salman89

Scalable system does not imply needing many machines. There is no reason you can't just deploy your entire system on a single host, but maintain the ability to reconfigure exactly when needed.

But yes - its about finding the right balance.

I agree with the general premise of avoiding premature optimizations, but designing systems that scale is important for several reasons:

- Startups grow exponentially, if you're playing catchup as you're growing you are focusing on keeping the lights on and hanging on for the ride. Important for a growing company to focus on vision.

- Software that scales in traffic is easier to scale in engineering effort. For example, harder for a 100 engineers to work on a single monolith vs 10 services.

- Service infrastructure cost is high on the list of cash burn. Scalable systems are efficient, allow startups to live longer.

- If the product you are selling directly correlates to computing power, important to make sure you are selling something that can be done profitably. For example, if you are selling video processing as a service, you absolutely need to validate that you can do this at scale in a profitable manner.

I also don't agree with the premise that speed of development and scalable systems are always in contention. After a certain point, scalable systems go hand and hand with your ability to execute quickly.

Google Play supports splitting APKs on density. Its a little bit more work but can cut down the binary size if you have significant assets.

I like Heap's (https://heapanalytics.com) approach - capture everything, query later. Depending on your needs (Heap is front-end UI oriented), might not be the right fit.

I don't think it is as simple as learning that you can talk about it - you have to learn who to talk about it too. Not everyone wants to hear that things are not working quite as planned - most people would rather just hear "Great!"

Changes the color temperature.

Is there evidence to support that accelerators are pre-selecting based on elite backgrounds? It would be really interesting to see YC's % of founders from Ivy league + Stanford over time.

Are you saying that these accelerators are not increasing the founders' chance of success?

You can use cross-language templating options - personally I use mustache.

No disagreements on multiple solutions - definitely a cool approach.

Time till the page is usable comes under consideration. You can load the relevant html then begin the bootstrapping of the app.

If I recall correctly, Twitter had this problem. The size of their apps + templates bloated to 2MB or so - making that initial page load pretty bad.

What he's saying is that the views you want to be SEO'd can be generated server side and bootstrapped into Backbone (hook backbone views into an element that is rendered server side).

I currently do this too - I'll add that it is helpful to use a templating language that will work both server side and client side so you only write your templates once.

What does become a pain is doing routers/controllers both client side and server side - end up writing some code more than once and in different languages. Harder to maintain, especially when changes are made.

http://thepicrain.com/planets%C2%B3-an-open-world-voxel-base...

I think it is bad practice - users cannot type it out if needed

A cheap recruiting tool for these companies. Get top recruits through the door when the difference in a few K still matters to them.

It sounds more like "if you are going to do mobile, don't execute poorly" vs "don't have a mobile version because mobile versions are awful".

I too would think that the redirect links from Google are search-instance specific.

Good points here, especially on session length when related to logging users out.

I do however disagree with: "Anyways, the point of this is that in almost all uses, mobile site versions are god-awful." While the option to view the full site should always exist, there are enough experiences that designers would want different on mobile. There is a subset of power users who just want the full experience - but I think OP is generalizing here.

Where do we draw the line as companies in terms of user data collection? Should we stop tracking our users entirely?

Government eavesdropping aside, I see the internet as just another form of communication. Anytime you talk to someone, you are entrusting them with whatever you are communicating to them. If you knew a friend doesn't keep secrets well, you probably wouldn't tell them any secrets. When Mozilla sends you that email with the tracking links, you are entrusting them with that data, and are hoping that the data leads to a better relationship between them and you or offers some mutual benefit.

What is different in internet communication is that it is hard for a user to determine what company is trustworthy and when that trust has been violated. Most users also simply don't care when that trust has been violated - no one should like that their user data at some level is sold to advertisers by Facebook, but that won't stop them from using it (I myself am guilty of this).

Should tech companies not collect user data in the fear that a 3rd party may one day steal that data? Or should they not collect user data for some other reason?

This is an issue of disruption that can cause a large, politically entrenched gun market to fail being disguised as a gun control issue.

What steps need to be taken so that we can legally possess a 3D printed gun?

If you are in a crowded space, UX differentiation is a feature. In the case of close.io, they are competing against well entrenched market leaders. Making a high quality, easy to use sales communication tool is their MVP.

Absolutely.

I'd be really interesting in seeing if the energy cost is lower than the average long term output. I'd be perfectly fine with leaving my iPhone plugged in all night if it meant it could generate me $x/night, where $x is greater than the electricity hit I get.

Sure, but could the work not be distributed amongst many users? How many concurrent users would it take for it to be useful? Would likely demolish battery life and data caps, but I think you could run only when batt > 50% and wifi is on.

Is this a viable revenue stream for free app developers? Would it ever make it past the Apple review process?

Has to do with URL character count - Twitter limit is 140.

If the problem you are trying to solve is inaccessibility due to prohibitive cost, you'd have to at least show that there is market at that lower price point.

With regards to matlab, I don't believe the cost to be prohibitive. In most situations where you'd even require what matlab provides, $2k is not that much money. There is also already a very good product that competes with matlab on price - Octave, and its free.

Creating value isn't as simple as just making something cheaper.

I'll argue that signage and marking is already very well standardize and optimized for low ambiguity for human vision, but we are able to build things that humans cannot see but technology can.

The cars do have to be able to drive anywhere, but that doesn't mean we cannot improve quality of service in other areas. Suppose we can build roads where self driving cars can safely travel 100mph+ due to special infrastructure - I do see that as a big benefit.

What are things city planners can do from an infrastructure perspective so that we can drop the amount of data that needs to analyzed in real time? For example, can we use special paint for road lines in order to make the cost of detection of road lanes lower?

I have found a general lack of hosted PostGIS solutions and would have loved if this was around 6 months ago. Cartodb felt more like a mapping solution than a spatial database solution. SpacialDB (https://spacialdb.com/) was the only thing I could find, but their pricing plans vs storage limits didn't make sense (I was loading up OSM data - full dataset is really big). Ended up installing PostGIS on an EC2 instance manually, worked OK for development purposes but I would have never felt comfortable pushing that into production.

I thought about this too, ideally you would want to use crowdsourcing to just gather evidence and let professionals who are also liable to sift through the evidence. Another angle to work is to allow the crowd to analyze the evidence but not make that analysis public. Problem boils down to incentive - if your contributions are not made public and there is no attribution, is the motivation still there? 4chan is probably more interesting to look at in this regard, since all posts are anonymous.

Are telephone lines and cable lines leased from the public as well? Or the right to? I'm a bit ignorant here, but I would think that in those situations there is no free bidding on infrastructure deals.

Is there enough liquidity (I'm not even sure if this is the right word) in the standard exchanges to move $100M USD of BTC?