andrewparker

There's nothing about lawyers that requires geographic proximity. If you really dislike Chicago based lawyers, hire a lawyer out of a VC-specific lawfirm from SV or NYC.

I just wish Wikipedia would find a self-sustaining model that didn't rely on perpetual annual donations. I'm not proposing a for-profit company, but I am proposing finding a non-compromising way to make just enough revenue to keep it going sustainably while remaining neutral.

PS I donated to Wikimedia last year, so I'm willing to contribute until the project finds a more sustainable model.

* The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It :: by Jonathan Zittrain

* The Elementary Particles :: by Michel Houellebecq

If you're stuck on Outlook 2003, Lookout is an add-on for '03 that adds blazing fast search. I find it works faster than Xobni.

I'd pay twice as much to be able to target a specific demographic. Nice job John.

Justin, I've been mucking around for awhile in MTurk trying to use Qualifications to create an survey that would target a specific demographic. Have you cracked this nut? Is this something you're considering adding to extend the product? Or is it simply not within the scope of MTurk's capabilities?

I did my undergrad at Stanford, and after taking two simple intro courses, we had the first real intro to paradigms course (CS107). In that course, three languages were used: C++ (for a data structures project), Java (for an OOP and Concurrency project), and Lisp (for a context-free grammar project). I don't know if the course is still taught this way, but I thought it was great.

A brief Sam Altman story:

Back when I was in college, I decided to be an RA for a Freshman dorm during my Junior year. Two of my freshman in my dorm were Sam Altman and Blake Ross. We took a class together called Internet Technologies (CS191i).

Our first assignment was to build a VERY rudimentary web browser in Perl; all it did was, open a socket, accept and validate a URL as input, and print out the result of a GET request from a web server. The creator of Firefox was assigned "build a web browser" as homework!

Needless to say, both Sam and Blake dropped out of school before the end of their Sophomore year.

The equity slice in compensation depends on the salary and the stage of the company.

When the company is just a drawing on a scrap of napkin and no way to pay salary, it may require as much as 10-30% of the company to convince someone to come code for you. Based on this equity slice, the person would be essentially a founder.

When your company is a small prototype and can only pay enough salary to cover food, rent, etc, then you're probably looking at 2-8% of the company based on experience.

When the company is a couple thousand man-hours of code and you can pay a basic intro-level salary, then you're probably looking at 0.5-2% of the company, depending on experience.

Meh... after working with a team of 20 developers for a few months, I could very clearly tell you who are the rock stars and who are not. Particularly in software development, some people are just unbelievably better than others.

Google already fixed this. No one directly navigates to domains anymore. The SERP is a popularity-ranked page of everything that should be at the domain for the keywords you searched on.

Learn the guts of an OS (preferably *nix). Build an OS yourself in an OS class if your school offers it. You'll be surprised how important this knowledge will be in building/scaling web services. And, this skill set will be more valuable than just learning the same paradigms you already know in a new language.

It really surprised me that full-text search isn't easier on a Google-created cloud solution. Search is their bread and butter, you'd think this functionality would be a part of the default libraries Google created.

Yahoo Mail is based on Oddpost, which is the granddaddy of sweet AJAX web 2.0 apps. Not only is Oddpost not far removed from today's web apps, it's generally a key source of inspiration for many of the AJAX techniques used today.

Isn't this the pot calling the kettle black? Warren Buffet manages money on behalf of his investors via his investment vehicle: Berkshire Hathaway. He is a "Helper." Granted, he's a giant leap above the hedge fund world zero-sum game. But, he's still a stock picking "Helper."

What are those "x" URLs blocked in the robots.txt for HN?

I'd add that the publisher should have a syndication option for the comments. In other words, the publisher should get a non-exclusive, free right to syndicate all the comments along with the original blog post. A conversation and the corresponding blog post should always be able to go hand in hand.

Whatever provider you decide to use (and whether or not you decide to host it yourself or use an ESP), you should:

A) be sending from your own dedicated IP address (so that spammers sharing your IP address don't cause all your email to go to spam) and

B) work with a deliverability provider such as ReturnPath or Habeas.

Regarding "bang for your buck" Dell's are still the best bargain for compute power. Many people (rightly so) piss all over them for bad customer support, but if you buy from the "small business" side of the site instead of the "consumer/residential" side of the site, then you get small biz customer support bundled, which anecdotally is much better.

Riding on the subway earlier today, a guy got on an starting preaching how "the lord saves" and "you must embrace Jesus." I wish math could create equivalent evangelism. I'd love to live in a world where a guy gets on the subway and starts preaching the Pythagorean theorem?

This is post is little more than link bait (and I guess I'm falling for it by commenting).

Social Security # are security through obscurity. We need a national ID system that provided security by design. And, don't bother arguing that we shouldn't have a national ID system because Social Security #s are already a national ID system. If we're going to have a national ID system, it might as well be a good one.

Bishop c4 to f7. Check!

Can't wait to see how the game unfolds. However, I'm confident the only true winners will be the lawyers.

Don't underestimate the power of good brand marketing. The author of this post caulks up Apple's success to good design. I think design is important, but the Apple brand is more important. Apple has created this club-like feel to their products... if you own a Mac or an iPhone, you're in the in-crowd, and they have spent ungodly sums of money on star-powered commercials to create a brand with that "in-crowd" effect.

Unless you're building the next social news site or a bittorrent client, this is the wrong initial audience for your product. You want to find people that are actually in your target demographic, not the fickle digerati that try 10 new web services a day but never stick around at any of them.

You want your initial customer base to be your target demographic because their initial feedback will help shape future iterations of your product. If you just launch with the web 2.0 social news scene, their feedback will be less relevant and will take your product down a distracting path.

VCs analyze opportunities largely by pattern recognition. They detect correlations between their past successes and then ride them for all they're worth when looking at new deals. The "no sex life" thing is a particularly peculiar correlation that Doerr is focusing on, but his process of pattern recognition investing is pretty normal.

Important to note: these patterns and correlations, not causations, and no one is claiming them to be causations. Doerr clearly does not think that "nerdy, white, no sex life" necessarily leads to "billion dollar dot-com success". As Founders at Work (Jessica Livingston's book) very clearly outlines, successful founders look very different from each other and take very different paths to success.

No, BarCampNYC3 was back in March... great event: http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampNYC3

I don't feel qualified to really comment here considering how few languages I've really immersed myself into, so I'll add this snippet from Paul Graham's "Great Hackers" ( http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html ) essay as commentary, which immediately came to mind when reading bullet #2:

"A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT."

I think Henry did a pretty good job at explaining his methodology. He uses public and private comps for revenue multiples. Cites valuations in the case of private comps. It's certainly better than most of the random valuation speculations I read on Techcrunch.

I do use the api... the only way I can think of to not request passwords is to send emails to people reminding them to unsnooze people. The follow/unfollow commands require credentials (with good reason).