Mystalic

It's so easy for people to figure out when you copy language or basic code. It never ends well.

And Y Combinator.

You'd be wrong. Ask second-time founders. While you don't repeat some of your past mistakes, the expectations get jacked up and the stakes are higher. It doesn't get easier.

I don't think there's a conspiracy here. Just bad decisions.

This is a lesson in the power of language. The companies involved and their denials of knowledge of PRISM were not lies, but clearly they were making it easier for the government to extract data for surveillance, under an unnamed program with specific point people in each company who were only allowed to talk to the government and not talk to their CEOs about the extent in which the government was extracting data. It may go even deeper. We just don't know.

The thing that upsets me most is that I suspect nobody except for the whistleblower will take any real heat. I hope more will come forward with more details in the coming weeks, before the government makes an example of the whisteblower.

Will this incident change user behavior? I doubt it. We're too dependent on these companies to cut them off en masse.

If Tesla drives that money into development of the economy vehicle, they're going to scare a lot of car manufacturers.

I don't think Instagram/Systrom had any intention to sell user photos or do anything as drastic as the blogosphere made its TOS changes sound.

It did the right thing responding so quickly to user feedback. Hopefully it'll result in a TOS that lets Instagram monetize without infringing on the privacy of its users.

Congrats to Alex, Boris and the team! You guys are disrupting venture capital in a way that's been needed for years.

#Dominate

This group presented at the Angelhack SF hackathon (I'm a judge).

It's simple and only works in certain use cases where you need more immediate feedback, esp. the polling stuff. However, it definitely has its uses.

Good job, guys!

For context: this group just presented at the AngelHack SF Hackathon (I'm one of the judges).

It's funny, but Twitter will clearly drop the hammer on this. It's bad for the ecosystem overall.

As a former journalist, there is one simple way to press: get introductions.

If you don't know people who know journalists, meet them.

A strong network is essential to the success of any startup.

Ryan's a smart guy, but he has got this one wrong.

Product launches ARE news, no matter how you slice it. News is simply a product of what people want to know about, plus what people SHOULD know about.

So people want to know about new Apple products. So the news media delivers.

But they also SHOULD know about things like the failure of iOS 6 maps, which has been roundly slammed by the media. If the media were truly in bed with Apple, would it be writing this kind of negative portrayal?

Is there symbiotic relationship between the marketing departments of companies and journalists? Absolutely. Do journalists give them free passes? Hell no.

It's important to note that this isn't a complete reversal -- Quora's still going to display views from "in the feed". They're also blocking all "adult" content from the Views feature as well.

The changes should alleviate most of the pressure that was being placed on Quora. I'm glad they rolled back the most egregious parts of Views.

#1 way to get an interview: recommendations from other YC founders. Not just tepid "I know this person" but "I'm putting $100k down on this team."

This is a fantastic article with a lot of in-depth interviews and analysis. This is an example of what tech journalism should be.

Another note: the beauty of YC isn't that Paul & co. pick home runs every time -- they don't -- it's that they pick teams that eventually hit home runs. Justin.tv is doing okay, but YC's investment in Justin in 2005 has netted it Socialcam (acquired for $60M) and Exec. YC's investment in Reddit also netted them Hipmunk.

And I'm only scratching the surface here -- YC founders always recruit great people into the YC program.

Regardless of the politics, the ridiculous lengths that BMG and the other labels are willing to go to in order to take down content that clearly falls under fair use simply boggles my mind.

You often have to seed a social site in order for it to be compelling for people to consume. Once they're hooked, then they start submitting.

As long as the quality is good, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Most likely both.

I suspect Facebook has bigger plans for Face.com's technology than auto-tagging. I bet they integrate facial recognition technology into the Facebook Platform.

Tagging every face... everywhere... and sending that data back to Facebook. That could be monumental.