It is similar, but the goal with this is to have a more social, personal outlet for questions to friends. I think it's more similar to (and was inspired by) sites like failin.gs and formspring in that you can participate anonymously.
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Actually, I feel that these are some of the reasons that I find MongoDB to be an attractive solution for certain purposes. You can give up some facets of durability and make up for it in ease and performance. MongoDB actually fits quite well into various web apps that have a need for a secondary, non-authoritative datastore that needs to be highly available but not as reliable. Any kind of real-time stream feature would probably benefit from this. Just keep an authoritative copy of your data in your relational datastore of your choice, and asynchronously replicate data as needed to MongoDB. Since it's a non-authoritative datastore, you can denormalize it as much as you need. Works pretty well, IMHO.
I actually got the web slice accepted into the IE addons gallery (http://www.ieaddons.com) after waiting a couple months for approval. Then I made a small revision to the entry, and for some reason that made it go back into the "pending approval" queue. I sent several emails to the website support contact and got no answers. Months later, Amazon came out with their own extension. I finally got a response from a Microsoft rep after escalating with a friend, and they told me about how my extension can't be posted due to a partnership agreement. Pretty lame.
Wow, it's as if I wrote those few sentences :) I totally feel you on the chicken/egg problem. It's definitely a big hurdle for any kind of social web app these days.
Looks awesome. A quick glance at the demo showed that the site was hosted on your domain, even though custom domains are offered in all plans. It might work to offer a cheap/free plan that's hosted on your domain, and use that as a loss leader to gain adoption in the early stage.
Oh yea, I also like the integration with oEmbed. First time I've seen it. Definitely will play with embed.ly when I get the chance.
It appears that you're rendering the embedded content using AJAX? I tried pasting a YouTube link directly, and nothing happened. Wrapping it in a proper 'a href' tag triggered the embed, so I'm guessing there's no sophisticated URL-detection.
I'd say just remove the text about recommending specific browsers. As long as the functionality is the same, a loss of certain a look and feel isn't worth mentioning to the user and causing a big turn off. At least, that was my initial reaction when I read that.
Not very surprising, since most large companies have treasury departments responsible for managing the company portfolio. The graphic in the article shows that most of their non cash assets are in debt securities. Not as exciting as the title sounds :)
I read the article and immediately wanted to find out the actual holdings they allocate in their stock-based and bond-based portfolios. However, I couldn't find any information on the actual holdings, which is information that I consider to be pretty important. Do they just buy broad market index based ETFs? Would I be exposed to domestic, international, and emerging markets?
The experience is "dumbed down" to make it dead simple, but I feel that it's missing certain power-user features that would help convince people more in touch with their finances to make the switch to their solution. 0.9% is also a pretty high expense ratio. I'm guessing it's to offset redemption trades, fees, and what not. In comparison, passively managed Vanguard-style mutual funds/ETFs that also invest in broad indexes have expense ratios that are an order of magnitude lower.
So does the SSD portion effectively become a cache for the traditional platter HDD portion? Seems similar to an L1 cache for a HDD. Of course, as the article states, the caching algorithm will be application-specific. At 4GB however, it wouldn't be hard at all to keep a significant portion of the OS and any oft-used apps like browsers directly in the SSD portion.
I second kd-trees. I also only recently learned them, and at first encounter thought that they are in concept similar to binary space partitions used in computer graphics. Nearest neighbor search can be implemented using a pretty simple two-dimensional kd-tree. Useful for things like finding the n closest neighboring points for a given point on a plane (used for mapping applications, etc.)
Hear hear. Also, these statistics are nowhere near the average income tax statistics I saw when I finished my tax returns on Turbo Tax this year. The average income is much, much higher as are some of the other categories (capital gains, etc). I guess there's a big difference between the tax-filing average American family and the overall average?
It sounds like it would be a good idea, but you'd actually have to take a look at each of the companies, and figure out exactly how much each contract with Apple is going to bring in relative to their current revenue streams.
The way I think about it, in the simplest form, dynamic programming essentially boils down to a way of solving a problem with overlapping subproblems and an optimal substructure. Memoization is a technique that can achieve similarly efficient results, but is more of an "addendum" to traditional recursive formulations to avoid the cost of solving overlapping subproblems. The two are related, but not quite the same.
Why not 5x, or 15x? How do you quantify how much "better" one app is than the other? That, to me, is the hard part. Instead of aiming for 10x, continuously and incrementally improving your product until it reaches the threshold will suffice, especially since that threshold will vary widely depending on what kind of product you have.
I feel that some of the pictures are taken out of context and portray an inaccurate image. In Asia, it's common for schools and workplaces to allow students and workers to put their heads down for naps in the middle of the day. The article uses an image of workers seemingly "collapsed" on the work bench as the first picture to depict harsh working conditions, which is misleading.
Microsoft promotes faster than Amazon since Microsoft uses an internal numerical rating score that can potentially improve each review cycle.
Also, the offers I heard about (from a few years ago) from both companies were comparable with respect to base salary, with negligible differences. However, Amazon's stock-based compensation offers blew Microsoft's (laughable) offer out of the water.
How does equity figure into the equation? I'm guessing even equity doesn't matter much for startups, since they'll have very low valuation to begin with anyways.
Couldn't agree more :) I cringed through many pages of "The World Is Flat" in the same manner. The book was quite insightful and was a worthy read, but his treatise of technologies was unbearable at parts.
This is pretty much what Nassim Taleb alluded to in "The Black Swan": relying on Gaussian-based models for phenomena that fall in "extremistan" instead of "mediocristan" when Mandelbrotian-based (more fractal like) is dangerous.
I believe that guy effectively took short positions on the firms with toxic assets. His positions were pretty much insurance bets, which paid off when a lot of these firms tanked during the crisis.
Cool video, but it seems like all the "magic" is taking place in the custom software, and the details aren't revealed. Anyone have more insight about this?
Amazon Associates is a pretty good program that you can integrate into any consumer-facing site. When the Facebook app platform first came out a few years ago, I whipped up an app that integrated with Amazon associates in about a week's worth of time. Almost no maintenance since then (save for changes to reflect Facebook UI/platform upgrades), and it probably averages ~$40-50 a month, and makes several times higher during holiday season.
Amazon's Product Advertising API provides access to lots of their data, so if you so choose you can make mini niche shopping sites with significant dynamic data.
The only thing I'd be concerned about is receiving payments if you're not in one of the Amazon locales. Don't know if you need a valid tax ID or something. I think you can choose to get paid by checks though, if that works for you.
"Game designers, particularly video and computer games, benefit from integration of flow principles into gameplay design."
Gamers will get into zones, similar to athletes, where their reaction times become ultra quick and reflexes are super sharp. Game designers sometimes try to bake these directly into the game, and it's arguable whether or not it's beneficial. For example, many people complain about the killstreak rewards in Modern Warfare 2; once you get going, you're pretty much indestructible.