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Myspace gained their initial traction with pseudo-spam.

I'd suggest not following by their example.

This is what happens when you confuse technical complexity with product success. A complex product, or one that takes "more than a weekend to build" will not necessarily be successful, and a simple product will similarly not necessarily be successful.

It has much more to do with demand. The wheel isn't terribly complex, nor is it original. Yet, if I came out today and started selling wheels, I could probably sell a few thousand. There's a demand for wheels, and so it makes sense to sell them. I think that in this age we forget this part of the equation way too often.

It is kind of unfair to say all programmers are bad at designing interfaces. I've never personally met one that was actually bad, and know several that are quite good- to the point where they could be professional UI designers if they wanted.

I've noticed a trend where hackers with good design sensibilities have migrated to working on web earlier than other developers. That might have something to do with it.

This is exactly the problem my startup is trying to solve.

We'll have the materials management portion (purchasing, inventory, warehousing) soon- June is the tentative target.

There seems to be a pretty big gap between excel spreadsheets and huge business ERP/MRP/SCM/CRM software. Unfortunately, I think what you describe is right in the center of it.

My first client is transferring off an amalgamation of Intacct Small Business and Salesforce.com. I wouldn't recommend it based on my experience, but it has worked out OK for them for about two years. They're at about 8M/yr in sales right now, and if you're under that, that pair might work OK for you.

In the past 5 years they've mostly been one of:

1) Hardware

2) Giant

3) Enterprisey

None of which are very applicable to the original question, which is about web software startups.

I should have said:

"Sun isn't really a big dog in the startup acquisition game."

MySQL wasn't a startup.

Sun has been the most ardent corporate supporters of Rails. They were even before JRuby.

Plus, Sun isn't really a big dog in the acquisition game.

I think Microsoft is really the only acquirer where language/platform choice would matter. They're the only acquirers that have a real stake in the success of a particular language.

Even still, they bought Hotmail, who was using FreeBSD.

Wow. Just... Wow.

I understand that this is talking about India and I guess they have a different work schedule than is standard here in the U.S., but this guy must really have no clue.

To say that the need for employees to have a proper work-life balance means that they have no aim or drive is not only wrong, it is toxic.

If this "training" is so useful, why not hold it on a non-holiday? Take it out of the company's time, and not the employee's time.

That's not complaining about competition, that's complaining about theft of design.

I really don't think they care if someone copies the functionality of one of their products, but I think they care when someone copies their words and design (CSS and images, in this case). Two completely different things.

I don't recall the 37signals people ever complaining. There are oodles of Basecamp competitors out there, and I honestly don't think they mind the competition/copycats.

They are really very humble about competition, in general.

This was the last year of C++. It is entirely possible that the Java version of the class was less useful.

I think I took the AB test. This was in 2002, and AB covered binary arithmetic, data structures, Big-O, and a bunch of other stuff. The CS A test (which is all that remains now) cut out almost all of the data structures, and was light on all the rest. It was designed to be a single semester course, where AB is a full-year course.

The code and user base (the two most valuable parts of a startup) will still exist and could still be ported to another hardware architecture.

It was really good. I took it 6 years ago and even though I continued on to a non-CS degree, I still feel like I have a good grasp on basic CS topics (data structures, in particular).

This is a really terrible loss. I don't get it at all.

I used to work for a company that hocked speed reading training software. As a kind of side effect, I learned how to speed read.

The thing with speed reading is that you can increase the speed at which you read fairly easily, but your comprehension and recall will suffer greatly. I can probably read 500 words per minute, but comprehension is pretty low (~60%). At that point, it generally isn't worth it.

Speed reading is kind of a stressful activity, and there's only a very narrow set of situations in which it makes sense to speed read something. 95% of the stuff that I read, I read for pleasure, and in order to enjoy reading something you have to read it the "old fashioned" way.

If you want to teach yourself to speed read, books and the like won't really help much. It is kind of like learning to drive- you really have to just try it yourself. To start, sweep your hand over the words in an "infinity sign" pattern, with the height of each sweep being about 3 or 4 lines high. Don't read the words to yourself, just focus on the words above your finger. After awhile, you'll be able to detach your eyes from the lines, and you can stop sweeping your hand over the page. The key is to take in as much as possible with your eyes, and let your brain assemble everything in the background. You'll eventually get pretty good at associating key nouns with the verbs and adjectives around them. That's pretty much all you need to get 50-80% comprehension with most things.

(P.S. I'm not aware of any speed reading methods that don't come with a reduced level of recall/comprehension. I think it is just the nature of the beast.)

Good article. I had seen the original from the Skype blog, but it was kind of empty. This was a good recap. Plus, it liked to SkyTools, which for some reason I had never heard of.

Interesting idea, interesting people with enthusiasm. The challenge is convincing people of those three facts without coming across as an overbearing asshole.

Generally, you're going to have a hard time recruiting people that are going to be doing more work initially than you are going to be doing. I.E. a non-hacker trying to recruit a hacker to do some coding will have a tough time.

4 GB of RAM is $60? When the hell did that happen?

Not true. If Guido van Rossum had written it, it would definitely be worth noting.

It would be noteworthy if any evangelist for any programming language that is not PHP said something like this.

This update will have more of an effect of my day-to-day life than the 1.2 -> 2.0 update. It is good to see that the Rails team is confronting serious issues (like the Migration numbering) quickly and not letting them fester.

I wrote mine in Ruby.

Surprisingly enough, she loved it.