ryanlchan

A similar application was to use aerogels, which are highly insulating but not reflective, as clothing insulation. I recall a number of companies have explored this in the past [1]. The issue with aeogels appears to be two-fold: firstly, they are relatively expensive to manufacture, but secondly, the resulting garments are often too warm!

[1] http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/clothing-apparel/H...

The arrest rate is also different from the incarceration rate, which is much more heavily skewed. According to Pew, black men are incarcerated at ~6.5 the rate that white men are, per capita[1].

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/06/incarceratio...

This seems quite similar to the design AOL's Alto [1] used. I actually used Alto for a while, but found that the promotional images were less helpful than the short blurbs Gmail had already for quickly figuring out if I wanted to open a message, even one promotional in nature.

[1] http://www.altomail.com

This is actually one of the tuition options that the US armed forces offers students: we pay for your schooling, and you serve in the military for an equal number of years. It's also quite common for your company to pay for business school for a promising employee as well.

For anyone looking, there are also a number of sites dedicated to just this, with a similar audience to HN. Betalist[1], Cloudlist[2], and ErliBird[3] are examples that come to mind which I've had good experiences with.

[1]: http://betali.st [2]: http://couldli.st [3]: http://erlibird.com

I think a major hurdle we have to overcome with big data is separating causation vs correlation. As the data set scales, we gain ever-increasing confidence in the correlation, but an ever more complex set of causations.

Take their House of Cards example. Netflix saw a strong correlation between David Fincher, Political Thrillers, and Kevin Spacey. Fantastic. But why? What did people like about these things? Why did this 'work'?

Let's try to replicate this decision: take great directors (Wachowski siblings), a strong cast (Emille Hirsch, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon), and nearly unlimited budget ($200m) to reboot an existing, well received franchise. Should be a hit, right? Wrong - it's a complete and utter failure known as 2008's Speed Racer.

When we say we want to be data-driven we actually mean we want to be insights-driven. We want to understanding the "Why?" from the data's "What"; it's the 'Why' which lets us know how to react next. It's easy to confuse the data's specificity with insight's certainty, but they are distinctly not the same: We can pinpoint conversions down to 6 digits of significance without having a clue why it occurs.

What we really need is Big Insight, but that's a significantly harder problem, not because we don't have the technology to create a solution, but because don't even know what the right questions are.

I'm optimistic about the possibilities of a system like IBM's Watson in helping solve this, but as it stands, Big Data's utility is giving us 99.755% certainty that we have no idea what is going on.

This is a masterpiece of a backhanded compliment. Never have I seen such elegant transitions between briefly masked contempt and half-hearted admiration. It's really stunning.

I think analyzing these acquisitions from a raw dollars-to-dollars perspective is a mistake. When doing a turnaround with a company so fundamentally troubled as Yahoo, you need more than just a few patch-in acquisitions, so that's clearly not what they are about. These moves are part of a long term investment in motivating employees, building relationships with the valley, and regaining footing in the markets that they can win.

Yeah, I'm having trouble seeing the advantage of this over the browser's native implementation: Chrome's CMD+SHIFT+I hotkey brings up a mail this page window automatically for me.

I would definitely put some effort into copywriting the main benefits into that landing page.

People forget about the amount of data LinkedIn has available to them: ConnectedHQ (the predecessor to LinkedIn Contacts) has direct access to thousands of email inboxes, Rapportive can log any time someone hovers over a new address, and millions of connections have been gleaned through 'import your contacts'.

If you really want to talk about creepy, I'm fairly sure they use your IP address to match against other people who live/work at the same location: when I created a test account with dummy information, the first contacts that were suggested to me were my roommates.

I've been thinking about this as well; the results I could find are from quite a while ago, but in general the answer is to use a reversible encryption like AES [1] along with secure storage of the encryption key [2], preferably on another server or in an isolated part of the server. Not particularly satisfying, is it...

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1878830/securly-storing-o...

[2]: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/12332/where-to-s...

The project I'm working on (http://www.musubimail.com) was originally meant to help keep in touch with professional contacts, but I've been using it for beta-user follow ups to some good success.

I made groups based on how soon I need to follow up (this week, next quarter, etc) and have them track certain labels in my Gmail inbox. If someone needs to move groups, I just flag their email with the right label and wait for the reminders.

Let me know if this is something that interests you!

This is very clearly satire. Unfortunately, satire is usually lost of this crowd.

The bit with 'free vs non-free' had me rolling.

I'm betting it's about talent acquisition.

Like you suggest, the technical part just isn't quite there. I used Summly for almost 3 months, giving it chance and chance again to impress me. It never did. The summaries were mediocre at best and commonly irrelevant, and it got deleted soon after. It's stuck at the point voice recognition is, where it works ok at time, but generally isn't worth the hassle.

Yahoo's been buying up start-ups with good talent but middling traction to do a turn-around. Stamped, Jybe, and now Summly all fit the mold. Yes, they're purchasing at a premium - it's hard to convince a young, scrappy start up founder to join a company with Yahoo's stodgy reputation. But that's exactly what they need - a new infusion of big thinkers to turn around the company.

VC shops are like most PE firms - hiring is done on a small scale by the partners themselves, typically through their private network first, then using a recruiter second. If you can't break into the network individually, try breaking in through a recruiter who specializes in tech or VC.

This reminds me: I'd love to see how many of CodeYear's sign-ups completed a term.

I have lots of friends who want to "learn to code" but get frustrated and quit. It's too easy to give up if you don't have "something bigger" continually pushing you forward.

It's small - I launched an MVP into this area recently. Business people who are inundated by email want a heavy, full-service solution like SaneBox, whereas consumers have been conditioned into thinking that everything regarding email should be free. There's not a lot of (paid) room in the market left.

This will actually happen for any extension which requires many IMAP calls, or any combination of extensions thereof. As a Gmail extension developer myself, it takes a lot of effort to be efficient about your IMAP usage to avoid these kinds of issues.

IIRC, the Gmail tema has said that when most people report of slow Gmail mailboxes, it can usually be traced back to an overload of these extensions.

I'm curious to see what happens to Amazon FPS if these product based crowd-funding apps take off. We may be in for a bit of a Paypal style crackdown debacle.

I actually spoke with the Kickstarter guys back in 2009 when I was considering branching off their idea specifically for product based ideas, thinking that it could be "Amazon for stuff that doesn't exist yet".

We all agreed that the idea should happen, but Kickstarter didn't want to do it for two reasons:

1. Their goal is to help artists succeed. They're artists themselves, and the guy who started the site's been working on this for years. It means a lot to them to help the little one-man filmmakers.

2. The risk in having products that aren't delivered on time, in the same form as envisioned, or aren't even completed was just too high. They were terrified of having a backlash of backers who thought they were purchasing a product when in fact the transaction is structured as a donation.

The second one is what makes me worried. What happens if, worst case scenario, Pebble goes bankrupt without producing any items? Who takes the hit there? Is it Amazon, Pebble, Kickstarter, or the backers? It isn't clear yet because we haven't had a high-profile failure yet. But it's only a matter of time.

Golden nugget that that Jason just starts to uncover here: the reason customers purchase your software is rarely the same reason as why you started creating the software in the first place.

As a consultant, the one-line zinger that was thrown around was that we were selling "profits at a discount". You pay us, we reduce costs or boost revenues to pay for the service ten times over. The description certainly appealed to the firm's employees; we'd like to think that our analytical rigor and probing, independent viewpoint added value. Our jobs were supporting a raw, logical, business-driven decision.

But the longer I stayed in the field, the more I realized that making money was rarely the reason a case got purchased. There were situations where a short project would've had ROI's in the tens of millions of dollars if implemented, but never got picked up.

The real product we were selling were careers. Buyers would bring in the firm to help themselves hit specific milestones or objectives they had for themselves. Did we benefit the company in achieving those? Greatly. But the reason people were willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a month were because of the coaching, the 'white-glove service', and the network a successful case would entail. They were buying a promotion to SVP, the key results which got them their own division, or the track record to shoot for the CEO spot for the next company.

Jason's tips are pragmatic - over-deliver on value so that your customer never even tries to do the math and price according to how they pay are two great ways to grease the purchasing pathway. But understanding the customer's pain and guiding them towards their aspirations will have them fighting for your service, budgets be damned.

Another alternative is also just hosting directly off S3, which, combined with cloudfront, should eliminate any possibility of folding.

A bit of a false dichotomy here.

Don't do the work because it's expected of you, because it's sexy, or because it's "interesting". Don't do it because your friends are impressed, because the pay's good, or because your friends are there.

Do it because it enables you to do what you love.

Excellent! Two quick clarifications on what I mean by "just go goddamn start it".

1. For a majority of contemporary companies, the primary risk is not technical, but market driven. In other words, your biggest problem isn't figuring out how to build the solution; it's figuring out what the solution should be in the first place. A ton of progress can be made on this front without a single line of code. 2. A startup is beset with an unceasing torrent of problems. You need a programmer for your MVP, true; but what happens when you need to start marketing? Do you go out and try to recruit an all star marketer? But wait we need sales as well - how many people do you want to go out and find? I don't mean to say that you need to be able to do everything, but figuring it out is a crucial skill to have as a founder, and this is one of the times you'll be practicing it.

Good luck!

I never said that these credentials are required (in fact I don't think they are), but that the OP implicitly believes them to be true. If you complain about the "lack of good technical cofounders" when there are 14,000 CS graduates every year and a flood of 'Ask HN: Smart developer needs job' posts springing up, you must either not be looking very hard or have ridiculously high expectations. The post is meant to highlight the ridiculousness of what many people expect of a "good" technical cofounder.

> I think your entire response is full of regurgitated garbage designed to serve the valleys current paradigm: devs are worth money - ideas are free.

Well that'd be quite ironic, as I'm on the non-technical side myself. In fact my argument is that neither of these are true. If you want to go start a start up, just go goddamn start it. Don't wait for your magic non-technical cofound to come around and solve all your problems.

Let's clarify the implicit assumption you put in there: Why is it so hard finding a good technical co-founder? It's the same reason it's hard finding a good non-technical co-founder.

With a technical co-founder you're looking for proof of skill - they've done an app on no budget, limited time, and little sleep. Twice. They scaled it singlehandedly to 20m users. They not only know Node, they're on the core team.

What a technical co-founder is looking for is the exact same proof of skill. Can you sell ice cubes to Eskimos at 50% mark up? Can you get investment just by walking down Market? Do you have customers begging you to give them the privilege of sending you their money?

I wrote a blog post about this a few days ago [1]. The tl;dr: If you want a co-founder, earn one.

[1]: http://ryanlchan.com/post/32483578213/non-technical-founders...

This is likely the in-house rebranding of Karma, a gift giving app they purchased back in May [1].

Also seems to be a play for monetization on the mobile platform. From the mashable article, linked:

At the time, Linden said that the majority of the gifts sent from the app were actually done via SMS. “The average response rate for an SMS gift is less than 60 seconds,” said Linden. “Email is four to five hours. On Facebook, it’s a day.”

[1]: http://mashable.com/2012/05/18/facebook-karma/

What worries me, more than the accuracy of the story or not, is the overwhelming level of agreement from commentators. There's a pervasive sense of cynicism blanketing the tech start up world, but for some reason we're all still in the game.

There's a certain amount of hypocrisy you have to accept. We do this to ourselves. No one on HN would think worse of themselves for achieving a $5M exit, yet we are happy to vilify those who do.

Where are the founders of the next GE? The next IBM? Those who seek to solve the fundamental problems society faces? I'm not asking about space ships and world hunger. I'm just talking about solving real, concrete, long term business problems. The ultimate filter on this is simple: If your product were to disappear, would your customers' quality of life significantly decrease?

There's a great point here - the VCs are just like any good start up, and are investing only in things that help make them more successful. The difference here is that the VCs are likely satisfied focusing on qualifying inbound leads, whereas most of the businesses we see on HN are actively trying to attract traffic with outbound messaging.

A nice looking webpage is the VC equivalent of a 'vanity metric' - sure it looks good, but does it help them source great investments? Perhaps it raises the number of views on their website, but are any of them the high-quality entrepreneurs they'd like to invest in?

Frankly, I'd think that the problem that the top VC firms is not knowing enough people, it is finding enough time to properly evaluate them all. If you're picking a VC based on their website and not their intrinsic business worth or ability to help you succeed, you probably aren't the kind of business they're looking for.

Allow a short vignette from a former academic and now management consultant.

We spent six months at a major pharmaceuticals client examining their reimbursement data. Poring over many millions of rows of transaction data and thousands of payment codes (which, of course, were unique across sales geographies), we determined the ten regions at highest risk of reimbursement collapse. R was used, maps were created, beers all around.

But almost none of it was used for the executive presentation. In fact, the only part that was included was that we had ten regions that needed fixing, and our suggestions on how to fix it. You see, the CEO was dyslexic, the chairman of the board was colorblind, and the COO was a white-boarding kind of gal, so given this audience the nuts and bolts of our advanced statistical analysis were simply irrelevant.

This is hardly surprising. If we are having so much trouble hiring people who are fluent in Big Data, how can we expect business leaders to be even conversant? With only slight exaggeration, the way you do your analysis and the visualizations that you create are not important.

Companies are demanding Big Data scientists because they suddenly have lots of data and see the term Data Scientist in the news. But what they really want is not Data Scientists, it's business insights and implications from Big Data. The customer needs 1/4" holes, but we're all arguing over which brand of laser powered diamond drill they should buy.

It's part of an increasing awareness and importance of habits in a business context. The surge in popularity for game mechanics was largely directed at creating habits for consumers, creating an entertaining and engaging use case where they didn't have to think too much. Thinking is hard.

A business, at its core, is made up of a people. Well defined processes are the equivalent of habits for a business - common practices where the expected behavior is straightforward enough that the company doesn't have to think very much. This, as you say, frees you up to be an active thinker on many other topics.

Tangible things are not the only way to add value to a start up. Popular start up methodologies, and I speak specifically of Lean Start Up and Customer Development, all have a strong focus on making sure you're building a minimum viable business, not just a minimum viable product.

However, the statistics are such that it's rare to have a start up team with the self-awareness to recognize this need connect with a non-technical person capable of satisfying it.