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micaelwidell

581 karma · joined April 1, 2010

I live in Sweden. I co-founded the swedish e-commerce company http://fyndiq.se where I am CTO.

My blog can be found at http://micaelwidell.com

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micaelwidell··on Python Programming in your Browser: PythonAnywhere
With the emergence and success of services like Heroku for simplified development and hosting, I am pretty sure this is the next natural step. I think these kind of services, with development, revision system, deployment, hosting all integrated, with be huge within a year or two.
micaelwidell··on NYT Review of ‘The 4-Hour Body’
The big question here is: is Tim Ferriss that self-righteous naturally, or does he do it on purpose to gain more attention?

Few people can deny that being so self-righteous that other people get provoked is one hell of a personal marketing strategy. I just keep wondering if the people who succeed in personal branding have thought this out and planned their self-righteousness strategically, or if they just are that way naturally and got lucky.

micaelwidell··on Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search
Couldn't part of this problem be solved with an algorithm that identifies when several pages have roughly the same content (ie. original wikipedia article + 5 copies of it elsewhere on the web) and then giving the oldest occurance in the index a much higher rank?

That would kill incentive to create these spam-sites and give the user the result s/he was looking for.

micaelwidell··on When 9 Trillion dollars from Fed Reserve goes missing what can we do about it?
Vote for Ron Paul?
micaelwidell··on Do a startup or travel around the world?
All you people suggesting "do both" - do you really know what you are talking about? We may have different definitions of what a startup is.

If by startup, you mean a one man website that is some kind of low-maintenance subscription service, then yeah sure, go travel the world.

But if you define startup as I do, as a venture-backed, aggressively growing company employing people, then how the hell are you going to travel the world while managing that? Please tell me if you have a way, because I would be genuinely interested :)

micaelwidell··on Kod is a new Node.js scriptable code editor for OSX
Show me a usable file tree view that doesn't look like crap for vim or emacs, and I will go back to using them.

With today's web frameworks, when I hop between files all the time, I want a neat visual file tree.

micaelwidell··on Kod is a new Node.js scriptable code editor for OSX
Finally some potential competition for textmate.
micaelwidell··on Use Vim Like A Pro
TextMate is getting older and older. I would like to try something else, but I haven't yet found another editor with a sane file/folder sidebar, which is a must for me. Any tips? The sidebars I've seen for emacs and vim either look lika crap or use too big a font for them to be practical.
micaelwidell··on Ask HN: What is the success/failure rate of startups?
Of course the definition of success is different for every entrepreneur. My definition of success in this case is a sustainable company that is still alive and growing after 5 years.

Maybe the formulation of my question wasn't very good. What I meant was more like "How many percent of startups who get funding are still in business five years later".

micaelwidell··on Wannabe entrepreneur symptoms and cures
I think it is fairly normal to go through the wannabe-phase. We all do it until the moment that we realize we aren't getting nearer any goals, and decide to become a doer instead of a talker/planner.
micaelwidell··on Thoughts about Rails from a Django guy
About two years ago I tried a lot of different frameworks and languages to find which one would suit me best. After having tried various PHP frameworks, J2EE, Perl I arrived at Django/Python. The plan was to continue on to Rails after Django, but I loved Django so much that I couldn't imagine that Rails could be any better. Seems like I was right ;)

Like the author, I too think Django's default directory structure doesn't work very well once you start doing bigger projects. But luckily, everything is so loosely coupled that you can change the directory structure entirely without too much work.

micaelwidell··on Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency
I remember reading the book "The Sovereign Individual" which was written in the 90's. The authors argue that as the internet becomes more abundant, cybercurrencies will become popular and over time make it very hard for governments to collect taxes. This would in turn change the world in a lot of different ways.

Since I read the book, I have been waiting for someone to create something like this. It will be exciting to see if this will work and if "cyber currencies" will become more widely used.

micaelwidell··on Ask HN: Music while coding
I like http://rainymood.com Not music though, just the sound of rain.
micaelwidell··on Tell HN: My iPhone 3G is unusably slow since upgrading to iOS 4.0
Strange. I have a 3G and 4.0 feels slightly faster compared to 3.1.3. Did you jailbreak it and enable multitasking + extra animations?
micaelwidell··on The Value of Ideas
Funny you should mention hand-painted rock business as a counter-example. I presume you haven't heard of the massive success of Pet Rocks? Basically the story I was told was that Gary Dahl had a bet with a few friends that he could sell any product, no matter how stupid or useless, with the right packaging and marketing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock
micaelwidell··on Why are the east of cities usually poorer?
Stockholm (capital of Sweden) seems to be an exception to this.
micaelwidell··on The Pirate Bay up again - bandwidth provided by Swedish Pirate Party
I didn't want to link to that one, as it is in swedish.
micaelwidell··on Who's using Google App Engine?
Thanks! One more question: Had any problems with using third-party Python libraries? I mean like PIL, cjson or stuff like that? Heard something about C-based libraries not working?
micaelwidell··on Who's using Google App Engine?
About where do you usually hit the limit for free usage? Are we talking hundreds of daily visitors? Thousands? Tens of thousands? I know this varies heavily depending on your code, but does anyone have a good rule of thumb?
micaelwidell··on The best Present and Future alternatives to the iPad
Let me put it this way: How do you think Apple has become as big and successful as it is today, despite always releasing products that are technically inferior (ie. Mhz/megapixel/megawhatever) and often more expensive than the competition? Could there me more to a product than the hardware specs?
micaelwidell··on The best Present and Future alternatives to the iPad
Anyone who compares the iPad with a netbook, arguing the netbook has a faster CPU, better price or whatever, simply does not get it.
micaelwidell··on Facebook has acquired Divvyshot (YC W09)
They launched 49 days ago?
micaelwidell··on Facebook has acquired Divvyshot (YC W09)
Maybe this could be a hint: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121349
micaelwidell··on Stupid American Website Owners
Yeah, you know, readability is not a feature. Gotta focus on features ;)