j_b_f

This is a pretty fun project. Nice, lightweight, combines multiple sources. Kind of embarrassing for the news outlets though that google can produce a better version of a full-feed experience than they can.

What are the advantages to using any of these over the PayPal Direct Payment API? https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_dcc_hub-outside

VistA has an open source release called OpenVistA that is pretty well-supported: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista/

The volume of high-quality business and life observations you've been producing lately has been super impressive and inspiring. Keep up the great work!

I think he might mean "SimpleDB" where he says S3 and "SQL Azure" where he says SDS.

Man, this is a killer! I wish I had known that. Wish, wish, wish. Over the years I've poured hundreds of thousands of dollars down the toilet only to find that the customer had other objections (price/our size/whatever) rather than just pure feature objections.

Sure, if you have an urgent opportunity, sometimes you need to take it. But I had an employee once who suddenly quit to go to _med school_ - to which he had applied over a year earlier and never told us. It was devastating to the project he was on, the team, and to me personally since I had vouched for the hire.

In his defense, he was fresh out of college and thought it wasn't that big of a deal. So I sat down with him and explained that it WAS a big deal for a company our size, and he was super apologetic.

Linkbait riddled with spelling errors. Skip it!

This is actually a great Google Tech Talk on the language, definitely worth watching for anyone interested in Go.

Yeah, anyone who takes the formal requirements literally for a startup the size of Dropbox is probably not the type of person they're looking for. If you do a cover letter where you're like "I LOVE Dropbox and have used it for X years, have developed 10 Android apps (here are the links) and wrote a well-linked blog post on low-level networking over flaky 3G, oh and here's a ton of StackOverflow questions on mobile programming I answered" - you think they'll turn you away because you don't meet some arbitrary job posting requirement?

These postings are just written by other poor saps, on deadline, who generally just pull them out of their ass. They're not set in stone. (None of this applies to huge companies with rigorous HR screening of course.)

They are 100% not going to do that.

I was all set to write a snarky comment about the WSJ doing another piece on how (retrospectively) brilliant some outlier founder was until I read the piece and discovered that "wisdom" refers to a series of blog posts written by AdMob's Employee #1. Skip the WSJ and go straight to the source:

http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/23/omar-hamoui-on-ideas-an... http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/25/omar-hamoui-on-deals-an... http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/26/omar-hamoui-on-sales-an... http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/27/omar-hamoui-on-competit... http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/29/omar-hamoui-on-communic...

I'm not sure why I'd use this instead of http://answers.onstartups.com/ - I'm much more likely to participate in a community founded and managed by intelligent individuals that I respect. The site makes no mention of who's behind startups.com, why I should trust them, and how I know they won't violate that trust.

That said, it's cool that someone has based a megabucks domain name on Stack Exchange.

Extremely weird. Of course I would jump at the opportunity for another person to play me, if only to get a better sense of what others really think of my mannerisms, speech, actions, etc...

Of course, this rule is true for non-web-app businesses as well. Improvements in quality increase the likelihood that customers will come back, and returning customers usually have higher margins (due to lower sales & support costs) than new acquisitions.

Global Financial CrisOMGWTFauuuuughhh

@access_denied - wow, that actually makes me feel better. One other thing I wanted to point out was that it's not as if this came naturally to these guys; they have worked really hard for a very long time to get where they are.

Was it Blast Media? This old SvN blog post from Dec 07 talks about how they used them on a free trial: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/741-ask-37signals-10-ways-to-...

another reference: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/307-what-do-you-want-to-know

How do I remember all this junk and not stuff that really matters?!

I think it's a cost/benefit thing. You can probably watch a whole season of House in the time it takes to read one long book. I love fiction, but I certainly don't find his position hypocritical.

I agree with you about the abrupt ending but I think it's because the article was adapted from an upcoming book ("The Greatest Trade Ever" by Gregory Zuckerman).

Weird editing, but maybe the purpose was to make it abrupt enough that people who want to go get the book to figure out what happens next.

Also, if you don't mind paying for stuff, Launchbar is the shit.

I know we've been over this a million times before, but the whole "FAIL" thing really turns me off. I actually agree with the points but had to force myself to click the link because I immediately assumed the OP was a linkbating troll.

In the real world there aren't any constraints, but there are plenty of artificial limiters like the $5.

I had a great conversation with another small business owner the other day. She runs a small design firm that he wants to stay small and nimble. She encourages turnover because more senior employees demand higher salaries and better benefits, and upsets the overall balance of power for such a small firm. So 3-4 years is the longest they let anyone stay, unless they're on a partnership track (which one staffer currently is).

Obviously the dynamic with is different for hackers, and especially those working on a single product over time, but it was a refreshing perspective.

So basically they Wired is just writing about user-driven feature requests and spinning it into a "mob rule" meme? I'm not sure if that's what the article is about because I couldn't read past the capitalized "Retweet Incident" without cringing.

Funny + sad.

http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu/schedule.html - there you go.

Happened to me too today after I upgraded. Super annoying.

uhm... AT&T? Oh, wait, uh....

There's no relevant difference between GV and the plethora VOIP & dialer apps out there. At least none that would be explained away with a straight face by the "core functionality" argument.