels in a couple of areas that the iPad 2 does not "

Sure. When they ship it might be different.

"it matches or exceeds almost all of the hardware specs"

Sure. When they ship it might be different.

"including battery life, apparently"

Oh, so you've tried one? No? Perhaps because they're not for sale yet? The skepticism may be forced, but isn't your enthusiasm a little premature?

Does each generation need to relearn the lesson that the value of vapourware = 0?
Apple should preinstall Instapaper on new iPads. It's just that good.
Hmmm. If we look at some past examples of cases in the consumer internet space where a new entrant overtook an entrenched player (e.g. Google vs. other search engines and Facebook vs. Myspace), I think you need to have something new and compelling about your application to drive adoption. I don't know of any cases where just cloning an existing app was successful for a startup. Has movement to a new player every been driven by openness concerns?

What can you do that is different from Twitter and cannot easily be copied by them?
Driving theory test- Special needs
The Driving Standards Agency (DSA) offers a number of facilities for those with special needs, which includes foreign language voiceovers, Translator assisted and reading difficulties.
He's right. Who gives a shit about the stupid photo-sharing app at the end of the day?

If they build a dark-knight-like smart phone data miner, they can always sell it as a service to (or get bought by) somebody who already has traction.

Why care about traction if someone else might pay you to use theirs more effectively?
While I agree that it can be unstable (inference can get stuck in local maxima), latent variable models like LDA can be used to rigorously evaluate textual categories (e.g. journal articles). We take for granted that the categories we set are "useful", in some sense, so it's interesting to see that quantitatively questioned.

e.g.: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/11/12/1013452107.abst...

Also, for the curious, original paper on LDA: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/papers/BleiNgJordan2003.pd....
Here's a startup idea: a marketplace for badges. if that ever happens, i will give up my tech profession and take up some other career
I'd probably never install the app, but then I don't even use a smartphone - but they have enough money to make this mistake 10 times over

who knows, they might end up powering location for foursquare, facebook, and google etc. in 3 years time as the new GPS.
Argh, don't remind me about Subways in Eastern Europe. When Subway opened in Indiana, I told my (Hungarian) wife that if she wanted to make serious money, we'd open a Subway franchise in Budapest. She said, "Why would you try to sell crappy bread like that in Hungary?"

Sigh.
Practice what we preach
What happened to launch early and iterate? It's the theme we talked about daily here at HN. Yet, Color went out and pretty much everyone wants to crucify them. With that much talent and that much money, is everyone just green with envy?
I am pretty good at this... but can you give me more info on what your doing?

Here are some domains I came up with and am in various states of doing stuff with some of them...

BROWSETHROUGH.ME

BROWSETHROUGH.US

CHIRPCHAT.COM

CIRROSTRAT.US

CONFERO.US

DICIPUL.US

DOCTRIN.US

DOTSTAT.US

DROIDOC.COM

FLIGHTR.COM

IMBUED.US

MEDSTAT.US

MEDSTRAT.US

REPLET.US

SECUT.US

TEXTOO.US

TEXTUO.US

THELIFEWIKI.COM

TIMESTAT.US

VOLITICAL.ORG

WHATSTAT.US

JOTBOX.ME
Reasons It Might Be Time to Find a New Business Partner
Given Intellectual Venturers' reputation, perhaps they are afraid of being sued?

Modernist Cooking is still a fairly niche tome, even amongst the technorati hobbyist cooks. I actually only stumbled across it a few weeks ago, and I have Food Nerd almost as much as I have Code Nerd.
Don't think you did enough digging. Her masters in computer science is from Brown. http://www.techstars.org/mentors/hmason/
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