rabble

It is illegal for US players to do real money gambling. But the world is big and the there are other markets. As long as the US players are prevented from playing the US doesn't care that it happens elsewhere.

What total BS. The truth is that if you ask good programmers, they almost all started before they were 15, most before they were 10. Almost all contributors to Debian are the same way. The vast majority DON'T talk about it, it's assumed.

It's pretty damned rare for somebody to learn late in life (after 18). That's the hard ugly truth of the matter.

Yeah, programming languages, of course what other kind of languages are there?

It's always tricky to understand the intersection between legitimate use, promotion via social media of interesting stuff, and abuse.

Eventually you could go down the path of wikipedia, which has only 4000 active contributors left and dropping. They protected against spam, but lost the broader community. The walls were built too high.

It's not quite accurate. As far as i know, two of the people listed as having left haven't (yet) and others who did leave aren't listed.

https://twitter.com/jkalucki/status/104452365515628544

Of folks who were there at 2007, about one to two years in to twitter's life, there is still @jkalucki, @alissa, @robey, @stevej, and @jack of course.

The truth is that for the most part there were people hired in above the original employees and they were able to keep doing tech roles. Most didn't move in to senior management. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

So perhaps it was me, and other folks not noticing. It didn't hit the tech blogs much. The links are great, i added an update at the bottom with them.

Yeah, i wanted to talk about race and class, looking at who uses them. I find it ironic that folks were calling me racist (i think they meant classist). I in fact chose the nick, rabble, in part because i identify with the unwashed masses. It's been all over the UK news that the rioters using their blackberries were the rabble. :-)

Perhaps people are calling me racist because of the mad men clip. The biz execs in that clip are racist. That's not to imply that today the execs at RIM are racist. I don't know them, couldn't tell you either way. The whole transition for blackberries is about class, not race anyway.

I'm in Colombia this week to give a talk, and I was asking people about their phones. Turns out that if you've got lots of money to spend on your phone, you get an iPhone, if you've got some money, you get an android, and if you're poor or working class you get a blackberry.

It's fascinating that blackberry has moved from the phone of business, to the phone of the poor and youth.

I'm not sure it translates. I've got a place, listed on AirBnB which is almost always available for rent. It's a vacation home. http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/59577

We've had 458 page views and made $262. Hardly astonishing. We do rent it locally through a property manager, they get much fewer page views, but have repeat clients and make us $5k to $10k per year. At least in South America, AirBnb might as well not exist at all. Nobody uses it to rent.

I hadn't noticed the one before. It's tricky the way products and blog posts get mixed together in HN. The former should have a longer lifetime of being interesting. Also i assumed that it hadn't been posted because HN didn't kick it back. I guess it didn't notice that the www and non www versions were the same thing. It would have been nice to notice that.

Yep, but piepdx has been submitted, this page is specifically to apply for this funding cycle. They extended the deadline because google jumped on board with their backing.

Betable got the UK license and runs everything through UK servers. Getting a license to do this legally cost a bundle. That's why there's the rev split as it is.

Thank god Uruguay's not Argentina. This article is why i've refused to open up an office on the other side of the river. Argentina's an amazing country where just about every institution in society is in some sort chaotic collapse.

There's another part of the story which is left out. Only women get the code. At first it wasn't this way, but eventually they discovered that by only giving the code to women, it kept the space much safer for everybody. Of course some women do share it with me, and they know the code, but there are many codes, and if one is abused, you're code gets reset. If you share your code with the wrong person, it might get reset. So you have to be careful about who you share it with. Once you're locked out, you've got to ask around to get a new code.

I've only been to the famous hot tub once, i didn't get the code, but it was really nice. There's a lot to be learned in online communities about how to manage things from the famous hot tub.

It seems that this rule only applies on B2C sales. You only need to figure out what to do if your end use is a consumer, not a company.

There's a ton written about running a startup, but there is amazingly little written about doing a professional services design / development firm. Anybody know of good sources for running a good services firm?

I think it's useful to see and read this story. It goes in to how tough a real pivot can be. Twitter grew out of Odeo, but the process by which it happened was a complicated mess. I'm glad that Noah Glass is finally getting included in the story.

So if we edited late, and got a rejection letter, then we were reviewed and rejected. This is only for folks who did NOT get a rejection letter, right?

It's this year's letter, presumably it's the same as they've used in the past.

For some context, folks on twitter are trying to figure it out.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=flipzagging

What the hell is a bear doing in Yahoo's Offices?

Isn't Quora itself Answers for Entrepreneurs? How can anything but Quora itself be Quora for Entrepreneurs?

Do you want to be doing this? If so, don't sell. If you're happy somebody else doing what ever they want with it and don't want do deal with it? Don't sell.

I think there are only three people left of the founding team who are employees, @biz, @crystal (support), and @jeremy (ops). The oldest dev is @bs, but very early on, but wasn't around when twitter was created.

Twitter's not the company it was 5 years ago. People move on. It's ok.

Once you're lucky, twice you're good. The thing is, Ev did it a LOT more than twice. He started companies and products over and over and over again. Two of them became widely used. One, Twitter, even managed to make money. He was in a good place, at a good time, joined and supported projects that showed promise.

Ev was originally an angel investor in Odeo, then he decided to join and work on it after we'd been at it for about three months. When Apple crushed us with itunes podcasting integration, he and the rest of us were tinkering with ideas. Jack had a good one, and Ev was able to create the space for that idea to grow in to twitter. Is it luck that Ev invested in his neighbor, Noah Glass's startup Odeo? Is it luck that Jack decided to do twitter has his hackday project instead? His previous project was a universal js wrapper to play audio on the web sans flash.

What Ev is really good at is seeing, oh this seems interesting, let's tinker with it and help it grow. He places himself among interesting things and then supports them. He's right for not taking credit, he participated and helped, he was vital, but he wasn't the CREATOR.

So i'm assuming this is the YC company in this batch that didn't present in Demo Day?

Yeah i know a lot of people rant about monkey patching. It's one of those things the community does but doesn't want to promote. Monkey Patching is the recreational drug of the Ruby Community.

I've thought of doing something like this for years, you could do job references, former landlords for rent, etc... the list goes on and on. I just couldn't bring myself to build it because of that tiny thing with not being ethical.

I'm pretty sure Heroku doesn't want autoscale. I know it's been proposed many times, i asked myself many times. They think it encourages people to write bad code which isn't optimized.

I tried a ton of things and settled on xero.com it works well. It also has a ton of documentation which explains both how and why. Reading the docs and using the app, teaches you accounting. Pretty neat trick.

If you're not based in the US, then no US based accounting tool will work for you. The americans don't get VAT or multicurrency accounting. Since it's not there from the start, it gets added eventually as a clunky after thought. US companies also very heavily on Yodlee, if your bank isn't in there, you're out of luck. With xero we wrote our own bridge to the bank because they provided an api.

I've got no association with xero, other than being a customer.

Has anybody posted a 'YC Demo Day Pitch Deck' online on slideshare or elsewhere? I know most won't want to post it, half the companies didn't even want their product talked about publically. Some must have raised money and gone on far enough that they're welcome to share. Perhaps a class or two ago?