TravisLS

Plenty of people are bullish on VC and Silicon Valley, and almost by definition have plenty of money to bet against you.

Very nice - clean and simple.

I often ride 100+ mile trips to areas I don't know very well and the hardest part is knowing what roads are more-or-less bikeable to plan a route.

Google Maps bike directions are basically worthless on long trips since they divert you way too often into neighborhoods and side streets. Strava is a perfect data set for this use case.

This is damn useful as-is, but if someone could turn this data into long-range bike directions I would absolutely pay for it.

Oh, they don't deliver to the US...I guess I'll wait for it to show up on eBay.

The frame contains every living human, and every human who has ever lived - except for three of them.

It may have some struggles getting off the ground. After all, if you just want to put something on the internet, there are now many many ways to do that.

But for many people, the first step beyond their Tumblr page is still a total mystery. I learned HTML and Javascript because when I was 14, I wanted a website for my comedy troupe (no longer active). I spent hours researching free web hosting and stumbled upon Geocities. That kicked off a life of programming and a love for the web that has never died.

There are still people out there who would love to learn HTML and have some more control over what they put online. Bravo to Kyle for making it possible. Make a donation - even if you don't think you'll personally use it. It's worth it if it inspires even one kid to start building something.

While taken individually, many of the technologies presented in the story seem to be useful or even fun, the world they create is inescapably bland. And it's the inescapability of it that makes it so awful. While on the surface these theoretical advances provide value, they also potentially destroy the possibility of serendipitous interaction, of meeting someone incompatible, of having your perspective changed, of connecting with someone intimately.

For me, the "problems" being solved by the tech in this story are much of what makes life worth living. While building technology, I think it's important to consider the effects and side effects of these things, and to focus on technology that improves and enhances our lives, rather than takes them over.

Surveys can be a useful tool, but nothing replaces a real conversation. Even asking more open ended questions in an email or survey form can give you so much more information than radio button answers (and unless you're a huge company, it's not too hard to read a few hundred open-ended responses).

Along those lines, I'll share a snippet from patio11's Microconf presentation last year (posted on HN yesterday), regarding interpreting the responses you get to a more open-ended conversation:

"If you’re solving a problem people actually have, they will say at this point, 'Shut up and take my money.' If someone says, 'That’s kind of interesting, tell me when that exists,' you have not successfully identified a problem that people actually have."

You don't get that kind of insight from radio buttons.

As far as I can tell, Chrome lets you upload pretty much whatever you want into the Chrome webstore.

I'd be curious whether Firefox extensions have these issues in even close to the same proportions as Chrome extensions.

The case of content is different. Free content is not taking much market share from professional producers. A small subset of people are illegally stealing professionally produced content via torrent sites, but that group is small enough that it's still economically viable to spend $50M to make a great movie.

If we eliminate copyright, that group grows large enough that nobody will spend $50M to make a movie, and the big-budget movie will disappear. The big-budget movies don't disappear because people don't want to see them, or because free content has displaced them in the market. They disappear because so many people steal the content against the wishes of the publisher, it's no longer economically viable to produce the content at all.

In the case of video in particular, high quality content is still very expensive to produce. By removing the ability for movie / tv studios to make money from content, the likely outcome is we simply don't have big budget movies or high quality TV anymore.

Aside from all of the reasons why the businesses might want their revenue streams to stay intact, most consumers probably want it as well.

Click on a few of the bookmarks in this collection and you should be able to see my highlights if you want to try it out: https://annotary.com/collections/33/startup-marketing

It's a social bookmarking / annotation service for the web. Highlight web pages, take notes, share with colleagues and friends. We're just about to launch a collaboration toolset for businesses and organizations. Happy to chat more about it - my email is in my profile.

The Facebook of today is still valuable, but in an entirely different way. Facebook in 2004 had nothing to do with sharing content, it was just a database of people that you'd met in college that was exceptionally fun to browse. That database of people aspect is almost entirely hidden now in favor of the feed (useful but different), and what you "like" (the pages where you clicked "like" to get a $2 coupon).

I recall reading somewhere PG saying there may be an opportunity now for a "Facebook for college students", which I'd imagine as a realization of the early value of Facebook. I've batted around the idea of setting up oldfacebook.com, just as a copy of that early version. Heck, you could even let people sign up by connecting with Facebook.

If you're Elon Musk, have virtually unlimited resources, and an incredible creative passion, you can inspire a lot of people (me included) by pursuing revolutionary, high-capital ideas.

That's not to discredit, however, the many many successful businesses that are low-capital evolutions on existing ideas. For many entrepreneurs, especially early in their careers, it's vastly more rational to join an existing market, or resegment an existing market, rather than try to create something revolutionary. You can criticize them all you want, but many of those companies will have success, validate their markets early on, and have lots of potential acquirers in the existing market participants.

Especially in the case of Show HN posts, like you mention, it seems like people put themselves out there and most of the comments shoot them down, often without really exploring or trying to understand what they've spent their time on. Negative feedback is often quite helpful, but knee-jerk negative feedback almost never is.

Obviously it's a tough game, and you've got to have thick skin, but it did used to seem like this was a place to go to learn to succeed, and lately it kind of seems like a place to go to learn that everything sucks.

As for what to do about it, I'm not sure. I'll just keep reading it every day until a new, smaller, more constructive community pops up. I am (and I suspect many others on this site are as well), basically just an education junkie, and as the community becomes less educational, it becomes less attractive than alternatives.

2. Again, not yet. What features would you like to see in an API?

3. The main difference is the social value. I can easily make annotations and share them with you, see what my friends are bookmarking and highlighting. We're looking to build a community, rather than just an annotation tool.

This is my latest endeavor. I thought it would appeal nicely to the HN crowd who read heavily online. Let me know what you think - I'm here to answer any questions.

Being a programmer can often seem like the opposite of that, when you're in the office on Saturday writing PHP form validation logic for the 500th time for an arbitrary deadline.

I used to say being a bike messenger was my favorite job I ever had, until I saved up a little money and started working on a startup a few months ago. Building my startup's product and market is much more energizing, freeing, and rewarding than being a bike messenger ever was. I can't wait to get up in the morning and start programming (assuming that's on the agenda for the day).

Plus now I can ride my bike around NYC during the work day, without having to hang out in corporate mail rooms 40% of the time.