Heinleinian

In general, tech companies probably shouldn't do any preview videos at all -- they should just show a product demo when it's ready.

I do think a video like the one described in the link could be done in a way that it was clearly so far in the future that everyone would know it was an imagination thing, like the concept cars at auto shows, that could turn into a real product in 5-10 years. And it would be worthwhile to get people thinking about augmented reality. But those kind of far-off concept promotions are really hard to do well.

Last I checked you still have to get users/customers to be a winner in business. YC has clout with investors, so their companies are more likely to get investment, but that's not the right measure of who is a winner.

The millions of consumers you need as customers (or, if B-to-B, say fortune 500 companies) don't give a damn about the YC stamp of approval.

Increased investment only turns into increased "wins" if you use that money to get more users/customers, i.e. with a better sales team, more marketing dollars. Is this happening? I don't know, it sure seems like a lot of software companies are eschewing traditional marketing and sales and counting on viral growth to be a success, but you can't just hire more engineers and increase a product's viral-ness. I don't think anyone truly understands what makes a software product catch on.

Apparently Vincent hasn't figured out how to pre-filter people before he gives up 30 minutes to meet with them...

Perhaps he should look for a new associate or two.

Exactly. It really is a shame that the true implications of augmented reality got lost in all the Google glass mockery. Forget the text message pop-ups and map overlays, that's all basically meaningless. Just a slightly easier to look at version of what's already on your phone.

But this kind of continuous melding of real life with video game graphics? A game-changer. Extrapolate it to everyone being able to see whatever they want to see, all the time, and things start to get pretty crazy pretty fast. Highly recommend Vernor Vinge's book Rainbows End for a full look at where this could take us a few years from now.

Partially. The insurance policy still cost a couple million dollars, which they had to raise. And they didn't purchase the insurance policy until several years after the competition was launched.

The original, $10 million X Prize (for the first private space flights) was launched this way. They did a huge press conference to launch the prize competition, and got the head of NASA and a bunch of astronauts there.

Peter Diamandis later said he didn't have a dime of the prize money at the time -- he quietly raised it later. In the meantime, everyone just assumed he had it because the launch event had so much credibility attached to it.

Um, no. Valentina was the first woman in space in 1963. However, the Russians didn't fly another woman in space for the next 20 years, not until we flew Sally Ride. We've flown a female astronaut almost every year since, they've flown one. The full count is: US, 45 female astronauts, Russia/SU: 3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_astronauts

To this day the Russians still have a superstition that flying with a woman is bad luck, and many of them refuse to fly with one.

It's the Locksmith Institute. Locksmiths are who you call to get into a door to something own, but to which you lost the key. So presumably there's situations where a hotel can't get their keys working, and they'd like to have locksmiths in their city who are trained in this. Don't think it's any more complicated than that...

Isn't all software, always, just a few weeks away? lol.

Presumably there's some kind of legal construct that could act as a poison pill. i.e. some kind of contract that says "if this patent is used for [insert evil purposes here], it is immediately converted to GPL."

Also, I refuse to lump defensive patent holders in with organizations like shell-corporation patent trolls or Intellectual Ventures. From what I can tell, IV isn't even bothering to try and execute on ideas they come up with. They simply brainstorm, apply for the patent based on the idea vapors, and then go after anyone who is putting in the blood and sweat to try and actually build it.

Relevant: "Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection.

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better." -John Carmack

I love what I work on, I also love knowledge. Turns out the internets isn't just a place where people go for the latest Success Kid meme or double rainbow video, it's a link to the entirety of all human knowledge.

Oh yeah, and it's a link to the people I love and care about as well...

> that the laws of the universe prevent interstellar travel

Not true:

Hawking: Humans must colonize other planets http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15970232/ns/technology_and_scien...

'by using "matter/antimatter annihilation," velocities just below the speed of light could be reached, making it possible to reach the next star in about six years. "It wouldn't seem so long for those on board," [Hawking] said.'

The problem with any hypothesis that involves Earth being visited by extraterrestrials isn't the almost unthinkably large distances involved, it's the timescales involved.

For any two given planets in the galaxy that could support intelligent life, in all likelihood the technological progress of those lifeforms will not align, and it won't be close. Imagine one civilization encountering another, except the first is 50,000 years more technologically advanced. Or 500,000 years. Or 5 million years. What would happen?

The more advanced civilization wouldn't be playing games to keep from being discovered, that's for sure. They wouldn't care. Even visiting the planet would be a total waste of time since with that level of technology they could certainly observe from afar.

It's not about size. Human brains produce consciousness. Can't argue with that.

This is what drives me crazy about the dieting issue. People will cite a study that involves 21 people. 21! Think of all the pain caused by people being overweight, and the insane costs imposed on our healthcare systems. With all that pain and cost, we can't come up with studies with larger sample sizes? Show me a double-blind study with 10,000 people and I'll start to take it seriously.

I'm sorry, this needs a citation. I'm not trying to be a jerk, it's just that with a subject this controversial you can't simply assert claims like this.

I was seriously trolling, also known as taking an idea to its logical extreme to make a point.

You're presenting a false choice here. There's lots of other ways to attack the drunk driving problem without taking everyone's drivers licenses away and banning normal driving, as the OP was advocating.

I have always wondered why the Adkins diet seems to work. The article basically says it is both more successful and yet has no physiological reason for being more successful. So why?

My first guess would be: carbs/bread is cheap and usually comes in large quantities, like unlimited bread baskets. Meat is expensive and comes in smaller quantities. So eating mostly meat just makes it easier to consume fewer calories by default. But again that's just a guess.

Seems to me like they are often not actually out to delete the article, instead they're using the threat of deletion to try and spur the author to clean up an article to wikipedia's standards. Otherwise they'd have to do it themselves. In those cases I think it's actually a pretty reasonable strategy. There's a lot of crap and vanity articles that are thrown up there on any given day.

P.S. For added hilarity, the story directly below this one on HN is about cell phone tracking, where the top post is all talk of going without cell phones because the device's tracking could infringe on people's freedom.

Which is the scarier dystopia? Your phone keeps a running tab on your location, which could be accessed by the state or Google? Or your mode of transportation is tracking you, _and can be over-ridden or disabled at any time by the state or by Google_...

Um, you must be joking. Frame it like an opponent would who is running for political office against you in the year 2050. So you're saying take away people's privilege to operate a vehicle they own and paid for with their own money? You want to require people to use an automated machine that, in theory, the state could over-ride the controls of at any moment? You want to eliminate all jobs associated with commercial driving (buses, delivery trucks, etc.) many of which are union jobs?

No. No. No.

Also, the answer to the danger & death problem is well understood -- you simply require people to first accumulate several dozen hours behind the wheel, under supervised instruction, with training for emergency situations, just like we do now with pilots licenses. The fact that this hasn't happened yet in the US (like it has in say, Germany) should show you what a political impossibility what you're saying really is.

Just off the top of my head, I'd guess it's due to a lot of e's in words that, depending on the language, you'll see in almost every single method or function. Things like return, end, else, true, include, self, private, etc.

Don't forget to copy it locally, in case they (or their acquirers...) ever take it down. The Evernote web-clipper plugin is great for that.

I also did the same with all the folks who posted technical details on their experience dealing with the AWS outage. Great stuff to hold on to for future reference.

To be clear, I wasn't saying that Stripe and Github receiving funding was a sign there was a bubble. I was responding to the other poster who was saying this was a sign there was _not_ a bubble, to which I'm saying, that's not so clear. (i.e. He's saying A, therefore B. I'm saying A is not therefore B, as opposed to A therefore !B...)

I suppose its possible that Stripe and Github receiving funding will signal to angels that companies seen as having a customer base that is primarily other start-ups are the way to go, and therefore open the floodgates of angel funding further. But maybe not. I really don't have strong feelings about this yet at all (which is why I said "there is an argument to be made" and not something stronger). Like you I'd like to see a discussion about it though. It seems like we're in a rather unprecedented time for new startups which makes it all pretty hard to predict.

There's an argument to be made that there's not a macro-economic bubble right now like there was in 1999, but that there IS a "Silicon Valley bubble". That is, there are so many early-stage startups proliferating and getting angel funding that there's a bubble for companies that provide services to other startups.

If this is true, there's a doomsday scenario: if the SV bubble collapses (say, due to some macro-economic change that dries up the glut of angel funding), then a lot of those companies that primarily provide services to other startups will collapse with it. There's more. As the companies go out of business for lack of (other startup) customers, a lot of the remaining startups that depend on those outside API's could go down for lack of infrastructure to stand on. Things could spiral down to a bad place pretty quickly.

As I said above, I started brushing my teeth in the mornings in college for breath reasons, so this was when I was a teenager. That was a long time ago, so I don't know. I was staying up absurdly late, passing out, and then having to get up at 7am to catch the bus, so that probably had something to do with it.

I do think this is key. My Dad drinks no sugary drinks of any kind, including not just soda but fruit juice, etc. And I've basically stuck to that. Not big on sweets either. That stuff is killing us, seriously.

Random observation -- my family seems to have a gene that makes us basically immune from cavities. My father has, to my knowledge, never had a cavity, despite being born in the 1930's, when health care, hygiene and regular dentist check-ups were not what they are today.

I've gone months without brushing my teeth. Been to the dentist twice in the last 10 years - no cavities. (Of course, starting in college I realized I should probably brush in the mornings for breath reasons...)

I've often wondered if some clever bio hacker could figure out what protein my genes are telling me to include in my saliva and reverse engineer it. Perhaps these guys did something similar.