thomaspaine

If you're looking for a bespoke tailor in SF that does this, visit Spoon Tailor in Chinatown. Hong Kong tailors are some of the best in the world, and I believe suits start at $700+ depending on fabric.

This strategy doesn't work so great with things like dry cleaners, tailors, and dentists. Yelp has the potential to be incredibly valuable with these types of services but I've been finding that the recommendations and reviews are close to useless.

I think you may have misread that part, she includes people who graduated in less than 6 years.

> The chart below shows the percentage of beginning undergraduate students who, six years later, had accumulated more than the indicated levels of debt.

I use unmanaged dedicated servers with Serverbeach, but I assume SoftLayer has similar tools. If I totally screw up my server there are tools to boot in rescue mode or just wipe the machine and do a clean OS install.

For testing out puppet processes I use Vagrant with VirtualBox on my local machine.

I've never actually applied for a job at Google, but going to 7 interviews (or however many it is now) seems like a lot more work than what they're asking for. I'd rather spend 30 minutes writing code than 7 hours on interviews, and either way you're going to have to answer technical questions at some point in the process.

Also, if you can't be bothered to spend 30 minutes proving that you can code, how much do you really want to work there? The only time I've done one of these challenges was for a company that I was really excited about working for.

I liked Waiting for Superman a little better, but The Lottery is also good and touches on very similar themes. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1515935/

King of Kong. Donkey Kong was a little before my time, but the characters are so amazing that it's almost hard to believe it's a documentary.

Cosmos. Because it's Carl Sagan.

I think Sephr is referring to the fact that many fonts look absolutely terrible on versions of Windows that don't have font smoothing enabled, namely XP. We almost threw out using custom fonts after we saw what our website looked like in XP.

I wrote up an article not too long ago about how we worked around this, which I feel weird mentioning because I just posted this on another thread like two days ago, but oh well:

http://dev.codio.com/graceful-degradation-for-non-web-standa...

As long as font smoothing is enabled, which I believe vista and 7 do by default now, most of the Typekit fonts look ok. I wrote up a blog post not too long ago about dealing with users that don't support font smoothing:

http://dev.codio.com/graceful-degradation-for-non-web-standa...

What's the best way to test out different pricing plans without pissing off your users? Seems hard to a/b test because if anyone is actually talking about your company, people are going to be confused that the landing page tells them $10 when all their friends and blog posts say $8.

Based on the analytics at a startup I used to work at, photos are a much better driver of user engagement than status updates. I'm guessing the same is true for facebook, and anecdotally, most of the facebook comments I receive are on photos and shared links, not status updates.

Easy to say when you're a guy. I think it'd be pretty weird if the default pronoun for my username was 'she' or 'her'.

I don't know why this is so surprising, 99% of the websites and apps I see don't use SSL for login, even HN doesn't. It's good that this issue is getting more attention, but to specifically call out Instagram for it makes it seem like what they're doing isn't the industry norm.

Looking at the TC comments it seems like a lot of people are confused by the difference between sending your password in cleartext, and storing your password in cleartext, although I wouldn't be surprised if they're storing your tumblr and foursquare credentials in the clear.

It's easy to take Muay Thai classes or watch it and think it's not very technical, especially in the US because Americans are generally not very good at Muay Thai. But going to Thailand and getting your ass kicked and thrown all over the place by a 16 year old thai kid half your size will make you change your mind that it's not a technical sport.

I did taekwondo when I was little and I know some people who still do it. All martial arts are technical once you get into them, but grappling is different from striking in that what you do with your body is very similar to following a decision tree. Eventually these decisions get internalized into your muscle memory, but there's still a high degree of "if he does A, I'll do B, which will leave me open to C and D, which I can counter with E, F, and G, etc". Basically getting better at grappling involves filling out this decision tree.

Striking arts operate at a much faster pace so you really can't do that, the depth of the decision trees are much shorter, which is why I think bjj is more analytical and appropriate for most HNers.

I don't want to get into a flame war, but I personally don't find taekwondo and karate to be particularly realistic to fighting. Everyone has different motivations for training though, if you enjoy the fitness and athleticism of those arts, go for it.

I've been doing brazilian jiu-jitsu for about 5 years, and would highly recommend it to anyone. I know a wide range of people who practice it, from professional fighters to little kids to a guy in his 60s.

I think it fits especially well for the HN crowd, because there's generally very little mystical bs that goes on, and although this analogy gets abused, it's basically human chess. There's a very analytical approach to learning jiu-jitsu as opposed to most striking arts (I also do muay thai and recommend that as well if the idea if touching people grosses you out) which are largely reflexive.

What does alphalab offer over any of the other seed programs/incubators to justify being locked into Pittsburgh for 5 years? I split my time between pittsburgh and the bay area, and while it's a nice town it definitely feels like you're giving up a lot by staying there for 5 years, at least if you're a web startup. The only web development interest group or meetup I could find since moving there was some php group, whereas in the bay I can go to at least one a week.

Some hypotheticals and criticisms I've heard from people outside of YC:

1) There are so many YC startups that the brand has become diluted and it doesn't get you as much PR/street cred as it used to.

2) The YC team is working with so many other startups that they don't have much time to work with your startup.

3) If you're already in a position to raise more money from angels at a better valuation, is the YC rolodex worth the equity you're trading?

Generally everything comes with pros and cons, I don't think you can say that it could never be bad or that there are no downsides. At some extreme point the above must apply, e.g. it probably wouldn't be a good idea for google to apply to YC.

I keep waiting for an article describing a bad experience with Y Combinator. Not that I think there's anything wrong with YC, but I feel like I'm getting a one sided story when all I read are glowing reviews.

Even if you wouldn't classify your experience as bad or not worth it, there's always room for improvement. I'd love to hear some criticism from people within the program so I don't feel like I'm just reading propaganda.

I never understood this argument. Client side javascript and server side javascript aren't really the same at all, it's not like you can re-use your client side javascript on the server. The only benefit I see is that you don't have to context switch between python and javascript, but the only time I can remember this affecting me is when I forget to type semi-colons.

This math is grossly oversimplified...you're assuming zero interest. I'm on a train and can't do the math right now, but compounding interest + other variables like employer 401k contributions, tax shelters, etc make a huge difference when doing this calculation.

I'm moving from SF to Pittsburgh in about a month. What's the best way to get info on local meetups/resources/etc? I'm hoping to meet up with some like minded people and maybe even find a co-founder when I move out there.

I see humor is not your thing...

Palo Alto, CA

Mingle Media is a well funded startup currently looking for backend python/django developers and a strong frontend developer. We're building a vertical ad network on top of some web properties, the first of which is mingle.com.

The team is currently < 10 people, so you'd have a huge impact on what we're building and shaping the early culture of the company. It's also a great place to learn from successful entrepreneurs and play with interesting new technology (Cassandra, gevent, tornado, etc). I'm a developer there, drop me a line at dave@mingle.com if you have questions and I can forward your info upstream.

I'd love to see some evidence for that quote. This assertion paints individualism as a social rather than biological construct, and it's not obvious to me that this is true.

I wish I was better at design. On the other hand there's this wonderful principle called division of labor, and while I might spend 10 hours designing a mediocre website, a good designer will design a great one in half the time. This has actually happened to me. After spending a weekend building out some pages that I thought looked pretty good, my designer friend sent me a photoshop mockup that made me decide to totally scrap what I had made, and go with her design instead.

The most productive I've ever been has been while working in tandem with a good designer, because it frees me up to do what I do best, and that's write code.

Now, I will say that it's important for any web developer to understand principles of design, because understanding what your users actually want is crucial for both backend and frontend work, thinking about user interaction, your data model, etc.

A lot of libraries I've seen in universities have mechanized sliding shelves. They have sensors to ensure that if something is in between them, they won't close. Still though, it's easy to imagine someone getting crushed by their bed because a sleepy programmer made an off-by-one error at 4am. Guess I should probably go to bed...

I was talking to a VC the other day about Groupon. According to him, every local business he's talked to that's used Groupon has universally had a bad experience with it. Groupon customers rarely turn into repeat customers, which is the main incentive for a business to use Groupon. This shouldn't be too surprising given that most Groupon customers are probably very price sensitive and in deal hunting mode.

From your description, you qualify for rent control, which means your landlord can only raise you rent at the rate of inflation (with certain exceptions).

From http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html:

San Francisco's rent control law covers most rental property in San Francisco. If you live in San Francisco, you are covered by rent control unless you fall into one of these major exceptions

1. You live in a building constructed after June of 1979. This "new construction exemption" is the biggest exemption in SF

2. You live in subsidized housing, such as HUD housing projects.

3. You live in a dormitory, monastery, nunnery, etc.

4. You live in a residential hotel and have less than 28 days of continuous tenancy.

My current employer found me through LinkedIn. I get messages from recruiters on there every now and then that I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise, so it seems like it was worth the 15 minutes it took me to setup and maintain my account. I'm the bare minimum user too, I have 18 contacts and 0 recommendations.