lucasdailey

First Past the Post poll? Really? We're supposed to be smart nerds; with more than two candidates we should be using a preferential voting system, not FPTP. Even the Academy Awards and the Heisman trophy are selected with preferential voting systems. We're letting ourselves be outsmarted by football players? Someone make a Schulze Method poll already.

Edit: okay, it looks like it's Approval Voting; I didn't realize you could vote for multiple. That's a lot better but still not as good as the football players!

Same. I stopped by the one in Wisconsin (on canoe trips) frequently as a kid. I thought they were common.

Ok, not only is this an awesome idea, but I wireframed basically the identical thing; I called it Google Advice. http://happyemergency.tumblr.com/post/54216044989/google-adv...

Similar, no?

If anyone had any feedback I'd definitely love to hear it.

Cool, just watched the video, looks really ambitious! Yeah I'd like to hear more and share what I can. Let's setup a call or something. lucasdailey@gmail.com

Thanks! Although I kept meaning to change that but never did. I wanted something more like "To create an (un)social network, focus on how your product will provide value to it first users, not its peak users." Or something like that. "last" makes it sound like, well, last. Like the company is failing and you're down to your last user. I meant it in more of the full adoption sense. Lots of things I'd like to fix in the article..

Thanks digging my article! I'm curious what people thought about.

I certainly wasn't advocating ignoring them, I agree with you completely that all interest groups (which I think is a better definition than calling them political social networks) should take part, and I'm sure they will.

There's a long list, almost every problem in this country and worldwide ultimately comes down to political failures. We have almost zero long-term consideration going into political decision making. We have a terrible voting system that forces citizens to either vote for who they want OR effect the outcome of the race. This causes the two parties to eternally maintain their monopoly of political power, they'll continually shift to absorb any upstart interest groups. Which in turn leads to only two solutions being proposed for each political issue, each targeted to appeal to their constituency instead of solving the problem. Each party only needs to be less hated than the other by 50%+1 of the population.

So yeah, I think it's broken, it barely ever worked well.

And in the context of this article, I think we do a ridiculously poor job of listening to constituents, largely because there isn't a successful near-universal political social network that forces politicians to listen.

And for what it's worth if anyone had any questions or comments I'd love to talk about them here. <3 HN.

Currently there are really only indirect ways to influence governments, and weak ones at that. Like I lay out in the article I think you really need a lot of pieces in place to make a political social network have enough political strength to foster mass adoption and substantial political relevance.

As long as they didn't find oil.

Free with a 2-year contract. Like "Free printer with a new laptop". But yeah, the amount of the monthly service fee that goes toward paying for the "free" phone is probably more than the cost of the phone, thus a profit for the carrier. But if you want a major carrier plan you may as well take advantage of the offer you're paying for.

You're right, I should have been more specific. For my usage needs AT&T was less, if I use GV for sms (saving $20/m). Though the T-Mobile coverage is poor in the places I want it, so it wasn't one I considered anyway.

Because Free! Plus T-Mobile is more expensive. You can do $70/m on AT&T (with sms only though Google Voice, etc).

Personal preferences, design philosophies, lots of reasons. I find that office to be pretty unappealing, personally.

Agreed, though I think the dramatic lighting is responsible for most of it.

As a (steel & glass) architect I'm certain this is not an expensive office when compared to other tech companies. I think most people are being fooled by the "high-class americana" style, but really this does not cost more than a high-end minimalist office.

Question the style choices, sure, but the assumption that is in anyway more expensive than average is completely false.

Ranked Pair ftw. Bring it.

Madison's temporary lose is San Francisco's gain.

Don't get used to it!

Support!

Great timing, something I need to learn more about.

The best service they offer, imo, is just buying music. Instead of paying $8 for an album on itunes you can get the exact same album "used files" for say $4. AND you actually own the album, so you can resell it or give it to someone. So so awesome.

Digital music you actually OWN for less than itunes or amazon. Brilliant.

Good point. I hadn't checked them out before, they were part of the previous cohort, but it looks decent. Although without seeing a real user procession it's difficult to say, their site explains it more as a collection of features.

Listed on 94labs page, which I linked to. I only wanted to highlight my favorites, the most interesting.

Also mentioned, not a new Madison startup but a newly famous one: murfie.com

Ah, right on. Yeah that would be amazing.

I can't decide if that would be awesome or scary.

I think I'd rather see carrier/phone independence, which would be much more likely in a phone rental market where your carrier fee isn't subsidizing a new phone every 2 years.

Google is in a unique position that makes a rental phone model more attractive to them than to other OEMs. They should do it. It would make a huge difference environmentally and socially, nnd I would bet it would be the more profitable long term strategy.