geoffc

CPAN is the killer app for Perl. Every time I flip across to another language I usually love the syntax and structures but the lack of a CPAN equivalent is always grating and I usually end up right back at Perl to get stuff done fast.

>Wow. I wonder, have you and this smug author ever considered that you are the problem?

I'm positive I am part of the problem but I haven't found a better way for me to build a top notch team given my skill set and inclinations. As we grew I hired a good engineering manager who was able to reduce that ratio significantly.

To reiterate, in the interview process I explicitly lay out the methodology and all the risks involved as I understand the pain, stress and cost that a failed hiring causes. The end result of all of this was a very talented and efficient team that produced a great product which dominates it's vertical.

This works incredibly well. At my last company I fired about a third of the engineers I hired after 3 to 6 months and ended up with a great technical team. I never know how good an engineer is going to be during the interview process but after 6 months it is blindingly clear.

I am upfront about the winnowing process during the interview, it scares some candidates away but I often get a very positive reaction to this "meritocracy by proof" approach. Another advantage is you can take some flyers on people with nontraditional backgrounds and find the occasionally diamond in the rough.

That's cool! I'm going to try an omaha steak in my cooler, it is already vacuum sealed so as far as I can see I just throw the steak in the hot water and go have a few cold beverages while it cooks. Mmmmmh.

Agreed it is not accurate for huge servers and IO bound cases but I have found it to be a good rule of thumb for a LAMP web application stack on anything from single to 8 core machines.

It is a useful metric to start digging deeper into the machine.

My rule of thumb is that the end users of a web application will perceive that the system is "slow" if the 1 minute load average is above 4 on the application or database server.

When stocks tumble the companies usually keep operating along, the shareholders take the big haircut.

I have a good story about this market. A friend of mine is doing this and he bought a $20M portfolio of bad boat loans for less than 1/2 cent on the dollar. He closes on the portfolio and the next day gets a call from a bank in Texas that has repossessed a boat in the portfolio and wants to know his address so they can ship it to him. He tells them to sell the boat ASAP and send him the proceeds. The boat sells for more than he paid for the entire portfolio. There is some gold in this muck.

One word of caution on this is that to collect mortgage payments you have to be licensed as a bank in that state and some states have hefty penalties for illegal collection if you aren't.

Have to disagree on point 4 about Boston. I have raised VC during the boom and the bust here, it is do-able, maybe not as easy as the Valley but not impossible either. Agreed on the importance of customer traction.

I went with Linode because of the pricing and am happy with the service so far. Only nit is that if you want more than 1 additional IP address for a machine you need to justify the address by installing a commercial SSL cert on it.

I'm using jquery and google analytics to track this. Tie the interface actions into different analytic tags and use google to store and display the activity.

http://www.thewhyandthehow.com/tracking-events-with-google-a...

The idea for this site came from a comment from yannis on my prior HN submission for townflier.com. Sadly eBay sent me a form letter rejection for the affiliate network but I like the way the site turned out so I'm launching it anyway to see if anyone else finds it useful.

The site now does an IP address location and zooms you to the state level.

Agreed. First step was getting the software working, the next far bigger step is figuring out how to get content into the system and distribution.

Wow this is why I love HN, Thanks!

Nope running at Linode. Postgres/postgis and mod_perl on the back end sending JSON to the UI rendered in javascript.

Thanks for the information on Gumtree. I will look at that.

If you are using a location enabled browser like the latest version of firefox it will ask and try to use that location. The javascript uses the navigator.geolocation object.

Thanks for the ebay pointer I will look at it. I know scraping craigslist is not the way to go :-)

Yes, we have discussed allowing private or subscription townfliers for micro-communities. That might be the next step.

postal code and radius is another approach but what I like is that the push pins on the map quickly show you where everything is. Very useful for say planning a trip to multiple yard sales.

I couldn't figure out a better way to select a geographic region and hope that over time online map usage becomes ubiquitous

Thanks for the feedback. I was hoping to ride the twitter tersity trend :-) but agreed that we probably need to bump that limit and pictures would be cool.

The recovery.org data is all US based. Search on Kansas for example.

- Each posting has a spam link on it, if you click it the posting will disappear for you. Once enough different people click it the posting is deleted.

- Currently postings don't expire but are displayed time decayed. i.e. most recent first. Hopefully we can get enough traffic to where we have to address this :-)

- You don't have to enter your full address when you post. You can enter your town and the posting will be placed in the center of the town. You decide how much locational information to give out

- We need to get over the chicken and egg problem of enough postings first

Thanks for all the feedback!

Oooh, I like the five most recent item idea. Thanks.

The beta site is loaded with sample data so it is a little easier to see what is going on.

http://beta.townflier.com:8000/

Yes definitely global but currently only in english. The back end is designed to support other languages so we hope to get that at some point.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. This link is loaded with about 37K listings scraped from recovery.org.

http://beta.townflier.com:8000/

Thanks!

I got the idea for this when I was in a rural farming community in South Africa. The farmers traded all sorts of stuff using the local bulletin board and word of mouth rather than Craigslist. They knew about Craigslist but it did not cover their area effectively. Google maps is the centerpiece of the UI so that the users can select and search any area of the globe in a fine grained way.

Thanks for the feedback. If you would like to test the full cycle you can send me a location request at gcrawshaw@gmail.com

Sweet!! I got started on his DOS assembly book an eon ago. I'm buying this today.

For the acquired company you have traded in illiquid stock you have a lot of control over for illiquid stock you don't have control of. Only worth doing if you really, really believe in the acquiring company or can cash out a significant percentage of the stock.