chadboyda

The problem with autoscaling DynamoDB is that every time you scale up they shard your table into more partitions but they never merge them back when you scale down. You end up with less throughput per partition once you've scaled back down. The only way to correct this is to completely recreate your table. Does Neptune take this into consideration?

Thinking of a house as an investment is foolish. Do you think of your car that way? No. Homes are commodities that like your car depreciate in value. Building homes has like anything manufactured at scale, come down significantly in cost. This is making it possible to build many more homes at a much faster rate. The days of homes being an investment are long over and will probably never return.

Exactly. It's probably just more FUD to discredit WikiLeaks.

I'm sure this has a lot more to do with "anchoring" than "random".

Breaks back button, very frustrating. I don't get it, needs at least a short explanation on the front page.

Seconded!

Wow, thanks for sharing that observation! What a gem of insight into how easy it is to cross that gray line of usability.

Just a week ago I was watching the Berkely course videos from SIMS 141 on YouTube. This one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYbuDzvWr4s featured Dr. Daniel E. Rose from Yahoo! talking about User Experience Issues in Web Search.

Part of the video, which was recorded 2 years ago, he talks about some of their UI research and how they believe they can improve the interface a lot, primarily focusing on keyword suggestions to help people remember what they were really looking for when they might only remember part of it or something related. Ironically enough a day or two after I watched that video they launched this new feature.

Maybe they should have spent more time observing users. :)

Haha, too true! That made me laugh, thanks for sharing ;-)

Life must be good at the top!

The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steven Gary Blank

They are forced to build a better, more useful, competitive product so that they, their investors, and customers all benefit.

Daily active users is based on "touch points".

Touch points are:

Canvas Page Views

Link Clicks in FBML

Mock-Ajax Form Submission

Click-to-Play Flash

So Facebook requires some kind of daily interaction for a user to be counted.

Agreed.

28 + CHSPE

My high school counselor recommended I graduate early to attend college, but being 16 and feeling unchallenged by school I opted to apply myself to the real world and started my own business instead.

Faster? Interesting! I hadn't heard that before. Personally I'm rooting for them, I would love to see some innovation in the search market. Unfortunately I just don't see the consumer benefiting directly much from any of this. I hope they prove me wrong.

Exactly, reducing the indexing cost has little to no impact on the customers, so there is no competitive advantage to using Cuill over Google for searchers. They claim more "relevancy" but there is nothing to support that claim so far, but I'm eagerly awaiting it.

Even better relevancy may not be enough as most people believe current search technology is "good enough". It would have to be very innovative. If nothing else, they're a good acquisition target for an existing search company looking to further reduce costs and increase profits or allocate more resources towards more computationally expensive algorithms (spam filtering, semantics, content targeting, etc.)

Anything Trip-hop (Massive Attack, Morcheeba, Portishead, Sneaker Pimps, Bjork, AIR, EBTG, Zero 7, Tricky, etc.)

Fantastic job with the simplicity of it all. Only suggestion I have right now (after about 30 seconds) is to change the move block of text icon. I think it's a "paw"? But it was not intuitive at all to me what the "paw" did. I kept asking myself "how can I move this block of text?" Only after several guesses did I figure out it was the "paw" icon.

Thank you. I appreciated that. I can only imagine how awkward it must have been to be the only male in the room absorbing all of this. And equally as so to be able to submit your notes here, but I think you did a nice job of separating your observations from your comments and thoughts in a very candid and honest way.

I cashed out with $9 billion after being acquired by Google. Woohoo! How did I do it?

Spent my first $1 million on PR consultants. Didn't build a single product or hirer any developers. Went to Bubblecon 2008 to raise some VC with my army of consultants. With $20 million in the bank I then bought Super Bowl Ads until I got acquired. Yay!

Python and Ruby are great. But if you are interested in PHP and like MVC (such as Rails), I recommend trying Symfony. I use it for a lot of projects. There are still plenty of good reasons to use PHP just as there are any other language. Use what's best for your project. Be sure to consider feature requirements, developer skill sets, and your timeline when deciding.

After enough experience at programming you'll begin to realize understanding 'how to program' is fundamentally different from knowing one particular language or another. It's a logical mindset and way of thinking or problem solving that ultimately matters. Language is just syntax and can be picked up in under 24 hours for most languages once you understand 'how to program'.

Bought an album on there today. Great service! Easy to use, and 256kbps of DRM free MP3 goodness! Few kinks in the download process, but nothing Amazon can't fix easily. Highly recommended!

Wow. That story was... unbelievable.

Have you tried attending any of the tech networking events in LA? There is a strong, small, but growing tech / startup community in LA. If you haven't attended Twiistup, Lunch 2.0, LA Web App Meetup, or Los Angeles Open Coffee Club, etc. than I would suggest you start there. But there are definately people with the 'startup mentality'.

It's no valley, that's for sure, but there are those of us in the trenches working full time on our startups in LA. Don't give up!

a) "It's business", move on.

b) Don't let it! Move on, worst thing you could do is drag this on and not be up front and clear cut about it, because then it will drag the life out of the project and you.

c) Talk to your lawyer! IANAL, but -- Have you signed anything? If it's pre-incorporation, and you haven't agreed to anything, it's kind of a non-issue. As for ConnectU, I bet the case gets thrown out anyways, they don't have a very strong case and the judge is already annoyed with them.

d) You answered it yourself, plus you've learned a valuable lesson about getting the legalities out of the way before engaging in any part of the business. A good part of incorporating is so that you have a clear way of dealing with dispute resolutions such as this when they arise (and believe me they will!)

28

Whatever someone is willing to pay you for it. I'll start the bidding at $20.

I used to live up in the Valley for many years until I moved down to Los Angeles about 5 years ago. Doing a startup in Los Angeles has been difficult, mostly in trying to find and network with other like minded individuals but with a little effort we're finding its not all that hard. We use meetup.com and upcoming.org a lot to find or setup local tech meet ups.

It seems to be really starting to make a difference though, there's more of a sense of a growing tech community in LA now (a welcome relief from the entertainment buzz). Hopefully it'll keep growing.

So while I agree its definately harder than it is in the Silicon Valley, its not impossible. There are other people out there doing startups, you just have to proactively try and find them and bring them together if someone else isn't doing so already in your area.

Sounds like a very welcomed alternative.

Los Angeles, CA

I've been very disappointed with Spock so far in my testing. People that are very easily found on other search engines hardly if at all show up on Spock. I hope they seriously improve the index.