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Pinboard Turns Five. Was just about to go to bed but felt compelled to comment on this.

Show HN: Smart bookmarks extension. So that makes what 4 or 5 new bookmarks extensions for chrome in the last two weeks?

They all suffer from the exact same problem: online and not nearly as fast as the current default option in chrome. Don't get me wrong, I hate the default bookmarks manger in chrome and wish that after 6 years they'd update it already (or at least ad api's that allow someone else to) but all the latest get same basic things wrong while not being very different form one another. EDIT: I guess I should clarify, I don't mean that online is bad, I used xmarks for a long time, I just don't like online only because it affects retrieval and search rates. There's just no way to beat the speed of a local directory. [I've installed Dewey, dragdis, and fetching.io. fetching is really more of a history extension than a bookmarking one but the idea behind it is the same. Hybrid sweet spot: Native navigation, web content by David of Basecamp. When we launched the iPhone version of Basecamp in February of last year, it was after many rounds of experimentation on the architectural direction.

The default route suggested by most when we got started back in early/mid-2012 was simple enough: Everything Be Native! This was a sensible recommendation, given the experiences people had in years prior with anything else. Facebook famously folded their HTML5 implementation in favor of going all native to get the speed they craved with the launch of their new app in August of 2012. Thus their decision was likely driven by what the state of the art in HTML and on mobile looked like circa 2010-2011. In early 2010, people were rocking either the iPhone 3GS or 3G. With IPO Hopes Fading, Square And Box Face Reality Of Commodity Products. Square and Box would seem to be the very epitome of every startup founder’s dream of reaching the pinnacle of entrepreneurial success.

Take a kernel of an idea and turn it into a massive, multi-billion-dollar company that publicly debuts in an IPO. For the founders involved, the exhilaration and elation of that drive to the top must be deeply palpable, and at times it probably seems as though every single molecule in the universe is working in their favor. Yet, the cruel vagaries of startups are such that those laws of physics can change in mere moments. Square, a favorite with the press with its charismatic founder, Jack Dorsey, seemed to have everything it needed to conquer and crush the physical retail point-of-sale market, an industry that has called out for innovation for years without much progress.

Yet, both companies have now delayed their IPOs – perhaps indefinitely – and analysts are seriously questioning the ability of either company to get their roadshows back on track. Grow fast or die slow. Software and online-services companies can quickly become billion-dollar giants, but the recipe for sustained growth remains elusive.

Software and online services are in a period of dizzying growth. Year-old companies are turning down billion-dollar buyouts in the hopes of multibillions in a few months. But we have seen similar industry phases before, and they have often ended with growth and valuations fizzling out. 4 Symptoms of Dysfunction in Software Teams. Once you’ve been in the industry for a decade or so you start to get a sixth sense of when things aren’t right.

However even when your sixth sense isn’t working here are some signals that should raise alarm bells. 1. It Dependencies Every time you ask someone how something works or where some data is the explanation starts with ‘it depends’. For example say I enquire how a user’s password is verified, I’d get an answer something like this: “It depends, if the user registered before 2001 then you need to call the genesis logon system, after 2001 however we switched to active directory, unless the user was a customer of that company we bought in 2005, in which case you’ll need to call the ‘migration’ LDAP they put in place at the time which uses Netscape LDAP so you’ll need JNDI library we patched to work around some bugs.

You get the idea, technical debt has built up, poor decisions haven’t been rectified and now there is there a laundry list of ‘it depends’ for every question. [OCR] Project Naptha. Extension is awesome and while the code is messy, it has enough little jokes to keep you amused.

For those looking to access the backend OCR service, it seems to be down right now, but will hopefully come back up soon. Here were the API references I could find for the remote OCR: - GET - GET - POST Apparently the author was one of the winners of HackMIT 2013 according to some of the comments. Note from the Dev ( /* It's April 16, 2014. It's been six months since I started this project. Just under two years after I first came up with the idea. It's weird to think of time as something that happens, to think of code as something that evolves. Hopefully, this project is going to launch soon.