pgroves

If the article's advice was taken, you'd end up renaming WebServer to be WebPage, but then would have nothing to name a WebPage. (Maybe WebPageSnapshot?)

Perhaps I should have qualified that statement with "in terms of large american companies", which is what Drucker was talking about.... Companies whose product catalog became bloated over the years in an effort to serve every need of every customer and ended up doing nothing terribly well.

"Indeed, the basic problem of U.S. competitive strength in the world economy today may well be product clutter." - Peter Drucker, Managing for Business Effectiveness, 1963

Sorry I don't have a link to the original article, I had to look it up in a book

Sound editors like audacity can slow down sections and then do pitch shifting to make it sound like a slow version of the original. It's very difficult to use those features to make a good recording (it usually sounds at least a little weird), but for doing quick and dirty analysis of a song that will be thrown out within a few minutes, it's fantastic and easy.

I've used this method a few times over the years and wish I had time to do it more. Now that this article made the connection to learning a new language, I can actually see myself learning a new language, which has always seemed like it would take too much time. Obsessing over sound clips in Audacity seems totally normal to me, though.

2) It definitely sounds like you're solving a problem a bit more general than just sports teams, so you may be selling yourself short. It sounds like something that could be used for any kind of 'meetup' style organization (where there are some scheduling issues plus some financial issues). I remember needing something like this many times in college when everybody was a part of a million different student organizations. So... you could make the main pitch more general but than have a sports team as your primary case-study.

2) In my humble opinion, you aren't likely to do anything with photo sharing that hasn't been done before, and it doesn't look like you're very focused on it anyway. If it was me, I wouldn't bother with that aspect.

So to answer your question, an RSS reader as sound as Google Reader but with a better interface is still an unsolved problem, IMO, and FastFlip was on the right track.

I was once in this exact position. I was the first employee and over the next few years a bunch of senior managers came in and each got 5-10x the stock I'd gotten.

When the whole thing got old, I looked around and saw that I didn't have much upside potential (especially since there had been dilution), my salary was below market, and I left.

What was incredible looking back is that something similar happened with a truly key engineer... someone who was recruited out of a university because he had more or less built the text mining library the company was using by himself. A product line rested on his shoulders, so he had a ton of responsibility, but when things got rough he didn't have enough reason to stick around.

Added: The point is, there are good times and bad times in startups. In the good times you should look around and decide who you really need to stick around in the bad times and give out stock accordingly.

2) IMO you don't need to worry that the developer is more interested in a paying gig. Being treated as a valuable professional who is compensated for their time is not a bad angle to keep the dev's head in the game. Act grateful that he's helping you do something you consider important and then pay him. That can still go a long way.

3) I'm biased (because I'm a developer not a V.C.), but I'd say "what you can do beforehand" is mainly just getting the product as far along as possible. It sounds like you've already taken the leap of faith so just try to get to v1.0 quickly. Building a product and then selling it is not as unreasonable as some market pre-validation advocates say it is.

4) If you really have taken the leap of faith, act like it. You are going to build this product and sell it. You're just going to have some meetings to see if the V.C.'s want to come along for the ride.

5) To paraphrase Sh*t My Dad Says: "Son, let women figure out why they won't date you, don't do it for them." Applies here as well. In a less coarse example, when I was 25 and working at my first startup I was frantically trying to get all our ducks in a row before some big meetings with V.C.'s and potential enterprise clients. The CEO told me, "Don't worry about it. At some point you have to stand up and say what you have to say and let them challenge you on it. That's where we're at."

The argument that it's a scam if it can't render grass blowing in the wind is ridiculous.

Reading the blog post, I now know how Notch would approach building such a thing, and that he thinks his approach wouldn't really work. I still have no idea how Euclidean's implementation actually works and neither does anyone else who I've seen comment on their demo video.

I've heard Fred Wilson say that V.C.'s can't afford to be assholes anymore because it would end up on twitter and their deal flow would dry up overnight. Well... where are they? Where are the scorned founders? Do they not know how to blog? When they get fired unfairly and screwed out of their stock (which does not appear to be that rare) are they banished from the internet? Is there something in their contracts that says they can't talk about being fired or they would have to give up what little scraps of compensation they are left with?

As an outsider, the lack of anything but glowing recommendations of investors from founders makes me think not all is as it seems. Is there an implicit fear of being black listed if you speak up, ending your career as an entrepreneur? Does hackernews, techcrunch, etc all suffer survivorship bias (and not waste a single digital word on the losers)?

Where are they?

(Of course there are other Google-wide policies (e.g. egregious spamming, illegal activity, etc) that do apply to all Google products, and violations of these policies could in fact lead to a Google-wide suspension.)

So don't post about your favorite torrents site that violates copyright law. Or if you're like me and live in Illinois, video tape a police officer because that violates wire tapping laws. Yes, I know I would be in violation of this policy if I sent an email from gmail about these things, but I'm guessing I'm more likely to get caught if it's on g+.

Keeping my gmail account active is worth far more to me than any potential benefits of google+ at this point.

In any event, the down votes on the grandparent were uncalled for.

I'm just saying that when a girl figures out you work 12 hours a day and live off of $25K a year, much of which comes from credit cards, it is a bit more of a "con" than a "pro" in their mind.

Disagree.

Try this: Google's analysis of the venture capital industry shows that companies do better when it's difficult for their investors to meddle in their business on a day to day basis.

Eventually, however, an open standards organization should come in and say "these are the standard features, let's encapsulate them in an open standard that everyone uses." This has been proven to be a very healthy way to get to an open standard that really works well in practice.

In 2011, I believe social media is ready to move to an open standard. The last five to ten years has seen a lot of technology built and verified by trial and error. There certainly has been enough capital investment in social media systems. The basics of what Facebook and Twitter do are a very good start. Something like OStatus can define the basics of what social media is by looking at what really works, which would not have been possible even a few years ago.

This is why I'm disappointed in google+. The social media industry is at the point in it's life cycle that it can move to an open standard. Google was in a unique position to ram it through all at once. Instead, they decided to make yet another closed system with minor improvements over the existing competitors. They may win lots of users in the short term but a bigger shift to open standards is coming, but now we have to wait longer for it.

Being able to share info across social media services would change the way social networks are used in a significant way for every user, every day.

Portability is a backup plan you hope to never use.

Otherwise, this comment makes me more interested in Go than I have been before. OCaml has a bazillion features that I never use, and since every OCaml program can look completely different by using those features, the libraries outside the standard lib are all but incompatible with my code.

I forget who said it, but the best advice I've heard from a V.C. is that one of the biggest mistakes they see is founders going overboard trying to avoid making the mistakes their last startup made.

That said, I had an experience at a startup that did what the author now considers "the right way." We went out and sold before we had a product built. We figured out the pitch that the customers wanted to hear and had all of our best leads ready to go. But then it took more like a 12 to 18 months to build the thing, not the 3 to 6 we were promising. Unless you've built something exactly like the current product before, there are always technical problems you don't anticipate, and they always get solved the same way: add more engineering time.

Your earliest/best sales leads are a precious resource. Do not look like a dumbass in front of them. The second batch is not as easy to find as the first or they would have been in the first batch.

When the consensus is "yeah, thick apps are better for users but web apps are cheaper to build and deliver," we can safely say thick apps will eventually win out.

Some constructive criticism based on my first visit to the site:

- I really wanted to see an example final proposal, right away. I never did find one. I guess you have to sign up to see one? That seems like expecting too much from someone who doesn't know if they want to use your service yet.

- I didn't get what the 'negotiation' features where about. The site mentions the ability to get parts of the proposal approved or discussed with a client, but I think you need to describe that a bit more up front. I'm hesistant to ask a client to do very much work to give me a contract, so I'd need to know exactly what the client would need to do to use that feature. Sure, I could figure it out by signing up and playing with that feature, but I'd rather you just tell me. (As your potential customer, I don't want to have to do very much work to decide if I want to give you money :))

I don't think the basic premise of the interface is very helpful. Having to dial in an exact configuration to get any information is very cumbersome, and requires the user to scan the parameters and take notes to get an idea of what the tradeoffs are.

In particular, the way service providers disappear from the results when a configuration they don't support is entered creates more questions than answers to the user. When I enter a few configurations with no result for Rackspace, I think "why don't you just TELL ME what Rackspace supports."

I know you have many dimensions of data to deal with, so a more complex visualization is difficult, but it will be worth it if you can work it out. I would recommend looking at Edward Tufte's books.

You may also find Tableau software's free web visualization software useful. It solves this basic problem although I have never used it so I can't say if it works well.

In general, it seems close to what you would need to show to a software guy or maybe an investor. However, I'd say it's too fast and assumes too much prior knowledge of how Daily Deal businesses run to show to your average small business owner.

Their desire to stay put does not override all other concerns. If you were rich, you could hire a full time nurse, but you aren't, and your whole family needs to accept that.

I saw this when my grandmother couldn't take care of herself anymore. My parents dragged her to their house kicking and screaming and moved her into my old room. There just wasn't enough money in the family for anything else.

Forgoing building a life of your own so they can stay in their comfort zone is asking too much of you.

If you do that, I would recommend looking at WEKA's arff file format. It's a really clunky file format but it captures a bunch of meta data (data types, max/min, etc) needed by many typical machine learning algorithms. You could capture that type of data as the data is being loaded, which would make later analysis easier.

After that, you'd have a situation where you can either stream the data out of the csv files or chunk the files into subsets for use in map-reduce type algorithms. I'm not sure what the performance is like when you start requesting the middle of a large file from S3, though.

As for a stats package, if you know python, I'd go with it. There are a few stats packages already out there that seem pretty good. But really, if you're just going to do basic stats like averages, st. dev, moving averages over time, etc, those are pretty trivial to implement. That might be beneficial if you have very large data sets that can't fit in memory at once and a custom way of accessing data.

I should say I haven't used a lot of the newer whiz-bang analytics setups that have been coming out, but in general my experience has been that working around the idiosyncrasies of stats packages is usually more difficult than implementing my own methods while using their code as a reference.

My final advice is to not adopt an analytics framework that has to be the top level of the program. You really need to be able to control the analytics engine programatically from your application. Stay away from systems that make you create modules or data flows inside their application, and the only way to modify them is inside a gui or a complex config file. These systems are everywhere. They are nice as a high-powered replacement for Excel but not when you are trying to develop a software application.