This is great

Homejoy seems to be the most recent example of non-sensical unit economics.

cool, what app do you work on?

How does apple feel about it?

Thanks for asking. I think apple re-thinked their previous policy on Bitcoin. We did not have an issue to release the app. It actually only took us 3 days to update the app in the app store. 70% of our paid users are still using apple in-app purchase.

As a Sikh American that wears a turban every day [https://www.facebook.com/satjot], it's great to see a positive piece on Turbans in the US. For the most part I've dealt with comments like, "Hey Osama", "You Towel Head", "Taliban!"...

As s Sikh Brit that also wears a turban I usually feel quite at home when I'm routinely in the US. Hardly any noise direct my way (must have got lucky) but plenty of folk do glance in a curious sort of way.

People seem to remember us more which is no great surprise given we tend to stand out a mile.

Back in my consulting days I used to work a lot at Microsoft offices around the world. For some strange reason no matter which country I was in, the local staff used to assume I was there for a speaking gig!

But I'll never forget the time I went to Argentina -- the whole airport stopped as I got off the plane. I didn't go back there in a hurry...

I'm really sad to hear this.

Even sadder is the fact that (according to a recent Algerian speaking at TED), while westerners are calling all Muslims (and Sikhs) terrorists, they ignore that 85% of the direct victims of terrorism (ignoring USA drone strikes etc) are non-fundamentalist Muslims in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, etc.

Do "westerners call all Muslims (and Sikhs) terrorists"? Rubbish.

Do "they ignore that 85% of the direct victims of terrorism ... are non-fundamentalist Muslims"? No, they don't.

People throwing around blanket statements while complaining about blanket statements.

People are going to be racist and xenophobic assholes no matter what unfortunately. Anyone outside of their race / religion / country will be hated upon with the fire of a thousand suns.

Pure ignorance. People would react remarkably different if they knew that defending innocents are a Sikhs religious duty.

This seems very similar to hired.com

If the tech just looks at the screenshot image, how does it have near full coverage of mobile web but has to train/fingerprint apps?

Good question- with Safari, we use the visible domain to help score the confidence for mobile websites. For native apps, we don't have any such "easy" confidence boost. So we have to fingerprint the app based on different features present in the image that is captured.

The system is computer vision / machine learning based, so even on novel sites, it will get better over time with more usage and training. We've trained it up for a bunch of the most popular sites already though.

Does this make sense?

Sounds impressive. Do you have a pre-existing product database that you match them up to or do you just create products on the fly?

I would strongly guess it's a fixed set of product images they're training against, possibly attained by massive scraping. Another part of training or processing might consist of a reverse image search API, like TinEye, and gathering metadata from the pages containing the result images.

We do our own searching and wrote our own crawlers. Does that answer your question?

It does indeed. I'm very impressed. Keep up the good work!

Nice. Congrats guys.

Thanks!

@allantyoung there are a few ways Facebook can compile this data : (1) They could make calls to app url schemes that are publicly known (i.e. http://handleopenurl.com/) to check for a response (2) Facebook will become the largest data set of app url schemes as more apps register their url schema with Facebook when enabling deep-linking (3) Facebook bought Parse, and over 100,000 apps use Parse and many of those apps use FB connect, so Facebook knows which apps those users have

On Android, though, app developers just have to register open intents for their urls, and Android takes care of the rest. No special schemes necessary, and falls back to the browser if the user doesn't have an app installed to handle it. What exactly is wrong with that setup that necessitates a whole new set of schemas that will result in urls that can only be handled if you already have the app installed?

My friend has a 25 minute timer, during which time, he only focuses on the task in front of him. It is more to curb ADD but ends up helping with productivity.