jkincaid

This is really interesting — thank you for building it. It seems some of the comments here are living up to HN's reputation. May that prove to be a good omen, as it has been in the past.

The main thing I'm wondering is whether there's a way to record with this (so here's my wishlist). Often I'll be practicing along to another song, or just noodling around, and I'll really wish I had recorded what I just played. Would be amazing if I could say, "Alexa, record that", or "Alexa, record the last 90 seconds".

Similarly: "Alexa, record this." (and then after X minutes if I forget to stop the recording / no input is detected Alexa asks if I still want to be recording).

"Alexa play a metronome at 80 bpm and record this". "Alexa, play the last track and record a new track" (gotta make this very clear so as not to confuse overwriting the original vs recording additional layers). Sync the recording folder w/ Dropbox so it's ready for my DAW. Save two streams: one clean of the raw guitar (so I can tweak to my heart's delight later), one with the applied effects.

I'm curious to dig into the tones more; a lot of apps are goodish but don't quite get it right. S-Gear is the best plugin I've found. Also, I'm a huge fan of the amPlug 2 line from Vox. $40 for really impressive tones via a battery powered gadget as big as a few matchboxes. Sounds great hooked up to speakers and good enough to use in recording. But they don't give you a lot of options in terms of effects.

Great project! Hope the above is useful — I'll be following along!

Thanks!

This post is a good primer on PR basics. If you'd like to read more on the subject, I (also) wrote a book about startup PR with plenty of examples (and a few jokes).

The Burned-Out Blogger's Guide to PR: http://www.amazon.com/The-Burned-Out-Bloggers-Guide-PR-ebook...

(I used to write for TechCrunch and have subsequently done PR consulting for startups. Feedback on the book has been quite positive; if you read it and wish it covered something, let me know!)

If you're concerned about the way the tech industry engineers addiction by exploiting bugs in our brains, check out Time Well Spent - http://TimeWellSpent.io

It's an (early-on) movement exploring ways to build products that respect our time and focus. (Watch the video for a good overview).

Agreed. The complexity feels overwhelming at times, and yet all too often isn't flexible enough to do what I want.

Hi, OP here. It was very gracious of him, but I should note that I've met Phil several times over the years (including while I was formerly a TechCrunch reporter), which I suspect had something to do with the speed.

Obviously there's a lot of demand in SOMA, but one suggestion to anyone thinking of living there: spend some time wandering around, both during the day and during the evening, and see if you like the vibe of the neighborhood (this advice holds true for any neighborhood, really). I say this because I lived in an area that seemed desirable — about 5 minutes away from the 4th & King Caltrain, at 4th and Brannan, and, while it didn't seem so bad at the time, in hindsight I've come to realize that I really wasn't very happy there.

It's very convenient for work, but it doesn't feel like a neighborhood at all. Everything seems to close around 8pm and most of your friends probably aren't going to be hanging out around there. Yes, there are a handful of cafes around and you can find a few blocks that are busier, but in general it just feels like a generic chunk of tall buildings — I found it pretty gloomy.

Thanks for posting this here, I'm a big fan of Hacker News.

By the way, I'll have some free time (at least for the next few weeks), so if any HN folks have any questions related to PR, feel free to shoot me a note (email is in my profile).

I'd like to think there's more to it than that.

This line has made me laugh/driven me nuts since the first time I saw the movie — "Only the Sith deal in absolutes" is itself an absolute.

RepublicWireless.com just went live with all the details. Here's the catch (they're quite transparent about it):

The phone monitors how much data you're sending over Wifi vs cellular, and if you're using a disproportionate amount of cell data compared to the rest of the community, they can boot you.

"The best way to know how you're doing is by checking out your Cellular Usage Index (CUI). If it's too high, we'll let you know and give you tips to bring it down. You have plenty of time. But meanwhile, you still pay a flat fee of $19/month no matter what."

I don't know the financial breakdown, but it's worth noting that Bandwidth.com — the company behind Republic Wireless — actually runs the VoIP backbone that powers Twilio, Google Voice, and other services. So I'd imagine they get a better rate :)

It's feasible that Cyanogenmod will release a compatible version though, isn't it?

Hey folks, I'm a writer at TC. This wasn't about CrunchFund, it was an embargo issue.

That message sounds to me like the servers will be taken down on October 15 (not just the app, but the actual service). Am I misreading it?

"With this price, though, Amazon won't steal Apple's customers.."

I think a lot of people with iPads would have been more than happy to spend half as much to get an easy-to-use tablet.

I doubt Facebook would build a hardware device. Instead, I think they'll do a 'social OS' that uses Android for all the low-level stuff, but with the Google apps all replaced with apps that have deep Facebook integration (messages, contacts, photos, etc.).

Microsoft Bing apps (e.g. Maps) could round out the features that FB doesn't build themselves, and they could use Amazon's Appstore in lieu of Android Market.

But to your point, it's possible these designers are at work making this social OS beautiful. Android in the back, iOS in the front.

Google allowed Facebook to import your Google Contacts via an API for years. Last fall it blocked Facebook's access to that API, saying that they'll restore it when Facebook offers reciprocity (i.e. if Facebook begins to allow users to export their FB contacts using a similar API, then Google will reactivate Facebook's access to the Google Contacts API).

Facebook's argument has always been that it doesn't think you have the right to export your friends' contact information (or at least, they're endlessly pondering whether you have that right). Which is a ridiculous argument, because, as has been mentioned elsewhere, they already allow Yahoo Mail users to do exactly that.

My concern about Zynga is that they're going to burn through users.

People will pay for things in a game and have fun doing it. Then they'll get sick of that game and move on to the next one. And they'll buy more things there, and then they'll get sick of that game and look at the next one and realize that, hey, this one is pretty similar. And maybe it isn't worth investing hours upon hours tending to some sprites. Or forking over real money.

I'm not saying this is guaranteed, but as someone who has played a lot of games growing up, I had it happen plenty of times. Zynga needs to release some games that feel totally different from Farm/City/Frontierville.

In case you haven't seen it, here's an awesome story on how FB hired Chris Putnam: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Chris-Putnam-get-hired-at-Faceb...

He hacked Facebook in 2005 and they hired him. From what I've heard he was one of their most invaluable engineers.

I'm sorry you don't like the show. You seem to be in the minority, though.

FWIW there are some things I think we could improve on as far as polish goes (a title/intro sequence would be a start). But I'm not going to change my personality.

(TC writer here) I'd say send an email, and if you don't get a response in 1-2 days send one more saying that if you don't hear back in the next 24 hours you'll probably try your luck elsewhere. Don't be threatening about it (the reporter doesn't owe you anything), just be transparent.

Setting a 'time limit' like this helps makes sure you don't end up on the reporter's mental backburner indefinitely. Of course, if the reporter is super swamped this may lead them to simply pass on the story. But usually if it's good, they'll try to find another writer who can take it.

I'd love for someone to correct me, but this conclusion just doesn't ring true to me. They say "the world's most popular 'erotic' site for women is FanFiction.net".. and it only gets 1.5 million visitors a month. Something tells me there are way more women than that surfing the web for erotic material.

Also, this whole article seems to disregard social norms.

Okay, but Facebook isn't really going head-to-head with everyone else shipping the stock version of Android with a slightly different coat of paint, so I don't think it's a huge deal if they're a few months behind.

Also, while there have been some performance optimizations in the latest builds of Android, from a feature perspective there hasn't been that much (NFC is the biggest one in Gingerbread). So even working on the previous release doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.

Honeycomb is the outlier and will probably be released in a few months (actually, I think Google is stalling til they release Ice Cream Sandwich). And I doubt Facebook would release a tablet before they release a phone.

I don't understand how Google can maintain any control over those devices, though. My understanding was that anyone could download the Android source, sans Google applications like Gmail and Market, and install it on whatever they want.

If I were Facebook, I'd just avoid Google entirely and use alternative apps for everything. Amazon Appstore, Facebook Messaging for email, etc.

I think Amazon is trying to become the backbone for the 'alternative' set of Android core apps that will inevitably be developed. These apps will appeal to any carrier/OEM that wants to stop licensing from Google, or from companies like Amazon and Facebook who may launch their own devices with splintered versions of Android.

My guess is that Amazon will own content delivery for these devices (books, movies, TV, music) and that Microsoft will round out the rest, with a Bing Maps app and an email app that supports Gmail etc but syncs nicely with Hotmail (which has been totally overhauled since you last tried it). This is entirely a guess on my part, mind you.

You do know that Amazon just launched its own, competitive Android Appstore right? amazon.com/appstore

For what it's worth, Color (the company) does not see itself as just another photo sharing app.

When I was in their office, the executives kept making vague references to how they would be doing some heavy data crunching and creating recommendation algorithms. They really didn't elaborate, but it sounded like the photo-taking was very much just a Step 1. Almost like an excuse to get people to pull out their phones so that Color could collect a bunch of data beyond just the photo itself (the implicit social graph, location, time, audio, etc).

Maybe they were just saying this stuff so that I wouldn't put them in the same bucket as Instagram and the rest, but this is a really smart team, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Also, I don't think Sequoia would have poured this much money into just another photo sharing app.

I'm pretty sure that Color also takes interaction within the application into account (i.e. if you frequently comment on a user's photos, view their stream, etc., then it also boosts your social connection).