jonasvp

My former employer spun off a company based on exactly this problem: http://www.thinprint.com

They did very well back then and probably still do. If I had any stock, however, I'd probably sell around the time Cloud Print looked like it would get traction...

I used to have to exact same problem until I found Instapaper. Simple idea, brilliantly executed. Works even better in conjunction with Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) and an ebook reader.

I bought myself the Pocketbook 360 for christmas and it works like a charm: hooking it up to my computer has Calibre download all new articles from Instapaper, convert to ePub and transfer to the reader.

Even better, when I read on my Pocketbook I don't get distracted because it doesn't do Internet. Thank god.

Definitely a great book. If you're interested in human-scale development, you should definitely check out the writings of Leopold Kohr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr). E.F. Schumacher (of "Small is Beautiful" fame) was one of his students and Kohr writes even closer to the bone.

His books (my favorite: "The Overdeveloped Nations") are not only extremly insightful but actually fun to read.

Bit of a dense read but I think there's something here. The business idea starts with Chapter 5. I've been studying the case for demurrage (carrying costs for money, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_%28currency%29) for a while now and I think it could be the beginning of an idea for a startup.

If you're interested in non-realtime energy monitoring (and speak German), check out my skunkworks project from way back: www.stromverbrauch-online.de

You sign up, regularly put in your current meter readout and get an estimate of your monthly and yearly electricity bill. No hardware required. I've gotten a number of signups since and some people really get religious about putting in their data - some do it every other day!

Getting your energy consumption down can be an interesting sport, see the Tweet-A-Watt.

Well, it would probably be an interesting experience... not that I would care to find out. That's why I said the killer application would probably not look like money to us.

Take Youtube, for instance: people go to considerable lengths to create videos that others find interesting. Then they sit glued to the screen watching the view counter go up. There's a currency: people paying with their time (which everybody only has a fixed amount of) for someone's work creating videos.

Now have some ISP give extra bandwidth to people with Youtube videos over x thousand views. It doesn't cost them much "real" money since bandwidth is more or less a fixed cost but you have turned "virtual" money into a currency.

Granted, the example is a bit contrived but you can see where I'm going with this.

I've been thinking very hard about this topic lately and actually went ahead with writing some code. Then I found http://www.opencoin.org who already did some of the work.

I think there's a lot than can be done in this field - not with micropayments, which everybody seems to think about first when they see this. What I find a lot more interesting is the possibility of many competing Internet currencies not tied to any national one.

How about turning HN karma into a currency? Probably no mass-market appeal... what's lacking is a killer application for digital money and when it comes, it'll probably be in a form that doesn't seem like money to us now.

Great idea and these guys have taken it pretty far already: http://www.cargocap.com/

In a couple of decades, our kids will be asking us: "... and you had heavy trucks deliver goods within the city? Nasty."

Funny, everybody on Linux seems to have exactly one Java app... mine's jBidwatcher.

Funny, a while ago I rolled out my own version of this, even dirtier than the Wattvision solution. My users would go to the website, put in the digits displayed on their meter, and get a nice chart showing their consumption.

Accuracy obviously depends on how often you enter your meter count but it was fine for shared flats that needed to split their electricity bill and sublets.

We're using it for our shared flat and I still think it would be a good holdover until dynamic meters are rolled out everywhere. I even thought up a fitting domain name and put the app online. Before I even got any users, though, some marketing company got wind of it and offered me a load of money for the domain name - so I sold it.

I'll put it back online once I think of a new name but it's low priority. I'm not sure how many people would actually bother with putting in their data.

Looks a lot like what Rob over at Cockeyed did with his Light Sharpener: http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml

The Google version looks more professional, though...

The assumption most people seem to base their conclusions on is that making drugs illegal reduces consumption. All empirical evidence so far - even from less biased sources than the wildly free-market Cato institute - shows that this is not the case. In countries where more drugs are legal, consumption actually goes down.

Drug use is a facet of human existence that needs to be managed, not a virus to be exterminated...

My recommendation for basic backup needs: rsnapshot. I backup our public server to our internal network as well as my desktop machine to an encrypted portable drive using it: http://www.rsnapshot.org/

It's probably similar to rdiff-backup, which I haven't used. If you're fine with daily or hourly backups and don't have too much data (<100 GB), rsnapshot together with regular SQL dumps works fine.

Clay Shirky wrote about micropayments and free content a while back: http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

Basically, he's saying that micropayments will not work because they introduce a transaction cost into the act of reading: you not only have to decide if you want to read (or skim) the article in question, you have to decide if it's worth x cents as well.

And that transaction cost kills the transaction before it happens, never mind the x cents that would have been transferred.

Funny, I just put a somewhat similar site online. It depends on people putting in their current meter count regularly by hand and obviously can't be as precise. Still, for most people who don't have a smart meter (in Germany that's everyone), it can work well, and provide at least a monthly usage chart.

I developed it to scratch my own itch: we share a flat and had to pay a lot for electricity at the end of one year because the the advance payments we pay monthly didn't cover our usage. Since then I noted the meter count monthly so we could split the extra charges every month.

It's only in German for now, ugly, and probably still buggy. Feedback is greatly appreciated, though: http://www.stromio.de

I liked the bit in the article about MetaFilter shutting off the new-user page whenever they got too much press.

Maybe turning off new signups whenever some popular blog mentions Hacker News might raise the bar somewhat. That would get only those in who find HN interesting enough to bookmark it until the flood drops off.

The big difference in Amsterdam is how cars are not really welcome in the city center - and the drivers feel it. Access to many roads is restricted for private cars, almost every street is one-way, and practically everyone regularly rides a bike or walks.

This makes drivers respect the non-armored road users (pedestrians and cyclists) and streets are actually pleasant places to spend time in. Almost everywhere else city planners have basically said: "let's just turn this city into a giant racetrack slash parking lot".

Things are only slowly starting to change but at least some people are actually thinking about giving cities back to the people that live there: http://www.carfree.com

I believe laconi.ca (http://laconi.ca/trac/) provides exactly this kind of functionality. As always, though, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Look at Jabber and how little it has taken away from the proprietary IM protocols. As long as everybody and their mother is on Skype/Twitter/etc. there's not a big incentive to switch.

Obviously, not everything is a Ponzi scheme but the point the article is making is totally valid. Any child can understand that you cannot grow indefinitely in a confined space, even if that space is the Earth and even if the value measured is quality. The measure of quality is appreciation and we only have a limited amount of time on our hands.

I wonder why so few people think about the following line of reasoning:

1. Our current economy is based on money as a medium of exchange to function (separation of labor -> good)

2. Therefore, money is a universal medium of exchange and acquires a value separate from the exchange value: liquidity, the possibility to exchange it for anything else (see Keynes et.al) -> unintended but ok

3. As a consequence, our current money relies on a positive rate of interest to circulate. Whenever the interest rate gets too close to zero, money holders will not give up their privilege of liquidity and not lend out their money (bad!)

4. As a result, the economy collapses - simply because the medium of exchange stops circulating. In the end, the government has to print new money to replace the money not being spent/lent, leading to inflation. Alternatively, the state has to make new debts or fund dying industries only to keep interest rates positive... (very bad!)

This reasoning does not depend on any technology or production-based argument because every human undertaking these days is based on beating the rate of interest. Even if you only invest your own money, you have to factor in the interest you might have gotten at the bank.

There's a really simple fix to it: motivate money holders to part with their money even without interest. You would get an economy that can grow when it needs to but can contract as well without collapsing.

Even though it seems god-given, money itself is actually pretty hackable. If you're interested, one interesting proposal is here: http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/suhr/nngengl.html

Okay, so the _re_distribution of wealth by a certain political action implies less money spent somewhere. Yes, that's what redistribution of wealth means.

But again, how would spending less effort on digging up non-renewable resources negatively impact healthcare? True, the effort must come from somewhere and it comes from not doing certain things we're doing that we now know are impacting us negatively.

I feel the same but then I'm an educated, middle-class, straight, white male. It's always easy to disregard discrimination when one is part of the group currently having most of the money/power/prestige.

Well and concisely put. This is the actually the one fact we should try to get into these people's heads. The only change is in the _distribution_ of wealth.

What we should be worried about is not wealth but welfare. And I'm not sure polluting the environment and using up non-renewable resources improves anybody's welfare. Not even that of the people profiting from it.

Check out Roundup (http://roundup.sourceforge.net/). Written in Python, easy to extend, has a web interface and email gateway. The UI is pretty ugly, sadly, so if you want something easier on the eyes, you need to hack up some custom CSS.

That's cool, we're a startup located right on Görlitzer Str., across from the Edelweiß. I'll be sure to drop by on Wednesday and maybe we can do one of the next meetups in our office...