Hacker News: nbuggia

New comment by nbuggia in "Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot"

nbuggia — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 04:57:35 +0000

Can you share more about how your radio station bot worked? I'm curious what made these scenarios so successful for you?

New comment by nbuggia in "Microsoft Band"

nbuggia — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 14:33:00 +0000

I assume he's referring to Steve Ballmer.

New comment by nbuggia in "Washington Post adds Amazon buy-it-now links inside articles"

nbuggia — Sun, 17 Aug 2014 00:32:36 +0000

This doesn't seem like a very well thought out or innovative business model.

New comment by nbuggia in "How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry"

nbuggia — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 21:26:48 +0000

I wonder if the problem isn't the AppStore itself. It is so difficult to find good content, and the 'Top 10 Lists' are the primary place people go to find games. This has led to rampant spamming and other dirty tactics to get on these lists, and now there is no market for higher quality content.

I think another problem is scarcity - there isn't any anymore, making it hard for me as a customer to focus on a few higher quality products. Now there are just too many apps.

New comment by nbuggia in "Penny Arcade’s Insultingly Horrible Job"

nbuggia — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:37:33 +0000

Yes, it is so sweet they expect that you will find it offensive:

"- You should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment."

New comment by nbuggia in "Ask HN: Should I get mentored by this guy?"

nbuggia — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 20:58:11 +0000

I think the answers is Yes, absolutely. But I think I have a different idea about what the mentorship should involve then you do. I think you can learn more from studying his thought process and his experiences with sr. management, customers and partners then you will from simply following his technical suggestions.

I also think you should bring a couple things to the table that you want to teach him. It could be some new fancy tech, or some online community or something that will help expand his perspective and better understand where you are coming from.

At the end of the day, it is really relationship problems that hold us back - not technology problems. And your ability to form successful mentor/mentee relationships will help you much more in the future than learning new tech of the week. (It will also give you perspective when your future mentee posts to hacker news v.next about her stodgy old mentor that doesn't know anything ;)

New comment by nbuggia in "Challenging the Bing It On Challenge"

nbuggia — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:15:27 +0000

You should contact the Bing team to follow up with this:

https://support.discoverbing.com/eform.aspx?productKey=bingw...

I used to run the Bing Webmaster program, and I know they do support crawl-delay. It could be someone masquerading as BingBot, or simply a bug. Ping me if no one gets back to you and I can follow up.

New comment by nbuggia in "It's A Terrible Time To Buy An Expensive House"

nbuggia — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 17:05:13 +0000

Most people don't buy a house for investment, they buy it because they have reached a point in their lives where they want to settle down and live someplace with their kids for 10+ years.

In that world, I think you can simplify things quite a bit. First, buying a house is more of a hedge against inflation than an investment. The market goes up? You've got more equity to move somewhere else. The market goes down? Well, you lose money, but everything else is cheaper too.

For the average person, I think the real lesson here is to make sure you can afford the house, put 20% down and it is within x2-3 your annual income. If you live in low-supply/high-demand markets like Seattle, SF, then you might end up paying more, and it is just a trade off you need to make.

New comment by nbuggia in "Yahoo showed us 30 days of logos. Here’s the one consumers liked best"

nbuggia — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 21:44:35 +0000

There is possibly more than just design at stake here. It can be a really difficult technical and cultural problem to get such a large website to the point where they are capable of changing their site every day - and ostensibly compare the impact of each change on their metrics.

It can also be difficult for a company so firmly rooted in one brand identity to make a 'big bold change'. Forcing this type of churn onto the company could make the organization more comfortable with change, and could lead to an actual 'big bold change'.

I don't know if any of this will happen, but large organization often have a lot more to balance than just having one designer come up with what they think is right.

New comment by nbuggia in "If Amazon is the future of work, then be afraid"

nbuggia — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 18:22:31 +0000

I spend a lot of time thinking about this too - because computer/ robotic automation is not just going to take warehouse jobs, it will eventually come for all of our jobs.

But this doesn't have to be a bad thing, if you think about it from a community perspective, how great would it be if all our basic needs were automated and low cost? Theoretically, this should free people up to pursue other interests, like science, art, sports, religion -- kind of like the premise Star Trek TNG.

Unfortunately, this isn't the reality today. If things keep going like they are, then this automation will enable a small oligarchy even greater wealth and power, and leverage over the civilization. I don't mean this to be alarmist, this is a really logical progression, and 'they way things are' has created some pretty amazing achievements for us to-date. I think this will be the next big social evolution and I can't wait to see how it unfolds.

New comment by nbuggia in "Google Consumer Surveys: Measure site satisfaction in real time"

nbuggia — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 23:12:21 +0000

My company is working on something similar: http://www.muchfiner.com. We're more focused on the User Research aspects - we currently offer an A/B test for design concepts and are working on a suite of experimentation tools (e.g. Habits & Behaviors Survey, Value Prop Testing, Feature Prioritization, Task Completion on a Prototype, etc)

You can see an example report here: https://www.muchfiner.com/report/de5c2acc2a260fb6fcd8a9bd56

New comment by nbuggia in "iOS 7 looks familiar"

nbuggia — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:03:07 +0000

I have one that I would be happy to trade for your iPhone 5. While the nexus is a great device, it has tons of lags, and hangs. Android seems to be an amalgamation of rough edges - and I love google! For goodness sake, to add a telephone number to a contact you need to select 'add field' and then select the field type before you can enter the value. Okay, I'll stop with my rant, but seriously, I would live to trade. The screen and FF of the nexus are perfect IMHO.

New comment by nbuggia in "Light Table - a new IDE concept"

nbuggia — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:39:49 +0000

I love it, when can I use it, and for what languages? I would recommend Kickstarter over YC because I expect Kickstarter would result in something I can use sooner :)

Thanks for pulling the video together, there are a lot of really interesting ideas in there!

The Kindle (on) Fire

nbuggia — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 07:34:04 +0000

Article URL: http://nathanbuggia.com/posts/the-kindle-on-fire/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051514

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by nbuggia in "A curated catalog of iOS frameworks"

nbuggia — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 21:18:35 +0000

Great idea (I also love cocoacontrols.com).

Please show more than 5 results per page. PLEASE! How about 25-50?

New comment by nbuggia in "Ask HN: Why can't I make as much as I make?"

nbuggia — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:03:54 +0000

I think the gap is not how much value the hacker generates, it is how much value they get from the corporation.

If you are independent, than you loose out on all the value the corporation provides above & beyond your salary. Things like: - Taxes on revenue. The corporation pays state/federal taxes on the income you help generate. You would have to pay this on your own, and it can be expensive. - Limited legal liability. They have lawyers and deep pockets to dissuade lawsuits, and fight them if necessary. Most corporations protect individual employees. You would have to pay for this on your own. - Sales force. Demand generation is very expensive - Healthcare. Yeah, very expensive. - Office space. - Training, travel, budgets. - Hardware, etc.

Basically, take everything captured under "General administrative expenses" and divide that by the number of employees in the company. This is the amount of value each hacker gets above & beyond their pay.

This gap isn't insurmountable, and you probably don't need all the services, but it explains much of the 'barrier to entry' for hackers going rouge.