thorax

Sounds to me like it's implying that if you aren't in "not knowing" then you know enough to act and better be doing so.

> it is making itself a target before it has any real social defenses

The system doesn't exactly have control over who notices it.

Some people are (rightly or not) excited about it and building services, sites, and the like around it. That aspect of its virality certainly isn't a bad thing if the community wants to live past that coming critical inflection point you suspect will happen.

I think this is fair, but it would be good form to admit when you don't have a good alternative solution.

Like the idea, but how do you get it to call you back if you drop off or if you miss the call? Is there a dial-in also provided for those situations?

One important note that isn't mentioned here. From what I understand, major/towered airports often have crews working the ground at night (due to the low traffic), towing planes, etc, and communicating with the tower over their own frequencies. Not expecting an unmanned tower themselves, they could easily try to "wing it" as best as they could to get their job done.

Sure pilots can avoid each other on the normal control frequencies, but the situation on the ground could be unexpectedly dangerous to ground crew/vehicles, especially in a night landing.

Love the idea! I'd also love a thumbnail/pic for each link, though. Something that might give them a little more evidence of what they're getting into.

I think #1 is a bit of a red herring. The security problem is not what this is solving. It's the ease of getting paid for some content, with less hassle overall.

Keep in mind that this is digital content so anyone could just rehost/resell/redistribute anything they bought or downloaded. But for something low-payment enough or the average silly download, why would they bother?

It's important to tell sellers that it's insecure so they don't assume it's locked, but please don't complicate this by adding DRM or sharing prevention. The most I'd do here is track downloads and let people kill their link and repost it if they sense abuse.

I didn't download their full report, but other sources reported it as in their final report (not produced on April 1st).

Experiment suggestion: Upvotes are weighted as today, but downvotes are heavier weighted when you're downvoted by a user with high karma. I'd probably say that weight can't send a comment negative.

Big fan-- already gave us some new domain ideas to discuss for our next project. Thanks!

I am insecure in every area you mention above, and I do everything in my power to approach advice exactly as you phrase it. Perhaps this is because I am insecure (all I know is that no one really knows everything), I choose to phrase things that way, often also seeing if they know something I didn't.

I don't think there's as close a tie between condescension and insecurity-- but perhaps in some cases that happens. I'd rather people just never be condescending, regardless of what position they're coming from.

Aside from the books and subscriptions, seemed to me like a lot of trial accounts, basically. It feels more like buying a coupon book than getting anything tangible this time.

I rather like the idea of AppSumo, just this time I have a hard time seeing which of these are good deals. After going through them all one-by-one I still can't tell if it's worth a hundred bucks to the average startup.

Yeah, we use a large dataset (so does craigslist, etc). I've not seen crashes. I'd be curious to hear more about what you ran into.

The indexing speed is so very fast-- I can't say enough good things about sphinx.

Yeah, be careful though. I remember an app like this on LiveJournal that went wild. Then they came back and told people they could buy the list of all the people who have a crush on them for something like $5. Lots of embarrassment ensued.

You picked an example where Python took a step backwards in readability. That's fair but surely not typical. I agree it was a loss since I'm a huge fan of language usability-- in Python 2.5 os.popen is really rather simple to read and use.

The slowdown and Erlangfest was because of a big new influx of users, see pg's post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

And pg's appeal for sanity: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512280

I like the Facebook spin because it hints at what they want to see-- social media savvy.

Chatterous's Google Talk integration was so stellar (it's broken most the time now) that our teams used it exclusively for cross-team chat for the past few years. I was one of their biggest fans but now I know they're not giving it much attention anymore.

Given that, I really want to see convore integration with jabber/gtalk somehow, but I'm not sure how it would work for rooms+topics versus just rooms.

There is absolutely no way he could have made such a move without the board's blessing; perhaps it was even their expectation that bringing him in would improve a deal they wanted to make with MS. I don't understand at all why you'd hint that this is "Microsoft serving" when it is clearly the will of the board of directors that this happen for Nokia.

Holy cow-- I never thought about this. Thank you so much for mentioning because it might explain our sometimes weak streaming performance for different sites.

Except that many who get into it, gets their friends into it and their families into it (since it's such a great family game). I think you underestimate the appeal of a sandbox game like this. It's got all the casual gaming characteristics and enough depth for hard-core gamers. It's really quite impressive that way.

Not sure if you already knew about this and are just joking, but the locked hypervisor approach is actually one that Citrix (mentioned in the article) is touting.. their XenClient stuff does that.

On my surveys on MT I ask things like "Why did you choose this answer?". I also made a little script library to record the times they enter answers in fields. I throw out any that appear to be scripted or were so rapidly answered as to not have been a real answer.

At the price per HIT I paid (0.08 to 0.15), I only had to throw out 2-3 answers out of ~2000 due to someone trying to reply randomly.

We use it for shared notes in our weekly status conference call. Status was great as you could see team members tweaking descriptions of subproject status where they shared work, etc. A lot faster than seeing the notes later or interrupting for something not worth stopping the speaker to correct.

On the fun side, with another group we use it extensively for D&D discussions where we need in-line comments/party-voting, etc. We take live quest notes together and there's all sorts of data being captured there that would be lost or post-merged later.

As Google has implemented the existing Wave, it's a great multi-person brainstorming and note tool. I really do love it for those and haven't found any alternative that works quite as well... we tried it out on a lark and it just became too useful and natural for all sorts of shared tasks.

I can't be the only one who uses the iPad's orientation lock button frequently... The very impractical decision to transform it to a mute button is enough of a frustration that it will be a good while before I can convince myself to upgrade to an otherwise compelling release.

> no one is paying $500k for a fucking space station made out of pixels and stored on Oracle RAC.

Since you're so well upvoted, I guess a lot of people agree with this, so I want to respond to be sure people aren't dismissing this sort of purchase without being logical about it.

I'm certainly not paying $500,000 for a virtual good like this, but this kind of statement is a bit broad and (I feel) narrow-sighted.

There are currently large online communities paying thousands a month to keep their virtual play worlds alive (e.g. larger gaming communities in Second Life). It's not hard to imagine someone acquiring virtual real estate at very high prices. Certainly I know of many investors doing it to the tune of tens of thousands. Just like landlords, those buyers are regaining their money by renting out portions of it to tenants, virtual good shopkeepers, special in-game events, etc. This is absolutely without question happening right now in many virtual settings and has been for years.

As such, virtual land can be a true investment, regardless of the number of "pixels" it contains. I'm not saying I think it's a good investment, but to dismiss the market entirely as worthless is a narrow-sighted decision without understanding that there are true economic forces at work, and that business-people do their math and seem quite willing to make large payments they expect to recoup (just as with real property).

Further, some could have said the same quote about websites and look foolish today:

> no one is paying $500k for a fucking virtual magazine made out of pixels and stored on a Wordpress server.

> no one is paying $500k for a fucking virtual name stored on a DNS server.

Virtual and digital items are going to be more and more important in our lives. They will continue to be valuable. Bet on it.

Even beyond the business implications, the comment and reaction surprises me. I don't see people reacting with the same shock about buying a $500,000 work of art, memorabilia, or antique. Clearly things can be of exceptional value based on the amount of time involved in creating it, the amount of sentimental value it holds, or the level of beauty/quality it has.

It's entirely fair to think high-priced virtual goods are a bad investment or to be skeptical of their worth, but to be severely dismissive of them is an act of ignorance and not giving them the (small?) respect they deserve simply as an economic factor in our lives and our children's lives.

You'd be undercutting these guys:

http://coins.shop.ebay.com/Federal-Reserve-Notes-/40029/i.ht...

I would recommend it to the ebook selling crowd. Those business owners would love to have more "How to raise a parrot" sort of ebook sales, but in video.

I like to believe he's out there, using some new pseudonym (or many) and still contributing in different areas.

Even if he's not, there's a lot of good people who still are.

I really like their service-- my problem is that I can never remember the name of the website when I setup a new PC.