marclove

I can't disagree with much you've said. I was born and raised in San Jose. For most of my life, San Francisco was always been the place I thought was fun to visit, but didn't want to live in. I live here now and it's better than I thought, but I still have issues.

Crime -- As far as big cities go, New York & San Francisco are both abnormally safe. They regularly rank as two of the safest large cities in the country.

Food -- They both have a diverse selection of awesome food.

Beauty -- San Francisco is nestled in one of the most beautiful parts of the Bay Area. The scenery is awesome. The city is way too dirty though. I'm very liberal, but San Francisco is too liberal even for me. The city has a problem with litter which it needs to address, but the bigger problem is the homelessness. San Francisco actually has a homeless lobby whose actions ensure that homelessness remains a problem. They believe people have the right to be homeless, live on the street, and panhandle (frequently in ways that strikes fear into the heart of tourists). There are plenty of humane policies that can help reduce this problem, but the city is so liberal that policies like "Care Not Cash" are shouted down as if they were modern day Nuremberg Laws.

Hipsters/Wannabes/Bohemians/etc. -- Definitely can go too far and be annoying at times, but its also part of the culture of San Francisco that I can find charming. Like everything: in moderation. New York has its own version of this though -- the "I'm richer than you" syndrome -- the incessant need to buy ridiculously priced clothes, hand bags, accessories (women AND men), the name dropping, the pretentiousness, etc. Get over yourself.

Too laid back -- Probably. New York can be too high strung. I enjoy both in moderation.

Weather -- Wow. I'd much rather have SF's moderate weather, even if it is a little chilly at times, than NYC's hot, humid summers and cold, icy winters. But if SF gets too chilly for you, you're almost always a short drive away from a micro-climate that's beautiful.

Dating -- Well I can't complain as a gay guy. It doesn't get much better than SF. We have a few great spots in the whole country and I'm fortunate to live in one of them.

Some things I think you left out --

Blunt & Rude Honesty vs. Nice Dishonesty -- As a Bay Area native, one of the things I absolutely love about NYC is people's blunt honesty, even if it is rude at times. At least you know where you stand with people. On the West Coast, people will smile & pretend like they like you or agree with you, even if they don't. And then when you leave, they'll talk about you behind your back. This can be especially painful in the startup world when you're raising money and few will tell you the real reason why they're not convinced by your pitch.

Proximity to Destinations -- San Francisco is anywhere from minutes to just a couple hours away from beaches, beautiful mountains and camping spots, skiing, the best wine country in the U.S., legendary national parks, etc.

Suit vs. Jeans/T-Shirt/Hoodie -- I much prefer SF's dress code to NYC's.

Diversity -- Yes, both cities are very diverse. But I think San Francisco is more of a melting pot. New York seems like it still has neighborhoods that are very stratified racially/ethnically.

---

Anyways, I really love both cities for different reasons and I don't think I have a favorite. I hope someday I'll be able to move to New York and really live in it.

$1M at a $3M pre with a $12M acquisition means I'm getting a 3X return on my investment. Now that's certainly better than losing it altogether, but I think almost all angels would admit they'd be pretty disappointed in that outcome.

Good news for some startups. Not any that are looking for investors. At that average acquisition price, most investors would be disappointed.

It has nothing to do with jobs programs/corporate welfare. Remember there were security people before the TSA (just not as many) and the TSA was created in the post-9/11 panic.

This, like most aviation security, is just security-theater. The American people were scared and so elected officials, realizing they couldn't realistically secure aviation, come up with a bunch of "procedures" that's supposed to make the general public feel more comfortable. In the end, it's about votes.

How long before child molesters realize what a "great gig" it is?

And likely to end your trip quit quickly & prematurely.

This came up in a thread a while back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1483667). Bottom line is that "MM" comes from the banking/finance world. In banking, $3M actually means $3,000 and $3MM means $3,000,000.

Finally! They should have begun work on this a couple years ago. But its good to see they're finally headed in the right direction.

I just hope the HTML & JS it spits out is nicer than the HTML that Dreamweaver spit out. :)

Maybe they're trying to reinvigorate their young & happening image in the Valley with an extended outage?

lol...had no idea anyone would find that comment so offensive.

Its a gradual rollout. You probably don't have it yet.

Sounds like someone's a little bitter about an API usage dispute and a poached employee.

He brings up legitimate, but minor issues that are just a part of Twitter's growing pains. Let's be honest, the background customization has never been a huge selling point for Twitter. Sure its fun, but most people use Twitter via mobile clients & txt messaging and never see the backgrounds. I think I've seen the backgrounds of maybe 10 of the people I follow.

The #newtwitter rate limiting is an annoying issue they need to resolve, but they'll resolve it. They're still ironing out the #newtwitter kinks.

Yea, but users could give a crap about that. It's their official product and the default way for people to use the service. It shouldn't have rate limits on how much you can use their website. They need to fix it.

Yea, those crazy voters...engaging in a little self-masochism because they want things like police officers, firefighters, armed forces, potable water, roads, education, and social security.

In general, I agree that the private sector can do better than the government in many areas. The problem is, when it comes to health care coverage they haven't, not when the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States is medical bills.

Furthermore, entrepreneurs still have the chance to do it better. Nothing in the health reform bill prevents them from doing so. So if you think you can do better d2viant, more power to ya. There are tens of millions of Americans with no health care coverage who are waiting for your better & more efficient solution.

I consider any tax at all penalizing.

Heh, so all taxes should be abolished because the government shouldn't be penalizing us for making money, right?

Exactly. People need to be able to see and identify a logo in a split second. People don't ponder over logos. Like I said up-thread. This isn't a design class.

The problem is they're trying to do both. Its half graphic, half wordmark. Nike's graphic and its wordmark can survive on their own or appear together. The same can't be said of this. MySpace can't put ____ somewhere and expect people to immediately associate it with MySpace, no matter how much advertising they do to try to ingrain it. Nor can they use "My" alone and expect people to know they really mean "MySpace".

Its just a jolting experience. It invites you to start reading it, which you do, and then you run into this underline shape.

Clever to the point of uselessness. It might get you points in a design class, but in the real world, it's a stupid move. Way to help further erase your already disappearing brand.

So if a company (or state government in your example) wants to provide health care benefits to be competitive in the marketplace, they should be penalized for that?

I don't accept your premise that taxes = penalization.

Employers who pay their employees $35,000/yr have to pay more in federal taxes than if they paid their employees $34,000/yr. I don't consider that a penalty either. Its progressive taxation.

Additionally, your statement about "well-paid employees" doesn't seem to fit with the article you quoted. Secretaries and van drivers aren't generally highly paid positions.

"Well-paid employees" referred to Microsoft employees.

The government positions (secretaries & van drivers) mentioned in the article, I would agree, probably aren't highly paid. They have a great health plan because of the unions that represent them and fight for those benefits. If they were non-union, they'd probably have much crappier health plan options.

But as the article said, the value of their plan is $20,400/yr. The excise tax is on whatever amount exceeds $27,500/yr. So they, and the state government they work for, will not be subject to any new taxes under the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

The reason I quoted the article was to show how great a $20,400/yr health plan is. Just imagine the benefits you'd get from a $27,500+/yr health plan. The people who have plans that expensive, most of them executives and other highly paid employees, are not hurting and I could care less if they have to go with a slightly less lavish plan that doesn't cover things like rehab, treadmills and gym memberships or choose to pay what amounts to income taxes on the portion that exceeds $27,500/yr.

Hilarious...

Fact #1: The only increase in cost for "premium plans" is the new excise tax which doesn't go into effect until 2018.

Fact #2: The companies who provide these benefits will have to pay the taxes, not the insurance companies.

Fact #3: Since the insurance companies are not paying any new taxes on the "premium plans", any rate increases cannot be blamed on taxes they will never be required to pay.

This is, in effect, a payroll tax on benefits provided as compensation to employees. But only the value of the plan that exceeds $27,500 is taxed. So if the plan costs $28,000/yr, they will be taxed on a whopping $500 of the plan.

$27,500 is more than twice what the average employees' employer-provided health plan is worth. So yea, I don't think there's anything unreasonable about taxing whatever exceeds that amount.

Health insurance companies have been raising premiums at ridiculous rates and finding excuses to avoid providing coverage for decades now. I find it hilarious that people are now trying to blame it on a bill that was just passed this year. They only dislike the bill because they dislike who's responsible for passing it.

I think its nice that they're telling employees about the change this far in advance. Most employers will tell you about this a couple weeks before the prices get jacked up or the benefits get slashed. It shows a lot of respect for their employees.

Nice try, but the the excise tax on "premium" plans doesn't go into effect until 2018. So if their only motivation was taxes, they'd have waited.

Furthermore, I'm not losing any sleep about the government taxing only the portion of the value of a health plan that exceeds $27,500/yr -- in other words, the first $27,500 remains tax-free -- when the average employer-sponsored health plan is valued at $13,375/yr (2009). And here's what a $20,400/yr plan looks like:

For the secretaries and environmental engineers, game wardens and van drivers who work for the state of New Hampshire, surgery is free, even at Boston’s top teaching hospitals if it’s necessary. So are MRIs, CT scans, and X-rays.

Pregnant women pay nothing for prenatal care; alcoholics aren’t billed for short stints in rehab. Seeing a therapist costs just $10, as many as 20 visits a year, and prescription drugs top out at $30 for a three-month mail-order supply. New Hampshire state employees get $450 annually toward gym memberships, if they go regularly, or $200 toward their own treadmill - and there’s a $150 annual reimbursement for yoga classes, diabetes clinics, and nutritional counseling.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/0...

Yea, cry me a river if well-paid employees now have to buy their own treadmills or pay for their own rehab.

Yea but like you said, since half of them are just for redundancy, they were in effect only running 2 database servers. I must say I find it stunning that a service with that much traffic, especially one with an infrastructure that requires the entire database to be in-memory, would be operating with just 2 database servers running on EC2.

I know hindsight is 20/20, but I can't imagine the foresight was any worse than 20/30.

Filling out my patent application for the "method of typing data into a text box and submitting it to a server for storage in a database". I'll see you all in court.

Its all fun and games until someone gets a shard in the eye.

Heh...that's one hell of a commercial support contract then. Should be interesting to read 10gen's own detailed post-mortem.

How many "regular users" do you really think would spend the time to read about why they were down? They just know it was down and wanted it back up ASAP. And how would you better explain it to a layman? The servers crashed. We worked on it. It took longer than we wanted. They're back up again and we're working to make sure it doesn't happen again. How do you go further than that without getting technical?

Agreed. And they did use their Twitter accounts to communicate the problem/downtime (which even MVP's should have & use for status communications). You can be sure their status.foursquare.com blog won't have any more information than their Twitter accounts when they have unexpected downtime in the future.

Right, I'm aware. Not everybody can afford a contract though, nor should they have to in order to avoid major outages like this.

But I would like to know if Foursquare has a commercial support contract with 10Gen. If they didn't, why not? especially for a service that big? If they did, how was it that 10Gen took that long to fix the problem?

But it wasn't the overloaded shard that brought the site down (it was only slowing things down), it was the addition of the new shard:

"For reasons that are not entirely clear to us right now, though, the addition of this shard caused the entire site to go down."