User8712

I'm in the process of scanning the family's old film, photos, and converting VHS tapes. I'll save all the original scans, and digital video into a folder which will now become the new originals (old ones still kept and boxed away). This is going to get backed up off-site in case of a house fire.

First off, this is the hardest part. Once everything is digital, keeping a future copy is simple as long as people are interested. I wouldn't worry about file formats too much, just use popular image and video formats, and it'll be easy to access for the foreseeable future.

Things to keep these available...

1. I'll inform all of my siblings of the files I have backed up, and basically copy them to a large USB key or external drive and label it. If I die, they easily have another copy.

2. I'm going to issue a copy of the files to my siblings. They might not be quite as tech savy as the HN community, but they take a lot of photos themselves, and they know how to manage them, back them up on drives in folders, etc. The more copies, and more people that have them, the better odds someone will carry them on. I'll also give a copy to my parents and grandparents, simply so they can view them any time.

What is this, a guessing game? If you don't want to answer the question, please let us know instead of giving vague answers.

How is it practical? It's a beautiful design, but far simpler designs can run circles around it in every scenario I can imagine. A small version might make for a fun desk toy. When I think practical, I think Boston Dynamics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISznqY3kESI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo

I'm curious to see what happens as our age group gets older. Right now few focus on developing applications, games or social networks for elderly individuals, since there isn't a big audience. As we age, I think we'll see a lot more technology designed to helping the elderly, and hopefully it'll allow them to stay more mentally stimulated, less lonely, and provide ways for them to further contribute so society online.

Are comments ever deleted or hidden from view completely? I've been reading HN for a year or two, and I've never noticed an issue with comment quality. In topics with a larger number of comments, you get one or two heavily downvoted posts, but that's it.

My question, is there an issue with comments I'm not seeing? Do the popular topics on the homepage have dozens of spam or troll comments that are pruned out constantly, so I don't notice the problem? Or is the issue those 1 or 2 downvoted comments I mentioned earlier?

HN receives a small number of comments, so fine tuning algorithms isn't a big deal in my opinion. This isn't Reddit, where the number one post right now has 4,000 comments. That presents a lot of complications, since they need to try and cycle new comments so they all receive some visibility, allowing them a chance to rise if they're of high quality. On HN, you have 20 comments, or 50 comments, so regardless of the sorting, nearly everything gets read. As long as HN generally sorts comments, they're fine.

The gym has one main advantage, you invested time to get there. When I had a gym in my apartment building, I'd put on my gym clothes, go down there, and workout for an hour without a problem. Once I was there, I had no trouble staying.

Now, I have some gym equipment in my room. This doesn't work nearly as well. I'll start to workout, then check that forum post to see if anyone replied, then I'll browse YouTube for some music, then I might do a few sets, and finally I get distracted by something and quit.

For me, the gym, or biking outdoors works best. Once I'm on my bike, I'll mess around for hours. If I try to bike indoors, I'll last about 2 minutes.

Agreed, cheap labor isn't hard to find, and there are countless people that would answer captchas all day long for a few dollars. How many captchas could you answer in a day? Let's say you work 8 hours, and answer one every 20 seconds. That's 1,440 captchas answered for $3/day. You get 5 captchas for a penny. If you can make more than a penny off 5 captchas and whatever you're trying to post or accomplish, you have a business.

Why would you say unable to launch isn't a fair assessment? If you had a functional and useful alpha over 2 years ago, and 1.0 isn't released, I'd say that's spot on. You're going to be in for nearly 3 years, $100k from the crowd, and an unknown amount from your supporters and team before officially launching. 15,000 users on free software is a small number. I'd be worrying the small number isn't because the big launch has happened, but because the concept doesn't have enough appeal. I've launched a few different projects in the past that hit 15,000 users in a week, and the majority of those died within months or a year.

Nonetheless, congratulations on raising $100k from 1,000 users. That shows some dedication from the community, so you must be doing something right. Hopefully I'm wrong on my forecast, and good luck on the project.

Crowdfunding web applications? Is this becoming a new thing?

Send us 100k, and we'll finish our beta application, and give you rewards, like your name in the code, or for $500, you can have a coffee with us on video chat. Or for $25,000, fly yourself here, and we'll give you a tour of the city and cook you dinner. Does this not sound crazy to anyone else?

If they raise an extra $150k, they'll develop extras, such as a plug-in architecture to enable an ecosystem of open-source plug-ins for different discussion and decision-making protocols that will scale to much larger groups. I don't know what the hell that even means, but isn't it a little irresponsible to even consider such features when you haven't made an official release, and proven the concept has any long term traction?

If you can't tell, this entire thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. After 18 months of beta they're unable to launch, or make enough sales to organizations to fund their development, so they're asking the crowd for a 100k donation? I don't believe their software is as life changing as the video makes it out to be, and I don't think they have a viable business. I expect them to burn through the money, launch, and fade away.

Agreed. I had the pleasure of calling CRA last month to sort out a problem. I spent an afternoon trying to piece together all these letters, payments, refunds, etc, and what exactly went wrong.

Anyway, I call, and it was the closest thing to magic I've ever seen. I give reception my SIN, and ask for the woman that signed the letter I received. I'm on hold for only 10 or 20 seconds, the woman answers, and greets me with my name. I didn't say more than a couple of sentences explaining the issue, and she says she'll check her computer, taps a button and poof she knows everything. Literally a few more seconds, and everything is sorted, and a cheque is being mailed.

I was almost speechless, I was expecting a 30 minute call between departments, explaining numbers, CRA scratching their heads since this was taking place across multiple provinces, and then me having to physically mail in a variety of personal information. Instead, it was a 1 or 2 minute call with an incredibly friendly woman, and she was so organized, it's like she spent the day preparing for me to call in advance. And, to reiterate, this was the woman that signed the original letter I received, not someone from support or customer service.

Now, the CRA website is a nightmare, but talking to them on the phone was the most impressive service I've ever encountered.

Ah, interesting. It looks like they sell a grinder to chop up your old parts, and then the extruder melts them into a filament.

Is there anything on the market to melt your printed parts or toys, to create a new spool of plastic for printing? In short, some type of recycling process you could do at home.

Why is it difficult? I run a medium size website, with a custom threaded comment system. It receives 30,000 new comments a day on average. There has been zero issues, it's a simple comment table in the database with an index, and some standard queries. It's something you could literally code up in an afternoon.

Now, if you receive a hundred million comments a day, it'll be a little more complicated, but those sites are few and far between. At that point, you most likely have a budget for better hardware and specialized staff.

Agreed, it looks like a JS library, or a new domain extension.

Cold turkey and uninstalling works well. In my case, anytime I wanted to game, I'd get a prompt that the 10gb download would take 12 or 24 hours to reinstall. I was looking to game that instant, not tomorrow, so I wouldn't bother downloading. It was a small barrier, but it prevented games from being available at the click of a button.

Let me ask you a couple of questions...

1. Do you want to take a break from work right now and play a few games?

2. Do you want to play games tomorrow?

Uninstalling games, and forcing them to be redownloaded changed the question from number one, to number two. Like most people, I aspire to be a better person tomorrow, so it was easy to say no to question number two, and redownloading.

Yep, that demo works fine.

Firefox/Chrome, Windows 8.1, Intel HD 4000.

Anyone else running into blurring issues? I tested it out on Firefox and Chrome, and in both browsers the face texture is a blur. The high resolution only appears when I have the browser scaled horizontally small enough to cut off half of the head. If I scale it larger, it blurs out again.

http://i.imgur.com/Yd4jCme.jpg

I think these would have been a huge hit in the 90s.

http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2014/03/3D-printed-shoes-by...

What do you guys think of the changes to Humble Bundle in the last year? They have a lot of additions, with not only occasional bundles, but now weekly sales, and their store. Do you think it's for the best, offering more sales and deals, or for the worst, making it too confusing to follow?

Agreed, they just keep showing this plastic rectangle, with a flat strip of carbon fiber sandwiched in the middle for reinforcement. Wonderful, but is that the limitations of this machine?

https://markforged.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/MF14_MK1_b...

If you look closely at the above image and squint your eyes, I think that's a carbon fiber part it actually printed, that appeared in the video for a split second. It would be great if we could see it close up. It would be even better if they printed a second copy with plastic, and then demonstrated the difference in strength.

Instead, they spent the entire video saying they're going to change the world, and then I guess you're suppose to take their word on it, and just drop $5k on the preorder.

Nope, I'm fairly confident in my ability to direct the site in the right direction, and to handle the development side of things.

1. I do have volunteers that assist with support. The app brings in roughly 50,000 support tickets a year, so their help is important.

2. I try to automate everything. Anything that goes to support needs to be handled with the click of a button. Otherwise the smallest task becomes overwhelming when you multiply it by countless users. If I can't automate the task, I try to find a way for the community to get involved in helping.

3. All important changes are reviewed by the community. I consult with the users regarding any design or interface changes. However, users are against the idea of change, and they don't typically know what's best for them. My job is to sort through their feedback, and to make the final decision.

One. I have enough work for 4 or 5 people, but I prefer to keep going solo. It slows growth a bit, but I don't have the headaches of managing employees, and it allows for more freedom in my daily schedule.

I spent a year or two building out the app, growing the user base, and adding new features. After that, my focus redirected to improving server performance with the growing traffic, handling support for users, refactoring code, managing advertising campaigns, A/B testing affiliate offers, and trying to develop a long term plan to stay relevant.

In short, my time went from building an app, to building a business.

This is the wrong approach, and it's going to help deteriorate an already small community.

1. HN doesn't have an issue with comment quality.

2. HN should be concerned about growing the community, and increasing comments. A lot of discussions already suffer due to a lack of activity. This is going to do the opposite, it's going to decrease comments.

3. We live in an instant world. Pending comments is a step backwards for user experience.

4. Occasionally I see a topic with 10 comments, the majority of which were written back and forth within the first hour of the topic. You're going to kill these discussions.

5. Manually moderating topics doesn't work for communities like HN. It works on a blog, where your article from last year gets another two or three comments every month, half of which are spam.

6. You're creating unnecessary work for members in the community. People come here to enjoy the community, not to moderate.

7. It's a poor method of moderation. You can have 99 users decide not to endorse a comment, then one person decides to click the endorse button. 99% against, and yet it's approved.

8. I'll have to question every comment I write, and avoid spending time on any detailed responses, because they might never leave the pending stage.

Keep in mind if the price lowered, domain squatters would increase. I kind of wish domains were more expensive, so companies wouldn't sit on half of a million domains. They just mark them all at $1,000+, so they still make a profit if 99% of their domains just sit there and rot away.

We should price the .com at $50 or $100 per year. This will force the squatters and people sitting on domains to let the majority of them expire. That might help to reserve .com for higher quality sites. For example, look at something like the free tk extension, compared to something like io, that has a premium price. The difference is night and day.

Why does everyone go crazy about the timex weekender? Am I the only person that thinks it looks like a dollar store watch for children?

The LG watch looks more like an iPhone strapped to your wrist than a watch.

http://i.imgur.com/yP1Qpa9.png

I was kind of excited after viewing the Motorola page, but after the videos, I'm disappointed. I don't want to speak to my watch, and I don't care about having yet another app for weather, calendar, etc. The videos just reminded me that I don't care about any of this information, or having it available on my wrist. I'll stick to a traditional watch, I think they're more stylish, and the time is really the only piece of information I need immediate access to on a constant basis. Everything else can be in pocket.

You have to consider whether or not someone with access to that data would want to reveal it exists. If the US says they located the plane in the ocean, in a location that no one expected, everyone will be wondering how they came to that conclusion. You can't say it was a lucky guess.

1. Do you have any idea how many seats are typically blocked out on this route for Malaysia to China flights? This might happen on dozens of flights every day, so please provide some proof if 50 blocked-out seats is unusual.

2. If it is unusual, the cargo might be more prone to error. Is it possible the cargo shifted back, causing the flight to quickly rise to 45,000ft before stalling and crashing down?

What about from a security standpoint? How safe are these web applications, and how confident can I be they're not logging audio or video from my calls? I'm not talking about government intelligence security, I'm talking about not appearing in my pajamas on the pirate bay.