Hacker News Reader

Toddwardon Facebook acquires Instagram

I haven't been able to find anything anywhere that says they actually closed that round - merely that they were looking to raise money at that valuation.

EDIT: Open mouth, insert foot: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/right-before-acquisition-in...

Toddwardon Facebook acquires Instagram

Quite a jump from the $500 million valuation they were shooting for last week[1].

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/no-filter-required-instagra...

Toddwardon Don’t Be Evil: How Google Screwed a Startup

Presumably, Google assumes that the account owner is the person or entity committing the click fraud and will find ways to continue perpetrating the fraud if only an IP or range is blocked. It's probably much less of a headache to just nuke an account than play a game of cat and mouse with fraudsters.

Toddwardon Source: RIM begins laying off high-level staff

“It is very clear to me that substantial change is what RIM needs,” Mr. Heins said on the call with investors.

Compared to (just a few months ago):

"I don’t think that there is a drastic change needed."

Oh, RIM.

Toddwardon Announcing Backlift: Deployment and Hosting for Backbone.js

Using bare PyMongo, asyncmongo, or some ORM-like solution?

Coincidentally, I'm also working on my own app using Tornado and Backbone and considering the switch to Mongo (currently using the base MySQLdb wrapper included with Tornado) - curious as to how you've found working with whatever Mongo solution you're using.

Edit: Initially forgot to include asyncmongo in that list.

Toddwardon Announcing Backlift: Deployment and Hosting for Backbone.js

Curious as to what the backend stack is - can you provide any details?

Toddwardon Ask HN: Does Anyone Write Code With an iPad?

Yeah, the external keyboard would be a must. Thanks for your thoughts.

Toddwardon New: Apply to Y Combinator without an Idea

We've heard/read countless stories of YC companies pivoting, but I can't find any hard data on it. I'd be curious to know what the pivot rate is for YC portfolio companies during their funding cycles; given this change, it would seem that the rate is high-ish, but I'd hate to presume anything.

Just curious.

Toddwardon Google's cloud-based machine learning tools

There's a meetup at Google's Crittenden Campus (Mountain View) that'll be going over this next Wednesday: http://www.meetup.com/sv-gtug/events/51114452/

Toddwardon Ask HN: Is there a HN-like site for Foreign Policy and International Relations?

Here's a subreddit I found, though it seems to be only moderately active: http://www.reddit.com/r/IRstudies

I'd be interested to know of any other destinations people know if.

Toddwardon Play 2.0 release candidate is out

I, erm, played around with Play! early last year and loved it. However, I wanted to get out of my Java comfort zone and moved on to Python (and subsequently Django); I would have tried Scala with Play!, but support for Scala appeared flaky at the time - that looks to have changed with 2.0.

If you're a Java developer who needs a MVC framework, this is the project to check out.

Toddwardon The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky

I've chatted with a few potential cofounders over the past several months who have exhibited these traits - the arrogance, the condescension, the overall shady attitude. It's exhausting trying to explain to people that they are not Steve Jobs (also, that The Social Network is not indicative of how things actually work out here).

Toddwardon A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem - Hackruiter

I applied, interviewed for, and then (stupidly) realized that I couldn't attend the coming batch. But I did get a chance to chat with Nick for 45 minutes or so - these guys seem very with it and I really admire how the primary focus of the school is to help people become better hackers. The press they've received in the past couple of weeks has focused more on the business/recruitment aspect of the operation - the feeling I got was that that's more of a peripheral advantage of the program.

I hope I have the opportunity to attend in a coming batch - if nothing more than to become a better hacker.

Toddwardon A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem - Hackruiter

Seconded - the Django tutorial is very well written and extremely informative. Django's documentation in general is a valuable resource.

Toddwardon Django Social Auth

I upvoted this because, a few months ago, I had a hell of a time sifting through the sheer number of similar, but inoperable/poorly documented Django backends. In the end, I rolled my own, but I wish I had known about this project.

Toddwardon Facebook's S-1 Filing

"We had 845 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of December 31, 2011."

That blows some estimates out of the water.

Toddwardon Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein leaves HP

I'm going to be really curious to see what he does next. Jon did an excellent job of making Palm relevant and exciting again. It was just too bad that their hardware was shoddy and the all-in push came too late.

Toddwardon Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, and fraudulent life of Kim Dotcom

I have to say - living a life that was a constant misrepresentation of itself must have been exhausting.

Toddwardon Do Great Things

Ok, allow me to clarify my position: I agree with notion that there are more important problems to work on than many we see startups pursuing.

If you had to pick a primary point being conveyed by the column, would you pick A) there are many important problems that startups could be working on or B) the 100th Facebook engineer made a more meaningful impact on the world than some popular startup founders? I chose option A.

Regardless, you seem content to argue with me because I choose to acknowledge his point. I don't care who he is, what he's worked on, or what other credentials he has - I agree with his core message, that we should choose to work on bigger ideas that change the world, not meaningless ones.

As an aside, I do think it can be necessary to go with smaller ideas in order to cash out and pursue greater ones. Case in point: Elon Musk; while PayPal wasn't necessarily a small thing, it pales in comparison to his current endeavors, which I believe will have a long-lasting impact on the world.

Toddwardon Do Great Things

And? Do you see me touting Facebook as the company that will save the world?

Toddwardon Do Great Things

That's a fair point. Mine was simply to point out that there was an idea that resonated with me, regardless of whether that point is muddled by hypocrisy.

Toddwardon Do Great Things

And that's fine - I'm not affirming or denying that he's done anything meaningful. That's why I'm saying you should try to look at his statement by filtering out who is saying it, what they've done, and what their ulterior motive might be.

Does anyone disagree that there are bigger problems to be solved than are currently being tackled by many startups? Not that most startups can tackle the daunting task of solving some of these problems themselves (at least, not without some serious IP and capital), but it's useful for a bit of perspective. Are we really solving some fundamental problem in the world by perfecting daily deals? No - it's silly to argue otherwise.

Toddwardon Do Great Things

Regardless of whether there's an ulterior motive for him writing the piece, I think it's still a good reminder for everyone.

Take the who and the why out of the equation here and you're left with a pretty sobering point - there are bigger problems to solve than figuring out how to make people pay for nonsense in flash games on Facebook (no disrespect to Zynga'ers).

Toddwardon SOPA/PIPA: Dodd Calls for Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Meet

What's really striking about this article is that, for all the missteps he acknowledges he made, he doesn't address the biggest fundamental issue - the bill was garbage.

It's also telling that he wants meetings with the tech industry now instead of, say, before they drafted and started pushing awful legislation. What a farce.

Toddwardon Werewolf

Matt Cutts mentioned it in a blog post earlier - must have piqued the interest of people who had never heard of it.

Toddwardon Hacker News Browser/OS/Region Analytics Data

Results up here: http://b.dd0t.com/post/15408032273/hn-user-demographics

Toddwardon Collecting HN Visitor Analytics for Distribution to HN Community

In response to this item on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3397619

I'm going to leave this page up for a week and then I'll publish the results under a CC license next week.

Toddwardon Hacker News Browser/OS/Region Analytics Data

http://dd0t.com/static/hnstats.html

I'll leave this up for the next week or so and publish the results next week (if there's enough interest, of course).

Toddwardon Facebook deleted their Python SDK repository without warning

I seem to recall Facebook announcing at the beginning of the summer that they were discontinuing support for the Python SDK. I'll try to track down the relevant article.

EDIT - Relevant HN link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2737965

Toddwardon All Hacker Monthly issues free for next ~24 hours

Thanks for the tips. I get better at Python every day.