I'm surprised Disney didn't throw all their weight behind the Doyle estate here. Under this precedent, all attributes of Mickey Mouse created in 1928 (his first appearance) appear to become public domain in 4 years time, giving you, me, and my uncle Bob the right to publish Mickey Mouse stories.
It sounds, to me, like they should have created a centralised spec for talking to these external system. Then created teams to build the interfaces between that spec, and the external systems.
So for healthcare.gov to talk to Hospital Insurance Inc. it would actually talk to the Health Insurance Inc shim and THAT would talk to the third party.
Now you have a small(er) definable project that a team can deliver and that can be tested. 100 shims later and healthcare.gov can talk to anything because they all (appear to) use the same interface.
I mean it's really up to you but I disagree with this. Reading the news enables you to have an understanding of current world issues and become a contributing member of society. I'm not sure where you live, but I feel like in the Silicon Valley there is pretty large bubble where people are so focused on building a startup they forget how thousands of children are being gassed in Syria. I believe that reading the news can give you perspective on the world and life.
Just my $0.02. Don't have to agree just my thoughts.
There's a big difference between reading the news every day, reading the news every week, and reading the news every month.
I used the read the news every day (and reading news magazines weekly); what ended up happening is that I also ended up reading through a lot of fluff and reading about a lot of inconsequential mere-fact-stating news. Even if you read the news every week, there's a ton of repeated analysis that you have to filter out. I ended up realizing that this was a legitimate waste of time.
Now I just read the news maybe every month. I'll usually only read long-form synthesis/analysis articles, rather than the kind of stuff that comes in through AP/Reuters. The exception being news articles coming in through HN, of course.
Going back to your analogy, while I'll keep myself updated on the major movements in the civil war in Syria, what I don't need to read about is how 12 people died in a bomb blast on Tuesday in <city> or something extremely-low-level like that.
I agree with this. I also stopped watching the "The News" and quit following politics altogether. Much healthier and the time sink is gone.
I found over time that most people's idea of following politics was spending an inordinate amount of time memorizing either side's talking points. And to get really good at it (ie. arguing on forums) you'd simply need to memorize more of these talking points and exchange the proper insults (which always seemed to originate everywhere but my own mind).
Basically, I was done being a parrot and I'm healthier for it.
I've done similar, but without any need for Raportive (though I guess my method would have a higher error rate and not work for MEGA corps).
You want to get Bob Smith's email at example.com, but you don't know it? Simply find as many @example.com addresses as you can find then use name dictionaries to guess the address format.
For example, if you find njones@example.com, pjohnson@example.com, ffitzgerald@example.com and jane.doe@example.com we can quicky deduce that example.com uses <firstinitial><surname> as their email template. The Jane Doe address doesn't fit with every other address we found so we can ignore it.
Now send an email to bsmith@example.com and you're most likely talking to Bob Smith.
Lovely idea. There's too much snark in the world. Any project aimed at making the world a better place is awesome.
Here's some immediate feedback that might (or might not!) help:
* One per week seems too long and people wont ever come back. More than one at a time seems too much. How about making it like Groupon etc and have an 'ask of the day' and then 'side asks' for things you'll never front-page, but are interesting?
* I'd love to see the Groupon idea stretched. Add an "I did this" button (or an "I'm doing this" that posts a follow up email asking if you've done it 24 hours later)
* Needs a button to 'share this ask on Facebook/Twitter/...'. Same after someone has 'done this'.
* I'd post a card if it looked like people were posting cards.
They certainly don't. My suggestions were more in line with creating a successful site.
While I understand the philosophy of the 'slow web', I can't see it creating successful websites that depend (at some level) on return customers.
The other option for traction would be search engine traffic, and that isn't (likely) to happen with ask.io. (A third traffic option is direct referrals, but they'll be specific to a week: hey everyone, send my wife a card: ask.io! .. and thus wont create return traffic)
The slow web is better for disseminating unchanging information - like a dictionary or encyclopedia - that's needed on-demand.
I'd be interested in OP's thoughts on his Slow Web philosophy and creating traction with ask.io.
Hi. Not OP, but I who wrote the initial content of The Slow Web here.
The Slow Web and traction are not opposed, in my opinion. You CAN have traction without choosing to annoy the crap outta your users. It comes from understanding what your users are (or the target market you want to chase).
If you want to make a Slow Web service, understand then that your users aren't/shouldn'tbe the kind that are interested in logging in everyday to check on updates. Your marketing to your users would need to be a longer term relationship thing. It would of course be easy to annoy the shit out of your customers, but it's in my opinion that all that does is longer term harm.
I stopped using Facebook, LinkedIn for that reason. Once the novelty wears off, you stop using anyway.
For those outside Australia, you can pay most bills at the post office (Australia Post) or online via the post office's PostBillPay service. Basically, AusPost act as a middleman between the biller and the customer. But AusPost only accept Australian Dollar payments.
So from my reading of it, Ryan's project takes a bitcoin payment from the customer, converts it into AUD, then connects to PostBillPay and pays the bill, then send the customer the receipt from PostBillPay.
Bill payments 1.0:
Customer -> Biller
Bill payments 2.0:
Customer -> PostBillPay -> Biller
Bill payments 3.0:
Customer -> BitBillPay -> PostBillPay -> Biller
It's a great idea .. but I imagine if it takes off, AusPost will implement pay-by-bitcoin in their own service.
Actually that's exactly the point of this project. I run a startup called CoinJar (the first VC-backed Bitcoin startup in Australia) and Bitbillpay consumes CoinJar Checkout API.
I will open source the project once it has gained some initial traction. But before that, I will probably write a few tutorial-like blog posts to demonstrate how to integrate the seamless and unbranded Bitcoin checkout solution into any online business.
But of course, Bitbillpay is actually easier and faster to use than POSTbillpay. For one thing, you don't have to enter your credit number, and you can automatically receive an email with the receipt. (Australia Post will ask you to "print out".)
I think teaching a kitten to read your credit card and arrange it's kibble into a binary representation would be easier than using the POSTBillPay website.
So this project is a proof-of-concept for CoinJar's Checkout API? I think doing a consumer approachable project to demonstrate something that's invisible like a new checkout system is a great idea!
It is absolutely a proof-of-concept. At the same time it's just one of the many tools I wish Bitcoin can have. I don't expect it to be profitable (unless you count credit card points) but I will keep it running to allow 694 billers in Australia to accept Bitcoin indirectly.
Maybe someday they will see the value in CoinJar Checkout API and integrate directly. I'll even give them the source code I've written if they're too lazy to browse API docs. :-D
> Shhhh! Don't bring rationality into this HN anti-LinkedIn Circle-jerk!
That's a reddit-level comment.
People with technical, ethical or privacy concerns are just as relevant to the discussion. LinkedIn already has a shady history in terms of unauthorized data slurping, privacy and handling of users. No one has to swallow what they're offering now as altruistic if they don't want to.
I don't get why this is any different to anything else. What's to stop Microsoft backdooring the next Outlook, MSWord or Windows itself? Why is there so much ZOMG-FUD over this from LinkedIn than there is over anything else?
"Most users" blindly type the same password into Facebook that they do for Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, OK Cupid, eBay and PayPal. Any of those services can (and do) get hacked and the password opens all the other services. Should we shut them down too?
