Hacker News: meursault

New comment by meursault in "Clicks Communicator"

meursault — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:36:01 +0000

You’re operating with massive hindsight bias here. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion in 2007 that iOS and Android were going to win. BlackBerry (and indeed many of the players you listed) had a chance to compete and they simply didn’t. Also I’m not sure where you got the idea that BlackBerry didn’t have a vertically integrated supply chain. They absolutely did. I worked there in the mid-2000s and the hardware was manufactured literally down the street from where the OS and apps were built.

New comment by meursault in "Clicks Communicator"

meursault — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:37:33 +0000

This is 100% the reason. I watched BlackBerry fail from the inside and there’s always been an extremely vocal minority of former BB users who want to go back to a physical keyboard. This is a niche product for that audience at best, it will never have mass market appeal as a primary device. I don’t think it will have mass market appeal as a secondary device for the same reasons as others have pointed out in this thread either, but I respect them shooting their shot I guess.

New comment by meursault in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"

meursault — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:23:17 +0000

MacOS is a brand that Apple owns, so that makes sense? It’s like saying in the market of Tesla cars there is only one manufacturer.

New comment by meursault in "Video game play is positively correlated with well-being"

meursault — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 18:49:50 +0000

My mind immediately went to surveying the participants in a Skinner box on their perceived well being. It would be incredible if people DIDN'T self-report feeling great after pulling the dopamine levers

New comment by meursault in "Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September"

meursault — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 11:37:10 +0000

Any "competitive advantage" gained by these points will be more than wiped out by the extreme difficulty companies will have attracting talent if they don't offer remote flexibility. All of the data I've seen so far is pretty clear that yours is a minority opinion among tech workers.

New comment by meursault in "Ask HN: Does anyone else find the AWS Lambda developer experience frustrating?"

meursault — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 20:56:11 +0000

Have you tried the recently added container support? There's a component provided called the Lambda Runtime Interface Emulator that exposes an API for the locally running container. In my experience this is miles better than the original approach.

New comment by meursault in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2019)"

meursault — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 17:22:08 +0000

This sounds interesting. Would you consider Unreal rather than Unity?

New comment by meursault in "Show HN: Burner, for temporary phone numbers"

meursault — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:09:20 +0000

I eventually found it by searching "burner phone". Fyi, your iTunes link on the site is broken for me, giving a generic "can't connect to iTunes Store". Thanks :)

New comment by meursault in "Show HN: Burner, for temporary phone numbers"

meursault — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:22:31 +0000

Awesome idea. You don't seem to be listed in non-US app stores (Canada, in my case). Any plans to be available internationally, or at least in the same countries served by Twilio?

New comment by meursault in "Show HN: Breakup Notifier"

meursault — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 02:26:46 +0000

great idea. this is actually how my wife and i met. no joke. i had just ended a long relationship and changed my status on facebook. she noticed and started messaging me.

New comment by meursault in "Show HN: My first start up (30 days in)"

meursault — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 05:54:10 +0000

Love the idea. Chore tracking would be a really cool feature I think.

New comment by meursault in ""Space Jam" movie website, untouched since 1996"

meursault — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 01:51:30 +0000

My favorite:

"Don't jam your computer -- download this screen saver, and never again will you need to suffer the indignity of burnt phospor."

That's some truly awful copy.

New comment by meursault in "Why the next big thing won't come out of the US - Finally"

meursault — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 16:37:09 +0000

At the risk of sounding trolly -- I hope the next big thing, US origin or not, will be able to handle more traffic than whatever this is.

New comment by meursault in "Ask HN: Interesting (offline) iPad apps for hackers?"

meursault — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 16:26:22 +0000

If you like hacking in Lua, I've been enjoying Luna. It's a little IDE with an embedded Lua interpreter. The interface is weird but it works.

New comment by meursault in "InnoDB faster than NoSQL solutions?"

meursault — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:15:59 +0000

Doesn't bypassing the SQL parser kind of make this a NOSQL solution?

New comment by meursault in "The Death Of RIM"

meursault — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:48:35 +0000

Sure, it's volatile. But do you think Justin Bieber chose BlackBerry because he wants one, or because he got a huge paycheck to use it? Product placement does not end at television and movies.

New comment by meursault in "The Death Of RIM"

meursault — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:45:30 +0000

The Bieber effect is an important point. I think RIM realized that they don't need bleeding edge tech to stay competitive. That's how you sell to people like Bob Lefsetz and David Pogue, but those guys aren't even close to representative of the largest segment of the consumer smartphone market. The way to sell to the everyday smartphone user? Influence. Product placement, both in media and the real world (i.e. putting new units in the hands of celebrities), is an extremely powerful trick. I think it's worked, and will continue to work, very well for RIM. Think about BlackBerry as a brand. Take the wealthiest and most powerful people in America: CEO's, celebrities, politicians. Mostly BlackBerry users. Hell, they even got Obama using one. They've married the ideas of affluence and power to their brand. Sure, those of us who care about innovation and moving tech forward want them to do something groundbreaking like they did with mobile email, but isn't it cheaper to just comp a 15 year old popstar a phone and watch the money roll in? The market rewards big companies with well-marketed mediocrity, so that's what we get. I mean shit, just look at Microsoft.