ripberge

Wow! Thanks

Good point. I have a surface and want to use IE 11 more because its touch screen friendly, however the back button performance is slow sometimes. Can be very frustrating, so I typically use Chrome. Hopefully Edge fixes that.

"I'm sure Google's next major Chrome update will show improvements over the Edge"

What makes you so confident the next one will be faster if the current one is slower? Are you on the dev team?

Seems like a pretty hefty chunk to give up for $20K and the chance to be a guinea pig in an unproven startup incubator run by...a baseball team.

I have no idea about the quality of RG/A's work, but we did share an office with them and it was always an entertaining recent college grad, hipster fashion show.

I do think the idea of sports focus is cool though.

When Andreesen talks about "tech funding", what do they mean by this?

A lot of VC funding that used to go to "tech" companies is now going into much less profitable types of businesses that should not be considered "tech". Businesses that most VC's don't really have a lot of experience with.

For example, their investments in Soylent, Walker and Co, Dollar Shave Club. It is REALLY hard to make money in these types of businesses when compared to software. They could be in for a rude awakening...

What business that develops software can't afford $9 a month for an upgraded plan? The utility you get from this type of software far outweighs the cost.

Who wants their wireframes to be public projects? Maybe if you're working on UI's for open source projects? I can't think of any other use cases.

Precursor's unique value propositions seem to be aimed at problems I would guess few people have...

No offense, but this tool seems pretty raw. Why announce it now?

https://moqups.com is a great web based mockup app I have been using for a few years. It's very slick.

I had this same exact startup idea as well after having issues with customs brokers and all the stupid faxing, bond issues, freight issues, etc. Its incredibly archaic.

I actually did try to use Flexport really early on for one shipment and it was very buggy and basically a total disaster, had to abort and use my old broker. They seem like they're a smart team and they'll get it right though.

I think "re-inventing global trade" is a bit of hyperbolic marketing speak, but in regards to re-inventing customs brokerage they are in the best position to solve this problem because the founder Ryan Petersen is a co-founder of import genius. Therefore they have an incredible database of importers to market their brokerage services to.

And that database and expertise is why I abandoned that business plan :)

The .NET community is extremely large, perhaps you run in a small circle.

A job search on indeed.com (a job listing consolidator) within 25 miles of my area, Santa Monica, CA reveals

2,477 jobs for .NET

2,083 jobs for Java

1,284 jobs for python

685 jobs for Ruby

Here are # of questions with following tags on StackOverflow:

Java: 845,330

C#: 786,850

Python: 417,737

Ruby: 132,074

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I would guess if you looked at 200 of the largest companies in Los Angeles, 90% of them have at least some .NET code running for something. It's pretty ubiquitous.

I guess the biggest functionality here is the ability to create repositories easier from within VS?

Because Visual Studio already has very good integration with git. I probably only use git from the command line once every couple of months.

This article is long on condescension and short on enlightenment.

Azure is definitely behind in some regards particularly IaaS. That was not really their strategy for quite a while and it shows. We are using their PaaS now and really like it, much better experience than we had with stuff like elastic beanstalk or cloudformation on AWS.

We still used Amazon Email and CloudSearch though. Azure has no email and Azure search is too new for me to trust.

Visual Studio Monaco is really the competitor to a product like this. It's a browser based version of Visual Studio that can be tied into other cloud services.

The real question proposed in this email remains. Has FB somehow discovered a way to make ads on mobile way more relevant and valuable than desktop? Because that's what props up their stock price. I would bet it's a lot more accidental clicks by users...

I am surprised http://www.bimeanalytics.com/ is not on there. After doing a lot of research and seeing a lot of demos in self serve BI it seems like one of the best products out there. Their pricing is also a game changer.

Why not power your dashboards with it? What do you use?

I am considering using a columnar data store (maybe redshift) with a BI tool like bimeanalytics.com specifically to do dashboards.

Optimizing the research.microsoft.com blog for heavy traffic is probably low on their priority list.

I've heard the name 42Floors many times over the years as they seem to get a lot of press for being a hot startup. For the first time, I just visited their website as I'm in the market for some office space.

This product is pretty underwhelming. I was expecting something game changing--on par with Redfin or Zillow. There's no maps, no ability to filter by zip code or name of areas within the city of Los Angeles. Craigslist is actually more advanced in several key ways. They've been working on this since 2011? Where has that $17 million gone?

They also have new Tableau competitor for self serve data visualization, PowerBI:

http://powerbi.com/

He'll change his mind once he starts encountering more SVG (which is becoming increasingly popular). Firefox SVG performance is so bad compared to Chrome/Safari/IE. Some sites are unusable.

He told me this story around 2005. I would guess it may have been about 5-10 years prior to that. Could have been more as he was there for a long time.

Treehouse is actually in a very luxurious position right now. They've raised a bunch of VC and this is a fairly new niche they operate in and more and more of society is recognizing how valuable these skills are. They can work minimal hours, see a lot of growth and everyone is happy.

Fast forward five years from now. There are going to be a ton of tough competitors in this space and eking out revenue growth month over month is going to be much harder. However, in five years they probably have the added pressure to start thinking about something called profitability.

The going is going to be a day of reckoning here when the harsh realities of cut throat competition set in. That just hasn't happened yet.

Doesn't surprise me. My old boss (a professor at Cal Tech) has a story of coming into his labs one afternoon when an assistant greeted him with "Oh, the Koreans came by to take the photos of the hardware." To which he replied, "What Koreans?"

I don't see much difference between jewelry and any other business that's been disrupted by Internet commerce. Except maybe women have a stronger place in society now and they care less about jewelry for their self worth (pure conjecture)?

One jeweler interviewed for this article is surprised people would go online and buy diamonds site unseen from Blue Nile. Having just done this dance myself, walking around the diamond district LA (and getting referrals from friends) I would not trust most of the jewelers there further than I could throw them. I would be more inclined to trust publicly traded Blue Nile that I was getting what I paid for.

I thought Microsoft was kind of dead too: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

However, in the past six months they continue to become more surprising, interesting and relevant on many fronts every day. And the pace seems to be accelerating. I might dare say they're the most exciting "big" tech company in 2015...

19.4% of Fortune 500 using Rackspace's cloud product sounds very high. How do you differentiate normal Rackspace customers from those using their cloud offering? I would assume they're all in the same data centers.

People patenting ideas they have no serious intention of ever building. The maximum effort they'll make is stopping someone else from doing it.

So this is why I said it depends upon your use case. We are an enterprise software company and there are probably less than 50 potential customers in our target market that could ever use the API.

We are one of the only companies that actually has an API. If a customer has a use for our API they'll get personalized support.

I think it depends upon the use cases of the API, but if you want someone to be able to build snappy and fast "apps" using your API rather than just facilitating movement of data in/out for an integration with another piece of software, I think granularity is important.

Having built our front end using AngularJS, we are the first users of our own API and that has driven it's design. In order to make things quick, we really needed to trim down response payloads in some cases which kind of deviates from standard CRUD patterns in some areas.

This has come at the expense of good documentation (we have a lot more methods now and having good examples of all of them will be expensive) and consistency--things are not very uniform anymore. However, as an API consumer I'd rather have the API give me too many options rather than too little. Our API has gone from "pretty" to "very functional".

Anyone here get resistance from your sales people when trying to get them to use CRM? If so, how did you overcome it?

At my company people basically refuse to do it, saying it turns them into a data entry person instead of a salesperson.