cubes

Wait, what? You didn't take AMT into account? Because I have colleagues that AMT has nearly bankrupted, and who spent years having their wages garnished by the IRS because of it.

Feel free to edit your post so as not to send people to the poor house.

I lean toward the 13" Air. My current work laptop is a 15" Macbook Pro, but I have an Air at home. If you don't need the larger screen, which I don't because I plug into at least one extra monitor most of the time, the Air is a nicer package. Less to lug to and from work. The other caveat is that, if you need to run multiple development virtual machines for testing, the 4GB memory max for the Air is somewhat limiting.

You're also missing the fact that joining an early phase startup carries non-trivial risk, and part of the reason early equity grants are large is to compensate for the risk one assumes by joining.

It's a potentially neat idea, but keep in mind that many people already use their email for such a purpose. Rather than a specialized app for managing and tracking pitches, consider building something that integrates into mail clients ala Rapportive?

SES is extremely easy. Unless you actually care about deliverability. Deliverability on the modern internet is hard. SES does not handle this. If Mailgun handles deliverability well, that alone is worth the price. Making it programmable is awesome.

Eventbrite is hiring in San Francisco. It's a fun place to work, and we've got lots of openings: http://www.eventbrite.com/jobs/

Email cubes@eventbrite.com if you're curious.

It's kind of organized ad hoc. If you're interested in putting one on, I'd suggest contacting the organizers. :)

What do you mean by large scale? The first San Francisco event featured 20 trucks. The most recent Brooklyn one, which is where it originated, had 30.

Some informative links, in case you haven't seen them already:

* http://www.quora.com/What-caused-Foursquares-downtime-on-Oct...

* http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/

* https://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/t...

Someone on this thread suggested that Foursquare's performance problem is related to the calculation of badges. I'm not sure where this idea came from. I haven't seen any mention of the issue being related to badges in first or secondhand sources.

That said, Mongo DB's map/reduce operation would not be a reasonable solution at this time. Mongo DB's map/reduce performance is, at present, somewhat lacking because it runs via the javascript engine which is currently single threaded. I know there are plans to improve performance of Mongo DB's javascript engine by switching to V8, but I don't know if V8 is multithreaded.

Often design decisions that look bad in hindsight get baked in early. By the time you realize that an alternate design would yield better performance, there may be too much data to migrate so you just have to live with it.

While luigi's statement is a little extreme, I think the gist is right. Yes outsiders can offer advice on a system, but it's really difficult to offer sound advice without specific details of the system. Perhaps outsider advice shouldn't be dismissed outright, but it ought be taken with a grain of salt.

I find this sort of uninformed armchair analysis to be unfulfilling.

The stock swap scenario is a hedge. It allows founders to potentially realize some upside even if their company does not succeed. I think this could be a useful tool to help founders effectively mitigate some of the risk they take on.

That said, there is the danger that allowing founders to hedge there risk in this fashion would make them less motivated to make their own company succeed.

Syzygryd, a 2.5 ton fire breathing collaborative musical instrument. With a lot of help from friends. http://www.syzygryd.com

I believe it's to encourage the projects Kickstarter funds to have a specific focus, and to decrease the likelihood of fraud. If the money just goes into a slush fund, it's easy to lose track of it.

For instance, the Syzygryd Kickstarter is to fund our flame effects. Our money is earmarked for prototyping and fabricating our flame effects, and any money left over goes to buying more propane for more flamey goodness.

This is actually tricky from a legal perspective because startups are illiquid investments, and the SEC has rules that prevent you from selling shares in a non-public company to so-called non-qualified investors.

I'm a member of Noisebridge, and I think it's pretty great. If anyone is in the San Francisco Bay Area, drop by some time.

Do something else. Travel. Go to Burning Man. Get away from the keyboard.

Startups are, typically, all consuming. Of course that's going to have an effect on your relationship with your significant other. I think it's really important to keep the plans you make. Yes, sometimes the servers will crash, and it has to be fixed now, but, barring emergencies, make a concerted effort not to cancel plans you make.

Facebook uses Cassandra, and, with properly designed schema, those queries are actually cheap, and, better yet, distributed across a cluster of machines. You can read about Cassandra here: http://cassandra.apache.org/

This is not really accurate. Some NoSQL solutions, such as Memcached, MemcacheDB, and REDIS are key-value stores, i.e. hash tables.

Other solutions, such as Cassandra, MongoDB, and CouchDB provide richer semantics that make it possible to perform efficient range queries and map-reduce queries. Cassandra and MongoDB both use indices to improve query performance.

One of the primary advantages of the various NoSQL solutions is that they make it easy to scale horizontally, i.e. to add capacity by simply adding another host machine. This is in contrast to traditional relational databases, which are typically hard to scale horizontally.

My point is that religious debates, not unlike the Google Pac-Man logo, waste time. But at least Google's Pac-Man logo is fun, and nobody spills blood over Pac-Man :)

As for using both, I tend to use emacs for the heavy lifting, and vi for quick edits.

Seriously? Seriously? It's 2010, and we're still having this religious debate? Pick an editor that works for you. Learn it. Use it. Done. NB I'm a heretic, I use both vi and emacs.

Minor technical gripe, there's an annoying audio hiss, but the information is great.

Facebook did not integrate in to MySpace, and managed to unseat it. I agree that ease of use is key, and this is what has crippled cypherpunk projects in the past; it's why STARTTLS protects so much email, and PGP protects so little. Also, most people using IM service today use Adium or Pidgin, which supports multiple networks.

The average Kickstarter is not pulling down anywhere near 200k, and it would take a remarkably clever con to pull off what you propose. Why would a clever con target Kickstarter, something that is trivially traceable? Also, why target a large group of smart, motivated individuals who know quite a bit about how to track people down on the internet?

While you raise a legitimate point, I think you discount the basic fact that, on balance, most individuals behave in a trustworthy manner. Society depends on this fact. We trust people to drive cars, and not intentionally run people down. Stores trust that most individuals will not shoplift.

Will there eventually be a large scale case of someone untrustworthy duping people via crowdsourcing? Probably. Does that mean the model is fundamentally flawed? No. Plus, crowdsourcing spreads the risk around so the loss is minimized. It's not like Bernie Madoff who insisted that investors invest all their funds through him.

The reasoning in this article is pretty specious and circular. Some of the author's arguments can be summed up as:

* Diaspora will fail because it sounds similar to something someone else tried one time that failed.

* Nobody will use Diaspora because it will fail.

* Diaspora will fail because nobody will use it.

* Nobody will use Diaspora because it will never ship.

* Nobody will want to pay for Diaspora because nobody will want to pay for it.

* Diaspora will fail because the creators are young.

I don't know whether or not Diaspora will succeed. The old school cypherpunk in me wants to see Diaspora, or something similar, succeed. I would be more curious to see a well reasoned article on the obstacles Diaspora has to face with getting traction, and finding a viable business model.

I like BeautifulSoup, but these days I'd suggest using lxml (http://codespeak.net/lxml/) instead. Unfortunately, BeautifulSoup is on the slow side, and development seems to have shifted into maintenance mode.

Sigh. Mark Cuban, multi-billionaire doesn't care about your privacy. Film at eleven.

How about all the people who pay for Wordpress and MovableType?