crispytx

I still don't think facebook is safe long term. I've been on facebook off and on for 12 years, and honestly is was only really cool back in college. I suppose there is some value in the whole 'real identity' thing. But the problem I see with facebook is the whole 'friending' thing. Do you really want to have to maintain digital relationships with everyone you've ever known? A digital phone book would be so much nicer. Want to reach out to an old friend from college you haven't seen in years? Look them up in the digital phone book. Wouldn't that be nice? But with how facebook works now, you have to stay 'friends' with everyone you've ever known (because its awkward deleting and then re-friending people). But then you ended up with this news feed full of a bunch of crap from everyone you've ever known. It's just not good. People aren't going to want to keep using facebook for 20+ years. After 12 years I'm burned out as hell on facebook and only have like 7 friends. And I have a feeling, other people are going to get burned out at the 12 year mark as well.

Anyway... I think facebook is still the most vulnerable of all the big tech companies. And I think Mark Zuckerberg feels the same way deep down inside. Why else did he pay $1,000,000,000 for Instagram? And feels he has to copy SnapChat? Because he's scared his empire is going to be the next MySpace. And you know what, it probably will go the way of MySpace eventually.

This ^^^. My Dad is always talking into his phone to send text messages. I really want to tell him, "Dad, you're doing it wrong. Nobody wants to hear you narrate your text messages."

Amazon hides a lot of its profits as R&D expenses. I'm not an accountant, but I think it's sort of a tax dodging scheme. Refrain from paying dividends, pump all of your would-be-profits into R&D, and essentially 'break even' on paper every quarter.

I think he means free search results.

I started blogging recently to document my experience starting a startup. In my posts I just make sure to mention where I'm at so people know that I don't necessarily know what I'm talking about yet :)

Duck duck goose.

I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine aswell, even though I use Google too. I like checking both to compare their results. I think DuckDuckGo could rival Google if they were a little more innovative. I actually tried to contact Gabriel Weinberg to pitch him my idea but he didn't respond. If you happen to read this Mr. Weinberg, hit me up!

Just curious, how many applications did you receive for Summer 2017?

This ^^^.

But the bubble always bursts, and someone always gets stuck eating the soggy biscuit.

I think the spectacles are pretty baller. Somebody send me some.

Hell yeah, I want some Rx Spectacles! Lost my Rx Ray-Bans in the lake this summer.

Here's one of their problems: Check out their advertising page (https://advertising.soundcloud.com/). You have to contact them if you want to advertise on their platform. You ought to be able to upload your 15-second ad, provide your credit card info, and starting running advertisements... $$$

If companies can't afford to give programmers their own offices, then they should just let them work remotely from their own private offices in their homes.

Do it dude!

I use Medium because I think their blogging software is superior to their competitors (WordPress). If there was something out there as good as Medium that I could install on my own servers I might do that. This seems to be the hierarchy of blogging software to me: Medium > WordPress > Blogger

I'm sure there are some other really great options out there that I've never heard of. And I'm sure if you spend a great deal of time looking you can find kickass WordPress themes. But the default WordPress themes are pretty weak, and Blogger is really weak.

So anyway, that's I use Medium to host my blog, because their blogging software simply kicks ass.

My blog is hosted by Medium on my own domain and I think it kicks ass. All of the issues the author brought up in his post seemed pretty minor to me. Just my opinion, but Medium has the best blogging software out there, by far.

I think Medium's financial problem is that they aren't charging for their services. My blog is hosted by Medium at my own custom domain, and the only thing they charged me for was the SSL certificate. They ought to charge for that like Wordpress.com does.

But yeah, Medium has some problems and a long way to go, but it has so much potential. One of their problems in my opinion is that most of the articles that show up in your feed at Medium.com have a BuzzFeed like quality to them. They should integrate some sort of RSS functionality into the feed, and start adding all of the best blogs, regardless of whether or not they happen to be hosted on Medium. But that's just what I would do, not that anyone cares ;)

For example, if you follow the "startups" tag on Medium, you ought to get cool stuff in your feed like IndieHackers. They could include IndieHackers and great blogs like it in their feed, and if people happen to click on those stories, they could just redirect people to those sites. So it would be sort of like Reddit, but instead of people submitting links, the editors at Medium would currate what gets added from other sites, and Medium.com users could obviously add blogs to their own personal feeds via RSS.

Twitter's problem is that they let Ev Williams walk away from the company, and then he goes and creates Medium. Medium could have been a product of Twitter Inc., and then no one would be talking about their lack of growth.

PHP on Acid ;)

https://phponacid.com

Hahaha! Best @#$%ing comment in this whole thread.

Agreed! Paint was the only Microsoft product that I actually loved.

I think websites, in general, tend to get a lot of bot traffic. My website doesn't have anything valuable to scrape, but I still get 100 hits from bot traffic every day.

LOL, your boss sounds badass.

Personally, I like DigitalOcean better than AWS.

I think that's sort of what RSS was going for, but it doesn't seem to have really taken off. Maybe we need an RSS 2.0.

Yeah I'm pretty sure that DuckDuckGo is powered by Yahoo/Bing which really just means, Microsoft is powering DuckDuckGo's search engine for the most part. I'm sure DDG puts their own spin on things as well, but Microsoft is doing all the heavy lifting.

What a horrible idea. Their original user interface consisting of a logo, a search bar, and two buttons is iconic and made up a great deal of what set google apart from its competitors. I know the first time I used Google in the late 90's, the thing I noticed was the user interface. I was a middle school kid then and knew nothing of PageRank. The reason I kept going back to google was their UI.

That's the lamest thing I've ever heard in my life.

Haha, I saw that on Mashable. I want one.

Yeah angel investing seems to be a wealthy mans game. You probably need to make at least 10 bets to have a chance at earning your money back. I did a little research and it looks like the first YC batch was comprised of 9 companies. Two of those companies, Reddit and Loopt, likely generated all the returns for that batch.