mmmurf

Check out a project I'm working on: hellocreature.com. We have a rails plugin you can use (or you can just use our REST api) to send emails that are signed with DomainKeys and DKIM, and are stamped with HashCash. We also support SenderID, SPF, etc. We also have standard pricing that is lower than those other companies' highest volume plans.

We're obviously in beta now so the site's marketing copy has a bit of work needed yet, but I'd be happy to get you set up today for a free trial. We've been having superb deliverability with our clients so far and we have a bunch of other nice features you may want to use.

Just email me at matt (at) hellocreature.com

Do you happen to know any other examples of such things from biology, particularly in a shockingly small number of neurons?

Great explanation, btw.

looks like a useful product. Isn't it similar to the stuff Ray Ozzie was doing before Microsoft acquired him? I think it has great potential.

I haven't tried one hub yet but I plan to.

One killer feature would be drag and drop file sharing with automatic versioning.

perhaps, but if one doesn't broadly agree with Rand's morality about capitalism, then he/she probably has some sort of "capitalism is evil/greedy" view, which is something that really ought to be sorted out before one ends up starting a business :)

I see your point but if YC is about entrepreneurship then one's understanding of the morality of capitalism determines whether one views the entrepreneur as a greedy scoundrel or respectable citizen.

Your point is that rather than worrying about principles we should just take a poll and only discuss things that poll at close to 50%?

So-called entrepreneurs who are anti-Rand are typically the types whose projects are not really innovative, and depend more on bubble mentalities than on actual value added. If all you want is to have a VC look at your degree and your buzzwords and write a check, then you have no use for Rand's philosophy or any sort of moral defense of capitalism -- yours is a world of saying what others want to hear and getting in good with the powerful.

Uh, do you feel that as someone who emerged from his/her mother's vagina on American soil you are deserving of more than someone who emerged elsewhere? Why shouldn't someone who is willing to work be allowed to come here to be hired by someone who willingly wants to hire them?

The US does not have open immigration, nor is it opening. Both Obama and McCain oppose(d) any meaningful increase in immigration.

Do you have a secular definition of greed to offer, so that someone might have a shot at answering your question?

ruby gets more and more hard core every day... this is awesome.

This is a gimmick. You can get the same deal 365 days a year from other companies, just do a google search.

I agree. It's just not an area that allows for much small business activity. The SEC shut down prosper.com, for example. To innovate one needs huge teams of lawyers and the sympathies of bureaucrats.

The bailouts, designed to prop up failing firms, are explicitly preventing the Schumpeterian destruction and creative reorganization that _should_ allow for entrepreneurs and others with creative ideas to jump in.

If there ever was any room for innovation in finance I'd say it's been dead for about 5 years... and it's no surprise that hedge funds (one of the few small business opportunities in finance) get blamed whenever there are problems, and are being regulated out of existence.

Could you elaborate on this?

Is portrait a parody? I read it to get acquainted with Stephen in anticipation of reading Ulysses, but haven't read Ulysses yet.

Maybe I just don't find it funny. I don't find Stephen Colbert the least bit funny either (though I think Jon Stewart is extremely funny).

This one reads like it was written by someone who got through the first 50 pages of Atlas Shrugged, read the cliffs notes, got a D on a paper, and has resented the style and the ideas ever since.

More accurately, there would be a shmarmy Wesley Mouch advocating Fannie and Freddie, and the need to repeal the Glass Stiegel act.

The most productive people in the world have never cared about finance or banking.

The only similarity between anything YC related and the credit crisis is that some business models are purely designed to catch a bubble. If you do that you are just speculating with code rather than financial instruments.

True entrepreneurship adds value and builds businesses that you can self-fund and that people will pay for, without trying to lure in a million visitors and a few investors with some sort of undisclosed, roulette-wheel business model.

In other words, how to shave the yak for about 6 months setting up a complicated security infrastructure.

These may all be good practices, but how many of them assume that Amazon itself will get hacked?

For entrepreneur on a budget, isn't #20 the most important one?

I think it's when you are doing it for the love, and it's also successful. The convergence of pleasure and productivity (in an economic sense).

By this logic, as a founder you may realize you've created something successful and fun but it's time to bring in different people to do things that you are no longer economically optimal to do.

Jeff Bezos is a great example of someone who clearly has a fun time every single day and whose creativity is still vital to Amazon's performance.

Perhaps my M was worn out, but it required so much force to press the keys that I got in the habit of pressing them hard, on any keyboard even w/o positive click.

I never had a problem with finding it ambiguous whether a key actually got pressed before using the M, except on ultra cheapo keyboards made in the early 90s.

Before I used the M I'd type with soft, smooth motions. Typing on a well designed computer keyboard bears no resemblance to pounding on an old fashioned mechanical typewriter, which is (I believe) what the M was trying to mimic.

Oh forgot one thing. You should expect to get free shipping on an order that size. When it gets to the last negotiation then you can say "Ok, I'll do it if you can get me free 2 day shipping on it".

You can save a lot of money by going with the sales guy. Just be sure he knows that you are growing and you'll be placing a big order every few months.

First go to the Dell website and price out the equipment. Then when you're speaking to the sales guy, tell him you priced it out on the website and it came out to about 88% of the actual price the site gave you.

Then tell him you've heard that talking to the sales guy is the way to start a business relationship and that you were hoping he could quote it out for you. Tell him you're ready to make the purchase decision immediately but the pricing has to make sense. Tell him the pricing on the website looks like it's marked up quite a bit.

It may take him a day or more to generate the quote.

Be aware that he has tremendous room to wiggle on some items, but not on others. Last order I placed the salesman could discount heavily some items but not others. You don't really care as long as the overall price makes sense. So when you eventually go over the quote with him, be sure to focus on your "budget" for the equipment, and not on where the specific pricing comes from.

You should also have a simultaneous dialog like this going with a rep from any other companies you'd buy from.

To the salesperson, the equation is effort vs time. If he knows you're ready to buy soon, then he has every incentive to make you a good deal b/c in a day the sale will be made and so he'll be willing to take a small commission in exchange for a quick sale. He has some constraints about how he can price items, but has a lot of flexibility on price.

If you're buying 10 to 20 servers you should be looking at least a 25% discount off of the website price. The only reason they publish those prices is to give the salesperson a starting point to work down from (or to sucker naive shoppers into paying full price via the web).

You want to come across as decisive and ready to buy at all times, if only he can solve the "issues with the pricing".

Frankly Dell's sales process stinks, and it is annoying to have to work with some of the salespeople there. But I've saved a substantial amount of money over the web prices by negotiating with them, so it's worth it.

You may also be able to save money by modifying some of the configurations slightly, b/c Dell lets salespeople discount based on the need to move inventory.

Don't be afraid to tell the salesperson it's OK if he needs to ask permission from his manager to make the deal, but that you're eager to get the order placed today. Tell him he can put you on hold while he speaks to the manager.

Good luck!

this is a great keyboard... i wish i could get one retrofitted onto my laptop... i stopped using it b/c switching back and forth between it and my laptop keyboard was costing about 15 wpm in errors.

I don't recommend the model M. I used one for a few years and enjoyed the feedback and noise, but I found that it got me in the habit of pounding the keys really hard with my fingers.... overall not a good strategy for RSI prevention.

Modern quiet keyboards are designed precisely enough that a small amount of resistance is all you need to type comfortably and accurately.

it doesn't? The average prisoner has an IQ that is one standard deviation below the mean. People whose IQ is one or two standard deviations above the mean rarely go to prison.

People get involved in free software for all kinds of reasons. I personally prefer the MIT license philosophy (pure freedom) over the GPL philsophy (restricted freedom)... the GPL has done better than the BSD license b/c it's more free, and over time the MIT license will likely triumph, at least to the extent that linux itself being GPL doesn't hinder progress too much.

It's a bit ironic that the whole point of the GPL is to control how others use the code!

My point is simply that Ubuntu is not an ideological undertaking, it's a business. Thus, it should have a simple screen that loads on the first boot that lets a new user avoid ending up with a crippled system, when perfectly good (free as in beer) software exists.

This will only help the Free Software world, since more people using Linux means more support for existing open source code and for new projects.

The real problem with closed source is that it fails to harness the willing contributors who would fix bugs, etc. Even OpenLaszlo uses the adobe runtime... so by shipping Ubuntu w/o a working swf runtime installed, Ubuntu's maintainers are harming at least one vibrant open source project.

Uh, so you're saying that the reason Ubuntu doesn't ship with Flash installed is to inconvenience users so that they will better appreciate free software -- because it <i>did</i> come installed unlike the evil proprietary Flash player?

Just as Ubuntu now has "restricted drivers" it should also have "popular non-free apps", and a screen should appear on the first boot that lets the user install flash, skype, etc.

It seems silly that a hard line on a few small apps is making it so nearly any windows or mac user will get scared off by Ubuntu in the first 10 minutes.

Correct. I have no idea why the Gimp designers didn't go with a GUI that is more like photoshop. Someone had a fork called GimpShop but I don't think it's had much maintenance.

This is a pure publicity stunt by Arrington. He was probably suffering from a lull in traffic...

dean kamen

ayn rand

jay z

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