gphil

> nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature.

Not to mention the ability to reply to those emails to add new content to those products. Building around email as a messaging backbone is incredibly powerful.

Not really. Portland is the 19th largest MSA and 29th largest city in US. There is only one city in the US that is 10x Portland in population (NY) and there are no MSAs that are 10x the size of Portland's (not even NY's.)

You don't need to be NY for transit to make a huge difference. Portland is a squarely mid-size American city and its quality transit is a key selling point.

My company makes a rent per sqft map that somewhat answers this question:

https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/Boston-Cambridge-Q...

https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oa...

Looking quickly, rents per sqft seem a shade higher in SF but not by a wide margin.

> my experience business people aren't dumb enough to think that a "software solutions engineer" is anything different to a plain old programmer

This is true, but I think misses the broader point of the article. It's not really about the title you have (though that's unfortunately what the name of the article suggests), it's about explaining your personal value to an employer in terms of business value created.

What a mess. The current real estate "system" in SF isn't serving anybody well.

> a single set of initial conditions can only result in one outcome

Nobody knows if this is true or not, or even whether we could know this to be true or not.

For more info: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

Off the top of my head, I remember the engineers' initial idea was to reduce the weight of a load in a truck. Then, they realized the technology could be used to build a time machine.

I'm certainly not an expert on this, but I think what hnal943 said is the general motivation behind these types of agreements. The one "non-compete" agreement that I've signed in my career covered both non-competition and non-solicitation all in one, and I was using the term to cover all of that.

I think the most common use case of a non-compete is to prevent employees who have developed strong customer relationships during their time at a firm from leaving that firm and bringing those customers with them.

Yeah, I was going to bring this up also. Obviously there are international markets as well, and the mere existence of Uber could in itself grow the size of this industry. However, if they are expected to become Google or Facebook-sized they're going to have to tap into some other verticals.

I'm curious about this too--clj-spark didn't work for me so I'm currently prototyping a job using the Java bindings in Clojure. If I end up wrapping the Java bindings in a useful way I would consider putting together some kind of release if there's community interest in that.

I think it's this podcast, where Rich Hickey explains codeq:

http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2012/10/12/rich-hickey-podcas...

Yep, I have a BA in Philosophy, have been employed as a Software Engineer, and am now the CTO of a SaaS startup.

I got into web stuff before going to college, but decided that a CS major wasn't really for me even though I wanted to make software for a living. Philosophy was my favorite subject so I decided to major in it. I don't regret that decision at all. I think my coursework has been very valuable to my career (even if not all employers would necessarily agree) in terms of my analytical thinking and problem-solving skills.

I think you should put a note on the form to explain this, I had the same confusion as the parent commenter.

Being able to link to and follow links to specific content is a defining feature of the web that has been disrupted by single-page JS and mobile apps that don't support it.

I always find it frustrating when I run into this, so I'm glad to see people are trying to fix it.

> Well, that's because we've never had a cryptocurrency of this scale before.

I agree. I was mostly trying to assert that we shouldn't confidently make predictions in the absence of data.

I didn't know about the Austrian School's attitude toward empirical research--no wonder I don't agree with what they say.

> What if Bitcoin does recover?

This is what's interesting to me about all of this. I don't think anyone knows whether or not it's going to work in the long term. The only predictions (both positive and negative) that I've seen have come from dogmatism and not from data. The ultimate test is whether or not it actually works. Very rarely are radical ideas like this put to the test, which is why it's so exciting to watch it unfold. I have no idea what is going to happen.

There are clauses in some agreements to prevent this from happening.

Presumably, Zynga employees just didn't get these kind of rights.

> 70% of Americans now have Comcast as an option, but only 9% have Comcast as their only terrestrial TV option.

Thanks for pointing this out. It would be better for that second percentage to be zero, but this isn't that alarming.

> They keep saying this is 2-factor authentication, but without the first factor (something you know e.g. a password)

I always wonder about this even when there is a password. For most services, a phone compromise would be a total compromise. I rarely get prompted for a password on my phone (nor do I enjoy typing one when I'm trying to do something quickly.)

Based on street view (and my limited knowledge of Camden based on living across the Delaware River in Philadelphia) these are all corner stores and bodegas that in some cases may have some limited fresh food, but most of the sales volume is likely packaged goods.

The idea of a "food desert" as I understand it is that it's an area with limited access to nutritious foods. Most of Camden definitely qualifies, especially for residents without cars.

Looks like something is wrong with our median income data in Seattle. We're taking a look at it now.

Edit: we were missing the median income data for Washington state and a few other states. It's fixed now.

Only if the listeners started listening to the new band as often as the existing band. Number of "streams" == number of plays.

I actually walked through this thing a couple of weeks ago. It was a little weird, but I didn't feel "detained" at any point. It just felt like going through a high-tech turnstile, as others have theorized it would.

I just sold my pet Bitcoin that I bought for $80 a while back. This is getting crazy, I wonder who the buyers are?

This is a great analysis, I've observed some of the same trends. When there was less demand for the black cars, they could still operate like limos. Now it seems like they've just turned into glorified taxis.

A theory of mine is that disruptive startups always evolve to look more like the incumbents as they scale, and I think this might be another case in support of that.

Thank you for the feedback! We're rolling out our models as we acquire customers for our B2B product, and we have none in Portland yet, but hopefully it's only a matter of time.

Sorry about the performance issues, I will be looking into them right away.

https://kwelia.com -- we are taking a quantitative approach to determining the market rental value of apartments. This has not been done accurately on a large scale in the past, and I think we are the first to do it well.

Yeah, I think the first clause was retroactively added to the title, because I did click through to read it before I posted--although I could have missed it and be embarrassingly wrong...

In any case, I'm surprised my criticism got so much discussion. It's hardly novel to call TechCrunch myopic, and not very insightful in retrospect. It was kind of just a knee-jerk reaction to a confusing (for me) original title. It just goes to show how important geography is to people, I suppose.

Yep, I'm even a startup founder (see my profile for more) and I live in Philly.

I went to college on the East Coast, and found that I just generally liked being on the East Coast more. I like the cities on the East Coast much more than SF. While I do miss some of the outdoor opportunities nearby, that's not really what I'm optimizing for at this point in my life. Mostly, I love being able to live in a hip, walkable and affordable neighborhood and not breaking the bank.

I also don't put that much credence in the theory that you have to be in the Bay Area (or anywhere in particular) to build a successful startup.