Hacker News Reader

It would be one thing if it was a book review. This is a product pitch page for $99/month SEO monitoring software.

A post I would like to see is how a minimal amount of search engine knowledge + Google analytics can help you more than a $1188/year on an SEO app.

hopon Are We In Inflationary Part of Internet Financing Bubble? 2011 = 1997?

One difference is its all private equity. These companies are not IPOing yet. There isn't a mad dash by the masses to buy tech stocks (or buy and flip their houses for that matter.) All these gains and losses are pretty well contained by venture funds and Angels - it certainly could be a bubble for them, but it will have nowhere near the wide ranging affects of the tech bubble from a decade ago because there are so few people involved and its orders of magnitude less in total valuations.

hopon IPhone 5 Chip Overloads Samsung Production Capacity

Interesting they are building the chip fab in Austin - maybe they will be moving more manufacturing to the US. Must be more convenient too since Apple is designing the silicon.

Edit: Silicon, not livestrong bracelet material.

hopon Microsoft Shipped 2 Million Units of Windows Phone 7 Software Last Quarter

$500M spent to buy Danger in 2008 plus assumption of debt and the $260M write down they later took on discontinuing the Kin in 2008. So probably around $.75B - that is still a ton of phone licenses they would need to sell to recoup.

And that isn't even taking into account the R%D spent on the Windows 7 phone, which they are said to spend $400M on marketing for.

If Apple was only selling OS licenses for the 14M iPhone4's it shipped at MS's price, they would only have made $112M-210M in revenue.

http://gorumors.com/business/microsoft-kin-revenue-loss/6154... http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-doll...

hopon Microsoft Shipped 2 Million Units of Windows Phone 7 Software Last Quarter

At $8-$15 per license they are charging, thats $16-$30M. They still have some ground to make up on the $1B or so dropped on the Kin. Does not seem like this can ever be a profitable business for them - especially compared to the $149-$499 they get per Office license.

hopon XBMC now works on Apple TV, iPad and iPhone

Can this play from a NAS or folders outside iTunes? And I'm pretty sure it will, but does it play a range of other filetypes - mkv, etc?

hopon Google to Launch Groupon Competitor

If the businesses were worried about cash flow, I think the 75% haircut would be the bigger issue. Also, they will likely be pre-paid for a large percentage of their Groupon patrons (I have many I haven't used from months ago) and not everyone ends up using their coupon.

Businesses flock to Groupon because its popular and puts them in the spotlight for a day to tens or hundreds of thousands of local people on their mailing list and twitter followers.

hopon Steve Jobs To Take ‘Medical Leave Of Absence’, Stays On As CEO

He is supposedly collaborating with Walter Issacson for an autobiography.

hopon Southwest Airlines pilot holds plane for murder victim’s family

Pilot only waited 12 minutes and could probably make some/all of that up in the air. But you are right, 2 hours waiting in line is bullshit.

hopon New stock market for long-term investors/reducing high-frequency trading

HFT has a negligible effect on long term investors anyways, its all on the the underlying company.

hopon Square Raises $27.5 Million

Magnetic cards will surely be around for a long time, but the second NFC comes out on the iPhone 5 (or 6), which Apple has hired a lot of NFC engineers for, I think it will be the thing to have for all merchants. And many do already - my BofA card has an embedded rfid which I have used at a lot of places with non swipe readers. They have been widely used in Japan for the last decade.

My point is the playing field will be much more open, because it will be only a software solution, not a hardware+software solution which has more barriers to market - There could essentially be a Visa merchant app that accepts payments from other phones.

hopon Square Raises $27.5 Million

All smartphones will have NFC chips in the next year or two which will allow payments from your phone. I see a much bigger future in small merchants using that than a card swipe via audio port, but maybe Square will have an NFC solution as well.

hopon Will Twitter Sell or IPO? CEO Dick Costolo Says "Neither"

They should have businesses accounts pay $100/year, honor system with a badge or something if you have paid (your company would look really bad if it didn't), and they could make a ton without having to do much.

hopon Steve Jobs Understands Team Building

Really wish Steve could expand beyond the soundbyte and go deeper into how they hire, manage, do product dev, etc. Very much looking forward to the biography he is supposedly working with Walter Isaacson on.

hopon iPod nano Watch Project Makes Kickstarter History

A good product design, those renderings are eye candy for tech blogs to repost, a great video, and people love rooting for the small guy. It's almost... why wouldn't it get a ton of press.

hopon The MacGyver Approach to Winter Biking (Zip Ties)

Some much better DIY bike chains: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/diy_bicycle_tire_ch...

These could probably be improved further by ditching the zip ties for something reusable like velcro.

hopon Dropbox for Teams

For a smaller company, divying it up per month can help with cash flow.

hopon Dropbox for Teams

If they charged $65/month, rather than $795, I bet they would have 10x more customers for this. How many people would buy cable if it was $1000/year, ditto for cell phones, Basecamp, Salesforce, etc. A little pricing psychology can make a massive difference.

hopon Twenty Billionaires Who Started With Nothing

And compound interest.

hopon Men wanted for hazardous journey: AdGrok (YC S10) is hiring.

Its a historical quote from Ernest Shackleton when he was recruiting the crew for infamous 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition with ads in London newspapers that read:

MEN WANTED: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success. Sir Ernest Shackleton.

I very highly recommend the book - http://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Incredible-Alfre...

hopon Between Gmail, Twitter And Now Facebook, There Is No Universal Inbox, Yet.

A tabbed browser handles this pretty well. I would certainly not want a co-mingled stream of friends updates mixed with personal and business emails in one super aggregator. Seems like they are huntinging for a solution to a non-problem.

I would love to see the end of text messages which cost $15/month ($180/year!) on AT&T - I try to email as much as possible, but its so convenient for everyone else.

hopon Shoply: Selling Online The Simpler Way

They need a better value prop than unlimited bandwidth or storage limits - those are near the bottom of the list of importance for a small-time eCommerce site.

hopon Student who hacked Bill O'Reilly gets 30 months

2.5 years in jail for a DDoS attack seems disproportionately steep. He made a few websites temporarily inoperable, sounds more on the level of a bad prank than a felony with jail time on par with armed robbery.

hopon A hell of a time

A friend in college was accused of something worse, luckily witnesses (her friends) and a video camera proved otherwise and she finally admitted the truth to the police two months later. No jail time for her lying, but this guys whole life was on the verge of destruction - jail time, registered sex offender for life, everyone in your social circle would think you are a monster, all friends in your hometown, your parents, their friends, any future employers that could Google, etc.

I'm certainly not saying that in this case, but this type of thing is completely your word versus theirs and an ounce of caution should be taken in the rush to judgement until all the facts come out.

hopon Anatomy of blekko's press launch

Who was their PR agency and what is the ballpark fee to coordinate a launch like this?

hopon The Day US Customs Found A Bullet In My Pocket

Thats not true, customs agents, TSA and Air Marshalls are all definitely trained to look for anything suspicious and/or fits a rough potential terrorist profile. Coming back from the Pakistan/Afghanistan, having a live round you carried on a plane, Osama Bin Laden candy... You are pretty much asking to have a sit down chat when going through customs.

hopon Merchants Can Now Run Their Own Deals On Groupon

Wonder what the cut Groupon makes on these, doubt it can be 50ish percent like the deal of the days are. This company almost has a license to print money, I wonder how long it can last.

hopon Offer HN: Design, Prototyping, and Manufacturing of Physical Products Guide

Industrial designer/mechanical engineer here too. For fairly complicated or complexly surfaced plastic injection plastic products, machined and fabricated metal, composite parts... I recommend designing it in SolidWorks and finding a freelancer off Craigslist to draw it up. They can render it photo-realistically, create manufacture drawings, and have CAD files you can send out for quoting.

And if you are just starting or have low-medium volumes, have it done locally. There are hundreds of injection molders, tool makers, machine shops, fabricators, etc... in every metropolitan area in America. I can't tell you haw many fuck ups, quality issues, extra expenses, importation problems, wrong/bad material used, corners cut, longer than promised lead times... I have had to manage. Rule of thumb - they will say yes to anything you ask for even if they can't. That said, if you have a good relationship, you can save a lot of money.

hopon Invisible Bike Helmet Inflates Before Impact

You can easily have 20g impact when you speed over road bump.

The accelerometers in your car are bolted to your 4,000lb frame, riding on dampened shocks and rubber tires - you will never experience acceleration anywhere close to what you would in a frame-on collision.

They don't have a shipping product yet.

hopon Invisible Bike Helmet Inflates Before Impact

The acceleration your car experiences in an accident is an order of magnitude higher than anything your car ever experiences in everyday use, making the control system very easy to engineer - something like anything over 20g's and it pops (the algorithms take vehicle speed into account too for a varying threshold and probably use jerk.)

In that video where the rider was hit from behind, there was very low relative change in velocity of the sensors in that helmet - no direct impact spike - and its on par with the same levels of acceleration you would experience in everyday bike riding.