meterplech

The first thing I thought when reading this article is that it's a shame the author chose this topic as his way of framing the post. If you remove the focus completely from the potentially flame-war issue this is based on there is some great advice in this article.

Specifically: "When I worked at Lulu, Bob Young used to say that whenever you screw up, it's actually a tremendous opportunity to win a customer's loyalty by making it right."

Pretend the topic is a bug found or any customer job delayed/flubbed. This is a great piece of advice. Generally engineering-types focus very much on explaining what happened and not enough time on hearing the customer, apologizing, and explaining that it won't happen again. It's our natural personality as problem solvers.

But I've seen how apologizing for even a major mistake can win loyalty, get help fixing the problem, and even make deals bigger/longer. "Wait, that problem happened because we are sending the data to you in that convoluted way? We should either fix that or work together on how to make it easier for you to support it." If done right, the relationship will become more collaborative (your ultimate goal) and the customer will appreciate you more.

I think this is a terrible headline that masks an interesting philosophical debate. Especially at this community, we feel we intuitively understand that we get the convenience and social value from Facebook for $0, and we pay in our personal data they use to serve up advertisements. That to me is hardly newsworthy and a relatively uninteresting piece.

But- there is an interesting question in what is an appropriate use of our personal data w.r.t credit ratings, financial decisions, etc... Just like there are anti-discrimination laws that prevent mortgage servicers from altering policies based on race, perhaps there should be other walls to keep separate how our data can be used financially.

This is a question the NY Times should've posed instead of this clearly linkbaity uninteresting headline.

I am honestly not sure, because the author is using some serious fuzzy math, but I don't think that's what the article is saying. 100 dud 25k investments means a loss of $2.5 million. I think it is saying that if one company you invest in sells for $25million and you have a 10% stake you have covered your $2.5 million loss on 100 bad investments. That's clearly missing the point that a 25k investment is pretty much never going to grant you 10% of a startup these days... When you factor in dilution/etc... the risk/reward ratio gets a little less obvious.

I was basing my comment on this earlier comment from HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3245520

Not to personally attack at all. Honestly. But, JF- your profile says you are a developer evangelist for Microsoft. Which is one of the biggest supporters of SOPA.

Do you think it's a little unfair to provide an opportunity to pressure YC companies that use GoDaddy for their domains because of their SOPA stance while evangelizing for a company that has the same stance?

Or they pulled in 18 million over the past year but their monthly revenue is now higher, and thus on a growth trajectory to pull in much more than 18 million next year.

This also doesn't include advertising revenue to their 20 million user base.

And it's a startup... so you know, the whole idea is that it might make more in the future. I know it is a lot of money, but they are supporting 20 million users & 8 million active.

This topic reaches the frontpage on HN at least once a week. Can we avoid rehashing the same arguments? Maybe just vote these up when something original comes up.

Not to sound naive here- but why does Microsoft support this if all the others don't?

>> "It should not be that hard to take income (or labor income) and regress against educational level and get a pretty good sense of how much inequality is related to educational achievement, and how returns to education have changed. My gut feeling is it explains some of it, but education has not that much to do with the vastly increasing income share of the top 1%. One man's 'stochastic' is another's 'uncorrelated'."

I think Mankiw is actually right about the 'stochastic' returns to education- but he isn't admitting the real reason. I believe it's because the returns to going to a select few schools studying a select few things do create outsized returns. I.e, graduating from a Harvard/Stanford MBA or Law program makes it much more likely to place you top 1%. The number is institutions that this is true for is very small. In a sense, I don't think the actual 'education' is causing this stochastic return, but the people you meet and opportunities people get at the oligarchical institutions.

The HN reaction should involve posts like Amex's 0day. Look- I enjoyed reading this too. But you come to HN instead of Reddit for a reason

I think a unified queue hurts the loyalty for instant queue people. Whenever I am on instant queue and I search for a movie and see that it's not available for instant I am annoyed. You could argue that it would help convert me to DVDs- but I know that it doesn't, especially afte the recent price hike. In fact, it really just makes me think about how Netflix streaming lacks material.

If they feel the true future of their product is in streaming than I think this makes sense. They aren't trying to hold onto the low-margin DVD my mail people. They are trying to encourage more streaming customers and move forward in a drastic way.

Maybe the better way to accomplish this is to make the netflix classic website as discussed in the article include the non-streaming movies and just have people with instant queue not even see other movies.

Regardless- I don't think one queue is necessarily better.

I'm not highly educated about this. But, it seems like they are assigning a lot of deep motives to people. Maybe he just didn't want to work for a big company any longer. He is obvious very entrepreneurial and vested in the startup community.

I don't like when articles assume so much about an individual's motivation.

Can people stop talking about the effect of the stock? I get it- many of us own AAPL. This is one of the greatest entrepreneurs and CEOs ever stepping down. Let's focus on that.

I'm impressed with the list actually. It's hard to create something like this- in order to be interesting you have to pick people others would consider relevant.

There are only two picks that are obviously wrong: Reed Hastings and Mark Zuckerberg. And, it's a testament to both of them that they succeeded in challenging circumstances.

And, they did a great job picking Ballmer and Torvald. Their explanation of why Torvald is included (open-source as a movement has out-grown just his brilliance) is very prescient.

Maybe that's what they are going to use the intended 340 new hires to build. I think that a much higher priced enterprise version that included client-side encryption & much more storage than currently available could be a game-changer for the business. Wouldn't be surprised if they were already working on it

Full text of the page in case it's down:

Just over a month ago we launched our new app Discovr Apps to help you find apps for your iPhone and iPad. Everything has gone really well and we’re very excited to announce some of our most recent stats:

* In the last 4 days alone, Discovr Apps has had more than a quarter of a million new downloads (256,719 downloads in 4 days).

* In the same 4 day period we’ve served more than 4.8 million requests in the app, averaging more than 1 million requests per day.

* On a single day in that period, our users spent the equivalent total time of 9 months and 1 day using the app.

* Discovr Apps also went straight to #1 app in 17 countries including the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Germany.

* We’ve released three updates in the 6 weeks since launch, and we’re very fortunate to have an average App Store rating of 4.5 stars.

* We’ve also seen an entirely new business model emerge in the last few weeks, with lots of developers wanting to advertise in the app.

All in all, we’re completely blown away by the response. We’re a small team based in Perth, Australia, and we just can’t believe it.

Thankyou so much to everyone who has had fun with the app. We’re just getting started. Get in touch to tell us what you want to see next!

The Filter Squad Team Stu, Matt, Tamas, Ben, and Dave

I kind've hate when people say this type of thing. It reminds of high-schoolers getting annoyed when another student was disappointed with getting a B. People have different standards of success. It's true- not a ton of people will have this choice, but for the people who do this blog post could be very interesting/useful.

Just when I (and everyone else) was saying how horrible this is, I was shocked to find out the Google did something very similar to a Director of Operations named Brian Reid. They fired him 9 days before the IPO- leaving him with 119,000 unvested options at $.30 strike price. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist)

As PG suggests: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2672454... the best thing you can do is work for a company where you trust the management team and the VC's that back them. An early stage investor would almost never do such a thing because it would completely damage their ability to get access to the best deals.

Check thefunded.com for the VCs (and ask around as well) and do your best to work for good people who care about their employees and reputation.

IANAL: But, I bet Zynga ends up trying to buy them when the lawsuit settles. The huge IP threat certainly devalues the company. And regardless of their copycatting they have a big presence in a massive market that Zynga doesn't have.

I think you might be getting too specific, but I'm sad you got downvoted. I think it would be very useful to have 2 tracks of a degrees- a "computer science" more academic and algorithmic training and a "software development" with industry practice, team project focused.

We need the people who can advance the field to get the training to do that- and the people who just want to create the next great company should be able to learn those skills.

Did you read the article? While the headline is about raising an entrepreneur the advice is to raise adventurous and curious children and to provide stability and dependability. Hardly threatening ideals.

Sure- forcing your child down one path isn't right, but this advice is almost specifically not doing that. There's no 5 step plan involving a specific major or school or anything.

Why not? Could you provide some explanation to your claim?

It's a pleasure to see someone take the stand and go against the rash of blog posts and articles against Groupon.

The main point of this article is that Groupon has value in connecting the online and offline world. Even if people use Yelp to decide on a restaurant, or search Google to figure out where it is- those companies never get profits from that because the restaurant never knows what sent the customer.

Groupon is able to monetize the online to offline sale by clearly letting the business see that Groupon brought in a customer.

He also says that while the daily deal structure might be risky/dead they can easily pivot to other online to offline connections like instant deals to your phone while walking by a restaurant.

Personally, while I think that monetizing the online to offline transaction could be a huge business opportunity I don't know if I am willing to risk money on watching Groupon make the pivot. If daily deal as a model is crumbling (which many people have blogged about), then you are betting a whole lot that the database of merchants and customers can be leveraged in a new business model.

I think you are right that this is a hugely widespread problem. Does anyone know what security solutions are out there now?

Big companies better start seeking out people like tptacek and quick. More than just consulting, I think a Heroku-like product with a heavy emphasis on security (in addition to ease) could be a great product/SaaS.

Common sense is surprisingly uncommon. You've heard about Friendster falling apart because of scaling issues? Or Kozmo.com expanding to too many cities in too little time... Many companies forget to start small and test

This is very intelligently done. I'm glad they are releasing the cards to just a small set of people first to check that everything works. People are very wary of any issues with their money/with their bank and absolutely any problem at the beginning would seriously hurt user adoption. Start slow and make sure it works.

Interesting. I like your description of this. I specifically think that a problem with Facebook for this is the jokes that are still there. That is another good point. I hope the press for you guys talks about the advantages of Facebook.

This seems like it would be a bad thing for 1000memories. They need to show why they are a better platform for memories than Facebook. I can definitely see advantages to them- seems a bit classier to me at least. But why they are better than Facebook for this purpose should probably be the focal point of their marketing.

From SFGate article about the acquisition: "Skype's huge user base- more than 660 million users, including more than 120 million active of 'connected' users." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/05/12/...

The 500million user figure was from a big TechCrunch article from 2009. http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/skype-hits-521-million-user...

Again, I'm not trying to necessarily argue that this acquisition was worth it. But, there is more than technological value here. There is a huge user base here.