Viewing profile — ryanlchan

A similar application was to use aerogels, which are highly insulating but not reflective, as clothing insulation. I recall a number of companies have explored this in the past [1]…

The arrest rate is also different from the incarceration rate, which is much more heavily skewed. According to Pew, black men are incarcerated at ~6.5 the rate that white men are, …

This seems quite similar to the design AOL's Alto [1] used. I actually used Alto for a while, but found that the promotional images were less helpful than the short blurbs Gmail ha…

This is actually one of the tuition options that the US armed forces offers students: we pay for your schooling, and you serve in the military for an equal number of years. It's al…

For anyone looking, there are also a number of sites dedicated to just this, with a similar audience to HN. Betalist[1], Cloudlist[2], and ErliBird[3] are examples that come to min…

I think a major hurdle we have to overcome with big data is separating causation vs correlation. As the data set scales, we gain ever-increasing confidence in the correlation, but …

This is a masterpiece of a backhanded compliment. Never have I seen such elegant transitions between briefly masked contempt and half-hearted admiration. It's really stunning. I th…

Yeah, I'm having trouble seeing the advantage of this over the browser's native implementation: Chrome's CMD+SHIFT+I hotkey brings up a mail this page window automatically for me. …

People forget about the amount of data LinkedIn has available to them: ConnectedHQ (the predecessor to LinkedIn Contacts) has direct access to thousands of email inboxes, Rapportiv…

I've been thinking about this as well; the results I could find are from quite a while ago, but in general the answer is to use a reversible encryption like AES [1] along with secu…

The project I'm working on ( http://www.musubimail.com ) was originally meant to help keep in touch with professional contacts, but I've been using it for beta-user follow ups to s…

This is very clearly satire. Unfortunately, satire is usually lost of this crowd. The bit with 'free vs non-free' had me rolling.

I'm betting it's about talent acquisition. Like you suggest, the technical part just isn't quite there. I used Summly for almost 3 months, giving it chance and chance again to impr…

VC shops are like most PE firms - hiring is done on a small scale by the partners themselves, typically through their private network first, then using a recruiter second. If you c…

This reminds me: I'd love to see how many of CodeYear's sign-ups completed a term. I have lots of friends who want to "learn to code" but get frustrated and quit. It's too easy to …

It's small - I launched an MVP into this area recently. Business people who are inundated by email want a heavy, full-service solution like SaneBox, whereas consumers have been con…

This will actually happen for any extension which requires many IMAP calls, or any combination of extensions thereof. As a Gmail extension developer myself, it takes a lot of effor…

I'm curious to see what happens to Amazon FPS if these product based crowd-funding apps take off. We may be in for a bit of a Paypal style crackdown debacle. I actually spoke with …

Golden nugget that that Jason just starts to uncover here: the reason customers purchase your software is rarely the same reason as why you started creating the software in the fir…

Another alternative is also just hosting directly off S3, which, combined with cloudfront, should eliminate any possibility of folding.

A bit of a false dichotomy here. Don't do the work because it's expected of you, because it's sexy, or because it's "interesting". Don't do it because your friends are impressed, b…

Excellent! Two quick clarifications on what I mean by "just go goddamn start it". 1. For a majority of contemporary companies, the primary risk is not technical, but market driven.…