tworats

Some details (perhaps a writeup) on this would be appreciated, I'd love to learn more.

Hackathons are the opposite of "how marketing people think software is made". They are the essence of the process of development with the decoration removed.

Dave must not have been to a good hackathon. I've personally been involved in hackatons where we created what went on to become a commercial product in under a day. The code written during the hackathon may not have been part of the final product, but the creation of the product (what it is, what it does, even much of how it looks) was the result of the hackathon.

I have the diametrically opposite view of Dave in this case - hackathons are exactly the tool needed to obviate the need for months of wrangling with "marketing people". Instead you can go directly to a tangible product that can be touched, tested, and discussed in a meaningful instead of abstract way.

The issue is that the Privacy Policy is (or certainly can be viewed as) a legal document. Therefore I'm strongly inclined to believe you're better off with a lawyer approved document.

I'd love to have our privacy policy be "we will not do anything remotely creepy with your data" (in fact maybe we'll add that to our current document), but that is so ambiguous I think users will not be satisfied, and lawyers will have a field day.

For a very early stage startup caring about privacy does not immediately translate to displaying a privacy policy.

For us it was a day 1 decision: we will not do anything remotely creepy with your data. We will guard what you give us carefully and collect only what we need to operate our service.

This is a fundamental and important part of our ethos.

Still, it took us more than 6 months to get an externally visible privacy policy in place, because lawyers are expensive and not displaying a policy did not kill us.

As a bit of background, Joe was founder of SimpleGeo, which raised $9.81M and was sold for $3.5M (according to TechCrunch). They were doing great stuff, but I kept wondering how they were going to generate enough value to justify a $10M raise quickly enough to satisfy the VCs...

Are there any good guides on how to combat a DDOS? I'm curious how a team of good technical people without past experience in the area could react.

Looks interesting, would be great to see screenshots/video of the actual product.

While it's fun to point out downtime of hosted services, you have to balance it against downtime you'd have had if you hosted the service yourself. I've found non-critical services I administer and host myself always suffer worse downtime than those I outsource to a service.

Very interesting. I wonder if it allows interaction with existing Android libraries / capabilities (eg. for building UIs) or if it's separate.

Also, would be great if there was a sample app to download and try so one can get a sense of what the final product looks / feels like.

I was rooting for HTML5 / jQuery mobile approach to work, but watching it develop (I know clemesha) it became clear that it wasn't going be a very good result.

The native app, by comparison, is clearly significantly superior. I wish it wasn't so, but it is.

For games at least, I'm convinced native is the way to go.

Alex, congrats, the game turned out beautifully.

Interesting twitter thread on this between @davemclure, @pkedrosky, @msuster, and others, part of which is here:

http://twitter.com/#!/pkedrosky/status/124323109032574976

(how do you capture a series of related tweets, btw?)

Summary seems to be: the cash crunch is not happening (yet). McClure calls it "poor reporting".

Looks like TechCrunch has captured a bunch of the related tweets: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/12/web-start-ups-hit-cash-crun...

It's important to note that the VC is not objecting to the founders taking cash off the table. He's objecting to the method (dividends as opposed to a secondary sale). His arguments are convincing to me - and I'm a founder so my bias is naturally for the founders.

The WhatsApp guys are very sharp ex-Yahoo guys who've had tremendous experience with scaling systems. Rick Reed is fairly legendary. Yahoo was a long time FreeBSD shop, so it's not surprising they went with that.

I hope they publish how they did it - in fact let me drop them an email and see if I can convince them to do so.

Well, that sucked. Go through the whole process then ask for an email address? Waste of time.

The author misses the goal of A/B testing: it's to improve a measurable business objective (signups, retention, etc), not to pick a more aesthetic design.

A/B testing may tell you to pick a "worse" design that results in better business. That's perfectly ok. There are plenty of design showcases one can browse for purely aesthetic appreciation of design.

I felt absolutely the same way, but once we started using redis (for other reasons) I finally took the plunge.

We've been quite happy with it so far. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you buy into the way it does things suddenly a lot of code you thought you had to write disappears. I was just looking at our async code and really was surprised at how short it is.

So far I recommend it heartily.

Epipheo does good stuff, but they are a bit pricey: http://www.epipheostudios.com/

Whereabouts in SoCal are you moving to? If you're in San Diego let me know and I'll get you connected with folks.

SD Tech Scene has a pretty list, and Brant Cooper has a San Diego Startup list email that goes out on Mondays.

http://www.sdtechscene.org/

San Diego has an active and growing community, and there's been a lot of growth in events, meetups, and venues recently. Even the funding community is starting to get its act together.

Would love to learn more about the SMPP server and your setup, is there a writeup or pointers to more info anywhere?

It is awesome that Khan Academy has attracted so much top talent. Has the potential to make a real difference in world education and thus in human potential. Goes to show how much effect a relatively small investment can make when joined with amazing, driven, talented people.

Absolutely, but I don't want that setting for all sites.

I'm sure I could configure just HN to open in new tabs using an extension or similar technique, but I'm guessing everyone always uses new window/tab with HN, hence the suggestion.

How were you able to bootstrap for 3 years? Were you consulting on the side?

For me college was tremendously fun. I learned a great deal, formed life-long friendships, and generally had the best time of my life.

You won't get that at a job.

You'll spend most of the rest of your life at a job. Take a few years to experience something different.

Besides, you've demonstrated you're smart and capable, so you'll have plenty of bigger, better opportunities come your way.

Go to school. Enjoy life. Talk one of the firms into giving you a part time job instead of full time. You'll get the best of both worlds.

Awesome, very glad to see Simon's project take off.

The first two applications that come to mind are automated testing and screen scraping, I'm a little surprised they didn't include examples of those. Looks interesting though.

Could you provide mode details on this, either in the comments here or in a blog post? I almost went with Selenium but ended up with a custom system to drive Firefox, would love to learn more about what the Selenium based solution looks like.

If this turns out to be true Samsung just lost a customer for life. This is just plain stupid, short sighted thinking.

Programmer comes home late with lipstick on his collar and face, smelling of perfume.

Wife is glaring at him.

"Honey, I have to tell you the truth" he says. "You remember Judy from accounting? We ended up talking, getting close, one thing led to another, and I ended up sleeping with her. I'm so sorry".

Wife glares at him some more.

"I don't believe you for a second, you lying son of a bitch. You stayed late programming again, didn't you?"