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bcrawl

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Could you please qualify your statement with an example.

In his essay, He has already mentioned that he considers Microwaves, TV's, ATM's as utilities and has no qualms,

"if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer.",

So, it derives that he is OK with flying on planes (which has proprietary software but is not prone to updates like your PC software is) or maybe an MRI machine or an Xray machine of the sorts for your life threatening scenario you mentioned. These are utilities.

Sounds like a pitch to fill open positions at YC funded companies. Nothing wrong with it, just the verbiage of the post -- "surprising hack". It is a hack which feels like Sam just thought up of or made it up. Because otherwise, there is no need to correlate working for YC as a hack to get into YC.

There were other "surprising hacks" always mentioned here, have a solid product with good group, have a product which makes money, get a recommendation from other YC alumni etc.

This, this just sounds like, "hey, we want you to work for our companies. In case you ever want to start one, we will look at your app favorably then."

Amazon's profits 13 years ago

please put a disclaimer about quora's log in requirement shenanigans. I "signed" up using one of my gmail acct, not sure if my contacts got spammed and ended up never seeing the actual post because the pop up never closed.

I support this notion. I dont think there is any current organization which deals with patent rights + free internet etc. There is EFF but no one takes it seriously. EFF is such a joke that Google autocomplete doesnt even find it even if you type EFF!

Patents stuff is too confusing for me, but the concept of ad space on popular websites to spread the voice of Joel/Internet would be awesome. I think Reddit will participate because they have been pretty devoted so far, definitely not Facebook though. I dont think they want any of this drama..... asusal.

I own an Android phone and I have a Hacker news App made by Ronnie Roller which is ad free.

Is this news-yc Iphone app in anyways different from the one I have installed as far as the features go? Just curious...

Also the ronnieroller Android app gets installed in phone harddrive instead of sdcard. Though it only takes uo 200KB, I cant move it for some reason, I dont really like that. There are other apps for HN on android market which I need to check.

Hi,

Thanks for the response. You echoed exactly what my friend suggested, that I take a break and get my financial situation together. I agree with you. I ignored my personal life a little too long. I will take some time and rethink.

Yes, I am not a programmer. The reason I need 3-4K is for programmer and server costs. The process is semi done right now. The code is written with some bugs. But needs some more work and hardware.

Regarding the xml feed, I signed a year contract and they charged my card, so thats a loss I have to bear. I can just ask them to stop the feed so that the files dont get clogged up on their server.

But thanks again for taking time to read through rather long post and your detailed reply. I really appreciate it.

Hi, How about you add some of your own flair to the site? Everything about the site screams mixergy and andrew. Except its you interviewing. Just because andrew seems to have no issues doesnt mean you can con and confuse visitors. Sorry about the harsh review but this is blatant copying. Other than that, I agree that more interviews from more sources is always welcome.

ok, I think the chromeos forums deleted the thread. They are not in any way affiliated with google btw. Here is the screenshot which has instructions from the guy who said he flashed. http://imgur.com/TN21R

Here is the BIOS which came with that CR48 Windows 7 laptop. http://www.sendspace.com/file/wp9nb6

This guy flashed his regular CR 48 bios with the above one and was able to boot back into Chrome. http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10302232&postcoun...

Ok, just got done with this. I can verify 100% working. Instead of installing another OS though, I just rebooted after the BIOS flash and surprisingly Chrome started up! It erased the stateful partition and then reboot and voila I am back in Chrome -- with the notable exception -- of now being able to get into the BIOS.

Simply awesome.

Oops. I reread what I wrote and now I am confused. Maybe you are right. In developer mode, self signed images work. But I will leave the post.

--------------------------------

If you are talking about developer mode, Yes. I am pretty sure they intend to have that option in production devices. No. I think, even in developer mode the boot process checks for google signature.

From their site; "The first time a Chrome Notebook boots in Developer Mode after leaving Normal Mode it will: - Show a scary warning that its software cannot be trusted, since verified boot is disabled (press Ctrl-D or wait 30 seconds to dismiss). - Erase all personal data on the "stateful partition" (i.e., user accounts and settings - no worries, though, since all data is in the cloud!). Make you wait between 5 and 10 minutes to while it erases the data. - Boot from any self-signed image on its SSD, negating the security of verified boot.

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/deve...

tl;dr Guy receives a CR48 with windows 7. Contacts google/google groups. No one has any real answer how this could have happened. Google product guy sends him an email with RMA details. Participant complies. But before sending it back he dumps the BIOS out. Some one from chromeOS forums successfully flashed their BIOS with this one. So this works.

I fully understand that one should use these CR 48 laptops for what they are intended to be for. That is testing purposes.

ChromeOS forums: http://www.chromeoslounge.com/cr-48-chrome-notebook/607-wind...

Youtube link: www.youtube.com/?v=sy9JzYTP4xc

Right now google uses Verified Boot, meaning that only Google-signed images will be bootable. More info on this process here. http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/v...

CR48 doesnt have a regular bootloader like grub or lilo. Some more info on CR48 BIOS from their site. https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/deve...

initrd is typically handled by the bootloader, which reads the specified image from the disk into RAM and passes the address to the kernel as it's invoked.

The Chrome OS BIOS is a modified EFI BIOS. The bootstub is a standard EFI Application, but it's embedded in the kernel image in a dedicated partition type, rather than accessible through a FAT filesystem. To decrease boot time, the BIOS does not discover or pass the standard disk drive handles to the bootstub, so the bootstub doesn't know anything about disks or filesystems. There is also no Compatibility Support Module in the BIOS. In theory elilo or grub2 could replace the bootstub, but they would have to reimplement some of the device discovery functions normally done by an EFI BIOS.

If you want to take this on, go for it. That would let us create a kernel partition that just contained an EFI bootloader, which could then chain-boot to external USB drives, etc. That might be kind of cool.

Yes. It is expensive even for a single installation.. Now, if the cost were $50 to install a seatbelt, then the magnitude of the issue of "costs of installing seat belts" wouldnt be so big and instead people would be judging the "need for seat belts" based on merits. Does it really improve the net safety for children.

No, I dont think each seat belt would need to cost 150-250 bucks especially when these are installed in bulk contracts.

I am in a situation similar to yours. This is how I am doing it, I dont know if it will help you or not. I hired a developer to build the prototype. Me and the developer discussed the technologies and framework which will be used. Upon getting the info, I did some background research on every thing. From which OS to run, which database/webserver to choose, which language/framework to choose,which version control to use, where to develop, where to host, details such as those. Just to get used to the above stuff took me a while. Now that I am comfortable with the set up of the prototype, I believe it will be a more focussed learning if I wanted to start writing code. I dont really want to start coding yet because I believe it will take up a lot of my time. I plan to use this to sell my product. Like you, I do know basics of coding. I do plan to fire up Eclipse and start debugging code in the future, but only when I have found a business model/customer :)

DDG and Blekko definitely have a place besides google, bing and yahoo. One must appreciate Gabriel for his commitment to include BookFlavor. But on the other hand, I thought the article was pretty lame. Author did not give any convincing reason why he switched. Except, Gabriel was kind to him. Maybe he should investigate what DDG really has to offer and how it can maybe help him in his daily searches before committing to something as important as his daily to go knowledge resource. I use DDG and google to search for specific technical info. Google for obviously everything else. Simple as that.

Simple. Apple will unseat Facebook. Just the number of people working with Apple devices is mind boggling and Google comes way second with Android devices.

Just like everything, Steve Jobs will redefine how social networking should be done and people will agree. Steve is definitely itching to making strategic partnerships and spend some of that 50+ billion cash reserve.

wins the race as in, how linux wins over microsoft when it comes to servers since hardware is not the issue.

Article states that Woz thinks that current non iphone smartphone hardware is already better than iphones. Once android software catches up, which he predicts will soon, it will have "won" the race. The race of which OS has the most installs.

"Looking for the list of all auto manufacturers? Or presidential libraries? Or art supply sites? A casual comparison of our results with those of the major search engines would convince you that we were on to something. We recruited a group of non-technical subjects to do a usability test, and it flopped. Sit people in front of a search box and ask them to test it, and their first query is their own name. #FAIL."

Why did they assume their primary market was going to be non-technical people? Why not build some thing like stumbleupon of 100 Million bookmarks.

I watched sodium video. Guy dropped a chunk of it in water and told that it is going to explode. Duh. Had been impressed had they bothered to tell what exactly was the reaction and why was the heat generated. Instead they laughed, and laughed. btw, I understand basic chemistry so I dont really need explanation.