lsemel

It'd be great if this could work with libraries of UI elements, so we could load in Twitter Bootstrap elements if our site uses that, or have the ability to create UI libraries of our own.

We should be making a platform to crowdsource the hiring of lobbyists.

setup.exe? That's not going to run on my Mac!

From the perspective of a web app, how would PiCloud be better than, say, running Celery on my own server and sending all background tasks to it?

Did you see "Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?" http://www.slate.com/id/2301228/. I wonder if this is a market that actually wants nice single-page websites.

As far as documentation, I've found Django's approach to work better for me. It seems to be the norm in the Python community to document well and comprehensively. Python is the only computer language I've seen where, according to the creators, "Strunk and White apply" (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/) . With Rails, the community approach toward documentation too often seems geared toward beginners. Many gems provide a "copy this, generate these files, and type that" tutorial or a screencast. I'm reminded of the code-generating wizards you'd see in Microsoft Visual Studio back in the day. Often there's no documentation beyond an initial tutorial. When I tried Rails last year I found myself spending the majority of my time Googling and sifting through blog posts of varying age and quality in an often futile attempt to find what I needed, whereas with Django the majority of my time is spent actually coding, and if I really can't find something in the documentation, Django's code is so readable it's often easy to open up the source and discover what it's doing.

I answered this on Quora: http://www.quora.com/WiFi/What-are-the-best-wifi-enabled-wor...

Hah!

It was a pretty simple plugin.

Commodore 64, which I got when I was in elementary school. I still remember a bunch of the POKE codes you would use to change the colors in Commodore 64 BASIC.

Small group rates aren't that different than the rates you can get through a professional group, though both are much lower than purchasing insurance as an individual. This site lists some small group rates for groups of 2-50: http://www.nysmallgroupplans.com/category.aspx?id=MISC5 The lowest small group rate, based on their comparison spreadsheet, was around $275.

Sounds like you already have good insurance. Here in NY the most minimal insurance starts at around twice you're paying and goes up from there. You can see the prices of freelancer insurance from MediaBistro here: http://www.mediabistro.com/insurance/newyork.asp

That's a big reason why I cut back on going to tech meetups and events. It's the same people at each event, people whose main skill is getting publicity for themselves and going to parties, rather than having any technical, creative, or business skill.

Here's a hierarchy of programming languages (meant to be tongue-in-cheek): http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/steverowe/WindowsLiveWriter/...

Room & Board makes some nice mattresses, at lower prices than mattress stores, but still somewhat above your price range: http://www.roomandboard.com/rnb/subcategory/list.do?catalog=...

Bret,

Thanks for chiming in here. At our startup we are trying hard to reassure users we're not going to misuse the Facebook access they're giving us. Even though we're asking for a fairly limited set of rights, the permissions screen that appears after the Facebook Graph login is quite intimidating. The design has a warning stripe across the type that is reminiscent of a danger sign, and combined with the copy, inspires a feeling of alarm. See http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/ for a screen shot. It would be better if the screen were friendlier and less evocative of danger.

Another way to improve the user experience would be to consolidate the login form and permissions to a single screen. Twitter's oauth login screen does this well. Screen shot: http://followfridayhelper.com/images/help-login-via-oauth.pn...

Additionally, the oauth tokens should be long-lasting by default. We originally set up our site to not ask for an extended-life token, because we wanted to reassure users that we weren't going to be posting things on behalf when they weren't using the site. But this ruined the user experience. A short time after logging in to our site, a user would initiate an action, but because their token had expired, we had to pop open a new Facebook login window, interrupting what they were doing. Users were annoyed at having to constantly re-login to Facebook. So we now ask for the extended life permission. While this improves the user experience, it adds another intimidating message on the Facebook permissions screen, implying we're going to be posting on their behalf even when they don't initiate it.

Happy to chat more about what we're doing and give additional feedback.

Lee Semel

It is mostly done through networking in non-tech circles, with executives of other types of businesses that would need the consulting projects. And responding to lots of RFPs.

I'd have expected that median (200K/year for 20 years) to be higher.

Sign up for http://elegant.ly

Agreed - there are loads of former banker types, or rich wives of financiers, who decide starting a startup is cool, and go try to hire an engineer for 2% equity and treat them poorly. Their "startups" are often some kind of online magazine where the main technical challenge is themeing Drupal.

Engineers won't want to work in startups (especially in NY where rent=2500+1000*num_bedrooms) until they see a lot of other engineers getting rich due to having worked in startups. People follow incentives and respond to stories of others' success. In NY thus far, these success stories are rare.

For buyers, this isn't any different than using craigslist. Why would they go to this site? What's in it for them?

All the benefits of using this are targeted toward sellers.

4.0 means you got an A in every course, and in each course the grade is usually based on a weighted average of tests and papers. You usually don't have the opportunity to redo work or retake tests.

I spent 2 years at a good state university and 2 years at a top private university, getting 4.0 and 3.97 respectively. I think getting the 4.0 at the state school was harder as there was less grade inflation.

You do not need to be a super genius to get a high GPA. It's a combination of intelligence, interest in the subject matter, hard work, and priorities. Looking back, I thought getting a very high GPA was essential, but now I don't think it matters all that much, nor was it worth the effort.

In NYC (or anywhere, remotely) - looking for with experience in PHP/CodeIgniter, jQuery, Compass/SASS, MongoDB - and have a good UI sense - flexible/freelance OK - email me - lee at http://sawhorsemedia.com/

There are plenty of distractions in an office as well -- chitchat, meetings, poor environment not under your control (e.g. too hot or too cold) and noise. You do need to be disciplined because there's none of the peer pressure that arises from being around other people who are busy working. Additionally, I'd only work from home if living in a big city, in order to combat isolation. In a city you have access to people, whether by interspersing meetings into your day or simply stepping outside, and this combats isolation. I would not enjoy working at home in the suburbs.

It's a good idea to avoid using trademarks (like "twitter") in your site's name.

You need to put in some hooks to help spread the word about the site. How come you're not encouraging people tweet or post to Facebook right when they sign up?

Why not offer any type of media or product that you can grab from Amazon.com or another source to match on?

Books, movies, songs, travel locations, favorite restaurants, etc.

At NY entrepreneur meetings I tend to encounter a few of the same types over and over 1) people who don't actually make or do anything but constantly show up at all the entrepreneur meetings and 2) people in suits

Lately this seems to be changing, which is a good sign.

I tried it out and thought it was a fun site. It will be even more so when there are more people on it.