johnrob

76 ms·

811.
by johnrob 16y ago
I would think the biggest issue with Groupon is the type of customer they send to your business. Is the Groupon demographic likely to produce valuable long term customers? I am skeptical, because the trait being selected is price sensitiv
812.
Ask HN: Does comment editing on HN cause bad habits on the web?
4 points by johnrob 16y ago|3 comments
813.
by johnrob 16y ago
I don't use the service, but I see it as a blog like tool. If you have one, you only use it in scenarios you'd like to tell everyone about. If you're at a baseball game, you use it to buy beers and they automatically post something like "
814.
by johnrob 17y ago
The point I was trying to make was that the proposed corporate 'metric' could easily oppose basic economic best practice. That said, it should be no surprise that Craigslist is at the top - they might be leaving more value on the table than
815.
by johnrob 17y ago
Some micro economics: An enterprise is supposed to add resources until the marginal revenue equals the marginal cost. In this case, it means the additional revenue produced by the employee equals the salary. Some of these 'efficient' compa
816.
by johnrob 17y ago
Wouldn't this cause me to get 2 alerts instead of 1 (notifo alert followed by SMS alert)?
817.
by johnrob 17y ago
How do you explain Marc Andreessen's company laying off half its staff? Is he not a good entrepreneur?
818.
by johnrob 17y ago
I think Ning is trying to maximize the size of success, not the likelihood. Trying something very, very few other companies have managed is precisely the point. Most of us would rather increase the likelihood; but most of us are also not M
819.
by johnrob 17y ago
Worth pointing out: a) Facebook used the same 'fat' strategy and is winning big. b) Swinging for the fences increases the odds of striking out. c) Marc Andreessen is not interested in creating 37 signals.
820.
by johnrob 17y ago
Picking losers is a lot easier than picking winners.
821.
by johnrob 17y ago
Moore's law seems to be in full effect for handsets. I think a lot of the innovation here is a stop gap measure before these handsets have virtual memory, making the complication behind multi tasking obsolete. On a side note, I seem to tak
822.
by johnrob 17y ago
Problem - if a new game shows up, it doesn't provide a fresh new leaderboard for the achiever to climb.
823.
by johnrob 17y ago
Excellent advice, you can never hear stuff like this enough times. I don't buy everything I want/need. There is some stuff I simply care more about, and that's where my attention goes. In addition to asking 'does the customer need this?',
824.
by johnrob 17y ago
Two different ways to look at this interesting situation: 1) A tweet is no different than an email sent to the entire world. Like an email, if you want to protect the contents, you should include a disclaimer. 2) A tweet is a small blogpos
825.
by johnrob 17y ago
"I'm not going to mention any of the websites by name, because they are extremely litigous, and I don't want it to be said I directly accused any particular company of scamming." I hate this aspect of our legal system.
826.
by johnrob 17y ago
I wonder how many sites have a similar redirect feature for post-login pages instead of outbound click tracking. This feature makes it easy to login from any page, and immediately return to the page upon success. How many sites don't vali
827.
The appstore policy hasn't really changed(johnrob.blogspot.com)
6 points by johnrob 17y ago|0 comments
828.
by johnrob 17y ago
Most of PG's writing on the subject implies the same 'all in' mindset. He himself said that he's hesitant to start another company because he doesn't want to schlep away another 5 years. I'm a fan of the slow organic approach myself. But
829.
by johnrob 17y ago
It's really not that risky if you're willing to fight to the death, so to speak. Many 'failures' are really just cases where people gave up.
830.
by johnrob 17y ago
Even if they can tell the difference, C code is C code. It shouldn't matter if it was generated so long as it uses kosher API calls. Doing so would be no different than enforcing which editor I can use to write code in.
831.
by johnrob 17y ago
Hand held computers capable of rendering standard web pages have not been around for very long, unless I'm overlooking something.
832.
by johnrob 17y ago
"Mobile" is what will become obsolete. These new devices are handheld computers pretending to be phones. Someday they will embrace this reality, and inherit all of the progress that's already played out on PCs/laptops - browsers, flash, e
833.
by johnrob 17y ago
The best example of this is forward/back buttons - these don't exist on the desktop, but are integral to the browser experience.
834.
by johnrob 17y ago
Is the browsing experience really better than the iPhone, or is it just faster? There are things that annoy me on the iPhone, but screen size has never been one of them. I wish my phone had the computing power of the iPad...
835.
by johnrob 17y ago
None of this matters, the only relevant question is whether it's interesting.
836.
by johnrob 17y ago
You should disclose what you consider to be "worth reading". Hopefully you have a bias that is different then the front page, otherwise it's really no different than that.
837.
by johnrob 17y ago
... and why didn't they already launch an iPhone app?
838.
by johnrob 17y ago
I think you can go one step further and assume the browser is going to be the only app most people use. It's happening on the desktop, and there's no reason the same phenomenon won't happen on devices. If this seems far fetched, look at it
839.
by johnrob 17y ago
The current system encourages companies to use copyrighted material get a foothold in the market. There's no real penalty for having an unknown website full of unauthorized content.
840.
by johnrob 17y ago
Law schools often use transfers as a way to increase head count without lowering admission standards.

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