dzohrob

UPDATE: To everyone worried about their privacy on AngelList: We’re sorry. Thanks for all your feedback.

We’ve made more changes:

1) We stopped using the first-person on all emails. We wrote that first-person notification literally 5 years ago when we had a few thousand users, and we never re-visited it. It was pretty stupid. Now they all clearly come from AngelList.

2) We won’t send notifications to companies when you add them to a project. We used to because the project shows up on the company profile too. But it’s not what people expect, so we stopped, and we stopped showing the projects on company profiles too.

Thanks again.

Dave

AngelList

Hi there,

I’m Dave and I work at AngelList on our Talent platform. Please accept our sincere apologies for what happened here.

Sending an email without giving you a heads-up or control over its content was wrong. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it:

* We’ve made it clearer that tagging a company on a project may notify them by email.

* We’ve revised the project tagging email to clarify that it’s automatically generated by AngelList.

* We’re looking through all emails we send on behalf of our users to make sure that a) it’s clear when an action may generate an email notification, and b) any automatically generated notifications come directly from AngelList.

As long as you keep your profile up-to-date by tagging your current and previous employers, we won't show them you’re looking for a job— they won’t see your name or resume appear when using our recruiting tools.

Again, please accept our apologies. We’re working to make this better. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns -- dave@angel.co.

Thanks, dave

Hey, I run AngelList's jobs platform. If you could give me details on the recruiters that spammed you, I'd really appreciate it (dave@angel.co). Either way, thanks for the mention.

Hi there, I run AngelList Talent. I'm really sorry to hear about your bad experience.

Our guidelines require companies to list fair and accurate compensation [1]. We receive and act upon candidates' reports of bad company behavior -- from unprofessionalism to salaries not matching the ranges they've posted -- every day. Many companies who get reported are banned from using the service. And to help combat this specific problem, I've recently (in the last month) made our job posting form much more explicit about our rules around compensation and recruiters.

Your suggestion that we accept reviews from candidates and employees is a good one -- it's on our to-do list for the next quarter. I think it'll go a long way towards solving this problem.

We can't catch every job or every bad actor -- there are about 17,000 active listings on the site right now, with many more posted each day. But we're working to improve the experience for both sides, and we rely both on algorithms and reports from users like you to make that happen.

I'd really like to hear more about your specific situation. If you care to share, ping me at dave@angel.co -- I'm based in NYC and have a vested interest in making sure our marketplace operates well here.

Thanks for your time and for bringing this to our attention.

[1] angel.co/help/talent#rules

Can anyone explain to me what "full democracy" means in this context? From the page:

"It’s on. Wire is perfect for staying connected with any group. Create a conversation, name it as you wish, and add people — your groups will be taking off whether they’re about work, family or fun. Oh, and Wire groups are full democracy."

The original Blippy team is now working on Tophatter.com — http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/tophatter-iphone/

Blippy.com seems to be run by a team unrelated to the original Blippy folks.

This is super-helpful, thanks for posting!

One quick suggestion: it would be great to be able to save the numbers you've punched in so you can share a URL with someone (e.g., spouse, parents) next time the rent v. buy discussion comes up.

I think the blog is actually http://www.datagenetics.com/blog.html -- I made the same mistake while compiling this post :)

EDIT: Looks like I lost my fix in the post as well. Fixed. Thanks everyone.

We're definitely going to implement something like this; thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks!

We're not scraping much data from other sites yet -- we wanted to focus on the core experience of "read what your friends are reading." We plan on taking advantage of more data sources in the future, though I don't think any Facebook Social Reader apps have open APIs.

Thanks! We bought it from its "original" owner. We had the .it domain but thought it was worth it go for the .com.

Thanks for checking it out.

We don't ask for permission to post to your Facebook feed, so FB can't change anything there. Facebook definitely tracks the last time you used an app -- they expose it to you via the Application Settings tab (http://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications). I don't know what else they're tracking behind the scenes though. That's why we offer a non-Facebook login option.

Hi HN, we'd love to get your feedback on the product we've been working on. Read a bit more about why we built it here: http://blog.lookmark.com/post/31927814893/why-we-built-lookm...

Happy to answer questions/get feedback here or via email -- team@lookmark.com. Thanks for checking it out.

congrats to Mike and the card.io team!

The problem is that you're thinking of extensions as files, which most users don't understand. They want an extension; they don't care how it's delivered and they have no idea what an auto-update source is.

I have a button on my website that says "Install extension." I don't tell them it's a link to a .CRX file; that's an implementation detail. If you asked any of my users whether they had downloaded a file (let alone what its extension is), most couldn't tell you. Similarly, the Chrome Web Store has buttons that say "Add to Chrome," not "Download Trusted .CRX File."

Thank you, I hadn't come across this yet. This should mitigate the changes to the user flow.

I don't have the stats yet because I haven't yet made the change. With the inline installation that Justin mentions above (thanks, I hadn't seen that yet), I'd guess that it'd be a wash.

Still, it makes me nervous to be building a startup around a platform that can make such major changes so quickly.

The complaints are about a major change occurring with little warning.

For context, I've spent the last 2 months working on an extension that asks users to install from our site during signup. Making them install through the Web Store will increase confusion (why am I no longer on CoolWebsite.com?) and hurt conversion rates.

I agree with both of you; it feels fundamentally egocentric to broadcast one's thoughts on the web. But it's been an interesting exercise for me on many levels.

The feedback you get from friends and strangers can be valuable - like this discussion. And clear writing == clear thinking. I find that in the process of writing I edit and re-edit my thoughts and sometimes change my mind. That's helpful in and of itself.

As for public-ness making it difficult to quit -- many people (PG included) have written about this [1]. My goal in making my work public is not to benefit from this social pressure, though that would be a nice side-effect.

I want to document my hard work, and ensure that the good parts of what I work on don't die.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

I agree that time for heads-down coding is very important. My point was more about one's overall career -- that not contributing publicly to the industry can be detrimental.

Even if it takes a long time for your stealthy startup to launch, it can be beneficial to write about your experiences and/or open-source a cool project.

Glad to hear it rings true for you as well. I'm not speaking at conferences yet, but my experiences have been overwhelmingly positive.

Hint: click the "Shuffle" icon in the upper-right. It's addictive.

We don't have a lot of listings in Vancouver because our jobs section is so new... and we need to improve our search UI. In the meantime you can see the jobs we do have here: http://angel.co/jobs/in/vancouver

Are you paying people regardless of whether they receive/accept a job offer from you?

I don't understand - all actual purchases go through mandatory, non-customizable Apple UI. There's a "Confirm your In-App Purchase" AlertView, which will also trigger the entry of your iTunes password if you haven't purchased recently. It would be very difficult to misunderstand the purpose of these dialogs. Am I missing something?

AFAIK the "drop-in" membership isn't full yet, just the dedicated desks. The common space is beautiful and well-designed; there are details that aren't finished (I think more couches are going in soon) but the vibe is nice and I've already met some nice NYC folks there.

It also works in Italian and Spanish, and sorta works in French -- I'm sure it has to do with the phonemes in each language and how the languages are implemented in the text-to-speech algorithm.

so who's going, and what are you working on?

Funny, I lived in SF for 6 years and just moved to NYC as well, for similar reasons... but I haven't felt the same about the tech scene, maybe because I just don't know enough people.

Any decent cafe in SF is full of startup folks, for better or for worse -- I've only overheard similar convo at the Ace Hotel.