mixmax

As a comparison: In 2012 (the latest year I could find data for) Danish police fired a total of 49 shots over the year.

Just because many successful companies are built on ideas that at first seemed ridiculous doesn't mean that ideas that seem ridiculous will be smash hits. Actually, most ideas that seem ridiculous are ridiculous.

If, however, a new market, technology or cultural bend turns up, an idea that exploits it might seem ridiculous because it breaks with social norm or accepted technological limitations but actually be viable. When Tesla started building electric cars they were ridiculed because few people understood that both the technology and the social acceptance was now at a point that made it possible. Had they started ten years prior the idea would probably have been ridiculous.

The trick is to be able to see the difference between the snakeoil salesmen, mad hatters and crazy inventors and the true visionaries. What makes this really difficult is that noone, including the founders, knows whether they're one or the other. There's a lot of luck and timing involved.

I'd also wager that the reason that mindblowingly successful companies often start out as seemingly ridiculous ideas is that if they don't have any competition in a niche that they can exploit. Microsoft, for example, were the first to sell software. IBM laughed them out of the room because software was just something that came with the hardware. The idea that you could sell software seemed as crazy as selling sand in Sahara. But because of a technological and cultural shift it was a good idea, and because it seemed ridiculous to "real" companies they had the market to themselves for the first vital years. Had they not been so lucky (or smart) with their timing noone would know who Bill Gates is.

I think you might be able to conclude the following:

"If you want merely to be well-off start a company that isn't based on a ridiculous idea. If you want a small chance of changing the world start a company based on a ridiculous idea"

This is already happening. The coffee shops, kiosks and warehouses in Denmark where I'm from are packed with economical refugees from Southern Europe.

The sad part is that the ones that leave are probably the most driven ones, and thus the ones the southern countries need in the future.

Good luck getting through that.

For the first few years they ran without an income model and hoped something would come along. That something was adwords, and it made all the difference. But an argument can be made that it was luck, google didn't start out with this income model, and kind of stumbled into it. A lot of people were initially opposed to the idea, but they tried it anyway, not thinking it would be a runaway succcess.

I'm old enough to remember the web before google, and it was terrible. Back then we switched between hotbot, altavista, yahoo and a few others - and they all sucked. Some of them ranked searches alphabetically - try searching through 100.000 results that are ordered alphabetically.

I remember the first time I ever used google. From the very first day I never used anything else, and recommended it to all my friends. If you haven't experienced the web before google I think it's hard to imagine what it was like.

Pagerank made the difference.

Most of them haven't even mastered threaded comments yet.

Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Thousands, sometimes millions of horsepower in an engine smaller than a car, cryogenic liquids at -200 degrees celsius cooling a nozzle that is 3000 degrees celsius 5 millimeters away, heatshields designed to absorb obscene amounts of heat, the list just goes on and on.

Most people don't realize how hard this is. The physics, the engineering, the design.

Yet we have made great strides, especially over the last few years, and Virgin Galactic is a part of this. There is a new era of cheap spaceflight on the horizon, driven forward by fearless men and women that want to go to space no matter what the cost.

This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We wouldn't have flown the skies.

Today it appears we lost one of these fearless men, but he now rests in peace assured that others will take his place, that he was not alone in his longing to drive mankind forwards into the unknown, that his dreams live on to inspire others.

We have conquered the skies, and we will move on. Eventually we will conquer space and make it accessible to all mankind. A fearless man has given his life to allow us to some day leave the cradle that is mother Earth.

His ultimate sacrifice won't be in vain.

- CSC, that handles a large part of Danish infrastructure including social security numbers, police backend, etc. has dismal security. They don't even update their software as security patches become available. Warg had access to their mainframe for 9 months without them having a clue about it. The only reason they found out was because the Swedish police called them and told them.

- username/password pairs for CSC's server were readily available on one of their subsites(!)

- Warg turned off the logs on the CSC mainframe, and they didn't notice. It appears that logs were turned off for months. As a result CSC doesn't know whether data has been altered. We're talking about all police systems, social security systems, and more.

- The police have not had their own investigative team at CSC, and haven't looked at the technical evidence. This has been done by CSC, which is an obvious problem.

- The Danish police was contacted by Swedish police three times during 2012 because the evidence from a Swedish case turned up files from CSC, and the Danish police didn't respond as they apparently didn't find the information important. During the courtcase the Danish police's chief IT investigator was caught lying about this.

- The prosecutor and judge were clueless, bordering on the hilarious, about technical issues. For instance the prosecutor refused to acknowledge that other user accounts except Wargs existed on the computer (there were 5 accounts), tried to paint putty as a hacking tool that only criminals would use, tried to establish Jacob Applebaum and Warg as friends because Applebaum retweeted one of Wargs tweets (only friends do that!), etc. etc.

These are just the highlights...

You know when you look through your feed on facebook, and every single day you see that at least one of your friends has done something amazing, commendable or just interesting? That makes you feel that you aren't doing anything with your life, and that all your friends seem to be living more interesting and happier lives.

But stop and think for a moment. Approach it from the other side. If you have 365 friends, and you post one interesting post a year you are faring as well as the average of your friends. It just seems that everyone is doing more interesting things than you because you only notice the interesting things your friends post. You only see the highlights. Nobody posts a "today was boring - I did absolutely nothing" status.

HN is the same. Think a bit about it.

If 10.000 people see a comment thread then statistically someone will be knowledgeable about the subject, whether its the French Revolution or the finer nuances of L2 caching. The most knowledgeable ones will feel they have something to contribute and write a comment. The vast majority won't. On top of that the top comment is (supposedly) the most well-written, eloquent and knowledgeable, and can thus be argued to be the best 10.000 people can come up with.

If I were to start commenting on threads about L2 caches I would make an absolute fool of myself, and prove to everyone that I have no clue what I'm talking about. So I don't.

second, the sea is one of the few places where there's still some sort of non-monetary, honour-based system where people will help each other if needed. I've personally helped folks in trouble with risk to my own boat, and I'd expect someone else to do the same if I was in a tight spot. It probably has to do with the environment - the sea is very lonely. If you are having an emergency there will be no police, ambulance or firetruck coming. You have to fix it yourself. If you're lucky another ship is close by.

I live on a boat, and have done so for 8 years. I know quite a bit about what it takes, what the difficulties are, what to look for when buying a boat, what to do about heating in the winter, etc. etc.

I've thought about writing an e-book about it to give others an insight into what the life is like, how to do it, what it costs, all sorts of practicalities, etc. But I don't think I'll do it after having researched what I can expect to make on it.

It's simply not worth my time because it seems like people on the Internet generally aren't that willing to pay for good content.

This is the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjD9VvhXJrE

I think he succeeded - it's one of the best brand videos I've ever seen.

A nuclear bomb has two design criteria that are at odds with each other; On the one hand it must under no circumstances detonate when it isn't suppposed to. On the other hand it must be easy to detonate when it's supposed to.

How do you design a fail-safe system that lives up to those two criteria?

It's a lot harder than it sounds.

read that sentence again and think about the US.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskCulinary/

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/

http://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/

http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/

http://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/ (not so much the comments but more the content)

The article is a great example of how most newspapers and old publishing houses are barking up the wrong tree. It talks about using real names, court decisions and expecting people to read and comply with guidelines. That's simply not how the Internet works.

I see plenty of examples of excellent comment sections - often better than the article. HN is an example, some of the subreddits I'm subscribed to another. Interestingly I have never seen an old media outlet that has mastered comments.

The problem is that old media (or at least the people at the top) don't understand how to solve this problem because it involves a heavy dose of technology. I've never heard terms such as hell-banning, karma and vote-ring detection in a discussion by old media houses. Heck, many of them haven't even mastered threaded comments yet.

It's a problem that can be solved by a savvy combination of technology and psychology, but the old publishing houses seem to be clueless about both.

Source: I have a few patents, and have done this.

I'm sure there are young lawyers that would like to give some of these cases a try. Surely there must be someone with a conscience in that line of business. I could also imagine that companies and individuals might want to donate.

If you don't stand up to a bully, even if he is Goliath, he will keep on bullying.

Why not use this offensively against patent trolls? Find all sorts of ways to take them to court, the American legal seems to have plenty of opportunities in that regard. There are some problems with standing, but I'm sure that a concerted effort could be effective.

Sue them into the ground with guns blazing. Sue them for everything from not upholding workers rights, to misleading advertising and spelling mistakes. Make them taste their own medicine.

The effort could be crowdsourced.

If I remember correctly we had it up and running around Q1 2000 which seems to be before this (Not quite sure though, the article doesn't mention specific dates)