bbhacker

Source? If true, brilliance on Bill Ngyuens end and shame on the tech press for not getting it.

I am in no position to tell Apple how they should spend their money but after reading the articles about Elon Musk today I can't help but imagine how the world could be changed to become a better place with all this money.

And I don't mean that Apple should give money away to charities.

Why not invest in space exploration , electric cars, self-driving cars, medical devices, green energy,... It is not Apple's core business, but "phones" have not been the business of "Apple Computer" as well.

Apple has moved humanity forward with the personal computer and mobile phones. I don't want them to stop with computers, smartphones, tablets or TVs.

I want Apple to aim for more than just consumer electronics - but I guess we won't see that happening.

Could somebody who has knowledge about data centers make a quick estimation how much such a data center might cost?

I am asking since I am not a data center/architecture expert but the Groupon site should not be that complex from my perspective? Also the content should mostly be static, so caching should solve many problems.

For everyone who has not read it: Aaron is not proposing the future of ground-based transportation. This is an analysis why he scraps his plans for a magnet-levitation, personal transportation system and a call for new ideas.

I think the question is not how fast you can go from idea to first line of code but how long until you find out that your ideas is worth a line of code.

That is an interesting question in itself and would start a whole discussion how easily you could test the feasibility of an idea without writing a single line of code.

I think Jack Dorsey is doing an amazing job and it is extraordinary what he has shown at Twitter and Square.

That being said, what we are seeing here is basically "story telling" and "legend building" in action. The same happened when Jeff Immelt took over GE and The story was "Look at that guy! The hardest working GE employee, putting in 100 hours a week. What a leader!" (you can Google it).

While I believe that Jack didn't craft a master plan for this, somebody is certainly putting some effort into building a coherent story that helps Jack but ultimately also Twitter and Square and therefore its investors.

And once again: it get's us talking as well, so I would say: Mission Accomplished.

When I saw the headline my first reaction was: What? Unbelievable, this sounds too good to be true, but maybe the guys from RTM really found a way to do that.

When I clicked on the link I realized it has not much to do with Siri and is just about synching other iPhone apps.

Last time I checked, there was nothing sticking up my ass, but I do come to HN because it is different from Lifehacker, BusinessInsider or HuffPo. Nevertheless I do have to admit that it is a brilliant marketing move. They even started a heated discussion on HN :-)

So to extend my comment from a hacker perspective I felt tricked.

From the perspective of an online marketer I have to admit it is a brilliant move.

If I understand correctly, the have taught Siri nothing. What you see is task list synchronization between the iPhone and RTM.

You talk to Siri -> Siri creates a task -> Task is synced to RTM

Actually, Apple could stop selling all of their products and they could keep their operations running until 2018, probably already 2019 after the next quarterly results are in.

Source: http://www.asymco.com/2011/04/26/2895/

Thanks for the feedback, just fixed it. Not it should be readable.

It is often said that failing with your startup can also be a good thing because it shows at least that you have been willing to try and learned a lot. Frankly speaking, I always felt this mantra a little bit "too good to be true" and that if your venture does not work out, you are screwed.

But after following Chad (and also Paul) with their ventures (even though I don't know them personally) and I just feel like this is one example where it is true: Yes, it didn't work out, yes, a lot of money was invested and not earned back.But ultimately a lot was learned and Chad has shown his development skills and ability to ship something. The business model was not perfect, maybe the market was non-existant. But the way they have run this project and the way they are handling it now gives them more credibility than trying to hide a stagnant startup.

Could some share his opinion about other players in the Twitter ecosystem? I am thinking about Seesmic that has acquried ping.fm, is bonding heavily with Salesforce.com.

Are they still a relevant player in the field?

The problem is: It is very difficult to make acquisitions work in successful companies (i.e. Google integrating Jaiku is just one example that comes to mind) so I wonder what this will look like at a struggling company.

I am also very suspicious that buying up random companies and integrating them is easier than actually building something on your existing infrastructure.

This is just the Financial Times article series which is actually called "Lunch with the FT". The idea is to have an interview while having lunch with various people and it is included in their weekend edition.

As a regular FT reader I actually enjoy them, including the descriptions about lunch.

I can't help but think that that this statement of "building things because you like building things" was very scripted at Startup School. The reaction of the crowd was 100% predictable and it was a very smart move and completely re-framed the movie and all the other bad publicity around Facebook.

"Their argument/story/point of view is not valid because they don't understand that you can just build things because you like building things" - 100% crowdpleaser. He is not addressing the issues, he is completely reframing it.

If you look for more examples check out the movie "Thank you for smoking": The question is not whether smoking is good or bad for you or whether we knew about that. The argument is whether we should make decisions for the people of this country or if it is their freedom to make their own decisions.

Curious to hear how that happened :)

Monocle Weekly - High quality reporting about current global issues done in a refreshing way. Awesome.

http://www.monocle.com/The-Monocle-Weekly/

Is anyone aware of the long-term effects of taking melatonin before you go to bed every night? Just curious, maybe worth a try?

I downloaded the PDF, also the First Edition and I thought it is time to donate. It was my first PayPal donation and I spent it for something I am passionate about (startups).

Keep up the good work, and check out Monocle - maybe you can get some inspiration how you can build and extend this.

I don't think it is about the technology (improving voice control) because as you can see in the video the speech recognition is from Nuance.

My guess is that it is about the integration of all these webservices and APIs and the agent behind it. There is some research going on at Stanford about this, here is a presentation http://logic.stanford.edu/talks/Wizard/

I would buy it as well, especially if you include your experiences with A/B testing

I don't know about you but here is my experience from my first mobile app:

After 3,5 months of development I was really looking forward to launching, relaxing and observing. I still remember when I received the notification that my app is selling and it didn't take long until the first sale came in.

But then you just realized that once your app is finished and launched, you are just starting. Marketing, sales, letting other people know about your app/startup, bug fixing, customer support.

While marketing is not everything, you will realize that even if you have an awesome product you have to market it because there is simply too much out there that anyone will notice. Of course if your product is not great, your marketing efforts are wasted. But without marketing efforts, nobody will know about your app.

I have simply setup a closed forum using phpBB and it works pretty well in my case. I can see who logged in, who contributed and forums are something that people are pretty familiar with.

I also like the idea of building a real beta-test community for my products because I found out that there are some people who are really, really good at finding bugs and problems.

I feel that while bubbles "refresh" me more, when i drink 2 liters of bubble water i start to feel uncomfortable. can't tell you exactly why, just a personal feeling

Water...all I can say is water....

While I knew that drinking more than 1-2 glasses of water is good, I never thought that the impact of drinking 1-2 liters of water a day could have such an significant impact on my ability to concentrate and focus on programming.

My suggestion: drink at least 1-2 liters of water without bubbles (or gas) and try to work on a mentally challenging task. And if you are stuck, drink half a liter more.

There is also a new site for BlackBerry smartphones, let's see if this will indeed be a serious competitor to the many other BlackBerry forums out there.

You can check it out a http://know.bbhacker.com

It took me less than 1 hour to set it up and get it going. This could be really helpful for everyone who wants to create a custom support site.

This whole duct tape programmer thing seems like a huge - and obviously working - marking tactic in order to sell that book. I mean, how often have we seen this story on hackernews since Joel posted the original article?

I have to say: Well done, and everyone that blogs about it helps to spread the word about the book.

You should setup a Google Adwords account and test the different names. Just put the different names in there and use the same description. This will give you quickly a feeling what attracts clicks (and therefore also views) and what not.

i agree, there are a lot of people out there who have money and are willing to "invest"/donate in people with passion. create a blog, show your passiong and SHARE your passion and you will find a way to earn money.