martian

I love that slippy maps are a commodity such that people can making art and craft them in new and wonderful ways.

There's already a nice collection of other twists on the slippy-map-as-art thing here. One more is Stamen's Pretty Maps, which does the heavy lifting in SVG and combines Flickr shapefiles in very interesting way: http://prettymaps.stamen.com/

What's your evidence of this? Have you built a large Backbone application? As it stands, your comment comes across as snide and indefensible.

The Dropbox post on passwords (and their password strength estimation tool) is much better at describing what strong passwords actually are.

http://tech.dropbox.com/?p=165

The advice from LinkedIn like "Don't use a word from the dictionary" and "Substitute numbers for letters that look similar (for example, substitute “0″ for “o” or “3″ for “E”." are security theater.

San Francisco

Software Engineer, Front-end and back-end engineers

Thumbtack is hiring awesome software engineers to transform the way services are bought and sold online. We're Amazon for services. A quarter of a million small businesses have listed on Thumbtack, and we connect those businesses with new customers everyday. We're well on our way to being profitable and growing quickly.

Our team is young and passionate and dedicated to good engineering. We have extensive benefits, including a in-house chef, a gorgeous office in SOMA, and money to spend on Thumbtack services every month.

Our delicious food culture was recently the top story on Inc.com.

Apply at http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

Or email chris at thumbtack with any questions.

Congrats to the Etsy team. Their engineering blog "Code as Craft" is an excellent resource for startups.

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/

Software Engineer - San Francisco, CA - Thumbtack

We're looking for full time software engineers, mobile engineers, and interaction designers.

Our delicious company food culture has been featured on Inc.com and inspires many Bay-area startups. We eat family style meals everyday cooked in-house by our gourmet chef.

We recently raised a Series A and are growing rapidly. Over 250,000 small businesses have already signed up.

We can offer visas if you live abroad and are willing to relocate.

thumbtack.com/jobs or email chris at thumbtack.

Interesting: Google+ borrows Twitter's awful grammar: "Who to follow."

The "google" variable is often not loaded for people who use Adblock or similar extensions that block social media plugins. You can simply check that "google" exists before running the code that depends on it:

    if (typeof google !== "undefined") {
        // run google code here
        google.magic();
    }

San Francisco

Software Engineer, Front-end Developer

Thumbtack is hiring awesome software engineers to transform the way services are bought and sold online. We're Amazon for services. A quarter of a million small businesses have listed on Thumbtack, and we connect those businesses with new customers everyday. We're well on our way to being profitable and growing quickly.

Our team is young and passionate and dedicated to good engineering. We have extensive benefits, including a in-house chef, a gorgeous office in SOMA, and money to spend on Thumbtack services every month.

Our delicious food culture was recently the top story on Inc.com.

Apply at http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

Or email chris at thumbtack with any questions.

If website backgrounds really bother you (and surely process.org isn't the only culprit), try using the Reader button in the top bar of Mobile Safari. Or try using ihackernews.com, there's an "Article Text" link that works very well for just showing you the body of an article on a simple white background.

This is free because to install it, you must put a link on your page back to MixPanel. MixPanel likes links because Google likes links: it increases the domain authority and PageRank for MixPanel. You'll notice that alt text in the link back to www.pixpanel.com is "Real Time Web Analytics", surely a set of keywords that MixPanel is aiming to own in search.

This is a very clever and subtle SEO move that provides real benefit to users at the same time.

Mixpanel also has an A/B split testing calculator: https://mixpanel.com/labs/split-test-calculator

San Francisco

Software Engineer, Front-end Developer

Thumbtack is hiring awesome software engineers to transform the way services are bought and sold online. We're Amazon for services. A quarter of a million small businesses have listed on Thumbtack, and we connect those businesses with new customers everyday. We're well on our way to being profitable and growing quickly.

Our team is young and passionate and dedicated to good engineering. We have extensive benefits, including a in-house chef, a gorgeous office in SOMA, and money to spend on Thumbtack services every month.

Our delicious food culture is currently the top story on Inc.com.

Apply at http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

Or email chris at thumbtack with any questions.

San Francisco, CA. Full time engineer.

Thumbtack is Amazon for services. A quarter of a million businesses have listed with us, and we're connecting them with local consumers in a very real way.

We recently raised $4.5MM in Series A funding.

We have an fun, intelligent team and eat gourmet home-cooked meals everyday. We work in Python, PHP, Javascript.

More info at http://thumbtack.com/jobs

OR email chris at thumbtack.

Noting that this article is from 2009, I think it makes some valid points. By owning people's entry to the internet, Google has a monopoly.

But I don't think it's so much a monopoly on search that's interesting, as it is a monopoly on entry. Google is everyone's front door to the Internet. There are a few geeks like us who know about URLs and TLDs, but generally people just google what they're looking for.

And on that note, I think there are other monopolistic gates to the internet being opened. Like the portals of old, Facebook is setting itself up to be the other Front Door on the Internet. Part of that is wrapped in what people care about most: other people. So it makes sense that you go to Google for things, places, and ideas; and you go to Facebook for people.

Google realized it was missing that category of nouns and built Google+. Facebook knows it's missing a lot beyond people and is looking to expand into other nounish categories, but it's also looking to expand into verbs: listen, watch, read.

I don't think Google has a monopoly forever -- I think it's fighting tooth and nail to stay at the top. I think there is fierce competition going on at all levels here, Facebook being the obvious example. And let's not forget Apple, Comcast, and other media providers who are using their control of media experiences to leverage control over people's experience of the Internet.

The future is going to be interesting!

Great point. This is something we're thinking really hard about.

Great, thanks for clarifying. The problem you're describing is essentially one of volume, if I'm understanding correctly. As you might imagine, increasing volume is one of our top priorities. If you have further specific thoughts or feedback, please let me know.

When you're building a marketplace, it's important to solve the chicken and egg problem. Search Google and you'll see how Groupon, Airbnb, etc. have solved this problem. Thumbtack's approach was to build its merchant base first, then to leverage that merchant base to attract consumers.

So I think you're incorrect to say the "size" of a company can only be measured in terms of the number of buyers. For younger companies, you have to look at which side of the marketplace they are building first and measure that. For mature companies, I think your critique makes sense: it does make sense to look at the overall size of the marketplace, rather than just one side of it.

(I'm an engineer at Thumbtack.) Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry to hear you say that you had a difficult time, since usually we hear the exact opposite. Of course, any transaction between two real people always is burdened by the complexities of a real interaction.

If you have specific feedback on what we can do better, we'd love to hear it -- either here or you can email me directly: chris at thumbtack.

ZeroCater is great! We have used them a few times and been impressed with the quality and variety. My only complaint would be that take-out food can be greasy and unhealthy sometimes. It'd be great if ZeroCater could cater to the "healthnut" crowd.

My company usually has healthy, seasonal lunches cooked by an in-house chef, but when she is not available we use ZeroCater. The discrepancy between healthy home-cooked food and sort-of health catered food is more visible when switching back and forth.

That said, the ZeroCater guys are great and I'm quite impressed with the service. If your startup isn't eating together yet, you should. It's definitely worth the cost!

San Francisco, CA (SOMA)

Thumbtack - Marketplace for local services

Wrapping up a series A round and expanding rapidly. We're looking to build product and scale web/mobile applications. We're looking for front-end and back-end engineers, as well as interaction designers. If you can program for the modern web and are looking to change the world, this might be a good place for you. Bonus: we also have a phenomenal chef who cooks mouth-watering meals every day.

thumbtack.com/jobs or email me: chris at.

My startup has an in-house chef. It is the best investment we have made. Employees are happy, morale is high, we eat healthy food, and stay late to have a family-style dinner. When we make it big, I'm going to be stoked to share profits with her. :-)

One of my colleagues takes pictures of our food and puts them up here: http://thumbtackfood.tumblr.com/

From the Simple FAQ:

Q: Are you like Mint?

A: No. ... Also, we hate pie charts.

Couldn't agree more.

This seems relevant (from HN a couple weeks ago):

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering/googlebot-makes-post-re...

Looks more like imgtotable. Interesting nevertheless.

I have the latest Chrome on Mac and am seeing the SSL Error. Cert information is here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/122722/backyard_io_certificate.png

I'm an engineer at Thumbtack. And yes: we have noticed that Googlebot does seem to obey robots.txt even when issuing these AJAX requests.

Easy to minify with Google Closure in a Makefile, all you need is curl:

  build/project_min.js: build/project.js
    rm -f $@
    curl -s --data-urlencode 'js_code@build/project.js' --data-urlencode 'output_format=text' --data-urlencode 'output_info=compiled_code' http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/compile >> $@

h/t @enaeseth, edited for formatting

I think what is particularly interesting about the data surfaced in this article is the baseline prices from Groupon et al are so grossly exaggerated in this particular vertical (service industry).

For the service industry in particular, hourly rates can vary drastically by geography and type of business, whereas for spas, restaurants, or other store-front businesses, it's clear whether or not you're getting an actual deal/coupon because you can compare the deal to the base menu or pricing packages.

San Francisco - Software Engineer

Thumbtack.com is an marketplace startup that connects people with local service professionals.

Great team, well-backed, offices in SOMA, a personal chef who cooks daily meals for us.

Learn more at http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

Or email chris at thumbtack for more info.

[edited with contact info]