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geekfactoron TC Cribs: Scribd office tour

Same thought exactly. Wild launch party, anyone?

geekfactoron Real-Life Massive Multi-Player Spy Game

Promoting a game like this would be an interesting way for China, Russia, NastyCorp, etc. (insert bad guy) to cultivate a network of HUMINT sources within the U.S. for low priority work. Create and run it as a game until you've got someone who lives near that scientist you want to keep tabs on:

"Welcome operative. Your neighbor at 2201 Main is also playing, and is your next target. To earn points, select from the missions below:

(500 points) For each day of the week of 2/24, call your handler at 212-555-1212 [twilio number] and report the time that the target returns home from work.

(1000 points) Your target has left an important clue in his trash. Rifle through his trash midday to find the clue. You will have to determine what it is. When you've found it, mail it to 2222 Anystreet."

geekfactoron Ex-Spy Runs His Own Private C.I.A.

This article reads like the back-story of a season of 24...

Owner of intelligence-agency-for-hire is "determined to remain a player." President/government has a different take on things and attempts to shut down the agency. Agency plants WMDs on American soil in order to distract country and guarantee relevance.

Wait. That was a season of 24.

Oh well. In actuality I'm surprised at myself for being surprised that such outfits exist.

geekfactoron "There's a Slide For That" - Generic Slides to Avoid in your Pitch

tl;dr: please make sure you understand and can speak to each of the slides in your deck, especially these most common ones.

Note that this is very different from the takeaway suggested by the title -- avoid these slides. That may be the poster's opinion, but there is no indication in the article that it is that of the article's author.

geekfactoron The Most-Read Blogs By Venture Capitalists

Note though that the original source uses bold to indicate blogs that have seen increased traffic over Q409 by 1,000+ uniques/month, while the WSJ says simply "the blogs in bold saw traffic growth."

geekfactoron The Most-Read Blogs By Venture Capitalists

Looks like I missed an opportunity for a grand click-bait headline: "David Skok dissed by Wall Street Journal".

Here is the list according to the original source[1]:

  1. Paul Graham (@paulg), YCombinator, Essays (97,227)
  2. Fred Wilson (@fredwilson), Union Square Ventures, A VC (81,483)
  3. Mark Suster (@msuster), GRP Partners, Both Sides of the Table (53,655)
  4. Brad Feld (@bradfeld), Foundry Group, Feld Thoughts (38,821)
  5. Chris Dixon (@cdixon), Founder Collective, cdixon.org (20,988)
  6. David Skok (@bostonvc), Matrix Partners, For Entrepreneurs (14,173)
  7. Charlie O’Donnell (@ceonyc), First Round Capital, This is Going to be Big (13,970)
  8. Larry Cheng (@larryvc), Volition Capital, Thinking About Thinking (13,215)
  9. Dave McClure (@500startups), Founders Fund, Master of 500 Hats (11,127)
  10. Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz), Andreesen Horowitz, Ben’s Blog (10,686)

[1] http://larrycheng.com/2011/01/19/venture-capital-vc-blog-dir...

Skok's blog comes in at number 6 on the original list, but has disappeared from the WSJ's list without explanation.

Too bad because there's a lot of great stuff on that blog and the site in general.

geekfactoron The Most-Read Blogs By Venture Capitalists

"(The blogs in bold saw traffic growth.)"

geekfactoron Easing into SICP

Marking something as a sticky is like noting something as an FAQ -- usually for the benefit of those that come along later, as opposed to oneself.

geekfactoron Piracy Doubled My App Sales

Does the author present any empirical evidence of piracy, or is this solely an assumption based on the the sales pattern not meeting his expectations?

geekfactoron Threewords.me is up for private auction

Disagree with public bids in this case. Perhaps the right approach for something that will be priced based on fundamentals or intrinsic value, but in this case the value will come from finding a visionary/strategic buyer. By definition these will be outliers thus public bids would put downward pressure on perceived value.

geekfactoron Ask HN: Please review my startup: TheSunnyTrail

And this is why HN is fucking awesome.

geekfactoron Django Deployment Workshop by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

I learned a lot by watching this and I highly recommend it but the viewer should be warned that many of the tools and techniques seem to have fallen out of favor in the Django community.

In my personal experience nginx+gunicorn turned out to be much easier to deal with than the reference Apache+mod_wsgi. It also seems to be JKM's current preference. Likewise, buildout, while very powerful can be a bit burdensome, and has fallen out of favor relative to pip+virtualenv.

For more current info, check out this extended chat with JKM and other lead Django developers here:

[discuss] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112160 [direct] http://www.revsys.com/officehours/2010/nov/05/

Note: This video is a dup to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1830696 though I'm surprised that post only got one point. There are probably others.

geekfactoron Why You Need to Learn JavaScript

I don't think that is implied in the article, so much as the fact(?) that fully understanding one requires a healthy understanding of the other.

Question mark b/c I don't know Scala, but as it is a JVM language my guess is that you would need to know a bit about Java and the JVM to really grok it.

geekfactoron Why do ebooks cost so much?

In comparing the cost drivers of physical vs electonic books, in addition to physical manufacturing the cost of physical distribution must also be considered. The latter includes both labor and fuel costs.

I would have imagined these physical costs to be significant, though not the main or dominant cost drivers.

I would also love to see some numbers.

Update: Clearly ebook distribution has costs that physical book distribution does not. The implication here is that I believe the marginal costs of electronic distribution, on a per-book or even per-title basis, to be minimal relative to physical. But I acknowledge that this too is only in my imagination and not based on empirical fact.

geekfactoron Why do ebooks cost so much?

In April of 2010, 5 of the major publishers (Penguin/Putnam being one of them) instituted what is now called Agency Pricing.

Can anyone explain how this isn't considered price fixing, collusion or otherwise anti-competitive?

geekfactoron DropQuest 2011

Me: "Cool, that was fun, and I got another gig of space."

My wife: "Yes, much better than forcing the kids to open Dropbox accounts."

(Which I did once, when I needed to share a big file!)

Doh!

geekfactoron DropQuest 2011

Funny Acorn didn't work but PS did. Go figure.

geekfactoron DropQuest 2011

Yeah, I got that, with hex and all, but when I use digital color meter I get a different reading on each of my monitors, thus the question.

geekfactoron DropQuest 2011

Is it possible that Step 17 is platform dependent?

geekfactoron Discuss HN: Dropbox Scavenger Hunt Thread

284, what now?

EDIT: Nevermind, that was easy.

geekfactoron 10 petabytes - visualized

I love #3, especially the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!

geekfactoron Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

Even if the Western countries did do as the OP proposes, it would simply result in a shift to non-Western suppliers such as the Chinese-owned Huawei.

geekfactoron Selling to small businesses is damn hard. Here’s How.

Hmmm, I found this post underwhelming, and it didn't deliver on the title for me.

The observations up front apply to people in general, not just small business owners. People are busy, impatient, prideful, etc.

The recommendations are similarly lightweight. Be attentive, be nice, be patient. K, thx.

geekfactoron Progressive Signup: A Better User Signup Process

Is there a catalog of Web/conversion optimization patterns like this? That would be pretty interesting.

geekfactoron Drupal 7 Released

I love Drupal but it's not a great testament to the technology when the announcement site is broken:

http://screencast.com/t/RE6gn0gIZL

geekfactoron Digg Founder Kevin Rose Launches Private Newsletter Called Foundation

Can you give me an example? Not that I don't believe you, I'm just curious about what's available with premium.

According to the site the main difference with premium is that you get access to programs older than two weeks. But there are lots of older programs available both via the web site and via iTunes.

I kind of assumed the premium program was donationware.

geekfactoron Digg Founder Kevin Rose Launches Private Newsletter Called Foundation

If you haven't already checked out Andrew Warner's Mixergy (http://mixergy.com) you should.

He interviews these kinds of people all the time and while the (usually Skype-based) interviews aren't fancy, the content is fantastic. Andrew is a great interviewer and he digs deep into the core of whatever the issue at hand is.

geekfactoron RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

geekfactoron Sacked by a Google algorithm

Agreed. I don't know the AdSense agreement at all, but I'd think this is a smart argument for creating separate LLCs (or other business entity) for each of your online endeavors.

geekfactoron Apple is not a luxury brand

Ah. Thought there was a new app, "Ultimate Design," that I needed to investigate :-)