dmitri1981

A slight misunderstanding perhaps. By electorate I mean the general public who elect the politicians. As far as I know they don't get paid to have opinions, unlike some politicians in a few cases.

Since we live in a democracy, there are elected representatives whose job it is to listen to voters. I think the best way to proceed is to put the cynicism aside and actually let them know how you feel about the issue. If you are really passionate about it, convince people around you to do the same. Quite easy really.

> Fortunately, there are elections next spring

I would say you are mistaken in the belief that these policies exist because of certain leaders. In my opinion, they exist because the electorate is misguided in believing that this kind of 'censorship' is a good idea. Therefore, I would suggest that voting out the incumbent will not necessarily make the problem go away. I believe that the best way to deal with this is by spreading the counter message to show just how foolish and misguided the policies are. In addition, you should write to your government representative and let them know how you feel, ideally providing some good justifications for your argument.

Very true. Though, the crux of the matter lies in what exactly does better mean. Another commenter made the great point that you should try speaking to find out why they left. Also, it is worth keeping in mind that if you are competing against an army of developers, you need to be super careful about what you put your efforts into. This will make you focus on the most crucial features and usability issues, which in longer term (if you make it) could be a blessing in disguise.

I think this is the article : http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7490&...

Congrats and good luck. Feel free to contact coderholic or myself for any advice. We set up exactly a year ago in London and now have close to 1000 members. Also, you may want to let Jonathan Nelson know about your meetup. He is in contact with most HN meetups around the world and is a top bloke.

It is pretty difficult to figure out the problem without knowing in what way the pitches were bad.

What in particular was missing? Did the teams make unrealistic assumptions? Did focus on pie-in-the-sky financials? Etc...

Oddly enough my friend paints famous people as cats. Her Chairman Miaow is incredible and I am sure people would love the prints.

> the panel decried Europe’s lack of hunger

A somewhat inadvertent turn of phrase that may well be telling you more than expected about the situation in Europe.

Here is an idea for a weekend project: an open source Crazy Egg.

good one.

How come this is a closed group?

If you can't make the event please sign up on meetup.com for updates about future events. The next one will be on 23rd June.

around £35k+bonus for dev at decent bank.

Sorry to be pedantic, but I think half the buzzwords in the title are quite unnecessary.

Cool. PG has been suggesting a startup for startups for a while now.

See http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html , point number 30.

> According to the media there is going to be £1,500 of funding/incentives for startups as part of this project, but I haven't quite figured out if that is launched yet, or whether it means those offers and the other bits on the page (which is not very impressive if so).

Click on 'Growing' link. It is the offers on the right hand side, eg, £30 Adwords voucher.

I've seen some of them posted on-line in the past. Do you know if Stanford still do that?

thx

There is a free version available as well. Link is just on the right, below the prices table - https://www.getquantify.com/plans_and_prices

I have been seriously impressed by geckoboard, but do not have anything serious enough to use it on and so would be unlikely to pay much for it (for the time being).

One other thing is that if I was using for something serious, I may be worried by geckoboard having access to some of the more sensitive data. I think this could be a big deterent for some.

Overall, you have an absolutely kick-ass product, I suspect that if you dropped the prices a fair bit then even the most casual users would sign up, which should result in greater revenue for you.

Absolutely not. You are very much welcome.

I am not sure why you see socialising with fellow geeks in the real world as a popularity contest.

Hi Piers, this is the meetup page http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/ . We'll announce the next event shortly, expect it will be at some point in March depending on venue availability.

I did not advertise the last event on HN because it got booked up very quickly and were at pretty much full capacity last night.

I think you are being a bit harsh. The meetup was never intended to be an event purely for the early stage startup entrepreneur. The primary goal was to allow the users of Hacker News to meet in the real world, talk about their interests and share experiences.

I've met many fascinating people there, who between them have been through all stages of the startup life cycle and made many new friends.

I am sorry that you got stuck talking to a bore. In my experience people like that have been very much the exception rather than the rule.

Anyway, I value all feedback and want the meetup to be as useful and interesting as possible so if you have suggestions or ideas on how to improve it I would love to hear from you.

Presumably if your objective is to save money and you have some self control then it should not be too big an issue.

Systems that are used to carry out trades of foreign currencies and related securities. These markets are extremely liquid and a delay of a few milliseconds can mean that you don't get the deal at the price you want. Therefore the banks need to make sure that they can execute the transactions as quickly as possible to ensure they have a competitive advantage over their competitors.

Here is basic overview : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_latency_%28capital_markets%...

If you are a top Java/C++ coder, you could probably make that much working for a big investment bank. Many of them are upgrading their FX trading systems to allow low latency trading and are prepared to pay top bucks to get the right people.

Alternatively, if you have a strong quantitative background (ie. Maths / Physics) you could go into quant development which would pay handsomely as well.

BTW, this is also an excellent post on actionable metrics by Eric Ries : http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/05/19/vanity-metri...

He didn't say it 'felt' like being shot three times. He said it was like being shot three times due to the bullet ricocheting inside his chest.