guybrushT

http://www.scatter.fm/ (and a mobile app) - a location based deal site and mobile app for hunting deals from nearby shops. Zero users (never launched).Available to anyone who wants to run it.

2.52 minutes of Alan Watts - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UxrdQRODuc

137 million fake points, 500 years, 1 addictive game. http://www.stefanom.org/spc/?view=3032407

A very simple and elegant idea. Well done.

Completely tangential - but does anyone know how to setup a call center this quickly? Is there a service that one can use?

I was thinking that this is about people buying stuff for others and bringing it for them. So this isn't necessarily an unknown item being asked to carry. But I see your overall point.

I am intrigued by this part: "It is possible to run this legally, but then the process won't be as cheap as I think you're expecting it to be." Can you please expand?

Do you mean that one can 'enforce' duty payment, and then it can work?

For just about every reason that chaz (above comment) has given. The idea that strangers will bring stuff for you sounds a bit too fantastic. I am still working things out. Would love to hear your views.

Good point. What if it is restricted to items bought in duty-free shops? Eg a nice scotch bought in a duty-free for a friend. Is that still encouraging to break the law? [serious question]

replied here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7166333

Thanks for good points.

I was thinking that to make this work:

1. Exchange of favor - e.g. bring stuff and I will show you th city, concert tickets etc. 2. The buyer's card is authorized (not charged) and traveller gets paid after the stuff is delivered. 3. Pickup/dropoff points in a city (ofcourse, doesn't scale) Do any of these mitigate concerns?

Great points! You perfectly summed up all top-of-mind issues with this idea. All of this was running through my head as I was cobbling together this shoddy landing page.

(Btw, I just posted the question on Ask HN, is it ok if I reply there? - I thought the idea was so strikingly stupid that no one would care)

Anyway, I have some thoughts about the problems you laid out. I will post a reply on the ask HN thread - and would love to get your thoughts!

"It looks like what you are thinking of is for the person doing the traveling to basically buy the stuff and bring it back or vice verse take it with them?"

Yes Exactly.

Thanks for the encouraging words. ok, maybe I should post a Ask HN to get feedback on this, so that I don't interrupt this discussion. However I do want to ask you if you believe that someone could be incentivized to bring a TV from America to UK? This is exactly what the idea is - but I always thought 'small easy to carry items' (not TVs). But interesting comment. Thank you.

Very good suggestions and thank you for the encouragement.

About your point 'set up a service for these people to sell their goods to Americans.' - Never thought about this. So you are saying that there be dedicated businesses selling to americans, and 'shipped by' people who are travelling? Have I understood your view correctly?

In keeping with this spirit - Is this idea good? https://yenbe-beta.appspot.com/

I just made this page 2 hours ago, and took a break to see whats up on HN. As I was making this, I was thinking "This is a stupid idea" :)

Very interesting to see the dataset being made available. Whenever I want to do this kind of analysis, I always stumble at 'how to get the data?'. In their paper, it is mentioned that "We created a dedicated computer program to carry out the navigation and data collection tasks required to gather the metadata for all available videos...". I would love to see this program. More broadly, can anyone help me with best resources (pref python) where one can learn to crawl/scrape this type of information?

Looking at things as "business" and "technical" is part of the problem. There are "products/services" and "customers". A group of people wanting to serve a market must be able to contribute to these two things - via programming, selling, insight, connections or whatever. This is important. It doesnt matter how one does it, but contributions ought to be meaningful. These labels (business, guy or technical guy) may prevent a good open discussion and box people, sometimes too early and sometimes needlessly.

Reports of Google's decline are greatly exaggerated :) G+ is annoying, but these days no large company can make all their users happy, with all their products/features/changes, all the time. The so-called erosion of 'Don't be evil' has just become more apparent now, but as long as I have known google, they always made money from ads - and ads are fundamentally evil (IMHO). Search, maps, email etc are quite nice and I use those everyday. Fast, reliable, solid products - vastly improved since I first used them (many years ago). Where is the decline?

Correct. I had this issue a few weeks ago, and managed to undo this in settings.

Nice post.

Summary: Find your voice (Be authentic). High quality visuals. Give reasons for others to care about (or subscribe to) your blog. Get noticed by influencers.

I hope this is accurate.

Also, one more implicit take-away: make sure readers to come back to read next week by ending a post with a cliffhanger (e.g. I will tell you how this blog got 1000+ subscribers in a day if you come back)

You are right.

An unrelated query: does anyone know of companies (like Streak.com) using app engine datastore in production? We are newbie programmers, and developing our app on app engine (because it was easy to learn) - but it feels a bit lonely sometimes :)

Parent-child relationships, though incredibly tempting and useful, have a very serious limitation in app engine datastore.

Any transaction on an entity in a group will cause any other writes to the same 'entity group' to fail. Therefore, if you have a large entity group with lots of writes, this causes lots of contention, and your app then has to handle the expected write failures - which is a pain!

It is stomach-churning, terrifying, and maddening to read this ...

Just adding a link to the companion site to make it easy to click: scatteralpha.appspot.com [Please think of the web front-end as an very early draft version!]

I couldn't appreciate the point this is trying to make. Especially I can't understand what the article tries to say at the very end--"But it also shows how the online world is getting closer to solving the conundrum he posed. Far from being an industry where cause and effect remain murky, online advertising may yet become one area where the dismal science can predict how to get costs down and profits up." Can someone please clarify what these lines mean?

What I took away from this is that paid links (what the author calls internet advertising or search-engine advertising) aren't necessarily more effective at bringing sales leads as “organic” search links. Maybe I am missing something, but is this "finding" a surprise?

Well done to you guys. This is a very good idea. I can see many potential extensions and applications. I was asking myself if this would have been as cool had this been just an LCD screen? Does this look cool because there is something exciting about manipulating a physical object with a simple digital signal? Is it the simplicity of this counter? I can't put my finger on it, but it certainly looks very cool to me :-) I would love to understand the philosophy that drove you to create this - if you can share. Because, you are on to something! :) I have shared this link with a friend and a cousin, both of them run their own store. Maybe you will hear from them soon. If you are interested in bringing this to new markets (e.g. India/SE Asia), drop me a note - maybe I can help.

I have to say it again - very well done :)

Cool piece of work. Guess it would be good if I can record my handwritten signature once and have it included on my mails or letters everytime I compose one? Something like Gmail in the settings panel?

I just wasn't ready for the awesomeness. In 2002, as a graduate student I worked on developing a similar app for Phantom (a desktop haptic device that our research group had bought). It took me a full semester to create a similar haptic simulation (actually, our visuals weren't half as good as the one here). Our goal was to simulate the texture and "feel" of skin, with the aim of one day allowing doctors to operate patients remotely. When I first came across haptic devices, I (wrongly) said to myself - 'my god! everything will work this way one day'. The promise of combining physics-driven visuals and haptic feedback still remains unfulfilled to this day (except some games, but still to a very limited extend, in my knowledge). Thanks for putting this out there. It was fun to revisit my graduate school memories!

Definitely worth a read. Its like reading a wonderful short story that just works on so many levels. It has many layers - interesting ideas on technology, free-speech, values & idealism, information flow, bitcoin - plus the personalities involved themselves (JA, ES). Fascinating indeed.

In particular, I am intrigued by JA's thoughts on a peer-to-peer mobile network. For those who understand this well, can you explain how feasible it is to do this today? What are the challenges involved? Why isn't a startup doing this? It would be nice to one day, bypass the telecom company towers to transmit data directly to another person/phone.

Q. What is this video about?

A. Its about: Magic. - a cloth unravelling out of a hockey puck - water turning to jello - things and people suspended in air - water flowing against gravity - happening somewhere in space

Magical. An neat little experiment proposed by 2 highschoolers!