avner

Why post this when you can't even try it. What is the point?

POTS is not going away anytime soon. Yes, it is seeing evolution happen (circa: VOIP) but at the end of the day, POTS is a critical infrastructure to almost every developed and developing country.

i imagine you guys are already working on the skip/back functions. Awesome initiative!

Wow. Thank you so much for the outpouring of support and wisdom. This really, really helps.

Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle. ~John Watson, 1897

well, I'm guessing they did pick the most imposing dropboxer in the office to give the tour so Jason continued the tradition. :D

Stephen Elop has finally put in writing what the market has said about Nokia ever since the iPhone came out. Props to him for finally initiating this intervention at Nokia; it has been long overdue. Someone has finally said "we have fucked up, its now time to get back on the horse and make it right" to the Nokia management.

Less than a decade ago, nobody could touch Nokia in the mobile handset market, Nokia defined quality... and then they got complacent and instead of innovating, they stuck to old principles. Its like Nokia witnessed the age old fable of the tortoise and the hare firsthand.

Do you have to plug in "1000Memories (YC S10)"?

source?

Thanks for the insight. It'd be interesting to know from a technical standpoint where the problems lie, if you don't mind providing a little detail.

... and GV still cant send international text messages. I mean come on....let me pay for it at the very least.

I will gladly pay to send/receive mms, international text.

Its mind boggling that they expect your google voice number to be "the one to rule them all" when it can't emulate half the functions that are considered minimum today.

I tried to start a hardware startup last year and actually made it to the interview with PG & co. At the end of the meeting, while the idea was good, it came down to the obvious question of assembling and sourcing the hardware. At that stage, after a lot of research and thinking, I decided to cut my losses and shelf the idea for the time being.

Why? Because hardware is hard. I may be an engineer, but scaling production of a hardware unit from a prototype to shippable products en masse is an extremely hard challenge if you're trying to source your hardware from somewhere like China. Its harder if you're not Apple or HP..or Sony for that matter. I think its unfair to judge wakemate to Sony or Apple standards.

Coincidentally, I met the Wakemate guys when I crashed at the SF hacker house during that time. While they're brilliant and dextrous folks, I certainly felt the vibe that they were finding it extremely challenging to design, produce and ship this thing. The idea of wakemate sounded great, but I wasn't convinced that being non-tech founders, they were entirely aware of the technical and logistical challenges of producing and scaling a hardware unit from scratch to the production line.

I wish them luck though. While they could learn a lesson or two about PR, they've been at it for over an year and have persisted. Customer patience may be running thin after these series of setbacks, but I still believe that they will eventually pull it off.

The matter at hand transcends into international politics of the highest order. It is not some website that someone created to opine on their dissatisfaction with the government and hence were ordered to take it down. Its a website that hosted classified documents that don't belong to them, and were obtained illegally. No cognizant web-host in the US would want to host such content, if they want to remain in the business without an agenda. Amazon does not have to subscribe to some social contract that obligates them to submit to an organization like Wikileaks. As crass as it may sound, Amazon's in it for the money, not international politics.

Your expectations from Amazon, while noble, unfortunately do not translate into what is practically tactical for Amazon from a business' point of view. Any other US host would have yanked wikileaks out too. It is unfair to only subject Amazon to such high morality.

I love dropbox but giving it complete access to my facebook besides all my files is pretty much handing my "social life" and my "work life" to a single company.

There are way more iPod touches out there than iPhones. This could have been a great ipod touch app for people who don't want to pay ridiculous amounts for a phone.

I guess on a similar note, I also don't want to sign-up with my e-mail to use and then consequently decide whether I do or do not like another GTD tool.

It would help to have a demo visitors can play around with in realtime.

My father works for the largest thread company in the world, Coats plc. I ran down everything avinash told you in the above post with him and he says its good advice. E-mail me and I can put you in touch with him -- He can put you in touch with the right peope in places like Egypt, Kenya. According to him, its all about volume in the textile business and quality control (i.e. silk printing etc) can be very hard when you outsource your production to a third world country.

If I may chip in,

0. Lack Of Respect For Time- A person who does not respect time will be limited in what he can accomplish in this world, regardless of talent. Besides your own, if you don't respect other people's time, your integrity depletes by the second until there is none left. Almost everything else is a byproduct of this, positive or negative.

Brad Manning violated the very core values of integrity involved in operating as an IA. In my opinion he doesn't deserve the 'whisteblower' status some people are trying to protect him under.

Leaking a single controversial guncam footage because his conscience gave in is one thing, but continuing to leak documents and material and then boast about it to someone like Lamo is another. As a former Marine, I have seen and done things that keep me awake at night, but I will never violate my own integrity by doing what Manning did and end up endangering more lives.

Lamo ended up turning Manning in for another 15 minutes of fame. Anyone ethical with real national interest in mind would distance himself from this mess. Either way the leaked material will end up doing nothing but costing more lives.

I really don't see why someone shouldn't showcase something they hacked together, regardless of the time it took to materialize. Granted that the "in X hours" part may reflect the hacker having some other agenda (as highlighted in your post); at the end of the day however, like you said, if whatever it is that they are showing off holds any commendable merit it will be recognized by the community. Anything else will die down after a couple of upvotes anyway.

   allow a soldier to act as an air traffic controller in zero visibility

I read that on their website. Having had Marine Forward Air Controllers embedded in my unit, the claim sounds very dubious. Again, there isn't much technical or otherwise literature on this out there; I can only judge by my past experience with the gadgets I used in the military and as a bot engineer today.

A "battlefield" is an extremely noisy environment. I've worked on bots of such nature for a living and while the concept they describe makes sense at a modelling level, their process has very little field application (Dedicated IIR-ESP when you're getting shot at?). As far as pinpointing the location of gunfire goes, you are trained in Target Detection (TD) and have mounted systems like Boomerang on HMMVs. Trust me, when you've been out there long enough, you don't need a gadget to tell you what kind of gun the shot was fired from or the sort of aircraft approaching.

Cool concept nonetheless, I hope they publish more details.

I wouldn't so much call it a resume/C.V. than an intuitive addition to one on a portfolio. Good idea nonetheless.

  Know when 80% is good enough

I consider this an important strategy when executing most tasks. It is an on field guideline in the Marine Corps to aim for a 70% solution to problems in some cases. It is sometimes a better strategy to implement an imperfect plan than to roll out the perfect plan by the time it's too late.

This is security through obscurity. To quote Bruce Schneier:

Security is both a reality and a feeling. The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different countermeasure... Security is also a feeling, based on individual psychological reactions to both the risks and the countermeasures. And the two things are different: You can be secure even though you don't feel secure, and you can feel secure even though you're not really secure."

The body scanners give the reactionary populous a reason to "feel" secure; even though the chances of a terrorist being caught by body scanners are slim. (see http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/german_tv_on_t...)

I'll withhold any and all judgment until I can hear both sides to the story. In the meantime, we should let this drama unfold over the course of the week.

I'm not Indian but have dealt with contracts from India. It really comes down to two things.

1) Work culture - Indian work culture, for the most part is not same as the work culture in the US. From what I've seen, Indian bosses are a lot more assertive and controlling than you would expect from your boss in the US. I can only imagine what it must be like in bureaucratic government agencies in India.

2) Infrastructure and Equality - Its just not there. It might be sprouting or even maturing in certain places but for the most part, there is immense red tape and corruption in India. This is common for most developing countries and until the average minimum wage in India for a low level government official is somewhat closer to something decent, the bribery and favourism will continue and ambitious programs like these will continue to fail. Some of the smartest Indians I met in college told me they have a better shot in the US because there is no widespread favourism here.

Penn Stater here! I've thought of organizing something like this for some time. I know a few of you Penn Staters are regulars on HN.

Lets do this sometime next weekend.

Basically, it automatically adjusts the RGB elements of your display to be more subtle on your eyes depending on what time of day it is and lighting conditions in your room. It does a fair job at it. I highly recommend it.

Likewise.