The best products solve niche problems that the solver is familiar with and is personally invested in solving. So if I have 3 good ideas, I'll do one and give the other 2 away - that way all my problems get solved!
This is called commerce, and it doesn't have to be the cutthroat fixed sum game that corporate culture has made it.
The goal of business should be quality of life and prioritizing problem solving, not getting richer than the next guy.
Without turning this into another Python vs Ruby post, let me ask this:
How should someone choose between the two when the priorities are time and quality of the learning resources online? Rails has RailsforZombies and the Poignant guide. Does Django compete? Which would be more valuable on a resume?
For many folk who may not use PSN much or recently, the first concern I imagine would be to recall whether they ever provided Sony with the most sensitive things on that list.
A quick gmail search tells me that they had my mailing address and full name, but I have no idea if I ever gave them my CC or DOB or SSN or Gitmo prisoner bar code or whatever else.
I'm glad I use lastpass because I have a nice list of sites to update password info, but I imagine this process is going to take quite a while. Too bad I repeated that password so many times.
Many film cameras used to be sold with only a fixed 50mm or a 35mm lens. The restriction forced people to think about what was in or outside the field of vision. Today's cameras that have 10x zooms do not force the same consideration, and I suggest that amateur photography has suffered as a result.
A friend of mine is a house-painter by trade, and has set himself the restriction to never use a brush when he paints a canvas. This forces him to consider what he really wants and how he can get there, instead of simply smearing paint around the canvas until he gets bored.
We have too many choices these days. Getting rid of a few can make results much more deliberate.
HN is a great reference library as well as a news source and a community. The 'front page' is great for keeping your finger on the pulse, but what about more tools for finding and keeping up with subsets of the astronomical amount of information.
For example, what if you could look at all postings that have at least 10 but fewer than 30 ups? What if you could look at the posts with the most ups of all time? A data-mining point of view might accentuate the depth of the knowledge represented here.
The mystery of the PageRank algorithm is not only a defense against gaming, it's a defense against competition. Other than stylistic differences (a la Bing), it seems difficult to differentiate a new service when nobody understands the details of the standard one.
As a net addict, I regularly find myself frustrated because I can't figure out how to get meaningful information out of Google instead of sites trying to sell me. And if I can't think off the top of my head of a website that will act as a relevant portal for that kind of info, then there isn't really any alternative to Google.
At least, not that I know of yet: can anyone suggest one?
Google has done amazing things for our ability to get what we want and fast, but it also is slowly eroding our independence from it and our ability to educate ourselves by other means.
Here's hoping they prove worthy stewards once they own all the information on the planet.
They really are good shoes, especially in an urban jungle.
The trouble is that they don't provide much insulation, so anyone living in colder climates has to go back to cramming their toes in Oxford toeboxes for half the year.
This is called commerce, and it doesn't have to be the cutthroat fixed sum game that corporate culture has made it.
The goal of business should be quality of life and prioritizing problem solving, not getting richer than the next guy.
So there should totally be an idea exchange!