skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pablasso, we will never know for sure.

But strategically wise, I can see a threat from Wunderkit to Basecamp. Wunderkit is trying to bring a BP-style project management product (evolved) to a mass-market. It is not going for the geeks, designers, etc that BP has mostly as its clients. It is going for the mass and thus a recent article has mentioned them as "a Facebook for the workplace". After all, their first product (Wunderlist) has 1.5M users and reached 1M users in 275 days(!). Finally, a previous comment in HN frames 37s move in a nice way:

"This is very Apple. If somebody is going to cannibalize our market anyway, we prefer to do it ourselves." (by armandososa) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3506546
Privacy is a legitimate concern, but there are useful things you can do that you might feel comfortable sharing with our servers. Zero-information computing is really hard, and we didn't feel it was worth the time it'd take to give that kind of strong guarantee.
> What souvenirs can I bring back from the United States to Germany, I had nothing to say.

The joke is on him: pretty much ALL typical American exports and products are extremely common parts of daily life over here in Euroland... we have your music, movies, tv shows, video games, fast food restaurants, soda pop, clothes, cigarettes, etc. So, yes, considering this it might really be hard finding something to bring home he really cannot buy here anyway.

> The old days of having artisans build guitars for Fender or build bicycles for Schwinn was the old model; i.e. giving a niche market high quality products. These quality products have usually gained value

This is an extremely bad example and a wrong conclusion.

First, there still are a TON of very high quality "artisans" building guitars, guitar amps and effects for the "boutique" niche market and most of them come from the USA and they pride themselves on their products, the quality and that it is done by hand, in the USA. I am sure you will find the same is true for other industries and markets. Just because you don't know them doesn't mean they aren't there.

Second, the craze over Fender and Gibson vintage guitars has MUCH less to do with real, actual quality and I say this as a guitarist. Be realistic. This is a vintage collectors craze over very iconic products which have become extremely rare because before the vintage craze, they were a dime a dozen - see Clapton's legendary "Blackie" was bolted together from parts of 3 guitars he paid a 100 bucks for, total. Most people didn't store them or consider them valuable at all, they just played them and modded them and when they broke they were thrown away, nothing special about them. They were mass products, FAR from what those USA boutique luthiers do today. But it is EXTREMELY rare to find a mint condition guitar from that era. Actual production quality, quality assurance and longevity of guitars made by USA Fender today are arguably WAY better with WAY less variance but everybody wants a 60's Strat... for a fraction of the cost of a vintage one, I can get one of those boutique luthiers to build me a more reliable, more durable and better made perfect replica. Sentimental values aside, there is a thorough understanding what made a 50s or 60s Strat and you can get virtually in-distinguishably close, including a used look as if it was 50 years old. So, this is just like saying a mint-condition vintage Mustang was a WAY better car than the ones they build nowadays.

The value those items have NOW does not come from superior engineering or production. They have sentimental and iconic value and they are rare.

While we are at it: where did the internet and PCs come from? What about 90% of all programming languages and operating systems used nowadays? Who brought us our beloved iPods, iPhones, iPads and apps?
I think they're aiming at the wrong market. If my Facebook feed is anything to go by teenagers absolutely love new chat applications, but the reason they love them is because their friends introduce them. Although yes the requirement to register is a barrier to entry, it's a good one, it makes your users invested in pushing their friends into using it. You took away the element that makes these applications successful. Aim it at teenagers, provide an incentive to use it and then drop the sms thing, then you'll take off (if you're lucky!)
Ultra miniature switches, on off, micro, limit switches, nkk, 12v rocker switch
Company selling key, electric, momentary, magnetic switches, electrical, electronic, single pole, reed, slide switch, spdt, spst, snap action, ultra miniature switches, on off, micro, limit, 4 way, dpdt, cherry, apem, carling, nkk, 12v rocker switch.
How  To Damage Your Website Or Blog — Monetize Blogging
What about Denmark? You can't mention Swedes and Norwegians without mentioning the missing triplet. Denmark.
I think the reason for this story not being picked up is that the tech blog writers understand that there is no demand for such an app. 99% of the people don't care to sign up for a service like MSN in the old days and WhatsApp now, and everyone is on Facebook right?
Graphene: The perfect water filter
Simple virtual machine
The original presentation was nicely done, but knowing how things work in JavaScript (even though I don't know Ruby) meant I didn't exactly have that WTF-experience. This article explains it nicely to those who had.
Arsenic life does not exist after all...
What @mwotton means to say is that we've made a lot of progress. We could probably eventually sell Ninja Blocks without Kickstarter, but certainly not to the quality we want.

Unlike software projects, hardware requires tooling, parts and materials. Kickstarter is allowing us to do this!

We're also open source hardware!

Cheers,

Marcus (I'm a developer on the Ninja Blocks project).
Britney Spears : son prochain album ne sortira pas avant 2013
Britney Spears ne sortira pas d’opus avant 2013. La star a décidé de prendre une année sabbatique. Retrouvez les titres de Britney Spears sur le Net.
That very much depends on the country's laws - here in Prague, there are no fewer than seven different transport companies providing public transit. The traveller doesn't need to know or care that the bus line 292 is run by one company, line 165 by another, yet another runs 314, yet another runs the light rail and another runs the normal trains - the fare is integrated, so tickets are valid for all of these. The integrating organization (which IIRC holds auctions for licenses on each of the lines) is city-sponsored, so you could call that a government influence. It should be noted that this is a system that's been taking hold for some ten years now, and that the majority of public transit is still provided by the city's public transit company.
Help us spy on Twitter: FBI asks companies to develop software for monitoring
meanwhile in Poland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ACTA_protest_by_members_of...

http://m.onet.pl/_m/97f16e62164319581cc1a44fd071c744,9,1.jpg

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?act=url&#...

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js...
“The Big Bang Theory” meets Siri ‹ Where Am I?
It has been corrected, if you see anything else wrong with the translation, you can edit it, it's a wiki…
Hey Shadowmint,

I think you need to checkout http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/backing%20a%20project

Cheers,

Marcus
The fact is, that you created a product like other thousends of people, and this is not the biggest face palm for a product launch... everyone is enthusiastic about his product and expect it to have an enormous pitch. But like you a lot of people remain disappointed. Good luck.
Reflections on Android
Well said. Observer is how I got my head around it also.
There's another angle on this that you haven't covered. Despite having big name founders who can easily get coverage, apps like Path and Oink all have something else in common. Design matters a lot these days, particularly when it comes to iPhone apps, and unfortunately it's something that your app is lacking in a big way. This is something that's immediate from the screenshots, and I'm sure would put any tech blogger off straight away.
How to Hide Ads in Gmail
Nokia and Windows
> Gates got pissed when he realized he had lost the browser wars

Gates announced his retirement in 2006. At which point IE's world market share was between 85.33% - 90.01%

Hardly what I'd call having lost a war.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
In Prague, the metro system runs 4AM to 0AM - all maintenance and upgrades are done in the four-hour window without revenue moves. It's a system that's an order of magnitude smaller (in revenue track length) than New York subway, though - I'm not sure how this would scale.
"If your key is on a smart card it can not be stolen, even if the machine you're ssh'ing from has been compromised."

If the machine you're ssh'ing from has been compromised by a halfway competent attacker, there's no need for them to get the key from the smart card. They can log in to the remote machine by simply piggybacking on to your ssh session (with a compromised ssh client).
1,2) Your point was "large" in terms of distinct regions, I think implying that the US has a harder time to have our products accepted as opposed to a more homogeneous society. I think diversity and culture is a separate issue.

I dont have experience marketing products in Germany, but like I said almost every country has unique

3) The bicycle companies you listed, most USA brands have shipped production overseas do to labor prices. Off the top of my head, I can think of Trek and Cannondale as the only true mass produced bicycle manufacturers left in the United States. I am not saying there is something not good about the US. I am saying that the lack in quality demanded has left us wish cheaper products that can't demand the prices that will employ engineers. In turn, young engineers are leaving to the finance sector. Here's an excerpt from the BBC documentary.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4081937.stm

4. "Bakery" in the US means cakes, brownies, and cookies not artisan breads which requires fairly skilled workers to make. Only in Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, San Fran, Boston, St. Louis, and New York can you really find artisan bakeries in the US.

But this point was made to establish the uniqueness and quality demanded by the consumer. German Bread as Cultural Heritage:
http://www.goethe.de/ges/mol/typ/en8187653.htm

5) You are right baklava is not unique to Iran, but the Iranian spices used were unique to this Baklava. The point is that the consumer demanded/expected a level of quality which is unique to their culture.
They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Yeah, but we replaced them with a new 1%. Until recently, Sweden basically had an aristocratic caste consisting of the inner party of the Social Democrats, the labor leaders, the head editors of the major newspapers, etc. Basically a clique of people doing deals behind closed doors and having their own shared mythology/worldview as well as exclusive channels to the populace.

In the last 6 years, Sweden has been going through a transition phase where the assumptions of the last 70 years are being challenged. For instance, many social democrats considered the elections of 2006 and 2010 to be something of a coup d'etat (because they broke 70 years of near total domination by their party). Another big change is the increasing fragmentation of the media - the "gammelmedia" (old media) no longer holds a monopoly on information.

I am not dissing the social democrats - they were a clear improvement on the previous feudal system - but they've become stale and out of touch IMHO. As an example there is still no insight into how they pick their party leaders. A new one was just announced today, and no one really knows how that decision was reached. It's not like in the US, where people can actually have some choice of candidates for Presidency.
Louis CK has shown one way to bypass hollywood. If more artists replicate the CK model; if there are more online distributors that can reach any device (youtube, netflix); and if there are angels, VCs and more crowdfunding platforms for content creators, we can move closer to killing hollywood. What this does validate is that content is king. It needs better/alternate funding and distribution systems.
awesomeness with ifttt

I bow down before our new ninja block overlords.
It's more appropriate to say he lost to the internet. Even by 2006 it was obvious that OS didn't matter any more. Not that I agree with the grandparent.
Microsoft could rule the web – and here is why
Wait till after Ninja Blocks gets funded...
I'm a left-winger and I support this message. Post-WWII political categories are getting increasingly meaningless.
exactly :) (I'm french and launching a startup :-).
I'm using the same book too, the next edition should come out sometime in march and they also made a book about cocoa programming that follows the same approach (it covers lion too).
I can see varying opinions on antitrust laws (especially depending on how you phrase the question), but I have more trouble believing that most Americans are in favor of a completely unrestricted free market. Unless the people I've come into contact with are completely unrepresentative, I'd be really surprised if there were majority support for proposals like, "insider trading should be legalized" and "it should be legal for businesses to discriminate against employees based on their race".
Who is responsible for making sure project creators deliver what they promise?

Every creator is responsible for fulfilling the promises of their project. Because projects are usually funded by the friends, fans, and communities around its creator, there are powerful social forces that keep creators accountable. Creators are also encouraged to post regular updates about the progress of their project post-funding — communication goes a long way.

--

Yes, I'm quite familiar with the Kickstarter FAQ and TOS.

As a project owner, you are not legally obliged to provide anything. It's entirely up to you.

You earn negative karma and never-allowed-on-kickstarter-again status if you mess it up, but that's about it.

Kickstarter is not an ecommerce site. If you're selling things, you should use a shop. Wordpress and paypal will get you off the ground in about 20 minutes.

If you're doing a startup that needs funding to get off the ground, awesome, use kickstarter...

...but not as a shop.

The only point I'm making is that it's deceptive practice to pretend that Kickstarter is a shop, when none of the normal legal provisions apply.

Of course, what you do it entirely up to you, but people should be aware.
Whoever wondered where space begins:
The Kármán line at 100 km is (arbitrarily) defined as the boundary between atmosphere and outer space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line

24 km is at least "Near space" (20 to 100 km):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_space
> now we don't.

Yes, yes you still do. Iron horse, Kona, Fuji, Cannondale.... Mesa, Fryette, DrZ, Carr, divided by 13, 65amp, 2Rock, Fuchs, Lovepedal, Catalinbread, Earthquaker Dev, Devi Ever, Death by Audio, CMATMODS, Dwarfcraft... Lollar, Lindy Fralin... etc etc etc

Need I go on?

> Germany is large too with different dialects

Sorry to burst your romantic bubble but... more or less slightly different dialects yes, but still it is one culture. Austria is even smaller and we have a TON of dialects and even parts with different languages. And Germany is actually pretty small, most towns are nowhere as huge as your megacities and people here live close together, I wish I had as much space as you guys do.
> I am saying that the lack in quality demanded has left us wish cheaper products that can't demand the prices that will employ engineers.

If you actually click through those links on the page, you'll find that many are local hand-made bicycle manufacturers. I don't see how mass production is related to 'quality demand' or why out sourced products are necessarily inferior in quality. Certainly Apple products are not inferior in quality. In fact the argument you are making about out sourcing is a completely different argument.

> Only in Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, San Fran, Boston, St. Louis, and New York can you really find artisan bakeries in the US.

Incorrect. http://www.bbga.org/find_members

> The point is that the consumer demanded/expected a level of quality which is unique to their culture.

You were able to glean this insight into Iranian culture because your friend brought you back baklava hand-made with indigenous spices.
> Aim it at teenagers, provide an incentive to use it and then drop the sms thing

"Okay, I have an idea: CSI, with robots, in space."

"Okay, that's great! But... how about if they weren't robots, and it was in a regular Earth-bound police department?"

"So, you mean... CSI."

Seriously, now, if you remove every bit of what makes the application unique, then why should they be building that application any more? Why not build something that they do have a unique value proposition for instead?
Of course. There is still significant value in not allowing the attacker to ssh at will from any box at any time though.
Racing Games
I think this kind of misses the point. Even if you understand why JavaScript behaves this way, it doesn't mean that the behavior is sane.

JavaScript without type coercion would have been safer and saner in my opinion.
According to the text in the votewatch report you linked, the European Peope party voted against the proposition from the left in order to get their version to pass :
"However, to win on this issue, the EPP and ECR first had to reject the joint Motion for Resolution proposed by the centre-left. The EPP and ECR managed to win thanks to 11 defections from ALDE and 13 from S&D members (the entire British Labour delegation)."
You're misreading this. The motion that was defeated against the votes of the center-left was this:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION...

It is a resolution that is critical of ACTA and asks for necessary clarifications and improvements. It is pretty much the exact opposite of "voting for ACTA".

The center-right parties then succeeded in getting a motion of resolution approved for the following text:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION...
Even so, the laborious market as the writer describes it would be better characterized as an olipsony, as collaboration was required to perform the action the article is speaking against.

I'm not familiar enough to speak on anything else in the article, but this in particular bothered me.
Okay, you have a very good point about the guitars and the inflated values. a $32000 guitar must play itself. This is something I call "apparent value"

>While we are at it: where did the internet and PCs come from? What about 90% of all programming languages and operating systems used nowadays?

Good question. They came from people at Microsoft, Mathematica, Xerox (former MIT researchers), Bell Labs, and ITT. You are right. But in the article I wrote specifically that software engineers have kept their ranks and continue to prosper.
Frankly, personally if I knew someone like this locally who I could call to dispose of old appliances etc. and get a little bit back for it, and who was trustworthy and I knew would do pickup, I wouldn't bother with CL even if I knew there was a difference.

Someone who appears trustworthy + guaranteed quick turnaround would be worth the difference in return for me - I've disposed of old appliances by paying a removal company to take them away on more than one occasion because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of something like CL even if it meant I might make some money back.

I think in the long run there's a lot of opportunity for repeat business there from people who don't need to make the most cash out of the sale as opposed to either make it quickly or just want to get rid of the item without fuss.
Hi Mate,

>> "If you're doing a startup that needs funding to get off the ground, awesome, use kickstarter"

That's exactly what we're doing! As previously mentioned, unlike software projects, hardware requires tooling, parts and materials.

Kickstarter helping us to pursue our vision!

We've run an e-commerce site in the past and we know how much people's expectations matter.

Cheers,

Marcus
The German government doesn't have to ask twitter. Twitter would be breaking the law in Germany to publish it. It's not a request.
Record-Setting Terahertz Transmitters
If they want to build this then they should accept nobody will use it. They're complaining nobody uses it so I assumed they wanted people to use it.
Latest DRM Goes From Horrible To Slightly Less Horrible
They seem to be clear that they're using the cash for tooling and production.

> What's the money for?

> Backers of this project will be helping to create the first production run of Ninja Blocks. Your pledges will enable us to move forward and create more sensors, actuators and add support for more of your favourite web applications!

> Every $1 will help us make Ninja Blocks better!

> Where to next?

> This Kickstarter Project will allow us to put the final polish on our prototypes and be able to afford the tooling and parts needed for production. [...]
Promising final fixtures of Aus Open 2012
As some of the top seed tennis players Roger Federer, Ferrer, Kim Clijsters, Caroline Wozniacki, and Serena Williams have found their ways back from Aus Open 2012, what the first grand slam of the year has to offer to it’s revellers is the promising final fixtures which are firm fixed to be true entertainers by having contenders who are adept enough to make their moves eye catchy on the blue mat draped tournament.
Hook.io looks great! FYI we're actually using http://www.zeromq.org/ and getting 10,000 messages per second off the Ninja Block ;-)

Cheers,

Marcus
I think what the guys is done is fair enough, although I can definitely see the point you are making. The thing for me about this that makes it more kickstarter like than ready for an online store presence is the fact that it's going to be a few months before I get my hands on some shiny Ninja Blocks.

For some reason I feel more comfortable with pledging money to a small business on kickstarter than through an online store having them say "we'll get it to you in four months time". I realise it's just a slight mental shift, but it really changes the way I look at things.

Perhaps it's time for KickStarter to adapt to the growth in this area, by spinning of a products and projects site (still kickstarted branded and hosted) which does help folks bootstrap small companies that actually need to buy stuff in quantities to make something viable.
I think it's the case of Kickstarter funds finite projects (rather then the ongoing nature of a startup).

Cheers,

Marcus
Double precision performance is now just half speed, which is the same as the CPU. Many applications are bandwidth bound, so running in double vs. single doesn't end up with a 2x difference anyway.
I would like to apply but I feel stumped. I have a bunch of ideas and I'm a very resourceful and personally developed person (heh) with a big network of useful contacts / potential cofounders, but I don't know how to translate that into a compelling pitch.

Someone should start a business that writes these applications for you. :p
What they should really do is distribute some of those billions to their employees, and set a precedent for fair/social capitalism. Because yeah Steve Jobs was a genius, but any engineer who uses their devices knows that the folks who executed his ideas were just as critical for Apple's success.
Maybe they weren't excited because iMessage has reply all, and the tech press all use iPhones?
The Italian Wikipedia was blacked out for such a proposal earlier. The rest of the European Wikipedias could do the same.
Some of these infos are in the podcast, but I agree it will be nice to see them in the next parts