Hacker News Reader

Your pricing model is extraordinarily expensive.

The US prices are reasonable, but the UK prices are just horrendous. £500 for the 6P brings it out of the range of "I'm due an upgrade anyway" into luxury territory.

I think I'll stick with my Nexus 5.

fenaeron Linux BBQ

I think you're missing the point a little.

fenaeron A Murky Road Ahead for Android, Despite Market Dominance

What if a significant number of the people who adopted Android as their first smartphone move on to something else as they become power users? In Apple’s last two earnings calls, Timothy D. Cook, the chief executive, reported “a higher rate of switchers than we’ve experienced in previous iPhone cycles.”

Are they trying to insinuate that power users move to iOS? I'd consider myself a power user, but for that very reason I've stuck with Android. Higher-end Android phones provide much more for me than iOS can with its closed-ecosystem.

Also, are these "switchers" coming from Android, or a mix of other sources?

fenaeron Show HN: Vivaldi programming language

There is another project called Vivaldi, a new web browser. It's been featured on HN a few times.

https://vivaldi.com/

fenaeron In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) [pdf]

I have attempted to portray similar ideas, in regards to a universal wage, to friends and family. Each time I'm met with "What stops some people from not working" and they refuse to move past that. They see people who work less, or don't work as a detriment to society.

What sort of changes can be made to change people's viewpoint on hard work as a virtue?

fenaeron Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus

Why not a space plane? Surely reaching orbital velocity on a platform that is already moving at a decent speed around the planet would ease it somewhat?

fenaeron Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

What sort of use case is this for? The demos talked about in the article seem rather specific. I don't see how this will appeal to mass consumers.

fenaeron My experiment with smart drugs (2008)

It's apparently also been shown to have positive effect on depression, when taken with anti-depressants[1]. That alone makes it very attractive to me. Who knows, maybe I'll try it some day if it gets proven safe but I can't bring my self too at the moment.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17729016