zmitri

Enjoyed this a lot. Great starting point for anyone interested.

Believe this one works https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.550287341792003.10...

I recently had a solo art show consisting entirely of ASCII Art works based on Taylor Swift, and it was quite successful. Probably 300 people came and I'm a veritable nobody.

A bunch of young Swift fans came with their parents and it was a good introduction for some kids as to what you can do with programming

Some images: https://www.facebook.com/dmitricherniak/media_set?set=a.5502...

A video rendering I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hyfGkkFoOw

What an excellent post. Respect.

Maybe, but maybe lots of solutions like this already exist! Tweets, genius for annotations, facebook, youtube... I agree certain backers might care more about having an article published in x ways, but I think they are overestimating their usefulness and things like tweet embeds, youtube embeds, or using phantom js to render custom twitter cards with text PLUS the full length article do the same job more or less.

RapGenius has that, it's called genius.com/beta and it's cool.

I remember seeing your Citevault tool. It was dope! We talked about it a lot at my work.

I started Beacon which funds journalism online (http://beaconreader.com) — definitely don't fit into the old business model, but that's the game they are playing.

I guess I should have said "well enough." Would you personally pay for it?

I agree that the NYT is in a better position than most papers, but the reality is advertisers would rather put their spend into Facebook or something like Buzzfeed which get have a much larger audience and way more page views than the New York Times. Not only that, the tools are self-serve and the interactions they get are much more clear.

The New York Times is already a large corporation, with lots of employees, and tied to revenue streams from advertisers that are waning. I don't seehow it's like going back to Facebook or Google in that regard, because their head counts were minuscule.

Paying for an "experience" vs "content" are very different things. I definitely don't think people will pay for content, and was not trying to saying they would above.

Perhaps my understanding of business models is flawed, but this year my company will pay out millions dollars to journalists. In that regard perhaps my flawed understanding is an asset!

The future of news is not an article, nor video, nor particles, nor arbitraging the cost of a page view from advertisers vs the cost of paid distribution on Facebook (yes NYT does this) — it is finding a business model that actually works and that people want to pay for.

Let's go over some of the points brought up with that in mind:

Would you as a reader pay for more for a service that had "enhanced tools for journalists"? No.

Would you as a reader pay more for "summarization and synthesis"? Probably not, Wikipedia and Google already do this really well.

Would you as a reader pay more for "adaptive content"? No.

Newspapers (including the New York Times) are in serious trouble, and instead of playing catch up to look like a mix of every tech service, they should focus on delivering an experience that people actual want to pay for.

There is no future of news without figuring out the next model for news.

Because of how fragmented the hair industry is. In this case, Mayvenn is not into piece meal distribution—they are the "Atlantic Records" of hair and are concerned with distribution. And then, because the hair comes from India, they are flying it over the Atlantic Ocean as well.

Hmm this seems like a waste of time. Very nebulous. You should focus on building your product and users instead. If you do that and succeed at it you'll be able to get a meeting with whoever you want.

Most investments come from warm referrals or investors you meet and build a relationship with. I would be surprised if this got you a serious meeting with a partner who can make a decision.

How is this different than YC you ask? YC makes their terms clear and upfront (120k for x%) and has a whole process for reviewing all the applications you send in. Not only that, it is in YC's best interest to introduce you to other investors.

"More" doesn't necessarily mean "more successful". It's not unreasonable that government intervention creates more entrepreneurs - as a Canadian I know I can go and get tens of thousands to start my own company along with some nice tax breaks - but it doesn't mean they would produce much value or amount to anything more than a barely afloat small business.

Personally I believe anything you decide to call art is art.

I appreciate what you are saying with regards to brilliance, but experiences and emotional responses to software, code, products and anything else really don't necessitate art -- the act of declaring it art definitely does though.

Exactly correct.

Side note for companies like Indiegogo, success at attracting device makers to use their platform is key to their growth. At CES alone they have something like 14 booths.

No details whatsoever but I can across this because customers at certain banks asked why their one time charges were showing up as recurring in their bank statements. I emailed in to stripe asking what was up and they let me know it was standard practice to do that, and it would do so if I used a stripe customer.

I saw it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/help/handbook/rewards

I read too quickly though, $25 is most popular reward level, $75 is average. Either way, it shouldn't be a big deal since it's much higher :)

Took 'em long enough.

Only downside is that Amazon has smaller fees for micropayments than other payment providers at 2% + $0.05 for debit cards and 5% + $0.05 for credit.

For comparison, Stripe has a rate of 2.9% + 30¢ -- but I'm sure KS will get a better deal due to the magnitude of their throughput.

Given that the average pledge size is $25 it won't that much of a problem, but any of those $1 pledges are close to halved from KS+Stripe fees before they get to the creator.

You don't use auth and capture -- you create a customer (with the card/token) in stripe and then create a charge against the customer.

Having a customer allows you to charge the user without entering in their info each time.

EDIT: I built beaconreader.com which is a crowdfunding site and we use stripe. One thing to note about creating customers is that on the backend Stripe (and other payment providers) tells the banks that it's a recurring charge, even if only charged once, which I believe allows them not to deal with the auth and capture step. I could be wrong, but there's something like that lets processors get away with it.

Yeah I've actually emailed support about the same question and got a quick response back.

FWIW I generally have had excellent customer service experiences with Stripe. Often receiving responses within an hour after sending them at 2 am.

In fact, once an employee out of the blue sent me a mockup showing me how I might use a whole new feature, completely integrated into my sites js and html structure.

Mixtape Weezy is my jam

I tried it out. Barely functional is pretty accurate unfortunately :(

I was using it on screens though as opposed to paper.

What's an approximate range of $ raised/valuation that makes for a Black Swan seed round in your opinion? It's hard for me to understand what the implications are of this besides "don't believe the hype" without having some relative sense of that.

I just realized the Mixpanel issue might just be because I use AdBlock...

Yeah I agree. The FAQ page is a huge win. All of the content is super useful and I only ever found it before from pecking around.

Do I get to be as brutal as Kevin giving design feedback on the new site? :)

The JS affix doesn't trigger off at the bottom so the sticky nav stays fixed http://i.imgur.com/YAqGVoL.png

Mixpanel's logo is forced display:none; on the homepage so it offsets the grid http://i.imgur.com/SV2dLq8.png

Overall this redesign is absolutely fantastic.

PS. Did the valuation required to get on the homepage go up a bit?

In Waterloo I think it's possible with a seed fund that puts in 100-150k at 2 to 3M valuations before the good ones get picked up by YC.

A lot of Canadians move down to the states anyway because developer salaries are like 2-3x higher.