dongle

How is it that the word 'hubris' failed to appear in any of the 177 comments?

Put a counter on it so I have a reminder to complete challenges each day. I like this low-friction making as encouraging an attitudinal shift.

Who's going to write 'Privilege 101' for HN?

touches nose

[don't make me do it, 'cause I'll do it if you make me.]

This is one of the best bits of tutorial writing on the internet. It almost never sacrifices correctness for didactic purposes, and when it does, it lets the reader know. I find it astounding that many other tutorials walk the reader through bad practices for the sake of simplifying the explanation.

Neat. Maybe I'll write a script to scrape my Google calendar and automatically send birthday cards. Can see companies using this to send a personal note to their best customers.

I also sent a card to my mom. Next I'm going to send a card to some people who hosted me while I visited Canada. The difference between this and postcards (and postagrams) is that I can remember to use sendwrite.

Feature request: scheduled emails to remind me to send a card to a person. I can simply reply to the email to send the card. I'd definitely send monthly cards to various members of my family, or a long-distance sweetie, or what have you.

Transmedia reification.

Yeah, it's useful for both checking revisions of a contract and for comparing an initial contract vs a 'standard' template contract to see the initial pressure points.

This is great. And there are obvious paths to export games for mobile devices so this could be the best cross-platform development environment for 2D games.

The hardest and most time consuming part of game development is iteration and livecoding makes that so much easier.

It's cool that Netflix pulled that off, but it seems like a company (like Dotcloud) that could prevent you from building infrastructure on top of infrastructure would be a boon.

Again, you're totally allowed to sell your company for $20 million dollars (or less) when the offer comes. If you're thinking about exits at all at the SEED FUNDING STAGE of your company, that offer is never going to come.

Dude, it was in all caps for comedic effect. It's the most melodramatic WOO MONEY AND STARTUPS phrase in my article. Was that an Earthbound reference? I'll give you some points for that, at least.

The rest of your comment is rehashing things that have already been discussed above.

And you're right that it was a little absurd for me to wind up in Silicon Valley doing a startup. I'd be glad to write a follow-up post about how that all happened.

Your comment: "All I want to do is solve a real problem for some segment of a large market and make their lives a little easier."

My article: "That drive to make a part of the consumer world better is the mark of the entrepreneur."

I'm not saying everyone needs to cure AIDS. I think our sentences seen side by side align quite nicely.

You're right – I used colorful, imprecise language. Yes, you should try to make your company profitable. I'm speaking in the context of exits.

Hey I think we've met IRL in an apartment on McKinley Ave. You know where I live and that it is not glamorous. I kind of hoped the text on the sidebar wherein I'm begging for money would contextualize the post appropriately.

Bingo. If you go in looking for an exit, you're going to fall on your face.

I'm not at all against starting lifestyle businesses; those also do not have exits.

I'm broke and my company is not growing. I believe that a large contributing factor to the failure of my company was that we went in to it with an exit in mind instead of a love for our product.

Would we have sold our company for $20 mil? Hell yes. But we went in to Y Combinator excited about an exit and we stunted the growth of our company by shooting for dollars instead of stars.

The site looks fantastic, and those are all A+ companies to apply to. I especially like that their roadmap involves developing intelligent ways to search for new jobs (like by languages in use – why has it taken this long for such an obvious filter?).

I was one of the beta-testers of the WakeMate, so it's been a part of my life for about a month now. Prior to using the WakeMate, I had two choices regarding sleep: establishing a strict routine by retiring at midnight every night and waking up at 7:30 on the dot, or keeping other hours and feeling groggy all day regardless of the total amount of sleep. Since I have friends and an unpredictable work schedule, I've never been able to stick to fixed sleeping patterns for a prolonged period of time. With the WakeMate I still need about 7 hours of sleep each night, however, I can take those 7 hours whenever it is convenient for me, and wake up feeling about as great as I ever feel in the morning.

The WakeMate costs as much as a week of coffee from a café – try it out.

This is cool – there were two back-to-back one hour lectures on application states at WWDC. Absorbing this graphic is obviously faster and easier.

TL;DR

Microsoft needs to stop assuming that people care enough to read paragraphs of marketing-speak. It's ludicrous that it took them 1500 words to say that they're a faster version of Flash and that they're not stepping on HTML5's toes.

Ignoring Paul Graham is a bad idea because PG is extremely sharp, reasonable, and has a keen grasp of where his expertise lies. If he says something I disagree with, I'll happily engage in a discussion until we've laid out all our facts and ideas and found an optimal path. Provided a reasonable argument, PG will readily take your word. If you can't provide a reasonable argument to contradict PG, well, that's a good sign that you at least need to think about the problem some more.

I co-founded a games studio. Paul doesn't have experience in the games space. The "worst" outcome of a meeting with PG has been that he's given me an important new perspective, even if he isn't able to come up with specific prescriptive advice. His ideas and perspectives are hugely valuable. Not once has he stepped on our toes.

The key here is that startups receive tons of conflicting advice from all angles and discovering how to process this advice is crucial. Paul trusts that founders can decide for themselves whether his advice is, at face-value, good.

Word on the street is that Jessica wrote a good book one time …

Welcome to twitter!

Before we joined Y Combinator, my co-founder and I had plans to build a Panic-style status board. Then we realized that status boards were not our core competency and we dropped the board completely to focus on our primary task at hand. I love that I can pay Leftronic for a fully customizable, fantastic-looking board – this way we can make our product and track it, too!

BTW, I've seen one of these boards in person and they're really slick. I can think of a hundred ways these could be hugely motivating (have a dial tick down based on bug-counts, have a meter showing avg user engagement, etc).

I love this app. I can't wait to use it during the trailers at a movie, or in between bands at a show.

We had a mixed-gender development team and tested extensively at parties. People like to pass the game around and show it off, and it's not so intense that you can't talk while playing it. And even if you don't use PongVaders as an intro, it provides a shared context which makes meeting new people easier.

I'm going to have to disagree. Its accessibility via the muni and the bart, combined with the proximity to the hard-drug areas of town means that there are a number of quick and dirty smash-n-grab robberies of transient ne'er-do-wells. Admittedly I'm biased because I experienced a single one of those datapoints first-hand.

Wow, this is excellent. I'm looking at moving to San Francisco later this year and this is such important information. I knew that places like the Tenderloin were dangerous, but there's an unexpected hotspot in the middle of the Mission that I know to avoid now. Thanks.