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36 karma · joined August 11, 2013

NY/CT, coder
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belowlightsblue··on Hey Japan, What's Up With Your Startup Culture?
The article quotes someone as saying: "Selfish, greedy, untrustworthy: That is the image of the entrepreneur in Japan since around 2000"...I don't think Startup culture in America avoided that image after the dotcom bubble and even with all of its success, there is still a lot of suspicion
belowlightsblue··on Ouya Free the Games Fund project suspended by Kickstarter
Why? Every project has inherent incentive to use Kickstarter to hype themselves and other projects have had matching-fund promises too.
belowlightsblue··on Stealing Traction: How Youtube, Paypal, AirBnB grew through piggybacking
Youtube to Myspace does not seem like the same as the other comparisons. Myspace is/was a social network and better in-page videos -- no matter where they are served from - would only make Myspace more appealing because of how they catered to music bands. to say that Youtube stole Myspace's traction is like saying imgur stole Reddit's traction when instead, it's more likely that imgur's great service accelerated Reddit's popularity (at least with memes...I'm talking quantity, not quality :)) -- and vice versa. There was no reason that couldn't have happened with myspace/youtube
belowlightsblue··on Compare headphones
AOLs and content farms are nothing new: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/02/you-may-not-like-it-b...

Here's more context about Findthebest with someone from there trying to claim that they have a large editorial team that hand edits the lists http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo

belowlightsblue··on I’m Sorry
I'm glad he's at least not trying to claim it was "satire" because that's an insult to satire. He wrote complaints that lots of SF people share and that's probably why he thought it was a great thing to publish. But there's a difference between:

1. SF has a bad homeless problem

2. Why can't SF clean up after all these dirty drunk conniving homeless people?

And being unhappy about finding a date can be handled differently than trying to blame SF's "ugly" women for acting self-confident and rational

belowlightsblue··on Reshaping New York
The NYT is doing alot of coverage about him with the elections coming up and all:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/nyregion/what-new-yorkers-...

I think jobs and the economy matter most to people and since Bloomberg was mayor during the 2008 recession, that's going to make him seem worse than he might have though he may not have been able to affect the worst of the economical situation in any way.

In the story linked to above, it says less than half of surveyed think that crime has improved under BLoomberg. That is just plain absurd no matter how you look at the stats...Bloomberg's (arguably too strong) law policies have made the city safer than it was in 2002. IT just shows how hard it is for people to remember what things were like a decade ago, due to nostalgia, etc.

Also you say he won his re-election "just barely" but that's because he bent the term limit rules for what most people considered in an illegitimate way

belowlightsblue··on Troubled Teens Make More Successful Entrepreneurs
From the article: "Using data from the March Supplements of the U.S. Census Bureau‘s Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, they look at the cognitive, noncognitive and family traits of self-employed individuals who have incorporated businesses and compare it to the characteristics of salaried workers and the self-employed who don’t have incorporated businesses."

So the population of the study is people who have incorporated businesses. So by "Troubled Teens", it means "Troubled Teens" who did well enough to incorporate a business. But that doesn't count the many troubled teens who ended up poor and/or imprisoned...hopefully parents aren't getting the idea that it's better for their kid to get in trouble if they want to be rich later

belowlightsblue··on FakeValley: 'The Onion' For Silicon Valley
In the current gold rush, there are so many hokey startups with buzzwordy derivative missions ("we're the Airbnb for Big Data ROI!") that a great satire site could be made from copying their mission statements and change a few words around. FakeValley kind of tries too hard

also: I don't think you should promote yourself as a satire site. That's kind of like going around telling everyone you're a hilarious and witty comedian.

belowlightsblue··on Ask HN: Is it ever OK to completely unleash on incompetent coworkers?
Sanity, or the appearance of, is your friend here. If this coworker is lashing out wildly, then the problem of him being bad for the team will become clear to the people who can take care of it. But it sounds like you're spending too much energy being upset by this. it's not your decision, its your manager's...this co-worker is doing enough harm without you harming yourself with resentment