evanprodromou

I'm a big fan of Digital Ocean; great value and good quality.

If I had any complaint, it's that occasionally I get a droplet with a wonky IP address that seems to be shared with another host (like, the SSH host key wobbles between one and the other between invocations of ssh).

There was also some flakiness with NYC2 a couple of weeks ago, which caused some sadness and grief.

All in all, they're saving me multiple thousands of dollars.

@dherman The document says, "extraordinarily optimizable". Do you have any numbers on that?

I'd love to see benchmarks from running asm.js-compatible JavaScript on e.g. SpiderMonkey versus an asm.js-optimizing SpiderMonkey.

Are we talking about incremental differences of 5%, 25%, even 50%, or orders-of-magnitude improvement?

Here are some of Heather Arthur's other projects on Github:

https://github.com/harthur/brain - neural network https://github.com/harthur/classifier - bayesian classifier https://github.com/harthur/clusterfck - clustering https://github.com/harthur/glossary - term extraction

You can see more here:

https://github.com/harthur?tab=repositories

Nice stuff.

I'm in.

I just made my indiegogo contribution to get a kit. Looks really interesting.

Rocking!

The Montreal startup community is buying this historic property in the heart of the city to make a permanent technology centre. The new building will be 30,000 sq ft and include a cafe, co-working space, and offices for funds and startups. Help us out!

I completely agree.

I'm one of the co-authors of the OStatus spec and the lead developer on StatusNet (http://status.net/) and the ActivityPump (http://activitypump.org/).

I think the secret weapon in the OStatus arsenal is that there are literally hundreds of millions (literally HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS) of PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds on the Web.

Blogger, YouTube, WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous as well as StatusNet and Diaspora* all provide PuSH-enabled feeds. That's a huge body of content to follow in real time.

Another good part is that PubSubHubbub will help with SEO -- Google Search bots subscribe to PuSH-enabled streams, which gets you indexed faster. Lots of incentive is good for getting things done.

There is distinctly lower support for the other parts of the OStatus stack. But I hope we'll see this stack continue to develop.

Wow, this looks pretty cool.

The problem here isn't the interviewee; it's the interviewer.

This is exactly why we do phone screenings and brief initial interviews. If something like location, development technique, interior design or dress code isn't going to work out for someone, you should be able to flush some of that out in a 15-minute phone screen, and the rest in a 30-60 minute initial interview.

By the time you're bringing someone in for a full day, the interviewer should be at well over 75% sure the person is a do-hire. Don't waste your team's time or effort on someone you're not going to go with (unless you're stress-testing your interview process...).

As far as walking out: there's so much data here. For the company, they've either got a dysfunctional interview process or some seriously difficult fellow developers. Both those problems need to be addressed.

For the interviewee, there's the information on how the team responds. If there's a problem, and they want to solve it, they need to be more pro-active about it. "Can we break now and continue later?" Also, "Can we get a post-mortem from you?" At the very least, it's a good time to break for coffee or beers around the corner.

Hey, so, I'm one of the co-authors of OStatus.

First, welcome to the community of people working on this important problem. I highly recommend you join this group to stay informed about what's going on elsewhere:

http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/

It's an "issue" group, not dedicated to any one protocol, service, or software package. Please, make sure you're a part of it!

A couple of notes:

1. We're working on including private messages in PubSubHubbub 0.4 and thus into the next version of OStatus. Understood that it's a big deal.

2. You're right, there's no standard API. ActivityPub is an attempt at that; see here: http://www.w3.org/community/activitypub/

Thanks for considering. Let's make sure we interoperate!

What Ben didn't point out (which I mentioned in my comment on his blog) is the risk of not starting a company. The risk that you'll live your whole life never taking the incredible opportunity you have to make a difference.

Small teams of smart people have more opportunity today than ever before in human history to change the world. The technology, the networks, and the capital are there for people who want to use them.

The risk is in waiting for even better conditions than we have right now. Is there going to be even more of a chance to have an impact five years from now? Will five years of doing what someone else tells you to do make you more ready to take that chance?

It's foolish to throw away a good hand of cards and gamble that a better one is waiting for you in the deck. You could get hit by a truck in the next five years. You could have a personal financial catastrophe that would make it impossible for you to forego a salary long enough to make a startup work. Worse, you could get too comfortable taking orders and forget what it means to take a chance.

If you think you can change the world, there's no time to waste in getting started.

I think key part of this article is this sentence: "Watching your savings dwindle isn’t a risk, it’s a fact." There's no risk in founding a startup, if you take "risk" to mean "possible downside". There is a _certain_ downside; maybe that doesn't qualify as "risk".

If you go into a startup thinking that you'll have dwindling savings, lost time with family and friends, and mental and physical health impact, there's nothing "risky" about it.

I'm giving this talk at Open Source Bridge next Tuesday.

Can the market beat this? Or is the gravitational pull of the giant Kindle market too great?

Yeah, it's just a great API. Hits an important pain point.

Nothing. I've made several and made money on them. (Wikitravel, StatusNet). There are others who have done so, too -- WordPress.com being the classic. Probably the biggest place we're seeing this right now is in IaaS and PaaS efforts -- OpenStack, Nodester, CloudStack, OpenShift, CloudFoundry. Open Source all the way.

I've really enjoyed the responses to this question. I have yet to hear a single person say, "I'd consider it..." or even "It would depend..." It's been almost universally "No way."

I'm going to try to pull together a blog post that summarizes the responses. Some have surprised me.

My answer's no on this, by the way. It's probably a federal crime, and it would probably derail your startup (and the rest of your career) if you were ever caught or even suspected. Also, I'm in this to build things, not to mess up what other people are building. But I don't think everyone feels that way.

So sorry to hear that Ilya's gone. I only had a chance to meet him a few times, but I found him intelligent, thoughtful and friendly.

I don't know the circumstances of his death, but I do hope that his family and colleagues get to see what an impact it's had on the hacker community.

I look forward to hearing ways that they'd like us to honour his passing; until then I'm going to do it the way I know best -- keep hacking.

In the global sense, sure, apply to whatever.

However, if you actually want to get an investment, you should probably know that the investor actually wants to invest in the kind of company you run.

Considering the quote from "How to Start a Startup" in the piece, it's not clear that Paul Graham thinks startups and Open Source are compatible.

So, that's why I asked.

Not particularly, but I know Bryan from around town here in Montreal.

Oh, _are_ you? That's really interesting!

Neither do I.

Step 1: learn to program.

Follow-up here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2248114

This is a follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2245765

Hey. I grew up in SF, moved to Montreal in 2002. So, you know, we probably crossed around Iowa City or so.

There's a lot to unpack in your comment. Is there enough similarity between Open Source companies that they will benefit from being near other OSS companies? I think so, for a few reasons.

1. Local investors will have experience with Open Source (we've seen this here in Montreal; our big seed investor MSU has invested in 3 OSS companies).

2. Local service providers (accountants, lawyers, consultants) are aware of and can work with Open Source business models, licenses, etc.

3. A pool of business talent -- people who know how to commercialize Open Source.

4. A pool of Open-Source-sensitive technical talent. It's hard to make Open Source work from a technical level. Some people have the chops for it -- others don't. The ones who do a good job make it look easy; and then there's the hundreds of thousands of 1-person projects on sourceforge.net.

I think that making a successful Open Source company is as different from making a shrink-wrap software company as making a Web company is. It's a sufficiently different model that you have to have a much different team to pursue it.

I totally agree that it's a hard place to have a startup. That's one of the reasons ecosystems matter to founders (see http://nextmontreal.com/12-reasons-a-healthy-startup-ecosyst... for my thoughts on the matter).

I think if there's critical mass, there can be a strong ecosystem here if we specialize.