railsjedi

Yep, we'll change the name (our first batch of startups will get to pick the real one) . NCombinator is just a working title.

I'd love to have tuesday dinner meetups in several cities simultaneously. Would you be interested in organizing one in the valley as well?

oops, sorry. my comment was poorly worded. I just meant that our goal is to benefit the community and not just a few particular individuals. In other words Ncombinator is nonprofit.

It's ok we won't be dicks about it :) it's just there to keep people motivated. Teams that are dysfunctional / aren't producing should know it and bow out voluntarily.

Totally agree. Thats why every week the teams that don't ship will get filtered out. At the end only the best will remain.

Low barrier to entry, but high barriers for completion is our theory. We'll see how it works in practice and adjust.

Agreed on the name. What bubble are we riding? We're trying to bring something that works (a small but passionate community of startups) to a larger audience.

It also takes no equity and benefits no one except the participants.

Cheer up man! Enjoy the good times while they last :)

The N stands for "Nice"

We were going for the "so bad it's good" thing ;)

Yep, we know :). It's a "working title" (tongue in cheek)

Simple honest answer, its a beachhead. Techies are natural early adopters so it makes sense to start small with them. Trust me, our ambitions are far greater :)

Yeah, good call. We figured we didnt want to confuse users on the "how" while we were trying to pitch them on the "what".

We'll add a "how do we work" link that brings up this information directly on the landing page.

Well, the one thing Silicon Valley does best is solve its own problems :)

Agreed. That's one reason why we added the email forward (so you just have to forward the specific bills). But it's a bit manual (though you only ever have to forward once, we calculate the monthly date for all the other bills for each service).

Also, we got a great suggestion from someone else about setting up inboxes for everyone so you can just sign up with services with [yourname]@saasly.com and then we just look at your bills instead of all your email.

Yep, inbox mining (via gmail oauth) is our first dev priority. I agree it's gotta be automatic for it really to be useful. Thanks for the feedback!

This looks like their YouTube license. I think they need to amend it specifically for Google Drive.

I seriously doubt this is anything more than a stupid omission on their part. They'll fix it and won't be doing anything notorious with your data.

Though Google.. I'd appreciate if you didn't "publicly perform" my google docs. kthx

Awesome, thanks for the heads up. I'll definitely be trying DotCloud very soon. Glad you guys were able to really focus on the small details as its easy to glance over when trying to launch a product.

Most deployment allows for the site spin up independently before switching the load balance to it to provide a seamless experience.

Even a very simple Rails sample app will often take over a minute to spin up on heroku. I don't think it's smart to completely focus on server startup time when the real fix is available on most other deployment environments.

That said, I still like Heroku and can deal with this for a while until they fix it :)

Tried this, it's not really possible because Heroku deploys restart the server and make the site inaccessible for a few minutes (and often errors out requests).

Hoping Heroku will fix what I consider a major bug. Until then, I've resigned to having to redeploy to heroku in the middle of the night to avoid customers getting pissed.

Any luck with Chrome Frame? I've pushed that fairly successfully at previous clients. FUD aside (from MS mainly), it's really a great solution I think for anyone forced to deal with legacy IE6 installs.

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

Actually, maybe there's a much easier solution: Integrate Sparrow iphone app directly with Boxcar notification. Plug my boxcar account in and they can handle the rest.

Would love to see a writeup on how to set up boxcar for as a replacement. Maybe Sparrow should implement their push notifications by just integrating with Boxcar and making it idiot proof.

Sparrow seems to be going down the wrong path. They say they don't have server side expertise so they are promoting a solution that the iPhone clearly isn't meant for.

Simple solution, hire someone who understands secure backend infrastructure, wire up the push notifications, and charge a small monthly fee for the service. If they could convert a small percentage of their user base, they'd make their investment back and more.

Sparrow on iPhone is amazing. Takes an app like this to really show how old and crusty the default mail app has become for power users.

I really hope this trend continues and we can see power user replacements for Safari and Calendar as well.

Easy solution, registration for the first 2 weeks should only be through a rest api call (whose required params change every day)

Should weed out the cruft

I put together a quick and dirty bookmarklet: https://gist.github.com/2001302

Click it to quickly wrap any site in responsive.is.

They're both useful. I prefer the single site at a time when doing development since I'd rather focus in one layout at a time to optimize it.

Pretty awesome. It even works with port numbers, but only if you use it directly in the URL (entering :3000 into the top right address bar doesnt work). http://responsive.is/localhost:3000

A bookmarklet would be great too

Thanks for the heads up. I've searched far and wide to find any sort of docs for the built in debugger. ruby-debug was incredibly easy to use. require 'debug' sets a breakpoint, but I cant figure out any way to interact with it.

I use pry, however I've found it's very unreliable for stepping into shoulda tests, and often it errors out. I haven't been able to find stable alternatives to the most common ruby-debug commands 'l', 'e', 'n' and 'c'.

Having to learn the ins and out of bundler `bundle exec, update, --without :darwin`.. just to use a package handler. I had growl_notify installed, and now we've forced our team to be mac only because we got tired of dealing with linux issues.

Ruby Debug is impossible to get working in 1.9.3. The maintainer of ruby-debug has gone AWOL so we're forced to deal with solutions like this http://blog.wyeworks.com/2011/11/1/ruby-1-9-3-and-ruby-debug that don't work within bundler or a team environment.

1.9.2 + Rails 3.x is attrociously slow (30+sec). With falcon (a very unstable ruby hack) the startup speed goes to 10seconds. But 10sec is still way too slow

Sorry, it sounds bad when I just rant. In the grand of scheme of things, Rails makes me more productive as a web dev than I ever thought possible. It's just easy to pull out the daily frustrations and complain. I've been trying to help fix these issues but they are so dependent on a web of gem authors, and core ruby fixes that it takes an extraordinary amount of time.

I'm almost to the point where I think things need to be fixed top down. Matz needs to take control and try to make stuff not suck as soon as possible. Since he's working for Heroku now, it's in his best interest to push the platform and keep new users engaged.

I'm not ready to ditch rails yet, but I think the framework (and Ruby itself) needs an intervention. Bundler, Ruby 1.9.2, 1.9.3, and a ton of gems are all making life harder than it used to be.

I have faith the community is self critical enough to identify these problems and fix them. Posts like this are needed though to give us all a kick in the ass and make things better.