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alex1

1,428 karma · joined March 20, 2010

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alex1··on 2005 Zuckerberg Didn't Want To Take On The World
"[...] it was just me programming what was a facebook, really, at that time for Harvard [...] they didn't have anything like that. [...] I realized that because I didn't have people's information like a school would in making a facebook, I had to make it interesting enough..."

I think what he meant was that Harvard itself didn't provide an online facebook to its students. Wasn't Harvard supposedly working on a university-run online facebook during that time? Or am I just thinking of houseSYSTEM?

alex1··on Former Google engineer builds Turntable clone
Interesting HTML comments from the source after you log in with Facebook:

    <!--25 people. 3 Google, 2 Columbia, 2 NYU, 10 New Yorkers ; tribe designation...? --> 

    <!-- concept of the crowd : what the crowd looks like: 'oh a bunch of old people in this restaurant... fuck that'. oh mostly college-age kids who go to NYU -->
alex1··on WebRTC
I fail to see any comparison here.

WebRTC is a project building support for things like P2P and Device API support into modern browsers. This is so you could do things such as access a user's video camera through the Device API and establish a P2P stream with another browser, without using any Flash or installable plugins.

Now is just a JavaScript library that enables you to do RPC with browsers.

alex1··on Robert Morris, Pioneer in Computer Security, Dies at 78
For those who don't know, this is rtm's (YC partner Robert T. Morris) father. My condolences to him.
alex1··on Show HN: Log.io (Realtime log monitoring, powered by node.js + socket.io)
It's cool to see log files streamed in real time to your browser but most of the time it scrolls too fast to get any useful information out of it (unless you use regex filters of course). It would be cool to have graphs that show, say, browser usage (or IP geolocation or operating system or page visited or any other metric that can be gathered from log files), being updated in real time.
alex1··on Where Did Groupon’s Billion Dollars (Series G) Go?
Actually, they have 7,107 employees.

From the SEC S-1 filing[1]:

We grew from 37 employees as of June 30, 2009 to 7,107 employees as of March 31, 2011.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/0001047469110...

alex1··on Was LinkedIn Scammed?
One of the reasons LinkedIn's share price jumped so high from its IPO price of $45 was because of a very low float. There are too few LinkedIn shares trading on the public market. It is not that easy to get your hands on LinkedIn shares right now, even if you are willing to pay market price. This artificially raises the stock price.

I believe 7 million shares were floated out of ~94 million outstanding shares. If more shares are floated, the price per share should go down (not considering other factors) as there will be a larger supply of shares in the public market. The assessment that the investment banks that the IPO should be priced at $45 sounds more reasonable had all 94 million shares been floated (speaking hypothetically; this never actually happens).

For this reason, valuing LinkedIn by multiplying 94 million (total outstanding shares) by the current stock price on the NYSE (as most news articles have been doing) is probably not a very accurate measure.

alex1··on LNKD IPO opens huge at $83
The IPO should have probably been priced a little higher. Closer to $70 or $80, given this type of demand. The people that were in on the IPO got a very nice return this morning, provided the stock price stays this high for a little while. Also, LinkedIn would have raised something closer to $700 million or more, had the IPO been priced more accurately. Does anyone know who the underwriters were?
alex1··on AIM AV
Back in the late 90's and early 00's, I remember discovering a bunch of "internal" AOL sites. Even after posting about them on forums, AOL didn't seem to care much (unless they could be used to steal accounts).
alex1··on Dropship — successor to torrents?
What would stop pirates from querying each other (maybe on some P2P network) for those random bytes?

Client A wants the file that Client B has so when Dropbox asks Client A for some random offset, Client A asks Client B in the background and relays the result to Dropbox.

It really depends on how far pirates would be willing to go.

alex1··on Jedberg on Reddit's most recent outage
> All of our Cassandra nodes are now using only local disk, and we hope to have all of postgres on local disk soon.

Since local disk is temporary and can be lost any second, don't they still have to use EBS for persistence?

alex1··on I'm 16, and need advice
I agree with everything you said but can we please be a little more civil?
alex1··on I'm 16, and need advice
Take this advice with a grain of salt. I wouldn't take it at all. If you choose to major in CS (I would encourage you to), try your best go to a reputable school. I would say the most reputable ones are most of the engineering programs at the top 20 schools (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, etc).

I don't know much about lower or middle tier schools but at the top tier schools, nothing you learn will be 10 years out of date.

alex1··on Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances
The biggest advantage to this (other than security) is that you won't need to share I/O or CPU time with other people, resulting in much more consistent and predictable performance across the board.

Now, if only they could provide EBS this way...

alex1··on Verizon iPhones Fell Back an Hour Instead of Springing Ahead
Verizon iPhone here says 11:52pm (it's really 12:53am). Hopefully this fixes itself at the real 2:00am.
alex1··on Natalie Portman - Scientist
Here's the paper she entered into the Intel Science Talent Search: http://www.natalieportman.com/articles/1998/chemicaleducatio...
alex1··on Facebook raises $1.5 Billion at $50 Billion Valuation
So, Facebook has now raised, like, $2.3 billion in VC? Isn't that some sort of record?
alex1··on Why Caltech Is in a Class by Itself
Seems like link is down. Mirror?
alex1··on Objective-C code on Big Bang Theory
Here's a legal way to watch it: http://www.cbs.com/primetime/big_bang_theory/video/?pid=H8pV...

Skip to 6:00.

alex1··on Objective-C code on Big Bang Theory
I just watched the episode and was pretty impressed with the accuracy of their (iPhone) software development skits, including their dialogue (relative to other shows/movies). There was much more than what's shown in this image. Anyone have video?
alex1··on Live Streaming Lunar Eclipse
The eclipse is cool but it's even cooler that this is costing UStream almost nothing in bandwidth costs (15,000+ viewers) because of RTMFP and peer assisted networking. Kind of like BitTorrent for live video.
alex1··on Starting
If you ever want to take VC/angel money, you will most probably need to spend more to restructure and re-incorporate. The boilerplate that services like LegalZoom are not made for startups. They may be fine for other types of businesses, but not for startups. If you're one or two people running a small business, you should be fine.

Even YC advises against incorporating using generic paperwork (I would imagine the YC paperwork is pretty similar to what other Silicon Valley startup attorneys would use):

"Don't incorporate, though, if you can avoid it. It's easier to start with our paperwork than to transfer an existing LLC or S-Corp to a C-Corp."[1]

[1] http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

alex1··on Starting
How do I get a company registered? How much does it cost? I have used Legalzoom once and Harvard Business Review once, to start two companies. They’re both in Delaware (it’s the new hotness or something). It cost me <$400 each time.

Don't do this. I don't see a reason in having a corporate entity for making apps, let alone more than one. Get a DBA (sometimes called Fictitious Business Name or FBN; in California, this would be ~$80 one time vs $800/year if you incorporated and had to pay the franchise tax, which is owed regardless of state of incorporation or net income). If circumstances require you to establish a corporation (like a very rapidly growing service), establish a C-Corp and not an LLC. And go through a lawyer, not LegalZoom.

Never ever establish it through a service like LegalZoom. Pay an attorney $2k-$3k and do it the proper way. Any Silicon Valley lawyer (and investor) will tell you the same thing. Before any investor invests in whatever it is you're doing, they will require you to restructure the entity and issue shares all over again. Intellectual property belonging to the corporation may become another issue (I've heard some horror stories about this; make sure you transfer all IP to the corporation). This will end up costing more than if you had done it the right way in the beginning. I've even heard stories about people incorporating through LegalZoom and never actually issuing stock to anyone.

Also, there is a reason for incorporating in Delaware. Delaware's General Corporation Law is very flexible and is the most favored by businesses. The court also works better for businesses since your fate is decided by a judge rather than a jury. Other advantages include some tax advantages, a cheap filing fee, and privacy laws for executives and directors.

alex1··on Facebook Derivatives: Wall Street Goes Rogue-er
> (I thought that this is what you call brokers with heavy flow that could cross much of their traffic internally without going to the exchange.)

What you describe here sounds like dark pools[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pools_of_liquidity

alex1··on Facebook Derivatives: Wall Street Goes Rogue-er
I have also never seen the word derivatives used in this context. Isn't "derivatives" usually used to describe options, futures, warrants, etc?

Derivatives in that sense are used to add some leverage on a bet and are known for their high risk, compared to the risk in directly owning their underlying equity securities. They aren't directly related to the underlying (same idea in calculus: y = f(x) ≠ dy/dx). I don't see how this adds additional risk in addition to the risk associated directly with owning Facebook stock.

While this technically is a derivative (underlying is Facebook stock), I think using the term "Facebook derivative" is a bit misleading.

alex1··on There is a puzzle embedded in this page...
You're not alone; I tried doing the exact same thing when I saw "Reply back with the next packet in the handshake sequence as parameter 'msg'"
alex1··on We're moving. Goodbye Rackspace.
Just curious, are there any benchmarking results that show this?
alex1··on We're moving. Goodbye Rackspace.
Not to mention you could now have an entire year of EC2 micro (and a bunch of other services) for free.
alex1··on Zero to a Million Users in 15 Days
I wonder why Ping or WhatsApp wasn't able to get this viral. The only viral feature I saw is when I installed it, it went through my contact list (I'm assuming) and found all my friends that already have it installed. Others were able to find me even though I didn't enter my phone number when signing up. Weird.
alex1··on New MacBook Air Specs
Anyone else notice the Software Reinstall Drive?

http://images.apple.com/macbookair/images/specs_flashdrive_2...

USB drive with Mac OS X?

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