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hop

2,682 karma · joined April 21, 2009

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hop··on Jonathan Ive designs Leica camera for Red charity
Those perforations are lasered out, like they do the MBP speaker grill/holes.
hop··on The iPhone 5S and 5C
It's the caveat in every other major review, like Anandtech's, and anecdotedly, it the main reason people I know are switching to android.
hop··on The iPhone 5S and 5C
Yeah, he notably left out the elephant in the room that is the 4in screen.
hop··on Should I buy LED or CFL light bulbs?
A heat pump can produce 2-5 times more heat than an electrical resistance heater (like an incandescent bulb). It pulls heat from the colder outdoor air with a pump, it sounds illogical until you study heat cycles... http://www.dbh.govt.nz/UserFiles/Image/Publications/building...
hop··on Tesla Model S Outperforms Aston Martin
Elon had a Mclaren F1 as a daily driver after he sold PayPal, so I wouldn't be surprised if they came out with a supercar down the road as their tech evolves and batteries get denser. Ultra low center of gravity, flatter torque curve with no transmission, order of magnitude less parts than a Ferrari engine...

They could murder it on the very top and low end of the market.

hop··on How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
What a baffling industry. Wish great things to any startup that tries to get through the bureaucratic/legal/insurance hurdles to take a crack at some of this.
hop··on Hyperloop Alpha [pdf]
I wonder what they have in mind for how stations will offload/onload capsules onto the loop. That will be heck of an engineering problem to solve - ultra high safety, pressurized environment, fast turnaround times...

My initial thought was they would have switches on the track like a normal train and capsules would veer off. But I bet they would come to a stop on there own and then get lifted vertically off the train and into a decompression area where they'd cue up.

hop··on iOS 7
After using it for a day --

Great: Picture organization. Airdrop, this will be big. No more search field/page when you slide left on the home screen! Slide up settings is helpful (wish they had a link to settings.app there too. Screenshots of background apps are helpful. App store is back to vertical scrolling for the top charts. Safari top and bottom nav shrink when you are scrolling a site.

Not great: New keyboard is harder to see and type on, space bar got smaller. Not a fan of the icons and thin fonts. Wish messages were more compact. Calendar doesn't indicate events at the month view (or i haven't figured out how.) iRadio is a clone of pandora that's less simple.

Also, iOS7 now pops up a "This cable is not certified" when I plug in third party lightning cables. Looks like they are stepping up their proprietary authentication. Not a fan of that.

hop··on Kickstarter project raised $196K and stopped responding
I know they gave out a lot of refunds over the last year, looks like they stopped or ran out of money recently.
hop··on Kickstarter project raised $196K and stopped responding
Im a backer and they offered refunds twice to anyone that wanted it so I don't know why anyone is complaining.

This project was before Kickstarter disallowed renderings (for good reason) and they would probably never have gotten to this shitty position if they had to actually prototype it and find out how insanely expensive it would be to manufacture.

hop··on Introducing the Square Stand
How does it get power? Cord out through the bottom?
hop··on Creating the World’s Best Service and Warranty Program
Sounds like a good deal - selling direct rather than through the traditional dealership bs, they can make people a lot happier.

Wish I could iterate the model S's industrial design... plastic nose bulb would be first on the chopping block.

hop··on Status Board
Would be a great native app for AppleTV. Hope Apple does that soon.
hop··on Canon develops 35 mm full-frame CMOS sensor for video capture
I bet it can do some insane slowmo frame rates too in normal lighting conditions. For all they put into this sensor, surprised Canon produced such a crapily edited video.
hop··on CBS Bans SodaStream Ad
Ad firm makes ad they already know CBS wouldn't allow. Ad gets rejected. The outrage! The controversy! Ad then gets 10x more exposure and they can resell the spot.

SodaStream, like Godaddy, Peta, many others before. Pretty smart.

hop··on 23andMe raises $50M, cuts price to $99, sets goal of 1M genotyped customers
Yep, that's what happened. Also, procedures were different back then, so we could have many more siblings, hope we didn't hook up in college.
hop··on 23andMe raises $50M, cuts price to $99, sets goal of 1M genotyped customers
Ha, no. And my new sister's husband is also happens to be a phd geneticist.
hop··on 23andMe raises $50M, cuts price to $99, sets goal of 1M genotyped customers
In other news, 23andMe introduced relative finder not long ago. I hadn't logged on in over 2 years after I did it with a groupon promo, but I had a public profile with my name and city. A half-sister i didn't know i had found me with matching DNA, owns a business 5 blocks away and walked over to meet me (what's the probability of that!?). Found my dad was not my biological dad and i was from the same sperm donor as my new sister. That was a weird week...
hop··on Why our online startup releases a print product, and how we do it.
(On iPad, it starts to load, then goes to onswipe.com... Black with forever spinning circle)
hop··on The Tesla Model S is one of Time's Best Inventions of the Year
Beating every other invention of 2012: indoor fog machine cloud.
hop··on The island where people forget to die
I think the way to solve this is by better education and reinforcement. Wouldn't hurt to place a prominent link in the top nav like"better commenting" that went to a page with explanations and examples of good and bad. Perhaps have it up there one week per month.
hop··on The front of the iPhone 5 is not flush with the frame
I can't help but envision Jeff Daniels talk in a dog suit from Dumb and Dumber when I hear him voice the ads.
hop··on Uber allowed to continue operating in Boston
This is an excellent advertising strategy and cities play right into their hand - go launch in a new place, knowingly bend some old taxi laws and get served, make huge deal about it stopping innovation and be featured on every local news channel and newspaper. City changes old laws, doesn't want to look bad. That creates another multimillion dollar round of free advertising so everyone in town knows about them. Bravo.
hop··on The iPad's 'Ultimate Typing Accessory' Is A Dud
The ElevationDock can undock without the dock moving as advertised. It looks like he is bending the phone forward and then pulling it out - that pinches the connector and will certainly cause it to hang. Video just shot showing that - https://vimeo.com/45589974
hop··on BlackOps Plastics (Opaque to the eye, transparent for cameras)
The whole AppleTV body is molded in a similar material.
hop··on Redesign: Users: Thrilled. Conversion Rates: Up. Sales: Unchanged.
Ahh you are right - I was A/B sent to old site. Reloaded to the newer one - cleaner, nicer aesthetic, still could use some Armor All.
hop··on Redesign: Users: Thrilled. Conversion Rates: Up. Sales: Unchanged.
Honestly I think the site is really ugly - the color scheme, all the same size text, '96 aesthetic... it looks like a ghetto SEO trap website. Please don't take offense, thats my snap judgement of seeing it. What if you tried letting a designer do something on par with your payment processor Stripe.com - picture those cards on the right as bingo cards, good simple headline, call to action.
hop··on The Story of 2 $1 Million Projects in 24 Hours
I am going to write a long post about it soon b/c so many people have asked.

I would say polishing your video and articulating your widget well are the most important things you can do - you don't want to waste anyone's time. I did a million revisions to our video over the course of a year to get to where I thought it was launch worthy. Double Fine's is exceptional. I also found I am horrible in front of a camera unless I am the only one in the room.

We did no PR or anything before hand. A friend sent a link to Gruber a half hour after launch, he wrote one nice sentence about it, then it exploded around the web.

It also helped that Apple makes crappy docks and few people challenge Apple on anything. And that's a testament to Apple because they do usually kill at design. Marco Arment says it concisely here - http://www.marco.org/2012/02/09/elevation-dock

hop··on The Story of 2 $1 Million Projects in 24 Hours
Thx. Probably will use Shipwire or a local fullfillment company.
hop··on The Story of 2 $1 Million Projects in 24 Hours
Hi HN, Casey from the Elevation Dock project.

People use the term disruption pretty loosely, I think crowd-funding is really doing it. Goodbye middlemen, sayonara to the massive traditional barriers to entry. Hello bootstrapped projects like this that would otherwise never see the light of day.

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