HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

apollo

304 karma · joined June 29, 2008

submissionscomments
apollo··on Lessons from Pixar: Innovation through collective creativity
I think this was derived from Ed Catmull's talk at Stanford.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc

apollo··on 4chan's Chris Poole: Facebook & Google Are Doing It Wrong
So why require Facebook to register on Canvas?
apollo··on [dead]
What does this mean for the PayPal Adaptive Payments API and marketplaces that rely on it such as tinypay.me?
apollo··on Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
1) Provide an api (or release a dataset) and let people experiment with new ranking schemes.

2) The influence of your votes on ranking could be correlated to your relative importance in the community. You could do this with a simple PageRank where nodes are users and edges are votes.

apollo··on The Groupon Bubble is Going Burst Tech
Ebay is a deceptive example; auctions inherently have powerful network effects. I think Amazon might be a slightly better example: tons of competition but still a lot of money to be made. There can be many winners in this market, and Groupon will probably be the biggest winner.
apollo··on How to Beat Procrastination
As your first sentence indicates, in this scenario you have specific, attainable goals. Just getting to that point goes a long way towards beating procrastination.
apollo··on Equity in startups: Cap tables for Google, Apple, Genentech, Netscape, etc
Bill Gates (44.2%) , Pierre Omidyar (32.5%), and Larry Ellison (30.6%) are the top three in terms of Pre-IPO ownership. I wonder how they managed that.

Also, Microsoft only had 5.4% VC ownership pre-IPO.

apollo··on Register a Business Today
If you live in California there's an annual minimum franchise tax of $800, plus whatever annual fees are charged by the state you incorporate your LLC in.
apollo··on Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google
This may be a bit of a tangent, but I want to see the results of the VC system survey.
apollo··on Which start-up inspired you most in 2010?
Groupon, because they found a simple multi-billion dollar business hiding in plain sight.
apollo··on The Real Problem with Waiting for Superman
In terms of actual solutions, I think programs like KIPP are promising. If someone can demonstrate the right way to run a school system on a small scale, we can learn from it and encourage adoption of those changes nationally.
apollo··on Silicon Valley at a Cross Roads: Entertainment or Science?
Sarah specifically notes "This is not a zero-sum game. Both waves will find funding," so she agrees with you (despite the headline).

I think this is worth talking about though, since Thiel has signaled that Founder's Fund is transitioning to "hard tech" like space/robotics/ai/biotech. I agree with Thiel's assertion that the internet is no longer a contrarian investment.

apollo··on Poll: Why don't you have your email in your HN profile?
Ah, I should've been clearer: I meant putting your email in the "about" field for others to see.
apollo··on Gmail Creator: Facebook Has The Potential To Be Worth More Than Google
I think this is the reasoning behind the Facebook Questions product that they're trying out right now. If it works, it's a way to harvest intent.
apollo··on Welcome to the Pit of Despair...
Jacques, I'm curious as to where you put your effort in terms of marketing (contacting people to get backlinks, SEO optimization, etc) and in the end, what were the main sources of that steady growth in the second graph? Or did you just ignore marketing and work on your product?
apollo··on Google Web spam - Gabriel Weinberg's Blog
Yahoo's goal with BOSS is to fragment the search market; Google is so far ahead that Yahoo knows they can't compete head-on.

Google doesn't want the search market to be fragmented; they want to dominate the market. I think that's why Google doesn't have a good search API offering.

apollo··on Ask HN: Could HN make it as a business?
I think HN could charge a lot for a job board. I think this is the site with the highest concentration of people I would want to hire.
apollo··on What people want (according to Google Suggest)
At first I thought the numbers were number of searches, but they're not. For example, according to AdWords, "how can i be on made" is searched less than 10 times a month globally. The numbers shown are number of results.
apollo··on Android – Now Ported On The iPhone
The decision to do bootcamp on Mac was strategic because there was a ton of software that was windows-only, and for many people a windows pc was necessary even if their primary computer was a mac.

In the case of mobile phones, Apple is way ahead in terms of third party software, so I think in their eyes allowing double-booting will not improve the iphone substantially.

apollo··on Ask HN: ODBC driver using websockets?
It's possible to do it that way, but it adds some annoying constraints. If you're accessing data locally, it would have to go through a remote server, which causes latency and privacy concerns.
apollo··on Ask HN: Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s?
Reed Hastings founded Netflix at age 37, Peter Thiel co-founded Paypal at age 31, Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn at age 35.
apollo··on Aaron Swartz shows his FBI file
Mr. Swartz is known to frequent "Hacker News," an underground forum operated by the "partner in crime" of convicted computer criminal Robert Tappan Morris.
apollo··on Ask HN: Monitoring historical server resource usage on linux?
What do you use to generate graphs?
apollo··on Ask HN: Monitoring historical server resource usage on linux?
Free, but feel free to recommend proprietary solutions; I'm curious about what's out there
apollo··on Good bank account for a startup?
If I'm running a website and I just happen to live in California, does that count as operating a business in California?
apollo··on Good bank account for a startup?
I'm in a similar situation and I just wanted to share the little hangup I ran into:

I have a Delaware LLC and I live in California. When I tried applying for a Wells Fargo account in California they said I need a Foreign Qualification, which also means I would have to pay the California minimum franchise tax of $800/year.

I'm sure there's an easy way around this but I just set it aside because it's not a priority for me.

apollo··on List of Layoffs and Job Cuts by Industry and Employers [flash]
Other additions to the errata:

* Pfizer listed twice in Pharma

* "Macy" should be "Macy's"

apollo··on All the Texts on Financial Engineering You Could Ever Want
The difference is that there is enough demand for airplanes/ships to overcome these events. That kind of demand doesn't seem to exist for Zeppelins, probably because they are so slow.
apollo··on How I Reimplemented My Shopping Cart To Sell More Software, w/ Code
Good work, I admire your approach.
apollo··on Picturesurf launches: Dead-Simple Photo Galleries For Bloggers
How do they monetize this? I don't see any monetizing currently.
Page 1 of 2Next →