inmygarage

I changed the title to "why you should" though I do think there's a lot of "how to" in the article - just not in the typical list form that makes how to articles digestible.

"To have one’s work responded to by another mind, or to have to stretch one’s own creative muscles to accommodate someone else’s muse, is a satisfying exercise. It gets us outside of our self-created boxes."

It's one thing to get feedback - but to try and actually create something with a person that you're not used to working with every day seems much more challenging.

I wonder how this impacts objectivity. As an editor, your duty is to "maintain objectivity" yet this becomes a lot more complex when you have to interact with your audience in the way that most community sites require.

Given the economics of the online music industry, Pandora is a truly admirable success story. I think what's great about it isn't necessarily that it's a superior music service (since there are so many that are awesome), but that their recommendation system is actually pretty good.

how long of a response do you want on this? i've got lots of theories.

i suppose you can make this argument for any top engineering school, but anyway:

1. the economy is starting to pick up - the activity on the eecs jobs list is crazy. hundreds of emails a week for any possible hott tech job you could imagine.

2. there's a pretty palpable division between the business school and the rest of campus. another topic entirely, and one that's likely been debated ad nauseam on HN.

3. people at mit are not short on opinions, and some would-be entrepreneurs have trouble handling it when someone (especially a professor they respect, for example) tells them their idea won't work. see #1, rinse, repeat.

4. there's also the whole east coast/west coast theories on startups + entrepreneurship that's relevant here as well. i wouldn't say acceptance of failure is "alive and well" on the east coast.

5. the e-center at MIT has undergone almost a complete makeover (both ideologically and physically) in the past 6 months with the new managing director, and hopefully there's more to come in the next few years.

Campus wisdom states: At MIT, you can have enough sleep, good grades, or a social life. Pick two.

The monthly three-day weekends are nice though.

It has to do with the titles and snippets that Google provides in its search results. Murdoch is saying that their using the titles + blurbs without permission.

More here: http://www.corporate-eye.com/blog/2009/11/news-corp-wants-to...

I used the site both before the re-design and after.

love the re-design.

Lots of reasons:

-the core of thesixtyone is about discovery and the problem with many discovery sites is they are too bogged down with choices. the browsabilty of the new design is commendable.

-all of the stuff they are clearly doing around machine learning is more obvious in the second version

-the new design is edgy and i'm sure they knew they would alienate some users, but it's also gorgeous. about time artistic content was more aligned with artistic design.

sure, there are definitely a few usability kinks (trying to delete a song from a saved list, for example) but am i confident that they'll fix them eventually? absolutely.

Convinced! Brilliant.

Horrific: Usability Fail. Animated gifs. Need I go on?

Brilliant: I have already shared it with 6 people.

So then, given the current state of software patents (seems like they're difficult to attain and even more difficult to defend) how are you supposed to put up barriers to entry as a consumer web company? Are there examples of web/internet companies in the last 5-10 years that have succeeded by following #1?

Perhaps I am too much of a "normal" but the phrase "SaaS Achievement Engine" sounds like that specific type of tech-marketing-speak that will be unappealing to site owners because they will be too bashful to admit that they have no idea what it actually means. I have no such hangups.

Second comment is that I think incentive systems are highly highly tied - almost inextricably so - with the content and community around each individual site. In order for a reward system to work correctly, it has to be based on existing user behavior. For site owners who know this, they'll probably want to structure the system themselves. For site/app owners who don't, how will you sell them on the idea that incentive systems are important to begin with? I think the market you're dealing with right now is people who understand the importance of incentive systems but don't know or are too lazy/busy to make one themselves. If you believe this market is large enough, you should go for it.

"I am glad that my relatives helped me with it by ‘investing’ some money in my idea. It wasn’t very much money, so I couldn’t just buy new servers just like that, I had to optimize my code as much as possible instead."

No choice but to optimize. Love it.

seems like it took years before there was any interest in mining facebook and twitter data for stuff like this - the google buzz mining has already started after three days.

Actually I agree with you. I think what I did not communicate well in the post is exactly what you said - I have more ideas than I know what to do with and the rate that I think of things to build is exponentially greater than the rate at which I can build them.

I am not someone who will learn something conceptually just for the sake of knowing it.

The point is that, what I learned from Chinese was that if you just suck it up and force yourself to learn the basics for a while (no matter how much you wish you could just get back to building things) that you can actually become better faster. That is the part that's painful - the actual making-of-things part is way fun.

There have been a bunch of studies indicating that learning languages (and this applies to music as well, I believe) at a young age gives you immense advantages over those who start later. Tons of theories for why this is (but that's going down a brain development/neuroscience rat hole that's a whole other thread).

yeah that makes sense. I have several projects I am working on in tandem which have been insanely frustrating, but once you can actually make something work it's easier to stop doubting yourself. i guess the eventual goal is a complete end-to-end implementation of a large web project. if 5 years is too much time, that is great news.

yeah, i am starting with python. the whole stack is my 5 year plan. i am ambitious like that.

but on a different note, as far I can tell (and granted I am brand new to this) does "coding" as a general term necessarily imply a scripting language? can you not "code" a database or is there a different verb for that ("implement")?

I hope you're right - social pressure can be incredibly powerful, especially in a business where deal-flow is currency.

And yet, as digital real estate, comment sections are among the most under-optimized sections of any content site.

A site with high-quality comments can increase the value of the existing content exponentially, but because there is a more removed connection to revenue generation it seems like the majority of comment sections (HN excluded, of course) are thrown in as an afterthought.

This discussion reminds me of Fred Wilson's article about bit.ly "That's only Ten Lines of Code"

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/03/thats-only-ten-lines-of-code...

Sure, you can replicate lots of sites but to me Reddit wasn't great because of the tech, it was because they had built something really zeitgeisty that people liked.

Best Quote:

You know what startups hear when you say “help their strategy”?

“This person is going to write a report.” Startups don’t need more reports. Some of them don’t even have printers.

I have been waiting for someone to write a post like this. Not because I think it's important to discuss one startup versus the other necessarily - they have very different markets in my mind - but because an exploration of the developing NYC aesthetic is worth examining.

I actually think it has a lot to do with early users. In the Bay Area, it's easy to find a large group of beta testers and early users who "get" technology in a profound way that (sadly) no where else in the country does. This contributes to the SV echo chamber and yields a certain type of feedback that in turn creates very distinctly "west coast" products. In New York, the number of truly tech-savvy social web types is much smaller and the majority come from media and advertising - ie, people who care first about design, and second about everything else.

While I'm sure the debate could rage all day about real growth and traffic stats, that's not what I took away from this article at all.