spokey

Ya know, I'm usually a fan of alternative history and "what if" kinds of futurism, but these people can't be serious. A breakup of the United States, let alone one that sees the US divvied up between Canada, China, the European Union and Mexico isn't even remotely possible in the next year or even in the next decade. Even with a 50+ year time horizon you have to be pretty imaginative to come up with a plausible course to a scenario remotely like this--and that's still ridiculously unlikely.

- Also, what does "European Union" even mean here? The EU is composed of individual member states. Is the former US Northeast ruled directly and collectively from Brussels in this scenario? Is that an independent nation that has joined the EU?

The author, and the "analysts" he links to are either trolls or fools. Possibly both.

Link?

Hi Jori and Karri.

Kippt does look promising. I have a little bit of a meta-question for you.

Do you have any tips or advice you could share about getting covered on RWW with an early stage app?

Based on a cursory look I think you'll agree that Kippt is an MVP right now. A well polished MVP, but still an MVP, and one that isn't markedly different than (and in some ways you've already called out, somewhat lacking in features compared to) a host of Delicious- and Instapaper-type apps. (I don't intend that to be negative, so I hope you don't take it that way.)

How did you manage to get RWW to cover Kippt at such an early stage?

It's less that no-one knows who _why is and more that good people everywhere don't bother to try to find out. The community is willing and able to support his preference to remain "anonymous".

I assume with enough Googling around you could figure out his given name, but I've never tried to do it. If you do find out his name or other personal information, please DON'T post it here. This thin veil of anonymity seems to be important to _why, and that's good enough reason for me.

It's kinda like the graffiti artist Banksy. It's not that it is impossible to track him down--he participated in a documentary about him and I think I've heard him interviewed on NPR before--but that those that could readily "out" him are willing to protect his privacy.

Are you a native English speaker?

I'm not the OP here, but I'm curious if you've never heard the idiom or the if the idiom just rubs you the wrong way.

> Replace god in this expression by gays, Allah, children, science, music, bits or whatever

That's just it, "for the love of X" doesn't really get a rise out of me for any value of X.

A less common variation of the idiom is "for the love of Mike", which I think points out how arbitrary the object one's affection is in this expression.

> And it doesn't provide any useful and constructive information to the main point.

Without commenting on whether the use was appropriate in this case (frankly I don't have much of an opinion either way), usually that expression is just a way of underscoring the importance of the part that comes after it. For example:

"for the love of x, please stop doing that"

implies more emotion and greater importance than:

"please stop doing that"

The importance of being able to actually reach potential customers, and how to do so profitably (ie. cost of acquisition).

No matter how well you can covert or how sticky your product is, you need to be able to get to them first. Most hackers I know (and the old me too) think SEO, SEM, display ads and maybe viral/WOM have this pretty well covered. Not every customer is easily reached via search keywords.

I have an ASUS (my second in the EEE line) with exactly the same keyboard. You get used to it, or at least I did. I actually think the chicklet-style keyboards on recent EEEs are among the best laptop keyboards I've used. A much bigger problem for me is accidently hitting the touchpad while typing. Depending on your OS there is usually a way to disable the touchpad while typing.

On the thickness thing, do they advertise this as being as thin as the Macbook Air? I took that picture more along the lines of "here is the X101 compared to a laptop you're probably familiar with". The optical illusion created by the black plastic is a little sneaky though.

Is there a site with reliable specs for this box? Googling around I've seen different numbers (e.g, a 16GB SSD vs. a 64GB SSD). What's the battery life? That's what appeals to me most about the EEEs.

I'm not sure I understand what it would mean for this to be "a hoax". Someone made and released it, right? I thought the point of Anonymous is that it is not a specific organization or group. Whoever made this video could claim to speak for Anonymous as much as the guys that hacked HB Gary, right?

Is it widely known/suspected that the various hacks and messages that have been attributed to Anonymous are from the same group of people?

EDIT: Ha. Great minds think alike. I see Xuzz was posting precisely the same idea as I was typing this.

I'm high on the introversion scale (and work from home, the cafe, etc. with some regularity) but I agree with the grandparent post. I like having a space dedicated to work and the ability to collaborate with my coworkers in person.

While it seems self-evident that a willingness to plow thru obstacles is a good trait for entrepreneurs to have, I think the specific example selected for the article is a poor choice. I have a word for the kind of person that would voluntarily attend and then disturb the religious observances of dozens of people because of a minor, fleeting, personal inconvenience, but it isn't "entrepreneur".

Bulldozing through a velvet rope to gain entrance to a club or restaurant is one thing. Bulldozing through a velvet rope because you were late to the opera or because you want to skip out of rabbi's sermon is another.

(Also, the title is misleading. The point of this article seems to be that there is only one type of entrepreneur.)

I hope this doesn't sound condescending because I'm very, very far from an expert in this field, but you might want to spend some time researching conventional methods of business valuation. I'm pretty sure your expectations are a little off here.

I think this could be a valuable service, but $99/test seems quite high (compared to similar services targeting desktop instead mobile users). At $500 to run Nielsen's recommended 5 person test, running my own tests starts to look like a viable substitute for your service (considering I'm likely to want to run more than one round of tests).

I think this is true at both ends of the scale: Startups will compare this cost against guerrilla testing techniques (e.g., sourcing testers on fiverr, asking people on the street, or inviting them into a lab for a hour for a small reward). Large firms will compare the value of this service to hiring a more high-touch UX firm (or building this competency internally) that does much more than record test sessions.

For what it's worth, here are some questions I have as a potential buyer:

* How long are the test sessions in general?

* How are the tests "facilitated", or more to the point, what happens if testers don't understand the task instructions or can't get the app to run?

* How are you sourcing testers? Can you quantify their demographics? Can you provide testers that meet specific demographic profiles?

I'm a little confused by your question. Are you looking to spend $100K or to generate $100K annually? If the latter, the company is probably "worth" 2 to 5 times $100K.

> There are not 10 herokous or similar

1. Salesforce's Force.com

2. Amazon's EC2

3. Google's AppEngine

4. Microsoft's Windows Azure

5. VMWare/Salesforce's VMForce

6. Makara

7. CloudBees

8. PiCloud

9. PHPFog

10. DuoStack

I'm not sure it's obvious that PaaS is "winner take all", but even if it is, right now there are several deep-pocketed companies fighting to be that winner. Sounds pretty good if you're looking for an exit.

I'm a couple of years younger than Julian Assange and commonly use two spaces after each sentence, purely out of muscle memory. (I took a "keyboarding" class in 1987 or so using an IBM Selectric typewriter and that's the way I was taught to do it.)

I'm not at all surprised that many people still do this. I'm a little surprised that people assert that's a "proper" way to do it or for that matter get worked up enough about it to write that you should "never, ever" do it. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I was expecting an actual negative consequence of using two spaces. Typography is important, but I'd guess that with modern kerning techniques the difference between two spaces and one is slight. (In fact, if I were designing a word processing app, I'd think this is is a case I'd account for: If there is a "proper" distance between the period at the end of one sentence and the start of the next letter, wouldn't you ensure that's the distance that is used whether the user typed one space or two?)

Arguably Posterous fits this criterion.

I'll suggest that the other stuff causes enterprise software to be of low quality.

Not all enterprise software sucks, although much of it does. Often there are non-sucky options in the space, but they have less market share in no small part due to that other stuff. On the client side of things, if you can fix the politics you can generally fix the suck but that means as a supplier your success will be determined (in part) by how well you help the client address the politics and "other stuff". Sucky enterprise software exists (in part) because many suppliers have found that there is greater return on focusing resources on the other stuff than on focusing resources on improving the software.

Which one is "hacker" and which one is "developer"?

> If you only give someone a public key, > how can they authenticate you based > on that? You must be giving them some > piece of private data, or else anyone > could authenticate as you.

That's not quite the way it works. There is no shared secret required. With my public key you can create an authentication challenge that allows you to validate my identity without ever seeing my private key (or, for that matter, you can send me a message that only I can read).

If I'm using it right, it looks like more than 7.5 million papers were submitted to PubMed in this 10 year period. Only 0.01% of all papers were retracted and only 0.003% were retracted due to "fraud". This seems like an exceedingly small sample. I wish we could see more of the raw analysis (p-scores and the like).

I think the other result was more interesting: 53% of "faked" research papers were submitted by "repeat offenders", while only 18% of "erroneous" papers were. If you do this once it seems you are likely to do this again.

BTW, the abstract is at http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2010/10/18/jme.2010.038125

> Also, there are major trademark, patent, and copyright issues that need to be settled before anybody can safely fork Java and stop adhering to the spec.

One would certainly have trademark issues with the name Java, but I'm not certain about the rest of that statement.

Sun/Oracle have already provided a GPL'ed version of the JDK and core libraries at http://openjdk.java.net/. There are/were independent attempts to do this also, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Virtual_Machine#Licensing and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines for example.

I think the only real issue is around the TCK, but that's just blessing an implementation as "Java Compatible(tm)", or at least I think so. Couldn't one take one of the existing JDK/JRE implementations, rebrand it IcedTea, and create their own IcedTea compatibility test?

I thought that went the other way: you need a patent license to author and/or run the TCK. You can create a Java compatible VM (many have) but you can't run the "official" compatibility test without Sun's, now Oracle's permission, and there is some concern (at least at Apache) that you cannot easily create a "cleanroom" implementation of that TCK. (Although I think that latter concern is more social than legal--if I remember correctly conventional wisdom said that there were too may Sun folks already involved with Java projects at Apache to have any reasonable expectation that a cleanroom would remain clean.)

I haven't been active with Java for more than 5 years, and I haven't been active in the ASF for longer than that so I may be missing some of the nuance here, but isn't it possible maybe even probable that this is simply the point where Java and/or the Java VM "forks" into Oracle's proprietary version (likely to die on the vine) and one of more versions from some combination of IBM, Apache, RedHat, Eclipse, etc.

It seems like there are a large number of Java developers, a large number of organizations heavily invested in the Java stack, and a number of vendors with both the capacity and potentially the motivation to serve those organizations.

I find it hard to imagine that if developers and organizations abandon Oracle's Java in droves that no one will make an effort to fill that void. (And fill it with something more "Java-like" than not, at least at the start.)

For what it is worth I'm pretty sure Land of Lisp author Conrad Barski is an HN user as well. I think we talked at an HN meetup (but I don't know his id offhand).

If you are reading this Conrad, congrats! The book looks great and seems very well received.

I'm curious, does a "slashdotting" create a noticeable blip in traffic or book sales anymore?

I agree. It's clearly not something that can be entirely reduced to formulas and numerical relationships.

Moreover, an intuitive "design sense" is probably faster and will carry you farther than any set of specific guidelines.

But this doesn't have to be something you just intuit or pick up through osmosis.

For instance, a blind person could create an acceptably harmonic color scheme with a little knowledge of color theory. It ain't all handy-waving and intuition, there's some baseline part of this that can be reduced to numbers and guidelines.

You can jump-start someone's path to an intuitive design sense by teaching them some of the theory behind it (whether or not designers are conscious of some of the guidelines they're often following). It'll only take you so far, but it will take you a long way from square one.

EDIT:

Hi Douglas, I see from another comment that you are the author of the article. Neat, that's always one of the great things about HN.

By the way, since your account is new, let me offer this disclaimer: don't let the harshness of HN users get you down. Engineers are jerks by nature, and HN readers in particular are keen on offering what they see as constructive criticism.

To that end, I think the root comment on this thread has it right, what strikes me as odd about this article is that seems to be simultaneously aimed at neophytes and experts.

For example, under "Avoid Similar Classifications" you write about "slab serif" and "transitional serif" fonts without defining those terms.

If someone knows what these terms mean, are they likely to need this advice, or anything more than a simple reminder of it?

That's something of an honest question. I have no idea what "slab serif" and "transitional serif" mean beyond what I can grok from your usage of the term in the article.

IMO, this article would be much more useful to me, for example, if it said something along the lines of:

"Here's a slab serif font. Notice how the serifs have the same weight as the body.

"Here's a transitional serif font. Notice how the serifs are thinner than the body.

"Notice how if you use two slightly different fonts from the same category they create tension? It's better to use fonts from different categories, like this..."

but maybe I'm not in the target audience for this article.

Precisely. This is the typographic equivalent of advising "don't use colors that clash" without specifying what "clashing" means.

I actually think you could teach objective if subtle rules about this (for instance, compare the lowercase 'n' for the fonts in the first example) but this article doesn't do that. Instead the article uses terms like "neutral", "outspoken", "conservative". "dynamic", etc. to describe what to a casual observer are quite similar fonts (it's not like we're comparing Helvetica to Karbine or Comic Sans).

No.

Just to add to the list of alternatives, I don't know where you live but several states have some sort of "talented and gifted" magnet school that might be more challenging/engaging for you. Many cities do as well, but you're probably well aware of local options.

There's also Bard College at Simon's Rock which accepts rising high school juniors and gives them a BA in 4 years (and is affiliated with a top tier liberal arts college). The timing for that is just about right.

Also, you may be interested to learn more about the "unschooling" movement. Some variation of that might be a good fit for you. Google "unschooling" or "John Taylor Gatto" for some background info.

Other people in this thread have discussed the drawbacks of a GED rather an a high school diploma, so I thought I'd share this one little anecdote:

One of my classmates in high school happened to have skipped a lot more grades than most. He was 12 in his junior year of high school, so I guess that made him 14 or 15 when he started college and around 19 when he graduated from undergrad.

He was a great kid. Clearly ridiculously smart but very modest and soft spoken. Everyone seem to like him. But he didn't really have "friends" per se. Everyone was nice to him, but everyone treated him like a kid brother.

I ran into him at our 15 year high school reunion and we had a long chat. Looking back on it as a happy, successful and established adult, one thing he clearly regretted about his life is that he never really had a college or a high school "experience", he just went to classes. And he regretted it.

My point is that there is more to the high school experience than what you're being taught in class. Sure, you can skip it, but be aware that you're trading away something with real value, sometimes even when it doesn't seem like it is. I don't think that should make your decision for you, but it's another thing to throw on the "no" side of the scales.

Also, I think the deck is generally stacked against you as 15 year old high school drop out trying to succeed as an entrepreneur. Gaining a little bit more life experience (quite possibly doing fun and exciting things that aren't like high school) might make you a better entrepreneur. You'll understand your customers, partners and employees better.

(inb4 "Fool, YC has had several successful 18/19 year old founders." I know. That's not the same situation as this.)

Spot on. I missed the 2 part, which makes this question much more interesting. By the way, I think I do could it in one drop; drop one from floor 1. If it breaks the answer is 0, else 1 because I don't think many eggs could survive a two story drop.

Their statistics cover a much more engaging domain than most.

Is the answer you're looking for a binary search algorithm, or do you have some lateral thinking solution in mind?