I lived through the Twitter ecosystem collapse and now I'm a VC I worry about investing in startups that are built on any large ecosystem where there isn't an alignment of clear economic interest.
Google of all people doing this just made it tougher for everyone else to maintain confidence in large vendor platforms.
Here's a note, straight from quotes file, I took around the original Twitter fiasco, and have since reposted or mentioned on HN a few times on occasions similar to this:
* Sovereign from Mass Effect on using someone else's technology:
"Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it." Strangely, it seems to describe recent (2012/2013) situation with API of Twitter perfectly.
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Twitter did that twice[0] already, but it's a lesson people have to learn and relearn repeatedly: this is what happens when you build a business entirely around someone else's platform.
Between this and the infamous hacker group called "The Shadow Brokers" I think it's time someone did a study on the influence of Mass Effect on tech culture.
Not me, though - I'm in the middle of some calibrations right now.
[Spoiler alert, Hyperion series] That sounds totally lifted from the Hyperion series, but maybe the idea is earlier than that, does anyone have a proposed source for that idea that's earlier than 1989?
The writers were big Sci-Fi fans. The Asari were heavily influenced by the Minbari of Babylon 5. There are lots of other callouts to classic Sci-Fi in the series.
The bones of the setting and plot, the tone, plus lots of details, are so heavily borrowed from B5 that it's practically a kind of remix.
Not complaining, though, since [heresy incoming] they seem to have said "what if we took B5's setting but tweaked it to make it better" and then did it.
I will always be mad about the ME3 ending. If reincarnation is something that happens, my reincarnated self will be mad about the ME3 ending from birth.
The Reapers definitely fill a similar role as the Hegemony's TechnoCore, but the idea is so general: bigger, smarter entities leverage their natural advantage over smoller, dumber ones (who are sympathetic and protagonistic and somehow win love powers the universe shh it's ok).
If you build on someone else's platform, the best case is you get to be a sharecropper and can make money as long as you don't make so much that your platform-betters get jealous.
The more typical case is this, where you get to spend your time and money doing real-world R&D and discovery of what works for them, for free.
If you're going to dance with a vampire, don't be surprised when it bites you.
You can build alongside someone else's long-term demonstrated strategy (developing Microsoft desktop software) much more securely than developing a feature in someone else's closed garden.
You can also spread your footprint. As just an easy-to-discuss example, Facebook and Twitter develop for many different someone else's platforms, by supporting multiple browsers [who in turn support multiple OSs], multiple mobile platforms, etc.
Developing Microsoft desktop software you're still building on someone else's platform and hoping they don't decide to alter the terms of the deal. Microsoft may be more forward thinking than Google, but companies change.
Absolutely. That risk is much lower than developing for the Alexa, Nest, Twitter, etc platforms. At some point, you’re forced to build on someone else’s platform(s), even if that platform is “Intel” or “AWS” as no one is doing the entire end-to-end value chain.
Or build on an open an open source stack. Don't like Intel? Switch to AMD. Don't like AWS? Switch to another cloud.
Proprietary platforms lure developers to their stack by making development easy. Learning an open source is typically more difficult, but the reward is greater freedom. Believing you're forced to build on proprietary technology is a fallacy.
This is the kind of thinking that leads startups to build their own autoscaling for their pre revenue CRUD app. Trying to roll your own cloud infrastructure will kill you far quicker than AWS shutting down your service.
And you will always be relying on someone else's proprietary tech - whether it's laptops or power stations or cloud infra. The trick is deciding then to outsource and when to build your own.
There are a number of business models that are compatible with open source. But the question here isn't whether to open source your own software or not. The issue is whether it's a good idea to build on somebody else's proprietary stack.
It's in the long term interest of any business not to rely on the goodwill of some other business. This goes for Microsoft as much as for Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
Agreed. What's funny is that people now think Microsoft is this warm and fuzzy thing. They used to be far worse than they are today. For example, Microsoft Excel is nothing less than Microsoft's successful attempt to destroy Lotus 1-2-3. If the owner of the platform thinks you're getting too big for your britches, you can bet they'll try to take your revenue.
A difference is that Microsoft (currently) can't render your install base useless. If Microsoft drops Windows (or core Windows APIs) your existing users can stil use your software. With Google or Twitter shutting down "cloud"/web APIs all is gone.
People seem to have forgotten that Microsoft's unofficial motto is "Where do we want you to go today?" They've made an empire out of cutting off competition by changing their ecosystem.
Microsoft is all about cloud and web now. Clients are supposed to be web browser (asp.net) or mobile (xamarin), and they plan to add java, objc and swift interop to better target android and ios.
It is possible. We just have to prioritize open standards much more than we have been doing in the last decade.
History really repeats itself in this regard. First we get ourselves in a tight situation with lots of closed platforms, which is bad for everyone. Then someone comes along, spouting a new philosophy of openness (Stallman comes to mind). The philosophy takes hold and open technology flourishes for a while.
But then a huge corporation appears, offering to contribute to this new abundant ecosystem with great new things. By now, people are too relaxed and optimistic, so they readily accept this. Yet, little by little, the corporation exploits this, seizing more and more control, until we get right back where we started.
It's worse than Twitter. Twitter made a strategic decision (correct or not) that applied across their entire business. Google are making this decision and calculating or hoping that it's in isolation from the rest of their business. That really doesn't seem to be the case.
For the rest of their business' life, Google APIs will be met with skepticism about their long-term prospects. That sucks, because it doesn't seem good for anyone. Not good for Google. Not good for their customers. Not good for 3rd party developers.
Per many comments left on HN, the people that this does benefit are the PMs. It seems that a well-worn path to promotion at google is to launch products. Hence, the reason we have umpteen chat apps. Once the promotion occurs, it seems, the product is all but forgotten, having served it's purpose: a raise.
The divocring of incentives at google are at fault. The PMs aren't incentivied to do what is best for google, as it conflict with what is best for the PMs' families, college funds, mortgages, and health care. Hence, they do what is best for them at the expense of google.
I've already held that opinion of Google products for some time after seeing what a ghost town Sites and Docs are, and the shutdowns of Reader, G+, Wave, etc. At best it seems that you can count on a product silently losing support for years as a hint that you should migrate.
Well, the good news is that Google is kind of outing itself as a true outlier in that space. They clearly do not care at all about hurting developers that build on their platforms and there is enough daylight between them and other large tech companies on this that you probably don't need to extrapolate from Google to the entire tech world.
Makes me sad to say it as someone who has often defended Google in the past, but I can't on this.
Google and Amazon are ruthlessly strangling tech startups and smaller mom & pop shops that latch on to something and see a big spike in sales. They have all the data on these companies already, and people are just waiting to jump in and takeover or destroy a company completely regardless of industry or location. They just borg cube consume any success and very few people make any money in this process. This is happening every day, multiple times per day.
That's a way bigger problem than relying on an API or building some app in garden.
> Free members with more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded to Flickr have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download content over the limit. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr. After February 5, 2019, free accounts that contain over 1,000 photos or videos will have content actively deleted -- starting from oldest to newest date uploaded -- to meet the new limit.
I have a Pro account so maybe it's different, but I have a "Request my Flickr data" button in the bottom right of my account page: https://www.flickr.com/account
And unless something has changed recently, IIRC, Flickr had a very generous and fairly easy to use JSON API. In the past I've been able to bulk download my ~10,000 photos with just a few calls: https://idratherbewriting.com/learnapidoc/docapis_flickr_exa...
Surprisingly enough, they have a data export on the account page. I'm not sure when this was added but it was always a pain point for me and a reason I stopped paying any attention to my Flickr account. All it took was a drastic change to make me re-check my account!
In the time it took to write this comment you could've logged in and spotted the big "Export my data" button right there on the Account Settings page...
We do not keep any meta-data or derived data, we literally tabulate the numbers you see on that screen and just store that and the email it is run with. Plus we kill off the token afterwards. So the only place personal data would be is the memory until it is cleared.
We did this for fun, as a proof of concept for a paid saas idea, and because it might be a good lead gen source down the road. Our hope is people can use this to show their boss the pain meeting madness is causing, and what is preventing them from making. :)
I still can't tell if these are just rebranded Feitian Multipass keys [0], which I've already owned for several years. Has Google added something that I've missed?
Interesting question. Now that the forum is going to be open to all applicants, I guess you (and others like you) can post some information about yourself and how you can help what kind of startups and how many. And then startups can choose whether they'd like you and / or can get you to be their advisor.
I don't believe I have access to the forum - I think you had to apply to startup school... which is why I'm asking YC if they have a plan here for this!
Yeah, it didn't occur to me that you weren't an applicant, sorry. Sounds like something YC or Startup School applicants could do something about.
Although, realistically speaking, YC may not have anything to gain from connecting the rest of the students to outside advisors, keeping in mind that this would require some effort.
This may be something the students will have to do themselves, using the forum as a place to coordinate.
I think you should consider your addressable market to be greater than Indian expats - I'm a Brit and I miss my curry living here as much as anyone from India!
Two quick thoughts:
1) I don't get your branding, especially the company name, and especially as all of your meals are vegan.
2) Shipping meat-based meals is presumably a very different and more expensive logistical challenge so I get the reason why there's no meat in these but it seems as though these packets could easily be combined with pan-cooked chicken to make a more substantial meal - is that the case and is that something you've considered promoting as part of the marketing?
> 1) I don't get your branding, especially the company name, and especially as all of your meals are vegan.
As I mentioned downthread, I was planning to skip this completely because of the name until one of the founders happened to mention in a comment that the meals are vegan. I don't normally associate "buttermilk" with anything that I eat as a vegan.
This might be a tricky marketing issue, because a huge amount of traditional home-cooked Indian food is lacto-vegetarian but not vegan. So there might be not an enormous customer segment that would view the lack of dairy in these meals as an advantage (although I'm in that customer segment myself).
That's a great point about the branding. Why we're called Buttermilk: Buttermilk is eaten at the end of almost every South Indian meal to "cool down" the stomach. As a South Indian myself, this is one of my go-to comfort foods. The aim with the company is to provide authentic, comfort foods which is how we came about to using it for the name! Plus, it's a known and easy-to-say word.
We didn't actually launch with the aim of only providing vegan meals, it just so happened that our first dishes are all vegan! This has definitely caused some confusion so we'll continue to iterate on our branding/messaging.
I may as well chime in here to provide another data point. I'm also vegan and I was definitely turned off by the name. I wouldn't have read further if it wasn't clearly a service for Indian food, which I am particularly interested in. I'm glad that your first line of meals is vegan, and as another South Indian I can sympathize with the reasoning behind the name, but I'm sure many others would be confused by the name as well.
Another vegan chiming in to say I assumed these weren’t suitable for me based on the name because buttermilk is an ingredient I see and think, “damn :(“. Veganism is very much about identifying red flags that make something unsuitable, so any reference to a non-vegan product is going to immediately turn off a non-zero portion of vegans because they won’t search out the ingredients to discover it is vegan.
A key part of a manageable vegan life is building a database of what you can consume that you enjoy and using that to drive choices, so if you can get vegan customers buying your food and enjoying it then they’re going to be stickier customers. I am a very loyal customer to my favourite food brands out of necessity, as are my vegan friends.
That said there’s certainly a double edged sword here in that there are some non-vegans who see “vegan” and are turned off but given Indian food is so often vegan I don’t think this would be a concern in your market. Although the name is cute, it’s definitely misrepresenting your product to a growing portion of your potential customers. If you stick with the name, regardless of marketing, you’re going to lose vegans, because many won’t look beyond the name because that’s a necessity for getting by.
There’s a few companies in the U.K. doing intentionally vegan ready meals (e.g https://allplants.com) and there’s a growing market for vegan ready meals (we are as busy/lazy as everybody else), so I think it’s worthwhile to reconsider the name, but also it’s a great name so maybe you can be the company to get vegans to look beyond red flags. Your product seems absolutely great for my needs and would, assuming they’re enjoyable to eat, integrate into my life well. Good luck!
> Veganism is very much about identifying red flags that make something unsuitable,
Yeah, I've become very quick at glancing at an ingredient list and noticing "whey" or "gelatin" and then putting the product back. So indeed, the brand name itself would trigger a similar reaction for me if the founder hadn't happened to specifically mention that it was vegan.
> That said there’s certainly a double edged sword here in that there are some non-vegans who see “vegan” and are turned off but given Indian food is so often vegan I don’t think this would be a concern in your market.
There might be some knowledgeable customers who expect a particular dish to contain ghee and feel like it's not likely to be that great without the ghee.
Great initiative. But even I don't understand the use of this name as Branding. As ideally "Buttermilk" is a Drink consumed throughout India, and ironically your company is not selling it. :-).
Also its a name of the Drink and you are selling ready to eat food items which also make this name a little inappropriate, as for any Indian it gives the impression of Drink selling site rather than Food selling site. (Even i was not planning to look at it, if I have not read the comments).
I saw Mitra's reply downthread, but adding my 2c as an Indian:
Buttermilk is commonly drunk with meals in India (both North and South, although lassi is very popular in the North too), and also separately as a refresher, more so in summer, often lightly spiced with cumin, hing (asafoetida), etc. and sometimes with a few green chillies in it (for the brave - heh:), and is considered a soothing drink, and also healthy and wholesome. In fact I remember a childhood friend of mine saying that (as we both drank a glass each of buttermilk at lunch at his house), and it stuck in my memory. And it is really that - soothing.
Ha ha, good point :) Yes, hing is a very strong spice. But it can be a light spice, if you use little enough. Normally just a tiny pinch of it is used. Also, in India, the packaged variety you get from shops is usually mixed with some filler material which makes it less strong. Not sure what, need to check. In a similar manner, for example, some mustard powder out here is mixed with some whole wheat flour (atta) and turmeric, for the same reason. E.g. Weifield's Mustard Powder, a common brand.
Most commonly. I'm in North America and that's also true for the hing here. Though I have found other fillers, which is good for people who need to avoid gluten (atta has gluten).
Interesting question. Answer: The former. However, there is another product loosely called buttermilk by some, here. It is just curd (Indian term for yoghurt) diluted with water and maybe stirred or whisked a bit to mix up the water well with the curd. If you can't get the former, you can easily make this with curd you have at home. The real buttermilk is usually salted slightly. The one made from curd can be had either salty or sweet by adding sugar.
Interesting. Could be because it is somewhat stale, maybe. (Was it bought from stores, what you tried?) Same happens in India. Fresh home-made buttermilk tastes good, from just after being made up to say 24 hours or so. After that it does get more acidic, particularly in warmer weather or if not kept in the fridge, although I might call it sour instead. Not found it tasting bitter though, as I remember. Could be you had bad luck and it was quite old stock.
A quick cooking hack when you're out of buttermilk at home is to add a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of milk. So I always assumed the sourness/acidity was the defining feature of buttermilk. It would be interesting if there were types of buttermilk (and recipes requiring them) where this was not the case.
Interesting, must try that out sometime. In India paneer (a sort of Indian cottage cheese) is made that way, by putting lemon juice in hot milk, which makes it curdle. Then the curds are put into a cloth and hung up for a few hours to drain off the whey. What's left is paneer, which can be eaten raw, or used in dishes like palak paneer (spinach with paneer), mutter paneer (green peas with paneer), some Indian sweets, etc.
Thank you for your feedback! Note about why we're called Buttermilk below.
Re: meat-based options, we have added suggestions for meat to mix in with each dish under 'How to eat'! We plan on adding more in-depth recipes in the near future.
As a former DEFCON attendee I remain confused why the hotels feel there is enough cost/benefit to host this event. I remember one year at the Rio attendees pwn'd most of their systems, took down the POS systems of most of the retailers, installed fake ATMs and even set up a rogue cell phone tower in someone's room that pwned everyone's Android phone with a side loaded poisoned Android update.
It was great fun. But if I had been staying as a non-DEFCON guest I would be furious.
There's an article on security weekly that gives some tips on staying safe at hacker conferences. Most people there do not do anything malicious, but there's always a few ass hats who are trying to prove themselves by doing illegal things. I don't think a lot of them understand, you get caught doing something like that as an adult and any career you thought you might have in the security industry is over.
Summer is not usually a popular time to visit Vegas, so it's a tonne of business in the off-season when the rooms would otherwise not be booked. Also, hackers have money these days, it's probably pretty lucrative overall despite the shenanigans.
I lived through the Twitter ecosystem collapse and now I'm a VC I worry about investing in startups that are built on any large ecosystem where there isn't an alignment of clear economic interest.
Google of all people doing this just made it tougher for everyone else to maintain confidence in large vendor platforms.
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