wgoodwin's comments

AirMap | Santa Monica | Onsite, full-time | BD, Technical Acct Mgr, Data Sorcerer and Engineer, Senior Software Engineers, Application and DevOps Security Engineers.

Help make drones part of everyday life.

https://boards.greenhouse.io/airmap/#.WGqn-LYrI6i

If interested, send an email to [email protected] with [HN] in the subject line.

I'm a lawyer, with a split practice between IP lit and tech trans, and tried some modest entrepreneurial ventures pre-law school that ended up failing, and I read HN for largely the same reasons.

Yeah, how has this not generated more comments? I felt like an absolute stalker as soon as that woman moved, and the subsequent images have made it only worse. Bizarre is an understatement.

" It's disorienting for the 1st click on a name to expand a comment, but then the second click (on the same-styled name) to open another webpage (rather than collapse)."

Ditto.

In rare moments of digital altruism.

A-fscking-men.

Well done (I'd say better than the original).

One of the things I find most surprising is the data on the bus lines. I'd assumed, as a recent LA transplant, that the bus lines would generally serve worse off neighborhoods (it is always thus in LA; minority and lower income neighborhoods get mediocre bus service, while wealthier neighborhoods get expresses and light rail).

Of course, it would be interesting to overlay the stops of the various corporate buses on top of this information. My guess is all those high points have private alternatives serving them.

Final point: this might be best for the questions it raises. How does service compare across lines? How many people does a line move and how fast? How much is the line getting subsidized (BART, I'm guessing, crushes the others in that regard).

I was going to say that 20% seems exceptionally low, but I see how the pensions were being backed out.

Fire and public safety, and their corresponding pensions, make up the bulk (like often >50%) of all municipal expenditures.

Yeah, this was an astonishingly valuable list of "shit not to do, if you're trying to grow up."

Seems utterly improbable. That was my first reaction to: Apple would never do this. Per my comment elsewhere, I'm not sure that's a terrible thing by itself.

I'm torn between enthusiasm for these awesome additions to to Google Maps, and the longterm effect on one's sense of wonder at the vastness of the world.

Something of the wonder of hiking into the Grand Canyon is lost when you can walk it in Google Maps. Some of the mystery is gone. Oddly enough, that's part of the reason satellite maps are so engaging, and have far less of this effect: you're getting a perspective that you would never otherwise have, and thus nothing's particularly lost. If anything, browsing around Google Earth is an invitation to explore. Walking the Grand Canyon on Streetview...that's an invitation to second guess making the effort. Or worse, spend countless hours comparing streetviews of different trails to see which is better.

That last point might be the worst: previewing trails and outdoor experiences just accelerates the paradox of choice problem, as you are constantly comparing what you see beforehand to what you see in real life to what you also saw elsewhere digitally.

Agreed, entirely. I realized that I've been using FB as a surrogate for an email newsletter for side web projects. I also realized that many people I know use the feed as a surrogate for RSS to the feeds of their friends' lives. In both cases, FB isn't the answer: it's neither MailChimp nor FeedBurner.

I don't begrudge FB trying to monetize their service. It's just that their service isn't what most people seem to be using it for. Thus their paid options will seem like bizarre value propositions to the average user.

A slight deviation of topic, but I think this point is too-often ignored: "VCs apply money to fix problems and risks in order to increase growth." VCs want you to increase your risk profile, while entrepreneurs focus on getting capital to decrease the risk of going belly up from undercapitalization. Your last point seems like the way to avoid those two from coming in conflict from the outset.

This news is actually a brilliant illustration of the sloth of academic publishing. I used Color as an example in a book review of an academic text on the knowledge economy, written now almost 18 months ago. Hopefully, it will be published by the end of the year.