dosh

Congratulations Anisa!

Hi guys! I'm John, co-founder of SendBird. We've just released a tutorial for building twitch-live video chat app. Let me know your thoughts! :)

Hi guys, I'm one of the co-founders at SendBird. We've been making social games and community apps previously, and have been looking for better ways to build messaging/chat features. So we made something that we could use ourselves repeatedly. Would love to get your feedback and shoot me any questions!

This is exciting. Not sure how they will go from electron-positron creation to protons which needs quarks, but according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_creation

Summary: Matter creation is the conversion of massless particles into one or more massive particles. Since all known massless particles are bosons and the most familiar massive particles are fermions, usually what is considered is the process which converts two bosons (e.g. photons) into two fermions (e.g., an electron–positron pair). This process is known as pair production.

So technically, it is a matter creation.

When RFID came out, investors and media argued that all products will have RFID embedded in just a few years.

Fast forward 10 years, we see RFID applied across logistics industry and some parts of finance/security, but it wasn't cut out for everyone everywhere. In the beginning, people argued that the distribution wasn't happening because RFID wasn't cheap enough, but with the recent production costs nearing cents, now it's evident that it's due to lack of clear use cases.

I do agree that the development of use cases requires more creativity and has a big room for innovation, but saying there's going to be a chip in every physical item sounds similar to "there's going to be Uber for everything."

I don't want to sound pessimistic, but I think as with all startups, you have to start with a clear problem (other than gaming/entertainment startups) and develop a customer value proposition compelling enough for an industry to emerge.

I'd bet more on VR having a broader implication in the next 10-20 years, and expect to see more digital items produced vs physical item ever created in the history of mankind.

It's been a crazy year.

- even smart people will react very differently to same events, mostly because of their context/interest/values.. but most of all, emotions.

- until the money is in the bank. many people will bs you, but you never really know everything until someone actually takes action or commits.

- scalability of an organization depends on its people. the leadership, the hubs(influentials), and the values/culture. the structure comes after.

- never give up. we got accepted to YC on our 2nd try.

agree with blake here. we're also working on a similar product, but we had customer base from the start with actual use cases, which lead to bookings/revenue early on. you have to look at from the customers' perspective to see which problem you are actually solving and how you are creating value/saving cost for their business.

in the age of over-supply, it's definitely never enough to just create technology and expect it to sell automagically. go talk to your existing/potential customers and get their feedback. start with a local optimum product catered to their needs, and generalize towards global optimum from there. even Einstein started with a special relativity and not general relativity. ;)

to offer a realistic advice, unless you have a customer-development cycle in place with a target customer base (who has at least signed a MOU/LOI/Purchase Agreement/etc.), I'd stay frugal until you have something like this, then raise money. and yes, I'd definitely stay away from consulting kind of work if you are serious about your business/product. this is a short-term way of staying afloat, but once you build your company's cycle/rhythm/culture around b2b human-labor business, it's hard to turn that around towards a product-driven business.

We've been making something during our internal hackathon with a similar goal in mind, but perhaps a different approach. Hopefully I can get some feedbacks: http://jiver.co/startup

It's a rough alpha (desktop web-only, mobile support in January).

After reading this and "the everything store," I wonder what Jeff Bezos & Blue Origin (which started in 2000) would feel about Elon's recent endeavors with SpaceX (started in 2002), considering his highly competitive character.

It's hard to grasp what's really happening over there over paragraphs and few photos, but this video delivers the atmosphere in a very effective manner.

Once this goes live, PayPal will sooner or later face stiff competition beyond its current stage under the umbrella of eBay, competing against Chinese players like those of alipay and tenpay which already have users in the hundreds of millions. These players are agressively looking into the markets outside of mainland China.

The landscape won't change in a few years, but in a decade, may look completely different.

It'd be interesting to learn the depth of study related to spectrum of scenarios in which human race will be facing apocalypse.

Few things that pop up in my head:

- disease

- nuclear (or comparable) war

- depletion of natural resources

- natural disaster

- extra terrestrial influence: asteroid or alien invasion

- artificial intelligence

- anarchy / disruption of social security

hmm...anything else?

Bit off the subject, but think putting a computer on a race track (with driverless car, of course) might be a good AI exercise. Although the physical conditions are a bit extreme, it's a more controlled environment and would be easier to optimize.

Perhaps a Nürburgring test would be comparable to turing test?

There's a biological phenomenon called "apoptosis," which may give us hints into the cause and behavior of suicides.

Apoptosis, simply put, is a cell-level suicide (or programmed cell death), which happens from multiple causes, but generally for the beneficial effects to the entire body, which happens to be a tragic outcome for the cell itself. This helps to increase the overall efficiency of the body or to prevent any possible damages.

But, as you can presume, this 'suicide' sometimes happens to a perfectly healthy, normal cell -- when it's isolated, lacking interactions with other cells. Of course, as with most living things, this is not a binary state, where a cell immediately performs the suicide on a trigger, but more of a gradual, transient process, which when pushed beyond a threshold or when the cell-death process wasn't halted for some reasons, may conclude in the death itself.

This brings important insight into the behavior of human suicide as well. What role does interactions play part in making a healthy (or a depressed) human being to commit suicide, and what process can we learn from cells to prevent this from happening? Life forms, no matter how complicated they seem, in general are fractal in nature with some degree of complexity layered by emergent behaviors, so there, we can learn something from our roots, or cells in this case.

Even more disturbing thought might be: Are suicides sometimes beneficial to the society? I'd hate to ponder on this idea, but if we can assume a perspective of an alien scientist observing human colonies from far far away, this might an interesting area to explore.

Being a parent to two kids, I can definitely see the 'evolution of rationalization' taking place as kids grow older. Your child will feel angry about certain events, or about other people and so forth for whatever the reasons, but usually, it's simply because they are hungry or feeling tired.

What's interesting is when you observe how they are trying to find out reasons why they are upset, when basically, it's their instinct/emotion that caused them to get upset. So you will notice the lack of consistency or relevance of their evidence in backing up their argument.

But this changes gradually as they grow older. They become more logical and more consistent. I think this is what most adult, or smart individuals learn to do as well.

It amazes me everyday to find myself rationalizing so many things and at the same time, persuading others using the same logic, when the other part of my brain secretly acknowledge/recognize that I'm making it sound all logical and trying to get others approval for my own sense of security.

Growing up with games from Nintendo, Sega, and bunch of old-but-goodies, sort of miss the old days. Playing Super Mario 3 on the original nintendo, then the awe of Super Mario World on SNES.. Sonic the Hedgehog's awesome CD background music...

Life was much simpler back then. You get your game featured on one of the game magazines then you hit gold. No version updates, just plain big releases. Game reviews...

I remember seeing the documentary on what billionaires buy for houses and on there, the real estate agent who worked with Larry Ellison, said he literally went house after house knocking on their doors and offered a money the owners can't refuse, got multiple houses in a single row on the same beach and it became his beach.

This is really helpful.

+ I've been using Buffer for few weeks now and it's really a pain killer. Hope they can make 'locale/language' setting available for Facebook Pages tho.

Fairly recent, but Nate Blecharczyk of airbnb at Startup School 2013.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya0I6oz7q9U

Great to learn the early days of airbnb and how (great) entrepreneurs persevere through the challenges.

Imgur combined with bufferapp makes a great use case for running twitter accounts.

Just out of curiosity, is hacker news built in similar fashion to reddit? Considering reddit is a YC invested company. reddit is open source so...

This is a really helpful article to learn about the early days of Google and the challenges in scaling your organization. Thanks for sharing.

A friend who works in one of the airlines told me recently, the story of six family members from middle east traveling all in 1st class, including kids and the nanny. The flight ticket was around $10k per person for the one way trip. Madam was all Hermes, and the nanny was wearing 'mere' Prada and Burberry. Thought it was interesting/funny.

visit top 5 co-working spaces around US/UK and start your own.

pros: you get to meet talented people and they will work in your space.

cons: your rent might not be that financially rewarding.

I like the slick design. pretty neat.

As far as growth hacking goes, airbnb+craigslist is considered to be a genius 'hack'

http://www.quora.com/Growth-Hacking/What-are-the-Top-10-Cons...

which I think is well, something you have to do in the early stages of your startup. :'-(

secondary?