aliasaria

Anyone know what tool is used to draw the graph in the post? Is that an open javascript library?

This is a great introduction to R for people that already understand SQL well.

Brute force for the win?

Here's the changelist for Lucene: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/lucene/java/trunk/CHANGES.txt?v...

I wrote to their PR person to see if they can offer us any advice -- I will post any response I get...

Evil

Is it just me or is Chrome just not as exciting as we'd hoped?

Often, EIR's are paid to sit in VC firms waiting for a company that could use their talent. By virtue of their position, they get to see every cool company in the community and pick where they want to go next. If they aren't dropped in as an exec in a single company, they divide their talent amongst many companies -- working with them to develop the business. Of course, no titles are clear at VC firms.

The VC world needs more awesome people like Chris Hughes. This is a win for the startup community.

For a site where Nginx doesn't make sense, has anyone used memory caching on Apache (to store static files in memory) with success? I am curious as to how this would perform in comparison.

e.g. modmemcachecache

http://code.google.com/p/modmemcachecache/

Well, Google was being silly, too, for keeping that open. But, yeah... nice.

I agree that times have changed, but this seems a little too far, even if it is just a rule of thumb.

Also, there's a tendency for these types of rules to become self-fulfilling prophecies.

All three of the above lawyers (Rob Hyndman, Suzie Dingwall Williams, and Cognition) are awesome.

And remember, there are usually 2-4 founders.

Every non-technical founder without a working prototype needs to read this.

My experience is that good investors know that profit+loss projections for certain kinds of products at certain stages are pretty much useless. In these cases, your goal is to make something that isn't laughable (when forced to make projections).

It's easier to forecast expenses -- you know how many engineers you want, and can guess at legal, rent, etc.

But it's also good, if you can't have a market ready piece of hardware within two years, to have an alternate source of revenue in the beginning. For example, you could sell a suped-up (expensive) early-adopter version for a year which will serve as a prototype for the real (cheaper) consumer version.

Plan to sell very little in the beginning, as that's what always happens in hardware. And consider planning to sell through someone else. For example, if your device has to do with telephony, assume you will sell through one of the major telephone networks in your area. Then guess at what percent of their users in your target market area you can convert in the first year and calculate your cut of the sale. It's easier to estimate sales if you're thinking about taking a bigger and bigger slice out of a large, defined pie (rather than growing from nothing).

Use LCARS 24 to turn an older computer into an awesome alarm clock / calendar with a startrek theme. (Geeky, yes, but still pretty cool)

http://lcars24.sourceforge.net/

Another option is Shopify (shopify.com) if they want to create more of their own store, but have their own brand. Etsy is pretty awesome, true.

This is absurd.

I can't believe the comparison between the Internet and tubes ala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

We add custom invite code to each application. For each app, we have an admin site that has a button that allows us to generate a single invite -- a button that says "gimme a ticket". It uses an sqlite table to store all of them. Every time an account is created, it checks if the invite code exists and has been used yet. If it hasn't been used, the form validates and the username of the new user is stored in the ticket table so we can track which invites are used.

Some good features to have for a ticketing system: - ability to type in an email or set of emails and it automatically sends a different beta code to each address - ability to have one invite be able to create more than one account (sometimes we send a code to a company and tell them to create a few accounts for their staff, each invite can create X users before it expires) - have a date expiry on invites so you can toss-out old ones