physcab

This may be a stupid question, but how do you go about getting these domains? I refuse to believe GoDaddy Domain Buy Service isn't a scam...

Thanks. Feedback is definitely noted!

Thanks. I'm not a designer so for right now I got an awesome theme off WooThemes. The product itself is a theme off of ThemeForest.

The front end is Javascript MVC and Jquery. Backend is PHP and MySQL. Payments are done by Stripe (more on that in a later post). Charting is done with Highcharts and a custom data API, and I'll prob move to d3.js once I figure out some more visualizations to put in.

This is definitely genius. Even for programmers the service could be very valuable in learning new languages. I love my O'Reilly books, but I would throw all of them away in a heartbeat if the content was wrapped up in an interactive console like this.

True, but with Ebay, space separates me and the other party, so I still have (or feel like I have) some level of control. Could I still fall victim to random acts of hatred? Sure.

Call it a bad taste or a pit in the stomach, but the incident only reinforced my worst fears about the service. It's something that will be difficult to forget.

I want to believe that people are fundamentally good as well and there is definitely evidence that supports that.

But this incident has left a bad taste in my mouth, and their response hasn't made me feel any better. It's not like Ebay where if you have a bad experience, your loss is stemmed to the material good you have given away. On AirBnb, the potential harm in the worst case for both a guest and a host are massive -- total material loss or even rape or death.

I'm sure many people find value using their service, but after today, the risk is so clearly present that I don't think you can pay me to use it.

If Primus sees their content on our site and they don't want it there, all they have to do is tell us. And we'll do exactly what you say by filtering any mention of the word Primus, take it down promptly and do everything we can to make it never happen again.

Whichever way you look at it, building a business in the music space is difficult. We're all probably competing with piracy more so than each other. There is no good road. You make it sound like we've had it easy, which is not the case. Every employee has at some time gone without pay for an extended period of time. Mine was 10 months. That's the sort of dedication it takes to bring a product from a thousand users to millions when you're underfunded. And our relationships didn't form suddenly when we had millions of users. They were the result of years of work in the trenches when our userbase was small- going to concerts, promoting artists, branding our site...basically everything we could do to get their songs heard.

You might "discover" more in the sense that you'll get far more recommendations of songs you've never heard of, but those recommendations might not be relevant to you. Why? Because your mood changes from song to song and algorithms will never capture human emotion quite like, well, humans.

When I'm in a well-DJ'ed Turntable room, the "radio" feels so much more natural. Songs flow. People are constantly editing their queues to best the song before it and I find myself rarely having to vote on a song. Its already better than Pandora, IMO. It also beats BMAT which has amazing algorithmic recommendations (based on waveform analysis and musical feature decomposition).

The only issue I see right now is that if your tastes are outside of Electronica and Indie, theres not much else for you at the moment.

After testing out Turntable.fm for the past few weeks, I have to almost disagree. And this is coming from someone who worked on Grooveshark Radio for a year, which is almost all algorithmic.

> Maintaining a list of the top 1,000,000 bands in the world and not letting anybody upload tracks with metadata that included those bands and song names in it would not be that difficult.

I addressed this in my other comment, but as it turns out, this aspect of the problem is incredibly difficult. Metadata can be wrong and we can't always depend on it. So we use waveform analysis. But thats difficult too due to the indexing and storage requirements and the accuracy of the algorithm performing the search. Also this list is not finite. It changes constantly and parties are always bickering over rights to content and that takes time to sort out. We actually have a team of people who handle takedown requests, and we have another team of people who put in the necessary restrictions to keep content from getting played or uploaded.

Its not a black or white issue. Licensing is incredibly complex with ownership sometimes changing between territories, products, people and having the technology in place to enforce specific terms so all parties are happy. I'm not completely knowledgeable about the subject so I won't comment on that further, but its not something we turn a blind eye to. Our content ID system is getting better and better. Ultimately its a question of resources, and when you're a cash-starved startup, you're spread super thin.

My point is that we genuinely do our best to help artists. We're good people. If you want your band's presence taken down, you're entitled to have that done for you. You can also leave your music up so millions of users can discover it and find out more about who you are. We have tens of thousands of individual artists managing their own music and we get tons of fan mail from artists who say that our platform has not only decreased piracy but has actually encouraged fans to buy more of their music and see their shows.

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/040811grooveshark

How are our (I'm a grooveshark employee) legal tactics questionable? We sign deals with new labels all the time and our #1 company-wide goal is to help an artist make over $1M through our service. Here is a list of all our label agreements: http://www.grooveshark.com/labelslist. I don't think its updated though since we have a deal with EMI and I can't find it on the list. Yes, a few of the other majors are missing, but that is always an on-going conversation. We also fully comply with the DMCA in the same way YouTube and all other UGC sites work. Case in point: try searching for Beatles.

Some brief thoughts from a researcher turned programmer.

1) At first glance, I'm having trouble discerning what this might be used for or who its targeted to. Every discipline has different terminology, so I imagine what might work for Chemists might not work for Engineers. In our lab, we didn't have very many chemicals, but we had certain instruments setup with finite lifetime values.

2) Also at first glance, I thought this was a lab notebook replacement or supplement. Now that would have been awesome. Going back over my _many_ pages of notes over the years was a pain in the ass, especially when it came down to writing proposals and papers. I'm sure there is a huge opportunity in digitizing this to make lab notes searchable, reference-able, more organized, and even more secure.

3) To reach students, I would suggest to hitting up large conferences. If you're based in SF you're in luck because most of the big conferences my colleagues and I attended were in SF, NY, or Boston.

It really depends which room. With Pandora you're at the mercy of their recommendations too, but they aren't really held accountable for bad recommendations. Sure there is an algorithm, but I would bet on people picking songs any day over an algorithm if anything were on the line. With Turntable.fm, you're playing for your reputation, and some people take that VERY seriously. Some of the bigger rooms I've been in have had incredible selection, especially the ones with DJ thresholds.

All you want to do is showcase your company's growth in the best possible way without being misleading. They're not being misleading or shitty. If you're a free service that doesn't require a signup and makes money off advertising, then reporting registered users doesn't make sense. Advertisers just want to know eyeballs, so Google Analytics Visitor numbers will do. For Foursquare reporting registered users doesn't really make much sense either. They could have easily reported mobile installs too, but that would be similar. Internally, I'd be checking other growth metrics such as "How many people are using Explore", or "How many people are referring friends", or "How many businesses are getting new leads as a result of Foursquare". These are much more important questions, but alas, getting the media to care about that is hopeless.

Really good talk. I'm curious if you can expand on how you would optimize for maximum benefit of an exact match domain. It's a singular event obviously, so do you need to lead up to it with relevant content or will it just sell itself because people are already searching for it? Are there ways to get a multiplicative effect out of it, say use it to boost other products? Also, how do you keep taking advantage of it even after the event passes?

A month in review? Is that normal? What are the average review periods to be expected for both paid and free apps?

I use both equally. Hulu is great for current content and it seems more like a TV replacement. But the movies on Hulu suck. Netflix has awesome movies. Its TV series is improving, but it will often get a series months after it airs. Theres definitely a place for both services.

I only pay for Netflix right now because the Plus offering for Hulu just isn't there yet. A ton of the content isn't available on mobile and the buffering can be terrible at times. Also they claim to keep full series of shows for Plus members, but when I tried it out I couldn't find historical seasons for many popular shows that I had wanted to watch and start from the beginning. So that pretty much killed it for me.

> I'm also kinda bummed that this kind of research doesn't have a higher profile in the US.

Graphene gets a ton of attention, do not worry. It is one of the most competitive areas of materials science research. When my former gradschool groupmate did his proposal on it and all the experiments he wished to do for his PhD thesis (keep in mind he spent a year putting this proposal together) most of the experiments had already been done by the time his proposal was actually accepted. When I left the program, there was literally a "groundbreaking" paper per a week coming out in Science or Nature, and all the other publications were being flooded.

> They have one of the best pitches for hiring: "we have some of the smartest engineers" is an easy sell.

I actually didn't get that impression when I read (and heard) their hiring pitch. To me, their pitch was "the people who work here are geniuses and you have to beat them to be recognized. Oh did we mention they are the best in <insert continent>?" Not exactly as humble as saying "come and work with brilliant people. you too can have a massive impact."

lal is a curious site. I've known about it since december when my sister told me about it. She used to spend hours on it reading to me funny little flirts that people wrote. The initial users had a great sense of humor and it was really lightweight and fun. Now though, it is so heavy and serious! It seems like half the people who post are depressed by a breakup and are looking for an outlet. Also, since the site is less popular now than it used to be the posts stay up for a while and the content is rather stale.

This reminds me of those kiosks they have at airports begging you to play games while you wait. I never see people on them but have always wondered how much they made.

I'm curious to hear more details about your "tipping point". What sort of metrics seem to put investors at ease? Was it a specific revenue goal, a more polished plan of action, a certain user-growth model, or all of the above? My limited experience from working at a consumer internet startup has taught me that once you hit about a million users, everything else seems to fall into place a lot easier. Of course that varies widely depending on the business, so I'm just interested in hearing other data points.

I've been at Grooveshark for a while. While I'm not going to comment on this story, I will say this: every single employee (now about 70) has sacrificed immensely for the success of this company since its start. It's pretty clear to everyone who works at Grooveshark that they don't do it for the money. They show up everyday because they have fun working with a great team, an awesome product, and the hope that one day this industry will be changed for the better. We've gone through a lot- lawsuits, employment without payment, app store removals, people saying crazy shit ("a legal jihad"??), competitors sprouting up every day etc. I'm sure this won't be the last either. But what keeps us going is hearing just how many people NEED us from my little sister who sends me her iPhone every month so we can put a dev build on it when her certificate expires, to the numerous artists we meet at music festivals both large and small who need a better way to distribute their music and get heard.

I think it depends on the customer. Probably somewhere between $50 and $300 million [1,2]. My guess is that the more successful programs will retain their current (probably defense) customers, but SpaceX will effectively serve a new generation of private companies who can take the risk. You also have to keep in mind that a lot of this is political and regulated. Depending on how a government contract swings, it might favor SpaceX or their competitors.

[1] http://www.aiaa.org/aerospace/images/articleimages/pdf/AA_Ja... [2] http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2010/July/Pag...

With all their partnerships and contracts, SpaceX is now a viable alternative in the industry. Clearly they can compete on price. What remains to be determined however is if they can compete on mission success and reliability. You can bet their competitors are playing the fear card to their customers.

It is just an example of an alternate viewpoint. My point is that sometimes you will have more success finding data for questions that interest you than looking at datasets that interest you and trying to come up with questions.

When you want to create a new website do you start by looking at a bunch of clip art and images? Browsing through datasets such as the ones listed in this thread leaves me overwhelmed. I've never had any difficulty finding open datasets. If there is a dataset I need that doesn't exist or costs money, I find a way to create it from scratch.

Asking "What datasets are available to me?" is sometimes the wrong question. A better way of going about the problem is asking something more specific like "How can I create a heat-map of U.S poverty?" The reason why the latter is better is that it not only focuses your attention on something do-able but it actually teaches you more about data analysis than just searching for datasets.

For example, to solve the question above you are going to be asking yourself the following followup questions:

1) Where do I get a map of the U.S?

2) How do I make a heat-map?

3) How do I feed in my own data into this heat map?

4) What colors do I use?

5) Can I do this real-time? Do I need a database? What language do I use?

6) Whats a FIPS code?

7) How do I find a poverty dataset with FIPS codes?

8) This poverty dataset doesn't have FIPS codes, but I can join it with this other dataset that does have FIPS codes.