thedob

This is really great. Kudos to Stripe. I'm curious about what the ideal scenario is at the conclusion of the 3 months? Some options are...

- The project has progressed significantly to the point where the developer can hope to find continued sponsorship at Stripe or elsewhere.

- The project has progressed to the point where it no longer needs the tender loving care of the maintainer full time. Either it got more contributors or has reached a new level of stability.

- The developer joins Stripe (or somewhere else) full time and the project is left better off, but without a full time contributor/maintainer

Any thinking about what the end-game is from the developer's perspective. Either way, it's an incredible opportunity.

Congrats to MongoHQ.

I often wonder why the hosted Mongo services aren't offering dedicated servers yet. It seems like an easy opportunity to provide service, automation, and monitoring value add at a high price point. Is the thinking that most customers who would opt for the dedicated instance would just run it themselves to save money?

A mistake that first time entrepreneurs often make is to try and identify their startup by researching gaps in various hot markets, or they try to identify something that sucks and improve it. These are both good starting points on their own, however there needs to be an additional qualifier: Is the founder passionate about the problem and the larger market area they're entering in? Are they excited to work within this market for the next 5+ years and are they naturally going to spend all their free time thinking about the problem?

I know that I've made the mistake multiple times before of stumbling upon a good idea, getting started on it, only to have it turn into more of a side project than a business. Passion around the market and problem area is something that I wouldn't participate in a business without going forward.

Did a writeup including winners at blog.dougpetkanics.com

Thanks for the feedback, and I agree that if we ever create more problems it'd be a good idea to help people learn along the way.

Re the spammy comments, our entire team are longtime HN users so we all know those hurt way more than they help, but think one of our "fans" wanted to "help" a little too much. Love their enthusiasm though.

We thought this would be fun to make and fun to work on for an hour or two. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions.

Yah, we're working on it. More inventory will definitely be key. We'll be doing some marketing starting next week to get the word out about the $500 incentive we'll pay people for listing their apartments. In the meantime, if you let me know what you're looking for I'd be happy to keep an eye out and let you know first thing when something matching gets posted.

Product Genius - New York, USA

Back-end Developer - New York, USA

We're hiring at http://JumpPost.com. We currently have a product aimed at helping to solve the NYC apartment search process by connecting apartment hunters directly with vacating tenants, but we're also testing out some other products to connect local supply with demand. We're built in Ruby, running on Heroku, using AWS, working out of a cool meatpacking district loft, and are looking for some smart people to join our three man operation. Must be in NYC, but we can discuss relocation. Email jobs@jumppost.com to chat.

This seems like the right way to work on hard problem. Super smart team builds a product, gets early customers to use it on large datasets while they polish, tune, and iterate over a period of time leading up to launch.

Interesting pricing model too. It's more costly than some of the other hosted database services, but they also provide a reasonable free version so people can experiment with it. Good luck guys.

NYC (Meatpacking)

http://jumppost.com

We're hiring a product design lead and front end developer.

We're running on Rails/Heroku/S3. Small, but fun team in a great location.

See the job post at http://jumppo.st/bqCUJv

All great use cases. In the case of a global commenting system, I think that rather than "everybody agreeing on one standard," there's an opportunity for one major player to define the standard simply by announcing support for a specific format, and implementing it into their product. Disqus would be a good candidate.

Anyone who wanted their tweets picked up by the hypothetical Disqus engine would need to annotate accordingly, third parties would build apps to support this annotation, and the cycle would perpetuate with everyone conforming to said standard.

More direct contacts among people that you consider your peer group is a worthwhile enough purpose.

While 90% of the time I agree with the ease of sandboxed and cloud-synced file management, there's still that 10% of the time that I'm annoyed by it.

If I want to copy, rename, share, or email a specific file I find it easiest to do it in the file. I find it almost as easy to do it in an app that facilitate it easily like iPhoto (with it's built in share and email buttons). I find it much more difficult to do it in an app that doesn't make it quite as easily facilitated through the UI, like iTunes.

I would love for the finder to go away, but I'd hate for it to go away at the expense of every app developer having to rebuild mechanisms into each app to expose general file manipulations that the finder handles quite well right now.

You're definitely correct about the first statement. It should be revised to "Heroku has a strong history of very little downtime."

Regarding the second though, I truly believe that the cost + time savings are tremendous from using their platform vs administering your own early on in a startup product lifecycle.

To answer your question without inciting the classic NYC vs. San Fran debate: Yes, there is enough tech talent in NYC. There's a stable and rapidly growing tech scene here with startups across various disciplines, and finding engineering talent is not an issue. The latest news.YC inspired Hackers & Founders meetup had over 100 people and a waiting list to boot, which is evidence of the entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

Is San Fran a better choice? It could be, but let's leave that to another thread.

I have an idea and ongoing project that I'd love to run by you in case you're interested. Drop me an email at petkanics@gmail.com

This is a great idea. The H&F meetup is by far my favorite NYC event for both hackers and entrepreneurs. Looking forward to the new format.

Biggest additions I see here are the additional memory, cellular connectivity, and rear facing camera. The limited memory made multimedia application development a challenge on the N810, and the front facing camera was rather useless for photo taking. Now this will truly be a use-anywhere, do-anything mobile computing platform. Looking forward to developing on it.

Battery life was always a problem on the N810 with constant connectivity. We'll see how it holds up on the N900.

One thing that's confused me about the "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." question is the parenthesis. My guess is that they're included because you'll accept either a computer, or non-computer related example.

If it's confused me, chances are it may confuse others as well.

Is this not in direct competition with their "hire-by-acquisition" model? Generally, Google acquires companies early on for a price that is favorable to the founders, but wouldn't be favorable to any institutional VC since it wouldn't "move the needle" enough. If Google Ventures invests, then this means that they'd be hesitant to sell for a founder-friendly price to google itself.

Then again, maybe companies that say no to an early stage acquisition, are prime candidates for investment. Something that was impossible before Google Ventures.

You can finance yourself with credit cards for a far lower interest rate than this. If you're betting on your ability to pay back debt, and there's no value add for taking the money (such as an investor with connections), then you go with the cheapest cash available.

This is a great idea. One problem with the class upon first glance: the grading structure.

It's a compilers class, where you'll actually implement a compiler, for only 10% of your overall grade? The rest of the grade is made up by midterm, final, and quizzes.

Teachers not putting emphasis on the actual development often leads to students half-assing assignments and not getting the coding done. The compiler implementation is by far the most valuable experience in this class. The final isn't. The grading weight should reflect as much.

The way these guys pump out features, I don't see how any other blogging service can keep up. If other services try to add more engineers it will only slow down their process. Goes to show there's no better way to build a product than with a small group of awesome, dedicated coders.

But I bet many novice developers have been exposed to Ruby and Python (and SVN) because they shipped with OS X. Let's let newcomers use git without a custom install, and maybe it will lead to more widespread adoption.

You don't need the latest version of git for init, clone, add, commit, push, and pull to work.

Click 'link', then 'Save to Delicious'. Problem solved.

Living in NYC, Friday and Saturday nights tend to revolve around restaurants and bars. Although drinking is generally involved, this doesn't mean that it isn't a good time to get to know and engage in conversation with other entrepreneurs and hackers.

From my experience, the best way to quickly become friends with someone is to share a couple beers with them. Plenty of business, coding, and good general technical discussion can follow later.

Quality picture on top of the article Dan...if your hands were feet they'd probably be size 26.

It's clear what people want: Any movie or TV show ever made, at the press of a button, in high quality.

Now realistically forget the 'ever made' part, and focus on classics + all recent content, there's no reason why cable companies shouldn't be able to deliver this soon. Merge the on demand libraries with streaming video sites like Hulu, and we're almost there already.

Great, now we just have to wait until every IE6 and IE7 user has upgraded to IE8. By then, we'll be on to new browser technologies completely.

This is huge win for any company making a product that needs the network but doesn't want to be tied to an existing broadband deployment. The cost of embedding a WiMAX chip is far cheaper than embedding a 3G chip, so a whole new array of devices will now be able to communicate with your network or web site whereas before it was too expensive.

Some of the examples in the article (parking meters, home energy meters, etc) were interesting, but there are exciting consumer facing applications for this.