mikk0j

I do it for all three reasons, but habit most of all.

But thanks for the links. There also seem to be (other?) lawyers on this comment thread who have pointed out how useless such notices are for enforceable copyright protection.

Interesting indeed, that goes against the grain of what I read here in opinions and links. So maybe it does matter? Thanks for the list.

That's right thanks. Yes, only the first year when published serves a purpose for copyright reasons. You just see so many of (c) boilerplates that give a year span. Or are there for not copyright reasons at all. But right, having a single dynamic year is not good for copyright reason.

That's it. I had to read this far before I realized that's exactly what their core is: "trying to normalize liquid diets" (as in make them normal, acceptable, approachable, I think?). There's nothing natural (as in biologically normal, desirable or standard) about a liquid diet, so that's going to be an uphill battle.

Awesome list, thanks! There's worse things to be addicted to...

It wasn't "up to". It was those amounts stated in the docs, using only the number of founders (from one to three) as the proxy.

There's tons of space to do this in without compromising the quality of the city. Bayview and south from there, all the way to South San Francisco where there is tons of undeveloped space, and where the combination of new large developments with high-speed commuter rail (i.e. modern fast BART, with a couple of branching lines - CalTrain is decades past prime) could end up being cheaper and faster to build. It doesn't have to be the heart of the city, nor does it have to be the suburban sprawl you commute to/from +2hrs per day. It should be a menu of options.

Again, there are sides to that. Paris is one of the few places more expensive than SF, and the quality of the density can be a subjective one. I for one dislike Paris and the kind of density it creates (comparable to London, just smells worse).

I tweeted @hiddenapp 20 minutes ago to ask if this is legit or marketing. No response yet, though I'm pretty sure they're looking at their feed to capitalize on the publicity. Most likely a marketing stunt in my opinion. If turns out to be that, very dodgy.

As an employer I would want to block this in an instant. It's the perfect addition to any social engineering arsenal. If it works, great for finding out little details about a company that only an insider would know, to support a more thorough corporate espionage or hacking attempt.

Also, given that out of the volume of incoming queries that companies get only a tiny fraction is related to potential employment there, you'd have to figure out how to filter out people looking for 1) sales leads, 2) customer support, 3) freebies, 4) a direct line to the CEO for their complaints, 5) a direct line to the CEO for their charity sponsorship, etc.

Sorry about being harsh. I just think it could be a bit of a Pandora's Box.

This is such troll-fodder. I'm not even a militant atheist, and still just looking at the front page pisses me off. That and the design, which jars my brain and hurts my eyes.

The blogger who wrote this up as terrifying isn't really with the program. With a friend of mine building laser-guided mosquito zappers in her backyard, drones like these are relatively easy to deter. Of course it leads to an arms race, but maybe we'll eradicate those mid-summer bloodsuckers while we're at it.

Drone proliferation, military and civil, is unavoidable.

Quick background: We're building a video platform, and running a free course is our way of "hacking user acquisition" for testing our new version, geared for educational and tutorial content. All the while, this will be a real course, based on curated material and original material. Please join or comment!

+1

Really really nice UI and design. Well done there.

Depends what they mean by make it. Survive as a niche network? Maybe. Break it big? Not likely.

It was that email that prompted the blog post. For the Cue team's credit, they got in touch afterwards and we exchanged a couple of emails about it.

That's a great suggestion. It will certainly be an improvement. Just explaining it to a wide variety of people can help your thinking about it. If you get outsiders to describe it for you, even better.

That's the key thing: "like I had been waiting for them". No, we haven't been waiting for you, sorry. So please remind me what it was you do again?

I'm keeping track. Thanks for the feedback - obviously not a good description for everyone. Would have worked for me, though.

Maybe I should've stayed at Google then? :)

I don't buy the taller buildings = more wealth, creativity and energy argument. New York and Tokyo are easy examples to refer to but they are in scale and history completely different. What about other cities that build high and are on a smaller or average size scale? Good examples? And you couldn't double SF's size by building higher easily anyway. City and county is 800,000 people now, doubling would bring it to population of Manhattan. That's lots of floors in lots of buildings. Tokyo is 13 million: 16x the size of SF. Not a relevant comparison.

I come from a marketing background, so I guess I'm both numb to and guilty of that kind of text. But I don't see how "most elegant" or other superlatives are different from "best for X" though. Both are equally difficult to prove, both may be completely subjective and contingent.

I like the kid in the superman costume analogy for startups and big ambitions. I'd cheer him on. If he believes it he'll try to act the part, so the more I'll be inclined to believe him, too (though I might stop him from trying to halt a truck).

Thanks!

Yes, I think they certainly don't write bad emails because they don't care. They might write bad emails because they care too much. They may think about their product constantly, so stating the obvious about it doesn't even come to mind (and I generalize horribly here).

Good slides btw, worth checking out for anyone. Many startup email writers may be even too conscious of following the AIDA guideline and thinking that in order to grab the reader's attention, they have to open with the feature or the announcement, instead of reminding what it is that they do. Happy you address the 'noreply', too.

A/B testing is a great thing to do with email. On the point of Mailchimp, they also allow you edit the little preview text box - this is what shows as the preview snippet in many email programs and is a good place to remind the recipient what's going on (very briefly, though).

Completely agreed. Like pointed above by venus, the "best for" format may annoy some people and is not necessary in all cases. Your more generic example works as a better template.

Thanks Venus. No I don't recommend that across the board. I did use "X is the best Y" 2 out of 5 times in the examples (both are directly from their value props on the site or on Twitter bio). Personally, I don't find it annoying anymore but I do agree that it is devalued. Do I believe they are the best X for Y? Of course not. Maybe I'm more lenient since think of it more in terms of vision and ambition.

I think you'd need to tell much more about how this is special, and especially how this is easy for me to use. Basically, this is a static social profile? Ok, all data I would want to make available in such a page is already somewhere in other services. So do you grab that from LI, FB, TW for example? I sure don't want to sign up to a new service _and_ have to type in my profile info yet again.

From the little I've seen, this is in competition with LinkedIn profiles, possibly the strongest entrenched piece of personal entity online. If not, make the case why not, on your front page.

And maybe lose the whole login thing upfront. Really puts user off as there's no idea how much work signing up for the service will be.

For me, this perfectly sums up the futility of the Strong AI / AGI research project. So much of what we consider to be 'intelligence' or repercussions of intelligence are in fact language-based communications and culture - with an immense genetical legacy, bias, and quite frankly, burden. To create human-equivalent intelligence, most or indeed all of these evolutionary biases would have to be built in.

Consider a different example: constructing artificial vision. Human vision is the result of evolution, of course. It is incredibly inefficient, but evolution is blind (sorry). When we now construct computer vision, we capture an optical image and transmit it optically as long as possible, since this preserves information. The human eye does not: it sends information via neurons to the visual cortex, compromising immensely in bandwidth. That's why we need visual error-correction mechanisms in the brain, and redundancy of visual information (achieved by the eye moving rapidly many times per second, for example).

When we construct optical computer vision that achieves the a similar thing as human vision, the two have nothing in common. You can't plug in the artificial front end into the biological back end. The two systems produce literally different images, that are not comparable. The systems will not communicate with each other. We have skipped the legacy of biological evolution completely. To create an artificial system that accurately corresponds to the biological would be an immense waste.

The same goes for intelligence. Our 'wet' evolved intelligence is an entirely different picture from the project of Strong AI. They will produce very different manifestations of interacting with the world. Why would the latter ever result in the illusion of free will or the self-referentiality of personal identity, two things we assume are parts of human-level intelligence? They are like the neurological channels for conveying an optical image: hopelessly inefficient, but the ones that make sense in the light of our evolutionary legacy.

As a side note, yes we know of a time when there was no language, but it not a good representation to consider that a binary switch. We know of complex communication between other animals, and given that even current languages are in rapid flux, I think it is is fair to think of the transition from pre-language to language a continuum. Language is still arising.

This is sad news! Arctic Startup developed immensely in the quality and depth of reporting in the last two years (props to both Antti and Greg on this). Granted it was impossible to keep up a deluge of posts, hastily slapped together or semi-sensationalist like some other European tech media do, but at least weekly, there was a pearl of writing to be discovered at AS. Hope that continues as a community-driven effort.