bmaier

I'm constantly amazed by how incremental people are in creating webapps. The long tail is an interesting concept but why is the digg/reddit concept for a specific niche being so thoroughly flogged to death? Is each site really grabbing big enough traffic numbers to make it a worthwhile pursuit?

How can we break ourselves of the herd and copy+features methods of problem solving?

Now taking this question from a different angle... Suppose the striving programmer has chosen to start learning python.

What steps would you take to start (are there any one click installers like there are for ruby? other things? tips for beginners). If you were doing it again, what would you keep in mind?

Personally, I don't think anything will truly replace email (at least not for many many years). Twitter is a nice fringe communication tool but simply that. Hopefully what Twitter and the new communication apps will contribute to is a reduction in the number of pointless short emails I get. Perhaps the article should be titled, Twitter is the new IM.

I don't mean to be a downer, but how many times can these principles be re-worded and written about by different people?

Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to develop theories about luck and timing beforehand.

I don't think Mark knows how to make a point without making a polarizing comment. Of course, it is one of the reasons he is famous, so whether his off-the-cuff remarks help him or hurt him is open to interpretation.

Stuff like this makes my brain hurt. Ok, so you wrote a post that essentially yells at people, good job. What value does this add? what problem have you solved here? Let's keep hacker news to submissions that are relatively content rich and engaging.

I think the more interesting question would be: What techniques do you use to develop a completely unique solution to a problem?

Most of what is being done today is incremental problem solving. What are some techniques that can be used to de-construct a problem so that you can get past previous experience bias and find new ways to solve it?

I guess what I'm asking is, what techniques do you guys use to get a view from "10,000 feet" above a problem rather than the biased view you get when immersed in the middle of it?

I agree, Its all about the bug list. Think of all the things that bother you or dont make sense in your every day routine and think about how it should be done ideally. The solution is the beginning of a startup.

Oh, and keep a running list.

I'm not sure if I'm missing something entirely but to what URL would you like us to bring our friends and earn these karma points? Might be helpful to get that out there.

It is my understanding that NDA's only protect propietary and unique information in a very narrow scope, It does not protect things that could be found by others in the public realm or that are readily known by others in the space.

So the general idea then would not seem to be protected. Only things like algorithms, some source code, some processes, and very unique customer lists are protected. For the most part almost every NDA I've seen is too broad in scope to be truly enforceable.

In my opinion you walk a fine line by trying to get people to sign the NDA and in the end you turn a lot of people off if you push too hard. It seems to me that the only people really hung up on NDAs are the people who are sharing things they shouldnt be sharing in the first place.

Note: I'm not talking about NDAs in M&A situations or in employee company relations and partnership agreements for established companies...things like these actually do hold weight. Essentially I'm agreeing that the NDA is often focused on too greatly by early stage companies

Might be a bit late on the reply but the $10 cpm seems to be an inflated statistic. The ones that are quoting that are getting rates of 10 per cpm on the canvas page while in reality that page is only a small fraction of the total page views. If the canvas page accounts for 1/3 of total page views then that statistic gets brought down to a lower number cpm for total pageviews. Is this consistent with what others are seeing?

Ok, a forum is set up for now at http://www.geekchicago.com/talk the geekchicago.com site itself is not complete yet but the forum is working, lets talk there.

I'm putting together a simple forum right now.

On second thought, if the need is there I'll just put out the cash and get a 12 user room for the month. Campfire seems like a good way to do this. Any other suggestions?

Note: Campfire turns out to be less than optimal for these purposes. Working on setting something better up.

Keith does a good job to develop community here though it seems beta is a bit stagnant. I believe he's still working on JobCoin as well as a pretty successful facebook app

Campfire set up for organizing and just general ChiTown talk. http://ycombinator.campfirenow.com if you want an invite mail cubend#gmail.com Works well as a message board or a chatroom. I'll be in there off and on all week

I just set up a campfire for Chicago news.ycers if you want an invite drop your email to cubend#gmail.com It'll be easier to work something out in there.

I'm in Lakeview. Is there an area we'd all want to meet in that's kinda central to everyone?

A news.yc meetup here would be great. OpenCoffee Club here has been ruined by MidPhase but theres no reason we can't set up a weekly or monthly meeting time at a coffee shop where news.ycers can come and go, with some way to identify ourselves like a post-it note on your laptop or something. Anyone up for it?

Chicago is just getting close to reaching critical mass. The startups that succeeded here before did little to foster community. The startups here now are coming around to the idea of a start up community. It should be interesting to see how it plays out. The other problem here is that a bunch of the good hackers go to places like Citadel rather than do a startup.

It seems like an interesting idea but what does it do other than add one more app to facebook. It seems like work that might not add much value. jmho but if you're going to put out the effort put it into something more beneficial.

I don't know Paul but having followed here for a while and having read most of his work I'll offer you two reasons:

1) The site was losing its usefulness for him so he made it more useful for himself and chances are others will find it useful as well.

2) Because He Can

Perhaps if you don't agree with the changes, then write your own news app and compete. Its how the world works after all.