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hiroproton Please Steal My Startup Idea

So, interesting question...what's better? Tagged as "contains gluten" or "gluten-free"?

hiroproton Please Steal My Startup Idea

I posted this on the blog too, but keep an eye on my startup, http://forkly.com

We just might solve your problem ;)

hiroproton Twitter's iOS Integration and What This Means for Developers

Any way to participate remotely? I won't be in SF that day unfortunately.

hiroproton Twitter's iOS Integration and What This Means for Developers

Is this a virtual or on-location event? (couldn't see that specified anywhere)

hiroproton How a 3 week business trip to the US got reduced to 3 hours

The thing's called DAFT? :) Love it!

hiroproton William Gibson's cyberpunk classic 'Neuromancer' may finally get to screens

Be glad...initially the guy who did Torque was slated to be the director

hiroproton EC2 Users Should be Cautious When Booting Ubuntu 10.04 AMIs

FWIW, we're using the Amazon Linux AMI (from Amazon themselves) and are quite happy with it.

It is a pretty minimalist AMI, which is what we wanted. One caveat: it is in beta.

hiroproton Active Admin - The missing administration framework for Ruby on Rails

I wish this worked with MongoID :(

hiroproton Show HN: Let's end the Programmer Salary Taboo

Sorry, didn't do it for me. I was at first confused by the "give it a name", then it took me to another page and I lost interest.

Why not just a simple form that lets you enter your salary, and provide some optional info that will only be revealed to people you choose?

hiroproton Simple, Effective Password Management with Keepass and Dropbox

I've been very happy with LastPass

http://lastpass.com

hiroproton iOS Libraries

That's good stuff, helped me get started a while back :)

hiroproton iOS Libraries

We were playing with it too, but ended up doing our own thing in the end.

hiroproton iOS Libraries

Beware overusing MBProgressHUD. It's a really nice library, but in general you should try to avoid modal progress dialogues in favor of progress that can be presented non-modally.

hiroproton iOS Libraries

JSONKit (https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit) is quite a bit faster than the mentioned json-framework.

Also, an alternative to SDWebImage is EGOImageLoading (https://github.com/enormego/EGOImageLoading), which might or might not be better (Instagram uses it).

We've been using both libraries quite happily for our new startup, forkly.

hiroproton JSend: a specification for how JSON responses should be formatted

The one thing I could see this being useful for is standardizing pagination for large result sets. Ideally, the server would return meta pagination information that includes total number of results, offset, limit, etc.

Unfortunately, this spec doesn't address that at all as far as I can tell :(

hiroproton You Dont Need a Good Idea To Start a Great Company

But one example is often markets where user behavior is fundamentally shifting, or where there is a sudden change (e.g. adoption of truly smart phones) leading to opportunity.

Great point. A very good write-up on that is http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/build-what-had-p....

Maybe I will write a post on how to identify a great market, as that is a pretty big topic.

For what it's worth, I'd love to see you write that.

hiroproton The World's Happiest Countries

Wowzer...Luxembourg is not even on the overall ranking list?

From what I recall, it has been consistently in the top 15 in other studies.

hiroproton $15 phone, 3 minutes all that's needed to eavesdrop on GSM call

Very misleading title.

The article mentions that 4 phones, a laptop computer, and a lot of specialized software were needed (they mention open-source, but there are no details).

Also, the process they describe seemed to be much more time-consuming than just 3 minutes.

hiroproton What is the First Programming Language You Would Teach Your Child

Pascal was one of my favorites growing up too, although not my first (Basic and Logo got me started).

I learned most of my hard-core programming through demos ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demo_(computer_programming) ), which I did in Pascal first, and then added x86 Assembly.

Demo programming not only made programming accessible and fun, it also was the first time that I actually got interested in Calculus outside of school (matrix math for 3D animations, etc)

hiroproton Path — Introducing The Personal Network

Somehow I was more excited about the list idea. I thought they'd build a really solid version of http://listiki.com/

Oh well, maybe we haven't seen everything yet.

hiroproton Ask YC: What is an appropriate valuation for a startup that is brand new?

It depends primarily on the track record of the founding team. If the team has a history of being able to execute and the idea is promising, I'd say you can raise money on valuations between $1-3 million pre with just a powerpoint and some background research.

If the team has no track record, it will be much, much harder.

hiroproton Tell HN: Denver Meetup of HN

I'll be there.

hiroproton A viral "launching soon" form

You make a good point. We've been thinking about other ways for people to move up in the line that involve some of those things.

We don't require you to spam your friends list for an invite, but if you share the link with your friends, you'll get it earlier :)

hiroproton Ask HN: YC in SF or TechStars in NYC?

I went through the program in 2007 in Boulder (the first year they were offering it) with Brightkite.

I'd definitely recommend doing it, it's more than worth it. To answer your specific questions:

a) It's primarily about the team. Assemble a founding team that has a history/evidence of being able to execute. You can do that by either having an impressive resume, or (in my case back at the time) demoing software that you've written, even if it's not directly related to what you're applying with.

There are also a bunch of online resources that answer this question. A select few:

http://nattyzola.com/7-pieces-of-advice-to-techstar-applican...

http://www.seattle20.com/blog/Some-tips-for-applying-and-get...

http://www.nearlynicole.com/2010/05/tips-for-applying-to-tec...

b) This really depends on your experience, but in a nutshell, try to focus on learning the things you have little experience in. For example, if you are a great engineer, but know little about raising money, focus most of your time on that.

Also, my friend Jon from IntenseDebate (sold to Automattic) has some great advice here:

http://jonefox.com/blog/2008/06/08/tips-for-techstars-teams/

Hope this helps,

Martin

hiroproton AwesomenessReminders now has 750 paying subscribers

Yeah, but unlike most other subscriptions that people tend to forget about, they'll be reminded of this one each and every day.

hiroproton Bank Simple actually personalise their email

I received the same email, and didn't even notice the personalized language. After reviewing it now though, it says:

Even if you don't want to talk about banking matters, I'd love to hear more about your own start up. (I'm sure that from that you also have some great suggestions for us!)

hiroproton Female Anti-Rape Condom

Snow Crash, anybody? :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash#Dentata

hiroproton IPhone multitasking and background updating

One way to work around it would be to just register for significant location updates, which are bound to occur as the user moves around. Those updates trigger a callback into the app, which could then check the timestamp of the last articles update, and fetch new ones if enough time has elapsed.

hiroproton How to take a screenshot

I find it interesting that this is so easy on iPhone and so hard on Android.

For some reason, I think of taking screenshots as a poweruser feature (which might or might not be the case), and that Android would make it easy, while Apple wouldn't make it available to regular users.

I wonder what the thinking behind those decisions were. Did his Steveness demand the easy screenshot functionality to capture UI feedback on the go?

hiroproton Idea: Multifocus Photography

Good analysis of the 3D focus problem: http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/12/avatar_3d_headach...