vicbrooker

I find it super interesting that this is on the front page at the same time as a ex-Google design ethicist is talking about respecting the user ahead of commercial interests.

I can't see a way for this style of design to be feasible that doesn't rely on a subscription-based business model.

As long as users allow free + advertising generally be the way to for build a dominant tech company then I would assume anyone that tries to compete by not optimising for advertising (eg. reducing friction for users) will lose. Which is a damn shame.

Based on my limited knowledge of the history of news media, theres a cycle between free + advertising and paid + high quality. Intuitively it should apply to other verticals too, and I hope that, in reality, it does.

I don't think that there's enough to say here that anything is inherently due to the UI until the context of it being on Facebook is removed.

I would bet that are broadly acceptable use cases for FB chat and ones that are not. At best, this is saying that in the context of a chat, communicating like this comes off differently than using the full conversation, or, say, an email.

I'd love to see this repeated with white labeled mockups, and remove the Facebook branding as a variable.

I've been on-and-off interested in facial expression for a while, and can't help but feel that 'the emotion tool' is kind of flawed.

Unless there's been a groundbreaking shift in the last 12 months or so, this software will be using the Facial Action Coding System to recognize muscle contractions which are then interpreted as 'emotions'. FACS is an amazing tool (can't recommend learning it enough if you're interested in this stuff), but it still relies interpreting the context of the expression to determine an emotion. It's a notation system for expressions, not an identification system for emotions.

There's an off chance that their algorithm has crowdsourced their data which can be even worse because the emotions we display and the ones we feel aren't always the same. For example, I may force a smile to cover fear. FACS training can take 100+ hours because a lot of heuristics for identifying expressions need to be unlearned.

It's a bit of worry when https://www.projectoxford.ai/demo/emotion#detection uses mostly posed photos to demonstrate their software. The third photo contains perhaps one smile that shows signs of being genuine, the rest seem to be posed (I'd need higher resolution to be sure). If this third photo was accurately reading their emotions (cf. expressions), then the results should not be that they are happy.

Replacing the emotions with names for expressions would make me feel a little more comfortable about using this: 'happy' with 'smile', 'angry' with 'glare' and so on. But then it seems a lot less useful so I see why they've described/marketed it the way they did.

Their prototype reminds me of concept car designs that look great but don't have enough internal space for an engine. You'd maybe fit a AAA battery in the handle but I haven't even seen a torch that works without more juice.

Also, I was kind of suspicious when I noticed that more than half of the team have beards.

And did so in favour of a forced one - I think the title is meant to reference the whole track runner thing.

Unsolicited feedback:

At first glance, I read the logo as AURD rather than AURO, and I still had a bit of cognitive effort to remember that it's an O after finishing the article and scrolling back to the top.

Could be because I saw the old logos first, which seem far closer to D's than O's and so I was anchored to AURD, but might be worth testing with new players?

If you're interested in startup internships and you're in Melbourne the guys at http://www.tinalleybeta.com.au might be able to set you up somewhere. Other options are to ask around coworking spaces like inspire9 or york butter factory (Melb) or fishburners (sydney).

non-startups to look into: atlassian, campaign monitor, envato, 99 designs, canva (maybe).

Keep in mind that Australian employment law is a bit anti-internship: technically you can't contribute to a business' productivity without being characterised as an employee. So unpaid interns are, officially, not a thing here.

Unofficially, who knows where a bit of hustle can get you ;)

My critique of the model is more that outsourcing will get expensive quickly. The founder of this product 120+ schools to support with 30k. Many of these schools are expecting lifetime support: they paid a one time $250 fee. It's not clear what the legal relationship is between the service provider and the schools either, which may be a problem.

So my critique has nothing to do with technical skill, it's more that getting 'profitable' quickly without any consideration of the potential long term debt can be a bad business decision.

In my view, these were shaky business decisions (to outsource development, cutting legal corners w schools, one time fees), rather than technical ones, if that makes sense. There are times when outsourcing is the right call, in the context of this particular business I'm not convinced.

Ps. The adequate technical skill to execute is kinda assumed if you're founding a tech startup. If it's just building a product without the expectation of scaling it you can maybe get with outsourcing. This might be why there's more of a discussion on HN about the business side - this is the area that most of the audience here need to develop.

I remember reading that YC was founded in the first place with a hypothesis that teaching tech founders the nontech skills (eg. business/communication skills) is far, far more effective than vice versa. Seems it was right.

Just picked this up, but the early adopters pay $250 for lifetime use. So it's not necessarily $30k/yr, just $30k.

Not sure how this is a sustainable model.

The impressive part of the article is the network the author has developed prior to beginning anything. The real startup killer in Aussie edtech is the sales cycle and this product has ostensibly hit 10% market saturation in Victoria (~120 schools) since launching a month ago. With a paid product.

For comparison, many edtech startups in Melbourne are offering a trial period until the next billing cycle (July), because it's the simplest way to get through the bureaucracy. Might not be the best approach, but it's one that seems to be the fastest way to get users.

The real cost here isn't the $10k in dev, its however many hours/dollars were spent getting the network together.

On a side note, having 'lorem ipsum' as both the public terms/conditions and privacy policy is an interesting corner to cut when selling to schools, particularly in Australia.

Icebraining's wiki link below hits it on the head, but my view is that knowing too much stuff deeply might make it hard to collaborate in teams as it makes roles really hard to define.

Happens in soccer a lot - teams with really versatile players will usually get whipped by teams who have specialists in each position. Top teams aim for squads with 2 players for every position, not 2 positions for every player.

Hope that makes sense, it's getting late here :)

It's great when companies find someone who solves their exact problem, it sucks when you're the guy who can only solve one problem though.

Especially when someone finds a way to automate a solution.

I think Valve described the 'T' employee: know one area very deeply and a broad range of others reasonably well. Seems to be a good approach :)

Maybe another way of looking at what your friend said is to just be specific about your skills/experience when job seeking?

Steve Blank was recently in Melbourne and said that his opinion was that 'experienced' was a better adjective than 'failed' for founders who have stopped working on a startup. It's a nice perspective.

Personally I agree, but would add a single caveat. I consider a founder 'experienced' when they have made a good faith effort to attempt solving a difficult/worthwhile problem. Someone who succeeds at someone pedestrian isn't terribly interesting and neither is someone who tried to build the hyperloop with paper mache for a week.

So, my advice is to ignore the title and give weight to the particular characteristics of their startup. The presence or absence of success is far less relevant than what they were trying to achieve and how they executed. I would pick someone who got to 80% of a home run over anyone who succeeded at hitting to first base. Ask questions about how they executed, the unique problems they faced and why they picked their vertical - this will tell you more about them than a snap judgement based on whether they were a CEO or a President.

On a side note, I would generally consider managing to found a company that survives for 1-2 years (full time) while tackling a hard problem as a demonstration of above average/high capacity. I would definitely look into them.

Again, depends on the context of your workplace, and the context of what they actually worked on.

Hope this helps.

Help please!

I followed some instructions so that Carrot would be compatible with Apple, but it's made it impossible to move without a Glass!

I don't want to be sucked into relying on overpriced peripherals... How do I do a factory reset?

http://www.purejuicing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/apple-...

IANAL, but it will depend on whether JavaScript is used by members of the public to refer to ECMAScript that isn't JavaScript (that's a mouthful).

In other words, I can call a fountain pen a biro and that shows that the trademark has become generic, it doesn't matter that I'm technically wrong.

This is how it works in Commonwealth jurisdictions anyway, haven't checked US law for about a year.

Slightly off topic: but why didn't Tim release it by tapping his watch? Or better yet, have Bono reveal he was wearing a watch and do it himself?

Seemed like the biggest slam dunk in history when I was watching it live. Couldn't believe it when they did the finger touch.

Giving people the option to download/claim their U2 album would probably have been a better option though.

I just assumed this was a typo:

'At Google we say, "Focus on the user data and all else will follow"'

I'm interested to see how it handles minestrone soup...

I think the critical role for tech in recruiting is to help work out who to meet, not to replace the conversation. It's definitely an arms race to turn the 1000 resumes into 10 people to be interviewed, but I don't even know where to begin taking it past that realistically.

The first automation software for the full hiring process is a going to be a very well marketed solution, not necessarily an effective one.

Ideally, I would see less of a need for specialist recruiters as tech has made connecting with appropriate hires simple enough for someone from the team the hire will work with to conduct interviews.

There's already an element of SEO-style optimisation in resumes as it is. I have a few outside-the-box approaches on how to get around this and I'll be doing a Show HN once I have something together :)

I think I prefer Gild's approach (I've only superficially skimmed their site, no actual experience of their product). They're analysing existing data points to predict the right applicants - StackOverflow, Github etc.

Seems more elegant to use what exists than to ask recruiters to come up with a custom challenge. If they can't make realistic asks at the moment it's unlikely they can create realistic tests on HackerRankX either.

I'm still waiting to see the first job that requires 5 years + experience in Swift. Shouldn't take more than a few months.

True, but the HealthKit.com can't really establish any sort of claim to the IP - the name is both generic and descriptive and is therefore ridiculously hard to protect without huge traction.

The fact that has Apple has more money than they know what to do with is the real factor for legal repercussions.

It's one thing to have theoretically defensible IP, and other thing entirely to actually be able to.

Assuming equal resources backing the legal teams, it would probably be sufficient that they are both forms of software, as all software trademarks are lumped together in the single category. There might be some sort of passing off action one way or another but it would be more likely to come from Apple than HealthKit.

There seems to be overlap between the Health app and Healthkit.com which I suppose is the real issue. Hard to tell if Healthkit truly got sherlocked though, because I can't tell what they do from their website past management software.

It's a huge distinction if formal legal action happens because Apple can establish quite easily that they have relied on the Kit format for previous software, whereas HealthKit.com doesn't (AFAIK) have any major traction in the software space. Law student here, IANAL, so take this with a huge grain of salt.

Either way, in Australia, both parties would apply under Classes 9 and 44 which covers all computer software and medical services respectively. It's likely that Apple will win on class 9 as "Kit" is far better known in the software community than "HealthKit.com"; and arguably 44 too, depending on Healthkit.com's traction in the medical field.

It's unlikely that Apple's HealthKit and HealthKit's HealthKit would cause confusion in the market - but it makes a silly story to say that Apple's Health (which may have overlapping functionality with the preexisting HealthKit).

Gotta love the media.

Aussie law student here. IANAL. I haven't studied IP in a year or so but I'm not convinced that the startup has a huge claim to the name HealthKit at all. I've looked at both US and local law in the past so I'll try and explain in case it helps any founders reading this.

"HealthKit", in the context of both healthkit.com and the dev kit describes the intend purpose of the IP. The startup seems to produce a software "kit" for health practitioners and the Apple version is obviously a dev kit that deals with the new health app.

Any trademark that describes intended purpose is called a 'descriptive mark' (lawyers are an imaginative bunch) and are generally really hard to protect. You need to show evidence of market use, and for lack of a better word, traction. Apple actually seem to have the stronger argument here: MapKit, GameKit, UIKit etc. have been used for ages and are recognised in the software community as being associated with Apple. This would be categorised as a software trademark and I'm not sure that the startup can establish a strong argument that they've a) established their brand in the software market and that b) they should be able to exclude Apple to prevent confusion. This is consistent with both Aus and US law to my knowledge, and successfully establishing themselves in the Australian market, or filing a trademark here won't bind the US anyway.

Bottom line, the more generic and descriptive your name (in context), the harder it will be to successfully defend it. Owning a .com doesn't count for much, if anything (even trying to register a generic descriptive word + .com - mattress.com was registered unsuccessfully IIRC). You need to get eyeballs on it and sell stuff to win this with a common law/equitable trademark. Considering I hadn't heard of HealthKit.com until this happened they might struggle with this.

If you're a founder and you want to protect your name, pick a name that is something arbitrary or suggestive. Healthkit.com's claims would be much stronger if it was named Potato or Voozle and Apple used the same name for a dev kit. It makes it far harder to communicate your product quickly but thats the tradeoff. Names that invoke your product through onomatopoeia, like 'Twitter' strike a good balance between effective communication and defensibility. They're bloody hard to come up with though.

Hopefully, HealthKit.com use this as an opportunity to get their message out to their target audience, they're getting an audience on hacker news but its doctors they should be going for.

As an aside, it's interesting to see how much of the media is confusing the HealthKit dev kit with the Health app. Helps with the story I guess.

""There is a clear advantage to being female to study physics: a greater chance of top grades and a lower chance of failure and lower grades. This holds at both AS and A2", says their preliminary paper."

I'd consider dropping out if my science teacher couldn't distinguish correlation and causation in their paper.

More seriously, I found the idea that high-performing students are dropping physics to optimise their overall average as an interesting thing. It's a shame when students sacrificing knowledge and skills that may have long term benefits in favour of a short term grade boost.

On another note: wouldn't the majority of students who drop out of physics be among the 'brightest students' at their school?

Personally, I can't agree enough with this. Positioning the wearable as a "iBracelet" means that it can be work at the same time as a consumer's watch; whereas an "iWatch" potentially limits the market.

That said, I can completely understand the position of making an iWatch and forcing the choice between existing watches and Apple's. However, to me it's better to competing with fitbit than rolex.

tl;dr - don't fire people if you need them

...or shotgunning, and trying a lot of weak leads at once.

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but the guy doing the email is almost certainly paid (or at least seen as successful) when he organises a face-to-face meeting. There's a fundamental imbalance of incentives here: the Sales Guy wants to get paid for taking time to sit down and negotiate, and the Programmer wants to get paid for running his business.

I think the major inefficiency is here: "My time is very limited, maybe you could first tell me roughly what this would be about?"

I would personally ask if they're most interested in features/option/pricepoint A,B or C. If it's not clear on the context I would ask a direct question for the three topics he would like to talk about.

Anything that steers the conversation towards what you want: whether this partnership is something you're interested in. At least this ways there's actually some motivation for him to actually tell you what's in it for your business.

[edit] the end was cut off for some reason