vostrocity

There's also a lot of disincentive that's not necessarily about money.

But when does this ever happen? Startups generally are not communities, and communities generally don't see exponential growth.

Slightly tangential, but this is a problem that is being worked on in MOOCs. It is ineffective to have a forum for all 10,000 or 100,000 participants in a class. Issues may be surfaced there but it is a terrible venue for authentic discussions and building relationships with classmates.

There is one startup spun out of Stanford that is doing MOOCs by emphasizing the small group. At the beginning of the course, you can either create your own group and recruit others or join a group (generally 4-8 people). Those who do neither after the first week or so of class are randomly assigned into groups with others who were also not proactive about joining a group. It is easier to do discussions and group projects when there is a permanent group of 4-6 other students, and some of the courses have components where the group will submit work together and the rest of the class can see it.

I have not read that book, but I will throw this in for the sake of counterargument. That said, I don't believe anyone is saying cancer is "just" an effect of environment.

"Cancer is caused by both internal factors (such as inherited mutations, hormones, and immune conditions) and environmental/acquired factors (such as tobacco, diet, radiation, and infectious organisms). The link between diet and cancer is revealed by the large variation in rates of specific cancers in various countries and by the observed changes in the incidence of cancer in migrating. For example, Asians have been shown to have a 25 times lower incidence of prostate cancer and a ten times lower incidence of breast cancer than do residents of Western countries, and the rates for these cancers increase substantially after Asians migrate to the West."

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/

I believe that's what OP was referring to, considering his link. No one was presuming environment meant the conditions of the natural world.

The point stands. How many people consciously make an effort to prevent cancer in every aspect possible? On a personal level as much as a societal level, we're doing little to address the preventable causes of cancer. Why are so many people making so many "bad life choices"?

How about Square Cash then? I was quite impressed to see them use only a debit card number to receive cash.

Public transportation and biking both reduce congestion. That said, drones.

Don't know if it's just me, but for the three months that I lived in NYC, I did not see a single speed trap or cop that batted an eye at speeders (and there are many who drive way too fast).

On long trips, I optimize speed to road and traffic conditions, as everyone does, but also to engine RPMs. If speeding is making you run 4000 RPM in your highest gear, you might want to slow down a bit (use your onboard MPG display to see the difference). Someone can check whether the time savings of having to make fewer stops for gas is worth it. The fuel consumption and engine wear savings certainly seems good to me.

Update: There is also aerodynamics to think about. Aerodynamic drag is almost twice as great at 70mph as it is at 50mph.[1]

[1]http://craig.backfire.ca/pages/autos/drag

The middle lane makes more sense as the cruising lane on an empty 3-lane highway because:

1) You do not need to change lanes to avoid cars at on-ramps or cars on the shoulder

2) You do not need to switch lanes to pass slow traffic (semi trucks, etc.)

3) There is more room to maneuver in case of emergency

It could be useful as a tool for new Twitter users, but it doesn't seem revolutionary. If you up the limit to 2000 favorites an hour, then it's suddenly not different from any other bot, despite good intentions.

Again, I can see it being useful for a new Twitter user (if you manage to get it in front of them), but it's not going to solve the grander problems of Twitter sociability.

It also ruins Twitter favoriting as read-it-later (through IFTTT or otherwise) for people who use it that way (me). Perhaps I'm in the minority though.

I've questioned learning styles ever since I was introduced to it. To say that all people could be separated into visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles seemed far too good to be true.

This article[1] asserts that the style of teaching should fit the content, not a vague notion of learning styles, and the best teaching should cater to students' background knowledge, interests, and abilities – all real and definable things.

[1]http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September-Oc...

Possible idea: Display all user-added activities by popularity so that someone thinking about hosting an event can get an idea of whether there is already an interested "waiting list"?

I would never think about Meetup for sports/casual activities. All Meetups I attend are "professional" events in my field. Perhaps Meetup has an untapped market?

Unlike alma maters or perhaps Xoogler status, I don't think SAT scores ever comes up casually in a conversation, and where it does I doubt someone scoring 1500/2400 would be mixed up for someone scoring 1500/1600.

I don't think College Board wants to normalize for background differences; that would be a lazy and hugely treacherous to do. Instead, they are tackling the background differences head on by doling out free test prep. I believe education as a whole is heading toward widespread accessibility of top-quality education for everyone. But for now, Khan Academy is taking a small step to democratize test prep, and it should be enough to make a noticeable difference.

Some also feel their time is better spent on learning and smart work and not dry, repetitive practice of test-taking strategies.

Interesting that you view it that way. I also compare my convenience to time, and every time I use a plastic container I think about how it came from peat that was built up over millions of years and took a certain amount of energy and fuel to travel across oceans to reach me in final product form and now I will handle it for approximately 15 seconds and it will proceed to the landfill where it will stay for a few hundred years and outlive my children's children.

I would stay away from 1and1 in the future, but their customer service seems alright. The main thing to watch out for is they don't notify you when a contract is about to expire and instead send you the bill after it auto-renews. My fault for getting used to other registrar/hosting services' conventions. They waived and cancelled my account after I called though. I'd say they're a bit more upstanding than EIG's[1] brands.

[1] http://www.digitalfaq.com/editorials/websites-blogs/hostgato...

>computer science & IT people tend to be nerds/geeks who like to tinker in their free time and as a percentage of the population they stay relatively the same from year to year

Why do you say that?

I think you may be thinking too much in the short-term. I was actually wondering what programmers in their mid-20s today are going to be doing when they're, say, 70. How many programmers in their 70s do we have today? Very little, because computing was in its infancy 50 years ago. With every generation, more and more are being exposed to computing/programming at an early age.

You also have to remember that there are tinkerers in not just the computing field. Think about the weekend woodworkers, car guys, model aircraft enthusiasts; could many of them be tinkering with software if they were exposed and educated in it at the right age? I say yes. On the macro scale, we are only at the dawn of computing and the internet, and there are going to be MANY more people working on it in the future.

I agree. I regularly have hundreds of tabs open in Chrome, and while I do regularly save things to Chrome bookmarks, I treat it more as a place where I can put something that I won't look at again but there's a 1% chance I'll desperately need to find it at some point in the future and won't be able to find it by Googling.

Also interesting that Chrome never added an option to sync bookmarks to the Google Bookmarks web service.

I agree. I'm a tab hoarder with hundreds of tabs open in Chrome. I never do that with Firefox's scrolling tabs because I remember where things are based on their place among the other tabs. Firefox doing a min-width on each tab and hiding the rest makes it impossible to find where that other page I looked at 5 minutes ago went.

Yup, I certainly remember those Peek devices from back in the day! I've also been working on a little something in the email space and so I've kept my eyes peeled at the influx of "email reinvented" apps in the past months.

I don't have strong opinions on all of your statements; it really depends on the person. My core belief, however, is that email is broken on the front-end. Sure it'd be nice if we threw out all the legacy of email protocol, but that won't happen without some titanic effort, so for now we'll fix everything we can on the user side of things.

In addition to the email apps that have popped up on HN, I trawled through Dribbble at one time to see who all is working on what. A lot of it are pretty interface elements on the same old concept, but a few are real, active projects with potential:

http://dribbble.com/ndrw/buckets/92665-Designer-Mail-Apps

Also, AOL Alto is doing lots of things right:

http://designtox.tumblr.com/tagged/aol

You can indeed "hack" your car. In fact, ECU flashing is one of the most common upgrades for people who want more power out of their cars because it requires no physical parts.

It's generally done commercially [1][2] though there are attempts at user-configurable software [3]. Now I'm no expert on ECU flashing so these links are just examples.

[1] http://changegears.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/apr-stage-1-ecu-... [2] http://www.velocityfactor.net/scripts/prodview.asp?idproduct... [3] http://www.tactrix.com/index.php?option=com_content&view...

What is the Bluetooth going to connect to when the car owner isn't the one driving?

Dell emailed me a number of times about this, but it never made sense to me personally. I adore Dell as a company, and the Dell Vostro laptop I bought in 2007 performs splendidly to this day running the Ubuntu I installed on it. The thing is, installing Ubuntu didn't take me too much effort in 2007, and it shouldn't today. Seeing as how they are targeting this Sputnik as a developer machine, almost everyone should be able fix up any quirks in a zip.

The pricing also doesn't make sense to me, but it may to some. I know some people, especially professionals who buy machines as part of their work expense, would willingly walk into an Apple store and buy a MacBook at its retail price. In that regard, this Ubuntu XPS 13 is not that out of line. However, in the Windows world, you'd have to be stupid to buy any computer at MSRP. In fact, it's pretty much not possible due to all the discounts thrown on. I've seen these XPS 13 Ultrabooks go down to $799 on the street, and that's with a nice Windows 8 license thrown in (and installed and configured nicely; you may not think this, but configuring up a clean Windows install onto a laptop can be easily as much of a pain as configuring a Linux install). You might not need Windows, but why not take it as a bonus even if you immediately throw Ubuntu onto the next partition? This option also means you're using the latest Ubuntu build instead of Dell's own channel based on LTS (could be a pro or con, but you could also opt for LTS yourself as well).

Canonical has the image that Dell uses for the XPS on this page: http://hwe.ubuntu.com/uds-q/dellxps/

All that said, however, I understand and applaud the idea of making a complete hardware/software package as seamless as a MacBook. I don't doubt this would make for a great option for consumers who want a smooth experience with Linux.

Good observation. Same, though I've always used Readability instead of Clearly.

I'm a habitual selector, but I also have the habit of clicking away from my selection before I perform any other action. Thus never had a problem with this feature.

Back when I used a mouse, I always worried that my compulsive selecting drained my mouse battery faster than it needed to. It probably added a lot to my WhatPulse stats as well.

Everyone is talking about PR yet no one has mentioned our problem with consumerism. See the #buynothing campaign if you haven't. It's an interesting perspective:

http://www.storyofstuff.org/blackfriday/

I pledge to skip the mall and stay home with friends and family this Black Friday. Instead of spending money on things I don't need, I will spend my time with the people that I love.