c3o

He also makes wonderful music as http://boyinstatic.com and http://theconsulategeneral.com.

He made a neat (mildly) interactive Flash site for one of his songs years ago: http://www.bellyfull.tv – I loved the concept of doing this instead of video.

At http://www.sonatafortheunaware.com he generated music from footage taken on the Philadelphia subway.

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth." – Steve Jobs in WIRED magazine, February 1996

It's not like you don't have control over your participation in this silly ritual... I think automating a meaningless post would be the wrong way to go. I try to write thoughtful, detailed birthday messages for people who really mean something to me, ignore birthday notifications of more casual friends and temporarily hide my own birthday when it's getting close to prevent the avalanche of hollow wishes.

Traveling hackers should check in at one of these: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces Instant community of like(ish)minded people, pretty much everywhere.

Yes! I'm involved with a hacker space in Vienna, Austria (we're proud that Noisebridge cites us as inspiration) and I've long believed that on the floor above every hackerspace there should be a hostel. A "hackers in residence" program, if you will – complete with international exchanges and a "worldwide pass" subscription. I haven't figured out how to cover the starting costs, but using Kickstarter is a really good idea. You should start a mailing list/Facebook group/wiki.

"You can convert losslessly" – that's not the whole truth. It's an issue that there's no obvious or agreed upon way to render an XML format like ATOM into JSON, because everyone makes up their own transformation rules. Here are two distinct attempts: * http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-atom2json.html * http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/json.html

Probably many would find something else, and that's a problem - but surely it can't be used as justification for not changing the policies. Legalization should happen gradually and with some kind of amnesty outreach program. But even if not: Crime like robbery would likely spike, but unless gangs quickly find a replacement product that's in similarly high demand (if there was one, wouldn't they already be serving it?) I imagine cutting off their easiest source of income would fairly quickly reduce their power to attract new members, purchase weapons, etc.

By listening for Capslock presses, it has an unusual interface that people weren't consciously aware any USB device could have – that's what makes them think about security implications.

Also see: http://seldo.com/weblog/2010/09/04/san_francisco_city_guide_...

Dave's 500Startups seems to invest pretty much everywhere, including Asia and Europe.

Justin.tv lets users trim and title recordings (they call it "highlighting"). I did that for my favorite talks, here are direct links with no skipping required:

Paul Graham: Recent trends in startup fundraising http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272030715

Andrew Mason (Groupon): Polishing your turds and getting SUPER RICH http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272030648

Tom Preston-Werner (Github): Optimizing for happiness http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272031754

Ron Conway (SV Angel): You can do it too http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272031486

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) interviewed by Jessica Livingston http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272031868 + http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272031906

Brian Chesky: 1000 days of AirBnB http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272030551

Anyone wanna do the rest?

I "highlighted" (aka. trimmed and titled) my favorite talks here, this might be a little more convenient: http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/videos

Yes, these sites seem to offer a vastly better deal to customers than traditional contracts. But there's a catch: As a consequence, the deal they offer to designers is necessarily so much worse that the only ones participating are those who can't find work elsewhere, ie amateurs. I think the Gap contest perfectly demonstrates that this isn't the type of task where a "Mechanical Turk" approach works. I've looked at the top 200 rated entries, and there's hardly a passable one among them, let alone anything even remotely inspired.

Plus, it came with a level editor! Oh, the hours I wasted with BUILD.EXE...

I agree that you need to make sure there are people in your life who know clearly (ie, you tell them honestly and openly) what you're going through, who can stand by your side as you go through several attempts at coping with this.

I can assure you right now that if you ever went through with it, there would be several (if not dozens) of devastated people going "If I had only known...!"

As for how to involve other people while still "saving face" and not being too much of a burden, I always liked Jane McGonigal's "recovery game" idea, maybe this can give you some ideas: http://blog.avantgame.com/2009/09/super-better-or-how-to-tur...

I wish you all the best!

In GA there's a setting to allow sharing of my data with other Google products. If I check this, do they still not use that as a source for Trends?

They're also using their own FlockDB (http://github.com/twitter/flockdb) to store their social graph.

A friend of mine committed suicide last December, at your age and from what I can tell, in a similar situation (he was even also a previous YC participant). It hurts how much reading this reminds me of him.

You mention some people know this side of you (to what degree?) but that they don't know how to help you. I think it's critical that during this rough patch you're going through, in addition to receiving anonymous advice here on HN, you surround yourself with supportive people in real life. Even if it's just one person that sticks with you through this, that you are completely open to and stay in close touch with about your plans and progress as you try therapy, medication and various other techniques.

For ideas on how to involve other people without having to be embarrassed or being too much of a burden, read about Jane McGonigal's "recovery game": http://blog.avantgame.com/2009/09/super-better-or-how-to-tur...

I wish you all the best.

By that logic you'd need to believe in every single religion at once to hedge your bet, since most only promise the afterlife to adherents of their specific belief system.

That aside, how can you say it'd "cost nothing"? It would cost me my integrity.

Another debunking of this argument: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZpJ7yUPwdU

Same here.

The 3.5 inch figure represents the floppy, remember that? :) A "3.5in HDD" is a hard disk that fits into the bay originally designed to hold a drive for 3.5" floppy disks.

It's sarcasm. "I interviewed all three women who attended" as in: there were hardly any there.

By "HTML design" do you mean the graphic design? In my eyes the site has an edgy, artsy, designer-y feel to it, are you put off by that? I found it more fun and exciting than YCombinator's or Seedcamp's sites or those of any VC I've ever seen (except maybe Sequoia). Of course an established investor/incubator/funding program doesn't need to rely on site design to communicate their awesomeness, but it seems like an obvious place to start differentiating and I don't agree that HackFwd's is "unappetizing" in any way.

Like they did with http://www.lively.com maybe?

That's because they have a contract with Channel4 to stream it in the UK: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-daily-show-with-jon-s... Not sure if the episode mentioned is already on there, since I in turn can't view the videos there...

How could that question not reflect respondents prejudices more than anything else?

Likewise MININGCO.COM is now About.com (#31 -> #65)

"Atomico itself is the largest single investor in its new fund"

To understand this you need to know that back in 2005, Ning wasn't as restrictive a your-own-customized-social-network service as it is now, it allowed you to build several kinds of social, "web 2.0"-ish pages like hot-or-not type rating sites, restaurant review sites and social bookmarking sites. You could "clone" the sites others had created and you even had some level of access to the underlying PHP code.

You can find references to that in old blog posts: http://blog.ning.com/2005/10/rate_my_anything.html

It's these applications that according to the article Ning later turned off, after they had moved to a new model.

Macs