benwerd

MIT + HUGWARE = my new favorite license. Thanks for the clarification.

It's a lovely, incredibly refreshing idea.

Don't confuse it for a legal license though, of course. For one thing, it leaves you open in the event someone modifies your code to do something terrible / broken. Maybe it could be something that can be layered on top of a license? I really love the idea of Hugware and would love to use it for all my open projects.

I'm not an editor, but I've used Nine before and she's great: http://www.outofthisboringneighbourhood.com/

My first reaction to this was "we don't need another phone platform". But you know what? I think their corporate focus is really smart - particularly at a time when both RIM and Microsoft are leaving craters in that market. I really hope they succeed.

I'm so pleased tef is blogging this stuff. It's fun to see it in one place.

Tempting. Very, very tempting.

And good luck!

Serious achievement. Well done!

Every time I've had traditional media coverage of a project I've worked on, I've made this resolution. I'm not at all ungrateful for the coverage - each time, it made a difference, and it's lovely to be noticed - but even Wired, which should be pretty good at this, got major details wrong. (To their credit, TechCrunch, RWW et al have always reported accurately.)

Journalism is really important, but it's rare to see it done well. I really like long-form journalism outlets like the New Yorker for this reason.

One obvious, safe way: set up an API on their servers, abstracting away the need to send actual MySQL calls over the Internet.

In smaller companies you can sometimes rewrite the contract. I've done this, specifically to remove this clause.

I use NetBeans for development, and always feel like I'm slightly inferior for not relying on vim. There's certainly a lot to be said for it, but I really like (1) being able to zoom straight to the definition of one of my functions (can vim do this?), and (2) being able to code offline / on localhost sometimes.

And I think the second point is my problem with this. Chances are, if I get a cheapo PC or a tablet to code on, it's because I'm traveling. If I'm traveling, chances are I'm not going to have a reliable Internet connection. I've got a mobile hotspot, etc etc, but sometimes the simple method - working locally - is the best.

I'd love it if ducks did this.

Activity Streams + IFTTT for the desktop, yep. I've mooted it elsewhere before, but I think I'll write up the idea more fully.

Cool! Here's what I would really, really like to see as part of a file manager re-imagining: a unified, programmable activity stream for my actions across both my local machine and the Internet, stored locally but accessible via API.

Imagine this:

I save a photo, with Photoshop, to my Pictures/2012 folder. It's immediately added to my local timeline. It's private to me.

I copy the photo to my Pictures/Web folder. Again, this is added to my timeline. I've programmed the timeline to also send the photo to Flickr when I do this.

I copy it to my Pictures/Clients/John Smith folder. It's in my timeline, but here I've programmed it to send it privately to John Smith via a web service.

I'm on a company network. I copy a file to a shared drive. It shows up in the timelines of all the other people who have access to that drive (although some of them may have chosen to filter these actions out). A couple of them have actions programmed in; they automatically copy the file to their own private folders, or to their mobile devices, etc etc. One of them decides to leave a comment on the shared timeline.

I can search my timeline by type, person, action type, etc etc. And do the same even when I'm disconnected from my computer and network, although not all of the files are necessarily available.

This. This is the web I care about. The principles that keep me doing what I do for a living. I love this web, and how it works.

But the thing is, I love the web we have now, too. I love the interconnectedness and the fact that you don't need to be technical to find, share and create amazing stuff. You just have to have imagination and humanity.

So, let's go back. Let's take the web we've got today, and let's consciously retrofit it with the plumbing we had back then. Let's take the services we all work on and stick in those APIs. Let's make it all work better together, so that the sum of all the web applications is far more than all the web applications separately.

Think about the back-end services we all value: Stripe. Twilio. AWS. What unites all of them is that they're incredibly simple to develop with, and to connect into other applications. That's why Twitter succeeded in the beginning, too: because its API was simple enough that people could build apps for the nascent mobile app ecosystem. This is good for all of our products, as well as for the web's health as a platform.

It's not hard. That's the beauty of it: all these APIs and standards are simple to build and simple to use. That's why they survived. All that has to happen is an understanding that being closed is not a better way to serve your users or run a tech business.

I'm with you, and I tend to agree with the Pando posts lately about "disruption" and the malformed philosophies that tend to go along with it. I didn't use it though, I promise!

I want to submit more reviews! Can I do that without having to submit another site?

Just requested and posted my first reviews. This is super-awesome, and I expect I'll be using it a lot. Thank you.

Scrolling down, I did also forget to leave a star rating. Maybe that can be clearer?

Hey now. That's not very nice.

Here's an edit just for you. Better?

I read this the other day and completely fell in love. What a fantastic thing to be doing - but, as jaysonelliot says, from the perspective of the person running the unofficial restaurant. It's worth noting that by the end of the article, he's opening a real restaurant. This was his way in, and it was very effective, probably because his enjoyment of his work shone through.

I wonder, though, if the same trick could be repeated by creating an unofficial restaurant aimed at diners who like good food but wouldn't think of trying to get into a fancy restaurant, or paying for one. Could you arrive from outside the restaurant "scene" and make a name for yourself in the same way?

Meanwhile, the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi is on a related topic, and very good.

I read this the other day and completely fell in love. What a fantastic thing to be doing - but, as jaysonelliot says, from the perspective of the person doing the scene-hacking. It's worth noting that by the end of the article, he's opening a real restaurant. This was his way in.

Do what you love.

I wonder, though, if it could be done with something more accessible - hacking not into high end dining, but changing the idea of what a restaurant is for the folks who like good food but wouldn't think of trying to get a top-tier table, or paying for one.

Meanwhile, if you're hungry for more food obsession (and entrepreneurial obsession, to a lesser degree), the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi is worth a watch.

I'm not sure it's any more personal to have your card be handwritten by a stranger.

For friends and family, a card or a personal letter is really worth taking the time over. For bonus points, you could even make the card yourself.

I agree with the sentiment on Black Friday, and I generally like Everlane (their t-shirts are genuinely fantastic, to the point that I'd be happy never buying any other t-shirt again), but there's something about the way this is presented that sticks in my mouth. Feels a bit self-righteous, I guess.

A great reminder that the macho "work all the time" attitude is actually counterproductive - not just in life, but in work.

You need to relax to be creative. Not just at Thanksgiving, or other publicly mandated holidays, but all through the year. There's a great deal of peer pressure in America to not do this, but hey - whoever said running a startup was about going with the flow? And you need to be creative to make great products and services.

Extremely. It's not so much that the iOS devices are prettier - although their UX simplicity is hard to argue with - but that Android's extra power and flexibility also comes with more interface complexity. People find it hard. To the point that my parents and girlfriend all have trouble placing phone calls with my Galaxy S2.

I still love it, but it's got a way to go.

Presumably all that'll happen is that firms will send their erroneous or overreaching patents elsewhere? Or is there a process to avoid this?

Scary, but I think worth doing - congratulations.

Having been a landlord in the past, I can also very easily see the market for your product. I really needed it, in fact, and I think your major issues are going to be getting the onboarding experience just right, and letting the landlord / agency communities know about it. (In fact, it might help landlords do it without agency help, which is nicely disruptive.) Those are nice problems to have.

Good luck, everyone. I'm looking forward to seeing the next generation of YC startups launch.

Great! That means I can write my application for the web and I don't have to worry about directly addressing the BlackBerry platform.

Yes. Get the CS minor. It means something to a lot of employers, so is worth it for that alone, and you'll probably pick up algorithmic techniques that you might not have thought about.

There will be plenty of time for side projects afterwards. (And I'll bet you'll still find some time to build stuff.)

I'd love to hear that longer answer, fwiw!