VomisaCaasi

This happened yesterday:

American mining company Molycorp has bought up a 90.023 share in Estonia's rare earth metals producer AS Silmet, taking control of one of very few sources of the much-sought materials outside China.

http://news.err.ee/economy/c12a9355-2b41-46d3-b00e-875806144...

Relevant, I hope.

I noticed that when you push blades out, some stay in locked position longer than the others. Start from 8 o'clock and keep going clockwise, very, very fast.

The author should've at least defined what kind of design was he talking about. Almost every person is a designer on daily basis, when we are cleaning our rooms, preparing a dish, or even when we are communicating with our peers. Unless we are copying everything and do everything as our friends are doing, then in fact we are in a design process. The difference comes in when a person is confident enough to write a cheque for his work that he and a client both think is a design. This distinction should've been clarified in the beginning of the article, or else we aren't even able to have a discussion about it.

I'm glad these guys didn't base their business idea on not primarily concentrating on customers who won't even have a chance to pay their loans from the beginning.

Here in Estonia, some entrepreneurs thought it was nice to mix up text-ing from cells and lending as far back as 2006 already (I think). Basically, you'll only need to provide your personal info with their site (name, Estonian version of SSN, bank account, telephone number), and then you'll be able to get a loan for as much as €1000 by just sending a sms. Most people lose their judgement after few shots of vodka, now imagine if you ran out of money after those two shots and the only thing needed to fix that was to send a SMS. Something that the provider won't be telling you, however, is that those loans come with high interests, sometimes as high as 1000% / year. As a result of that, quite a bunch of uneducated people have lost their homes due to this scheme that still is going on today in our unregulated economy. Seems as if they've now began tapping Swedish market, I wonder when is this going to happen in the U.S.

All in all, I was a text-book liberal before seeing some of the people dealing with results caused by this scheme, now I'm beginning to change my mind.

Also, there's a Wiki page about it: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...

Wired has produced a good article how little connected Russians actually were at this time.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/russnet_pr.html

You may be correct, but aside from wasting 2 weeks to plan the site, 2 weeks to the design the site, and another month to build that site, I don't particularly feel any other regrets as looking from mine point of view, there isn't anything more important than to achieve inner peace with oneself.

I guess even Google would be pissed if an investment of 125M was to be flushed down the toilet. Also, I'm pretty sure they had far-reaching strategy right from the beginning, and had prepared themselves for such issues that might eventually leading them into battle.

I had an idea of building a similar dueling site using memes. Actually, I even designed and built the site, but decided to ditch the project it just before paying for a domain.

The reason? I didn't want to turn into that guy who runs lolcats franchise.

Burma's internet use is almost non-existant. OpenNet Initiative says only 0.2% [1] out of population of 55M are internet users. I'd rather be making a comparison towards North Korea, than to Egypt, where 24.3% [2] of the population is using internet.

[1] - http://opennet.net/research/profiles/burma

[2] - http://opennet.net/research/profiles/egypt

I am someone who has got a foot in both of these worlds. Though, I code slowly and I can't really draw either.

IMHO, designers don't usually feel any importance of open-source projects because most of them/us are used to things that are aesthetically pleasing, and they would not want to burst their/our bubble. If they we're given a choice between free Linux (assuming Adobe Suite works on it) or OSX, they would be getting OSX because it suits to their world, they would be even paying extra if it was to cost more. Also, they want something that just works and don't really care whether they can see or edit the source, since their coding experience usually ends with HTML and CSS, hence the apathy.

I've worked with quite a broad range of websites and the less control I had over my work, the less I enjoyed it. Solution? If you're able to find a designer for your project, make him feel special by taking him as an equal member of the team and give him full control of the design side (aesthetics). More so, let him start from the scratch. Although, arguing about functionality (UI and UX), which has logic in it, should be encouraged, you don't want to offend him by saying his designs look bad, because a criticism coming from a programmer is as bad as it gets. Coder's blogs are usually coloured dark blue or green, that tells a lot. That's also the reasons why most designers hate working for Google. One hour meetings whether a line should be 1 or 2px thick? If you don't really like what he is doing, ditch him.

Seems as if it isn't that hard to bypass the "trial" period of HN. In addition to minimum karma requirement, applying 3 months of newbie time would probably be somewhat helpful as well. If the user has earned his badge of negative voting after the end of the rookie period, his understanding on the site has matured to point where he knows where the site is at, and he would be more than willing to keep it that way.

I have had my Public Folder disabled twice after sharing few non-copyrighted music sets to reddit's underground. I don't think they really care about copyright, since I did in fact have copyrighted music in my Dropbox as well that I shared only to friends, but rather by monitoring bandwidth. Dropbox isn't saying out loud what exact number is, but I figure it could be around somewhere 10GB of traffic per month per user.

Apple TV comes to my mind...

The Israelis probably did see far more wider uses for this technology, but it seems to me Microsoft just outbid the others and then marketed this only as a game controller. Though, I wouldn't be too surprised if we were to see more uses for this popping up in the next version of Windows or somewhere else.

Do you know when and if that so called "Non-Profit" Garage48 would be coming up? I'd be happy to participate. However, I don't know anyone who is going to these events. Would this be limiting anything?

I can't see yours either. (not sure if you had set one, though, could be a bug?)

I'll just throw it out then: [email protected]

Let me know which communication method would you prefer, so I can reply to you with Skype or MSN Live initials.

Sure. What do you have in mind?

Thanks, I will check the place out.

I guess I should've done a bit more home-work before turning to HN.

Thank you for the great advice, this is exactly what I'm going to do.

When designing web, I usually start with simple pen and paper for conceptualizing, then move on to Photoshop, and eventually to HTML/CSS or Flash.

In iPad design, however, I would be willing to learn the builder to the point where I can use the paper/photoshop concepts and hence produce satisfying design. I'm not sure about the learning curve in Xcode yet, so I can not really comment on that.

As findm hinted, I am not from the U.S and have mostly dealt with the clients locally.

As a matter of fact, I am at this point unfamiliar with any of these tools you mentioned above so your impression was correct. I'm pretty green in this field (other than the fact I've been bashing at design of various iPad's apps for quite some time now).

If you are in a great hurry, then I don't think it's worth wasting your time. We could always arrange it so that you keep working your designs, but give me concrete goals and a deadline. Should I succeed, great, if not, you have still your own work to rely on.

Yes, as long as it features a GUI. I don't own an Android device myself, but this seems like a neat opportunity nevertheless.

I'm not familiar with the pricing trends in the iPad scene, however, when I am dealing with my clients in web/graphics design, I've been billing for 15-30USD per hour.

I would be producing the design files that a developer could use and put together when producing an app. I am able to code as-well (not for the iPad, though), but in this case I would like to strictly stick to the design process.

I've been having that corporate vs self-funding dilemma for a while now. I am part designer, part entrepreneur, part programmer. I enjoy doing all these activities, and I do them with desire. I have an idea which would improve designers life and I think I might have figured out working business model. More importantly, it's very hard to get me doing something I find either illogical or immoral.

I have been reading HN for a while, follow 10+ blogs from VC-world and read whole bunch of books about successful startup founders and although I find corporate sponsorship great for some sectors (biotech, hi-tech hardware, some IT where founders are born programmers and not entrepreneurs) I've come to a conclusion that if I was to seek founding from either VC or Angel investor, I'd be giving away my freedom to experiment, my freedom to work in a pace and rhythm as I'd like and all the fun that would come with. That's was the whole point about being an entrepreneur, right? Doing the stuff you like / world needs and supporting yourself to a point? And who would guarantee me that investor knows more about my sector than I do?