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tomkit

333 karma · joined March 28, 2007

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tomkit··on Show HN: Open-source platform for customer-facing Salesforce integrations
Merge (and other companies who take a unified API approach) are great for integrating many tools at the same time, but are not suited for going deep in a few critical integrations like Salesforce.

Many B2B SaaS products require deeper integrations and more customizability beyond what a common data model supports (e.g. custom objects). Supaglue is designed to solve for these use cases.

tomkit··on Which Categories of Seed Startups Are Thriving? Which Aren't?
Interesting, but it would be more interesting to see these charts alongside a 5-10 yr returns graphs in the same said categories
tomkit··on Who Are My Investors?
You can't. What's needed is a framework and agreed-upon policy of what is acceptable due diligence in the community when taking investment money. Varying degrees of "organicness" for startups - like what you see in the meat section at Whole Foods.
tomkit··on Who Are My Investors?
Honorable, but it could also be a slippery slope: how far back do you look? If an LP, or investor in general, uses their personally earned money, but they earned it through capital gains from tainted money - let’s say from stock in a company with human rights issues - do you ask about that and if so do you take their investment?

If you only look at one degree, ie are your direct investors’ money clean, you could also be targeted for laziness in the “supply chain” of your investors’ money. This is similar to problems with blood diamonds, organic foods, unethical coffee etc.

What's needed is a framework and policy in the community for what's acceptable due diligence.

tomkit··on Uber is launching Uber Rent, a rental car service with Getaround
These models work if you have a small portion of users contributing (in this case providing cars). This is true for services like Wikipedia, etc.
tomkit··on Uber Agrees on Southeast Asian Sale to Grab
When the creator of that video uses hyperbole throughout, one should know to look elsewhere for research/analysis (hopefully primary sources).
tomkit··on Uber Agrees on Southeast Asian Sale to Grab
In a lot of SEA and EMEA markets road signs, signals, traffic lights, etc. are often non-existent, wrong or broken. Intersections may have 10-20 signs all oriented in a non-standard position.

Throw in motorists and bicyclists that are constantly swerving between lanes and inches from cars. Seeing current videos of how self-driving cars react, it would constantly be jerking in different directions.

There are also lots of local habits that self-driving cars would need to be trained to do, eg in Nepal when in a two lane and you spot an oncoming car, you turn on your right blinker to signal you see each other and can pass safely.

tomkit··on Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers
I'm breaking a 4 yr HN commenting-hiatus to post this: it's a bit disappointing to see how the quality of HN comments has deteriorated over the years. Virtually all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber. This is a plead to the HN moderators to continue to iterate on your product to improve the quality of the comments.
tomkit··on Facebook buys Whatsapp for $19B: Value and Pricing Perspectives
> "Why don't we sell ads"

There's nothing preventing them from data-mining messages and stripping out identifiable information (like what Google does w/ Gmail) to better target ads in other services.

tomkit··on Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy
Photos allow you to discriminate which moment in time you want to convey to people. You can take and retake photos until you distill it to the right scene. Dead simple postprocess editing, e.g. filters, allowed you to enhance that even further.

Videos don't work the same way. Trying to distill the zeitgeist into a video is (24FPS * 15sec) times more work. Without a rich set of postprocess editing tools, i.e. what filters did for photos, that are equally dead-simple, the fantasy-aspiration of what instagram did for photos simply isn't there.

Sure, the trailer instagram showed for the introduction of videos had the same emotional and fantasy components in it that filters brought to photos, except they did a crap ton of postprocessing work on it to get it to that stage. Contrast this with when they showcase photos and filters - they must have done little or no work. Unless the app itself can create the level of videos that instagram showcased, instagram video has brought upon itself the death of fantasy.

tomkit··on Foxconn to hire 3,000 to support Firefox OS and software development
The vast majority of that 1m+ employees are low-skilled wage laborers. Finding 3000 high-skill engineers is definitely a monstrous task. Twitter is 7+ years old and they're only at ~1600 employees about half of which are engineers.
tomkit··on Tourist.js: really flexible tours by Easel
We use Backbone as our frontend framework at my startup. A few months ago we evaluated guided-tour libraries such as Joyride, Bootstrap Tour and others. We liked Joyride at the time because it was declarative with some simple global setup and teardown callbacks, but it quickly became apparent it wasn't sophisticated enough for a rich web app where, in Backbone's paradigm, you're waiting for sync events and other events before continuing through the guided tour. We ended up having to fork and modify Joyride to support the behavior we wanted. This lib looks like a promising generalized version of what we had to fork Joyride to do!
tomkit··on Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success
I loved Ang Lee's own words: http://whatshihsaid.com/2013/02/26/ang-lee-a-never-ending-dr... (which is a link within this article).
tomkit··on Facebook Just Obscured App Reporting
I love the PR spin on appdata.com's frontpage:

"In an effort to improve and enhance our services, we are launching new site features..."

tomkit··on Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum
I think it's been about a year since he gave his Python talk at Dropbox. I suppose they also used that opportunity to begin to recruit him.
tomkit··on Steam releases Big Picture mode
Seems like Apple hasn't mastered video streaming compression as well as OnLive. OnLive seemed pretty playable to me when I tried it.
tomkit··on Steam releases Big Picture mode
I haven't tried AppleTV's Airplay, but I think it just mirrors your desktop correct? So theoretically you could just run Steam's Big Picture Mode off of a Mac and use AirPlay to stream it to your TV?
tomkit··on Google acquires BufferBox (YC S12)
Who is liable for the security of the package at these stations? In a normal exchange, it is the merchant up until delivery to a residence/office (or signature). In this case, is the station operator liable for stolen/lost goods? For the German one it looks like it's operated by the delivery company (DHL), but in the case of third party operators, e.g. Buffer Box, I'm assuming Buffer Box is liable?
tomkit··on Anatomy of a Native Feeling HTML5 iOS App
I actually think the app is pretty well made; I didn't notice too many of the problems that the other people are critiquing when viewed on my iPhone 5.

Having said that, the bigger question is: why do all that custom work when you can make a native one much quicker and more easily?

I think what this app shows is the lack of a HTML5 framework to quickly put together mobile apps that feel native the way you can with the iOS SDK or Android SDK. In the HTML5 world there are a lot of frameworks and libraries to create a mobile website, but there isn't one that lets you make a native-feeling web app. There are a lot of disparate pieces addressing different issues (PhoneGap/Titanium for native app launching, Bootstrap/Foundation for UI controls, fastclick implementation for faster tap response times, removing the URL header, hiding browser scroll bars, ...).

tomkit··on $49 Personal Genome at 23andme (incognito windows until you get the best price)
I think it's an A/B test as well. I saw $49, $149 and $299.
tomkit··on Netflix CEO: Amazon Losing Up to $1 Billion a Year on Streaming Video
I guess Bezos is really serious when he tells shareholders his company is willing to not maximize profit in the short term for long term investments.
tomkit··on Migrating a large JavaScript project from DOM spaghetti to Backbone.js
Totally agree. It shows more of the author's initial failings and then trying to generate buzz with hot HN keywords like 'backbone'.

One file with 8500 lines could have easily been avoided with the module pattern either by handrolling it or using various libraries out there like requirejs, commonjs, etc.; backbone is not required.

tomkit··on Glitch Is Closing
I tried this game out when it was in pre-beta too. I found it novel and refreshing that there was an MMO aspect to a flash-based game, but I didn't find myself going back to the game. I have no recollection of what the aspiration was supposed to be, and like you, all I remember about the core mechanic of the game is clicking on things I see and performing various actions on them.
tomkit··on Starbucks acquires Teavana for $620 Million
I also found Teavana's teas to be adulterated with unnecessary flavors and ingredients that aren't natural to the tea. I instead prefer to go to their cousin store, Lupicia, which are usually located in the same malls. The difference is that Lupicia tries to preserve the tea's natural flavors instead of trying to "enhance" them with fruity flavors.
tomkit··on BufferBox (YC S12) launches deal with transit system
It looks like Amazon Lockers are available in SF as well. What differentiates BufferBox from Lockers?
tomkit··on Apple Keynote video for iPhone5 introduction is live
For the first 12 minutes, Tim Cook sounds like he's trying really hard to mimic Jobs's style, albeit unsuccessfully.
tomkit··on Applications Open for Winter 2013 YC Funding
Given that some people think YC is starting to see scaling problems, I wonder if they will continue the trend of growing each class size or try to keep it around the same (or maybe even try to scale it down?).
tomkit··on Zynga: forget games, let’s just do viruses
I have the same work flow.

In addition, these "OK/Yes", "OK/(auto enabled toggle)", "YES-only" dialogs are not unique to Zynga and not unique to Farmville 2; it's been around for a while. I suppose the author of the blog was only recently compelled to try out the game?

tomkit··on Apple Officially Reveals The iPhone 5
In Steve's latest bio it seemed to suggest the next iPhone would have a revolutionary design. It seems to be pretty iterative to me.
tomkit··on Quora Co-Founder Charlie Cheever Steps Back From Day-To-Day Role At The Company
+1. Super smart + humble.
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