daveman's comments

That kind of hokey abuse of statistics always gets me riled up. Just because cigar smokers are likely to live longer doesn't mean the habit extends longevity.

A more telling study might be to compare success rates of startups with all female teams, versus all male teams. Then at least you remove the bias of having success attract a more gender-diverse team. Although you'd probably need to correct for industry area, since I'm guessing females choose a different set of markets to go after, in aggregate.

Crappy logic aside, I actually do think the original claim that women boost startup success is probably true. It's super valuable having team members who understand 50% of the population (and ~85% of purchasers), and knowing your customers is critical.

Regarding the topic of internet access, I wonder how many van dwellers resort to piggybacking on nearby homeowners' unsecured wifi networks? Seems like if you're trying to minimize costs, rolling up alongside an open network is a great way to get your Hulu and Netflix without going over your data limits.

The thesis seems fair, but when you go to LayerVault's main landing you get this swirling, vertigo-like background canvas behind the main content. This hardly seems "cut ... down to the bone" nor seeking "the most impact with the fewest elements" as the article professes.

Granted marketing content has different usability requirements than functional software. But I'd argue that dizzying your prospective customers with swirling animations is counterproductive and not an example of "lean design".

As an analytics professional who was pressured into a MongoDB environment, I feel the OP's pain. If you want to do gymnastics with your data, (aggregations of aggregations, joining result sets back onto data), SQL expressions are a 1000 times easier than Mongo constructs (e.g. map reduces). We usually ended up scraping out data from Mongo and dumping records into a SQL database before doing our transformations.

All that said, our developers loved the ease of simple retrieval and insertion, and of course the scalability. So I guess you ultimately need to base your decisions on your priorities.

I don't fault the OP though, since it's hard to know just how limiting NoSQL will be until you try to do all the things you used to assume were database tablestakes (no pun intended).

Josh Foer gave a good TED talk about this topic, you can watch it at

http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_...

After seeing this I actually was able to use his technique to help remember all the parts of a long wedding toast I had to deliver. It definitely worked in this situation, though I'm not sure how applicable it would be for cataloguing every day information you may or may not need to recall.

Like glasses, it's an interesting disruption opportunity due to the sheer size of demand. Just about 100% of the population sleeps on a mattress. It's hard to find other industries with so much penetration of demand and such inefficient competition.

These days it doesn't seem like outbound distribution is too big of a deal (many mattresses are shippable in rolled or compressed-box form), it's the reverse logistics that are tricky. Once the genie is out of the bottle, good luck getting it back in. I'd love to be able to try out a mattress, like Zappos shoes or Bonobos pants, and return them for free if I'm not 100% happy. Maybe someone needs to invent an easily-compressable mattress so I can purchase online with total confidence.

I also wonder if these folks were handed a brand new 4S, unhampered by apps and months of use. In my experience, the speed, even for activities like homescreen navigation, got slower over time, especially when I load more and more apps. Newer store models always seem zippier than my weathered old phone.

All this said, they clearly picked gadget plebians, as anyone even slightly in the know would immediately check out the 8-pin dock connector and 5 rows of apps.

I'm not very familiar with the product, but couldn't they just turn on the watermarking for the beta versions, versus all of production?

Absolutely correct. When prices go up, newer tentants end up subsidizing squatters who are paying below-market rates. If rent prices were variable then the market would be more liquid and the total supply would be higher, and thus new rentals would be lower.

I guess it's nice not having your landlord jack up your rent each year (and landlords can't price little grannies out of their homes). But you also get stuck in one apartment because the cost of moving keeps getting higher.

Our republic was originally designed to work like this, but the federal government has taken so much power that differences in freedom and self-governance no longer vary that much between states.

At the same time, there's also a dynamic where desirable states (those with thriving economies, liveable cities, talent pools from top Universities) end up taxing more and more, simply because they can. For many companies and individuals, the benefits of operating and living in high-tax states still seem to outweigh the costs. Although in the last decade New York and California have been losing people (partly due to companies leaving, partly due to cost-of-living and real estate prices).

When I tried using the app, for some a reason a car came by and picked me up.

When I was looking to buy an Aeron chair, I used it to learn the range of market prices, and even was able to negotiate the seller down with the information from the site. I wouldn't have been able to get such a comprehensive view (in any reasonable amount of time) by just reading through CL. So yes it has been pretty useful to me.

A few months ago I saw a tweaked-out guy at 6th & Howard in San Francisco (just outside the Techshop) literally trying to saw-off a U-lock in broad daylight. A bunch of other homeless guys were lazily watching with amusement.

I really would love to build a pepperspray-bomb-in-a-U-lock, if only I could do so without being instantly sued by a litigious thief.

It's particularly annoying that this prohibition is in place even though there are still other ways-- albeit less convenient ones-- to get the video streaming to your TV. For example, you can use a thunderbolt-to-hdmi connector (or VGA) from your laptop, and probably a 30pin-to-hdmi from your iPad (although I've never tried the latter).

So it's possible to still get the content to your TV, in a much less user-friendly (i.e. tethered) way. I know not everyone has these connectors, but since the ability is there, you'd hope they would just be gracious and allow for the better experience.

I found pipes/YQL very useful for doing some ajaxy things with sites and services that are not on your domain (since most browsers don't allow for cross-domain ajax calls, you can request a JSON version of a site's markup via YQL). However I didn't find the service 100% reliable. It will be great to have more services like this out there.

Is it just me, or is it kind of odd that he titles and begins the post with a plea to "Stop Using the Cup of Coffee vs $0.99 Cent App Analogy" but then proceeds to totally use Starbucks as an shining example for how to run your app business (and at the end he even says "Just do what Starbucks does") ? By the end he's promulgating that people should adhere to the analogy by taking lessons from Starbucks.

Maybe I'm being pedantic but this seems like a contradiction.

It may be true that FB is making more use of the data than you might have anticipated, but you can argue that's also the risk you take when you use a free service (do you ever really know the full extent a service will use your information, despite what they say in their lengthy EULA?). The funny thing is that in many cases, the user gains more value from the system than originally expected too, due to novel applications of existing data (e.g. timeline).

It's fascinating to watch how tech companies react to restrictive EU privacy laws. Many of the EU requirements (e.g. 'right to be forgotten', mandatory opt-in for cookies) could become a real hindrance for companies that want to build intelligent services and minimized user experiences.

Call me crazy, but it seems like when you get to use a free service or website that costs many millions of dollars to develop, giving the company access to your data is a fairly small price to pay.

I'm waiting for one of these legal actions to cause a company like Facebook to just shut down their service in the local area, and leave a landing page with the email addresses of all the politicians who provoked the outage.

Women have been able to simulate those for a while now.