nopassrecover

Snapjoy seems pretty cool, and the team seems like a bunch of awesome+smart people who I'd love to meet (e.g. http://www.slideshare.net/michaeldwan) but this article is terrible.

Going by Snapjoy's blog (http://blog.snapjoy.com/2012/copy/) this new copy feature seems to be "include friend albums on my timeline" which doesn't seem revolutionary or anything. If you were to pick a recent feature I think the fact they added SSL 10 days ago is just as noteworthy, and the ability to "liberate your data" and control your photos a week before that is even more interesting.

So given this there is something really odd about TechCrunch raving so unabashedly about Snapjoy. For instance, the article raves about the Copy feature, the Shuffle feature (browse your photos in random order), and then makes the claim that Snapjoy "nailed the timeline concept way before other big companies" (despite the fact they were still in private beta when Facebook launched Timeline).

The article even turns the lack of pricing plans, which seems like a point that invites legitimate criticism for a photo storage company, into a reassuring endorsement: "the future pricing plans aren’t available yet. Once they are, I think that you’ll be very impressed.".

And this all from the author (Drew Olanoff) who 2 days ago tore the new MySpace demo concepts to shreds (http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/the-mere-existence-of-a-new...) because "pretty things don't win" (despite lauding Snapjoy as being a "work of art") and then threw an ad hominem at Harrison Weber from The Next Web (Drew's former employer) in for good measure.

From what I can tell Drew doesn't have any conflicting interests (he just really likes Snapjoy and sings its praises through many articles and tweets) but this really doesn't feel like professional media.

If you haven't already you should check out the Who's Hiring threads (latest: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4463689).

Also check out AngelList (https://angel.co/) and HN Jobs (http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs).

Finally, having a link to a blog / personal page / LinkedIn never hurts either.

P.S. Email addresses are private in profiles, you'll need to add it to your "About" section.

This isn't a direct comment on the post (which is quite good) but I had a tangential thought while reading.

I get the lean startup "talk to customers first" thing, and it seems perfect for so many startups. However, I can't help feeling there are some cases where you are selling execution not innovation and therefore "show don't tell" is more important. In these cases customers already have an existing solution which they probably don't consider a pain point and you literally have to show how their lives could be better to convert.

Some off-the-cuff examples include Facebook, Google Search and Google Chrome (unlike Google Maps which could have been a lean startup), Xero, the iPod and iPhone, nearly all media/entertainment.

I still think "release early" and MVPs are essential to avoid investing more effort than you have to in order to test a hypothesis. Likewise, I still think that getting in touch with your target market early is important as well (you're going to have to reach them at some point, so better start early to make sure they actually exist). But I question whether conversion potential can be evaluated for a pain point your customers don't realise exists until they see the alternative.

Yeah I originally thought "making something similar and open-sourcing is probably not that evil", but looking at this it leverages the name you chose for Svbtle, the design is near (exactly?) pixel-perfect, it leverages the Kudos device, and apparently even copy/pastes code from the original.

If we think of Svbtle not as a blogging engine, but as a company with various commentators/channels, this is quite obviously ethically wrong, and possibly legally wrong (I can't imagine I'd last long making a site called "BBBC" and using all BBC branding).

Having said all that, it validates the demand for Svbtle - why not start charging for people to use the design (perhaps with some distinct branding to indicate they're not part of the official "Svbtle network").

// Some afterthoughts

It's clear that all design is about inspirations, and you can see the Drawar (http://drawar.com/) inspiration in Svbtle. However, just because Svbtle clearly has design influences doesn't mean simply copying Svbtle without making your own changes (just as Svbtle has) is okay, particularly when you are stealing their brand name as well.

I'm not sure if Svbtle itself is WP-based, or whether the admin section is similar, so perhaps some innovation has been made there? Nonetheless, an effort to distinguish itself (and potentially acknowledging the original influence) seems important.

No idea how many things they're testing but it does mention:

In testing, the 120-megapixel camera, combined with the computer vision algorithms, generated 810 false alarms per hour; with a human operator strapped into the EEG, that drops down to just five false alarms per hour.

cough MySpace cough

I don't think it's necessarily about perfection on release (though certainly sometimes it appears that things were never user tested).

Reading through Scott's article, he points out that it's not uncommon for an issue to be raised by many users and ignored by the product owner (my personal pet issue at the moment is Google Calendar no longer allowing me to accept invites sent to non-GMail addresses).

It might not be cost-practical to fix issues that affect a small section of your audience, but I'd like to think there's a certain qualitative aspect that comes into play, and if the issue affects 'n' people it should get a banner regardless of whether 'n' is only a minute percentage of your audience.

Both got decent upvote counts

Does anyone actually assume hotels are secure (in a sense other than good faith) though? There are so many points for allocation errors on the cards themselves, dozens of "all-access" cards available to both internal and contracted staff, and different people in every room most nights (e.g. no neighbour familiarity about an issue).

I think you're missing the point - Onity locks don't usually have this "big old manual separate bolt" as they're sold as "deadbolt inclusive".

Interested to see how Appharbor goes. I've been using a .NET MVC-based setup to achieve a similar thing here in Aus (for friends only currently as I've been relying on scraping for data). Really impressed with your customer dev efforts by the way.

I don't find this article deeply offensive or anything but agree it's not that interesting in practice (the concept is interesting) and this particular source is a low quality compilation (e.g. little personal contribution, you have to follow several links deep to find original sources).

However, I'd really like to see pg try article downvoting for a short period like the "no scores on comments" experiment. Ideally, without affecting karma negatively (so a -1 article has a 0 effect on karma). In an ideal world there could be a page that still worked for those who wanted to ignore karma downvotes and view the site as-is, but I'm not sure on pg's database structure.

Yeah was surprised a few of these names hadn't come out yet.

The price advertised on the site is $25, but when I go to buy it's $34 (which incidentally is incredibly steep for an eBook). At least where I'm from there are laws against that kind of advertising.

I wonder if there will be copyright issues to worry about. E.g. Can we expect Marvel to "DMCA" the design of physical goods (or even the goods themselves)?

I have to agree. Woz has done some cool stuff, and seems like a straight-up cool guy, but I'm not sure that confers special status to his opinions on anything and everything tech. Now having said that, I think it's mostly the media's fault for covering anything he says (e.g. http://www.news.com.au/technology/apple-co-founder-steve-woz...).

Would you level the same criticism at any of the other brands which are fairly OS-hardware tied?

Steve Yegge wrote about this recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4365255

Right, but it seems more accurate to attribute the income discrepancy to the productivity of those people, rather than "oh you went to uni here's extra money". This means we need to decide if "people who are super-productive tend to go to uni at some point" or "uni produces super-productive people".

> Do you actually believe that calling someone a sexist (however 'careless' it might be) is an attack on the male gender as a whole

Keyword being 'often' not 'always', and it's usually particular to the male/female gender issue rather than all majorities/minorities. In particular, if you read the article you'll see that both the critic who claimed sexism and the woman being critiqued throw the term "boy's clubs" about. I've found it's socially quite acceptable to imply assumed male misogyny, but maybe my 'often' should be degraded to 'sometimes'?

> A problem with reverse racism/sexism arguments is that they allow people who are secure in their positions to brush aside the racist/sexist undercurrents of society

Right, which makes it all the more important to ensure that when racism/sexism claims are made, they are made legitimately and not casually, lest they be used as examples to dismiss, or ignore, genuine issues.

> Just because people with axes to grind can use gender as a smear (an inept one, in this case) to paint someone as a sexist, doesn't make it right to imply we as males are somehow being attacked or victimized

This probably comes back to my first point, but look I think the points are orthogonal. We agree that using social issues as a smear tactic is wrong. What I've noticed (and we seem to disagree on) is that at least sometimes (though perhaps limited to the gender case as I talk about above) someone using a social smear tactic will make an appeal to the wider issue (e.g. "x is a horrible sexist, and we all know how bad those boys clubs are") to solicit agreement and rapport, thus strengthening their attack. What I get concerned with is that the implicit acceptance of this wider issue claim tends to paint the majority as collectively guilty of issues which should be identified on an individual basis, which leads to more of the "us vs them" mentality that we're trying to eliminate.

Without a lot of prior context, this seems like a clear-headed rebuttal to an otherwise pretty low ad hominem attack.

On a specific note, to characterise someone as sexist because they disagree with someone who happens to be a woman is in my opinion itself one of the most egregious examples of both sexism (for reasons I'll detail) and libel (for the damaging political and social impact of being branded with such a label).

First, throwing the term 'sexist' around carelessly undermines genuine claims of sexism. Second, it attempts to not only target an individual as sexist, but often the male gender as a whole as being part of a "misogynistic boys-club", in turn implying that masculine identity itself is inherently wrong. Third, it undermines genuine gender equality - if people are concerned about their criticisms being perceived as sexist they will refrain from open and honest critique which is the hallmark of colleagues and equals. Fourth, it assumes (paternalistically) a gender role for women as "poor persecuted girls" who need protecting from criticism and attack. Consequently, sexual inequality is perpetuated - after all, if this same criticism had been targeted at a male journalist would we expect to see responses such as "you're only picking on him because he's a man"?

There are plenty of genuine cases of sexism (against male, female, and other gender identities) which emerge out of the obsolescence of traditional social roles. Leveraging the political sensitivity of this important issue to attack an opponent is pretty low.

Interesting case here for carjackers. You're Google car probably won't floor it in the middle of the night through a red light when an armed gang approaches your car. Then again I guess that's what "manual" is for.

> Visa's market research suggests a significant increase in Visa usage and Visa brand value among consumers aware of their Olympic sponsorship.

Couldn't this be that heavy-Visa users notice the company's sponsorship and usage more generally? This doesn't really prove that Olympics sponsorship increases usage.

> The same report found Visa’s brand equity was higher among consumers who were aware of Visa’s sponsorship.

Again, couldn't it just be that the kinds of people who notice that Visa sponsors things are the kinds of people who already like Visa? This doesn't establish that sponsoring the Olympics helps Visa.

Wouldn't someone notice if the cable went out of commission for 10 minutes while they spliced?

Sure, I can work at home too

I found I could get better than 2:1 against extortionist fairly easily by mixing up my strategy as well.

This is actually a really good article, including easily missed gems like the demos that the author put together (e.g. http://s3.boskent.com/prisoners-dilemma/fixed.html and http://s3.boskent.com/prisoners-dilemma/titfer.html)

I find it somewhat interesting that the Secret Service protects bills issued by the Federal Reserve which is nominatively a "private" entity.

Few rhetorical questions:

* I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that customer-driven development is key, so who were you building this for and why were they interested?

* What are they doing to solve their problem at the moment and how is your solution better?

* What evidence did you have that this was a good idea?

* What evidence do you have now that this is a bad idea?

* Why does it have to be friends - can you facilitate spontaneous meetups with strangers (ideally with similar interests and values)?

* Why does it have to be spontaneous - could it connect people who will agree to meet [sometime today/this week/by the end of month]?

* Why do you "spam" people - why not have people collectively opt-in with a "I'm free" marker (with various [free to anyone|free to friends])? Bonus points if you can align calendars to suggest a free time (why Google doesn't do this I'm not sure).

* Is "spontaneous meetups" the right way to sell the idea? What about [coffee-with-interesting-people/speed-dating-in-your-lunch-hour/try-something-new-every-week/never-eat-alone-again/get-fit-with-strangers]?

The thing is, listening to the early SO podcasts it was clear Jeff gave a lot of credit to the mechanics of the site. Clearly (and I'm pretty sure Joel gathered this) it was the combined critical mass from their blogs and the viral effect which led to a significant portion of the community allowing the site to become a "standard".