blparker

How do you protect against single point of failure and total data loss? Do you do frequent offsite backups?

> So I'm curious... is there any kind of "open-source incubator" out there? Like, a site with 500 developers signed up, they all vote on new project ideas, start a new project each month, kind of like a great big collaborative hackathon, in order to put out some really impressive piece of software, that then hopefully lives on?

There was something posted on here a while back called AssemblyMade. They basically do crowd-sourced development. To my knowledge, ideas are voted on, and then people essentially work in a democratic environment iterating on the development. In the end, the idea is that any profits made from the project will be split.

Do you find an incentive to read more as to ensure that you are getting your monthly money's worth?

How does one "capture" data flowing over a private fiber channel? Does it require a physical tap?

"Facebook's new ad service, launched earlier this month, gets around the traditional third-party advertising cookies by doing the tracking on its own. When a person visits a website selling shoes on a work PC, a piece of Facebook code placed on that site—Facebook's own cookie—recognizes that the person has logged into Facebook using that browser before."

How does this even work? Is the shoe seller placing some kind of JavaScript snippet on their website in order to allow Facebook to track users? Is this coming from their "Like" button?

How do you market StaffSquared? You mentioned SEO and ads; is this your main source of customer acquisition?

Yeah, it's gone through changes over the past year, and it's pretty much all but dead. There used to be a decent blend of development/designer articles, but it's completely dominated by design articles now.

Interested in your opinion as to why you don't think this acquisition will help gain market share on AWS.

I consider myself a proficient developer, however, in situations where I'm required to solve an obscure puzzle while someone is staring at me, generally makes me uncomfortable...no matter how easy the question. I interviewed for an internship position at Microsoft, where I was required to write some bizarre code on graph paper while the interviewer literally stood over my shoulder. Horribly uncomfortable, I barely made any progress, and was subsequently denied a position (obviously). After the interview, I went home and solved the question in a matter of minutes, wrote the code, optimized, and fully tested it. While I choked during the interview, I saw fellow classmates fly off to Redmond...classmates that I knew weren't better developers than I was, simply because I had worked with many of them on projects several times. That's when I knew this whole puzzle interview stuff was nonsense.

Agree with you, sir. I'm not the target market, but I'm not entirely sure how this application differentiates itself against the bigger names in the space (namely Carbonmade). I'd be interested to hear what the OP says.

I was too lazy to refresh, so I built a script and dumped 220 of the ideas in a pastebin. Sorted with duplicates removed. Very likely that some are missing. Would've probably been just as easy to try all combinations of left and right terms, but oh well. http://pastebin.com/rzEuz89f

@brockf - I'm putting together a list of Startup Success stories, and your story sounds like one people might be interested in. Would you be willing to write a quick summary of your experiences? You can reply here or email me at bryan.parker24@gmail.com.

Pretty interesting story. Have you considered writing a blog post to document your story? That would be a nice read.

Nice idea. I seen it initially on Forrst. I'm interested by the fact that you plan on being transparent about the numbers. Where do you plan on posting these figures?

Yep, crashed on my iPad2 as well.

(Not Mike, but I can relate) - I suffered from a similar problem some time ago, that I have since overcome. I'm not sure if I can offer any words of advice, but I can give you a recount of my experience that helped me overcome it. Like you, I would often start projects, leaving them unfinished after the interesting part. After noticing this trend, I stopped and did a little introspection. I thought long and hard about what I want to do in an ideal world. Do I want to be a corporate citizen my entire life (no harm in that) or do I want to do my own thing? I determined that I eventually want to be my own boss and try to build things that people (and I) care about. Although apparent, I had to realize and implant in my head that nobody was going to do anything for me. If I want to be successful, I'm going to have to bust my ass and do it on my own. I was going to have to make sacrifices and modify my behavior. I had to exercise self-control and only focus on one project at a time (I would tend to bounce back and forth between ideas). I had to treat it like a job and set up expectations and deadlines. I had to set up tasks and goals and deadlines, because flying by the seat of my pants hadn't gotten me very far, and sure as hell hadn't allowed me to finish any projects. So, I guess, what it boils down to, is that I had to make a behavior modification and realize that I have to do it on my own, and that I can gripe and groan and read about other's success on Hacker News all I wanted, but if I wanted to be successful, it was all up to me.

I have to agree with the commenters. You should ultimately build on whatever you're comfortable with in order to get your product out the door. If you have to worry about optimization and scalability later, then you will have to cross that bridge when you get to it, but it is a good problem to have. Aside from that, I can say that Node.js is an ultra fast, low footprint platform. The amount of throughput that you can get out of node is pretty incredible.

Great work. Looks professional and polished.

Love it. Thank you.

Was this list derived from the Facebook page?

That's a neat idea.

So, I added all of the resources up to this point in the link: http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/

Feel free to add more to this list.

This is pretty cool. Do you have any idea if this stuff is manually entered, or does he mine HN for it?

I agree with this to a point. You should produce code in whatever language you are most proficient/comfortable with, pending that language is suitable for the domain in which you are producing code in. I wouldn't want to try to produce a web application in Assembly.NET, nor would I want to develop a low level component in Ruby. Depending on the domain, language becomes a bigger issue, which may result in you not having the ability to be language agnostic. But, in the overall sense, I do agree with what you're saying.