htsh

If 15-20% of top companies are using twitter for customer service, that is a tremendously good thing.

To frame it another way, if you told a startup that 15% of top companies would be using their startup for customer service within a few years of launching, most people would take that in a heartbeat.

Also, this early I don't think the actual number is as important as how fast its growing/shrinking. It'd be useful if they showed us last year's number and I'll be curious to see next's...

I find that I'm able to consume all of the media I need to on except for Microsoft Silverlight content like Netflix and the Feynman Lectures. The bigger pain for me is that there's no iTunes or Adobe design products. I'm not sure if there's anything that we can expect more from Ubuntu in this regard.

With Google's ChroneOS on the way and Apple's eventual move to the cloud, I hope that I can soon access my iTunes functionality from a browser. And adobe has committed to moving all of their products to the browser, so I'm not too worried about i, just wish the process would move along a bit faster.

I recall reading somewhere that some of the better font hinting algorithms are patented such that its tough for linux distros to make them as pretty. My pie-in-the-sky hope is that the knight in shining Google armor comes in and buys some of these patents for their ChromeOS and opens them up in the process.

But really, Linux is far from ugly and can look as nice as anything you can do on windows/mac. Your fonts will be the same and you are by no means limited to Gnome or any of its themes. Having bad defaults is one thing, being ugly is another.

Reddit's search is broken now but users their post some absolutely gorgeous desktops where they do all kinds of neat stuff with conky. I will try to post some if the search comes back within the edit timeframe.

Yeah, it definitely can't be broken by default like that. And I don't really see a need for the "applications, places, & system" menu if they can be reduced to one button to make room.

Makes me wonder if there may be an auto-hide dock or panel at the bottom? I'm curious to see how this shakes out.

I've always put those in the same bar, reducing the ubuntu menu to just an icon (instead of the separate applications, places, & system) in a setup similar to Windows, with open windows in between the application launcher button (start or whatever) and the notification area on the right side.

The thing that immediately sticks out to me is that the bottom gnome panel is no longer there. Up until now, default ubuntu (and gnome) setups have had one panel at the top and another at the bottom, and the first thing I'd do on a system is to get rid of one of the two.

This made more sense with 4x3 screens but now with many laptops at 16x9, it seems silly to waste that much screen real estate. The mac has a menu bar up top and a dock, but they also move application menu commands to the top, saving some space there.

They are on the left now, formerly on the right. I think you have it backwards?

No, I've decided that it doesn't make sense for me right now. When I stopped working at at a law firm, my cobra payments were $600/month. Since the law firm ceased to exist (heller ehrman), even the option to even pay $600/month for that premium care lasted only a few months. Independent of some sort of union, my cost will be around that same $600/month for the lowest level of HMO with large copays, and this is what I did for a few months before deciding it didn't make sense.

I am relatively young (33), relatively healthy (knock on wood), and I have a decent enough network in India such that I can drop in on a moment's notice. In India, healthcare is 10-30% of the cost for similar care (American run hospitals, often by universities like Harvard). There are other concerns, but purely on cost, its actually cheaper to fly from NY to India or another country and have many popular medical operations performed. An MRI costs $1500 here, in India its $100. A broken arm can cost $25,000* here with hospitalization, less than $1000 in India.

This leaves me wide-open for catastrophic events, for which I wish I could buy "urgent-only" insurance to cover this small probability. I'd like to insure my urgent care in the US but for anything else that requires a doctor and is not urgent, I'll take care of it elsewhere, likely planned around vacation.

Some people seem to have decent rates and plans for their small companies, but I'm finding quoted rates much higher for very new companies or individuals than they used to be.

(* edit: I've never broken my arm but I got the 25k # from a reddit conversation about ridiculous emergency room hourly costs for the uninsured. A quick google search for "broken arm cost" reveals that though 25k may be high, ppl have reported 20k and 5 figures seems to be the norm -- looks like it depends on the amount of emergency room time req'd.)

Can we at least agree that the $150 is very reasonable relative to what the worst offenders of this practice charge?

If you get 100 applications and can only take 5 in an OAF event, there are still 95 other candidates of which some might find $150 to be a nominal cost to avoid this sort of scrum. Its admirable that folks are protecting startups from obvious scams but its dangerous to get overprotective when the end result is that you remove a reasonable option from the table. For $150 you get a sit-down with smart people and will at the very least get practice pitching under pressure and good feedback.

And at $150, we're talking picking up the tab for a nice steak dinner, which is something you've advised numerous times.

If these dudes have invested in companies they met through this type of forum, all the better. And there's a certain amount of due diligence an entrepreneur should be expected to do -- no need for the rest of us to protect people from their own stupidity.

The correct order is Linux, OSX, FreeBSD:

"Rob, Ken, Dave, and I use Macs as our desktop machines, but we're a bit of an exception. Most Google engineers use Linux machines, and I know of quite a few ex-Bell Labs people who are happy to be using sam or acme on those machines."

I think the model is sound as well but the prices are a bit expensive and its all-or-nothing. I'd love some sort of micropayment option per interview. At his cheapest option, $25/month, that's either $300/year for interviews, which is over double the price of my highest paid subscription to anything right now (the Economist).

They're arguably worth it, but I can see folks with tight budgets not willing to pay that much for any content.

Also with so many good startup eyeballs I am curious if the sponsorship angle was considered, specifically from service providers. There seem to be a ton of lawyers & other products that would kill for eyeballs and ears in Andrew's market.

I'm a big fan as well but I still find this a bit startling. But I do appreciate as well the fact that you can watch interviews free for the first week. That is plenty -- he could have cranked that down to one day and personally I'd still find my way over there to watch/listen.

The thing that has disappointed me about Evernote forever is their complete and total lack of Linux support. This is a product that has Palm Pre and Windows Mobile clients but for whatever reason has decided that developing a Linux client isn't worthwhile.

A recent Hacker News poll of OS used day-to-day, Linux finished second in frequency behind Mac OS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687267 . People who do dev/database/IT work frequently need snippets of text like IP addresses and passwords and API keys and this sort of tool would come in handy for us. But a lot of us run Linux as well. Even ignoring the nerd market, Linux is increasingly run by regular people on their netbooks.

I guess the reason I don't get this is that tech savvy folks seem like a great market to go after with your software, as they tend to be very influential in their social networks' decisions as well.

Apples and Oranges, I know, but I use and love Dropbox in large part because it works with 2 of my 3 computers. On the other hand, Evernote runs poorly on my mac and can only be accessed via the web on the others. I actually use dropbox now as I would evernote, by keeping .txt files in my dropbox.

I remember this too -- saw it on reddit, had a title that had something to do with elephant's memory or something to that. Anyone know exactly what this was?

Edit: found it! melancholy elephants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholy_Elephants

I don't know if you need to change much Andrew -- there is nothing factually incorrect or misleading about your headlines. Perhaps the same "unfunded startup makes it big anyway" formula is overused but its a damn good formula and there's a reason it works so well. And its not like your headlines are like Mashable -- the quality of your content is consistently very high and very thoughtfully done.

Though your interviews are unlike other interviews in traditional media, they are totally helpful and inspiring for those of us slogging away who haven't quite crossed the line yet. I'm a big fan, especially of the fact that you don't let go of questions very easily and that you do nice things like provide transcripts or make your interview videos embeddable.

to go back and correct myself: a friend made clear to me that porn sites play video on the iphone already, via a quicktime player that loads up when you click on many videos.

In chrome, I have unchecked "always show my bookmarks toolbar" such that my home screen is my top-8 as well as my bookmarks toolbar. I use it all the time if I want to recycle a tab instead of opening a new one.

Is 10.1 going to use hardware on the mac? I've read conflicting reports on this.

The elephant in the room is pornography. If people are offered an internet experience with porn and one without, they might just choose the one with. I think this is going to be a bigger factor than is being written of right now for getting Android market share. Mobile Flash is a big deal.

repost. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005406

You still need to get the application on the iphone somehow, and there's no indication this can happen through Safari. If anything, this is a good argument for the controversial "walled garden" approach Apple has taken to date.

Also, its worth noting here that if what is described as possible here is a security hole, then every operating system ever made is insecure. You can run a keystroke logger on your mac or any other operating system that would access everything you type, including passwords. You could also install a screen capture utility that records and automatically uploads what you do. Just because you can run a program that gets your personal data doesn't mean that the platform is inherently insecure. Now I understand that it may be stupid to allow apps access to information, but there may be a good reason here. Its possible that applications might need to access contacts, bookmarks, etc. and without knowing more about this particular situation, I can see why these types of things might be possible.

As things currently stand, some level of common sense is required by the end user. With the walled garden approach Apple has taken and with the coming Cloud operating systems, security will be force-fed to the end-user. And though this isn't perfect, its pretty damn good from a security standpoint.

I don't know if its pie-in-the-sky as much as its an inevitable reality? Everything is moving to the web. And they are building a big server farm.

Now that things have shaken down a bit following the mp3.com legal debacle, it seems clear that Apple can let people access their own iTunes library via a browser without upsetting too many people.

in NJ, the ping is higher on google's servers than it is for OpenDNS (about 20ms vs 13ms) for me.

No apology necessary -- your rambling reminds me tangentially of Max Brod's decision to publish some of Kafka's writings after Kafka had explicitly asked him not to do so. The same question was at play -- whether one should interfere with the destruction of knowledge by its creator. Brod ended up publishing and for it we got Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle.

I can see arguments for both sides. Genius can be self-destructive and susceptible to manic episodes, and perhaps there's an argument where knowledge can forcibly be kept alive against its creator's will.

But it is his information, and as far as I can recall, its his right to get rid of it.

Though its not explicitly clear, from the explanation link posted below it seems as if he did this due to some sort of allegation(s) of copyright violation?

"Stepwise consisted of thousands of files. I didn't feel it was possible to locate and remove the files that were copyright by a single individual."

(explanation link: http://abandoninplace.squarespace.com/blog/2009/10/31/the-de... )

Agreed. Also, nothing he criticizes here has changed since he wrote this.

When I worked at a biglaw firm a few years back, we were told that the shelf-price of one of these wide searches was upwards of $800 for the firm and we were encouraged to narrow down the search as much as possible. The cost for recovering a single case: $6. They didn't actually pay these fees and had an umbrella agreement, but the cost of this umbrella agreement was determined by how widely the firm searched.

However you look at this, this is a big blow to Lexis/Westlaw and their monopoly position has taken quite a hit. I agree that they add a ton of value and will still be around, but its hard to overstate how big of a deal this is.

Its especially big for non-profit legal clinics and independent lawyers practicing on their own, which had difficulty doing any sort of legal research without coming to an agreement with one of these duopoly actors.

Its not just the boot process, but disk access in general will be slower, especially if your disk is fragmented. The file system is implemented as a single file on the windows partition.

http://linux.about.com/od/dist/gr/dstwubi.htm http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-536450.html

Something that struck me about these is that they are for twitter but still relatively long url's in themselves. longreply.com is 13 characters, twitlonger.com is 14, and the last mentioned in this discussion logilogi.org is 12. For me, that alone makes these not worth a second look.

I realize that if you're using this, you likely have room under 140 to post the URL, but I believe that in practice many will use this to continue posts -- I'd still post the beginning and then finish in one of these pastebins, rather than just post the URL. People are not going to just click on a rogue URL but they are more likely with a bit of an intro.

http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/ is alright .. but its not specifically for startups..

Yeah I don't know why they took something that wasn't broken (the reddit envelope system) and made it less useful. It'd also be nice to save pages to view later as Reddit allows one to do. I know the goal was to minimize interface options here, but these are useful interface features that make for less clicking around or using third-party products.

I installed and use the "read it later" extension for firefox solely for the purpose of tagging HN articles to read later.

Alternately I'd also love to see a page which lists all of the stories I've upvoted? That might do the trick for me.