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The Elegato Prompter (a separate piece of hardware) has this built in.

Consider hiring an executive coach. Sometimes things we don't enjoy are opportunities for growth. I worked with one and it unlocked a lot of stuff for me.

What a strange reaction to a recipe.

I'd be willing to bet you've not given your email to any political candidate or campaign.

Is there a way to simplify moving password management out of Keychain and into Firefox?

I am more interested to know how much of that payout he will be taxed on

I’m not particularly familiar with FCC law, but don’t they tend to... not approve things like this? Not being sarcastic, honest question.

Real estate. Rental units are a great passive income

While I generally agree that members of Congress listen more to lobbyists than to constituents, the idea that money flows this transactionally is just absurd.

You yourself have probably given to a member of Congress because they did something rather than so that they will do something. I gave to a member of Congress because they spoke out for Gun control, not because I called them and told Them that if they speak out I will write them a check.

That’s what makes this kind of uncontextualized data pretty disheartening. You’re showing some correlations, conflating it with causation, and disaffecting the electorate (which, in turn makes the lobbyists more powerful)

The great thing about predicting bubble bursts is eventually you’ll be right! (And if you’re wrong, so what)

I've really enjoyed OctoberCMS: http://octobercms.com

While it's poor form to have a leaky database, this information is largely public and dirt cheap. You can buy a whole state's worth of data for a couple hundred bucks or a few cents a name. That includes whether or not you're registered to vote in any specific primary.

Doesn't look like who you voted for is disclosed -- I'm not sure that this data even exists. I suspect in most states, you go in to vote, your name is crossed off a list, you're assigned a hash, and that hash votes, and there's no database of "John Smith voted for Jane Doe."

What happens when the company that won tries to get on schedule 70, and are negotiated to contract to government for some fraction of a dollar?

It sounds preposterous, but government has done more preposterous things in this sector.

Isn't this exactly what you did at BSD? Enabled advocacy organizations to send millions of form-letter to Congress, making real constituent contact get lost in the flood?

Yes. More than a decade ago, I admittedly had a hand in creating this problem, and now I'd love to see it fixed.

That EFF and Sunlight could justify spending a pretty amazing upfront investment of staff labor and resources to create that ecosystem demonstrates that the existing vendor-driven market was limiting who could participate.

Not sure how Sunlight and EFF spending staff time on something validates or dis-validates a market.

They're not the customer, and to treat them that way is a great way to ensure that Congress is never made uncomfortable. It doesn't matter how many staff complain to the CMF about it.

Let's be real: An 85% incumbency rate takes care of that. The reality is: Nobody is going to lose their office because they didn't reply to messages from Democracy.io. Moreover, no congressional _staffer_ is ever going to lose their job taking these messages and throwing them in the trash. There's not going to be some sweeping revolution in Congress because Congress wasn't representative enough.

The fact is that Congress' approval rating is 15% and their incumbency rate is greater than 85%. People already believe that their Congress doesn't listen to them, they also really don't like Congress and, it seems to me, are pretty much fine with that situation, at least electorally. The "This will make Congress uncomfortable" idea is one that's stale and old.

You can call this elitist or patriarchal. But my suggestion is that the EFF and Sunlight do exactly what you are doing at 18F (which I suggested to you 2 years before you took the job, scoffed at, and as I recall were quite argumentative about it. So...): go on the inside and work on problems from there, because if you're connecting firehoses to drinking straws, you're doing more harm than good.

Finally if you want to make it so Congress is well represented by its constituents, make it as easy and delightful to hear from your constituents as it is from a lobbyist. Until then, the lobbyists will always win.

Obviously your product, ScreenDoor, addresses some of the concerns you're raising around better data collection. Glad to hear you're so enthusiastic about that approach.

Not sure what that's about other than it being a strange comment to make.

The EFF isn't planning on selling software to members of Congress.

Who said anything about it being commercial? I think that if you talk to a member of Congress, or an LA or SA inside of the hill, they'll all tell you the same thing: we take electronic messages and basically throw them away. That's nearly universal feedback. And before we start thinking it's out of cynicism or dislike of the constituent, it isn't out of malice. It's because if they started reading every message they receive right now, they'd be stuck in July of 2015 for the next 10-15 years with the resources they have.

So my point is: why bother with increasing their volume. It's a bit like shipping gasoline to a forest fire.

The reason this is a problem is because it drives up apathy and cynicism. People will send more messages, get worse responses, and continue to be validated with the idea that Congress doesn't care about what they have to say.

Congressional staff already have plenty of tools for separating those form letters from real, constituent-written letters. I can dig up their names, but they're built by high-level contractors.

Intranet Quorum. Last updated in about 1996. It's probably what 95% of staff uses, and it's woefully inadequate. Clearly you talked to zero congressional staffers in the creation of this software. Which is a shame. Because if you had, your software would be effective.

Heck, even if you'd read one of the dozens of reports from the Congressional Management Foundation _FROM 10 YEARS AGO_ http://www.congressfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_conte... you could spot the problem here.

Whether advocacy organizations "send" the emails or whether they're sent by an individual has no bearing on either the legitimacy of the message, or whether or not they will remain unread.

I'd encourage you to hop on a plane, and go visit some congressional staffers and ask them how they'd like to receive your messages. Then build a tool starting from there. Like it or not, they're the customer.

Sigh.

Yet another tool that makes it easy to write your representative. As though this is an actual problem. It isn't. The Market is saturated with so many tools to send messages to Congress. Especially electronic ones. Whether it be Blue State Digital, Change.org, BlackBaud, Salsa, or the plethora of other online tools, this problem is solved.

In fact, it's solved too well. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, Congress receives millions of messages a day, and it doesn't have the manpower to actually read the messages because their systems are so antiquated and underfunded. It's as though the market goes "Congress isn't listening to us, we need to make a tool to make our voices louder" when in fact, Congress isn't listening to us because we're deafeningly loud.

Want to really solve a problem? Build software that helps members of Congress receive and sort through their messages. Using their IT systems. Build a FrontApp for Congress that can handle a million messages a day and cluster things by topic group and sentiment. For bonus points, add a public element to it so that the press and the public can see what members have been receiving from their constituents.

Which leads to the second thing to build to help solve the problem: build a system that for real verifies that someone is a constituent instantly. Members want to hear from their constituents, not from the general public. But these electronic messages usually come with no verification. So do you know where they go? /dev/null

As someone who has worked with these guys for years, PLEASE stop making tools like this, and work on the other side of the equation.

Unfortunately the schedule 70 provision in this RFQ requires that you both get your devs to put something together using your open source codebase, AND spend months navigating all the bureaucracy to get on GSA schedule 70.

ConAgra's secret? X.XB in Government Subsidies.

Exxon's secret? x.xB in government subsidies.

Apple's Secret? X.XB in Government Subsidies.

Your House's Secret? 188.7B in Government Subsidies. (the home interest deduction is, itself, one of the largest subsidies there is, and probably the biggest gateway into home depot)

Point being: Government Subsidies are huge. Saying it's anybody's secret is just sensational.

What's remarkable, actually, is how little we know and how hard it is to count up all the subsidies -- especially when you count tax expenditures.

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/archived-projects/subsidyscope is a good place to learn about this stuff. But dated.

If you're up against companies with centi-billion cash reserves, yes.

Yeah, I'm a pebble wearer and have been for about a 2 years. You get used to it.

What's happened is: people got lazy at their notifications on their watch. Then they bought the Apple Watch (or rather, journalists got a review unit), and then they get lots of notifications on their wrist rather than on their phone and they complain about all the notifications.

Same thing happens with the Pebble and others I'm sure: you just have to take a minute and set up the notifications right so that your wrist buzzes when it's actually worthy of your immediate attention. When is that?

For me it's when one of eight people call me, my wife texts me, or when I get an email from one of three people. Those are the things that make me go "ok, sorry person I am talking to, but this thing has happened and I have to check it out."

These things happen maybe once or twice a day. Not once or twice an hour.

I just don't buy this "Wearing the Apple Watch makes you a Pretentious Douchebag" argument.

I bought it with Google Glass because it was ugly and pointed a camera at someone's face, all the time. But the iPod, the iPhone -- these were also expensive goods that cried out "pretentious consumer" at the time in comparison to alternatives.

Many watches cost much more money than the sport/watch editions of the apple watch.

You're right, it is just ludicrous.

How is it worse than people meeting you so they can steal technical details about your product?

It's not. It's in addition to.

Fundraising is hard, for sure. You know what's harder? Having investors want to meet with you, and taking your meeting, not because they see value in your business, but because they want to fuck you.

Can you imagine how infuriating that must be as an entrepreneur? Imagine that there's a 50/50 shot that, every time you have a meeting with someone, they're just stringing you along so that they have the opportunity to fuck you and have zero interest in actually investing. You'd be outraged not only on the creep-factor, but also just the complete waste of time. Moreover, these same people trying to fuck you are also investing in actively shittier companies than you run.

As people are trying to "focus on growth" every single one of these meeting invites for investors could be a huge waste of time, and that alone is cause for outrage. Take the sex out of it -- imagine that for every investor you pitched, 50% of the time the investor stood you up. That's the baseline of what's happening here: the investor isn't showing; in his place is also a dirtbag. That's a really hard fundraising environment.

The only thing I can critique this woman on is why she's not more upset, and why she's not publishing a list of names.

I encourage people to do the same thing that the OP did. If you're thinking of kvetching here about Comcast, you're doing no good. The FCC doesn't read HackerNews. It does, however, read comments sent to it.

You'll want to go here: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/hotdocket/list

and click on:

14-57 Applications of Comcast Corporation and Time Warner Cable Inc. for Consent to Assign or Transfer Control of Licenses and Applications

It's mostly, right now, because Amazon's desktop software is _so_ bad. Whereas with Dropbox and Google Drive, I can simply save files to a directory on my computer and can be assured that Dropbox/Drive are uploading them automatically and keeping them in sync, with Amazon, they seem to have forgotten about Sync all together. There are files that I add to the cloud. Should I need to work on them again, then I download them from the cloud, edit them, and add them back.

This workflow sucks, and it's worth paying to not have to do that.

I understand that prices went up as a result of demand going up. And in the event of it being new years, rainy, a parade is in town or whatever, that's reasonable.

I don't understand how a human being can write a tweet like that explaining the price increase, for that price increase to stay in place for an hour, and only after significant blowback, for them to say "oh, we'll not charge riders."

That to me is the part that's actually worrying.

This wasn't an "automatic price increase" unless software got really good at explaining why they were increasing prices.

http://cl.ly/image/2U3l242l350p/Image%202014-12-15%20at%2012...

"We are all concerned with events in CBD. Fares have increased to encourage more drivers to come online & pick up passengers in the area."

Somebody wrote that sentence, and it's a gross one. The same doesn't belong on the Post, it belongs on the person who wrote that and upon the culture that allows for sentences like that to be written.