justincpollard

And that's a good thing for the article author too, because it gives them the chance to see if they're a fit for the job and could learn the required skills even if they don't have them now.

I think you're right on here, but I also think the benefits diminish the further a candidate goes in the process only to get turned down with an explanation that was known at the beginning. How many interviews does it take to come to that realization?

It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it.

It seems like this should be true, and I hope it is, but I have worked for companies that seem to interview just for the sake of feeling or appearing to move forward in filling a position. Maybe the recruiter or hiring manager is incentivized in that way? Some action, even if it's in the wrong direction, is perceived as better than no action at all.

My main takeaway from this article is that the author wasn't necessarily frustrated with spending 12 hours to prepare a 1-hour long presentation - though this does seem like a big ask - but was more frustrated that they didn't even get the opportunity to present it because the company was

looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume. And from my first interview. And from my second interview. And when they told me that I needed to prep a talk.

Shouldn't the company have seen this deal breaker before the interview process started? Or at least after the first interview or two? Acknowledging that the author wasn't the right fit would have saved both the company and the candidate the time and effort of going through an interview process that the company should have known wouldn't yield an offer.

I'm not sure if this is common practice, but I've encountered something similar, going through multiple rounds of interviews over many hours only to have the recruiter tell me that "based on your resume, you don't have the skills we're looking for in a candidate for this position". Why waster my time, and yours, going through the interview process then?

I don't think any of these rationales are very satisfying, but here are some possibilities: 1) The company didn't know what it was looking for when it started the process and came to a different understanding of the job requirements as the candidate moved deeper in the process. 2) The company is covering up the real reason they didn't want to move forward and "lack of relevant skill" is an easy excuse. 3) The company's recruiting process is immature/messy/sloppy/ineffective and they literally missed the lack of required skills until the very end. 4) The position had to be filled and the company wanted to maintain a backup candidate in case their first choice didn't work out.

I'd love to hear from those with experience on the recruiting/hiring manager side to see whether any of these reasons ring true or if something else might be at play.

I don't think what you've written is exactly true. At least some of the rental property in San Francisco is rent controlled (possibly a lot of it if you believe this site: http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html). If a person/family lives in a rent controlled unit, rent increases aren't necessarily tied to the rental market, but rather are limited to a percentage of the CPI (1.9% increase for the current year - http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=1501). Wealthy neighbors don't have much to do with it in these cases.

One of the nice things about Vanguard is that the fee structure is much less than 1-3% for many of their funds. I invest with them in some of their index funds and pay no more than 0.4% in fees; usually much less than that.

Building the "vanilla post and search rental platform" first reminds me of a strategy I've read elsewhere: spend time working in the industry you hope to disrupt. There is no substitute for real world experience when researching/understanding an industry!

"The proper solution is to make it very easy to strike down bad patents ..." isn't this exactly what the author is trying to do? The author states that he uses StackExchange to "respond to requests for prior art that invalidate an overly-broad patent." Sounds like you two agree.

Rather than asking "Why don't designers take Android seriously?" I'd ask "Why don't companies take Android seriously?" Once a company decides to take Android seriously, it isn't all that difficult to create compelling apps, with or without a designer that is dedicated to the Android platform. While I don't advocate simply copying the iOS experience on Android, a developer with some knowledge of how the platform works doesn't necessarily need a designer's help to modify the iOS experience to fit Android paradigms.

I've just downloaded the Holification Nation Instagram client. It's nice, but the icons are very grainy. They may not have included xxhdpi assets, which is unfortunate; that oversight tarnishes what would have been a really nice app.

If there's a shortage of doctors we could increase the supply or examine whether we need fully trained doctors for certain more basic services in the first place. There are plenty of beneficial/ necessary medical procedures that don't require an MD's expertise.

I know you're just providing a hypothetical example, but I think it's common for services provided by doctors or a hospital emergency room to cost quite a bit more than $100; in many cases an order of magnitude more. At the end of the day, I do agree that a hospital will or should make a collection decision based on a cost benefit analysis of some kind, but I think that decision will be to collect a good portion of the time.

These types of of writings are often hard to come by, but they always provide a refreshing taste of an often hidden part of entrepreneurship.

We rarely hear of the hard times before an entrepreneur/ company hits it big. It's all smiles at that point. Andy's blog series is a real gem.

Whether or not voting is a system to avoid violence and conflict or create accountability, it's dominated by a system that allows for those outcomes (assuming they are binary) and a third: a better candidate is elected to the position. As long as the process is generally known and makes sense (whatever that means), I'd rather have all three outcomes than just two. I think the author's point is a simple and important one.

Isn't this generally what investors look for in a market? Something large enough that even a small share can earn a handsome return? I wouldn't judge Dwight on that statement alone; Ms. Zuckerberg just needed something juicy for her audience. My guess is there's much more to him than that.

I've actually enjoyed the first two episodes (half watching while programming); they're are quite entertaining! I think it's a bit unfair to judge the overarching merits of the personalities depicted just yet because we haven't gotten to know most of them. We know Sarah Austin, the life blogger, and the Way duo. The first 2 episodes haven't focused much on Kim Taylor, who has, in fact, worked in the industry over the past few years. Nor do we know much about Dwight's ambitions (yea, we've seen him party and make some general statements about his goals, but we don't know much about the process he went through with regards to Carsabi), though he and his co-founder are apparently Berkeley grads.

If at some point we get to more more about the lives of these two over the last 6 months, I think the overall tone of the show will have shifted.

An important topic, Andy! Related: if you're motivated (positively) enough to work that extensively, that's a gift unto itself. Take a step back and think about working just 8 hours a day at anything. How would you feel if that's something you didn't love? How would you feel doing something you didn't love for even 4 hours a day? 2 hours a day?

If you love what you do and are motivated to do that thing for such long hours, more power to you!

It's not clear to me whether the process you describe would infringe. It seems to me that if the component server returns only a data object with all scripting instructions provided by the host computer, this patent would not be infringed. This patent appears to me to be speaking to plugins that return both data and script. Facebook's like button comes to mind, perhaps ...

I'm no scripting historian, but I believe the relevant date from which to judge this patent's validity is 4/12/2000, the date of the provisional application from which this patent was born. As of that date, were these types of embedded components possible?

"But once a user has signed up, make sure you take them by the hand along the funnel." A few weeks ago, Danielle Morrill of Refer.ly, blogged about a her company's new user onboarding process (http://bit.ly/QZ9cxt). She was apprehensive at first to "hand-old" first time users, but ultimately the strategy worked for getting people to share their first piece of content.

My question follows: What's the rate of returning users that create more than one piece of content when using a hand-holding on-boarding strategy compared to using a very minimal on-boarding strategy? That might be the next step in Gabor's chart.

A preliminary injunction requires the fulfillment of 4 requirements: 1) the plaintiff will likely succeed in proving infringement, 2) the plaintiff will likely suffer irreparable harm without an injunction, 3) "the balance of equities tips in his favor", and 4) an injunction is in the public interest.

The point on which the injunction was overturned was 2); The court found that there was no causal connection between the alleged infringement and alleged harm.

In this case, Apple was seeking an injunction based on alleged infringement of a "unified search" patent, in other words, the technology that supports Siri.

I read things a bit differently; the assumption is that the product experiences 30% customer growth per year (around 2.2% growth per month) and loses 10% of those <i>new customers</i> per month. I think you may have read it to mean a loss of 10% of all customers per month.

Posner's positions, and the frank and open manner with which he expresses them, are a much needed breath of fresh air from a legal system that is all too esoteric. Especially with regard to patents.

Though not directly related to the position Posner takes in his most recent blog post, it's ironic to consider the fact that patents are filed not by the inventors themselves, but lawyers who represent them. To me, that begs the question of whether or not "someone of ordinary skill in the art" could actually replicate the invention disclosed in any given patent. In reality, depending on the invention, it doesn't seem likely that the inventor could even replicate her own invention using solely her patent as a guide. This is a result of patents that are too vague, too general, and too far removed from the actual technology they purport to disclose.

In his recent writing, Posner has chosen to make the point that companies use either defunct or trivial technology to halt innovation through patent litigation. Recently, the culprit has been Apple, but Apple is, of course, not alone. In the fight against patent bullying, Posner's conclusions are, for the most part, right on target.

True innovation protects itself in most cases, depending upon the ease with which a third party can copy it. In general, the threshold for what constitutes innovation in software is much to low. The certain of Apple's patents in its case against Samsung provide relatively good examples of this. The "bounce-back" feature, while a nice addition to iOS, is not an innovation that warrants patent protection. Nor is the "tap to zoom" patent.

So now textbook authors are forced to license their books in such a manner? Or is this a choice that certain authors can make?

If it's the former, financial incentives for textbook authors have fallen precipitously. So, the question is, who's going to write these "free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges"? Might the authors receive government subsidies? If this is true, then we're simply shifting from a market mechanism to a government funded model. Either the cost of writing a textbook won't actually change, the quality will go down, or we'll have many fewer options to choose from.

This article was written to express findings of one study ("two days running usability tests") with specific products ("websites that sell financial products like life cover, funeral policies, and annuities") for a specific target market ("lower-income users who access the Internet at least once a day on a desktop at home or work, or on their phones").

Take the information with a grain of salt. It's a positive thing to think about how a user outside of the early adopter cohort will use a product. Maybe not right at first, but at least later on when your company outgrows (hopefully) its first users.

I think that "in-person usability testing" refers to the process of actually watching a user use a product. I agree with you that these aren't general truths, but I don't see where the author said that; the author said that these are "general findings". Also, they are general findings for a specific target market: "lower-income users who access the Internet at least once a day on a desktop at home or work, or on their phones". My guess is that anyone who visits Hacker News does not fall in that target market.

These guys are going to make a real splash! I went to EDC in Vegas this year and used an App just like this. Kind of a hassle though because I had to DL it to my phone and then delete it later. Web apps would have made a lot more sense. I was also able to make an app (a beautiful one by the way) in about 5 minutes! I had some fun exploring the possibilities beyond those 5 minutes, though ;-)