simonholroyd

>> It's also really hard to convince people to come work for you for no money

I think this may have been why his face dropped. If your pitch isn't convincing anyone to take a risk with their career/time on you, then the investor is going to think twice about taking a similar risk with his money.

This article really fails to answer the question its headline poses.

Another great tool to help with this process is Pivotal Labs' LicenseFinder: https://github.com/pivotal/LicenseFinder

Disclosure: I work there

I think Bostonians would take issue with your assumption:

- Boston has one of the best public transportation systems in the country (ranked #4 by Us news) [1]

- Boston and the surrounding area is very densely populated making things generally not far away. In fact, Boston is about 4x as dense as Atlanta and the surrounding cites of Cambridge and Somerville are more dense still. [2,3,4,5]

- Boston is pretty much covered in college campuses. They're in the middle of the city, edges of the city, and outskirts of the city.

[1] http://www.usnews.com/news/slideshows/the-10-best-cities-for...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge,_Massachusetts

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerville,_Massachusetts

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta

I also hold the phone this way.

The author's grip puts the home button halfway outside his "thumb zone" forcing an awkward claw whenever you need to multitask or return to the springboard. Our grip puts the home button in a much more natural position.

2014 will be the year of the ____________ .

There's got to be some better alternatives. Ideas?

Good candidates should prepare for interviews. Interviews typically require that a candidates are able to reflect on previous successes and failures and provide insights so a hiring team can review their candidacy. Failure to do show shows either:

1. lack of understanding of professional working environments (ie. interview structure)

2. lack of preparation for the interview

3. lack of ability for self-reflection

4. actual lack of any experience with which to construct even a lame story.

I'm not disagreeing with your point regarding wealth, but football is the most popular men's high school sport (by participation) in the country so your experiences aren't likely the norm. Also track, tennis and gymnastics are mostly individual sports so they're less likely to be the ones driving the same level of school-wide support and pride (logos on the masthead, trophies in the hall, etc).

Also HN readers might be unlikely to have had the average American high school experience.

You're right it's more difficult to pull off a soft launch on mobile if you're also aiming for a feature in the App Store (Apple seems to favor new-ness when selecting apps for features). I've heard of iOS apps launching into a subset of the regional app stores as a way to soft launch (ie. excluding the US store and thus preventing Apple from featuring there before the developer is ready).

If there really is a substantial difference in the quality of two software developers then that should play out in the amount of value delivered. The article lost me at:

> Conversely, what about the guy sitting in the corner who works 9 to 5, and seems to spend a lot of time reading the internet? Is he just very proficient at writing stable reliable code, or is his job just easier than everyone else’s? To the casual observer, the first chap is working really hard, the second one isn’t. Hard work is good, laziness is bad, surely?

If the brilliant developer is spending a lot of time reading the internet, never staying late, and producing the same output (minus bugs) as the weaker team, then maybe he's not providing quite as much comparative value as he thinks he is.

Note: Some discussion on here regarding sys admins. I agree the situation is different in the maintain-working-systems roles vs. the create-new-products roles.

Not sure if this is what you meant, but I don't think it's fair to call The Economist "right wingers" in the American sense, and probably not in the general sense either.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...

And on universal health care they're generally on the left.

http://www.economist.com/node/15720396

Seems curious to me that (at least by visual comparison) London looks to be about 30% larger than NYC, and NYC appears to be about the same as Paris. By population, you'd expect NYC = London > Paris. Is NYC really still that far behind in its tech scene? Does Paris have that large a tech scene? Or am I just reading the chart poorly?

the ads i've seen in the subway are from wag.com, which is indeed part of a generalized delivery service.

This doesn't seem like a very fair comparison. Most browsers account for this (by default) by using a different cursor symbol for linked text vs. non-linked text. Some also show the linked url in the browser UI also.

A web developer can override both those conventions and when they do, their links become less recognizable and their apps become less usable. Since there's no cursor on iOS touch screens, losing the visual cues is a similar problem.

[edit] You might argue that just tapping on something serves as the way to discover if a visual element is tappable on iOS. But it doesn't, as the original article states, it just makes the user wonder if something might be broken.

It's different because prior to this change, you could make an educated decision about whether to support an older version of your API based on usage of your app. When the legacy version reached some threshold percentage of your user base you could be fairly confident that you were inconveniencing a small and dwindling fraction of users and drop support.

With this change you can no longer be confident that app usage for legacy versions will always decrease. If your app suddenly becomes very popular (as most app developers are aiming for), you might have a substantial contingent of users who are on an old OS downloading an outdated version that you no longer support.

>> I'm very careful with my fingerprints.

What does that even mean? You wear gloves in public all the time? You wipe down everything you touch?

Which makes me wonder, aren't one's finger prints all over your iPhone exterior anyway. If someone steals one's phone wouldn't it be easier to dust it for prints than crack the security on the digital copy?

Priced out, but apparently also losing jobs while lower incomes gained jobs: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up/51308385

I agree with you I don't think the income gap is the cause of lower crime. Also these crime rates are dropping absolutely not per capita, right? Is there any data to show that the actual population of lower income (or even middle income) residents has dropped? All the news focuses on the variance in income distribution. NYC could be getting richer while still taking in more low income residents.

On one of the Apollo missions (11), a medal commemorating Yuri's first flight was placed on the moon by the NASA astronauts. The medal was commissioned by the British government and contained inscriptions in both English and Russian languages. It was among other items commemorating fallen astronauts/cosmonauts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin#Tributes)

I'm aware of this because my grandfather hand engraved the medal.

My team has done similar user testing in Starbucks quite a few times. Here's my $0.02: If you're willing to be bold, walk right up to people and ask, you don't need to offer free coffee or gift cards. We've found this is a better strategy for a few reasons: 1. It's cheaper. 2. It does not dramatically change the number of test users you can get in a given afternoon. And 3. You're more likely to get critical negative feedback if you dont put the users in the position of owing you for the coffee.

Why not add a link as the 3rd step in addition to the invite code? Once the app's installed on a user's device you can pass through the code via a custom url scheme and avoid the possible drop off of having a user mis-enter their code. (you'd probably still want the code there in addition for users reading the email on a non iOS device)

> For zero dollar sales of apps, you will not see any transactions reported.

Aren't most of the apps that AppGratis links to discounted to free for the day. Apple doesn't pay commission on free downloads, right?

I'm not sure why press, media, futurists insist on pushing the idea that the future of user interaction is via replicating 3-dimensional physical interaction. There's a reason the keyboard, mouse and (small) touch screen are so successful as input devices. They each create an huge degree of meaning with a high level of precision, for relatively tiny physical movements.

While a 3-d interface that mimics reality might be more intuitive to a first-time user, it is vastly less efficient for an experienced user trying to get work done. A 3-d desktop is an accurate mental model but it doesn't need to exist on a screen if it exists in my head. I can move through the z axis of my desktop faster with alt-tab than I could ever move, shuffle, re-order a stack of documents with my hands in a 3-d environment.

* EDIT: tv and movies (eg. minority report) probably have a clear incentive to favor input devices where the audience can more easily see what's happening. 3-d works better there.

I certainly sympathize with the stress, I've been there. But programmers are much more effective at resolving downtime in low stress situations, so the best strategy is neutralizing those high-stress moments and just accepting that "downtime happens".

It's interesting that you'd say the downtime was relatively overwhelming. From an outsider's view HN seems like it must be a relatively low stress site to maintain. If it goes down, YC suffers very little. Its community views the site as a public service. If anything, a few hours or even days of downtime just serves to remind the community how valued that service is (and by extension how positive our feelings towards YC are).

Is there a hidden downside to the downtime I'm missing? Worried it brings into question YC's technical chops?

well, FDR was the only President elected to more than two terms (and some pretty historically significant terms). Grover Cleveland might be more of an outlier, especially as both his two (non-consecutive) terms appear much further from the mean of his era.

EDIT: wikipedia has a section on Cleveland's vetos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland#Vetoes

Also, the Nevada Gaming Commission frowns upon changing the odds of a game while a gambler is playing (at least for slots -- I believe this is true for most other games also): http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/feb/17/dont-worry-your-...

Does anyone here know whether sexting is actually a major use for SnapChat? It's often thrown around as the 'obvious' use-case for the service, but having not tried it I'm not sure if there's any curation/content flagging or banning system.

If it is a popular use, does facebook really want that sort of content? Does facebook think that sexting users would trust them with their photos? If I were to send a sext, I'd certainly consider the (even faint) possibility that the pics could get up on facebook somehow...

And The Wire ranks below The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in "Law" themed tv shows? huh?

It seems to me, if Instagram could really only chose one metric to track it would be an app visit, not a photo upload. Instagram must have users who are primarily content creators and another larger group (probably a superset) that are content consumers. Not focusing on the actions of the content consumers would seem really bad for business since what early-stage Instagram's investors care about is eyeballs not photographs and what late-stage Instagram's advertisers care about is eyeballs not photographs.

Really Instagram probably has a few OKMs (visits, uploads, hearts, comments, follows). All of those are important and should be tracked. In their documentation and educational videos, I've not seen Mixpanel focus on visits as a key metric. I'm not sure why.

This stuck out to me too, but some googling of "Illonois" brings up a lot of census records from 1930 using that spelling. I can't find any concrete confirmation but maybe it's intentional and accurate?