What if we designed public infrastructure facilities with solving other problems in mind that actually built public support. For example, parking structures with new public parks/soccer fields on top can garner more support than just a simple concrete structure proposal. For these access hubs, maybe we can build them as part of a public toilet structure, god knows we need these in San Francisco.
Trump's presidency won't simply be about the direct benefit to Thiel's existing investments and bets on the table like Palantir. I believe that the greatest opportunity that Trump's presidency will create is through disruption to a whole host of industries. If you're a VC, you are probably already looking at areas that there will be massive privatization like education, health care, etc. These create new business opportunities for an entrepreneur like Thiel to make plays in.
Finally looked at it and it's because the address is generically "Mountain View, CA" in Google Places. I tried to suggest an edit to give it a more precise address but it wasn't one of the available options. Perhaps YC asked for their address to not be listed so random people don't show up to pitch.
When hosts cancel on you, their calendar gets blocked for those dates and a notice is automatically posted to their reviews that they cancelled on a guest. These are there to prevent this sort of behavior you are describing. Hosts that violate these rules frequently will get banned.
Google has never been an engineering company, it's a search company with an engineering-focused culture and an ad-driven monetization model.
Please don't paint broad unsubstantiated strokes over all "non-developers and non-software engineers". You mention Facebook as an example that's not engineering focused but fail to mention that their equity structure is such that Mark Zuckerberg has control effectively through the votes his shares represent which means MZ, an engineer/hacker, is responsible for the decisions of the company.
Google is not a company whose mission it is to preserve people's privacy. They are out to solve search and organize information and in order to reach their goals, they have to find a way to attract the best talent in the world. This requires making tradeoffs in order to get the capital required to invest in changing the world in the way they think will be better.
Farecast and subsequent Bing Travel employee here: I had already moved on by the time the decision was made to discontinue the fare prediction service but I think it was mostly due to the amount of work it took to maintain a high accuracy rate and the large amounts of data we had to ingest to do so. Over time, there were less people from the original team working on it and the data options were limited (ITA was a major source of data) so it was discontinued. Glad to see we were ahead of our time!
I would check out the Houzz app. The design is clean and simple but the reviews are the best I have ever seen for an app at this scale, especially the ratio of 5 star reviews on the app which suggests to me that they have designed something that works really well for their target audience both aesthetically and functionally.
I've worked with companies before that only gave credit for a fraction of revenue/orders driven by brand terms. They did a study on what % of brand SEM terms were cannibalizing against the organic listing and only gave credit for what they believed to be accretive.
This study (http://searchengineland.com/google-research-even-if-you-rank...) is a bit old and possibly biased (since sponsored by Google) but when I worked in SEM the experience we had was the same which was the top organic position + the top paid position netted overall more traffic to our site than with just the organic position alone. The other considerations are:
1) Brand SEM terms are cheap - if you own the brand, especially something like Squarespace, your ad will have a high quality score and will thus pay a much lower CPC than a competitor trying to vie for eyeballs with your brand name as a keyword. This means that brand terms generally are pretty cheap to buy.
2) Real estate ownership - The more real estate on the page you own the more click share you will get. This will keep other organic listings from getting click share which may mean your competitors will get less traffic off of searches for you.
3) Control over message - Ads provide a high degree of creative control which means you can change the copy and also add on Ad Extensions like sitelinks, app download buttons, "click to call" buttons, etc. These are all things that are harder to control on your organic listing.
I have the same idea, how are we going to push the human race to new limits without some pioneers who are willing to exceed our mortal boundaries with the help of science.
I noticed that since I have iMessage synced to my Macbook, if I ever lost my laptop and someone tried to hack my accounts, they would get the 2FA access code on the laptop they stole.
Sometimes the same information can be much better expressed or presented by high quality sources that are often paywalled (NYTimes, WSJ, etc.) I don't doubt that the HN audience probably has more disposable income than the general internet but it's more likely that our reading habits tend to lean towards these paywalled sources.
The difference is Hipmunk is a metasearch site and relies on the connectivity it gets from travel agencies and airlines directly to power their price feeds and then you book with an agency/airline directly. Chase rewards portal is probably acting as a booking agent so may have access to prices/itineraries that are not found on metasearch sites.
Actually, coming from a marketing perspective, this model is sort of like the Kickstarter model. Those who take a risk with a logo before the design firm has been established with a reputation will get a high discount factor but as more clients buy logo, the designer establishes a track record and can thus command higher prices since they can show a past history of sales/clients.
The cause and effect one is kind of interesting to me, it's almost like having a life coach/accountant that gives it to you straight and keeps you on track. For example, what if it knew you got a penalty fee for being late on paying your phone bill and it knew you bought a six pack of beer last week which caused you to not have enough money? Maybe it can berate you and let you know that the six pack of beer > no money in your account > late payment > late fee > in debt and broke? Can an app be heartless? This one has potential.
Help me out here, I really never got wash.io or rinse or any of those services. I'm assuming the target audience was millenials who have never stepped foot inside a dry cleaner and realized that many of them offer "pick up, wash & fold" services. No fancy app I'm sure but the core of the service existed. The comparisons made to "Uber" were not applicable in my opinion because there wasn't some type of laundry cartel controlling laundry medallions resulting in poor laundry services at high prices. Anyways, I'll go back to washing and folding my own laundry which provides some zen time in an otherwise hectic day.
It's okay that the marginal successes don't upend the world, the writer simply is asking if those of us in the valley are "disrupting" the right problems for the right populations. A marginal amount of time-savings for a high-income earner in having their car parking woes solved might be economically more viable than working on a problem that is less sexy but potentially has significantly less impact on actual improvement to people's lives.
I don't think it's odd because there is now a direct conflict between Uber's future direction (autonomous cars for hire) and Google X's self driving car project.
Regardless of any claims about a possible Chinese wall between Google Ventures (GV) and other Alphabet divisions, Uber is right to limit information access to direct competitors even if they are investors/advisors.
I can see how the logic around this went: There have been some negative press from folks who worked on the trending team which probably pissed Facebook off. Theoretically, clicking on a trending topic would bring up the latest news articles posted and provide additional information/context.
The reality is that I am seeing a lot more tabloid-esque topics that seem like they might be relevant but are not once I click through.
Yesterday, a trending topic for me was #mcchicken which I thought oh maybe McDonald's released a new chicken sandwich or some type of food/health news. Instead, it was trending because some guy basically stuck his penis in a mcchicken sandwich and posted a video of it. Previously, I would have expected human editors to either deem this unnewsworthy or at least provide a better one word description than #mcchicken maybe like #guyhassexwithmcchicken.
Anyways, I'm sure it will get better over time but I am missing the old module. I thought the descriptions were succinct and well written.
Global events just need to be triggered based on their geodata. They can even use dynamic triggers like if a lot of players are online, find a central location to spawn a Quest/Challenge and alert everyone in the app.
These global events I think are key to keep things fresh. They just need background notifications to alert players who are in a specific area. The global events don't have to be a big new Pokemon monster but that would definitely be fun to show all the trainers who are currently battling the monster. There should be a time limit on when you have to defeat the monster to earn the prize which encourages people to get out there.
There could also be fun challenges like "Magikarp invasion!" - 400 Magikarp have invaded Fisherman's Wharf. They need to all be caught in the next hour or else they'll threaten native species.
Create some fun quests and challenges and randomize where they spawn and make them time limited.