ehedberg

http://www.enleiten.com went for that approach, but hasn't really gotten over the chicken-egg problem wrt public user lists. Still, might be interesting.

Huh, I've been quite happy with backgroundrb lately, both for repeating (cron-style) background work and for deferred processing. We've had little trouble tracking worker status once we switched to the memcached-based result cache, which allows the app to interrogate workers however it sees fit...

Strictly speaking, Vegas does have open container laws. You aren't allowed to carry a beverage within 100 feet of an establishment with an off-sale license. Of course, enforcement of that ordinance is another question.

Given the difference in market cap, I'd be surprised if either could afford it - GS =~ 60bn, MS =~ 40bn, WB =~ 33.5 bn on 835bn AUM. They're not exactly small, post A.G. Edwards.

Amazon isn't sacrificing predictive power because they want to give you the explanation. They're just including profit margin in the data to give recommendations that are valuable to them. Not that I can blame them.

Of course, you can use cmd-; to toggle Option between Meta and system (and ESC works as Meta anyway).

Or even (defun last(thing) (car (reverse thing)))

BSDi merged with Walnut Creek, then sold its software operations off to Wind River in 2001. That was a bit of a rocky period for FreeBSD releases, if memory serves, since a good chunk of core had worked for Walnut Creek before the merger...

Joyent.

I particularly found the explanation of Gresham's law to be the best I've seen...

That works great, unless you want to survive. The right order is 1) Build the product 1) Sell the product. You won't know for sure what you're actually building until you're trying to sell it and have prospects looking at it. And if you're done building before you start selling, you a) won't have anything somebody wants to buy and b) will be flat broke. Just sayin.

1. Network extensively. Not just with fellow tech entrepreneurs -- you should also make friends with the local small business community in general. They've done this the hard way, they've been where you'll be, and they have useful friends.

2. Scratch an itch. If you can build a product yourself, you're in better shape then most of the funded startups out there. If there's something you want to do online, the odds are that you can both a) do it right, and b) find enough people on the the internet who also think that you're doing it right to make some money.

3) Figure out how to cut your expenses to the bone, now. Ideally, and this may be tough in LA, adjust your lifestyle down to the point that you and your family can live on your wife's salary. Sock the money away somewhere you won't touch it, but that there won't be tax consequences if you do.

4) Get laid off. Ok, that's a reach, but trust me, there's nothing quite like walking out the door with your finances already in order, your vacation paid out and severance in the bank, and still qualifying for unemployment to be able to bootstrap a startup.

+1 for YUI. The Yahoo team has done an astonishingly good job of demonstrating what javascript looks like if you treat it as a language worth using well, as opposed to forcing it to pretend it's something it's not (eg. prototype). I've been working with it for a year and a half, recently migrated a substantial Rails app from Prototype/Scriptaculous, and couldn't be happier.