nudist

I don't know if this is true for content producers... Why would you care about the file itself if you can create and manipulate the content easily?

That is absolutely untrue. It's pretty clear that Buzz was inspired by Brightkite. I'm not going to pass judgement on the similarity, but the inspiration is clear.

Depends on the instigator, of course.

Oh come on, he's a teenager, and it's pretty obvious he's the intern in question. You didn't have to submit this as a story.

Also, if you think this is an isolated incident in this industry, you are sorely mistaken.

Interesting, anecdote, but user tests show that you are in the minority. About 80% of people immediately scroll down when they reach a new page with sparse content at the top of the page.

You can use an Apple keyboard to play JamLegend. It's awesome and works great:

http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/jamlegend2...

Almost all of these things are not Amazon's fault. The fault should be placed on the stupidly idiotic actions of the publisher.

He mentioned somewhere that he designed elements of the iPad's Maps UI.

Incidentally, not knowing what's going on with the lower levels is also the primary benefit of cloud computing.

Just curious, but have you ever driven in Boston? I think Northern California's signage is decent or better than most places.

Definitely agreed. TC editors by and large are terrible writers, but Paul Carr is a real journalist. I love his stuff.

If they had a dedicated server stack, they would probably have done the same thing as a hardware RAID anyway. They just replicated in software what they would have done in hardware.

How does one catalyze mass behavior change to improve society?

Pain?

When you poke a Euglena[1] with a pin while looking at it under a microscope, its sensors detect an intrusion and immediately start flapping the flagella (the thing it uses for locomotion, analogous to a leg) to get out of the way. That's a super-simple nervous system. Many plants do this as well, using a slow production of chemicals which move branches and leaves.

As you get more advanced, going up the biological totem pole, every creature uses that exact same sensor => action mechanism. Pain is the brain's complex interpretation of the pin prick, and an animal attempting to remove itself from the source of the pain is the same as activating the flagella.

My brain has mirror neurons which make me literally feel your suffering as you experience it, which is why humans are so against "pain" and "suffering". It's also why I personally will never injure another human, or even another animal, purposefully.

Is it more "wrong" in any scientific way to injure a human instead of a dolphin or a bear or a chimp or a plant -- or even to break a window? Absolutely not. This is why science should never be used to prove or disprove human "morals" and morals should never dictate the functions of science.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euglena

It's not a scientific judgement? How can you say it's OK to kill plants but not "animals," considering they are made of essentially the same thing? Where is the line?

It's fairly easy to trace the evolution of the nervous system from simple single-celled organisms to modern animals. Moral repugnance is a purely human invention.

I love YC, but this is false.

TechStars, actually, has a better track record of exits when compared to YC. YC has some bigger companies that are still growing, but the TechStars scorecard right now is looking pretty good.

More valuable than all that is the fact that Yelp is the de-facto real-world review site. Its brand is powerful, about as powerful as YouTube's was when Google bought them.

Yes. Have you used reMail? The product is awesome and it sells itself. I highly doubt YC was even part of the consideration.

Honestly, I feel like having YC backing you might actually end up putting a bad taste in the mouths of some companies.

I think he is arguing that healthcare is just a commodity.

This is definitely anti government-run healthcare.

Are you suggesting that this is a ruse to lower the price of Overstock's shares? On a Saturday? By using an obscure blog?

Wow, Japan has more US debt than I thought. Anyone know how that happened? US companies don't tend to build stuff in Japan, do they?

Actually -- and this is new in 2009 -- gift cards cannot expire by law in California.

My point is that most companies, like Dell, sell their consumer machines at a horrendously low profit margin. They make it up in enterprise sales.

Apple, however, sells consumer machines at a tremendous profit. The value you think Apple should see in enterprise is negated by their own business model being different from the industry norms.

And an Apple MP3 player must have an FM radio built-in because all the other companies put them in their players.

Apple applies the same principles to customer service that they do to their products.

Rather than tier service -- and by design treat some people badly and some people amazingly -- like many companies do, they work hard to find a good middle ground where everyone is sufficiently happy and receives almost the same level of service. Necessarily, this means some people used to amazing support will get worse support and those used to shitty support get better support.

Whether you like it or not, it seems very strange to me that someone would say Apple is "clueless about enterprise level support." Of course Apple understands how the industry standard is for enterprise support. They most likely consciously do not copy it.

Neat list, but just keep in mind that many of these (20-40%?) are inaccurate. Many startups listed as active have actually failed, but they kept their site up.

Also, a vast majority of the acquisitions shown here were for talent. They generally involve very little actual money and in many cases could be considered company failures.

Still, I'm happy for the successes. But in startupland there are many magic tricks to make things look better than they are.

At one point, Starbucks was a local coffee shop. One of the reasons it was successful was because it made its drinks unique-- it puts a tiny amount of caramel into Mochas, which give them a distinct taste that people feel they can't find anywhere else.

The coffee is only just decent, but 99% of people don't know or care about that. Most people wouldn't know what good coffee tastes like. They assume -- and, through the power of placebo, taste -- the coffee is bad because of the undertones about Starbucks in society.

I don't think this is about coffee or brands directly. This is about perception. The perception of localness is what Starbucks was hypothesizing to be powerful. They either failed in their experiment (likely by mentioning that it was inspired by Starbucks) or discovered their hypothesis was incorrect.