Hacker News Reader

kra34on Unintentionally Hilarious Interview with Tinder's CEO

Can you imagine if Tinder was IPO'ing with him as the CEO?

Fred Wilson recently wrote a blog post about this:

http://avc.com/2015/10/negative-gross-margins/

A lot of companies will fail because their investors will lose patience and no longer support subsidized pricing.

I enjoy the VC capital community subsidizing my life style, however its best not to think about the source of their funding when getting food delivered to your house from 10 miles away for 99c.

kra34on The viability of JavaScript frameworks on mobile

That has not been my experience, but if you had a large enough engineering team, lots of churn, and bad management / development practices I could definitely see that developing into an issue.

kra34on The viability of JavaScript frameworks on mobile

or you could just write regular Javascript. Browsers seem to be pretty good at handling Javascript, CSS, and HTML. The default size of vanilla js is actually 0 KB and that's not even gzipped.

kra34on Default Alive or Default Dead?

http://blog.samaltman.com/

I'd say three of his last four posts are more negative than he has been historically. I've also observed an increasing number of articles about properly calculating financials, unit economics, and hiring "killer sales teams." I don't know that it means anything, but there does seem to more of that kind of chatter - and not from the buzzfeed "Bubble!!!!!!" kind of sources that its been pouring from for years.

kra34on Default Alive or Default Dead?

It's interesting to see the tone change from Paul Graham and Sam Altman in the last couple of months, its almost like somebody finally bought them a calculator.

kra34on Do not let your CDN betray you: Use Subresource Integrity

Wouldn't it be faster (browser being able to use resource) to just skip the CDN and host the resources yourself?

kra34on Latest Snowden Doc Shows NSA Spied on German Intelligence

I don't understand what you mean when you say "spy on American citizens" do you mean court order/warrant approved surveillance? Even your local police can do that, its generally how criminal investigations are conducted.

kra34on Amazon Flex

Seriously, traffic isn't that bad?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1&v=Cds9uQMQAnA

and also the governor of the state wrote an oped about how bad Baltimore city is at being a city:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/bs-ed-hogan-baltimo...

I have lived in Baltimore for over 10 years. The roads are in terrible shape, there are only two streets to get across town and they are jammed 12 hours a day. 95 is under heavy construction and the entry points into the city from 95 no longer support the volume of traffic.

kra34on Amazon Flex

Are Uber lyft and everyone other one of those companies pushing the same costs out to their drivers?

kra34on Oyster is shutting down

It would be nice if somebody built a Product Hunt list for these since their UI is much nicer than tumblr - "A curated list of exits!"

kra34on Stop using React for everything

Yeah not exactly a well reasoned article about the strengths and weaknesses (these really do exist) of using React or X Other Framework. I went back and actually read it.

The CEO of the Meteor Dev group gave the following presentation recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G2SMVIUNNk

He indirectly touches on some of those probably 25 minutes into the talk.

kra34on Stop using React for everything

I don't even have to read the article to know this is going to get down-voted into obscurity. It's like mom always said if you don't have something nice to say about this week's popular javascript framework, don't say anything at all (or else...)

PS This week's framework is actually Falcor

kra34on Netflix Releases Falcor Developer Preview

Unfortunately, the presenter says "earl" when referencing a URL so it takes multiple tries to get through the video.

kra34on Why $53M Wasn't Enough to Scale Good Eggs

The first time around it was called "The New Economy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_economy

kra34on Ask HN: Do you aspire to be a venture capitalist?

I think they prefer to be called robber barons these days

kra34on Instagram co-founder on search, and co-engineering inside the Facebook empire

>>>>> The example we like to play with internally is Halloween. It would be interesting if you were to see who are all the people posting Halloween costumes, and what’s the most popular costume. That would be an interesting use case if we had really great neural networks and machine learning. But right now we’re mostly using the textual content of people’s captions and their accounts.

Machine learning's most brilliant application to date

kra34on I thought The Social Network was a superhero movie until I went to the Valley

I don't think anybody ever said a young white male software engineer will have a hard time fitting in Silicon Valley.

kra34on Ask HN: Ok you've built a rudimentary prototype – how would you proceed next?

http://www.tabbedout.com/

When I was looking at this awhile ago, these guys had gotten pretty far with the concept. I think they had a blog article detailing why POS companies were a pain to work with and in some cases very expensive (they charge partner companies for access to their "APIs")

A business plan might be a good idea. Who is going to pay for the service, are you going to charge the bars or the consumer or both?

OpenTable is also doing this now for restaurants they have the added advantage of having a dedicated PC with their software in each restaurant already.

kra34on Instacat – the kitten delivery service

It's currently the #1 Product Hunt startup of the day

kra34on Ask HN: Are we in the middle of yet another tech bubble?

We are in a global asset bubble, not specifically a tech bubble. People like to highlight tech valuations because the general public is familiar with the companies.

Click Bait Headline: "COMPANY WITH NO PROFIT WORTH $1.5 BILLION, THE END IS NIGH!"

The valuations are divorced from the future earnings of most of the companies, but so are real estate prices in many cities around the world. So sure, we're in a "tech bubble" but its all part of a shared economic fantasy so it probably doesn't matter.

kra34on Ambitious teenagers are flooding into San Francisco

"...he rebuilt Yo's backend. He's baller."

I wonder what he did with the other 23.5 hours that day...

kra34on Germans, still outraged by NSA spying, learn their country may have helped

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]

Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Captain Renault: Oh, thank you very much.

kra34on Show HN: The Loft Club – Monthly access to top restaurants in your city

About the only thing I can't pay somebody to do for me these days is post on Hacker News. Billion $ idea <- that one is free.

kra34on Secret Shuts Down

How much do Unicorn horns fetch on the black market?

kra34on Show HN: A random startup generator

How many of these are Y Combinator backed companies?

kra34on Postmortem of Venture-Backed Startup, Sonar

You can't ask that kind of question here anymore

kra34on Gas Valet will pick up your car and fill your tank

This is pretty similar to my startup "Mailboxer" everybody knows getting a letter to your mailbox is like climbing Mt. Everest these days, so we provide that as a service. You launch the Mailboxer app and one our dedicated professional Mailboxers will come to your house, pick up your letter, and then walk it to your mailbox. The service is completely free, but if you want premium features like putting the flag up we charge a small fee.

kra34on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2015)

Aren't you guys a live streaming video company recently acquired by Twitter?