sskates

37 ms·

331.
by sskates 15y ago
Hopefully this can also act as a signal to the federal government about how costly the lack of immigration reform is. I certainly hope we see a real solution sooner rather than later.
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by sskates 15y ago
This is the exact problem cited in the original post. Why are we designing for hypothetical users when we have actual users to design for?
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by sskates 15y ago
But it doesn't make sense to me- why does presentation need to be separated from content? On pretty much every single page on the internet, layout and presentation are so tightly coupled that it ends up being more of a hassle to maintain a
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by sskates 15y ago
HTML markup is a good example of premature design optimization. It may have been a good in theory to separate content from presentation, but if you look at the web today, the way pages are generated is a huge mess. Even this site, which use
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by sskates 15y ago
Aren't all quants that work as speculators (eg math PhDs at hedge funds and prop trading firms) trying to do exactly this? I would be really surprised if they've found anything novel. Thousands of really smart people have been looking at th
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by sskates 15y ago
Startups aren't fighting for credibility, startups are fighting against nobody caring. It's good if someone reads one story about you and then reads another one a few months later. Even if they get mad at you for changing your story, that's
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by sskates 15y ago
Great post, thanks guys, we've been struggling with the exact same thing. I hadn't thought about calling them- I can see how that would significantly increase the response rate.
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by sskates 15y ago
That's like saying people who don't understand how rsync works are losing out on the full experience of Dropbox. For the 99% of people who aren't programmers, first time ease of use is orders of magnitude more important than learning how to
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by sskates 15y ago
It's funny, because this seems like it gets you a lot of upvotes on Hacker News as well. The top comment on an article will often be a coherent and (seemingly) original rebuttal of the articles main points. And then the top response to the
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by sskates 15y ago
It's disappointing that a mean comment with no content gets upvotes.
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by sskates 15y ago
My first instinct is you're worrying about nothing. However, if you really want to know, who is the negative feedback from and what is it about? You have to be more specific here, otherwise we can't really say.
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by sskates 15y ago
One of the most comforting realizations is when you find out no one else really knows what they're doing either and that all startup founders are on the edge.
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by sskates 15y ago
Didn't mean to use marketing-speak. When I said conversational, I meant that our app talks to the user, waits for a reply from the user, then does that cycle again, like Siri does. There are a lot of other ways to do voice interaction, like
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by sskates 15y ago
If you have the "turn-on when driving" setting enabled, then our app will acquire a CPU wake-lock that keeps it running (this is not a big drain on the battery, about 1% per hour). Every three minutes we'll poll the GPS to see if you're dri
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by sskates 15y ago
We agree with you completely, we are very much for safety. We are against people touching their phones while driving (it's illegal in most states) and designed our product specifically so you don't have to touch your phone. It auto starts u
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by sskates 15y ago
We're going to be more flexible with our monetization in the next few weeks. $20/year for unlimited was a last minute addition to the launch so that we could get feedback like this. We don't want to pigeonhole ourselves into one model just
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by sskates 15y ago
To diffuse some of this, the comparison to Siri is that it's a conversational voice interface. We're actually surprised that people are picking up that we're optimized for texting while driving and that Siri is a personal assistant (perhaps
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by sskates 15y ago
Our sense is that people don't want to use speech for everything ever, they'd much rather use their hands and eyes when they're available. We're laser focused on texting while driving right now, it's the one big use case for voice commands.
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by sskates 15y ago
The limit is only for composing a text. You can receive an unlimited number of texts. Did you get the impression that you could send unlimited texts for free? (serious question- it's not our intention at all)
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by sskates 15y ago
We just launched. Would love HN's feedback (critical or otherwise).
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Like Siri? Sonalight Brings Powerful Texting-By-Voice To Android(techcrunch.com)
47 points by sskates 15y ago|27 comments
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by sskates 15y ago
As an Android dev, I have to say this is very true. Emulators either don't simulate or don't simulate well enough a lot of stuff that you really want to test, like picking up audio from a microphone, or getting your location from GPS. There
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by sskates 15y ago
I can't remember where I read this, but I believe one the partners has said it's unlikely they've looked at earlier versions of your application.
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by sskates 15y ago
You guys might want to talk to Peter Thiel. He's trying to start an incubator by funding high school graduates. http://www.thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&...
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by sskates 15y ago
Success isn't binary. YCombinator is more like a multiplier on your success than anything else. It's like if you were going to be a 50 million dollar company, YCombinator can make you a 100 or 200 million dollar company. If you weren't goin
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by sskates 15y ago
Yes, those two things are correlated, although they are not the same. I imagine based on what pg said that there are startups that are great in every respect except how they present themselves to YC.
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by sskates 15y ago
It's a difficult effect to do a controlled experiment for because of the way homophily acts as a confounding variable. Anecdotal evidence suggests the effect is real though- as Justin said in the article, he didn't actually start riding a m
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by sskates 15y ago
I'm not pg, but let's see if I can give this one a shot. In response to your question, you want people who are all awesome (although it looks like you've already come to this conclusion on your own). Skill can change but determination gener
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by sskates 15y ago
I think you mean out of all the web based startups ever created. Also it's okay that you're a geek and you don't use other products. Most web based startups don't try to sell to people who consider themselves the biggest geeks.
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by sskates 15y ago
Cool project, but the intro on Kickstarter is grossly misleading. It implies that you have a way to obtain the data about what should be rendered in addition to projecting it, when in reality this project is only about the projection part.

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