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throwaway98237

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the primary reason i purchased an kobo aura one is the red led back light, so i can read at night without messing with my sleep cycle. it's a killer feature. you'd be wise to consider it.

I bought 5 I was so excited. I ended up selling 4 after realizing that they were gonna require more time than I'd expected. I need to go back and see if they've since improved their platform.

Amazon Go 10 years ago

But you come to HN and read the comments because... I mean, the comments are the social portion. Not pure facts. They're other peoples views. So, I mean, you kinda socialize when get your news here and post pleasant comments interacting with other readers. So, I take it, you totally get what I'm saying.

Amazon Go 10 years ago

"They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction..."

False. Sometime I go to the grocery store for social interaction. You know, to get out. I generally go to a particular wine shop cause I like chatting with the guy at the counter. The idea that we do all this "stuff" ("processes") to get "stuff" done, and then separately we go somewhere for the express and sole purpose of socializing, is just clearly wrong. It's all mixed in. We're social creatures. We socialize while at the barber shop. We socialize at the grocery store. We socialize at work. At church. At football or soccer games. If we attempt to "refactor" out the "process" to make it more efficient, fine. But, don't pretend like whatever we replace that effort with we're not going to be socializing while we do that new thing.

It's frankly really sad that we have all these people that used to be persons we knew and visited with at the checkout counter, now they're in some warehouse being super efficient having no time to visit with coworkers while they work, meanwhile, we pretend that stuff magically shows up at grocery stores and we can walk in and walk out and magic and future wow.

The original Leap Motion was awesome. But there was no adoption of it. It would have been great to see it included in laptops, for instance. Just my opinion, this is because, well, the same reason there are all sorts of arbitrary names for command line switches. The people that could build this already have something that works for them, so why spend time building out a whole new interface for other folks, average folks. Same reason why OSS has been great for programmers, not so great for consumers. Majority of the effort has gone to tooling and platforms, not to the non-technical user side of things.

The "state" has no place in regulating competitive video games by use of force. Already in place no doubt was the ability of the state to enforce private party contracts. But, bringing the state into the mix... that's like saying the state, i.e. the citizens, have some standing in every such contract/instance. This is bad,

I oversimplified. I would say that all three of those should be an option, that one should not consider their education complete till they'd gotten through either university, college, or a trade school. I'm even a huge advocate of apprenticeships. I suppose those could be rolled up into the trade school category. But I believe that leaving university out of that group (only counting college and trade school) ignores a large and important portion of the economy. Also, the liberal arts portion of schooling is important for a citizen.

I'm vegan. I ride public transit when possible, and moved next door to my job so I don't need to commute on a daily basis, I buy used whenever possible, and try not to buy stuff I don't need. I take carbon into consideration when making holiday plans (a few plane rides can double a persons carbon footprint). I compost. Future changes I'm trying to make include going to local farmers market and growing more of my own food, switching to solar power. But, realistically, I'm only one person. If everyone went vegan today, gave up cars (for bikes) and planes (for electric trains), and we started growing 51% of our food locally we'd be well on our way to meeting carbon emission reduction goals. The technology has been around for awhile. The will to make the choices has not. Which is why, I'm a pessimist on these issues.

University is the new H.S. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. We have publicly funded high schools. It's time we have publicly funded universities. If the U.S. wishes to be competitive globally we need a well trained, educated workforce unencumbered by mountains of debt at the very time their supposed to be making their first "adult decisions" (buying a home, having kids, choosing which city to live in). Lump this in with climate change and universal health care, as far as I'm concerned. This is 2016, not 1850. It's not every person for themselves on the frontier. Almost everything we consume is touched by folks far away, requires IP to be built, and public infrastructure to get to you. This "there are no externalities that we need to worry about", "I can take care of myself mythology is so blatantly false at this point", it's b.s. and I just consider someone that starts with that as a set of axioms for their world view as ignorant or delusional.

The point of going to Mars is to give humanity a plan b, not as a vacation with lots of hiking and other outdoor leisure stuff. Considering how much time an Earthling spends indoors, it's not a huge leap to spend all of one's time indoors. Building underground and staying inside. There, problem solved. Makes a whole lot more sense than making our first attempt at colonizing a whole new would at the distances we'd be looking at with Titan.

The new Blackberry DTEK60 is based on Android but supposedly hardened and has much longer term security updates. You can still use the Play store. I know, Blackberry? But seriously, it's not a bad looking phone and has good hardware specs.

All the same, I'm in the same boat as you. Thinking about switching to land-line and buying a separate camera and GPS navigation device. Hello 1990's! Idk. Not liking my options.

The bigger issue is, many of these same folks are not gonna stop buying into "echo chamber" news and gossip just because FB stops publishing it. Sad as it is, this is what Fox News is to a super lesser extent. This is what shooting the sh-t at the bar with your buddies is.

We don't need less fake news. We need a more educated and engaged public. Now that we have a president-elect that campaigned on gutting public funding, including Dept. of Education, well, we'll see how that goes.

If you watch an old tech talk re: Google disaster recovery topic, the Googler explains that a user's info is never fully deleted because it's too expensive to do so given back-up duplication is processed multiple times in multiple locations and sometimes over multiple technologies. In other words, cancel your google account today and your data may be "deleted" but it's really, as in actually really, still on magnetic back-up in several locations, but it's just really hard to get to and put back together, so is considered "gone". Unless you're a really big organization with the means to go to such troubles, like maybe the government or Google.

One would only be on-board with that assuming they were on board with the whole of the product. So first you'd need to make the argument as to why a vegan should be behind this product, besides "more people can afford it if all vegans buy it."

Also, that only works if it has competition, otherwise, if it were that popular and there were no competition the producer would have good reason to raise the price knowing the market could bear it.

As a vegan, I feel the day fast approaching when I must choose whether I'll eat this "vegan" meat or not. Either way I'm rooting for them on behalf of the environment and all the animals caught up in our current industrial food system.

You gotta see the humor in Google being of the opinion that a "service worker is a script". I mean, we've all kinda expected that Larry Page is under the assumption that we're all just subroutines running in his "matrix", but now it's official.

Last summer I bought a motorcycle in Duluth, MN and rode it down to Austin, TX (ok, well, to Oklahoma City from where it hitched a ride in a U-Haul, hey it's a road trip and it was a used bike off Craigslist). I was mostly unplugged apart from the maps app (which is not how I plan on doing it next time, next time I plan on having physical maps, maps that can't die on you, move to an irrelevant portion of the trip, or otherwise randomly turn from a navigation device to a screen saver).

"No Vacancy" signs were absolutely welcomed sights. They also just made it all the more visceral. Could I have pulled over, opened an app, and reserved a room online in less time and perhaps at a lower price, absolutely. Then, I could have followed the "map's" directions directly to this place and called it a day. Instead, I had to keep my eyes peeled, take in the city, maybe figure out where the main drag was.

We need to stop pushing efficiency and start making space for discovery. My trip down the middle of our country, that deep red cut of Trump support, I got to see it all. I was a Hillary voter, but, can honestly say I understand a bit of the reasons those states went the way they did. Riding an old motorcycle through the heart of our country, and then using an app to make my hotel reservation, or staying at some cookie cutter hotel instead of the local places I chose, that'd just have been a non-sequitur. I might as well not even have made the trip.

I would have missed the camp grounds, the fellow motorcyclists helping me with engine trouble, the welder that fixed my chassis, finding out that Nebraska is basically one big corn field, the super-hero of a motel clerk that let me sleep at the indoor pool when i showed up at 1am soaked and freezing and there were actually zero rooms left in the small town, the motorcycle club (shout-out to the Amber, OK Outsiders!) that put me up for a very drunk night after electrical issues, and the many other folks I met. But I didn't. It was awesome.

In a capitalist society one can receive grub for work on ethics.

We need, as a society, to decide that it's worth investing in ethics, in basic research, etc, rather than trusting that market incentives will trickle out of these companies.

Do we want the fruits of scientific progress to be made publicly available and shared by all of society (one must grant that even public universities have already begun privatizing their work, which is sad) or for it to end up privatized as part of patent portfolios to go to the highest bidder and to serve those with the most capital?

I already know what the answer is if we look at the current incentives in place, but what do we want?

Imagine that landline phone calls were initially free and had to be "monitized" via adverts. Or, if it ended up being the case that they couldn't be sufficiently monitized and thus were considered a "failed business model". This age of freemium is producing all sorts of wack products. Why can't I just have a phone company that adds Twitter-like functionality in my paid plan. Oh right, because even though it's all "free" it's all proprietary and incompatible.