TooMuchNick

Aging is bad because it hurts quality of life. Right now, people live longer than their bodies can perform at full capacity. Most people would prefer to remain healthy for their entire lives. No matter how ready someone is to die, no one wants to spend ten years in a nursing home. So everyone could find a way to die before then, or they could find a way to stay healthy even if that doesn't increase their life expectancy. You can guess which option is more likely to catch on.

The argument over whether we should fight aging is one worth having, but only as a philosophical exploration. The reality is that we always have fought aging, and we always will, because those who think otherwise have a tendency to die first.

Wow, it's the buddy system for backup! That's a great solution to the psychological barrier: usually, no one but you can tell you to backup your personal data.

I went to a Christian college where everyone was issued laptops, so several of my friends used a special program to share their web histories with "accountability partners." Then they could monitor each other's porn use, ideally to keep them from looking at any porn. Having backup buddies reminds me of that (without the scary religious suppression of natural urges).

In fact, I might be better at making sure my friend shows me photos of his family than making sure I back up my own. Of course, that's one thing cloud computing was supposed to solve in the first place.

And because you will by default be lazier than you should be, sit back right now and think of some worst-case scenarios that would screw up the projects you're currently working on, and write down what you need to do to avoid those. Living out the disaster scenario in your head may preempt living it out in reality.

Because right now my backup harddrive broke and my checking account is in the red, my personal lazy backup system for day-to-day important files is Dropbox: http://www.getdropbox.com/

If I'm missing an obvious free solution that doesn't require me dragging folders into Dropbox every day or two, please let me know.

Man, I had no idea. Where'd you hear/read about this?

Ha! This is honestly going into a comedy I'm writing about startups. This is Arrested-Development-level hypocrisy.

In this case, I actually find the baroque "misspelling" charming. It's like Ben Franklin is spelling the word "tweet." The overwrought spelling fits the tone of the site: a little more weight is expected here than in the usual Twitter message.

And if Sousa were right, the country wouldn't now be full of clubs, bars, cafes and concert halls where live music is performed, and there'd be nothing to play on the radio (or, okay, download on Bittorrent). Music scales through distribution.

IBM's new business plan: Run the works of the Clash through their software, crank it through Songsmith and make millions on the YouTube adsense.

But like I said, there are plenty of awful cafes on Valencia. I guess I conflated financial success and coolness: Mission Creek, one block down Valencia from Ritual, seems to get along just fine but it's a terribly dull place to go. The coffee there is just like anyone else's; the food is mediocre; the atmosphere is deathly silent. They've taken prime real estate and turned it into an office for people with no office -- and not a fun one. It's literally no more social than sitting in your living room, and the coffee and food are on par with what you could make for yourself. And the entire city is full of these decrepit little places that can only afford to offer mediocrity, because better food wouldn't necessarily bring in profits, and cranking up the music might drive away the customers who buy the most product. In the midst of all these mediocrity machines, Ritual and Four Barrel stand out because of what they've done with the same opportunities.

Okay, they do have one big real estate advantage: they bought giant spaces with room for a roaster. But is there any other way a cafe could serve something special that still attracts the high-profit foot traffic that turns Ritual and Four Barrel into community centers? I'd like to hope so.

This could also be a pain for users who are used to checking the front page. If the states are listed alphabetically, everyone can find their state every time.

This also answers my longest-standing question about cafes: Why are there so few fun ones?

San Francisco's Valencia Street (with its immediate offshoots) supports hundreds of interesting businesses. Many of them are cafes. Only two of those cafes are any good: Ritual Roasters, and Four Barrel. Four Barrel was founded last year by a disgruntled co-founder of Ritual.

While the rest of Valencia's cafes are grimy, poorly lit, deathly quiet, or all of the above, RR and FB are sunny, friendly, and loud. That noise is all the foot traffic (and some David Bowie). The people sitting in Ritual for five hours on a laptop aren't paying the (staggeringly high) rent. It's the constant in-and-out of to-go cups. Mercifully, Four Barrel has no wifi and thus a more talkative, flowing crowd.

Ironically, because RR and FB have coffee that makes people come and go quickly, they can afford to make a pleasant space for people who stick around. Their solution to cafe economics was to make their own high-markup product.

Of course there are other solutions. Cafe du Soleil in the Lower Haight offers an extensive sandwich menu and gets its baked goods as part of a chain of boutique cafes and restaurants called the Bay Bread Group, which also sells bread to bigger clients like the Ritz Carlton. For all I know, Soleil is riding on the profits of the Bay Bread Group as an indulgent loss leader.

But I suppose there's a lesson there for any startup with a boutique aspect: Make your own supplies, and you might have a business plan to support your dream. In a way, wasn't that the model for Reddit and Justin.tv?

The difference of magnitude between the revenue of the proposed wifi charges and the revenue of BART ticket prices is so staggering that a comparison makes little sense. It's much more likely that money could be taken from another area of costs than that the cost of wifi would affect ticket prices.

I'm not saying the money will appear out of nowhere, but it's certainly not staggering if the current charge structure is expected to create a profit for the company that installed the network.

The semi-social, semi-user-generated porn site fantasti.cc was created by a group of popular dot-commers (I know who but I can't tell) who have so far kept their names off the site. One of my partners at Boffery (a pre-alpha visual diary for sex lives) did some work for them, and that partner and I agree that the site would benefit from the name brands of the dot-commers.

In a supposedly enlightened modern world, and more importantly a world in which every man with a computer uses it several times a week to view porn and nearly every man and woman masturbates daily, is there really so much shame in being the person who provides those services?

I have no data on who the most financially successful sex aid and porn makers are, but we certainly all know of some success stories, and we know them by their legal names: Hugh Hefner, Sasha Grey, Larry Flynt. The founders of JimmyJane (a high-market sex toy maker and seller) are out in the open, as is their investor Tim Draper.

Sex sites aren't exactly parallel to porn sites, but it's the closest comparison I have. In its early days, Boffery will need every advantage I can give it, and one is my small amount of notoriety online (both as Nick Douglas and as "the first editor of Valleywag").

I've heard a few stories: FriendFinder calls itself a "social network" when talking to money people. JimmyJane has a different corporate name, but one still assumes Tim Draper knows exactly what he's investing in.

In short, if you don't want to be associated with your industry, you're at a huge disadvantage (your competitors will profit from risking more of their personal reputations) and possibly even have some moral questions to ask yourself. Why do you want to spend time profiting from anything if you feel it would taint your name?

I'm honestly not being cheeky, I suppose I'm just slow: Wouldn't it be easier to just not think about the points? I've found the points useful when looking for a summary, takeaway, or rebuttal that earned attention.

I have to complain, I've ridden BART in San Francisco for three years and had no idea I could have signed up for wifi. I wish I'd noticed the network on my phone and looked into it, but of course looking for wifi on BART never occurred to me (to save battery life I have "search for networks" turned off). I ride the train almost every day and I've never seen a notice at a station about the network. If only 16,000 people of several million in the BART service area signed up, then apparently tens or hundreds of thousands of wifi-enabled commuters never heard of this either.

And now they'll be expected to pay as much per month for a daily hour of the Internet as they do for constant access at work and home.

As a layperson, the only reasons I can see for BART to set such a high price point are a misunderstanding about the economics or a desire to keep usage at a low, manageable level.

I suspect I should be glad that there's wifi at all, at any price, but frankly $30 a month makes this "public service" a toy for highly paid commuters rather than an intensely useful public tool for all the area's travelers. I hope against hope that the daily and hourly fees aren't high enough to remind me of AOL-by-the-hour. To think we've reached a point where the privately owned cafes give away wireless, and the publicly owned transit charges for it.

Except, I'd think, for the bit where Eric Bauman makes even more money in the sale and faces no charges for a decade of illegal business that funneled capital away from the creators who deserved it.

Dear lord, I think I just gave myself enough cognitive dissonance to stop using Bittorrent for hours.

But my point is that Bauman hasn't really repaid his debt to society. He's been shamed, and a lot of us are glad for that, but only by yet another corporate raider who will likely not redeem Ebaum's World the way College Humor redeemed itself after the IAC purchase.

It's okay, a little smack on the hand is just what I needed. I have no idea what's brought so many new users (I just came to find talent and advice for my startup), but as long as it's a temporary influx, the new users will settle down as they usually do. A short period of bad behavior from inexperienced users is just a growing pain for any healthy organization, and since the community (and Paul) have dealt with it so well, I have little fear that growth will turn Hacker News into Digg. For instance, I know now not to cheekily mock Paul in his own thread, and probably not to write a single thing after several black-and-tans.

That said, members who wish to preserve a community's original quality should be proactive. They may have to replace the functions of some other original members who have left. We call this "culture."

"A little dirt is good for you" strikes me as a bittersweet lesson for those of us who avoid the conflict and drudgery that's necessary to reach any worthwhile dream.

Plus now I'm hungry for some beef.

Since I'm spending a lot of time on 4chan lately as research for an article, I got a fit of giggles when you mentioned the hormone-drunk adolescents that rule...Reddit.

I just learned the very hard way to never ever comment on HN after drinking.

It would be healthy for submitters to look at headlines before they copy them directly, realizing that what makes sense for a blogger (aware of Digg) seeking some well-deserved attention for a post might not make sense in an extremely specialized forum like Hacker News.

What I mean is, a blogger is completely justified in naming a post "Why James Bond would never drink a Coke" (like I did for an environmentalist blog) if that blogger believed their purpose would be best served by alerting Digg users to the perfidies of the Coca-Cola company. But if a Hacker News reader appreciated the post's message -- that Coca-Cola is exploiting water rights laws in third-world countries to produce its products cheaply at the expense of the residents and their clean water supplies -- they would do well to use a different headline that what the desperate blogger, often paid by the pageview, had written with a view to Digg.

That said, bloggers will more and more overhype their posts in the way that media have since their beginning, and those of us on small thinky web sites will have to get used to downvoting and moving on.

Unless you have a not-so-secret smirking attitude toward Paul Graham, having publicly ridiculed him in an earlier stage of your career and now being lucky enough to have no need for his money.

And by "grown-up," we mean "like grown-ups who aren't from TechCrunch."

Ha, yes, that's a major concern for us. We lucked out and found some very experienced people who've worked with federal financial data. We're assuming major security threats from (before) Day Zero.

One advantage is that all Boffery accounts are private. No one knows you have an account on Boffery unless (1) they email you a friend invitation on the site and (2) you accept. While this only protects against certain forms of attack, it does make us a slightly less inviting target. There is no Barack Obama or Kevin Rose of Boffery until they choose to publicize their accounts elsewhere.

Plus we will not use a dictionary-searchable admin password. Ha.

I'm sure I will waste all my karma this fall asking HN to pick apart our security plans. But for now, I just wonder if choosing sex as the test of this sort of high-security, process-intense visual social network format wasn't just the thing to keep us from scaling TOO fast to keep up with reliability and security.

Karma whores.

But seriously, mostly we care more about talking to the HN community than we do about adding value to your article. When you say "more helpful," you mean more helpful to you and your readers. "More helpful" to me might mean more accessible to Hacker News.

Get used to this. The more your startup gets covered, the less control you'll have over the conversation.

Bugmenot Firefox plugin, so on any login form on the web you can right-click and select "Login with Bugmenot": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349

Sorry, I should have realized the OS would be very important. I want to try writing a couple of Mac apps.

Still less silly than sweatpants and slippers.

Sounds like that line in Bridget Jones: "I'm very busy and important."

Meh. Nothing I don't see on my Google search. And they didn't find my email address.