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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

Hold on hold on. This is a big swarm of satellites and (I assume) a forthcoming API and the comments are "the scrolling sucks"? They could have used tables and comic sans for all I care. This is awesome.

Though Planet Labs will always be my first affection in this space. Talk about a hard and interesting problem. This data takes you to so many different places.

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Usually I'd agree... but I legitimately cannot access the content because the page is so broken. I actually found out what this thing is from your comment.

Normally I'd agree, but in this case I literally tried on three devices -- two Google Android phones and a very powerful laptop running Google Chrome on a fast connection and it not only took forever to load but was completely nonfunctional when it finally did. I literally couldn't access the content whatever I did. This is one of the most ridiculous examples of a site not working that I have ever seen. If I had not opened this thread I would have literally no idea what the site even was. If I were able I would fire the person responsible for the site, no questions asked. This site is so far past "nonfunctional" it isn't even funny. I agree that "They could have used tables and comic sans for all I care. This is awesome.", but there's a huge difference between "somewhat ugly presentation", "horrible presentation", "unusable for most people", and "a professional web developer with three devices and many web browsers could not make your page load".

Regarding the content of the page, which has been summarized at http://pastebin.com/raw/kYpdLgYg by commenter Raphmedia, I'm impressed. 90cm resolution in a 100kg package is pretty crazy. That they control the multimillion dollar satellite through a web interface is interesting. One clear advantage they have over governmental systems is their ability to do international launches (their initial launch from French Guiana certainly gave them some significant boost of tangential velocity compared to say, Russia, which is geologically screwed.) If anyone wants to see a visualization of that, see http://i.imgur.com/6c9Edge.png

I still do not know how is this actionable. So, they have satellites that take cool pictures, ok. Are they selling the stuff? Sharing an API?

Whether it's a consumer sale (sign up via web and get an API key) I do not know, but if you have a compelling use I'm sure you can get access by talking to humans. In terms of what you can use it for, I know people have built applications on top of Planet Labs to run queries from counting the number of cars in Walmart parking lots every day for hedge funds to tracking deforestation.

> but if you have a compelling use I'm sure you can get access by talking to humans.

So they make money by potential customers guessing at what they can provide them and reaching out to them? Seems like a terrible way to do business.

Unless I missed it (which would be easy; damn is it hard to get to the content on that site) I see no information about anything other than what they do internally. Which is cool but that's about where it ends.

This is afaict a pr buzz piece. They apparently are hiring.

I think this is also surveilance-wash so to speak. Look at our cool team, look at our wonderful use cases. Don't think about how it can track the movement of everybody in a city from space. We're good.

Very valuable data to finance - commodities and macro trading could use this data to understand supply and demand trends, like a robust version of "Helicopter Edge": http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-12-19/helicopter-...

Where do you see any info on an API?

God, no kidding. These comments are a disaster.

They could have used tables and comic sans, and it would have been an improvement because if nothing else I could have read the content.

As it is, I kind of get the idea...sort of. Something about satellites, imagery, real-time somethingerother. There's complaining about weird scrolling and "broke my back button", which many of us tire of, and then's there's "hi! Didn't know if you noticed, but your site's broken on the most commonly-used browsers, broken to the point that many cannot read what I'm sure is absolutely awesome content." In other words, had this been a marketing page for something people don't give two shites about, the column that holds the abandonment rate in their analytics DB would have to use a float lest the tiny, tiny percentage of people who didn't immediately close the browser tab be recorded as "zero".

So I'll take your word for it when you say it's awesome. Currently, I am not equipped to confirm that with Mac OS X and Safari or Chrome.

> This is a big swarm of satellites and (I assume) a forthcoming API

How can I know if I can't read the content? I'm not exaggerating - simply not usable.

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