jhuckestein

Is it necessary for friends to "be an advantage" to you besides just being your friends? When you spend a lot of time in places like HN, you're at risk of succumbing to some kind of extremist lifestyle where you have to rationalize even who your friends are or use dumbbells while you're brushing your teeth because it saves time. This is not necessary.

I have friends from way back that can't relate to what I'm doing and will probably never "help" me in any way. However, when I go back home, I greatly enjoy spending time with them and for me that enough.

Keep in mind, it's possible that Gabriel Weinberg is making enough money off of DuckDuckGo already and isn't looking to swing for the fences with this particular project.

Yes, absolutely, and not only in the US.

In Germany the legal drinking age is 16, but you need to be 18 to get into most clubs. When you're 16, you get an ID card in Germany. It's relatively easy to change the birth date on those using small, thin stickers that exactly match the font and background on the card.

I'm greatly enjoying this entire debate, but I'd just like to point out one thing: Elon said he doesn't know for sure how to do it yet or if it's even feasible (although he thinks it is). This means

a) It's possible that not all of the statements he ever made about the Hyperloop will be true for the final design (if any). I'd be especially cautious about the comment about right of way issues. This might as well just mean that he found an unused railroad track or something. And

b) Nobody knows if it can be done. Keep that in mind when debating the ideas. As far as I'm concerned, all ideas are constructive at this point.

I'm not a physicist and it's very likely that this solution is completely impossible, but let me ask anyway. If you just had a 1200 mile long train and you somehow got the mass going in a circle at 1200 mp/h, how much energy would you need to keep that momentum going? Could you cover that with solar panels covering the 1200 miles of track?

This all makes sense, if you think of the future as a linear progression. Technology however, progresses exponentially (I don't want explicitly invoke Kurzweil here because his theories have their own faults, but the exponential part he gets right). That means 500 years from now, we will probably have solved the problem of survival. We will probably be much more intelligent, not have to work, almost certainly beexploring space etc.

There's almost no way to try to predict what life will be like in 500 years (try the predictions people had 500 years ago!). When I think about this, the most interesting questions are philosophical. If ou didn't have to die and could simulate whatever pleasure you desire whenever you want to, what will the point of living be? What will the definition of a human, a life and consciousness be if you can simulate/augment it using computers?

The problem with cancer is that, much like with the HIV virus, the immune system is fooled into thinking the cancerous cells are part of the human body.

From what I hear researchers are optimistic that any such disease can soon (i.e. within the next 20 years) be cured by injecting blood-cell sized nanobots that can reliably target the foreign cells or viruses in your body and kill them (and, unlike chemotherapy, don't destroy the good parts, too). I think the chronic disease is just a crutch that'll soon be obsolete.

What is the point of this and who's behind it? (serious question)

Finally! I've had half-finished Instacart orders sitting on my phone, just because I was too lazy to pick all the items from the mobile interface and kept losing track of what I still needed (don't judge me!).

I just tried the site and ordered my weekly groceries within a few minutes. It works great and has a refreshingly small amount of cruft. Just a searchable, categorized list of items, a shopping cart and a checkout button. Good work!

What if they went from being a store-builder to being an online mall? I hope that's true! At first glance that sounds like a brilliant idea

In case anyone from launchrock is reading this: I'd be much more likely to use launchrock if I could embed the relevant functionality (signups, sharing, referrals) using javascript.

You're about to reimplement every tool that somebody would want to use to set up a landing page, beginning with an editor. What if I want to use a wordpress blog as my landing page. What if I wanted to embed the launchrock lead gen tools with some announcement that is posted on another site? I think that'd be useful and you wouldn't have to build so many things.

This might not be the solution, but I doubt 20 years from now people will be using email. Arguments like yours can be made about anything that's new.

That said, my personal take is that you should start with kids. In contrast to the "dumb" people in the office, my younger sister's friends don't know how to use email. It's what their parents use (gross!). FWIW they use Facebook and a random collection of mobile apps for all online communication.

The author quotes Jony Ive on simplicity. There's a great interview he did with the telegraph on simplicity: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9283706/Jonathan...

My favorit quote is "Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple."

They got a design patent for the iPad's design. Not for a rounded rectangle. Comp the first comment on arstechnica that jccc posted here.

A hidden message here is "Jerks exist". For many people startups are the first time they play a high stakes game and that's the first time they can really get burned by jerks. You might have encountered some in school etc, but usually you aren't put in a position where you rely on them.

This happened to me once and I found it hard to accept that someone would even be mean-spirited at all. It can take some time to get over this, but at the end of the day I think you shouldn't be overly cautious about this. If you worry too much about people being jerks, the cost of missed opportunities is likely to outweigh the benefit of working with less jerks. If somebody turns out to be a jerk, just be nice and try to remove yourself from the situation as gracefully as possible with as little damage to everyone as possible.

As a side note, as with most things, the jerk/not-jerk distinction isn't binary. Most jerks will have a nice side and friends that don't consider them jerks. Of course that doesn't help you if they're being a jerk to you, but keep it in mind.

IIRC you stick an anode and kathode into the urine, separated by a semi-permeable membrane. This takes power of course. I'm not entirely convinced yet. Saying something gives you "6 hours of electricity" means nothing. My watch battery gives me years of electricity for example.

Because a large portion of both the tech industry and HN audience resides in the US.

Disclaimer: I have only hobbyists knowledge of CAD and 3d printing

The author may be a mechanical engineer, but he certainly isn't an entrepreneur. The interesting question is not "Does it make sense for everyone to have a 3D printer now?" but "What kinds of things become possible once everyone has a 3D printer in their home?"

In Germany we have a multi-party system and it works a little better than in the US but it's not a silver bullet either. After each election, the elected representatives vote for our chancellor (similar to the American president). Because we have so many parties and the two largest parties usually get only 20% to 40% of the vote, they need to form alliances with the smaller parties in order to gain a governing majority.

Sometimes our conservative party will team up with the liberals, sometimes our social democratic party will have to team up with a right-leaning party and sometimes the two big parties will even form an alliance.

This works fairly well, especially because each state government has a different set of governing parties so there's not as much bitterness and more people get to work together. That said, within each office, parties still consider themselves to be either governing or the opposition and fall into opposition mode for a few years, just like they do in the US.

I remember lots of stories of people selling things on ebay at a young age back in the day. I'm pretty sure some must have made more than $1MM in revenue.

Recently there was a story about a 16 y/o who's converting a sports car to electric and runs a CAD business that seems to be doing pretty well.

Edit: I just dug up the car conversion thread I mentioned. This kid is making amazing progress: http://www.s2ki.com/s2000/topic/975497-wait-that-isnt-an-f20... (that's the last page of his forum updates)

My dad made me take one when I was a kid and I did really well, but even then I thought it was stupid. The first issue is addressed in this blog post. The questions just aren't good enough. This is nobody's fault really, because it is very difficult to come up with a set of hard questions that measure your intellect and don't require lots of domain specific knowledge. It's either within a certain domain. If everyone taking the test was a Mathematician for example, the questions could be more clearly defined.

The second issue is that intelligence is multi-dimensional yet people try to measure it on a one dimensional scale. What's worse, the dimensions of intellect are somewhat elusive as well, so you can't just say something like IQ is the sum of values on each axis. Personally, I think that people that are high achievers in any field (business, arts, athletics, leadership, politics, science) are intelligent in some way. But when you look at all those people, there's no common denominator, no discernable pattern for intelligence.

I've seen this shared quite a bit around the internet and I'm surprised how many people are surprised by this. The standard of living has, for the most part, continuously risen throughout the course of human history. And with the aid of technology, the rate of improvement is increasing as well. We have problems and it's great to acknowledge them, but personally I have a deep faith in the ability of humans to make things better for themselves. Most of the people I hear complaining about how humans are messing everything up would consider the circumstances under which even rich people lived just 100 years ago to be entirely beneath them.

Regarding the food, water and energy comments, I don't see how that is a problem. Our planet is covered by 70% water and the sun (directly or indirectly) provides enough energy for our food to grow and machines to run.

I wonder if humans are predisposed towards pessimism. Is there some advantage to selectively seeing only the things that aren't going well? From what I hear every generation thought that things were going badly and everything was better in the past. If that was really the case, when would all the improvement have happened?

I love how he doesn't consider himself an optimist. There's an important distinction between knowing that something is possible and going for it and hoping to accomplish something that may not be possible. I think many people confuse one for the other.

I think this is best translated as: Back in the day you couldn't get this kind of business off the ground without a huge fulfillment center, a huge server farm and a huge fleet of trucks. Today all you need is a notebook.

And for those who aren't aware, WebVan attempted to do roughly the same thing over 10 years ago in the dotcom boom and was a poster child of the famous crash.

Maybe this time around the business can be profitable at scale. What few people know/remember is that Kozmo, despite ultimately burning large amounts of money, was profitable in three cities right before they shut down.

I love Instacart, I use it almost every day! Glad to see some big name investors agree.

After heroku's most recent outage, I've been trying to find a way to replicate my heroku database to a non-heroku server and so far haven't found an easy way to do this. Has anybody gotten the log streaming to work with a postgres box that is hosted somewhere else (in my case on Rackspace)?

I love this. In fact, I love everything Mixpanel recently did. They introduced Flow which made Google Analytics obsolete for us. Then they introduced People tracking which replaced our admin dashboard with various tables and graphs about

They also did something that wasn't really announced: you can now drill down into every single event a user has ever triggered and look at all the properties. It always baffled me that this wasn't possible in the stream view or when segmenting down to individual events. I use mixpanel not only for reporting but also as a first aid resource when something breaks for a user. It's great to be able to see what they did when exactly and under what circumstances.

I think it's brilliant that Mixpanel lets you measure the impact of email campaigns without having to track opens and send them to mixpanel as events. If there was a way to send emails in response to certain events (such as purchased item X) and then to refer back to those events from within the email, I'd remove all lifecycle emails from my code and just use Mixpanel for that. Can we get that, Suhail? Please? :)

I'm surprised none of the top-comments has mentioned that this causes problems for startups legitimately trying to hire the best people they can find globally.

On of the many things USCIS doesn't understand about young (pre series-A) startups is that the compensation is often a mix of equity and a below market salary that is bumped up significantly upon raising money.

My lawyer tells me that H-1B denials have been piling up in the last few months. Perhaps it is the USCIS response to practices like the one described in the article.

What, aren't the teachers able to determine who's present anymore? How large are the classes in this school?

All the other potential use-cases such as payment for lunch, logging onto computer systems, identification etc sounds useful. Tracking attendance sounds very misguided though. I didn't go to class a lot and whenever I did show up I caused a ruckus (yea yea, I know... but back then I thought it was hilarious). I don't think anyone's situation would have improved if somebody made me tag in and out of classrooms or globally punished me...

I'm genuinely curious what you think the most likely attack vector currently is and what the next most low-hanging security fruit for coinbase are.

From my perspective it looks like coinbase is currently the most secure and redundant way to store your bitcoins. Of course everyone could store them on their own and design my own security system, but I doubt many people can do better than what the OP describes.

I agree with you but we're talking about two different things.

My point was about teenagers trying to figure out what to do with their life. I came to Silicon Valley from another country with no connections and definitely no means from back home. Obviously part of being an entrepreneur at a young age is being able to deliver enough value to an employer to always land back on your feet.

That's not what's holding somebody who has been told throughout all their life that they'll never accomplish anything back, though.