rdudekul

Here is OP's TekpubTV video on RethinkDB (2 years old): https://vimeo.com/60697270

Thanks for sharing. I found http://hookrace.net/blog/what-is-special-about-nim/ enlightening as well.

This one looks reasonably good to me. What in your opinion is full featured News.YC friendly bookmarklet?

@ruchir said it beautifully. Lets say you want to use meditation to improve your ability to market things better. What may end up happening is that, with better clarity and focus you may have gained from meditation, you will not only understand the true needs of your potential customers, but also the limitations of your product/solution. In the end you will feel compelled to do the right thing for your customers, instead of exploiting their ignorance.

Pursuing Meditation as a way to make more money or increase business productivity/bottomline, is too narrow and simplistic. Daily meditation (specifically Passage Meditation http://www.easwaran.org/) practice has changed my life's priorities dramatically.

At the risk of sounding a little too touchy-feely, Meditation helps you:

a) Be more compassionate and choose what is right, instead of what brings more material wealth.

b) Bring more clarity and focus to what you are doing.

c) Understand yourself and others better, forgive yourself and others easily, love yourself and others unconditionally.

IMHO the post "Screw motivation, what you need is discipline", hits the nail on the head. For many years I too thought that I need to first figure out what I love, then what is valuable to the world etc. etc.

However when I started using Pomodoro technique (http://caps.ucsd.edu/Downloads/tx_forms/koch/pomodoro_handou...) to simply complete daily tasks, I discovered that process is more important than product. When I changed my focus from goal or product orientation to simply discipline/process orientation, I started achieving more.

Somehow there is an emotional weight to thinking about results. To push this burden off, I felt I needed motivation. Ironically I started seeing much better results, when I aligned myself to disciplined execution with a certain detachment to results. Eventually I started hitting most of my objectives, even freeing my time off to do things outside of my work related goals.

Here is the philosophy behind React Native: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVZ-P-ZI6W4#t=1725

"Learn once, write anywhere."

Many times I visit Amazon to buy a single book, but end up purchasing more. Though some books I bought on Amazon helped me a great deal, most simply languished in my bookshelf. After Kindle books appeared my temptation to buy books that looked good increased even more.

I will implement the suggestion given in the article, to restrain myself from using the Buy Now button and wait for a day or two, before deciding to buy anything.

Product CEOs are intimately familiar with their products including design decisions, code quality etc. This creates an attachment to get a little too involved in implementation details even as the company is growing beyond say 100 people. One way to get a bit detached is to be deeply involved in hiring people and coaching technical leadership. By thinking at a meta-level it is not hard to arrive at some process that can be documented that teams can self-manage well enough for product CEO to let go.

OP is the author of "Smart Customers, Stupid Companies: Why Only Intelligent Firms Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them" has some good free ebooks to download at http://kasanoff.com/free-stuff/

Interview with Bob Metcalfe, worth watching (11 mins.):

http://standards.ieee.org/events/ethernet/index.html

"I recently read Functional JavaScript and can’t physically recommend it enough".

I believe this is a must read book for all advanced JavaScript developers. Michael Fogus uses UnderScore.js library by Jeremy Ashkenas, to teach functional programming using JavaScript. It changed my perspective on how to create reusable javascript functions that are easy to maintain.

Try this one: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-26/barnaby-jack-comput...

I am subscriber to both PeepCode and PluralSight. The high quality of PeepCode's screencasts is something that PluralSight can make use of. Though PluralSight primarily catered to Microsoft developers they seem to be of late focused on creating quality content for open source developers as well. I believe this is a win-win for PluralSight and developers.

Your points do ring true.

Here are a few more mistakes founders make:

1. Resistant to talk to target market

2. Focused on adding more/better features

3. Involved in pleasing one or two early customers

4. Taking nay sayers seriously

5. Losing steam at later stages when growth does not happen as planned

Good pros and cons of Go language. There is some information around why Go and not say C++/Java/Ruby etc. The statement "I see Rails as the emperor with no clothes on" seems to be made in haste, since Rails is awesome for basic forms based apps.

Why is "Try RethinkDB now" button NOT working?

How things get done? Through a combination of focus and personal connections. Focus at YC is “write code and talk to users”.

Here is the Charlie Rose interviews Paul Graham, YCombinator video:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/14928956

The talk is very interesting, since it shows how functional languages can be used for creating traditional enterprise apps. There is a gap in OO developers minds in terms of adopting functional programming (FP) and how to organize larger projects. Amit Rathore, author of the book The Joy of Clojure, does a great job in presenting a simple way of applying DDD principles to FP and thinking about organizing FP code that scales team productivity.

"Political parties fared worse in the United States, where the 1,000 respondents surveyed gave them a corruption score of 4.1 out of 5".

That seems surprising to me considering there is little 'apparent' corruption exposed to common man in the US versus most 3rd world countries.

Awesome analysis!

Questions applicable to every hard working startup:

  + Do we solve a real problem?

  + Do we have customers who find our solution useful?

  + Can we make enough money to make our solution a sustainable business?

Questions for the execution team:

  + Will we know when and how people hear about our solution?

  + Will we be able to understand if and how they use our solution?

  + Can we change things quickly enough to improve our solution (based on learning)?

  + Can we measure the quality (usage) of our changes?

  + Can we reduce amount of work and test for need earlier (think MVP)?

This is scary stuff!

I am flabbergasted to know that Palantir along with Sean Parker and Peter Theil are involved. I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now. If Palantir is getting investments/revenues from government, I wonder if Facebook too is getting some.

Though continuous design makes sense on paper, I am skeptical about the practicality of it. It was a big jump for developers to move to TDD & continuous delivery practices. I think unless a set of designer friendly tools and practices emerge, NoPSD requires a bigger cognitive "jump".

I for one am rooting this movement goes forward, since I like most did suffer the PSD to HTML cycle overhead.

Great way of learning languages, at least at a high level in minutes. The X now includes C, PHP, Python as well, as of June 28 2013.

Interesting answer, potentially suggesting the people of the US are the enemy of the US government, simply because government wants to protect some corrupt corporations.

Awesome article that goes into great detail as to the specifics or assumptions behind the statement "eval() is evil".

"Using a dual-license model, with commercial licensing supporting the development of both community and enterprise versions. It’s a model that companies such as Redhat and MySQL used very effectively in building billion dollar businesses and enterprise grade products."

The statement seems true for infrastructure oriented open source projects (MongoDB etc.). For software applications that business users use, does a dual-license model hold true? I personally doubt it.

Thank you. Can you elaborate your statement "you can learn NeDB using MongoDB's REPL"? Specifically steps to use MongoDB REPL connected to NeDB.

Great idea and project. Questions: a) Is the database loosely coupled to query language implementation? b) In my biased opinion RethinkDB has a much better query language. Is there a way to implement RethinkDB's query semantics and how much work is involved? c) Underscore.js has a ton of collection manipulation functions. How easy is it to use it from within NeDB? d) How easy/difficult is it to run NeDB as a lightweight RESTful server, in its own Node process?

These screencasts by John Lindquist, available for many months with new ones appearing frequently, are awesome. The youtube channel is http://www.youtube.com/user/johnlindquist.

John provides very quick yet potent explanations of most features in AngularJS. All those videos can be played at 1.5X speed using YouTube's HTML5 mode. Takes roughly 2 hours to complete them.