Keios

Hey this one is fun too :)

Paul, If the parts of a program define its succinctness then my hypothesis is that succinctness is efficacy not power. Imagine a useful machine with just one part to understand my chain of thought.

PS: IMO there is a difference in power and efficacy.

You can stretch this line of thought to any though provoking book.

Sure, you can - its takes a little while but it is fairly easy.

From my experience - likelihood of succeeding because you tell people and all the other variations of this are just hoopla.

You will succeed if

1. You have a market

2. You service that market better than most or better

3. You can do what you are doing for years at a length. And then keep doing it some more without even thinking about it.

I don't understand the relevance of your link???

Good book, it should be in everyone's library but it won't help you learn about hacking.

Hi Palish, Thanks for your response. Some more thoughts...

The challenge is that the current system is generic, it allows you to choose any field of work or study and that choice can be postponed. In your school, that choice is made early and that brings with it a risk.

I think your pain was that 'you' felt mentally caged in the current educational system and that 'you' fixed your pain by making a change. What you seem to be doing now is applying a 'mass fix ' by generalizing/abstracting your problem, and while that works in most cases it may need additional fleshing out. Perhaps the fix for each individual might be more effective, perhaps everyone who feels caged needs to apply an individual patch just like you did rather than fix something which isn't broken when they are in 6th grade. Are we fixing before there is a pain?

Hope these thoughts help you develop your idea. Best of luck.

I seem to have only a few questions...

How does a 6th grader know that she wants to be a startup-founder?

Are you attempting to replace an admittedly broken schooling system with another one?

Are you attempting to increase creative space? If so, can creativity be decoupled from freedom? Are you going to force them to be creative?

Finally, at a risk of sounding a tad off. What good will this do anyone? What pain are you fixing? Is there a pain big enough? Why hasn't it fixed itself yet?

Ah! technical dialogue! Now where did you see that here? ;P

Paul, Regarding your first point:

This title could use editing if any title needs editing - "Fuck Facebook Conversion: Be platform agnostic and use your own APIs. " I appreciate that the title of the blog entry is such, but then the site doesn't look clean with this title. I must also say, I think this aspect of the new changes might be a tad over zealous perhaps even anti-septic.

Regarding your second point - Titles are made to tempt people to click and most times the original blogger or author might use such a ploy.We might use the original authors title and he may be doing the spinning. How far down the line can you edit? Again the "Fuck Facebook" title is a case in point.

I urge you to reconsider the editing. Thoughts?

The point of Pareto's rule is not so much that the numbers must be 80 and 20. The essence of what Pareto proved is that the few(causes) are responsible for the many(effects). So Pareto's principle is very much at work in Flickr.

The currency markets work 24 hours. Yahoo plots the intra day voltality but the graph that yahoo shows in that link does not chart all 24 hours and that is why you see a break which causes it to look like steps. The steps are going down because the currency seems to be on a downward trend.

Dean, I agree with your on the un-equal votes and I can appreciate your point about losing startup related content. But I think that it may not come to pass. Only time will tell... :)

Thanks

Dean,

1. This site hasn't stopped being about startups.

2. Lots of people are bored with just reading about startups. Because beyond a point you need new material to spark interesting thoughts. Like many others here I am an entrepreneur for over 3 years and am now working on a web startup idea myself. I find stories such as #3, #5 and #6 useful - they contribute directly to my goals. Remember what stays on top is still decided by the people. And we won't go down the 'digg' path unless the audience that submits and votes changes - which is a problem I am certain PG is aware of and he has made references to some solutions that he is trying to put in place for keeping the stories interesting.

3. I have found that I find stories that PG submits interesting. As long as that is true he is a good measure for the typical audience.

4. Finally between stimulus and response I have freedom of choice. I will up vote only stories I like and I think that might be a great way to participate in the content.

Thoughts??

I think short also because it can take a life time to master this subject and the author probably feels that there is much more to discuss than he has covered.

Can you put a page views number in front of each submission?

Glad you expanded, now I can read some more interesting stuff...

I would recommend PostGreSQL and you probably won't need to switch to Oracle if you use PostGres properly. Importantly its free and has a usable and friendlier license than MySQL.

I am working on a startup idea which will also have high traffic and I am personally using Schevo - which is a non-sql Object DBMS for python based on Durus. I like Schevo because SQL sucks and using Schevo is like you a programming language - in this case its Python. You can check out the Schevo project at www.schevo.org. This would work for you only if you are using Python (highly recommend). Schevo does not have very good documentation yet, but it has excellent support on the IRC and Google Groups from its creators - at least I have found them to give complete and quick responses.Hope this helps.

I use Python-Pylons/JS and Schevo for the backend. I have some experience with Django. Pylons is much better for serious programming - Django is better if you want to make a run of th e mill app like a blog. Using Pylons is like working with Lego bricks - stuff is swappable easily - not so with Django.

I totally agree. This also effects people who are in different timezones.

I understand. I hope news.yc doesn't become an overly serious place though.

PS: As an after-thought, social pressure may be more adaptable than software.

Why don't you publish the top 3 or 5 folks who up vote and down vote the most, maybe as an additional section on the leaders page. It might effect behavior interestingly.

I think the Facebook valuation is a bit much at $4.5 to $7 billion.

My reasons:

+Web startups should not be valued over 10 yrs, this is demonstrably much longer than most significant startups last Also consumers in the web world have short attention spans.

+Esitmated Prime page views aren't validated

+Prime CPM growth rate increases 400+% over 10 years, which even after adjusting for inflation seems to be a strech.

I think facebook will lose value over the coming year. If they wish to sell, they must do it soon. This is because the industries understanding of the valuations for acquisitions such as DoubleClick will correct. The multiples are too high.

I am in a similar situation. Moonlighting too, but that should end shortly as I leave my current company for working on the startup full-time. Surprisingly I am doing the 'don't break the chain' thing too. I seem to be getting about 20-30 hours on my project.

I think that there is a very strong emotional bond involved when programmers create a product that they think is the best. This is because they have both the craft and the vision - these are critical components for success.

Rokhyakebe in your suggested model marketers will have the vision and not the craft and programmers will have the craft and not the vision.

Job A if your want to improve your creativity.

Job B if you want to encourage your technique.

To improve my programming I generally do things that I can't figure out how to do in my head.

Not just the backup.Maybe you can strech it by allowing a user to upload her address book to the site. Then the site automatically links everyone on your phone book to each others profiles and if anyone changes a phone number it has a cascading effect on everyone who is linked with them - this way phones numbers stay current easily. Also, you could offer functionality to send business cards to each other.And maybe even backup text messages. A social network for phones.

Winter 2008 or summer 2009 is too far out. Work expands to fill time after all. If you aim for Summer 2008 you might be able to do this better.