terryjsmith

That's fair, but even if it is dynamic, I doubt it's checked on a regular basis; I doubt it's a scenario they've even considered before now. This would be on par with the DNS root servers changing and somehow letting everyone know about it on the fly.

Yea, see the above comments. Bringing up individual nodes isn't an option as they would likely be overwhelmed and rate limiting traffic from all of the running instances in a P2P network would be near impossible. Bringing up an entirely new super node network, while insane, is probably their best option right now.

Edit: I initially read your post as sarcastic, but I realize now it may not have been. It's definitely outside-the-box thinking and after considering their options, this certainly seems the most viable.

Since it seems a good chunk of the super nodes went down, I imagine every running unconnected Skype instance is checking all of the super nodes it can find (or actively searching for them). Changing the logic at this point isn't really an option for them.

When this happens to our websites (when all servers go down), we need to rate limit and/or shut down traffic at the load balancer level as we bring things back online, otherwise everything just continues to get swamped and goes right back down. This would be nearly impossible in a P2P network and coordinating it between locations would be an even bigger nightmare. I imagine this is why turning on an entirely new network is a more viable option for them.

This seems like a nightmare situation for P2P company. Your super nodes get knocked offline and there's no way to force update them until they come back online, which is sporadic at best (based on my own experience today), which means either manually updating them or completely re-seeding your network (which seems to be the route they're going -- though so far it doesn't appear to be going all that well).

As other people have stated on other articles posted here, no discredit to them for having some downtime (I'm sure they're working round the clock on it), but I have to wonder if this could have been avoided with a phased roll out of new version to the super nodes.

This thread was started/answered at the beginning of the month: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957364

While I agree with the consensus that this is evil (essentially cutting a start-up off at it's knees), RIM has a legal obligation to enforce that patent if they know someone is infringing or they risk losing it. The Kik founder should have been much more vocal about being booted and having his keys revoked; now he makes himself look like an easy target. He really needs to put PR pressure on RIM at this point if Kik is going to survive.

I agree, with the disclaimer (as you pointed out) that it also has some good discussion. I'm all for making sure the question is answered, but asking a question in and of itself doesn't contribute much if the answer is simple.

It seems counter intuitive at first, but it's the same way in Canada and the US. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, San Francisco, New York, etc.; they're all the best places to grow companies. Rent is a fraction of what start-ups pay in salaries and the talent pools are often focused around those areas. You're right that you'll save money if you're bootstrapping or have a remote team, but if you're taking money and/or growing and hiring, higher rent is just the cost of being in a good location for everything else.

^^ This. Also, while you're presenting, try to remember that you're the expert. Practicing in front of people will give you an idea of what kind of questions you might get so be prepared with a coupe extra slides to answer any frequency ones.

I saw that, but it's not enough. Someone needs to send some of these pictures (even better, pictures of congress members) to Wikileaks or a similar organization to really push this forward.

I can't get behind this, especially when it comes to kids. I really hope that someone finds proof they do store images and sues the US government/TSA for child pornography or something similar. While I doubt this opt-out day will gain serious traction to make a decision, I agree that the best thing to do is continue to call media attention to and scrutinize it.

Who's paying $500,000 for rock stars??

I'm beginning to miss Marissa Mayer's axe on things on the main search page. I think Google's primary advantage for a while now has been cleanliness of results (as the difference in relevance between search engines has slimmed); they're opening themselves up to a competitor with a better design/flow by continuing to cram these "useful" items in.

First, this looks like a huge project; congrats on getting it done and out there!

I think you should stick with your title here as the main hook at the top: "Open, democratic project management." The rest seems like too many buzzwords and still doesn't tell me what your app is/does.

I agree with a couple of the others that the front page has too much on it. I think you could definitely benefit from a tabbed set of panels with all of this info on it so people can navigate through it all.

Other than that I like the idea, and will be trying it out with some other team members.

The application is actually just revamped as I understand it (based on the above review by Startup North); maybe in a major way but still based on a previous product. As Ted from Kik has responded below, they e-mailed nearly all of their 55K previous users, though very very few of them converted.

Their history deserves mentioning and is likely what put them in a position to be able to launch, market and scale effectively. The users may not be the same, but the strategies and the tactics used to get there are likely based on previous experiences as well as having some great people get them this far.

Obviously this community isn't the target of their post, but I would be even more interested in hearing the whole story: how they went from zero to 55K customers in 7 months, lost almost all of them, and then scaled it back up to a million users in two weeks

This story is completely mis-leading. They certainly had users before 15 days ago [1]. The product was developed in an incubator in the Winter 2009 class [2]. They have relaunched and revamped it, but to start from a clean slate and say you had zero users with no disclosure or information about your past makes this story blatantly false. It's a shame because it still would have been a good story without the reset.

[1] http://www.startupnorth.ca/2010/11/03/has-kik-finally-arrive...

[2] http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/alumni/kik-at-blackberry-devcon

Yup, no flame here. That's the problem I'm finding here in Toronto (or any major city I would imagine). I lived in a much smaller city a few months ago and was fortunate enough to have a really great instructor and an even better master. Thanks for the advice though, I'll be sure to check it out!

Have you tried other martial arts like karate or taekwondo? How does it compare? I recently moved to Toronto and have yet to find a great (ie. non belt promotion based) school downtown. I've found a number of potential BJJ schools though and have been curious.

Taekwondo. I highly recommend it (and any martial art really) that have a good/regular schedule that will help you to be motivated.

The most important thing is to do it for the fitness, for weight loss, or for something else goal oriented that isn't belt levels or rank. Make sure to set attainable goals, meet them, re-evaluate, repeat. I went into taekwondo wanting to lose some weight. I lost 30 pounds. Then I wanted to make the competition team, so I started training harder, running and doing interval training. Last year I won 1 gold and 1 silver medal in competitions. My current goal is to be able to do single leg squats.

Just keep mixing it up on yourself. You would be surprised how motivated you will find yourself even outside of class.

I imagine a number of people blindly up vote the RMS posts to encourage the trend, though I'd be curious to see the data behind this compared to other post types.

I have some people I've worked with before who are now consulting. If you would like a referral/introductions, shoot me an e-mail.

I've actually used tom's code from the PHP.net site to replicate the get_called_class function when it's not there in my own framework:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.get-called-class.php#9...

This is based on my own experience at our startup. We looked at a number of NoSQL databases for our backend storage. While others may "be made to", MongoDB was the only one that advertised it as a feature and was by far the easiest to use for that feature.

jQuery is nice because you can jump back and forth between it and "regular" Javascript. Inside your $(id).click() function you can just as easily call document.getElementById. jQuery even provides you access to all of the DOM level objects in case you want to escape outside of it for a bit.

Most frameworks do not let you do this and you have to actually have to work at it/hack at it to use functionality that isn't provided by them.

This is essentially a non-discussion depending on how they're using Mongo. I suspect that they, as we are, might be making use of Mongo's ability to query documents based on embedded objects, which means their only choices would have been a traditional RDBMS with JOINs or MongoDB.

This idea of people only doing it for themselves is cynical. I agree that it is taking up space on the home page; maybe it should be a sub-section (edit: and now it is).

This notion reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg's recent quote at Startup School: That others (Hollywood in this case, but I think applicable here) can't see to grasp the idea that people would build things just because they like building things.[1]

[1] http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178321

This. The most important part of any project I've been involved with has been showing it to other people. You can see how they are going to try to use the product and what you might be missing. Even more so, I've had people I show it to come up with better tag lines and branding than I ever could have myself.

I'm certainly trying. I am a CS dropout and feel like I'm lacking a good bit of theory (algorithms and math specifically). I gobble up what I can find that actually makes theory applicable/interesting.

What kind of modules would you be looking for? Open to suggestions :)