colinplamondon

A shocking number of people don't realize just how bad it is there. And that there are, in fact, concentration camps of historically unimaginable sizes operating as we speak.

It's a mixed bag. That morally reprehensible money raises awareness of exactly what's going on, and just how abused their citizens are.

One wonders if, ever there were a just war, it wouldn't be to free the North Koreans.

Condescending? This is an enslaved country with concentration many times larger than anything the Nazis cooked up. It's hard to condescend to one of the great evils in history.

This seems like an unprecedented situation. They much set $25,000,000,000 on fire at the same time that they made $29,000,000,000 on a great investment.

A company makes an amazing, generation defining large bet on a startup in a fantastic market. Which pays off as one of the best investments in history.

That same company then proceeds to do _nothing_ with its actual business. It purchases a series of tiny startups that go _absolutely nowhere_, the acquired talent of which create _zero value_.

And, simultaneously, new, younger competitors start eating their lunch in every one of their established markets.

If that's not unprecedented, I'd love to hear the other example. That situation would have to be just as fascinating.

I love that there's a travel alert for the planet, but not for American cities.

Lived in Boston for the last four years, was there during the Marathon Bombing. I'm now traveling within Europe, and am pretty 100% confident it's safer somewhere like Poland or Croatia than any first tier American city.

But, really, who cares? Change of dying while commuting is catastrophic compared to a terrorist attack.

The Parisians had the right idea - day after the attacks, everyone fills up the cafes.

Which is the opposite of what we did in Boston - cower at home, while a couple kids with IEDs shut down an entire state.

Terrorists only win when the people they attack are chickenshit.

Each time the West gets hit, it gets a little harder to worry about the next one. Just like you might get into a car accident driving to work, some Islamist whackjob might blow himself up at a concert, market, or restaurant.

When the risk is going outside and doing things that involve other people, there's no different action to take as an individual. It becomes background risk.

Pretty key to have high quality mobile apps. Another big use case is having my teams be able to share passwords.

Highly useful to be able to have access groups like "team" (everyone, things like Zendesk) "team-secure" (stuff with CC's, like Amazon), "dev" (general dev accounts), and "dev-secure" (compose.io access and the like).

Makes it way faster to onboard new folks, and when people leave, to cleanly strip access and change passwords.

The open source tools don't solve for those kinds of use cases, as far as I know. Just "I have one computer, and want to store my passwords on that one computer."

This really rubs me the wrong way. Do not like the idea of my password manager bouncing around owners. Or infrastructure changes that new owners often push on the acquired company.

If there's one business I REALLY do not want to be moving about, and I want as little churn as possible for, it's a password manager.

The thing I liked about LastPass was that it seemed like the highly geeky, less startupy approach to password managers, more likely to be run for the long-term, less likely to be at risk of an acquisition.

Going to look into Dashlane.

I find this kind of analysis way more interesting than highscalability. Different audiences, but these kind of frontend-centric articles are incredibly actionable.

Worst case is a half-day of cleanup once in a year to keep your computer secure and up to date.

Most years (like this one!) there's a one-liner for Homebrew upvoted to the top of HN, and that's it.

290,000,000 speakers (including secondary speakers.) out of 7,000,000 people on the planet.

4% of the planet. If 4% of America spoke a language, most of us wouldn't be in much of a rush to localize.

Fortunately for French, the core native speakers in France are rich, and most of the planet is still poor. As the rest of the planet catches up, "curiosity" becomes more accurate over time.

From what I read, it sounded like the Green Revolution ended with what amounted to a military coup, and the military holds far more of the cards than they did beforehand.

That's just a casual, amateur take, though. I'm sure there's folks here who have a more detailed opinion.

Right now, there's a lot of bubbling neutral-to-pro-US sentiment in the younger, wealthier segments of Iran.

If we purposefully, wantonly destroy their economy without even negotiating, that disappears, and we turn potential allies into absolute enemies.

The level of currency devastation they've had since the beginning of these sanctions, and resulting unemployment, have already pushed their finances to the brink.

Normally "sane" countries (Germany, Italy, Russia WW1) that go over the brink economically tend to go batshit crazy, and put into power the worst elements from their society, and invest even more control in authoritarian hands.

I don't think anyone wants a regional power like Iran, controlling the wealth that it does with the military it has, to go bankrupt, and even worse elements to take power.

We may not like their government, but at least they're rational. ISIS shows there's far, far deeper levels of crazy just waiting to be unleashed.

TL;DR: Not being callously destructive of another country's economy, whilst negotiating in good faith, is in our national security interests.

Love it. Early stage, hard to justify optimizing send-all into 'suggest 5 people to invite'.

Total no-brainer to use a drop-in like this. Make onboarding a way better experience, captures exactly the same, if not more, value on referrals.

It'd drive me crazy if Gmail _didn't_ do that. Love the keyboard shortcuts, including and especially the ones that override. Highly productive compared to the alternative.

Same with the microphones on your computer, external monitor, tablet, and soon smartwatch.

To be effectively paranoid like the grandparent commenter, one would have to opt out of a _lot_ of convenience. If you're actually a person of interest to the point of being surveilled with an Echo, you'll be surveilled with all your other digital devices as well.

Hell - the Echo would be incredibly limited relative to those other devices. It only captures specific rooms in your home. Those other devices follow you throughout the day.

Jesus. What a horrible comment.

She crushed it starting this business, got traction, built up a community, and was getting close to scaling what was a real business, with a real business model, and real money.

It's phenomenal how much her team accomplished on that money - which is not very much for a team of 5. Until you've run a business yourself, it's hard to understand just how much overhead truly does walk on two feet.

If this company had gotten to scale, it could have provided food for hundreds of thousands of men and women, selling extra stuff laying around their closets. And that's off a glance at their site and app. If your comment was your first response to an amazing post like this, you should look in the mirror.

Everyone spies on everyone.

From the telegraph onwards, everyone has signals intelligence organizations, the sole purpose of which is to intercept foreign communications. This changes nothing.

This will launch, reduce latency for South Americans, and 10 minutes later it'll be tapped by the US, France, and everyone else who cares enough to send a submarine on over.

Agreed with that - I know that in my campaigns, I prefer having a bunch of smaller campaigns, which I can track the performance on at a very incremental level.

One twist is also that a lot of advertisers don't do CPC bids with FB. I know for Mobile Installs, the default is optimized CPM, without a specific CPM bid. Just throwing it to the FB algorithm wolves, and seeing where it lands.

I've found that has better results than CPC, CPM, or CPI bids, but, because it's entirely in the hands of Facebook, I have to watch it like a hawk. If I look away for a few days, the costs can get out of control.

One key here - eCPC dramatically ramps as a campaign goes on, given the same target demographic.

If he was targeting a demographic like women in SE Asia, 18-35, then his test campaign would have first seen cheap clicks. Facebook's algorithms would find the cheapest users within that demographic, who are the least in demand by other advertisers, for whatever reason. CPC's would be low right off the bat, with a $200-300/day campaign.

Then, when he just suddenly increased to $100,000/day, he would have absolutely tore through the cheap available impressions within a matter of minutes, leaving only the more expensive users, with much higher CPC's.

As soon as the CPC skyrocketed, he should have pulled the plug on the campaign. But, it sounds like, there was a bad mix of both him being inexperienced with online advertising (needing training in their office) and FB sales reps encouraging him to let it ride.

If he had slowly increased budgets, from $300/day to $500/day to $1,000/day, he probably would have started to see a spike in CPC as soon as he moved it up to $1,000/day, and a vertical "holy crap KILL THIS CAMPAIGN" spike in CPC when he hit $1,500/day - $2,000/day.

It's really hard to manage campaigns at that volume - and there's entire teams of people needed to manage a campaign at the level of $100,000/day.

This reminds me of those Groupon horror stories. The small businesses were wrong to not running the numbers on deals that would clearly absolutely destroy them. But, the sales people at Groupon were even more in the wrong by taking advantage of those small businesses to turn a quick profit.

That discounts the fact that in-app purchases works phenomenally for many, many companies. You may personally not like it, but the fact that IAP drives billions of dollars a year in revenue probably makes it non-idiotic for companies deciding how to monetize.

No one cares about getting your money. They care about the rate at which new users convert. Some segment of any new group of users will be violently and religiously against IAP. That's fine.

Some segment of users will also be violently and religiously against a credit card form, because they think software should be form. That's also fine. That segment just isn't going to have very much overlap with the segment of people that pay you money for services.

This is effectively a weapons system, and any country with budget can build the same system or better. To stop the NSA would be unilateral disarmament, without reason to expect others to cut back on their infowar programs.

I don't see it making much of a difference- if you've proven out your product in a reasonable private beta, your public numbers shouldn't be surprising. You go live, you see a big spike, then after a week your metrics go back to normal. No harm, no foul.

It sounds like they're going about it in a great way with Origami, and, once they have their numbers in good shape, if they were to launch publicly there'd be no downside. That they weren't able to eclipse their launch numbers (5k-ish downloads is normal for a standard TC launch) within a month is just a way of showing that they didn't have a grip on their growth before launching to the App Store.

As a note, there's a slew of reasons not to launch a "beta" app on the App Store- not least of which is that "New and Noteworthy" is really only for "New" apps and "Noteworthy" huge updates. You totally shoot yourself in the foot by taking yourself out of the running for the former.

That's not how civil disobedience usually works- there's generally some kind of punishment, and the person taking part in the disobedience takes on some risk. Here, though, the punishment was so utterly, utterly disgustingly disproportionate, that it boggles the mind. It wasn't "6 months in jail"- a bad, bad sentence, but not the end of one's life. It was years and years.

In a just system, the system will go out of its way to bend, and all the individuals in the chain, from the prosecutor to the judge to the jury, will do the legal minimum- and then push for change. In the best system, the citizens will take part in jury nullification, and save the defendant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unite...

How much money was at stake here? How many actual employees? It sounds like it was you, a friend, and his dad trying out a startup that didn't work, from the way the post was written.

There was a great video on this by Microsoft Research- basically, you have to get the lag down to 1ms for it to feel like you're really writing or moving a physical object. The iPhone 5 is 23ms according to a quick Google.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/9/2856795/microsoft-high-perf...

Someone that just spent $600 on a new tablet is probably gonna be just fine spending a few hours getting used to a new keyboard.

Haha, well played!

They're now Top 200 Grossing on iPad- seems like they managed to trip their way into one hell of a marketing strategy.

1) Bitch about not making enough money because you boned your conversion funnel.

2) Get an article written about how you don't make enough money

3) Make money!

Don't try this at home.

Because their stock has dropped?

Compare Android to Windows Phone, Android tablets to the Surface, and the Lumia to the Galaxy Nexus.

Google and their partners could have taken the high road and created their own take on what a touch screen phone OS is, but instead they took the low road and did a wholesale look and feel copy and paste job of iOS to get scale.

Copying look and feel isn't actual wrongdoing, but it's certainly not the high road.

Now Apple is taking the low road and trying to smack the fuck down Google legally, instead of taking the high road and competing on its own merits.

Both companies have taken the low road, and both companies are culpable here- no one comes out looking good in this story.

There's only two great accelerators- YC and Techstars. The falloff after that is ENORMOUS, even just going to #3, #4, and #5.

If you go out of the top 5 accelerators, you're dealing with everyone who wasn't good enough to get into a respected accelerator. Doing an accelerator that isn't in the top 5 is a mark of incompetence- it filter for the desperate who couldn't

a) Get into YC/TechStars

or

b) Build the business on their own