hnsmurf

Just because you're paranoid/doesn't mean they're not after you.

That's not really fair. The people who run corporations have a fiduciary responsibility. (There are of course caveats, and we can argue all day over whether or not SOPA is unconstitutional or otherwise illegal, but you get the point.)

If you are a movie studio, SOPA is a great idea for your bottom line.

I don't think it's fair to call everyone who is in favor of SOPA either evil or stupid, even if SOPA itself is both. I can understand why YC wouldn't want them around, but I can't necessarily say they wouldn't be good investors.

Good Times RIP never did happen. Within a few months of that presentation people started wondering whether or not we were in a startup bubble.

As a merchant account provider PayPal has lots of competition.

PayPal will re-evaluate your rolling reserve periodically. Assuming steady volume and low charge backs they will lower it.

Rolling reserves are not uncommon for merchant accounts. PayPal didn't event them. 30% is on the high side but if PayPal feels the merchant is risky they should have the right to ask for it. There are other merchant accounts out there this guy can use.

I get a blank page when I click that link, so maybe a better publish button is in order.

For my Epic 4g I was able to buy 2 batteries and a charger for less than $8 on Amazon. The charger even has a USB port on the bottom so you can charge an external battery and your phone at the same time. I find it not too inconvenient to just keep a couple backup batteries around at all times.

I don't get this one. I would assume that you'd have to be extremely wealthy to be Steve Jobs's neighbor. As a result you'd think bumping into other extremely wealthy, successful people would be routine.

Tablet apps are generally not consumable, books are. I use maybe 5 apps on my iPad that weren't free and I keep using them. If I only purchased 5 books on my Kindle it would have become worthless to me after about 2 months.

Yeah I'm certainly not suggesting there's no demand for this now. I just think the demand will shrink over time. I don't think I'd want to try to build a long term business in a market that will certainly shrink.

I feel like selling printed photos is a lot like selling CDs. You know at some point nobody will ever use these anymore. You don't know when, exactly, and they'll probably outlast the CD, but I personally already get annoyed when someone gives me a non-digital version of a photo. If I like it enough I scan it and throw it out, if I don't I just trash it directly.

Every day a bunch of people who want printed photos die, and a bunch of people who will never want one are born. That's not a good spot to be in for the long term.

They don't make money because they compete on fares, which is because that's all most people care about. Those who care about luxury just fly first, but that's a small percent of the market. Even most people in first got there via free upgrades.

After deregulation, especially in the advent of low cost regional carriers, there have simply been too many airlines. Bankruptcies and consolidation are going to take care of that very soon. This happens all the time in new industries (and the airline industry is effectively new since deregulation reshaped it so much).

Yeah. There are two possible scenarios.

1) Everyone who has run an airline for 30 years is an idiot. It never occurred to them that people would pay more for better service, even though they all went to prestigious b-schools. The author of this blog post is a genius.

2) The author of this blog post has no idea about the myriad of government regulations and economic realities of the airline industry.

If I'm ever arrogant enough to assume #1, shoot me.

This guy has apparently never heard of first class. You pay $200 extra, just like he suggested, and you get every perk he suggested that isn't impossible due to government regulation. They'll give you more legroom, better food (and you don't have to pay for it), and even load your carryon for you.

That's not customer service, it's advertisement. There's a difference. When you do something to get a mention from a guy with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers/blog readers it's marketing. If they did that for me it'd be customer service.

It's 2011. Who picks up a phone? Phones are for texting, web surfing, and posting on HN.

It wasn't that long ago when you could have shown a similar chart with Android phones.

I'm not so sure. I think the broader economic forces may help tech companies rather than hurt.

No matter what happens, America (and the world) will still have a lot of very wealthy people and institutions. Those people need to put their money somewhere. The stock market is scary, bonds and banks don't pay anything. If you had $100 million tomorrow to invest what would you do with it? I'd start looking for startups.

10% unemployment seems bad to us, relative to our more historical 5%, but Europe has dealt with that for decades. People still buy iPhones and sign up for Netflix. Even if the market for new services is reduced by a few %, the quality of new services will more than make up for it.

Rich people will still want to make money and startups will still be an appealing way to do it.

If I were AirBnB I'd be talking to an insurance company right now about offering supplemental insurance to renters. AirBnB could make a nice chunk, the way Best Buy does when it gets you to purchase those stupid protection plans, and simultaneously offer users peace of mind that this will at least be taken care of if it happens to them,

Does homeowner's/renter's insurance cover the property damage from renting out your place?

Not to be grammar police, but either this guy is allergic to his "s" key or he thinks Apple is plural. The tile of the post, "But Apple make fewer acquisitions", "Apple over-invest in their supply chain", Apple pay a significant portion" makes me think that he thinks the plural for Apple is Apple.

The back button on Android is fundamentally broken. WebOS is the only operating system that really does this right, and it's because they've architected the entire OS around it. The way apps use scenes and stages makes the whole thing flow.

Proper back button behavior isn't something you can bolt on, but Android could still get much better than they are.

Remembering state intuitively makes sense because the real world remembers state. Apple uses a lot of real world metaphors, such as the inertial scrolling, for this reason.

The exit section is a little silly. When you take $50m you don't just get to not exit later. You're just saying you're going to do it via an IPO or an IPO-sized acquisition.

If you really don't want to exit, don't take money at all. The minute you take a VC's funds you're agreeing to exit.

It was something I did pay for, just not as much. They increased cost by increasing convenience.

I don't think they've cut costs at all. I pay them $9 a month now or whatever. I didn't spend $9 a month at Blockbuster before they existed, and I don't watch very many more movies now than I did then. Might even be less.

I do it because it's very convenient, not because it's a way to save money. I'll probably switch to DVD only from them now and actually start using whatever free streaming Amazon gives me via prime. The streaming selection sucks anyway, I probably watch more on Blu-Ray or stuff I torrent.

I don't disagree with you, but a lot of people feel the same about marriage. A lot of people (not me, btw) feel that this is a Christian country and it's antithetical to our founders' beliefs for gays to marry and yadda yadda.

The point I'm making is that everyone has a different idea of what those core values are.

That wouldn't end the deficit, that would just ensure the deficit was 0 the day before elections. Also there's a slippery slope. This same logic, if we allow it to be applied to the deficit, could be applied to other things. No congressmen could be reelected if gay marriage is legal, etc.

This is interesting but entirely useless. Though he's never used a computer, someone already has used this one and changed some things about it.

#1 IE defaults to a blank page in what appears to be private browsing mode, rather than Bing as it does on any new windows install. He's somehow running IE on a Mac which may be why.

#2. Someone checked out San Francisco Yelp on Chrome and as a result there's a link for it.

#3. "We shouldn’t assume that new users will inquisitively try and discover how new software works by clicking buttons and trying things out." That's probably misleading for 99.99999% of your audience. Yeah, the one adult on the planet who never used a computer before might be scared to death to play around with it, but you shouldn't design with that in mind (unless you're somehow aiming a product at them, in which case good luck with that sir). Put a 7 year old on a computer and he'll figure out how to find a restaurant in 10 minutes.

It's very tempting to read HN and TechCrunch and think that the complaints you see there are representative of the overall population. They're not. I'd bet at least 90% of Dropbox users don't know either exist. They didn't know there was a change of terms, they don't even know Dropbox has a blog.

I don't think anything has slid out of control for Dropbox. They're simply making an incremental improvement to their Terms for the 10% of users who do care, the same way they would any small feature.