mikeklaas

As someone who writes an html content extractor, you have no idea how much I hate you.

We launched an android version of our app (Zite) on Thursday.

For 1.5 days, users were unable to find us with a search for "zite" because google was silently correctly to "site". I estimate we lost between 70-90% of potential downloads during that timeframe.

Seems amateurish and affectedly geometric to my eye. Good effort, but not really suitable for serious use.

For anyone who's trying this, I recommend basing your effort on factor models (i.e., the thing that won the netflix prize). It works very well for us at Zite.

(Content models are the other, probably less interesting, 50% of the solution.)

As someone with a negative reaction to this idea, I think your characterization is off base. Nor is it a problem of fairness—I don't care who yc accepts nor am I interested in participating in yc.

I have a negative reaction because although I agree with the principle of funding people in general, I'm skeptical of the idea of people who "want to be entrepreneurs" rather than people who become entrepreneurs to achieve something specific. (I've already made one comment to this effect that was downvoted to oblivion.)

It's not that ideas are worthwhile and are what you should get into yc. I am skeptical that a good founder wouldn't be able to come up with scads of potential ways they want to change the world.

Hrmph. Startups are a means, not an end.

The biggest reason is that most css properties ignore fractional px values—you can't draw a .5px border, for instance.

Thanks. Now they'll just make us do both.

That's disingenuous: if every millisecond counted, then you'd be developing apps natively instead of using a web bridge.

Clearly, there is a tradeoff to be made between usability&portability and speed. To be fair, I think the camera example is not a good one: at Zite we use web<->native api for lots of things that performance is really important for since they are frequent (logging, timing, anything called frequently)

My schadenfreude gland really needs to know the purchase price.

Is that font Buttermilk by Jessica Hische?

Unrelatedly, here at Zite we use HipChat and it's pretty awesome, especially since we have offices in two countries.

Obviously, any kind of IM will "work" as a collaboration tool, but having a polished experience really matters. The persistence is key (start up hipchat and it'll show the conversation before you joined). Also, tons of little touches like being able to copy&paste images from your clipboard directly into chat.

A simpler way to do this is to keep stories around on the home page that continue to receive comments

It's TechCrunch.

The advice to "never be first to state a number" should really be "never divulge your current/previous salary".

Coke costs all of 25c/can in bulk. Even 10 cans a day is only 2.50

Macbook Pros went from 5 to 7-8 hours usual time on a charge by making the batteries non-(trivially) removable. You can also pay a modest fee to have the battery replaced, so there's no need to replace your device, as you suggest.

Same as all other skills: give examples from your past where you demonstrate the relevant skill (and don't explicitly say that you have it)

If FFTW were invented today, it would stand for Fourier For The Win

You can get almost anywhere a hipster would want to go in sf without worrying about the hills. It's easy to go around them for the most part, and barring a few exceptions, mostly low-density residential on the hills themselves.

Yeah, the /fl/, /ffl/ ligatures in that font are atrocious.

Hoefler Text has much nicer ones: http://imgur.com/ofE3Z

Sarno's book is a… difficult read for a person inclined to think rationally.

I recommend reading the entire contents of conquerrsi.com (gone, but still accessible on archive.org), thinking about that while your read sarno.

Just find a former technical founder that was by necessity forced to learn all these skills.

That's how I became solid (but not expert-level) in distributed systems, machine learning, web development, UX/UI design, and app dev.

Even for large teams, having people who have a deep understanding of all areas of work is underrated.

Tried this with a previous startup. Soft-launched an iterated on the idea. A few months later, started pitching the idea to press. The reaction we got was very negative—no-one wanted to cover us unless there was "news". We had already launched so there wasn't anything "new" to report. We had to invent features to put in the product and sell that "story" (it worked, sort of: people wrote about us but reported on the new feature rather than the fact that we existed).

I recommend putting some sort of beta-wall or limited access on your launch if you're going to do this, if only for the excuse of being able to announce public access later. I wish PR tricks like this weren't necessary, but they really are.

The vision of the initial creator often needs refinement to achieve its highest impact.

Another explanation is that is it very difficult to gauge someone's programming ability from a technical interview. Asking theory questions is a useful (albeit imperfect) proxy.

She started at MIT at 18 (or 19) and is now 23. She should be done her degree (or close to it) by now.

It's weird that most of the article consisted of "android doesn't suck as much as it used to"

I think it's… "win"

How is it "more prone to issues"? Have you have significant experience in an indentation-significant language like python? As someone who has written 100k's of lines of code in python, I'm surprised how rarely issues arise in practice.

The thing is, indentation needs to be correct in "brace" languages for them to be understood correctly, anyway. The famous "dangling if" problem for instance:

  if (condition) 
      x = 1
      y = 2

The better objection to indentation significance, in my opinion, is that it makes it very difficult to find an acceptable syntax for anonymous blocks (which is the main reason python doesn't have them, I reckon).