kolya3

Spore (2008) had a soundtrack that evolved based on your actions and your creature's evolution.

Here is an interesting experiment - create a "nice" looking rectangle of one solid color. See how long you can go before someone "maliciously" puts a red dot in the middle of your perfectly OCD constructed rectangle. Human nature + anonymity...

I think you are right when it comes to a product like Google docs - it's complicated enough that a consumer would look to the early adopters. However, this Helpouts product is simple enough for a consumer to understand that they dont need to ask their technically minded friends whether they should use it. All Google has to do to bring the users in is include a link to it on the search results page. "Were you looking advice on yoga? Click here to talk to a real person."

You and I are both in the HN bubble. We expect Google to kill products and Google doesn't expect us to "become part of the community." We are not the market. However, the general consumer, the one this is aimed at, loves Google. Their experience is with the search box and maybe Gmail both of which serve consumer needs perfectly. Consumers don't remember or know Reader and every other app Google killed so their reaction to this product will be different.

Both Ableton and Reason are over $400 and tons of musicians still choose those over Logic. For many, price is not the only consideration when picking a DAW and there are plenty of developers selling mere VSTs, not even DAWs, at $200/pop.

I would rather lose a few users through a faulty regexp than lose double digit percentage through an email activation step.

DivvyShot, acquired by Facebook, had a very similar product.

I'm starting to think this is a pretty good strategy - recreate apps that have been recently acquired and sell them to a competitor of the original acquirer.

Pretty sure most email services support this as the syntax is part of RFC 822. The problem is when certain websites ignorant of this standard, choosing not to validate email addresses with a "+" character.

When giving out your email to a website, change the email slightly using a + sign like this: "<youremail>+<website>@domain.com". The email will still get to you but when they share it with affiliates you'll at least know who shared it.

If an employer is smart they'll calculate the hours wasted interviewing candidates * avg hourly pay and likely realize that this cost is far greater than the $15K fee they'd pay a recruiter. Not to mention the delays in your projects as a result of your best engineers being distracted with interviewing candidates.

The Red Herring magazine and brand was bought years ago. The brand was whored out to promote Dasar conferences. If you want some sad entertainment, read through any Valleywag/Gawker articles about working at Red Herring. Sad thing is all the stories are easily verifiable - just talk to any ex-employee.

It's a clean sentence but doesn't make more sense. The screenshots fill in the blanks for me, as in it looks like you rebuilt Google Alerts with additional features for finding that content again later (tagging, notes).

If we were talking face to face and you said "This is the easiest way to find quality content" I'd follow it up with "what kind of content?" and "what problems do I have now in finding content?". I'd say "What problem of mine are you solving?" And the answer to that last question should be your tagline.

After a 10 second glance it looks like Google Alerts wrapped in a pretty UI.

Sure, though when you start a project often times the goal you set out to reach turns out to be the wrong one. Enjoy the journey and be flexible on the goal. The mere act of trying, produces fruits that you didn't expect.

I always loved this quote from Jobs: "...you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." And they very often do. So be sure to start that project, whatever it may be, just take the next smallest manageable step instead of just thinking about it. Go west and whatever fruits that produces might turn out to be very successful, just not in the way you originally planned.