Hacker News: broot

New comment by broot in ""They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story"

broot — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:02:27 +0000

I read this a long time ago but was never able to find it again. Thank you so much for the link! It's such a powerful short story.

Show HN: vReddit, the visual reddit reader

broot — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:45:58 +0000

My first rails/mongodb project. I've been a redditor for a long time and wanted to play a bit with other browsing formats. I find Pinterest hard to read, so I wanted to create something that was a bit more of the traditional left-to-right. It's also more image focused to better suit the content that is typically on the front page.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515343

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by broot in "Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result at LHC"

broot — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:20:59 +0000

Haha, I can't be the only one that got that.

New comment by broot in "Google+ Opens to All"

broot — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:41:17 +0000

I think you're right, the invite window doesn't matter, but like the first 100 days of a presidency, it's a solid enough chunk of time to think about what Google+ has accomplished, and I would argue that the answer is "not much."

The invite window won't kill G+, but apathy will. About a fifth of my Facebook friends are on it, but only 3 out of a hundred post anything. A successful competitor would need to stand for something other than "well, it's not Facebook."

It may find a niche as a long-form twitter (which is something I can't believe Facebook waited so long to do) but the initial excitement has run its course.

New comment by broot in "NASA Announces Design for New Deep Space Exploration System"

broot — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:05:14 +0000

I'm worried they'll build half of this and then cancel it.

New comment by broot in "Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?"

broot — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 05:35:04 +0000

There's a scene I really like in The Wire in which one of the major drug kingpins realizes that his product (heroin in this case) was inferior and expensive compared to the other stuff on the market, so he asks his community college professor what to do.

Rebrand it.

If they want to survive they need to hire a bunch of really, really great designers and consolidate their properties so that it looks nice, because their homepage looks like a screencap from 10 years ago. Allow people to assemble their home pages like iGoogle. Better integrate Delicious and Flickr into their other properties. Partner with Facebook to add a social component. Decide what they stand for it and make it contrast with Google. Maybe privacy. Then make that the drumbeat of everything they do.

New comment by broot in "With Help From Jodie Foster, SETI Resumes Search for Alien Life"

broot — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:25:02 +0000

I think Jodie Foster's character in Contact (who is based on Jill Tarter, the real-life director of SETI research) says it best.

"Look, all I'm asking, is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history... of history."

New comment by broot in "The future Firefox UI"

broot — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:24:01 +0000

I'm glad they finally got rid of that extra search bar, it was ugly and clunky and useless. Any word on when this changes happens for real? I would love a better looking firebug delivery device.

New comment by broot in "Show HN: Monster Coloring Book, my first App just launched. What do you think?"

broot — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 21:34:54 +0000

Site design is really great, really well done Zarprey!

New comment by broot in "Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?"

broot — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:28:29 +0000

But W1ntermute, wont William Gibson be mad that you're cheating on Neuromancer with Ghost in the Shell?

New comment by broot in "Where are my rounded corners?"

broot — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:09:19 +0000

This is something I've intentionally started to do with my start-up. As long as the design looks intentional, it's really not worth the stress and the bloat. Make it fast, make it good, don't make it an OCD nightmare

New comment by broot in "Ask HN: What is the first thing you do before starting a new project?"

broot — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 18:13:31 +0000

I turn on my Boards of Canada Pandora station and do a bunch of research. Jot some ideas down. Think about who would use it.