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lecha

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Congrats on shipping! Feature request: Make it easy to expose triggers and actions from internal enterprise tools. Zapier makes this possible via an API/webhook, but it's not trivial. Many workflows and business processes rely on internal tools that aren't designed to support workflow automation. If you find a way to automate processes that use those internal tools, you may create a bigger differentiator/moat.

How many of you have received this notice via an official security advisory channel you're monitoring/acting on? If so, which advisory service do you use and how you configure it? Learning about HN is useful, but far from a reliable solution.

Insightful piece. Thank you.

One point I wish the author would elaborate on is the value a company gets by acquihiring a great designer. I haven't used Summly so I cannot measure the talent of a designer Yahoo gets. But it would be wrong to ignore the design by focusing on technology advancement in "glue vs thought" argument.

How much would a company pay to acquihiring Jonathan Ive or Philippe Stark?

The author may be right to question the designer's talent or by googling "I use Summly", but it seems rather shallow analysis.

If you're running a hackathon in a company do it on company time and make sure to be prepared to do something with the ideas they generate. Results of our recent hackathon is a good example how to do it: out of 7 out of 14 projects are finding their way to the product roadmap. We run it on Thursday-Friday with demos on Monday morning.

If you don't follow up, event may backfire and will remain an example how a company merely pays lip service to ideas coming from developers.

Good read even if you're not an AWS shop. The interview has insights that go beyond AWS specifics such as dependency management in large-scale systems and relationships and roles of dev and ops teams.

The Apple Voice 14 years ago

Voice matters and it hard to build, especially for engineers. http://voiceandtone.com/ from MailChilp offers a good framework of designing a voice by cataloguing touch-points between the software and the user. You may or may not find MailChimp's voice fitting, but the framework itself is quite useful.

We hire smart people who get the job done. Yeah, we use a lot of Java. And RoR. And Hadoop, Cassandra, etc. We use AWS and we run a DC stuffed with custom-configured servers. In general, the knowledge of a specific technology/language/framework we already use can be helpful, but not a requirement. Chances are, you don't know everything you need to know to do this job. So willingness and ability to learn is a requirement.

Design is a strong advantage, but not sustainable one. Unless the design requires hard-to-replicate data or algorithms, design alone isn't a sustainable competitive advantage.

The data that Hipmunk displays is available to any other OTA. If the intent is to grow independent company they'll need to build that sustainable advantage (beyond UI patents).

NPR app was put together quite quickly and was intended by it's authors as a demo of though capabilities of www.Sproutcore.com

Let's not miss the larger point here. HTML5 have become a real option of application development. A business that relies on mobile/tablet form factor should seriously consider HTML5 as the application platform. The cost of porting iPhone/iPad apps to Android phones/tablets is much less with HTML5 than with native code.

Lack of distribution and monetization of HTML5 apps doesn't need to be an issue. A web app can be embedded into a native app to be sold on the AppStore.

Presumably the "terms" in "set your terms very favorably for yourself" refers to valuation.

Seems like the premise here is that VCs will actually take that valuation into account during the round A. How common is that? (versus VCs trying to set the valuation regardless of valuation of the round done without them)

After quickly reading the info on the front page I didn't see a direct comparison with other distributed key-value stores. Could anyone point to a comparison? (sorry if I've missed it)

I think membase is analogous to redis (HD-backed memcached), but unlike redis it distributes the data across multiple physical nodes. AFAIK Redis needs the DB to fit on a single disk.

Well, the strategy i'm describing involves a native app. In that case, would it be possible to expose device-specific API to JavaScript?

Also, multi-touch is actually supported by webkit. There a nice WWDC video that intoduces this capability if you'd like to learn more.

To be clear the idea above isn't new of course. For instance http://www.appcelerator.com/ provides a native app with a thin wrapper around a web control.