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Mark thanks. I appreciate it. Can't hire a lawyer but just wanted to see if this was somewhat common. I'll find an example and ammend it. Cheers.

i meant to imply that suggestions about browsers, (following a statement like "delete chrome") often aren't practical for most people, and as a web dev I need a fairly traditional environment. So by "sane", I meant things like using ice weasel with noscript or tor-browser, or a very non-traditional small independent browser. I have reasonable privacy and security settings in place but need to be able to test websites etc.

I was asking the above because I love FF but on my macbook it was spinning the fan up and using a lot of cpu. I will try it again, but it would crash or throw the computer into spinning beachball mode; a lot.

How elitist have we become that the top comment says staff will become confused by the term "sprint" or using Microsoft word, the most ubiquitous document writing software in existence. Would I use it? No. Would I suggest it here? Yes. I mean we are talking about PRINTING a 500 page document and carrying it around so we can't reach for the stars here, but I will grant them 2nd grade english and 5th grade typing proficiency.

Twitter is starting to look something like Reuters real-time reporting network and event notifications. It basically replaces the headlines of the newspaper people used to see while walking down the street. It is a notification service which makes it a great platform.

Medium is trying to be the actual body paragraph of the newspaper[0]. They seek to provide content curation, search and monetization. They provide the analysis of the interesting topics you see on twitter. Twitter is diverse with people like Kim Kardashian to Noam Chomsky. Medium will let these people explain themselves in long form and introduce you to similar thinkers. For Noam Chomsky that might be other linguists or libertarians and for Kim Kardashian it might be a piece of cardboard, or goldfish. I don't know what the strategy is, but I would say 20/80 odds they crack the code. Long odds, but better than most start ups face. They need to:

* Find a way to pay users for content, or create a great incentive for them to continue delivering high quality content to them for free.

* Find a way to organize and display the content.

* Get people to pay for it.

Obviously a tall order. They are trying to be the people who figure out how to monetize without advertising traffic. I have no idea what they told investors, and frankly Ev Williams could say he was remaking Pets.com and he would get funded, but I suspect they have an idea for monetization.

[0] A newspaper was sort of link an internet website. It was made of something called paper and was delivered by actual people to your door. People used to use their hands to scroll through it. Push notifications and updates took ~24 hours to reach newspapers. Not much else is known about these ancient artifacts.

Without getting too specific it helped me do a few things (I know your question is about learning) however. First, it let me mend fences with people who I hadn't talked to in a while and I learned that it was easy to reconnect by doing something like this because it makes it very easy and lowers the social friction.

I also saw a few broad themes like being disorganized, thinking big but failing to execute, lack of ambition, etc. Some overlap, and some were smaller issues. I reckon I will actually write it up, depending how significant the other half of the results are.

On balance, it is a good way to reconnect with people and also see if there are broad negative attributes you were missing. I also wrote a few responses to people who asked for me to do it in return, so it gives you a chance to help others and yourself if your close friend has a really annoying quality you wish he would work through.

> I presume this is a throwaway/anonymous account, for obvious reasons.

My HN is PGP verified by keybase.io via my profile, and linked to most of my online identities ;). Unfortunately, I had some serious data corruption issues with a PW manager and lost my credentials. I "think" I can get my old account back but I don't have the password anymore. I would be happy to send along the info privately as I am about to read the other half tonight.

I also, wrote the post light heartedly which fits with my personality. "As you all know, I am an amazing individual and it is really difficult to measure the breadth of my greatness due to the vast amount of positive qualities and skills I have".

I wrote something like that and made some other jokes. This allows people to know you can take a joke, build up a bit of cockyness which people love to strike down, and also segue into the serious bits without too much fanfare. Also, I would bet that people are more likely to respond honestly via email because it is dehumanizing.

Feel free too email me at skg@samuel.engineer for the results. I haven't looked at all the responses yet as I had a lot going on today.

I don't. I think it depends on who you are but I am not the sort of person to be easily offended. I didnt do a blog post because really outside of the premise your structure and objectives will be different. If your friends are shy and introverted You could do an anonymous post.

What browser do you use? If there was a sane option, I would use it but Firefox really consumes resources even putting effort in to optimizing my settings. Using the tor browser or something is just not practical for everyday use. You can either give your data to microsoft, apple or google (if you haven't already) or use FF.

This came up a few days ago on HN. There is brand awareness as well as direct sales. So if you see a Heroku advert, then see an article on HN a few days later about it, when looking for quick app deployment you may start at heroku instead of engineyard.

Also, everyone underestimates how much advertising works. People often downplay advertising and beleive it affects others much more than themselves. While for low hanging fruit like MacKeeper, a shit-tier virus-spam-app that constantly is displayed via popups, targeted ads based on your preferences are subtle and difficult to weigh.

> if others are really comfortable with the idea of uploading their customer lists to Google (or FB [)]

Just to present a cynical point of view, it is Facebook and Google. In America (and many other countries) Google provides mail servers via google apps or just directly on the gmail platform. I don't know the percentage so I won't invent one but I would argue it is quite likely that if an exchange takes place between 2 parties (the minimum for a convo) the traffic routes through google. Between facebook, chrome, gmail and android your customer lists are likely not private.

This provides a fairly in depth look at the music industry and really spells out why these changes have happened. However, and not to discount the author's work, without providing the breadth of evidence in the article, this stuff is just super obvious. Technology has lowered the barrier to entry for all digital trades, quality and supply have skyrocketed while demand has stagnated(due to competition with internet/tv/apps etc) and the distribution platform and monetization strategy has changed. Coupled with widespread piurating the switch to live concert monetization is obvious as it can not be replicated.

of course. I was implying that regulation without a purpose:

1)That is logical, and makes sane tradeoffs.

2)Is in the publics interest instead of lobbyists.

3)Is divined using evidence.

We need unbiased medical experts to propose a system that works which has the following charachteristics:

1) Promotes the creation and development of drugs and the advancement of medical science.

2) Allows for a tight feedback loop and quick sceintific evaluation of new drugs, possibly allowing less dangerous drugs quicker feedback cycles.

3) Lowers the cost to get to market.

This is a VERY hard problem to solve as an exercise, but particularly difficult within the current political framework.

> Mandating lower prices for drugs is unlikely to work

Not sure if you are saying this generally, or you mean it as a response. I did not mean to indicate this, I believe lowering regulations and dev. costs would be beneficial but not mandating lower prices.

As an aside, I agree with you but would be interested to see if America can continue to compete in the drug market long term. Obviously, it is a big market, but with countries like China and India and their growing middle classes, if they have a more attractive development cycle with less regulation and tighter feedback I wonder if biotech would move overseas. America has really great biotech and science sectors because engineers move out of those countries here. If this stops, other markets become more attractive, and/or the patent system remains broken I would be pretty concerned.

This is a symptom, not a problem. Drug prices are a good measure of how we are doing on healthcare policy and insurance regulation. It looks like poorly. It costs 2.5B dollars to develop a new drug. The regulatory hurdles are MASSIVE. We have a complicated and extremely compromised healthcare system that is focused on providing insurance when it should have been providing better healthcare. There is no easy answer here, but companies are going to want to make profits and the system incentivizes them to spend money developing a few critical drugs, holding on to the patent and pricing it as high as possible, the dev costs are passed to the insurance companies which are passed on to you in premiums as well as inflation, as insurance companies operate much like a bank. This comes full circle into the role that banks play in lending and increasing the money supply.

Possible answers. Tighter fiscal policy, patent reform, smarter testing, looser regulations on known compounds, google x prize like gov't or private funding for cures, distributed computing using algorithms to evolve a cure (will be interesting to see what happens with that patent)

[0]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-ne...

I suspect the opposite. The Scientific American estimates the cost of rbinging a new drug to market is 2.5B and that number has doubled over the past 10 years[1]. We need to find a way to allow tighter feedback loops, better data flow and less regulation without purpose. We have amazing technology that allows continual monitoring of vital signs and rapid blood tests etc. If our laws could evolve with our technology we would be in great shape. That would, of course, require elected officials to be qualified in various disciplines, act in the public's best interest and not accept money from lobbyists.

[1]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-ne...

Chris Coyne (co-founder of keybase.io) seems to send them to new members. Unless he was on here, which is possible, I have no reason to suspect I received special treatment. It actually is fairly smart because you can grow your base by an order of magnitude and if you have set the culture of the people you invite, the site will blossom that way. I sent you an email to ask if you want an invite. If you get back to me I will send you one.

Sorry mate, I was having a laugh with the social network bit, but I think we are both just saying the same thing. The product is in Alpha. It isn't ready yet. I just downloaded it and it says "This product is in Alpha". They will then move to private Beta then Beta then launch. So I think they will do what you are asking, but they are further behind.

I guess my point was that they have a really long release cycle because this is a security project. Regardless, I have 9 invites so I am considering allocating a few to some non-technical friends now to get their take.

I disagree. I believe there strategy is not,

> Asking what GPG-loving techies and HN readers think about usability

Although, many of us do UX or appreciate and can accurately review it, they want the GPG-loving techies to evaluate their security and software. This isn't exactly a social network, you can't move fast and break stuff, and just push flaming builds and iterate. This has to launch to the public with bulletproof security. This is because in 3 years they want "Log in with Keybase.io" on every website instead of "Log in with Facebook" and they want secondary authentication for twitter and facebook to leverage their keys. So they have to convince people and those companies they have security pretty well figured out.

I understand where you are coming from and I would like it if they rolled out quickly. They could maybe even do it tomorrow, I don't actually know but so far it seems to work well. However, the public isn't really clamoring for this anyway, because they don't even know what it is. I was even surprised how old keys were. You can see elon musks e@x.com key from the early 90's on the MIT keyserver and some are much older than that. Not even everone on HN has keys I bet, so the public isn't as anxious as you or I might be ;). I hope they release soon though.

> this is the main reason most people (including me) aren't using it.

Most people don't know what PGP/GPG is, probably know less than nothing (have misconceptions) about encryption, and don't even realize why a service like keybase.io would be helpful, much less that it exists.

What I love about this community is that there are people like aianus below who have early access to stuff like this, and being part of this community will engender them to help you. I like this service because people outside of this community will get involved after they work out the kinks. People getting invites are developers and tech-centric people who likely have other keys anyway and are testdriving the software.

The biggest way forward for keybase would be Facebook or Twitter allowing you to integrate your key into the service.

> it seems like I've been trying to get an account for years, now ;(

The keybase github account was created 2 years ago on sept 6 ;). Someone below will likely help you out if you email them.

Thanks aianus. Appreciate the invite.

Brilliant. Sent. Thanks a 10^6.

I think blogs really overdo the amount of links and nav they have (this trend is changing to minamalist now) but this is a bit too minimalist. They have a tiny footer with a link back to the blog, so they do have it, but a person curious what keybase.io is, would likely want to head to the homepage before reading a company update top to bottom to find that link.

i think keybase (or something like it) is going to be huge. Instead of email, sites like reddit and HN will use PGP keys for identity instead of email. I don't use keybase because 1) I'm behind 12K people for their private beta 2) I know how to run gpg --gen-key

This media angency began as an "internet popularity contest in 2006". It rose to prominence by blog spamming and riding the coattails of the popular meme "clickbaiting". It gained notoriety for the amount fo javascript used to serve advertisiments, poor articles, limited content and tracking and selling user data. At one time it was the biggest clickbait and blogspam mill on the entire internet.

It has earned another distinction, as a unicorn. Having a value of north of $850 million, valued in an investment by silicon darling Andreesen Horowitz. Andreesen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon went on to proclaim that the company was a great investment and would be a legitimate media entity.

Buzzfeed, have you forgotten you are Buzzfeed. You can't write a quote like this, and be taken seriously:

In practice, that meant a factory of winking pop-ups, banner ads, advertorials, and landing pages everywhere from Yahoo Mail to AOL and MSN, displaying pictures of old women transforming into young ones and scales tipping to lighter numbers. The rapid A/B testing and modification of these ads has always been Goldenberg’s strength

The irony is glaring and the funniest part is they don't realize it.

Not everyone views the world the same way. Some people would willingly trade their privacy for safety ("myself included") and would not feel "ashamed".

However, my appraisal of "safety" markedly differs (like most people's appraisals of things) and I am more concerned with an overzealous government than a foreign attacker. I would trade my google search history for a bullet-proof vest if I was in a war-zone. However, I am not, and I don't think giving it to the government makes me safer.

However, people view the risk to the country and themselves differently and they also put markedly different values on their own privacy[0]. Also, this article should come as absolutely NO surprise to anyone in the HN community (or even anyone with internet).

edit: [0] which they use as a framework to assess how others value their own privacy AND the value they themselves put on others privacy.

3. Wearables will stil suck because the problem they need to be solving is Peripherals The reason wearables suck and why glass failed is because they offer nothing. There is very limited value in a watch that lasts ~12-24 hours and can only take your pulse and display text messages. Google glass is awesome, but there was no way to actually use it. You immeadiately let everyone know you were a google employee or wealthy technologist by wearing it. The way you communicated with it was by shouting at it. Not very discreet at all. A company will emerge with a very low profile set of rings or bracelets that allow you to quickly gesture to your device what you want it to do. Before peripherals move past a keyboard or voice control there is no hope for wearables. Also, battery life is a factor. I also think that glass will be replaced by something like oculus with front facing cameras, intake the information, process it and deliver it. You won’t need to actually look through the glasses but see it on a screen. Night vision will just be cached copies of the previous days imagery processed on a master server using seadragon or similar software.

1. The Sharing Economy or Protocols, Protocols, Protocols

The sharing economy will be governed by protocols. Decentralization will be standard. Companies like Ethereum and OpenBazaar as well as the Bitcoin protocol are already being used/leveraged for this. It will be standard. 1. Decentralized authority will be used for most things and will destroy the power distance between individuals and regulators stripping their power. These protocols provide privacy, authority and identity by design and the gov’t can’t do anything about it. 2. Government won’t matter much This is basically the affect of trrend one. When decentralized protocols become common place there will be no way for government to enforce regulations. Some of this is good and some is bad. On balance it is good. They can still stop people from doing bad things in the physical world, but not govern and collect your communications, interlope into network governance and stop being the world’s sysadmin. Centralized authorities will prosper servicing things like DNS naming authorities, identity, licensing, communications, financial transactions, legal transaction, wills deeds etc.

2. Everyone will realize uber is a logistics company. Uber is building teams to for autopilot and self-driving tech right now. They have a “Math Department” to create algorithims and heuristics for prediction. They know that ridesharing p2p is something that can only last ~10 years. They will be the first people to do interstate logsitics and transport with self-driving vehicles. They will be the level 3 or cogent to Amazon’s comcast/verison. By this I mean that Uber will handle 90% of long distance supply chain hubs and Amazon will be the last-mile provider.

I Have Read this Medium Post.

The author makes a great case against Prop F, prop F seems like a totally shitty law and isn't going to fix the housing problem. It sounds like that isn't what the law is about anyway, but there is a great way to fix the housing problem. The argument he seems to allude to in his notes, is that people seem to choose sides based on their sentiment surrounding the current resedential/housing market.

In economics there are 2 forces at the heart of most problems. These are called "supply" and "demand" and they govern price. SF has not been keeping up with it's infrastructure, is a decade behind in new construction, and building new resedential properties will take ~5-10 years to complete. They are not actively building properties that will sufficiently meet demand even now. So this won't go away.

Unfortunately, people who paid a lot for houses have a vested interest in not raising supply, and the amount of regulation surrounding new construction creates massive amounts of friction. It will be interesting to see how this problem get's solved. I agree with the author though:

It is not going to be Prop F.

Yep. I like his talk at Pycon in 08, where he talks about building a better email client[0] but it is also noted in your link. Thanks, I switched back from mobile and meant to post it.

Incidentally, if anyone has seen his Pycon talk, one of his ideas is "Bring Back the Old More's Law", and if you are curious it is ~2-3 minutes here[1]. I have always been wondering what he means when he says a "sufficiently smart compiler is a byword for impossible" is this an AI reference or a deeper computer science theory that I am missing. Always been really curious.

[0]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=7m40s [1]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=21m38s

Smart play. If they can lock people in to their free chat client they can get a stronger foothold into enterprise and servicing smaller start-up/SMB companies. This is what Paul Graham talks about building an e-mail client, just call it a todo list.

This is a storage application front-end. Slack and hipchat charge the money for secure storage, file transfer and data. That is Dropbox's competitive advantage and a great way to break into the market discreetly.

Client looks cool, I will be downloading it.

Why quirky failed, kickstarter. It was an awesome idea, but kickstarter handles the long tail, shards and distributes the workload, and is universal. That is why Quirky failed.