maryrosecook

barbelith.com might suit your tastes. It's not invite-only, but if you apply then it takes months to get approved. Reasonably intelligent discussion occurs.

I work ten minutes' walk from the London end. The most interesting part of this is the way most people just stand and stare through the glass. The important thing is not so much the interaction with people at the other end, but just the seeing. Kind of like the way people love showing a just-taken digital photograph to the assembled group.

Sign up for Slicehost and work through the articles. They will take you, step by step, from a new slice to a hosted application. Two months ago, I was in the same position you are. I now have three slices all running apps. I have learnt about load balancing, database administration and tuning, web server configuration, the inner workings of Linux, scheduling, bash...

At times, system administration will make you want to kill yourself, but it's worth learning. Building your own slice is a great way to start.

4. The amount of comment activity.

5. Votes vs views.

Biggest, smooth-surfaced desk that will fit in the room without blocking the door.

Doing a dating app on Facebook would be difficult for two reasons.

First, the privacy controls. If I am already Facebook friends with someone I fancy, we would just correpond via the messaging system - no app required. For an app to introduce me to a potential date whom I am not already friends with, we would both have to agree to let the other see our profiles. This agreement would be based on the Facebook mini profile - a photo and location. This sounds like speed dating without the speed date bit.

Second, segmentation of one's life. Facebook profiles are not anonymous blogs about one's sex life, or conversations with friends about a Saturday night party - they are public faces. Even in the real world, dating is done in private: alone, with few facts shared until the relationship is official. People are not going to want to muddy their public Facebook face with their dating life.

An Australian visa is much easier to get than a US one. You apply online and get an answer within weeks.

He's said this before (for example, in the interview with Sarah Lacy at SXSW). His statement echoes Larry and Sergey's 20 year commitment to Google.

It seems reasonable that Zuckerberg is telling the truth. He will get rich no matter what, and the desire to Do Something Great is an almost overpowering driving force for some people.

You may already know this, but the developers of both Delicious Library and TextMate are going Leopard-only for their version twos.

The DL dev's justification is that almost all the people who spend money on software will buy Apple's stuff first, thus being Leopard-only cuts out only a small amount of your market.

TextMate's dev justified it in a similar way, saying that 90% of his customers are early-adopters who would be on Leopard as soon as it came out.

It is interesting to note that both of these apps have niche markets (people who organise their media collections and programmers/geeks). Thus, the devs are probably confident in their predictions about not reducing their potential customers too much.

Insanely cheap (nice meal out = 5 Euros), loads of alternative stuff: squats, parties, gigs etc. Very young, very friendly. Not sure about the start-up scene.

I don't get distracted by music at all.

If I want to get focused quickly, I listen to some particularly horrible electronica (Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole by Venetian Snares is a good example). If it's three in the morning, I listen to some minimal electronica (Vladislav Delay, B. Fleischmann both good).

Otherwise, it's whatever I'm enjoying at the moment (recently: brutal hardcore like Circle Takes The Square, weird indie like Frog Eyes and Sunset Rubdown).

Finally, long albums are good because of the longer gaps between ends of songs and ends of records.

Yep, count me in. Looking forward to it.

Please do!

I haven't got much time to work on Tweviews at the moment - I did it as a little diversionary side-project-burst-of-creation thing. My main focus at the moment is my start-up.

I also used Ruby/Rails. I find projects like this to be both ideally suited to, and hampered by, the use of RoR. They're nice and quick to code, but setting up the hosting environment is a time-consuming bore.

I implemented a similar idea a few weeks ago and called it http://www.tweviews.com I like your implementation: the RSS feed and the grouping of items being rated into the Hot Stuff category are both cool.

My set-up is similar: reply tweets sent to @tweviews However, I send them on as normal tweets to the tweviews Twitter account. This means that if people want tweviews, they can just follow the Twitter account.

Content-wise, I was shooting for a different slant: I also have a cron-job set up that pulls in the reply tweets, but I moderate them and only send on the good ones.

I'm still tweaking the format of the tweviews. Currently, it is "@tweviews thing, artist ... review" I display the latest five tweets in a sidebar on my blog (link in my profile) and automatically link the "thing, artist" part up to a Google search.

Anyway, in summary, I really like Twitterate. Nice job.

I work some weeknights, plus large chunks of the weekends. I get maybe 10-20 hours a week on the project. I find this approach quite frustrating, though: you get totally in the zone and then it's time to go to bed because you have work the next day. Also, I find that I no longer have so much energy for volunteering or writing music or socialising. I knew that doing a start-up meant saying goodbye to your life, but I didn't realise that sacrifice would have to be made so early.

Insanely Great - Steven Levy. About the building of the original Macintosh. Extremely inspiring and interesting.

Not sure if this will do, but you if you're on OS X you can use TextMate's 'Edit In TextMate' to edit code in any text field in any web browser.

Two things.

First, doing a startup is a really enjoyable form of technical work. You're working on what you want to, and that is fun in itself. It's also multi-disciplinary and thus you get variety and some quite arty bits of work. For example, How can we ask a question that will get us honest, interesting, succinct information about a user's personality?

Second, if your passion can't be your job (for whatever reason), make fucking sure you indulge your passion in your free time. I found that working a job that sucked hard to be an excellent motivation for making full use of my spare time by throwing myself into playing in a band, political activism, squash and programming my own stuff. If you don't get similarly motivated, perhaps forcing yourself to work on your passion will help.

There are a number of examples of this. For instance, the guy who developed Passage, Jason Rohrer, lives entirely off donations (http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/supportMyWork...) and he releases all his software under the GNU GPL.

Ones not already mentioned: http://www.atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/Index.html (programmer at Delicious Monster), http://ask.metafilter.com/ (Q&A site on a wide range of subjects), http://daringfireball.net (Mac weblog).

I gave up TV and computer games about two years ago. The first was easy, the second was harder. The way to do it is just to have a lot of creative projects on the go. In my case it was a start-up and a band, but it could be anything. As soon as you start creating, you get way more sucked in than you ever do with TV.

The only tricky part is finding something to keep your mind occupied when you're eating. Reading leaps to mind.

We are bootstrapping and I find it really helps. You get a higher thought-to-work ratio, which means you can more often work out whether an idea is good or bad before pouring away development time into it.

The downside is the frustration of not being able to work on your true passion all the time. But I would say this is a common problem for salaried employees.

However, once we start cranking out code, I think going full time will make us much more productive than continuing to bootstrap.

It surprises me that a man who writes such an unusual cartoon as xkcd should have such a standard political viewpoint. I am baffled by the fact that people get so worked up about general elections. Yes, the outcome will have a profound effect upon one's life, but that outcome is almost entirely outside one's control.

My own preference is for much more power to be given to local governments, and for consensus-based decision making, rather than voting. But I think further expansion of those views would be off-topic.