CharlieA

This reminds me of a quote attributed to Van Gogh. No idea how accurate it is, but the sentiment is great.

"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced."

(ofc: Replace PAINT with anything you like!)

I agree with your premise that the spirit of a law shouldn't be violated to send a message but I don't see that it applies here.

For me this doesn't pass the sense test: should a person be able to knowingly, intentionally fake the results of a scientific experiment in order to secure a grant of taxpayer money? No. No more than you should be able to fake the 'results' of your yearly income, say, for the purpose of receiving welfare.

Possibly there could be a meta tag describing which share buttons should be shown on the page--even what the particular share link should be when they're clicked.

Just curious--how or where did you hear about Braintree coming to Australia? And do you know if it's available publicly? It's something I'd love to look at (even with the Westpac account requirement) I can't seem to find anything on it.

Unless my math is off, or I'm misreading the article... that's about 1% of his total shareholding he's sold. How is this a scramble to offload shares? It seems more like a pretty minor (and sensible) liquidity transaction.

Thankyou for the feedback, I'm really sorry about this--I'll go back and check everything. It may be that you were playing songs that are a bit uncommon and it was taking some time to load them, or plain just couldn't find them.

I'll work on the side-bar music queue--you're totally right that clicking the song name and it adding itself to the queue is ridiculous--not at all expected behaviour--more an unforeseen consequence of re-using the same template for all track displays.

Just curious, what was your particular expected behaviour? To jump to that song in the queue and start playing, or to remove the song?

Thanks again for letting me know, I'll triple check this--I was stupid enough to only bother testing Chrome and FireFox on a Mac and just IE9 on Windows. Sorry!!

Sometimes, unfortunately it gets the music wrong--I think what may have happened with Hump De Bump is that it takes the MP3 from the official video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxEZVM84J28) which takes about 40 seconds for the music to start playing.

I'll play around with the code that strips out bad search results and maybe get this to change.

Thanks for the feedback / taking the time. As for the legal complications, I'm genuinely not sure--it's available on YouTube and downloading from YouTube is fairly trivial, but it's not like it's a functionality placed front-and-centre on this site. You'd have to be more tech-savvy to download music via this site than from any of the many YouTube to MP3 services on the web.

Thanks! The images are from Last.fm, the music from YouTube :)

Really wanted to focus on the interface so it seemed the logical approach.

Cool concept... I think there's definitely a sweet spot for guys who have no idea what to buy their girlfriend or whatever...

Couple of thoughts, though they're not specifically about the landing page, more general things that popped into my head (bear with me!)

- I'm not sure if many guys will be that into giving a gift every single month just because, but to keep in line with the subscription model you could give an option to send more expensive gifts for just specific months (say their birthday / christmas) and then maybe just one or two other random occasions throughout the year as the "just because" gift.

- I didn't get the gift brother name straight away. I guess what you're going for is "gift BROTHA" cool spelling and all, which is actually a great concept, I'd play on that as soon as you can--hire a designer to create a really cool looking cartoon guy, or something, who is like this suave guy who just gets girls/partners/signficiant-others and is the ultimate wingman for gifts--it's a really great idea to play off, because I think people will really get the concept from that, as well.

- To start have a DEAD-SIMPLE explanation with maybe three steps...maybe just three big images and descriptions like: 1. Tell us about your partner and subscribe 2. We do all the shopping / thinking / work 3. You get all the credit! And you can be really funny/creative with that last one, so go nuts. I think people would dig a quirkier approach, cause it's a great concept.

After that, though there needs to be some more details, like where you get the gifts from, what kinds of gifts you can get and the prices point(s) available... whether you ship to obscure countries like mine (Australia) and ways to put the service on hold (or stop it?) for when you fall out of love... maybe you could switch to getting manly gifts for yourself when you don't have a significant other, just to ease the pain of the heartbreak (or something)

Just some thoughts. Looks cool!

"Microsoft has positions in all the right places."

This.

Microsoft today is still one of the world's biggest companies, with a lot of talented people and considerable inlets into practically every home and office in the developed world. Apple of yesterday grew to eclipse Microsoft in a matter of years--there's no reason Microsoft can't pull off a similar reversal with the right maneuvering of its own considerable resources.

One of the artists in the video was explaining how the bundle works / what it is and said basically that it was available to mac and pc users, then: "and linux...whatever that is..." and then there was something at the end (blooper?) of him mentioning no need for steam codes and that it was "linux compatible" with a confused expression and then getting up and walking away.

It didn't seem like it was insulting linux (or its users) to me, either the artist was reading from a script and really didn't know what linux was, or it was just a mild joke playing off the fact that your average person doesn't. Seemed fairly harmless to me, and linux users are overrepresented in the humble bundle so the context (if it was a joke) is probably appropriate here anyway.

To be fair, it looked (to me, anyway) to be out of genuine concern that the change to the title would reduce the interest of people on HN who could see the post and maybe help out Aaron.

The video is 27 minutes long, with about 5 minutes of Q&A at the end and IMHO worth watching all the way through, but the '10 Golden Rules' he discusses are...

1. Speed - more than a feature, mainstream users tend to be least forgiving, slower apps grow slower.

2. Instant Utility - service has to be useful straight away, without lots of length configuration or importing data, use tricks to add utility (crawl web for initial population), example: Google Video took weeks to encode video...YouTube made it available ~immediately.

3. Voice - Attitude/personality from software/application. Example: Twitter 'Fail Whale' creates a "voice".

4. Less is More - example: Facebook at launch had a tiny amount of features versus now. Del.icio.us was limited but powerful... "one little thing...get a lot of utility..."

5. Programmable - Allow other people to add value to your application. Read/Write APIs. Lets developers add data/utility and "energy".

6. Personal - User's own data / their personality establishes emotional connection between user and app. Makes them "invested" in the product.

7. RESTful - ?misuse of the term. All accessible resources in application have a clean URL where it can be accessed. Example: Twitter URLs easily understood from just the URL. ("https://twitter.com/#!/fredwilson/lists)

8. Discoverable - How do people find your app? Take advantage of search (SEO) and social media (virality) and build apps from the ground up to BE viral and optimized for search.

9. Clean - Application has focus per page and functionality on each page is limited. Lots of space, big fonts. Don't let the user get it wrong. Example: Tumblr login ("http://www.tumblr.com/login) - ie. nobody won't know what to do.

10. Playful - Help users have fun and incentives for the user to behave in ways you want. Example: Weight Watchers has a game dynamic with setting goals and achieving weight loss / LinkedIn & Facebook & Twitter with friend/follower counts / FourSquare badges and mayorship.

A bit more detail further in the report: "The UNODC estimates, conservatively, that between 155 and 270 million people worldwide, or 3.5% to 5.7% of 15-64-year¬olds, used illicit substances at least once in the last year. Global lifetime usage figures probably approach one billion"

The biggest barrier IMO to a legal drug economy, with regulation and legitimate corporate players, is reversing years and years of learned stigma that "drugs are evil". And the incredibly irony here of the "please think of the children" mentality, is that it's reinforcing this feedback loop, and I don't see any way to break out of it.

The government can't legalise drugs because of the massive community backlash there would be. So the continued illegality, of the trade sees it linked to criminal activity on a macro scale (terrorist groups / bikies etc.) as well as at a local level (home invasions / thefts / pharma. raids etc.) not to mention the violence and the risk of overdose that prompts teary eyed parents to come on the news and espouse about the evils of drugs, leading to the (admittedly fairly compelling) conclusion that stamping out drugs would be a good thing. And that, of course, means the government can't legalise drugs because of the massive community backlash there would be...

I take your point, in part, and I don't necessarily disagree with you, because by and large the system does work. But (to use your analogy) when it comes to the law-making branch of government we have this massive sprawling "codebase" and it doesn't necessarily need a lot of new code (laws) putting in place, but rather, there's a lot of cruft and old legacy stuff that maybe needs to be removed or updated, and the time it takes to get things done is just incredibly slow, which can lead to a lot of frustration for a lot of people. While on the whole that may not actually be such a bad thing, as you rightly point out ("...law needs broad consensus and relatively few are passed...") it strikes me that the attitudes of many people (even myself, on occasion) are strikingly similar to the OP's in the excerpt I highlighted wherein due to a perceived inefficiency of government (rightly or wrongly) we may come to the conclusion that the best course of action is to abandon the democratic process in favor of something which addresses these inefficiencies...which in itself leads to...well...that's the scary part... I suppose. In a game of Civilization it's not a big deal. In reality...

My only real problem with the representative system of democracy generally, is the way we have to proxy our voting authority through our political leaders. It just seems archaic and ludicrous for a region of people (sometimes many hundreds of thousands of people) to have to boil down their political ideologies to a single "best fit" candidate. Even ignoring the potential for corruption, personal motivations, hidden biases etc. you've simplified thousands of separate beliefs on an equal number of issues, social, economic, all, into ONE PERSONS' beliefs and worst of all...that person then has a legitimate claim to believe that they're representing the people.

I suppose it's the difference between a politician believing that they're a "representation" of the people of the electorate, OR a "representative" of those voters. I think most politicians consider themselves the former, and I think that's a mistake.

The 3-way division of the world into "super-continents" and the constant war keeping the populace in a perpetual state of starvation and poverty, with the entire world in disrepair is so incredibly reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 it's scary.

If you haven't read 1984, it's a startlingly bleak view of a potential future (from a historical perspective, but still applicable today, I think) particularly through technology and a loss of privacy. It's the origin of terms like "big brother" and "doublethink" -- worth a read.

One of the most interesting excerpts from this piece IMO: "I wanted to stay a democracy, but the Senate would always over-rule me when I wanted to declare war... ...Anyway, I was forced to do away with democracy roughly a thousand years ago because it was endangering my empire."

Although I don't necessarily think it will be because of war, I can see a potential future where people/persons decide democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process -- democratic process being (more or less) committee-based decision making, which proxies votes through individuals based on what is essentially a popularity contest. That's particularly true here in Australia at the moment (amidst a minority government with a lot of political sniping on both sides and seemingly very little real progress) despite the fact that we have a comparatively strong economy, low inflation, low unemployment and generally nothing really significant (again, comparatively) to complain about.

It's candy and it's japanese... that just conjures all sorts of images of a super high tech factory run by cats and magic. I'd love to see a candy envelope being stylised packing animation in the background or off to the side. It could look amazing visually and would explain the concept instantly.

I don't know about the half kidding...it seems like you might legitimately be on to something there in the area of private deal "experiences" for you and close friends.

But I'm thinking, more so than Pinterest it's closer to "Path" where you and your small network of close friends collectively get a deal (at Jerry's liquor, lovely example) then post cute photos of your night/experience (sans the trip on the porcelain bus) which become public on "Jerry's Drive-In Liquor" or whatever, and exposes the deal to other people in the private networks of those who were in your private network... a sort of "local viral" marketing effect which works as advertising and as the regular "look how awesome my saturday night was" that we (what? just me?) use Facebook/Instagram for anyway.

I think it perfectly combines the innate desire to show off and receive value while maintaining an air of exclusivity plus the whole validation thing, from strangers and friends alike.

This is brilliant. It's always seemed crazy to me that terms, laws, and especially contracts are written in legalese that only a trained lawyer could really understand, and yet all lay-people are expected to adhere to the nuances of these rules.

Obviously that simplicity isn't sufficient alone, or we'd just have one law "Be Good" (even that needs 'good' to be defined properly) -- but having a summary like this next to the specific details, in "lay-galese" if you will, it seems like this should be the standard way to write all legal documents.

I hope it doesn't open them up to liability due to the interpretations of the summary, though?

Hilarious irony aside, what particularly is it that investors believe the company misrepresented about their financials? For people who didn't follow this too closely?

I take issue with the premise that search implies loss. When you solve a maths problem you could be "searching for an answer" -- it doesn't mean you've lost it before now. For me, Google isn't really about searching for something you're missing, it's about solving a problem. So it's not really serving results, it's serving "answers". Some of them are more correct than others.

I don't see that search is broken at all. I think search is one tool in a great arsenal of other tools, like social media, blogs, sites like HN, that we have available for discovery of new content and new sites.

Not for me either, likely intentional to prevent people from printing where they could otherwise sell posters or something? Shame though, it'd be great to see some full-size HQ versions.

I suppose when you're strapping jet engines onto a metal tube, filling it with people and hurling it into the sky you have to accept that things are never quite going to be perfect.

In the same manner, it seems like the take-away is: if you create something, then you'll always spot the flaws, but when the benefits outweigh those drawbacks enough, you'll probably be the only one who really notices them.

Purely speculation, but it seems like the only reason they'd do this is to free up the space for a future use case? While it will probably annoy/stump a few people for a second or two, ultimately people will just learn not to click on the logo.

At that point, the Google logo could become... err... well they tried to turn it into an all-google-properties dropdown previously, so who knows, maybe they'll try again later?

Search results not carrying over to Google News when you click the black header tab is something that drove me crazy for a good week until I trained myself to use the left-side menu for switching between result types.

It doesn't make sense, particularly when "News" is the ONLY tab which doesn't carry the search terms over. Try it with Images, YouTube and Maps; wonderful. I wouldn't necessarily expect convention to follow with Gmail or Documents, sure, but NEWS? Come on!

The missing + on Chrome made me think I had a screwy update.

I don't understand how he (or anyone) can get away with saying things like this--it's practically a straight up admission that they're buying votes.

How is this not corruption?

Reminds me of Viacom/YouTube. I wonder if this is going to have a similar ending.

Even though probably everyone who frequents HN is already aware of SOPA/PIPA, I think it's more a show of solidarity with others participating (Wiki/Google) and a "lead by example" case rather than the idea that it might make a huge difference in the same way that some of these bigger players will.

On the homepage (6th feature) "As Slowy mainly is a GUI for built-in OSX tools, it will occupy only few MB of your RAM and nearly 0% of your CPU."