geoffschmidt

I am to blame for that. Here is our thinking on it:

- Though it "feels wrong" (definitely with you there), is it really any different from downloading an installer package and running it?

- You can just go to install.meteor.com in your browser if you want to see what the script does (or just leave off the | sh), which is arguably better than other installation mechanisms.

Curious to hear people's thoughts :)

Well, I am one of the Meteor devs, and I used to work at Asana :) Luna is an astonishing codebase, and Meteor is a small fraction of it in sophistication and functionality. But we think there's room for a lighter weight framework for the masses.

Monetization: We're still figuring that out. For now, we just want to see what people do with it. We think a lot about companies like redhat and mysql, and how they have been successful while building open ecosystems.

Thanks for the feedback about the beginning of the demo. We had a really tough time with the site and the video because the people who are interested in frameworks like Meteor come from a lot of different backgrounds. Some people have written half a dozen Backbone applications and have written their own highly scalable node.js cache invalidation servers, while other people have suggested that we take the word "REST" off the homepage because it's confusing to new developers.

It's tough to find a pace that holds the attention of the experienced people while not losing the people that are new to web development.

Certainly! Take a look at Meteor.methods. That lets you define a method that the client can call without necessarily having the source. (If you give the client the source it will be able to do predictive latency compensation. But you don't have to. Or you can give the client a "stub" implementation that just inserts some placeholder records, while the server goes off and moves the forklifts around your warehouse over CORBA, or whatever.)

insert/update/remove are actually just "newbie helper" shortcuts on top of the underlying latency-compensated RPC mechanism (which is documented under 'Meteor.methods'.)

Once the auth branch lands, you'll have two choices.

One options is, you can turn off the shortcuts entirely, and write a method for each scenario where the client would be allowed to write to the database. This gives you the same security model as a REST API.

Or, you can register an authorization-check hook with insert/update/remove, so you can vet each write and decide whether to allow it or reject it. This might work well with an ORM where you've marked some fields as writable, and some as protected.

We visit a lot, but we all live in the Bay area these days.

Hey everyone! The four of us have been working very hard on this for the last six months, and we're excited to finally take the wraps off. Can't wait to hear what you think!

We've got a lot more stuff coming over the next few months, and if there are particular things you'd like us to do/prioritize, I'd love to hear about them!

He's 25 and already a two-time YC founder -- I think he's doing OK :)

If there were now 10X more startups, but only 2X more ideas per year, would that account for your depression?

There is a serious flaw in this analogy. It costs tens of millions of dollars to make a Hollywood blockbuster, and you don't find out if it was money well spent until opening weekend. But a couple of unemployed software developers can test out a startup idea for a few thousand dollars, and very plausibly get to millions of users or ramen profitability in a few months if the idea is good.

The incentives are totally different. So even if we agree that consumer media internet startups are becoming formulaic (I sure don't), this isn't the reason why.

The demand from what you dismissively call "social recipe sharing startups" is an insignificant fraction of the demand for software engineers. Techcrunch is not a good proxy for the job market.

How many people do you think are actually getting paid to write social recipe sharing software? Maybe 1000? There are ~1.5 million software engineers in the US alone. Even if you think that there are 10000, that's still less that 1% of all positions.

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm

No, this is just capitalism at work, and it's normal. Demand exceeds supply for software engineers, because humans need more software than ever before. Unemployment is high. Unemployed workers in other industries want to retrain as software engineers. This is exactly what's "supposed" to happen when workers are displaced from one industry.

You seem to be trying to imply that companies are hiring unqualified workers. I don't see any evidence of that -- do you?

Instead, they covered the interesting part, which is the differences between Exec and services like TaskRabbit (I've used several.)

> Unlike other services, it doesn’t make users manage a bidding process and vet offers.

Lately, whenever a startup is acquired, there have been haters that pop up on HN to say "That was actually a failure! A mere talent acquisition!" Even if the company sold for tens of millions of dollars and had millions of users. Usually, some irrelevant and dubiously sourced metrics are included, to demonstrate just how much of a "failure" the commenter thinks the founders are.

I think that's what pg is referencing.

Once it's been given? Unclear. Google "regulatory taking." When you downzone property you have to be worried about lawsuits. It seems like you could make a similar argument around copyright.

$995 - $12500, depending on where you want to go.

http://www.celestis.com/services.asp

Sure, but EMC and Mozy are a natural fit. It's not like he heard a really good song on the radio, and the next day EMC bought the record label.

It's as if you're saying "I don't understand what this part does, therefore it can't be that important."

Eliminating minimum wage or overtime pay would definitely have a material effect on the economy. Nobody disputes that. If you want to get rid of labor laws, you should either argue that that effect is desirable, or argue that while the effect is undesirable, freedom to contract is more important.

> the average user is far less sophisticated, perhaps a 12-year-old girl

Argh. The author just had to specify that the unsophisticated 12-year-old is a girl. Because, hey, a 12-year-old boy might be a larval hacker, right?

> or a grandfather

Old people is another category of people who hopelessly "unlike" the presumed Linux Magazine reader. They certainly aren't interested in microkernels, but let's make sure they feel suitably old and marginalized if they ever try to change that.

It can easy cost a thousand dollars to print 32 books.

For example, the fans of Jack Vance published an authoritative 44-set of his collected works, printed and bound similar to an encyclopedia. It was a nonprofit volunteer effort. The "reader's edition" was supposed to cost $1250 a set, but the price ultimately had to rise to $1500 to cover costs. The all-leather "deluxe edition" cost $3000.

http://www.vanceintegral.com/

They use a deceptive camera angle to make it look like it works much better than it does in reality. As thoughtful people, what are we supposed to conclude about hydrogen fuel cells?

It's still a great ad, and I enjoyed it. Some of the secondary press coverage is terrible though (PC World: "Mercedes makes invisible car, tricky to find where you parked it"; says that if the invisibility isn't perfect, it's because the LED sheet is too low resolution.)

Of course, it doesn't actually look invisible unless you're standing in exactly the right place. That is why the stationary shots at the beginning of the video look so much more "invisible" than the moving shots later in the video. If you pause on those later shots, you'll see that there are big discontinuities around the boundary of the car.

Thought experiment: imagine the car as a sheet of glass. Think of yourself standing at position A and looking at a point X on the glass. You see a position A' behind the glass. Now imagine moving to a position B and looking at the same point X on the glass. You see a different position B'. The LEDs don't know if you are at position A or B, so they can't know whether to show the light from A' or B'.

> If a good name will make your idea or product even 5% stickier, it follows that it may be worthwhile to spend 5% of your time just coming up with the name.

I'm a sucker for a great name, but this is misleading. If something will give you an x% better outcome, it doesn't follow that you should spend about x% of your resources on it.

It depends entirely on the opportunity costs, yeah? You should spend time on your name only when you believe that thinking about names for another hour will do more good than coding or talking to customers for another hour.

Don't confuse "simple" with "doesn't do much yet."

Exec does plenty. It planned an awesome weekend biking trip for my girlfriend and I, found me a great-sounding (and surprisingly affordable) stereo amp for my bedroom sound system, got me a new iphone (after minimaxing all of the plan options based on my historical usage and international travel plans), researched all of my options for cloud photo storage and got me set up, found me the most styling archival-quality inventor's notebook ever, helped me box up stuff and move it to storage, stocked our office with drinks.. gosh, probably some other things I'm forgetting. All in about a week and and a half. It rocks.

This was enough for Justin to sell me on offering a $100/month Exec credit to all of our employees (who am I kidding, I sold myself without any work whatsoever on their part.) So that quota-based, employer-pays billing system was the other thing they prioritized.

Like Uber, the genius of Exec is precisely that it is one text box and one button. More stuff on the webpage would probably make it worse.

Or the Philip K Dick version. Everything changes when the program has to analyze... itself.

On the other hand, the number of GOOD people with GOOD business ideas is almost always far less than the available capital. Angels don't want into any old deal; they all want into the best couple of deals. That is why YC Demo Day is so well attended.

As it turns out, users lie. They will often say whatever they think will please you, especially if they are your friends. They also have a hard time imagining how they will use products that don't exist, and a hard straightening out the reasons for their feelings. They will say "Yes, I totally want a site that will help me find cool things to do my city!" when what they really mean is "Yes, I wish I had more free time to go out with my friends!"

Ways to deal with this sad fact:

* Ask users "how much would you pay for this?" Follow up with "seriously, if I build it, you'll commit to paying that much?" Tends to bring them back to reality, but doesn't make sense for all products.

* Look for external evidence for user pain. If there is no tool on the market for doing X, but users manage to sorta-kinda cobble together four other products to sort of do X poorly, you can believe that they want X.

* Build quick little prototypes, as cheap as possible, and see what users actually do with them. (You've just done that -- good job :))

Here is the original article, which has slightly more info:

They "checked to make sure the flight wouldn’t be dangerous or illegal", and they used forecasts from "a website that calculates a weather balloon’s estimated landing spot based on input launch coordinates, prevailing winds, and balloon specs" to time the launch so that the balloon would land in Canada in the US.

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1120808--toronto-teens-s...

"We" are not "building" the economy in the sense that factory workers build a car. It is more like evolution. You start with some little molecules floating the ocean, you let the simulation run, and eventually you get a complex equilibrium that includes ants, giraffes, and those parasites that mind-control mice into getting eaten by cats.

You start with self-sufficient peasant farmers that don't want barbarians to take their stuff, you let the simulation run, you eventually get towns, feudalism, enough surplus food to feed a few scientists, the industrial revolution, world wars, the military-industrial complex, the internet, high frequency trading. There is not someone designing this progression. It is a system of particles that in each time step apply an update rule.

If we want to stop it, we need to figure out what force we can apply to the system to make it settle into a different equilibrium. That's not even the hard part, since the system is not very stable, and can collapse into new equilibria very quickly, just like natural ecosystems can when you introduce new species. What's hard is understanding the dynamics of the system well enough that you can steer it into a state that you want, and make it stay there. Otherwise it is like introducing kudzu for erosion control. Well, it sure controlled erosion!

I am not a fatalist or a nihilist. I don't believe that there is some universal predetermined order (I think giraffes are arbitrary) and I think that when we can understand a small corner of the system, targeted intervention can work. But it is not a question of finding the right "evil person" to beat up, or finding the right political dogma. It is a question of studying the system with the same intellectual modesty as an ecologist, and finding a few levers that we can responsibly use - and, yes, gathering enough force in one place that we can protect the levers from people that would rather they be set in different positions.

Let's look a little bit further down the road, say 100 or 200 years. If the computer is implanted in my head, can you compel me to give you the data in it? What if the computer is made partly of cells? Just how tightly integrated do I have to be with the storage device before it's part of the private, protected sphere of my personal consciousness?

I don't mean to be frivolous. As we become ever more dependent on cloud storage and mobile devices as extensions of our memories and our capabilities, we're eventually going to have revisit the legal boundaries of our personhood.

My communications with my attorney are subject to attorney-client privilege. It's almost like the attorney is considered to be a subprocess of me when he is thinking about my problems. We correctly see it as being in the public interest to allow me to communicate with my attorney without hindrance. Why shouldn't my communications with myself be given the same privilege?