dfield

SRS?

Wow, I literally had this exact same conversation last week. (Minus the domain name / equity portion.)

Warning sign 0: they're asking you to be a technical co-founder before you know anything about the product.

I, for one, welcome our new robotic over birds.

Can someone please make this work with Hadoop?

(cross posted from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2706219)

I'm very excited to try this out. Context (AKA "Circles") is the biggest feature Facebook still hasn't gotten right. By mirroring the way we think about our social graph in real life, Google is making a huge step toward converging Online and Offline identity. It will be very interesting to see how Facebook responds to this... they might finally have a competitor.

I'm very excited to try this out. Context (AKA "Circles") is the biggest feature Facebook still hasn't gotten right. By mirroring the way we think about our social graph in real life, Google is making a huge step toward converging Online and Offline identity. It will be very interesting to see how Facebook responds to this... they might finally have a competitor.

It's fun to bash something, but I think Color has a lot of chances left. They have a rockstar team and the money to support themselves for several years. Their current product isn't very good, but it's a mistake to write them off or call them "troubled" this early.

Matt is an incredibly nice guy.

Interesting to see others doing this. I'm working on a similar project at Brown right now with a few friends. We're lucky - the Registrar's office agreed to give us anonymized data to bootstrap our recommendation system.

"Act Like an Investor. At the end of each week, ask yourself the following question: Did our actions this past week increase value? What was the ROI on your time spent this past week? If you go 2 weeks in a row or 2 weeks in a month without a positive ROI on your time spent, you’re clearly doing the wrong things."

I feel like this is just good advice for life in general.

Not true at all. I was an intern with Indinero when they went through this program and its purpose is for Lightspeed to get to know young entrepreneurs and improve university relations.

I'm extremely sorry to hear you were disappointed. Like dtrejo said, there are a LOT of things we hope to change for next time. Please don't hesitate to shoot me an email if you have any other feedback.

Also, I can't resist pointing out that all but ten lines of code for the first place hack were created during the Hackathon: https://github.com/dfield/ConcertMasterHero. That said, I did not accept the first place prize because I was an organizer.

Absolutely, but don't forget that technology builds on itself. It's an iterative process. I just don't see how throwing out all the data is a good idea.

Facebook is an incredible product that has done some truly innovative things in the social networking space. Forgetting the lessons they've learned is not a recipe for success.

I'm 18 and I don't necessarily agree with this. From what I can tell tech is more accepting of young people than almost any other industry.

Evil Mad Scientist does a lot of things just because they are cool :) Example: fractal cookies! http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/fractalcookies

This is huge. Felten is the perfect candidate for this job and it will be extremely interesting to see how his presence influences the online privacy recommendations the FTC will be making soon.

Dave isn't giving you a solution. He's pointing out a number of problems that need to be solved. Just because technology works fine doesn't mean it's the optimal solution. Tech develops incrementally.

Stack Overflow has a search feature and it works fine. But wouldn't it be cool if someone aggregated results from different programming websites? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1854731)

Check out Union Square Venture's blogpost from May: http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2010/05/stackoverflow.php. In addition to describing their investment, the post describes problems in the space. If you had never heard of Stack Overflow and you only read about the problems in that post, would you say the solution was too complex?

If you don't mind, could I have zoink.ww.com point to zoink.com? Thanks!!

Wow, this looks gorgeous!

Thanks for your comment. Insightful commentary like this is why I read HackerNews.

They just graduated from Berkeley.

But those graphs were sexy ;)

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying I think it's unwise to do both at the same time.

I think you're right, but in my opinion they don't overlap very well either. A startup is very unlikely to succeed without complete devotion and it's very hard to take the most rigorous classes while working >20 hours a week.

This topic comes up on HN every few months and never fails to create a lively debate. As a (potential) future entrepreneur / freshman in college, I've gone back and forth a few times about whether I should continue my education. Here are the conclusions I've made:

(FYI - I'm probably just reiterating what others have said, but I'm lazy and don't want to properly cite by finding all the "should you go to college" blog posts / comments...)

0. Staying in school doesn't hurt. College is a four year block of time where you are encouraged and expected to experiment with every aspect of your life. This experimental space can't be found anywhere else. (The financial aspect is a different story; if going to college puts you in a huge amount of debt, this point may not be true.)

1. Know that you can always dropout. I take comfort in this fact. If I come across a life-changing opportunity, I can always just postpone college.

2. Theory != Practice. When I first started studying CS at school, I was peeved that professors didn't optimize code as much as possible. Why should I disregard the constant for a linear time algorithm? However, I've since come to appreciate the generality of this method of thinking. Thinking generally about specific problems is (to me, at least) a valuable skill to have and one that I need to work on.

3. It's not about the classes, it's about the people. This is an old but important argument and it's completely valid. You'll learn way more from your classmates than you will from your professors. It doesn't matter how great of a coder you are... if you don't learn social skills you'll be a terrible entrepreneur.

4. Professors are really smart. At any decent university, you'll have access to a group of people who have spent their entire careers being clever. Most are more than happy to explain their work / mentor an interested student / try to impart some cleverness.

5. A three-month summer. The fact that summers are exactly three-months is a good thing. If they were longer, students might not return from really wonderful jobs. If they were shorter, students wouldn't be exposed to jobs long enough. By taking full advantage of summers, you can "job hop" and sample careers / businesses in a way that would be otherwise frowned upon. I've learned a lot about how I would create company culture by working at different companies, and I still have three more summers to keep learning.

6. Keeping relevant paths open. Entrepreneurship has always sounded attractive to me, but I'm curious about a lot of things. I'd rather be positive about the career path I choose than always wonder if I should have done something else with my life. By trying out research / acting / underwater basket weaving now, I can either decide certain professions aren't for me or find a way to incorporate them into my eventual line of work.

7. Recruitment. From a purely economic, slightly perverse perspective, college is a great place to recruit for a future startup.

You should never ignore anyone, but not because you're trying to get something out of it...

Direct Link: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html

Most aren't idle. But to tap into this group, try campus recruiting?