Hacker News Reader

goodweedson Former Facebooker Scoops Up $1.4 Million for Freshplum (YC S11)

Man this guy's writing style is incredibly unclear and annoying.

I never liked the O'Reilly approach. At one point I had read 20 of their books and never felt like I learned anything. Some people can learn from references, but I really prefer Zed's "hard way" method which feels a lot like the Programmed Learning methodlogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning).

goodweedson Convore Shutting Down

Late last year I was in an incubator where Convore started. There were 2 other companies doing the same exact thing .. All of the YC companies were using HipChat, Convore seemed like "yet another copycat site to sign up for an account with". Chat is a solved problem. Let's move on.

goodweedson Garry's SF Guide to Where Your Startup Should Be

Downtown Oakland was sadly ignored. The nice side of Lake Merritt, as well as downtown and Jack London Square are generally overlooked. Maybe that's a good thing for my rent. I pay $1900 for an 1100 ft^2 2br/2bath right next to jack london square, with a pool, a hot tub, and soon with a 100mbps synchronous connection that will cost $45/month. BART is 4 blocks away and door to door I'm downtown in 30 minutes. I'm looking at downtown office space now and it's incredibly cheap, plus the business taxes are a lot cheaper.

The food scene isn't as great as Berkeley, but rent is 30% cheaper, and there are far fewer yuppy moms walking around with kids in strollers, which makes me happy. There has been a pretty solid core of hackers moving here in the past two years, generally people like me in our early '30s who have been in SF for a decade+ and have finally stopped drinking the "San Francisco is worth $4k for a 750 ft^2 apartment" koolaid.

goodweedson Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted?

It's hearsay, but a friend of mine who was there last year told me a pretty frightening story about how one of their engineers harassed and stalked my friend's co-worker for the duration of the conference. (word to the wise, women should never put their cell phone number on the business cards they hand out at conference filled with drunk, horny nerds)

goodweedson Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted?

Apples an oranges here. Linode kind of sucks, their performance is good but their pricing is whack and they're not really elastic .. a 1/2 month credit when you power down an instance is pretty lame. I won't do business with those guys after their behavior at hostingcon this year.

As to RackSpace I don't trust any tech company who has a 7:1 sales rep to engineer ratio. They are overpriced in all of their services, especially their managed dedicated servers (seriously, why does it take a week to have a server installed? it takes a week because they literally have a guy go out and image servers by hand. do you really want to wage your company's future on that sort of incompetence? I don't)

goodweedson Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers

The main reason to advertise on Yelp is extortion. If you don't pay Yelp their extortion fees, they only allow a small number of reviews for your business, and even worse, their algorithms pushes the negative reviews to the top. One of my friends' businesses currently has 200 "filtered" reviews and 19 posted reviews which in itself makes his business look incredibly shady (sure, he runs a dispensary, so he might be shady, but that's besides the point).

goodweedson "They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story

The video of this is often linked when people use the term "Meat Cloud" to describe tech companies who throw bodies at problems instead of process and automation.

goodweedson Yale Discovers a Fungus That Eats Plastic

There was an article about something similar on Slashdot a decade ago about CD/DVD-eating fungi.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/01/06/18/1317218/cd-eating...

goodweedson My U.S. Border Nightmare

Huh? I thought Virgin America canceled their routes between SFO and YYZ a year ago?

goodweedson "Ender's Game" movie happening

I received this email from Hattrack today:

Want to Be in Battle School? Open Casting Call for Extras in New Orleans This Weekend

Ender's Game open casting call being held at the Hilton Garden Inn located in the Warehouse District of New Orleans on Saturday, January 14th from 11am to 3pm.

Alexis Allen, along with Batherson Casting, are seeking bright and talented kids and teens ages 10-17 of varying ethnic background for the feature film production of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game"; based on one of the most famous science fiction novels of the last 40 years.

The film stars Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld and Abigail Breslin. Oscar-winning Director Gavin Hood will be filming Ender's Game in New Orleans from February until June 2012, providing those selected with up to 8 weeks of work.

To be considered, please come to the open call this weekend, located at the address below between 10am and 2pm

Hilton Garden Inn 1001 South Peters St New Orleans 70130

Please also bring a recent snapshot of yourself. Homeschooled students are especially encouraged, because of the work during school hours.

Please visit this site at <A HREF="http://www.hatrack.com>www.hatrack.com</A>

goodweedson Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?

Yes because a lot of wealthy people visit Hacker News. Angels, VCs, startup founders, hackers who had good exits, etc. If politics are owned by wealthy corporations and individuals, then let's throw some money against SOPA.

goodweedson Victorinox squeezes 1TB of high-speed storage into a Swiss Army Knife

I had a pair of nail clippers confiscated entering IAD a few years ago. Just inside the security terminal was the convenience store where i had purchased that set of nail clippers, so I purchased a new set and took them on the plane.

goodweedson How France’s Free will reinvent mobile

Sounds somewhat like a rip-off of republicwireless.com

goodweedson Buy (and rent) vs buy: a hacker's view on housing

I've spent the past 4 months obsessively browsing craigslist. This summer I moved out of an apartment (non rent-controlled) because my rent was increased from $2850 to $4,150. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/sfc?query=&srchTy... is a search of 2br apartments in the city of san francisco, all neighborhoods. It returns 253 listings. Raising that to 3000 -> 4000 gives you 265 listings.

If I exclude the neighborhoods where I wouldn't live due to distance, safety, or a dislike of feeling like I'm in the burbs (bayview, excelsior, ingleside, north beach (fuck tourists), portola, richmond/seacliff, sunset, tenderloin) treasure island) then those searches (http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/sfc?query=&srchTy...) drop down to 106 and 184 apartments, respectively.

The competition for apartments is fierce right now due to a combination lack of credit keeping people leasing rather than owning, and the current tech bubble having imported 10s of thousands of new dot-commies happy to spend 50% of their salaries on housing, because they're young and stupid.

If you make under $150k, are fiscally conservative and don't want to live with roommates, then you're priced out of San Francisco.

goodweedson Is online dating a failure?

Perhaps culture is changing, ancient religious customs are failing, and those of us who are inclined towards monogamy are eschewing marriage while still committing to our life partners? Also, perhaps homosexuality has hit the point culturally where those who otherwise would have lived an unhappy false life of heterosexuality are now free enough to be gay, and gay marriage is mostly illegal in this country.

goodweedson Buy (and rent) vs buy: a hacker's view on housing

Your number for SF is a bit outdated, add an extra $1k.

goodweedson Being the X of Y: Defining your place in the startup world

Whenever somebody pitches me on "We're the facebook for N" or "We're a groupon for N" I tune them out and find something more interesting to focus on, like the cracks in the sidewalk or that edge on the brown paper wrapper they add to a coffee cup to make sure that you don't burn yourself and sue them. What's that thing called?

goodweedson [dead]

U kind of see the point of objection if someone drops his pants in a picture that everyone can see.

This logic always confounds me. We are born naked, our natural state is to be without clothes. Worse still we are born into a society whose rules are based on a religion we may or may not subscribe to, but we still have to follow these rules under penalty of enslavement (prison) or physical harm to our bodies. Those naked bodies we were born with which offends some sense of religious propriety.

goodweedson End artificial scarcities to increase productivity

Bicycles! I ride my mountain bike pretty hard any time I go out for fun, and sometimes come back with an out of true wheel, a screwed drive train, bent derailleurs/disc brakes/frame/etc. This got in the way of my daily commuting/exercising so I decided I needed to have a good road bike, and a spare cheap mountain bike to make sure I can still go out to have fun, even if my primary mtb is in the middle of surgery. Having three bikes also means that when friends are in town visiting, I can show them around the city without having to resort to expensive taxis/zipcars or public transit.

goodweedson Ask HN: is it possible to earn a living US wage at oDesk?

Primarily devops consulting. $250/hour is what I'll charge for emergency work from unknown entities, poorly managed entities, or for piece work from customers who aren't likely to be a significant source of project work. For small projects I don't bill hourly, but rather I'll decide that a piece of work is about 4 hours of my time, and that I'm uninterested in doing it for less than $1k.

goodweedson Ask HN: is it possible to earn a living US wage at oDesk?

Over the past 7 years using the different sites I've turned down 20 projects that I've been asked to bid on, and have only taken one when I was really in dire straits. You could probably make more on odesk than at mcdonalds, but you'll make 5-8x as much by building up a network on linkedin, and by posting your resume to craigslist once per week. I set my contracting rate on a sliding scale from $250/hour down to $125/hour based on commitment, project, and how much I like the guy I'm talking with. I manage to bill out 750-1250 hours per year depending on how much I care to work versus how much I desire to travel. I couldn't fathom managing to bill out at more than $35/hour on oDesk, and even then I would be considered expensive.

oDesk/elance/etc is where cheapskates who don't know what they want or how to ask for it go to get what they pay for from guys in India and Romania who don't know how to accomplish the work they're being paid to do.

goodweedson Startup.com a movie about the last startup bubble

Every time I sit in a coffee shop and listen to some guy at the next table pitch his silly social networking startup, this movie flashes before my eyes, and I start laughing maniacally.

goodweedson Poll: Did you transfer your domains from GoDaddy today?

About 25 domains, though I found out there was a catch around transferring domains within 30 days of their expiration date, so it's more like 21.

goodweedson Look out, Nissan Leaf: Tesla S will sell for under $50,000, run for 160 miles

By which objective system of measurement do you make this claim? I'm curious.

goodweedson Look out, Nissan Leaf: Tesla S will sell for under $50,000, run for 160 miles

Tesla produces publicity rather more than cars.

Very well said! Tesla is in the business of marketing their brand and begging for corporate welfare, they only manage to build products as a side-effect.

goodweedson What's really behind Twitter's staff exodus

By not firing him on the spot they sent a message to their employees that this is acceptable behavior and have created a hostile, fearful work environment for their female employees. They have also allowed Florian to attend other conferences and represent Twitter, which discourages other women from wanting to attend these conferences, and from wanting to interact with brogrammers from Twitter. Their lack of action is wrong in so many ways that if you don't understand it, I feel really sorry for you, because you were clearly raised without a father, or at least without a father who knew how to teach you to be a man.

And for some reason, it's always germans. A german from VW violently raped one of my father's engineers at a conference 20 years ago, and VW tried pretty hard to cover it up. Since dad is now dead, I don't feel sorry to say that he beat this man to within an inch of his life, and then had him arrested.

goodweedson What's really behind Twitter's staff exodus

When you do it repeatedly and refuse to take no for an answer (like the jerk in my anecdote) that's the problem. Also realize that every woman at a conference gets hit on by about 20% of the men she talks with. At the last conference I attended our marketing coordinator decided to draw a penis on every business card given to her by a guy who hit on her. Out of something like 200 cards, 39 were sorted out into the penis pile.

When you hit on a woman while she's working, you're not going to get laid, you're just going to be the latest in a long string of men making her life hell that day.

goodweedson What's really behind Twitter's staff exodus

Are you at a conference in order to expand your professional network and to learn, or are you there to be a sleazebag?

goodweedson What's really behind Twitter's staff exodus

Consider conferences like your office. Sure you can hit on a woman, free speech is a right, but you're also a dick for doing so, and should be ejected from the conference, or the office when your employer finds out.