procyon

love this article. I agree with most of the points he made, particularly the line - "Most of us live seventy or eight years defending what we’ve been given, because we think it’s who we are."

agree. We heavily rely on Github as well but we have managed to get around the outages.

However, we have moved to bitbucket recently b.c their pricing was better suited for us.

We have been really happy with stripe as well. Past year or so we have built several projects using stripe. The only time we had a scare was due to a rogue administrator. Stripe helped us investigate the problem.

Being the Chief Tech at Conceivian (and having the best job of my life), I can tell you that working with startup founder's is a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and I'd do it again. There were tons of learnings, innovation and fun in the project Andrew mentioned and several others we have done. BUT nothing beats getting fully paid for the work done!!

If apple were to buy TW and I am not saying Apple will, but if they do, the market will be driven by customer demand. Enabling part of the market true IPTV experience will start pressuring cable companies to open up. Since IPTV is arguably superior technology customers will demand and in case when they have choice will prefer true Apple TV like services over traditional cable.

At the right price point, buying a current content provide would turn out to be a good move.

It took me couple of minutes to figure out how to copy the link to the URL. You can copy the url automatically to clipboard right after user uploads the files (and display the notice to communicate it) or provide a visual clue to make it easier to find URL copy feature.

this looks perfect. Though, it is a bit pricey for us. Ideally the code review tool would be integrated with Github, Pivotal tracker or lighthouse.

Yes actually our plans going forward might take that direction. When we cross the consumer product line, and jump to possibly business and more professional needs, recording videos directly from web camera does not suffice.

We really think there is a great need for a simple platform to communicate via videos - video emails is just an extension of it.

hmm maybe it is not apparent and I will make changes appropriately. Clicking on the button titled "Send message Now" will actually take you to the service page without asking user to login or signup. We thought it will be a better option than explaining in detail what we do on the front page.

thanks for your feedback.

I will work on 1 - 2 items

About 3 item, I will add more info on why Videoly. The service is about video messaging and not video sharing. Also, we have designed the site so that users can use the product without needing to signup. Won't that suffice ?

yes we are considering seriously about adding a video tour to our site, however, we still could not find a inexpensive way to do it.

append to this question. Has anybody tried gmail as an smtp with postfix ?

I primarily like using console while working on a project. I have a centralized location which is connected to my "very-rudimentary" version system. I have written small scripts which run every single time I fire up console. At times, I have project specific console scripts all reside on my desktop. I have global key shortcuts to open up consoles for commonly used projects. Simple aliases and scripting trick is kinda abstraction over the actual code organized in folders. I find it eminently helpful since I use Linux and Windows both quite frequently, so it keeps everything consistent for me.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/marketing/search... link specifically for SEO but they have plenty of information for website optimization

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ - Google webtools have been incredibly helpful for us. Also http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/ (no..it is not an adult site!) is a good blog on SEO

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/systemwide-gmail-outage...

AH... back online!

i am surprised nobody write a booklet for the either ;)

well often enough a query like "site:news.ycombinator.com techcrunch" on Google works for me

Yes totally agree! Email space seems so stagnant and everyday I use them think of ways it can be improved!

The email experience can be improved so much with just simple data mining like collecting information about a project by just looking at project related correspondence. Who has been active or who is not. Great deal of information about user is hidden in those mails, I am sure an intelligent pass through them can tell simple things like gender of the person, career, location, purchase history, relationship status and much more.

Also, another thing makes me wonder how email clients will adopt themselves to manage messages in forms other than text.

if a code is changed comments need to change too! Too many times I have seen out dated comments adding confusion to the code. If my code requires great deal of explanation, I go back to my drawing board and redesign the logic.

Not quite! I think code can be written to make it self explanatory. With appropriate variable, function names along with proper abstraction and refactoring code can be read almost like a prose which eliminates need for comments. At times comments are too annoying because they state the obvious or they are not updated along with the code.

eg: code like this in ruby can explain itself very well!

display_error if not valid_input

Now I do understand that comments cannot be replaced entirely and sometimes it is necessary to add notes to understand the code thus I prefer using comments sparingly and avoid long headers on top of each file. Those headers with author name, dates and other information is unnecessary if right tools are used to maintain your project.

wait .. what is so wrong with GrandCentral ? I use that service everyday and I have been very happy with it.

Well.. we are adding a comment feature to the videos which will allow users to enter short text messages. Also, we were going to allow users to customize their videos by adding characters or action related animation which gives us another anchor to extract video context. However, we are not able to find right service to use that information and display a related ad.

Yes we tried that too. However, people just don't know ClickPass or even never heard about OpenID. It doesn't make them feel any safer

actually current implementation is nothing but a simple videomail service. We want to really streamline the process and take away all unnecessary steps. Asking users to create an account just to send a videomail seems to be unnecessary.

Had a tiff with my co-founder couple of months back. We argued if we should specify that our service is free and how much importance we should give to that word on the site.

What do you think? Does a word 'free' on a site makes any difference?

wow looks like a great service from google again. I have been using lot of google technologies in my application lately, all of which are free.

I always wonder.. what's in it for google?

I totally agree that as far as investors are concerned Silicon Valley has more expertise concentration. On the other hand, Silion Valley also has more number of startups seeking funding!

In a web startup where geographic locations are not a huge factor for the product development itself, it is harder to justify high cost of living with other benefits hotspots in US like Seattle and Silicon Valley provide.

My current startup is in Seattle and we are bootstrapping right now. We are strongly considering about moving to another country. Startups are about people, as we all know. Seattle definitely had better resources to get support, advice, and seek funding. However, we had to let it all go over the vast cost of living difference between India and US.

just looking at the numbers these guys give out $10,000 to 30,000 for 4%-8% of the company. It is not a great deal of money but certainly most of the non-YC companies seem to be giving out more money.

Assuming that quality of YC and non-YC programs is the same, I wonder how much extra 10,000 going to make a difference.