martian

Bump continues to be one of my favorite YC startups. They have a killer team, and incredibly novel technology that allows their software to easily work across platforms and that is years ahead of where NFC is.

I'm excited also for their continued integration with storefronts and other physical locations.

I dream of a time when all I need to carry is one device and no wallet -- Bumping to pay at the local grocer would be amazing. As it is, bumping to pay with PayPal is still great, but all I see for Bump is amazing potential.

Great UI in many places, but SSL errors on their Cart.

https://www-secure.target.com/OrderItemDisplay

San Francisco - Thumbtack

Engineers wanted. We use Python and PHP. Interesting problems include machine learning and classification, website scaling, in-house analytics and experimenting, and making a beautiful and engaging user experience. Other technologies we use are Mongo, Postgres and Postgis, Puppet, EC2 and other Amazone Web Services, Twilio.

Our product helps people find and book local services -- everything from handymen and cleaners to wedding DJs and French lessons. If you've worked with small businesses before, bonus points.

Email chris at thumbtack if you have any questions.

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

PS: we have an awesome office in SOMA with a chef who cooks for us every day.

Thanks for the ODesk tip -- I'll check into it.

And I agree that the best way to win is to be the best. :-)

It's important to design, but also important to explain and defend your designs.

The sort of ideas expressed in this article help set the stage for subtle design decisions.

If you zoom out on the example you'll see it already shows the entire Earth.

http://thumbtack.github.com/rotarymaps/ (mouse wheel zoom)

I used this button 3 times today and am happier for it.

The product feels like it's lacking innovation, and among a crowd of hackers & builders, it makes sense that this article would gain traction. I've heard rumors that RIM will be adopting Android in the coming months. Regardless of this claim, a company with as much money and momentum can't be discounted so easily. It is foolish to claim that a Goliath is dead until you have his head in your hands.

Let's think for a moment about other tech giants: HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and certainly Apple --whose resurrection story is legend.

This sounds awesome, but would be better with a demo so I don't have to login with Facebook.

I understand why you chose not to use Google Analytics, but doesn't Mixpanel solve the exact problem you're attempting to solve?

San Francisco, CA - Full Time

http://thumbtack.com/jobs

Thumbtack is a marketplace for local services.

We're looking to hire an engineer. We are looking for great candidates and good culture fit rather than a specific list of qualifications. Salary, equity, health insurance are all standard. We have an in-office gym and a wonderful chef who cooks us meals every day: http://thumbtackfood.tumblr.com

We use PHP and Javascript for front-end development. Python is used for all back end processes. We've raised a round from well-known angels and have a bomber office in SOMA near BART and Caltrain.

Any questions don't hesitate to ask -- my contact info is in my profile.

TechShop in SOMA (San Francisco) has similar machinery and equipment, from the sound of it. http://techshop.ws/ A potential perk for SF-based startups could be access to shops like this. Buying all that equipment is expensive. Austin TX has a similar communal workspace http://www.makeatx.com/ and I'm sure similar spaces exist in other cities.

How does Beluga's offering differ from push notifications on any other platform? Are they actually making SMS cheaper? If so, does anyone know how?

Re the last paragraph: excellent point and sorry for the confusion -- just changed the title.

In the early 20th century Albert Munsell did a series of empirical studies to determine exactly how people see colors relative to one another. The results are expected, but fascinating.

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

This pie chart is illegible (four shades of gray?). A bar chart would have been much better.

Thumbtack is hiring engineers in San Francisco. http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

Just a hunch: I suspect they're not auto-detecting the trees, but rather relying on (amazing) tools like

http://www.urbanforestmap.org/

To clarify: Facebook was shown as the default login option, with a site-specific login available with a Javascript toggle. My test compared which login option was the default. I don't remember the specific numbers (had a lot of traffic though). Google Web Optimizer had given a 95%+ indication that the FB login was performing poorly. So I'd acknowledge issues with the test, but these numbers were convincing enough that I made the site-specific login the default from that point forward. What I did not test is whether having FB login as an option helps or hurts total signups. I suspect that this only helps but can't give any numbers.

Clearly there are lots of caveats, and the results of any experiment are going to be informed by your site, audience, and so on.

Last time I tried it I saw a significant decrease -- as much as 50% lower signups as tracked with Google Website Optimizer.

I met the Poly9 crew at a geo conference a couple years ago. They struck me as incredibly talented. Their Flash-based globe (similar to Google Earth) impressed me with its speed and responsiveness. I think they were using Papervision 3D. If I'm not mistaken, their 3d globe is still used on the ever-popular Twittervision:

http://beta.twittervision.com/?mode=3d

It's funny to me that one of Poly9's core products is in Flash, given how much Apple has done to push Flash out of its recent products.

Anyway, I'm happy for the Poly9 team. I'm sure they'll be doing amazing things with Apple.

Imagining myself as a restaurant owner, I'm confused as to how this would integrate with my existing website. Does it replace it? How do people get to the mobile version?

I suspect you have plans to move to the desktop web, too -- seems like it'd be great for restaurant owners to have a one-stop shop for all of their website needs.

Restaurant websites are definitely all over the place in terms of quality and accessibility -- seems like a solid market. Best of luck.

I used to work at a company where we used this method to tackle especially complex or politically sensitive issues. I have to say it was really effective at pull everyone together to have a constructive conversation. I wouldn't recommend it on a day-to-day basis, but for larger issues or for issues with several ideas in strong competition, this is fantastic.

It's awesome to see that more people are biking and walking, and that the government is spending money on programs to encourage this behavior.

However, this is essentially chart junk. The time spacing is not consistent, which makes comparing any two years essentially impossible. Also, this data does not take into account the growth of walking & biking per capita. The stick figures are clever but tell me less than the numbers below them. The only thing this chart really shows is that the government is spending money. Sorry GOOD, this is pretty, but you should do better.

For that matter, Google knows probably as much as any entity can ever hope to know about people's browsing behaviors. They track what sites people click from their search results, they'll know if you go back immediately to search, or try a different search, if you're not happy with the results. They have Google Analytics installed on millions of domains and know intimately the behavior of users on those sites. I really fail to see how the simplicity of a binary "like" button on opt-in pages with easily-spammable RDF tags can compete with this.

A great comparison of fonts that puts Inconsolata at the top. http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts

Inconsolata is also what I use exclusively. I make a point to install it on any new box that I'm going to be using regularly.

Does Posterous filter SEO spam? Otherwise this loophole seems like a perfect opportunity for SEO spam to start filtering in on lapsed accounts that still have some PageRank...

I am not a doctor. However: My friend was suffering some similar symptoms to what you're describing and after years of tests and trials, one doctor decided to give her some adderall and she's be glowing ever since.

Best of luck tracking this down.

Other than things mentioned here, we use an in-house graphing solution built on top of Postgres and custom views. This is great because we log almost everything and it's easy to join across users, etc.

Tableau also seems fairly promising, though it is really slow on live db queries. Does anyone here use Tableau?

The major difference seems to be platform. Xobni works with Outlook, eTacts is for Gmail. I suspect the two will have a lot of duplicated functionality.