huangm

We're actually using the Twitter Streaming API, which has pretty high limits even with access levels lower than the full firehose.

Thanks for the suggestions - it's certainly an issue we're thinking about and looking to improve.

Also, d3.js is a pleasure to work with. Really appreciate all the work you've put into it.

Did you actually read the article you linked? The article and the fund are quite consistent.

Thiel argues that the economic growth and tech breakthroughs of the past few decades are being taken for granted, that not enough people are taking on the ambitious projects needed to realize a future that we all assume is coming.

This initiative is him putting money behind his words.

It depends on your view of what makes the world a better place.

For tech startups, the distribution of world-changing impact probably closely follows the distribution of investment returns. If it's extremely bimodal, then it makes sense to concentrate on generating big wins.

Dropbox was not the first mover [1]. In fact, their entrance into the market for cloud storage/sync is in a way analogous to Google's entrance into search.

You're second point sounds right. But to me, Dropbox has always been about the UX and convenience rather than the cost / space.

I think it will be interesting to see what Google launches.

[1] See this slide for CEO Drew Houston's humorous take on this: http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lesson...

Both true points, but not sure what you mean by "actually".

In the UK, there is http://lovefilm.com

Also interesting: http://zediva.com

Most people behave differently in "near-mode" and "far-mode".

I'm more willing to commit to donate $20 to charity 6 months from now, than I am to cough up a $20 this instant.

SwipeGood (and BoA's keep the change program) try to short-circuit this cognitive bias by getting you to commit now, but pay incrementally.

We heavily adapted http://moochart.coneri.se/ for the graph.

I'd argue that looking at polarization is a good way to detect such movies, but that not all such movies are polarizing.

You'll have to forgive slightly imprecise language. This post was in response to the noise around the blogosphere that Hollywood has become too conservative, and is targeting reliable niches (as you point out).

We think one interesting way to observe the above is via polarization.

This was an intentional choice. It attempts to fight duplicate questions by forcing users to see the search results for their question before asking it.

I don't claim this to be the right design choice, but it is worth noting that there are trade-offs to consider. Optimizing for "ease of asking new questions by new users" is probably not optimal.

Here's the transcript:

-----------------------

I went to my boss and said to him, “You know, I’m going to go do this crazy thing and I’m going to start this company selling books online.” This was something that I had already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context, but then he said, “Let’s go on a walk.” And, we went on a two hour walk in Central Park in New York City and the conclusion of that was this. He said, “You know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” He convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision.

So, I went away and was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision. I had already talked to my wife about this, and she was very supportive and said, “Look, you know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do.” It’s true she had married this fairly stable guy in a stable career path, and now he wanted to go do this crazy thing, but she was 100 percent supportive. So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.”

So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that’s very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, “What will I think at that time?” it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

Pithy, but wrong.

They might not be themselves differentiators, but they are indicators of a differentiated understanding of how to design a good Q & A site that elicits high quality content from high quality contributers.

Technology is no longer the only differentiator. We've moved far enough "up the stack" that there are lots of ways to differentiate in consumer internet beyond better algorithms.

Do Craigslist, Facebook, or Twitter have anything that's, in your opinion, "differentiated"?

I have to wonder if a lot of the people criticizing this blog post actually read the whole thing.

Note the title: Things I learned. She's posting about her internship experience and the lessons she learned. She's not trying to give nuanced, universally applicable advice for how to become famous in every circumstance and industry.

She's talking about "fame" from a specific perspective -- that of a student who might be intimidated by the success of someone like Zuckerberg. She relates the example of Paul Butler and his "fame". It's clear he's not "famous" in the conventional sense, but that he simply created something that people in the industry liked enough to tweet and email around. She realizes that there may not be anything intrinsically different about the people who attract "fame", and that her having cut Zuckerberg in the lunch line makes him just another regular person who lines up for lunch and gets cut in line. The reason Zuck's famous is that he did something that people liked (and now he's arguably conventionally "famous" because peopled liked it at scale).

I found this to be a simple and useful reminder that our heroes are human too, and all of them got where they are by doing stuff.

There's an almost pathological compulsion here to analyze every word and sentence, hoping for some incisive way to show one's cleverness. I think that's missing the point.

This blog post is from a year ago, but I think there are a few useful & relevant ideas within w.r.t. getting users, customers and investors to try, buy and invest in your product. Narrative is important.

Also probably some relevant tips for giving good gifts. It's holiday season after all.

Foursquare (http://foursquare.com/).

Foursquare's ascension into the mainstream has been incredibly fast & impressive, especially given that on the surface there was little differentiation among all the competing LBS check-in services a year ago.

I think 4SQ is a good case study in the importance of the execution over the idea (a commonly harped on subject in these parts).

4SQ's success also helps to validate NYC as having some distinct advantages for certain types of social media plays.

Actually, the price of good engineers being high + high unemployment speaks precisely to a misalignment of supply/demand.

Looks neat.

Couple suggestions:

1. Add some suggested artists that let me click and immediately start watching/listening. You want to demonstrate the value asap, so anything you can do to reduce thinking will help. I spent awhile thinking, came up with "Arcade Fire", then found that there were no results. If this wasn't a post on HN, I would've bounced there.

2. Keyboard shortcuts. But this is obvious, and I'm sure you'll get around to it.

3. The on-hover controls are ok, but there should be some indication that they exist before I mouse-over. You could also use some basic icons to make the controls easier to parse (especially arrows for next and prev).

4. As it stands now, there's no way to surf videos easily. After clicking "next", I have to move my mouse out of the central area, then move it back over to click "next" again. The goal of a site like this is to facilitate brainless and easy surfing, so you should try to reduce as many friction points as possible.

Thanks for the kind words. We'll be adding Netflix integration soon.

We are making a visual search engine for movies and TV. Users can quickly navigate, sort, and filter titles along intuitive dimensions like rating, release date, genre, actors, directors and writers. Users can also rate and review movies, read and respond to their friends’ reviews, build a profile of their tastes, and maintain a list of titles they want to watch.

We are huge movie fans ourselves, and were frustrated with the fact that even a simple query like ‘show me the best films by Clint Eastwood’ is unanswerable by a site like IMDB.

We'd appreciate any feedback you all might have about it. Thanks.

I think he's referring to all the "Instant" copycats.

AngelList (http://angel.co/) is innovating a lot in this arena.

While Instagram's "overnight" success is certainly impressive, it's worth noting that this wasn't the team's first product. Instagram was a "pivot" from Burbn, an in-browser foursquare of sorts.

Founder/CEO Kevin Systrom tells the full backstory on Quora here: http://www.quora.com/Instagram/What-is-the-story-behind-Inst...

I don't think Silverman (aka Zugwat) is broke -- the article's title is just a reference to the magnitude of the stakes that he played.

I think you might be misunderstanding his proposal. He suggested raising $50k from 5 investors at a $500k post-money valuation, implying that you're selling 10% of your company to the investors in return for $50k -- and not that you're somehow giving them a free 10x.

There is a big difference between believing that government ought not be involved in certain things and believing in anarcho-capitalism. Your comment seems to be just unnecessary adhominem. If you disagree with the parent, then why not provide a reasoned response that would be more likely to convince?

Comparing the growth rates is pretty sobering:

                    1980   2010
 US Population      226MM  307MM  =  ~36% growth
 US Prison Inmates  0.5MM  2.3MM  =  ~360% growth

Symmetric follow doesn't have to fail for asymmetric follow to succeed. Twitter's innovation allowed them to create and serve new use-cases. That's all

Because you can express that sentiment with an upvote, a comment should probably have more substance than just the fact that you "liked" the parent comment.