dcurtis

It certainly gives me pause.

I now find those posts somewhat embarrassing. The vitriol was unnecessary and diluted my arguments. In fact, I no longer even link to those articles from my website.

Still, I don't think something I wrote several years ago in a completely different context should impact your opinion of Svbtle as a network.

Y Combinator was not part of the most recent round, so I edited to clarify.

I updated to post to reflect what I really meant.

The first non-commercial uses of photography were for experimentation and artistic portraiture. I don't understand why you disagree with me.

I'm not saying there's no future for artistic photography; I'm saying that there are new use cases that haven't yet been fully developed.

The problem is that "the best" is different for everyone. I can post some of the things that are the best to me, but it's also about the journey of finding out what really matters to you.

This blog is not on Svbtle. It's is a stolen copy of Svbtle's design; even the code is copied and pasted.

How is this acceptable?

I agree, and I'm working on fixing this problem.

That happens on Svbtle, too. (Not enough yet, admittedly, but it'll be happening a lot more often in the future.)

Not only is it a pixel-for-pixel duplication of the design, but now they're copying my front-end code, too.

What about the hundeds of people who may have liked your article, but didn't leave a comment? Aren't they, in aggregate, worth way more than a single comment?

I think it would make sense to merge the pricing and instance type sections (in a similar way to the linked page), and to also have all of that information in the new instance flow of the management console.

It would also be great if you could show estimated monthly/weekly pricing for each instance type, with comparisons for reserved and on demand versions.

This is awesome.

I was starting some instances this morning, and it's shocking how poorly Amazon describes what they offer. I had three browser windows and a calculator open just to figure out which instances are being offered, and at which relative prices. You'd think they would spend more time on this stuff.

Can you (or anyone with this problem) please send me a screenshot? hi@dustincurtis.com. Thanks.

Which iPad model and OS are you on?

It's not even a blog post. It's just a quotation I wanted to share.

I honestly have no idea. I don't do anything to promote Svbtle articles on HN.

I don't think this post is worthy of Hacker News, so I haven't voted for it.

No, actually these kinds of things are binary. Either you launch with something that isn't good enough, or you launch with something that is good enough. It takes talented people to know when that line is crossed.

My point with this post was to highlight the importance of people within an organization like Yahoo having the ability to veto product launches when the line hasn't been crossed. Hundreds of people were involved with Axis, no doubt, and many of them I am sure experienced the same pain that you did when you watched the ad. This is not about the product, per se. It's about the state of the product right now, and the ability of the designers/engineers to make great stuff.

I am talking about people inside Yahoo who do not have the ability to say "No".

The product is heavily informed by the ancillary activity that goes on to support it, including the marketing materials. It's called execution. You need an arbiter at the end of the chain who can say, "This isn't good enough." Otherwise, you run the risk of doing something poorly, which is embarrassing and damages the overall brand.

Yahoo, in particular, should be treating its brand very delicately right now.

This isn't really an issue that you can take an extreme on. Even in relative "failure," Microsoft has executed correctly in mobile.

Actually, their execution has been way better than I would have expected. It is losing money, sure, but short term losses are not important when you're talking about entering a market as large as the mobile phone market after the existing players are firmly entrenched. The traditional metrics of success only matter after you've been successful.

I agree. I've added the source and dulled the sentence. Definitely a mistake.

I just want to add that the other HN story title was completely incorrect linkbait as well: "HBO CEO: '...an internet-based model [for TV] is just a fad'".

It wasn't HBO's CEO, and he didn't use the word "fad." That word was from the Forbes writer. Also, it wasn't a direct quote.

I purposefully chose to ignore subpixel antialiasing because it's complicated and you have little control over how it works. It's done at a layer further abstracted from the source file, so you can't accurately pixel-fit anything to a subpixel. It's also just another hack, using a smaller unit than a half-pixel, and, like most hacks, it has some serious negative side-effects.

If I owned Facebook stock, I would disclose that. Since I can't own it yet, but probably will after the IPO, I figured it would be worth disclosing.

That graph on page 51 is comparing advertising revenue ($872M) to payments+other revenue (the smaller bar, $186M). Total was $1,058M.

Edit: updated the total.

Thanks.

I've updated the post to specify that revenue was for last quarter.

The S-1 describes James Breyer's shares as a combination of his and Accel's, with the following footnote:

(12) Consists of (i) 11,703,132 shares of Class B common stock held of record by James W. Breyer, Trustee of James W. Breyer 2005 Trust dated March 25, 2005 (Breyer 2005 Trust); (ii) 149,527,730 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel IX L.P. (Accel IX); (iii) 15,931,653 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel IX Strategic Partners L.P. (Accel SP); (iv) 13,939,214 shares of Class B common stock held of record Accel Investors 2005 L.L.C. (Accel 2005); (v) 9,949,820 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel Growth Fund L.P. (Accel Growth); (vi) 194,230 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel Growth Fund Strategic Partners L.P. (Accel Growth SP); and (vii) 132,570 shares of Class B common stock held of record by Accel Growth Fund Investors 2009 L.L.C. (Accel Growth 2009).

I completely agree with you, which is why the very next sentence is, "I think the next generation of finding things on the internet is going to require the use of both ends of the spectrum..."

You need both intent and relevance. Intent comes from search, relevance comes from you and your social graph.

At the fringes of every fashion era, there have been things that've peeked out into the future and tried to push things forward.

As a designer, if you aren't constantly trying to build stuff that's better than what other people think is currently possible, then you may have just become a cog in a machine.

If you're not a designer, it might be hard to see, but the importance of this work is impossible to overstate. In 10 years, we'll look back on today and think about how barbaric and stupid it was that we didn't have re-flowable text in multi-box CSS layouts or absolute control of typefaces on the web.

I have come upon the edge of what CSS is capable of multiple times, especially when building http://dustincurtis.com, and what happened surprised me: after a while, I noticed that I had started to subconsciously alter my designs to fit within the limitations of the display technology. As I realized that the only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position every paragraph, I slowly stopped writing and designing the articles. It was just too much work because the tools to do great custom layouts on the web just don't exist.

Compared to what should be possible by now, CSS is pretty primitive. It's a limiting factor in the digitization of traditional media, like magazines. What Adobe is doing here is awesome, and I commend them for pushing forward the status quo.

I know from multiple experiences that this graphic is misleading. Techmeme sometimes sends more traffic than HN; it depends entirely on the slant of the story and on its positions on TM and HN.

Interestingly, as he no longer works at Twitter, he no longer owns or controls the patent.