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The problem at Goodreads is not that they haven't made any improvements over the past decade that Amazon bought it. The problem is that they've only made technical improvements and other changes under the hood that no user ever notices. They weren't able to drive a strong product vision forward under Amazon because of poor product vision and poor organizational incentives. It should be a cautionary tale to the people who always complain about not working enough on tech debt - too much of that can be fatal too.

Amazon bought Goodreads in 2013 - if you had interviewed after the acquisition, you'd have encountered Amazon's style of interviews, which is much more professional and better than the experience you describe.

How is this computed? It looks cool, but it's difficult to use as a book discovery tool unless you know more about why it considers one book related to another.

This feels like a missed opportunity. There's a lot of data Shippo could share about USPS and that would help add more context to what's happening in the news. But it's difficult to understand anything concrete from this. It would be more helpful to see how this fits into long term trends and other context on how abnormal it is.

Wow! Q3F! That was my absolute favorite game back in the day, and I was always sad how it fell off. I couldn't get a game loaded here yet, but looking forward to it.

On the applicant side, one of the more interesting questions I've been asked (as a product manager) was something to the effect of:

"What is something you believe about product management that differs from conventional wisdom (or what the majority of other product managers believe?)"

I thought it was a good question, because it gives the chance for the candidate to talk about how they think, and it gives them a license to speak a little more honestly than they ordinarily would say in a normal interview. It shows you how much thought the person has given to their profession and how they approach their job.

If you were asking this during hiring, I think it should be done with care on your end, because I could see it easily being misinterpreted by the wrong team/interviewer.

For example, if someone came in and said something like "Compared to others, I think A/B testing is a waste of time", it would behoove you to dive in a little bit more to understand why they think that. It shouldn't be disqualifying if you're a team that does a lot of A/B testing.

  Location: San Francisco, CA
  Remote: No
  Willing to relocate: Yes (though preference for SF)
  Technologies: R, SQL, Javascript, D3.js, Python, iOS/Android, Jira, Web Analytics
  Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5aigPCvgtxAbWpyT0hNc19jMTQ/view?usp=sharing
  Email: nguyen.jnn@gmail.com

He uses node for the basic HTTP server to display the visualization, and he also uses NPM to manage dependencies for the project like TopoJSON

This is a great excuse for buying the nicest computer possible - I need to compute in the future!

This is really cool, but it is clearly heavily influenced in design by Viegas and Wattenberg's Wind Map: http://hint.fm/wind/

The creator should really acknowledge their work...

very nice, thanks. just a note - for some reason when I'm using it (safari OS X), the map keeps rendering on the bottom of the controls so you can't adjust the parameters and see the map at the same time.

This is a cool service for urban areas, but I wonder if it's really true that UPS or FedEx wouldn't just do this if it became popular. For example, I recently discovered that with FedEx you can now schedule a delivery for 5-8PM for $5, and often UPS will deliver things during the evening, I assume because people are more likely to be home then.

the "anticipated 5-star" safety rating doesn't feel very comforting...

I wish they published the raw data for this - it would be a lot easier to do analysis and visualization on it.

I really dislike these kinds of posts that try to dramatize things with statements like Uber "has no customer service." It feels like you're trying to hold up the company by stirring up the mob. You should have given them more of a chance.

I had a problem where I rode in an Uber and the GPS tweaked out, causing the distance to be 2x what it should have been. I responded to the email, and they refunded me for the difference that was overcharged within a day.

This is a great idea that I would use all the time, but I don't understand this trend of posting long blog posts of company ideas. If it's a good idea, why don't you just start working on it?

This guy left a passive-aggressive, disrespectful comment and is now trying to act innocent when he got an angry response? He should just admit his mistake instead of trying to turn this into a broader issue like bullying in the tech community.

Something seems off about this. I think we need to learn more details about what happened at the company rather than just accept some vague idea that there was a bad purchasing decision. Should a bad purchase really be able to sink a company? At an e-commerce company, shouldn't there be systems in place to make sure that this doesn't happen? I hope a another journalist digs into this.

Market share? It's been shown that even though a lot of "android" devices may be out there, the majority of use and engagement from mobile platforms is still coming from iOS.

See this post on asymco:

http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/26/the-android-engagement-para...

If you're making a mobile app, or especially something for tablets, in a lot of cases most of your users WILL be using Apple products even if it's not specific to iOS.

the yammer strategy? copy a consumer service everyone loves, market it for enterprise, sell to microsoft in a couple years...

Yeah I think you'd have to add them - but how else could it work otherwise?

Good idea, but I wish there was something we could see on the site before it was posted.

I think this could be an interesting service for the launch of Diablo 3 in a couple week. With the difficulty of Inferno mode in combination with the financial incentive of a real money auction house, hiring "mercenaries" to do quests could become a common thing.

To me, it seems like they must have omitted the iPad share on purpose to come up with this huge share number that actually doesn't matter.

I'm sure that they have the numbers - but if they included iPad, we'd probably see that the Fire's share one the overall tablet market share is some unexciting low number like 1%. Capturing a massive share of the Android tablet market isn't that important when Apple might be selling like 50 or 100 iPads for every Android tablet sold.

gg'ing when you win is so bad manner

I don't understand - why should they allow AirBnB postings in the first place? When someone comes to Craigslist, I think the assumption is that you'll be doing business on Craigslist and not through a third party site like AirBnB. Why should they allow another company to take advantage of their audience if they don't want to?

Seems cruel to release it so early PST... how many people are going to wake up this morning having missed the opportunity to buy tickets? :)

I don't agree with that analogy. To me it's more like saying that your children should have different parents through elementary/middle/high school.

With today's acquisition news, I think this is a good reminder of what happens to a lot of companies when they get acquired.

IndexTank was a good product, and it's a shame that they didn't continue with it. Yeah they open sourced everything, but that just isn't going to be the same as if the original team was still developing it.

When an acquisition happens, everyone in the valley is happy, but so often the users lose out in the end.

I think you can only say that this is a visualization of how things are in Crunchbase, not "the startup world" in general. It's ranking things based on the number of connections each thing has. For angel investors this may be a good indicator, but not necessarily for companies or VC firms.