netfire

You make a valid point given the current system, but the government mandated system of limited medallions seems like an unnecessary barrier to entry and prevents small (and perhaps more innovative) companies from competing in the market. (which seems unfair). What benefit, if any, do the consumers get from limiting the number of medallions?

Plenty of industries are subject to local and federal government regulation, but that doesn't mean they should be protected from competition. Where does the motivation to provide good service at competitive rates come from if you are protected from competition? Such an agreement, in my opinion, is inherently bad for progress and for consumers in general.

+1 for full-res screenshots. I like to see what I'm getting before having to create an account and download an app.

Like the concept. Just submitted 4 reviews and haven't got one back for my site after 15 mins. Any way of shortening the queue to provide a quicker reward for my critiques would be awesome. It'd also be nice to see your site's screenshot to know what people are looking at when they review my site.

Seems like a strange move by Google. Most small or starting businesses don't need a 25GB inbox (at least not every user) or 24/7 tech support. Why create the barrier to entry? Now people with businesses will be more likely to use personal Google accounts for business or look for alternative services. Why not just create a premium business account option that gives you this level of storage and support if you need it, instead of trying to convince your users that they need it, when most of them are happy without it.

Personally, I liked the direction Google was heading with their Google Drive product. You get up to 5GB for free and then pay for more if you need it. Makes me wonder how Google might try to monetize other products like Google+ once they have a substantial following.

I like the concept but the product doesn't seem to work well (at least the free version), perhaps due to HN traffic. I can't connect to most websites and the ones I can connect to take a long time.

As for your website, I agree with some of the other comments. Its not really obvious that you have a free plan or what that offers unless you read closely. I'd suggest you move that up into your pricing grid.

I'd also move the Sauce with Mouse row up to the top. I see your main value for users (or at least starting point) being manual testing. Focus less on automating and scaling up to huge numbers of tests. Get me in the door and familiar with the product, then upsell me once I'm convinced your product is awesome.

Best of luck to you. I'll check back in a few days to see if things are working better.

Sooner or later, we'll have to in order to compete with other nations. The problem is that it will eliminate jobs, which is unpopular. We seem stuck on preserving jobs in certain industries, regardless of whether the economy is better off with those jobs or not.

The question is: How do we create jobs for people with manufacturing skills in other industries that are more needed in our economy? We need to figure out a way to transition workers to jobs that are better for the economy, not keep on subsidizing industries in the name of creating jobs.

Yes, printing is part is a problem, but I just don't see the advantage of being able to explore a model using the augmented reality technology instead of just using your mouse or finger to rotate the model on the device itself. Interesting? yes. Useful? no.

Although the Augmented Reality part of the 3D models may be fun or interesting, its not particularly useful and may be annoying if you use it often (where did I put that marker paper again?). Seems like a direct interaction with the 3D model with your device would be more useful (they might want to at least provide that option). You lost me at print this first.

A few things bug me with the site design

- The header background at the top of the page seems strange, not exactly sure what it is (wood logs?). It makes the white text harder to read and doesn't seem consistent with the feel of the rest of the site.

- The vertical whitespace between the different elements on the site seems off. Different heights and smaller towards the top, with a lot more whitespace between elements further down on the page.

The chances are very low that a national popular vote would be so close that counting or not counting dimpled/pregnant chads would make a difference. Lets also not make the assumption that the same people would vote in an electoral election as in a popular one. I think more people would vote, especially in non-swing states, where their vote usually doesn't matter as much in a presidential election

The main problem I see with the electoral college is that it forces the candidates to focus on winning the votes of just a few swing states, instead of the entire country. If the president is supposed to represent the needs/wants of the whole country, shouldn't everyone's vote count equally to decide who takes office?

Seems a bit extreme. Other parts of the US have significant problems to deal with as well. The west coast (earthquakes), midwest (tornados and drought), south (hurricanes) and northeast (snow) all have problems which cost lots of money (sometimes federal tax dollars) to deal with. You could call building in any of these areas a "mistake", but that doesn't really help solve the problem.

I would prefer that the government not sell ad space at all. (The reason a subway should be built is to transport people from one place to another, that's what you are paying taxes for). The main point I was trying to make is that we should consider other rights when defending free speech (or other rights, including not being exposed to things you don't want yourselves, or your children to be exposed to). Defending almost any right to an absolute extreme produces consequences that are harmful to individuals and society (as your example illustrates).

We should be careful to not limit other rights in protecting the right of free speech. I defend the right of people to express their opinions, views, thoughts, etc in society, but I also believe you must have balance and allow people to choose whether they want to listen to someone's opinion or thoughts.

It is one thing to go listen to someone from the KKK speak about their thoughts or to read their opinions in a pamphlet or book (this type of free speech I support), it is another to force the public to be exposed to their hateful messaging by forcing billboard/television companies to allow their messaging be shown in a public place.

We should support the rights of companies or individuals to censor content they don't agree with or want to be affiliated with. Government should (at least in some cases) be able to limit certain types of speech where the public would be forced to see something they don't want themselves (or their children) to be subjected to. Government should be less involved with censoring types of speech that someone chooses to be exposed to.

What are your thoughts? How do we find the right balance with free speech and other rights?

This link posted says they are looking to rename Personas to something different, but it doesn't look like its actually happened yet (or what it will be called). Given that the getpersonas.com website is still calling them Personas, I'd say the Personas name is still alive and well (and easily confused with the new Persona product)

The main problem seems to be the lack of competition due to restricted infrastructure. In a lot of areas in the US, you only have one company that provides service to the area you live in. In a situation like that, the provider has little motivation to improve the service. This needs to be recognized as monopolistic and the infrastructure needs to be opened up so that it can be used by other providers.

Luckily, there is some decent competition in the wireless internet space. As technology continues to improve there, more people will have access to decent internet speeds wirelessly and the wired infrastructure will feel pressure to catch up. Hopefully more options for unlimited data plans will also become available in the near future.

As far as the absurd amount TV providers are charging for HD TV, DVR services and the like. Technologies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple and others are providing more internet-based services that provide this type of On-demand service at a much more reasonable price. I hope more content will become available on these types of services as more people realize how much better of a user experience it is over watching normal network TV (even with DVR).

It's not the fact that they are competing with Uber, it's how. If your way of dealing with a competing business is to pass laws that shut that business down to preserve a monopolistic system, instead of competing on price and quality of service, you are going to "look like the bad guys" no matter what. How would what the city and taxi drivers are doing look any better if they had done it a year ago? How could they have competed in a more reasonable way if they have started sooner?

I was wondering about the security as well. I would imagine it would make it easier for thieves to rob a house where they could turn off all the lights. Or turn on the lights and see if there is any reaction (to see if anyone is home).

Although I agree that having things like ping-pong, nerf guns or free soda available does not guarantee that there is a good company culture, I don't think its means there is a bad one either.

Regardless of whether the work is interesting or if you are productive, sometimes you just need to take a break. If during that break, you can have fun with one of your co-workers, all the better (not to mention the benefits of getting out of your chair to get some exercise).

As already mentioned before, some of the best friendships can come out of a working environment. Having fun with co-workers and trying to get to know who people are instead of just trying to understand what they know can lead to better communication and collaboration, as well as a more enjoyable workplace.

Agreed. Very cool.

I do wish it had better integration with the web console though. It just seems strange when you pop-up the web console tab to have a JS prompt for entering javascript directly above a Browser prompt for controlling the browser.

It'd be nice if you could just go into a javascript entry mode on the browser prompt itself and see the output appear in the web console. Even something as simple as adding a javascript command where the argument passed into the command is javascript would be useful (perhaps someone could create an add-on that does this)

So you replace a bike helmet with something you wear around your neck instead. That seems less comfortable and more annoying that just wearing a normal helmet. Plus you could get a very comfortable helmet for much less than $600.

I'm curious to know how this compares to other new aircraft testing, since there are already plenty of commercial companies in that space. Admittedly, spacecraft is a a bit different from normal aircraft, but something going horribly wrong in either situation still means almost certain death.

Isn't a user's browser technically an intermediary? The browser reads html from an initial request and makes automated additional requests for images, javascript and css files, etc and then renders the page using its own rendering engine. The only difference here is that the browser is making multiple requests and using a different rendering engine (the extension) to display it using a map.

There's an obvious market for people who want the amount of data that craigslist has, but wanted it displayed in a smarter way that allows better filtering and searching. They could make a killing licensing their data to 3rd party sites (or launching a new site with an improved interface). Instead they are giving users more and more reasons to switch to other services.

Same here. Doesn't bode well, does it?

Using Captcha on an ad landing page to determine whether someone is bot seems like a bad idea. It would almost certainly increase the bounce rate on that page and you couldn't just say that people who didn't choose fill out the captcha were bots.

Although our current poverty situation may be due, in part to income inequality and policies that favor the wealthy. I think it has more to do with how we deal with poverty, which is essentially to throw money at the problem and hope it goes away.

I'm a big fan of helping people help themselves. Many people live in poverty because of poor financial decisions or because they don't have skills to succeed in the workforce, not because their taxes are too high. In fact our current tax structure incentivizes people to stay in lower tax brackets because as you start to earn more money, you have to pay a higher percentage of your income to the government. I think the following changes would go a long way to solving the poverty problem.

- Focus on providing the basic needs (housing, food and medical attention) by providing those goods and services to those in need instead of just giving people money.

- Stop giving loans (especially high-interest loans) to people who do not have good credit. In my opinion the government should not allow loans to consumers to have an more than 10% annual interest.

- Stop using the IRS and tax policies as a welfare assistance program. They are probably one of the worst entities able to determine if someone is really in need.

As others have pointed out, American poverty doesn't really even compare to situations of people in third-world countries. Poor in this article refers to a statistic released by the census bureau, which best I could tell is calculated using thresholds based on one's income and how many people live in a household. Instead it should be based on whether someone is getting enough to eat, has somewhere to live and can get medical treatment.

If this were a replacement to the current backscatter scanners, this would be more interesting. Since it doesn't seem like this would catch knives or other non-chemical weapons, this seems like yet another step at the airport that won't provide very much additional security and could provide a lot of false positives, as already mentioned.

I had the same problem. I opened up multiple stories from Hacker News and had to click through each of the tabs find out where the music was coming from. Perhaps you could use some sort of javascript mouse event to detect actual user interaction with the opened tab before you start playing the music loop, and yes please make it clearer in your UI on how I can make it stop.

Overall, pretty cool concept/app.

Yes the subdomain is different, but they both share the same domain (that's what I meant by site) and both have to deal with the same thing--your company. Seems like they should as close to one another in look and feel (and navigation) as possible.

The whole navigation when on your blog seems confusing. If you click on the logo while on the blog, you get the blog home, but if you click the about link, you are taken to the main site with similar navigation (and a similar looking logo/layout). You really don't get the feeling that you've left the blog site.

Wouldn't it be simpler and much more straightforward to just add a blog link to both your blog and your main site, make your blog look like your main site and make the logo link to your main site. After all, isn't your blog part of your main site?

Also, when you click on your profile link on the right of your blog you get a posterous profile page. Seems like that should link to the about page as well.