terrym

I agree with you, but I don't think that's what's happening here - the main content of the article is about an interesting and remarkable approach to customer service from a company that every business can learn from. The format for it is as from from "hn material" as you can get, but the content is there. I agree that you can find lessons in practically any story, but I think it's whether or not the core of the story is relevant to hn that distinguishes what's appropriate to post here, not how it appears on the surface.

I'd agree with you if this were just a link to a local news story covering the event, but since the bulk of this article is an anecdote about two ways of doing customer service -- compassion vs. indifference -- and what a difference it can make, especially when the company stands behind it - there's definitely a business lesson to be learned here.

Haha you just reminded me that we used to do this same trick for tribes 2 at a friend's house. We'd play online, too, so every time the map changed on the server, we'd have to run back and forth to load the new map.

Since it involved a group of people doing it, you can't really know what the true motivation behind it was -- but I think removing the otherOS functionality simultaneously gave the movement behind this 2 things:

1) Motivation, attention, and energy (more people hearing about their efforts, offering their help, more passionately)

2) An area to focus their energy on (jailbreaking, or restoring access to homebrew/otheros as a goal)

Another thing to consider is that as far as I know, you should in theory be able to run the system at it's full capacity with the latest hack, whereas anything running on otheros was crippled by default.

I don't, but if you want to have the holiday theme, you could always set it manually to #BE2828.

I've always liked the way flarp looks (https://github.com/mikecrittenden/flarp-gedit) . It's light on dark, but using colors that are easier on the eyes than plain white-on-black. There's a screenshot of it here: http://mikethecoder.com/post/861539191/flarp-a-gedit-color-s...

That works. I think the key is having a solid introductory paragraph that explains what the product is, the tagline can only say so much.

No problem, glad it was helpful! The best thing for people who don't want to watch a video might be just some screenshots of the different states of the list: compacted, expanded 1-2 levels, and fully expanded with accompanying text explaining how the product works.

Another quick suggestion: "A better way to think" doesn't really convey what your product does, maybe something like: "Map your workflow to your brain, not your brain to your workflow." would work better? Something more descriptive might help people tell more quickly whether or not the product is relevant to them and worth checking out.

Interesting product idea - could use a bit more explanation on the homepage (maybe a paragraph of explanatory text?), the video was nice but a bit hard to take in (fast paced, talking over music, short).

Your other video "How to use workflowy" was much easier to understand and actually convinced me to sign up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMVtkNrquU&fmt=18 . Specifically, the part after 1:30 where you show the length of a list when it's expanded vs. when it's organized by workflowy. I usually end up with huge word documents that look like scarily similar to the sprawling, expanded list, and when you showed how the tool cuts down on that and only shows the level of detail you need, that hit home big time and made me want to try it.

Best of luck!

Was looking for it too, found it: http://www.pagerduty.com/docs/api/api-documentation took a while, though -- in my opinion, a link to the API documentation is important enough to put in the footer, maybe next to or under "integration guides".

Moving from "click to enable technology that usually contains annoying video and sound" to "click to enable video and/or sound" is a better approach, in my opinion. That way if someone wants videos to play, but require permission to play sound, or wants sounds on one site but no videos, they can do that. We move from an all or none solution to something customizable.

Also embedded audio and gifs aren't covered by flash-blockers, though in some cases there isn't much of a difference between that and a video ad. If we have to filter content by type and/or by html tag instead of "wrapper that normally contains type", we'd get better coverage overall.

I think your intuition is correct - that user contributions generally follow a power law, so when you randomize 1-to-1 interaction among all members, the likelihood of a person in the long-tail getting feedback from another user in the long-tail is high. A good essay on this: http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

Something like this: http://aidacase.com/keycase-folio-deluxe-with-built-in-keybo... might work for you eventually, though it may seem silly. I think the difference in this is that you can just open the front flap for quick, instant-on tablet access, and unfold it further for keyboard usage vs. having to set up / maintain two different systems or use a tilt/swivel joint to access the touchscreen.

I think it's also people who are scared of subjecting themselves to criticism, so they have to criticize others who share what they perceive as low-quality material that gets positive attention. It's a self-defense mechanism: he shouldn't be allowed to share his stuff because it's not good enough == I don't have to share my stuff and subject myself to outside criticism because it's not good enough.

While I guess the popup is better than nothing, seeing a window.alert anywhere usually brings up negative connotations (at least for me). I'd just add some text disclaimer on the sign up page - or at least confine the alert to that page. I tried thumbing through your site, but having to click "ok" every time I wound back on the home page didn't keep me on it for long. Best of luck to you.

Well one advantage the print view has is that it's at least centered, whereas the normal view is off to the left. Though this only makes a difference on higher resolution screens and it isn't enough of an issue to outweigh everyone having to dismiss a print dialog / deny ad impressions, in my opinion.

Hmm, you can try this submission if you haven't seen it - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041820. Check out the comments for it, too, since there are a lot of suggestions to use it to get started in the morning.

I've noticed this too - I think it might be a combination of this site's large commment width (up to 85% of screen width) and higher resolution monitors leading people to subconsciously keep their text to a reasonable width by adding new lines.

Long comments that don't incorporate this style appear on my screen at ~1600px and are 16.5 inches wide! (Not complaining, since I can just resize the window or modify the table's CSS, I'm just guessing what might cause this phenomenon.)

Doesn't every comment start with 1 point, though? People trying to game the system could still do so simply by commenting a lot (maybe on older, less visible submissions that won't get them down-votes). Maybe every comment should start at 0 points?

Good for you guys, especially starting out not running at all and already looking to do a 5k. I just did a 5k in them last week and it felt great - I picked the shoes up in august and I've been able to run ~3 miles every other day with them since.

I'd recommend trying, if you haven't already, a bit of actual barefoot running - only for a short distance to just get a feel for how it changes your stride. The reason I say this even though you're starting "barefoot" is I notice that the vibrams have enough padding to have a slightly different feel for me than actually going barefoot, so it might be worth testing it out and seeing if you notice a difference (if so, try to maintain the barefoot stride while wearing the shoes).

Good luck on the 5k, I'm sure you'll enjoy it!

How many companies sell suits vs how many companies sell barefoot running shoes? I mean, if you had to write an article on this subject, who else would you mention? I guess you could say "Nike, Adidas, ASICS, and Reebok don't offer any serious products for this market yet" but that's a bit like mentioning that Microsoft, Palm, and RIM didn't offer a serious competitor in the market of touchscreen smartphones right after the iPhone came out.

It's likely you keep seeing the brand because they were the first to market, and everyone else has been so slow to follow that they're the only serious game in town right now. That doesn't stop this article or any of the others you've seen mentioning them from being a PR piece they wrote or promoted, however.

As far as conspiracies go, you don't actually need to buy their product to try it for yourself - just take off your shoes, run for a bit, then try to maintain the same stride when you strap your shoes back on. The only reason you'd need "barefoot shoes" is if you like it and end up wanting to run barefoot often enough to warrant wearing them to protect your feet from glass and other dangers.

I think this also has to do with more people underestimating the trend you refer to than overestimating it. I think what this means is that because of the pace of technology, we have things that go from an idea in someone's head into an ecosystem of businesses, applications and technologies in just a few years. The ability to rapidly develop and share what we've built lets people fill in the gaps from deep meaningful, concepts like "never lose track of your friends" all the way to "Mary gained 20 points on farmville today" so quickly that it's hard not to mix them up as being one in the same.

I'd argue that this is similar to the car going from "new sector of transportation, economy, and way of life" all the way to "now with rust-proof undercoating with 0 down, 0% APR and $1000 Cash back", just much more quickly. If you were to look at the automobile industry after the arrival of the used car salesman as a solved problem due to the abundance of its superficialities, you'd miss the opportunity to build the hybrid car, the Smart car, the electric car, the hydrogen car and more, and all of the smaller incremental yet meaningful advances in car safety and technology over the years. In the larger scheme of things, Facebook is probably the model T of social networks...

I remember watching a video of a talk you gave at startup school 08 and near the end during the Q&A, you said something to the effect of "we fund what people apply with, which usually ends up being some form of facebook or something to do with independent music".

It seems that if the labels have positioned themselves as unfavorable toward startups to the point of making an anti-platform, that there would be demand for an independent, label-free music buying/selling experience for startups to work with. Yet the only thing I think of that comes close was the old version of thesixtyone's marketplace.

Are the startups that apply to ycombinator in this area trying to build something outside of the current music ecosystem and failing (and why)? Or is everyone just trying to work with the current system and finding that it isn't feasible/profitable?

The talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc