sounddust

A. Facebook has made it clear during the big "everyone" push that hiding your friends on your profile page is not the same thing as hiding it from public access; it is still considered public information by Facebook and can be accessed as such.

B. Much of your personal data is still publicly available through Facebook Graph, regardless of how much you try to lock down your profile. It's only a matter of time before people start scraping this information and publishing it in a way that it's clearly accessible from Google, and Facebook won't be able to do anything about it.

It looks like the sweet spot in pricing is the 16G + 3G model, at least for the Euro market. I was recently in the US and almost purchased one, which would have been $686 after taxes, or €539 - only a €40 difference (and I wouldn't have had warranty coverage in Europe of course).

It's explained by Steve's response in the article.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this, but why would Amazon, Walmart and others not make this type of linking against their terms of service?

It goes against the spirit of affiliate programs, which is an exchange of actual promotion in exchange for commission. The stores aren't gaining anything by allowing it since those links were already published. And it hurts other affiliates, not only by directly taking their commissions (because the most recent affiliate click before purchase counts), but also because it increases the total amount that the stores are paying out.

If this catches on, it will force merchants to lower their commission rates, causing them to lose publishers. I think that most merchants will end up forbidding the practice, just as many have forbid bidding against them in PPC campaigns.

That's an interesting point of view: Should people be encouraged to choose between religion or reason, or should we encourage religion to adapt? I don't think the answer is clear; I'd guess that the most effective approach is a case-by-case basis (true, the Roman Catholic church is unlikely to bend anytime soon, but perhaps other religions are more willing to adapt). Others have the right to criticize religion just as much as they have the right to their beliefs, so I think that the focus should be on effectiveness rather than "rights" (which I think are well-preserved in both cases).

One thing I want to point out: mother-to-infant transmission of HIV is around 2-8% with proper preventative treatment and 15-30% without, so I disagree that the child will "probably" carry HIV, although it is certainly a risk.

I'm not, actually. I'm suggesting that silent bans were likely implemented to deter (not prevent) people from evading bans by making them unaware that they were banned in the first place.

That's because HN doesn't seem to keep a full history of comments. At some point there is no "next" link even though older comments exist.

If you look at the comment history of a banned user, you can often see the very point at which they were banned (because comments posted before the ban aren't killed). It's usually just a single low-quality comment that triggers a ban.

That's fine; so he'll get downvoted. He'll either stop contributing, or he'll realize why he's being downvoted and change his tone. I've seen it happen dozens of times on HN; many people are willing and capable of adapting to a community.

If you explicitly tell someone that they're banned then they will just clear their cookies and make a new account. That's for sure.

But I don't think that justifies the act of presenting a completely false world to them in which they are active members of the community, while in reality no one can see their contributions. It just seems dishonest and contrary to the values that made the community strong in the first place.

I think it's a bad policy and should be reconsidered, even if it means that some disruptive people will be harder to get rid of (we can just keep downvoting them like we always have).

I don't mean to disrespect him at all, regardless of whether he's being sartiric. But I sense that there might be a bit of satire/humor in some of his arguments and I'm wondering if we're missing it. Apologies if I'm wrong.

I don't know the author of this blog, but am I the only one here who thinks his post was satiric?

HN could do what Metafilter does and automatically rewrite all affiliate links to their own. If they don't want/need the money, they could donate it to charity.

When I said the "average" American, I meant the mathematical mean. That is to say, if the health-conscious people get slightly healthier and the rest stay the same, that pulls the average up slightly, which means less medical bills on average (again, mathematical mean) and greater average productivity.

I don't disagree with most of your points, but at the same time I don't see why there's any reason this law should not exist; it's easy to implement and does help some people. This law is not the health care solution; it's one tiny part of it.

I think that the article is arguing that since this law will not have a major impact on Americans' health, it should not be implemented. I'm arguing that it's a good law because it makes sense to provide basic information on food, and it's not an unreasonable hassle to do so.

Even if it only makes moderately health-conscious people more healthy, it will still be a net benefit to the overall health and productivity of Americans. And if it reduces healthcare costs of the average American by even a minuscule amount, it will easily compensate for the effort required to put up the calorie coutns (which is honestly not very hard nor expensive)

Here's some background:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYt9UmastGo&feature=relat...

Seems like the explanation is rather simple: the animator (Wolfgang Reitherman) enjoyed reusing animations from old Disney movies and was known for it.

Correct; I've been using this feature for at least 6 months.

Regardless of what you are referring to, you are still using this number as if it were unique visitors. You say "multiply your total audience size by .00124" (total audience size is number of unique visitors). Then you say "That comes to about 8 million people" (people are unique visitors). You're still doing your math based on the assumption that 5 billion unique people visit Wikipedia each year.

Your math as it stands is impossible, and you're still using it to support your argument. Even if you assumed every internet user in the world uses Wikipedia, that means that the average donation per user would be 0.003875, more than 3 times your estimate. With more reasonable math (and taking into account that Wikipedia does not fundraise 24/7 and is not aggressive) you can see that the average visitor is likely to donate an order of magnitude more than you're claiming.

There are a lot of things in this article I disagree with.

1) Wikipedia doesn't have 5 billion unique visitors (there are only 1.6 billion internet users in the world). And they only put up banners asking for money when they need it, not all the time. So both variables in coming up with the "$.00124/visitor" estimate are incorrect.

2) Tax deduction does not make something cost-free. For most people, a donation saves them nothing (since they use the standard deduction) but even for those who itemize, it only saves them the tax they would have paid on that income, not the income itself.

3) Tipping doesn't have to create price uncertainty. As someone who has tried the donation model, it's clear that if you set the price of a donation (such as placing a banner that says "Give $5 now"), that's the exact amount that 90% of people will donate. So in essence, you do get to influence what the perceived value of your site is worth.

4) The article claims that in order to orgs like NPR to succeed on the donation model, they have to have federal grants and corporate sponsorship, etc. But this argument ignores the low barrier to entry (and low cost) of online content; it's not a valid comparison.

5) The article also mentions that those orgs can succeed because they offer physical goods and imply scarcity, but there's no reason that a donation-accepting site could do those as well.

I don't know if you're interested in statistics from outside the US, but if so, you should offer the ability to enter height in meters (or cm) and weight in kg.

Also, the A8 in "Paris, A8, FR" makes no sense, and it reminds me of those auto-geolocation ads that nonsensically say "Meet women in Paris, A8 now!" You should probably just drop the region altogether for most countries.

Finally, I don't think you should show any aggregate data until you get at least 4-5 responses, as you're leaking individual info. For example, just from what I've posted in this comment, anyone can deduct my height and weight from the "stats" on the site, which is not what I expected from filling out a survey (in this case I don't really care, but I'm sure others would).

I'd say that Apple's grid style does place a higher importance on essential apps: The phone, mail, Safari and iPod icons are not only in a special highlighted region at the bottom, but never scroll away no matter what page of apps you're navigating to.

It's photoshopped in. There are 10 photoshopped easter eggs on the map, placed there by the developers, and this is one of them. Another example is a fake grafitti drawing of what is assumed to be the dev/photography team photoshopped onto the side of a building.

I have no reason to doubt Woz, but what's the point of yet another claim with no evidence to back it up?

Woz claims it's repeatable. So why not buy a cheap camcorder, get a friend to be the passenger/cameraman, go record an instance of it actually happening and put it on YouTube? It would be on every news channel in the country the next day and Toyota would be forced to respond directly.

In fact, if I had the kind of money Woz did and thought there was a real danger here, I'd just buy a camera that installed in the headliner and recorded everything that was happening while the car was on at all times, so that I could easily catch the bug when it occurred.

The OP is going to the University of Washington, The ratio is 52.4% women, 47.6% men (http://admit.washington.edu/Numbers).

Well, Microsoft, for example, had been working on (and demoing) multi-touch for years before the iPhone existed, including the pinch, expand, flipping photos/pages, and everything else. I love what Apple has done with it, but I think you're giving them too much credit in saying that others shouldn't be able to implement some of their refinements.

I think the evidence is pretty convincing that they were counterfeits created by people with no connection to Intel.

Putting the CPU/heatsink aside - If you wanted to ship a demo unit, wouldn't you just use the exact same box that you're already producing thousands of in the factory and slap a "demo" sticker on it? Even if you made a separate demo box, there's no reason that the boilerplate text wouldn't just be a copy/paste. It's obvious that someone not familiar with English and French manually copied the text (the French text is even worse than the English; the accents are missing pointing in the wrong direction).

More (full-res) pictures: http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035412736&postc...

Well, it's still more battery life than a small battery that never charges to 100%, right? I think regardless of the battery size, you can make the decision to preserve the long-term life of your battery or have the extra capacity in the short-term.

Plus, charging from 20 to 80% is much faster than charging from 20 to 100% (I estimate that about half of the time is spent just going from 80 to 100).

Newer Sony laptops come with "Battery Care" software that automatically keeps the battery between 50 and 80% at all times. According to Sony engineers, a battery that is always kept at or below 50% will essentially never degrade in capacity.