nickmolnar2

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Wasn’t he supposed to be developing AGI?

I wouldn't assume it went as planned. Seemed plausible they tried to lend him $362m to exercise his options, and then chickened out amid bad press.

StackBlitz is Monaco in the browser. No extensions or terminal. Works great for certain kinds of front-end dev, but more complicated build tooling aren't available and only JS/TS are supported.

Aardvark, the question and answer service that was later bought by Google, initially routed and answered all user questions from their internal team.

_why would never write an article called 'setting up my own software programming company' or use the phrase 'Maybe it would’ve been easier and safer to just stick out the 9-5 and work my way up the corporate ladder in the hope that I got promoted enough to be comfortable after a while…'

Wouldn't the sheer number of coins involved make tumbling services almost useless. What is the volume that a single tumbler gets per day? If you put in tens of thousands of coins, and there are only a few dozen coins in the Tumblr that day, your coins are going to be most of what comes back.

According to Sequoia's post, they are adding 1mm users/day. http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...

The denials over Prism never squared with the size and capability of the system that were outlined in the documents, unless I'm missing something here. Is it not possible that the court-ordered data releases were just one small part of the Prism program, with MUSCULAR and others filling the data that could not be obtained through the legal system? Prism is just the query interface, which is not necessarily tied to one dataset.

I am a big fan of Put.io. This seems like a contender to replace it, although there is a long way to go. One of the wonderful things about Put.io is that it is so versatile. I use their Boxee app, Android App, iPad app, as well as the web version regularly. That's a lot of work to replicate.

Should definitely add Primer to the list. I've never seen another movie that uses scientific language that is not dumbed down -at all- for the audience.

Are you crawling these sites yourself, or using the Bing API to get the index?

Nope, this is all coming together in the next two weeks. Those Reallocators are madmen, and know how to get things done.

It'd be nice to have an audit trail of admin actions on HN somewhere.

Can we just take a moment and note that Kim Dotcom had two Mercedes ML63 AMGs seized in the raid. One had the license plate 'Guilty' and the other 'Mafia'. He knew what business he was in: working around the law to facilitate massive scale copyright infringement.

If we want this anti-SOPA sentiment to stick, we need to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Even on a free and open web there are going to be some people who are just plain-old criminals. I'd prefer the line to be somewhere between me & Kim.

http://torrentfreak.com/images/megacars.jpg

One other fact that backs up the author's point is that while Apple has a low percentage of the computer market as a whole, they have >90% marketshare for PCs over $1000. That gives them a lot of loyal, high-end, customers who also happen to be the early adopters for new technologies.

http://betanews.com/2009/07/22/apple-has-91-of-market-for-1-...

We've been testing a new startup with a hacked together Tumblr, to simulate the app we're building. Because of this we've been monitoring our Tumblr traffic & interactions closer than most casual bloggers.

We have 300 followers right now, and I'm going to about 15% of our Likes are SPAM. A problem, but not completely overrunning the system. They seem to also be using Tumblr tag pages to find articles to like. Articles tagged with common product keywords like handbags, shoes, or a brand name get much more SPAM Like activity than other posts.

Tumblr does seem to be hiding the entries in the Dashboard for some of these, indicating that they have some sort of system in place for isolating spammers.

I'm guessing w/in a few months Google launches a G+ integration with search that lets you reference your contacts in search queries using the + operator.

Sad story?

I think you miss the point. He was never in it for the money. The toys, houses, and cars were a distraction. Read his quotes in the article. The sad part is that he wasted so many years showing off when he could have been fulfilling his passions.

We have tried just about everything at our shop, Thirdi.

Fixed rate quotes are dangerous because they make all the pricing decisions at the point where you know the least about the product. They lead to waterfall-esque development, since your only shot at avoiding scope creep is to catch everything up-front. Plus, change requests feel like nickel and diming to the client, slow the project down, and are just generally bad service.

Hourly billing is difficult to sell: would you buy a house, knowing that the sale price might increase by 30% after you moved in? Plus, you run into the problem of those hours not being tied to a productivity level.

We've started giving high-level estimates of projects up front, but not committing to a specific scope or price. Instead we invoice for each 2-week sprint with set deliverables. This way, the client is paying for features, not time. We start a feature backlog at the beginning of a project, but add in much more detail right before each sprint starts. The client always knows what they're buying, and we can quickly tell if we're running ahead or behind on the project based on whether we are finishing sprints early, and how many features we are knocking off.

By not getting married to one feature-set at the beginning of the project, it also allows us to throw in 'nice-to-haves' that might be easier than expected, or scale back less important features if they turn out to be more complicated than we thought. It does add time for communication and managing the backlog, of course. We have a dedicated project manager and a QA lead to keep this stuff away from our development team, otherwise they might have all gone mad by now.

I'm also reminded of Daniel Dennett's secret to happiness: find something bigger than yourself and devote your life to it. That too allows you to drop your baggage and become 'nothing'. And it's a great way to leave a lasting impact on the world too.

Ummm.

http://www.theie6countdown.com/

Doesn't this system still lead to a large trail of emails going back to Pakistan (assuming the courier didn't go all the way into Afghanistan to send each email). Presumably, some of the computers that were on the receiving end of those emails have been seized by US intelligence in various raids. The IP of the sender would be easy to trace for the CIA, and the content of the emails would have at least indicated that the sender was in a key decision-making position within the organization.

Without some other security steps, like VPNs or proxies, the US would have certainly been able to trace the country of origin of these communications.

Thirdi is hiring in Vancouver, BC.

Looking for excellent problem solvers, with experience building production web applications. We typically work with the Symfony or Yii PHP frameworks, with a heavy dose of JQuery, but developers are free to choose their tech on a project by project basis.

Also looking for a HTML/CSS vet, preferably with some JQuery skills who can help us deliver pixel perfect designs.

You can find contact info on thirdi.com.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here.

Don't bet against a world-class hustler who can also build cool shit. And that's Bill Nguyen.

Let's remember how Lala came to be. He built a service for swapping physical CDs, which promised to make sure that every album ever recorded made its way onto Bittorrent (since someone could rip and flip an album that had never been encoded for <$1). He managed to use that as leverage on the record labels to give him extremely permissive licensing for the Lala streaming service, in exchange for shutting down the CD swapping business. I've been involved in content negotiations with record labels, and they do not give up ground easily. Not even Apple seem to be able to get that far...and they're Apple.

Then, he managed to get Sequoia to give their highest-ever pre-launch funding round. Sequoia isn't known for being a pack of dummies. Color has probably spent less than 10% of that round so far. There's a billion dollar market somewhere in this mobile photo sharing thing (I can't see it yet, but I can smell it), and I wouldn't be shocked if he's the one to cash in on it. Color has an accomplished team, and enough cash to make plenty of mistakes. He might have used every buzzword on earth to raise the round, but it worked, and now he's got plenty of gas in the tank to build something genuinely disruptive. And if Lala is any indication, he knows how to disrupt markets and build tight products (Lala was at least 2 years ahead of its time as a product).

While Color app might sound like it was created by pasting together TechCrunch and FastCompany articles, this is only the beginning for them. Color is clearly in it for the long haul.

Hardest working interviewer in the business? He's answering emails from the hospital, for gods sakes.

+1

Does this process payments from Canadian banks?

Should also add a link to one of the developers blog posts on the project: http://jonchui.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/492/

OK. So, I just put together that this event is competing head-to-head with Startup Weekend. http://vancouver.startupweekend.org

That seems a little rude. I'm with you that $75 tickets are steep, and hacker unfriendly, but it seems like 2 competing hackathons are going to spread our city's finite dev talent really thin. I can't see how this leads to a better experience for SW or your event.

Wouldn't it be better to have spread these events out? If people think SW is too expensive, they'll wait. If they want to contribute to both, shouldn't they have the option?