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hornbaker

2,083 karma · joined October 16, 2011

I'm a serial tech entrepreneur. Have done a couple EIR stints at Sequoia and co-founded a YC company. Spent 9 years in the Valley and currently live in Austin, where I work from home on various projects.
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hornbaker··on Censored Photographs of FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps
Most of them were Japanese Americans, born in America. One wonders why German Americans weren't given similar treatment.
hornbaker··on I am an investor in The Style Club. Or, at least, I thought I was
Exactly. Cuban and Shark Tank will still be able to back out of this deal and stay squeaky clean, assuming Howard Marks' story holds up.

The parties who will get screwed are The Style Club (more specifically the CEO), and Marks, who should have kept quiet and let her make the company a huge success with Cuban's help before coming forward with the dirt. He had the nut hole card but he flashed it too early.

hornbaker··on How to Grow
Same. Was really annoying, and I closed the tab without reading the article.
hornbaker··on Blueprint – A React UI toolkit for the web
The framework, while polished, lacks any responsive grid components. A bit of a glaring omission imho, in this age of Bootstrap and Semantic-UI giving you a responsive grid out of the box.
hornbaker··on Snapchat Seeks to Raise as Much as $4B in IPO
Themselves in the mirror, duh.
hornbaker··on Show HN: WikiRoulette – Randomly browse Wikipedia
Nice interface, but gosh that makes me feel dumb. So much I don't know.

Could be the basis for a nice party game, along the lines of Trivial Pursuit.

hornbaker··on Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
My bet is GOOG. They need a streaming newsfeed product in which to insert ads, especially on mobile where FB is killing it.
hornbaker··on Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
My bet is GOOG. They need a streaming newsfeed product in which to insert ads.
hornbaker··on Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
Google's long-game response to RapGenius: http://imgur.com/a/TLOuX
hornbaker··on Show HN: Wagstarter – just launched after 6 wks dev, feedback needed
Thank you for your feedback, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Pet insurance is certainly an option for low-income pet owners, but for whatever reason it hasn't taken hold in the US, where less than 1% of pets are covered. Vets have a somewhat negative impression of it, as it tends to be overly restrictive and, of course, doesn't cover pre-existing conditions.

Crowdfunding healthcare for pets is a fairly popular thing on GoFundMe (50M monthly users, only slightly lower traffic than Kickstarter), Indiegogo, and YouCaring. We think it's a unique and active enough niche to deserve its own, dedicated site, where the funds go directly to vets so as to better avoid scammers who just "claim" their pet is sick.

As with any crowdfunding model, most of our marketing is done by the pet owners (to their friends and family) and the vets providing the care (to their other clientele), so we're not dependent on inspiring strangers to donate.

hornbaker··on Show HN: Wagstarter – just launched after 6 wks dev, feedback needed
Thank you as well.
hornbaker··on Show HN: Wagstarter – just launched after 6 wks dev, feedback needed
Thanks, appreciate that feedback.
hornbaker··on Show HN: Wagstarter – just launched after 6 wks dev, feedback needed
My cofounder and I were vet school classmates. Wagstarter is a labor of love that I've always wanted to build, so in August I finally got busy on it.

I would appreciate any and all feedback, no matter how harsh, especially on design, copy, and overall feeling you get from the site.

It's really hard getting initial traction on something like this, so if you like Wagstarter, I would appreciate you sharing it with your friends.

hornbaker··on The French Number – Connect to a random French person and talk about anything
frenchconnection.io is available: https://www.nic.io/go/newfast/frenchconnection.io
hornbaker··on My @JFK Twitter account “has been suspended and will not be restored”
In a perfect world, Twitter would restore your account, and JFK airport would hire you as SVP Customer Service.
hornbaker··on Show HN: Amazon Search on Steroids
JungleSearch or JungleHunter would be decent compromises.
hornbaker··on Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring
"Don't be evil if someone explicitly asks you to not be evil."
hornbaker··on Users spend more minutes per day in Pokémon Go than Facebook
Last I saw, Nintendo's market cap was up $9B since the launch of PG.
hornbaker··on Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
Busy devs aren't going to do a competitive services search... they're going to use the first tool they find / hear about. Focus on SEO, SEM, offer a free demo mode with watermarks, then charge around $5-10/mo recurring for unlimited usage for solo dev (maybe $20-30 for team use), and you'll be golden.
hornbaker··on Keep your identity small (2009)
To be fair, the JS world has changed considerably since 2009.
hornbaker··on Firebase expands to become a unified app platform
Big +1 from me, as I'm working on a large Web app with Firebase and continually hit blocks where I need server logic/events. Read the announcement full of hope, then felt let down.

What's the point of BaaS if you still need another B to power it?

hornbaker··on Theranos Executive to Depart Amid Regulatory Probes
Someone should build a Patreon for Monks.
hornbaker··on Don’t Blame Silicon Valley for Theranos
Holmes was a family friend of the Drapers, and his investment was a token amount. I doubt whether he did ANY due dili on that one, and find it hard to hold that against him.
hornbaker··on Mathematicians mapped “Game of Thrones” relationship to find the main character
This would be interesting to run on the HN community, or any popular forum.
hornbaker··on Cruise
Traction trumps almost everything.
hornbaker··on DNS Outage at DigitalOcean
dnsmadeeasy for around 8 years now
hornbaker··on Mobile phones are 'cooking' men's sperm
The Tin Cup(tm).
hornbaker··on Uninstalling Facebook app saves up to 15% of iPhone battery life
iPhone 6+ here. Facebook isn't in my top 15 battery users for last 7 days (lowest 5 on the list take 1% each), even though it's been open in the background the whole time and I check in there on average once daily. In short, not a problem for me.

Like parent says, make sure you turn OFF "Background App Refresh" for the FB app.

hornbaker··on Requiem for GitHub
He's laying out the strategy of what will kill Github - the Psychopath Code. It could have been made clearer, so I suspect many will read it the wrong way.
hornbaker··on LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bubble
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