pit

I couldn't agree more. The curated internet is a terrible trend -- it encourages mindless, constant, and immediate consumption and discourages exploration (except safely between the lines of your preferred content aggregator).

Hi, thanks for getting back to me! I didn't realize that the right swipe existed, but it's amazing! It actually solves both of my problems: now I can keep my thumbs in pretty much the same spot, which is great.

I'm using an HTC First (please don't make fun of me), which has a 4.3 inch screen.

Okay, I'm typing on Minuum right now. It's extremely accurate but I feel slow. You sort of have to shut your brain off and pretend you're playing a letter hunting arcade game.

It seems like I miss the space bar about five percent of the time.

To the developers, nice job and thanks for putting it on sale in the Play store.

Thanks for explaining that. I wasn't sure why it it would matter to Kid #1 if Kid #2 had the mumps, as long as Kid #1 was vaccinated.

I assumed it had something to do with diabetes -- an online glucose tracker, for example. The fact that it was invite-only made me think "oh, they're trying to create a community for diabetics."

It looks good, though. I'll check it out shortly.

> I don't listen to music.

As someone who loves and makes music, I find this _really_ interesting. Do you play an instrument? Listen to unsigned bands? Don't get me wrong: silence is nice, too. But I don't think I will ever have a life without music.

Have you seen the Epic Citadel demo? It's pretty amazing: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

That's hilarious. It's time to cut out the act of consumption and skip right to destroying goods as a show of power:

> "In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his 'power' to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his 'power' was diminished."

-- Wikipedia (Potlatch)

Re: Sidenote:

I tried out iTunes Radio last night, thinking "this'll be cool!" About two songs into it, they played an ad for Macy's. I'll stick with Rdio, thanks.

This seems like a great question for StackOverflow.

That's true -- the Start menu has gone through a lot more changes than the shape of the button (moving from one column to two, for example). I guess I was trying to downplay those changes, which have been less disruptive to my workflow than, say, when "Add/Remove Programs" became "Programs and Features", or "C:\Documents and Settings\pit" became "C:\Users\pit" (and because of backwards compatibility, in Windows 7 we have both).

Admittedly, these sound like trivialities. My point is that learning how to use software is work. I've found it to be unpleasant work with Microsoft products, particularly when what you've learned in one release don't apply in the next release. And not in five big ways; in ten thousand little ways.

Worth reading for Richard Branson's story about the first Virgin Airlines flight.

I agree. The GUI changes in Windows (pre-8) are pretty negligible. Your Start button used to be rectangular; now it's a circle. Big whoop.

The most frustrating thing for me about Windows over the years is that the path to perform routine tasks is always changing.

It's really sad. I'm sure there are also people on Kickstarter who aren't scammers, just ordinary folks who don't appreciate the full extent of their commitment. You run into a few obstacles, or your mom gets sick, and suddenly you're on the hook for $50,000 and can't deliver what you promised.

On the other hand, you hear stories about projects who offer too much ("I'll paint a portrait of anyone who donates $7!"), and all their money goes to servicing those rewards.

I don't mean to excuse anyone. Obviously, not everyone is capable of running a business, and Kickstarter makes it really easy for those people to get themselves into hot water.

I humbly disagree. I was waiting for the site to "finish loading", and when I realized that it had, I was delighted.

Welcome to ad-supported content!

> We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.

What's interesting about this is that marketers are now stealing stories from consumers and selling them right back, either by monitoring our behavior (both on- and off-line) or direct solicitation. "Tweet your favorite Dunkin' Donuts memory with #DunkinMemories!" There are even promotions that encourage consumers to write and produce their own commercials for a product -- there was one a while back where the winning ad was shown during the Super Bowl.

Good point, especially because at 33 bits, storing everyone's ID would only take about 29 gigabytes.

7,126,462,675 people * 33 bits per person / 8 bits per byte = 29,396,658,534 bytes

World population source: http://www.census.gov/popclock/

It's nice to be noticed. :)

"Hypertext reference," I said to myself as I clicked the link. What do I win?

Great job. I also really like Capo for OS X: http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/Capo/index.html

Edit: can anyone recommend a good, free chord dictionary for Android?

Let's also not forget youtube-dl: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

I want to try an experiment that goes like this:

1. Block all network traffic, inbound and outbound.

2. When I decide that I need a specific network resource, enable it in a whitelist (i.e. enable traffic to/from news.ycombinator.com on port 80)

I wonder what that Internet would look like.

Man, I would hate to see that Google Doodle.

Remember all that fun we were having yesterday?

Here's a better view of the Winter Wonderlab in NYC:

http://winterwonderlab.withgoogle.com/finder

Strangely, it was near the bottom of the second page of (Google) results for "Google Winter Wonderlab".

Do you start emacs.exe or runemacs.exe?

This one is a little esoteric, but Billy is a cool, incredibly minimalist audio player:

http://sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html

Unfortunately, it looks like the site's downloads are unavailable right now (suffering from nostalgia overload?), but it's definitely worth checking out:

    * tiny -- like, 500K
    * gapless playback
    * 100% controllable by keyboard

Yes, Peter Pawlowski. According to Wikipedia, he is "a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft."

EDIT: He's also been working on an audio player called Boom: http://perkele.cc/software/boom

First Sonique, now this? At least we've still got foobar2000.