cedricd

Maybe you should make a SAAS to help identify startups that are worth paying attention to :)

Think of Ruby as a means to an end. Have a project. Rather than learning Ruby for Ruby's sake, learn it because it'll help you do something you really want to do. That's the best way for me to ever learn anything -- if the thing I'm learning doesn't solve a problem I have right now it's less motivating.

I don't think there's a good answer for you. The main thing I've learned over the years is that everything is about the details. Big ideas can't ever come to fruition without a huge amount of fiddly work. The trick is to find an idea motivating enough that you'll do whatever grunt work it takes to make it happen. Generally you'll never get into a position where you can be paid to think through the basic idea before moving on... unless you've developed serious expertise, which, again, is all about details.

If you've only applied I'd say the wrong way is to cold-call them. The best way is to reach out through your network -- you really should get an intro through someone who knows you.

If you do get accepted and want advice for the interview then YC alums become pretty responsive. But before that you're one of thousands and if they don't know you it's not worth the time. There are tons of great blog posts on how to write a good application, the most important of which is be concise.

Interestingly photographers have known about the effects of cold on li-ion batteries for a long time. It's common to keep your batteries close to your body to keep them warm when shooting on cold days.

What's the deal with this? "I exited the freeway, hoping that the lower-speed rural road driving would allow more regenerative braking and would extend the range. I got a little "credit" by coasting and hovering on the brake pedal"

Is there now a pervasive urban myth amongst electric car owners that you can get free energy from the brakes? Or that you can extend the range in stop and go driving? The NYT journalist did the same thing. That's just crazy.

Does it bother anyone else that Inc got the story wrong? I thought they were supposed to be somewhat journalistic .It took me < 30 sec on the site to find out that Buy.com had been bought by the Rakuten group. The post author is suggesting that Buy.com simply decided to change their name -- instead their owners want to slap their own name on it. Maybe silly, but not crazy.

The data looks to be way way off. I looked at salaries in NY. There were several software developer jobs with salaries in the 1.6M range. Looking at the result set it looked like everything could be off by 10x. I can't see the site now to give specific examples though.

The math is missing another important point:

"Given that your stock options are valued at the current company valuation"

That's a bad assumption for an employee. The current valuation is for what investors get per share. Keep in mind they have preferred, not common stock, which generally comes with liquidation preferences. Their shares are worth quite a bit more each than yours. This means if you're getting $50k of the company at current valuation, you really should assume you're getting more like $10 or $20k.

I'm really hoping this works. Partially because I'm a Netflix subscriber, but mostly because I want HBO, AMC, and Showtime to follow suit eventually. If Netflix shows that they can support a high-profile show with a subscription model, maybe non-cable subscribers can eventually get HBO. Or am I just dreaming?

Here's the relevant clause in the linked page. This seems shady to me. Is it?

---Ownership, Open Source, IP and Your Rights Top 3 Finalists: All finalist teams agree to give the CFDA, its agents or its assignees the right of first refusal to co-develop and/or purchase in whole or in part the idea or app and all supporting code and documentation developed in connection with the Fashion Hackathon, for a period of one year, starting from the day of the event.

It's a shame that Quirky would take to the streets like that. It comes off as childish and combative rather than as scrappy and willing to go to bat for their inventors.

If you want to be uncharitable that could apply to 90% of startups that we talk about here. No reason to be dismissive.

No offense, but that answer was wrong in every respect. There's a law that allows the Treasury to mint platinum coins of any denomination. It only mentions platinum. It wouldn't print the way out of the debt crisis. It's just an accounting trick that also wouldn't cause inflation.

How many of these deals are you doing? Just one? And if so once you've got your 50% you'll work on it full-time too?

Why not use a service like http://www.imgix.com/ instead?

This post makes a ton of sense. I spent a year traveling in the developing world a couple years back and was literally unable to watch a YouTube clip the entire time. It's amazing what parts of the Internet you can't see the moment you're on an insanely slow connection.

I was in Myanmar for a bit and their internet was so slow that I couldn't check even news or email -- no need for a China-style firewall.

Actually better yet: Why don't doctors spread the flu intentionally?

Security companies are also probably staffed by people who genuinely want to stop malware. Protecting people is probably part of their motivation to go to work.

No way. Imagine if they got caught. It'd kill their entire company. How is a little bit of marketing going to be worth that risk? It's almost like asking 'Why don't auto body shops remove stop signs in their area to get more business'?

OpenTok is pretty good and relatively straightforward to include into your site

http://www.tokbox.com/

This will backfire so badly if a porn site wins... Also too bad he didn't do this during the Presidential campaign. He could have been Jason Romney or something.

One interesting point: the tablet has the same CPU as a Macbook Air. It's basically a really tiny ultrabook and should be decently fast. It might actually be really nice with a good keyboard.

Nice... though you don't talk about what the data plan will cost. I assume it's basically like having an iPad with various carriers. But I could see that as a possible issue.

Maybe if it could connect to the wifi of my house and send some data then?

It feels weirder with an iPhone connected. You either see just the iPhone menu or you're in your library. Now that it's almost like two apps with one button to switch between them.

You're so clearly not the customer for this then :). You want a laptop with touchscreen optional.

But your comment is illustrative: who really is the customer? When I want to do serious work I want a 13"+ screen and full keyboard. When I want to just relax an iPad is great.

Really like the look of the landing page btw... nice job.

Maybe start a blog? Lots of sites use this to get traction.

Link isn't working... based on the title it sounds like filepicker.io -- is it different?

What people aren't really mentioning on this thread is what sort of burden a non-password system adds to the average site developer

What's the answer? Have all sites use OAuth and delegate to sites like FB / Twitter and hope they get more secure?

I've seen sites like http://www.loginprompt.com that try to provide authentication as a service, but they're all still fairly rudimentary or expensive.

What's interesting to me about these old sites is how bad the typography is. Why is it that sites started using decent typefaces only relatively recently? Print design was just as well understood back then.