vabmit

Crunchbase says Wavii only has five employees and only took ~$2MM in funding. So, I would bet it's more than $100K total. The funding is all listed as a 2010-07 seed round. I expect they raised more than that. But, given their acquisition price and business model it sounds like things worked on well for them and at least the founders were well vested. Or, did you mean actual cash excluding any GOOG options/RSUs?

My understanding is that a 4 year lock-in for non-execs (techies) is a standard requirement by Google during acquisitions. I've heard of some people negotiating it down to 3. But, almost everyone I know got 4.

I was also in your situation and my experience was just like zaphar. I was a high school dropout (I mostly completed 9th grade. But, not 10th.) in "no place" Florida. I wound up a sysadmin at MIT by:

1. Hanging out in tech channels on IRC

2. Teaching myself to program C with the GNU toolchain

3. Getting a 2nd job doing 1st level remote tech support (my first tech job) in addition to a full time job driving a forklift to save money for books/computer equipment while I lived with family/friends and slept on couches.

4. Joining open source programming projects and reading tons of other people's code.

5. Going to a programming job interview and beating all the other more experienced and formally educated candidates by walking into the interview with a working demo I wrote in the weeks before of what they wanted to hire a programmer to build running on my laptop.

6. Realizing a lot of programming was going to be outsourced and teaching myself sysadmin work so I could pivot.

7. Working as a sales engineer for an IBM BP to get corporate formal sysadmin "education" (certifications).

8. Applying for an MIT sysadmin job based on my IBM certifications. And, getting the job because I was better educated than the other applicants.

Obviously, a lot of that took years and there were other jobs (construction, concrete, moving furniture, factory work, etc) and stuff in between and countless set backs. That included tons of people that wouldn't even talk to me because I was a drop out. I did eventually get a GED and an AA degree from a community college (night school). But, the points listed really were the important events.

You need to treat your career like a start-up or any big goal. Decide what you want your life to be like and think of every possible way to get to that point. Then go. Be aggressive and relentless in getting there. There's going to be tons of failures and setbacks. Don't look at them as something that stops you or traps you. Look at them as pivots, as steps in the iteration that will get you where you want to be.

I wanted to be a part of MIT since I was a kid (because that's where the GNU software that gave me a chance came from). Here I am. There are plenty of people here that followed an ideal path to get to their current place in life (best wealthy families, best private schools, scholarships, mentoring programs, best research groups, etc). But, there are also plenty of people like me that can look back on the same kind of crazy path of "anything and everything necessary".

Like zaphar said, don't give up. Be dedicated, aggressive, and relentless in discovering the path to what you want to accomplish. That's the most important thing.

The Cisco VPN client supports 64bit Linux, now. Just go to http://ist.mit.edu/cisco-anyconnect and get the latest version of the client. You could also hack the 32bit only version to work on a 64bit Linux system if you can't use the new version for some reason. There's a wikipage on how to do it.

You should be able to use a cert based web form to get ssh traffic allowed to your host. But, if you were using the VPN, you wouldn't encounter the firewall.

It does kinda suck. But, the aaronsw hacks were a game changer. MIT became a different organization after them.

140: A cost benefit analysis was done and they saw a way to save money.

The long version from my perspective, as a former Power systems sales engineer/programmer/consultant, is that IBM's server sales division is struggling with declining sales. The source is likely virtualization and raw system capacity reducing the number of machines that the overall market needs. IBM moved xSeries (x86 machine) manufacturing/distribution to Mexico more than a decade ago, IIRC. So, this looks like a consolidation of both architectures in a single place to me.

Additional issues besides virt/capacity presenting themselves include not just the availability of cloud computing from companies like Amazon and Rackspace (and in house "clouds" like Google's x86 based white box one), but the design of start-up infrastructure (and even applications) specifically for that model. The emergence and widespread use of SaaS is similar issue.

The core issue with Power though, is that it's a different architecture than x86. If you really want to take advantage of the architecture you have to build your software (and all the underlying libraries and other dependencies) for that architecture. That work was often worth it when x86 chips were single core, 32bit, and workload could max out as many processors as a given system bus could support. But, now days with multi-core true 64bit x86 chips there are very few workloads where you need the Power architecture.

The Power is an amazing and beautiful architecture. But, even in the high end where you need the computational power it can provide it is not usually a compelling choice. For example, if you're doing large amount of complex mathematics (for physics simulations for example) there has been a trend toward using GPUs to perform the calculations due to constrained research and academic budgets. The libraries and code your simulation would run on are likely already optimized for GPU offloading. However, Power optimizations (if they were ever done in the first place) may not be kept up to date (ex: for Power4 vrs Power7) and may not be optimum or even build-able.

As the Power install base has declined, it's become more and more difficult to find people with the Power skill set and experience. While Linux distributions are available and supported for Power. Power was really designed to run AIX. Finding someone with AIX, IBM build tool chain, optimization skills, and Power assembly experience is very difficult.

The reason I left the IBM channel in the early 2000's and took a different career path is because I saw Linux/x86 emerging. I believed that it would eventually become dominant just based off my sales win/loss history then. And, cloud (or grid computing as it was called back then) was starting to emerge.

I don't know if Power is "legacy"/done for. I'm sure there are some specific use cases and applications where it still shines - like I said it's an amazing architecture. But, I think the writing is on the wall for all companies manufacturing large servers - IBM, HP, Dell. After all, there's good reason IBM has been pivoting to become a primarily services company over the last 15 years.

The event is free and open to the public.

Some additional information- The Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/318892888214473/

Taren's blog: http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/44649373978/mit-boston-memori...

I expect you'd be able to find metered on-street parking. Note that the city of Cambridge meters only take quarters (no dimes or nickels). The Meadhall is a couple blocks from the east end of the MIT campus. Here is a list of parking garages in the area if you can't find a metered street spot: http://web.mit.edu/facilities/transportation/parking/visitor...

The rogue DNS servers are reporting MIT's main web server IP for all DNS name queries (other than for the main web server's name) to people that are off campus. So, to someone outside MIT (depending on DNS caching), it looks like everything is down.

Also, ASP/SAAS companies in the .edu space often use a DNS name that is part of the school's domain in their model.

Yes. But, they look for another input that has the same hash and for which they also have other secret information. For example, a PGP public key with the same hash (Fingerprint) for which they have a valid private key thereby affording them a working "collision" key pair. Obviously, very difficult.

There are a wide array of attacks. Using the method just described and the existence of a hash collision to fake a signature, rather than a key pair, in some cases can be much easier. Depending upon the protocol and procedures used, it may also be possible to use a different method such as providing the true authorized signer with any content that shares a collision with something you'd like the authorized signer to sign (but that they would not normally sign). This can be especially true when the signing procedure is fully automated (For example, some CA's SSL certificate acquisition process is fully automated).

The reason that the collision is important is because many cryptosystem implementations (and humans of course) use hashes as unique identifiers of key pair material (PGP Keys & PKI certs).

The primary use case is identity fraud in financial transactions, software distribution, or in private communications.

For example, PGP v4 Key IDs are a subset of PGP v4 Key Fingerprints. PGP v4 Key Fingerprints are SHA1 hashes of some protocol information and the key material (for more detailed information see RFC4880 section 12.2). So, a proper collision, with other properly constructed packets, could yield two seemingly "identical" keys. Therefor, they may be able to produce a fake PGP key that you think belongs to a person you trust and want to communicate privately with but actually does not.

Hash function collisions can be similarly exploited with digital certificate protocols (like SSL web certs). So, a crime syndicate may be able (depending upon how badly certain hash functions are broken) to produce a fake SSL certificate for your bank's website that your browser thinks in valid. Or even worse, they may be able to produce a fake root CA singing certificate that your browser thinks is valid.

It's more complex than just "can compute hash collisions = fake certs" because there's a very limited amount of information hashed in both certs and PGP keys. The more data that is hashed the easier it is to find a collision. With PGP much of the data has to be very specific like version and algorithm designation flags and valid cryptographic values for the algorithm designated. It's safe to say "very limited flexible data = very difficult to find a collision".

Therefor, these calculations are interesting and do suggest that everyone should move away from using SHA1. But, the calculations to determine when a criminal or an anti-sec use case would be possible are much more complex and involve many more variables.

The guys are from the Seasteading Institute team. Patri is essentially resigning from operations and getting ready to focus on related commercial ventures (start-ups). You can get the full story in the latest newsletter: http://seasteading.org/blogs/main/2011/07/31/the-seasteading...

There are several companies that allow people to live on cruise ships for >3 months (like the "Semester at Sea" offerings). And, there is at least one cruise ship that sells cabins as condos and is essentially a permanent residence.

Keep in mind that you can spend a good amount of time on US soil and still avoid paying income tax or needing a resident/work Visa. I expect the ship will speed a good amount of time at port in California if they're able to get funding and execute.

I think this is a great alternative to say opening an office in London or Dublin to deal with immigration problems for EU people. Leasing and operating such a cruise ship probably (I'm just guessing here) wouldn't cost much more than leasing and operating an office in London. This has the added benefits that country of origin doesn't matter (it's not just EU), that the people would be in the same time zone, and that it is so close by that travel to SFBA would be relatively inexpensive (compared to travel from London).

I couldn't get this site to work. No matter what I did, it kept telling me my e-mail was invalid. It sent me an e-mail verification that I clicked on and it told me it verified it at that time.

Some other points: - The very odd location descriptions seem to exclude Cambridge, MA (MIT, Harvard, etc) - Skills: I'm primarily a C Programmer/Admin but there's nothing C programming, Cloud, Ops, or SysAdmin related - Search Results: They don't display the useful information (skills, location, etc). Focusing on showing pictures makes it feel oddly like a dating site. A dating site is definitely not how I want to find a co-founder. - The UI is lacking - Why collect any location information, like zip code, if you can't search by it? - The UI doesn't scale - It would be tedious to use this site if it had thousands of users.

Also, did you check to see what other similar sites were available first? http://cofoundr.com/ was set up a few years ago by a Google engineer (Rami Bitar).

I don't think you've hit a MVP with this site, yet. I would have waited to post it.

This is a question for a local lawyer with expertise in import/export law. You'd likely have no problem at all finding a lawyer or firm with experience and specialization in Chinese trade. They'd have not only knowledge of Chinese law, but infrastructure like local contacts and representatives in China. There are a number of such firms in California.

In my experience legal advice from people that do not practice law is rarely helpful and potentially harmful.

http://www.zazzle.com/ is already very dominant and vertically integrated in that space. Did you knowingly launch a clone? Or, think that this was an original idea? How do you hope to compete with them and the others doing the same thing? What's your value add?

To me, this space seems too cots, low margin, and crowded, to even build a lifestyle business in. But, good luck!

I'm going. I'll make a blog post about it and provide a link.

I heard about it because I signed up for the MITEF's mailing list (I was a member a few years ago). They often have some very good events. The events can be a little expensive for students since the organization is somewhat targeted at alums and faculty. But, I'd recommend following them.

If you don't want to be on their mailing list, they have a Twitter news feed: https://twitter.com/mitentforum

I'd invest in a way that didn't consume thousands of hours worth of my time.

I'd do what Mark Cuban recommended people like those found on HN (young entrepreneurs who want to launch a start-up) do: 6 month term back CD's:

http://blogmaverick.com/2010/08/20/the-stock-market-is-still...

When I was in my early 20's the president of a start-up I was working for (whom was a former professional stock trader) essentially gave me the same great advice Mark Cuban gave everyone. He told me to not focus on investing in the stock market because the amount of time I'd need to invest to do well would never yield as good of a return as I could get from investing that time instead on my computing and start-up related skills. He advised me to stick to what I was good at (computers) rather than trying to take on essentially a second job and build a second career in trading.

Looking back, I'm 100% sure he was absolutely right. In the last ten years, I've spent thousands and thousands of hours reading books on the investing, reading financial news, watching Bloomberg and CNBC programs, doing research on companies, developing and testing trading strategies, doing simulated trading, and trading. From all that time investment, my return was probably -5%. It was almost flat. That isn't bad considering that the markets have been so bad over the last 10 years. In fact, it's pretty good. But, had I spent all those thousands of hours on start-ups I probably would have had at least one big success by now.

I also would have been a lot less stressed and lived a lot happier life. I vividly remember the sick feelings I got during the crashes and upon watching the fallout from unforeseeable things like the bail-outs and the oil super spike.

Even if I didn't do bank CD's, I could have just bought index funds and done better with out all the work and wasted time. I think CD's are the way to go. If you really want stocks, it's index funds.

I almost got involved in the real estate market and other types of investments. I'm glad I didn't. Again, it would have taken a huge amount of time investment to compete with other involved professional investors. And, looking back now, I can almost say for sure I would have come out essentially flat if I made very good decisions and with heavy losses if didn't.

I primarily met other programmers and like minded people on IRC, open source project mailing lists, or at cons. If you really want frequent f2f contact with other developers, I'd suggest moving to SFBA (if you're not already there).

If working in isolation bothers you, you could try and work with more commonly used technologies. Like the programmers you mention, I've never used Ruby either.

How will you make money with this site? I don't think using it is enough of a value add for people that you'll ever see the tremendous amount of traffic necessary these days to earn even a small amount of money from advertising.

There is a start-up here in Cambridge, MA that was founded by a couple of MIT Grad Students called Course Zero Automation:

http://www.coursezero.com/

I've talked with them about their rates for working on physical device start-ups with me before. And, they were very reasonable. I know both of the founders and they're highly skilled and highly competent. They initially founded the company to compete on the DARPA prizes related to military device needs (specifically non-GPS navigation).

I'd highly recommend them if you're looking for engineers to do the consulting work necessary to develop a device like this.

Also, I like your idea. Green is big right now, and this is both an energy savings and water savings play. If you developed the device in a way that allowed it to shut off water flow after a given amount of time, you may be able to market it to large government markets such as federal and state prisons and the US military. One of the military challenges presented to MIT students this year was for a device capable of cleaning and disinfecting clothing with a very limited amount of water. In current battle field theaters, the US Military is really struggling with the logistics of troop water supply.

I've done it for cryptography code and cryptanalysis code. Specifically, optimizing code to take advantage of specific instructions available in certain processors or to make use of vector registers and instructions. I wrote my programs in C and then went back and wrote assembly for parts of the code that could deliver a significant overall speedup with hand optimization.

One place I did this was various RSA Challenge attack clients.

Is this just a project? Or, is it a start-up?

If it's just a project, then it's probably just a hobby and you can make the decision based on how much you enjoy your hobby.

If it's meant to be a start-up, then I think you need to focus on producing some hard data on market size and potential revenue before you even start thinking about the possibility that the space is too crowded. Whether or not the market is too crowded depends not so much on what features you can offer over your competitors' products, but on how much money you could potentially. Can you compete in this market and cover your development and infrastructure costs? Beyond that, do you think that you can eventually make enough profit that the opportunity cost of pursuing this specific start-up is worth it?

Regarding revenue: What is your business model? Do you charge people for your application? Do you count on advertising income? Is the application designed in a way that generates revenue through virtual currency purchases or pay-per-action? Have these revenues been growing in line with your user base?

Regarding market size: How many Facebook users do you think will eventually use this type of application? How many of them do you think will use your application? What percentage of invites to your application are accepted (are conversions)? When you graph your new users and your conversion rate, are they growing exponentially (like any tech start-up should be initially)? Or, it is only growing at a slow increment, nearly flat, or declining? They graphs would help you determine your overall growth and what percentage of total Facebook users you may be able to convert. That would help you answer the most important questions (those regarding financials).

If either the growth of your income or your user base are not growing exponentially, I would suggest that you think about possible ways to increase both to that level of growth and factor the amount of work required into your decision.

If you're not able to make both your user base and your income grow exponentially, I'd suggest you seriously consider pursuing a different start-up idea. You may be able to achieve the creation of a lifestyle business (one that would pay you a reasonable salary - $150K USD/yr) with just fast, but non-exponential growth at this early stage. But, that would not be the kind of life changing start-up that I, and many others on HN, are after.

You have to be careful to do major registrations quickly. I registered the twitter account (made a tweet), registered the facebook account (added only some very basic profile information), and then went to register the Google account only to find out it was already taken. My company name was (random two digit number)[no space](uncommon word). I did extensive searches in Google and other places before I decided to use it.

It was probably the tweet that got me into trouble. I'm kicking myself for not realizing that would happen before hand.

I should have registered everything (including the domains) as quickly as I could (in near immediate succession). Only after that should I have started tweeting or filling out any information beyond what was required to establish ownership over the accounts.

Now, I'm sure there's someone out there who hopes to either sell me the google account, or attempt to use the google account for financial fraud.

http://www.cofoundr.com/user/login

Cofoundr was started a few years ago by a Google engineer.

My personal experience is that I've met the people I've partnered with on start-ups/projects in three places:

  1. Local Entrepreneurs' Club (MIT e-club)
  2. IRC/Mailing list/Other online community (like lj/fb)
  3. Through personal recommendations from mutual friends

If you're not already attending meetings of a local Entrepreneurs' Club, I strongly recommend it. It's a great place to learn the model of how a start-up works - how do you make money, how do you build a brand, how do you improve your pitch, how does funding work, etc. It's like a real time HN. The MIT e-club lets people pitch their start-up ideas at weekly meetings where the rest of the club gives feedback.

Then, I would suggest you think about what technology will drive your start-up and what community it will focus on serving. By hanging out in the relevant places on line associated with the technology and community you're targeting you'll quickly be able to identify local experts. You can approach them to partner with you or to recommend someone who might want to. Those experts will be in a good position to help you evaluate potential partners.

If you are technical enough to build a demo and a good pitch for your start-up and plan to take angel funding, you can ask the investor to hook you up with someone. Investors tend to be locally well connected and know technical people with start-up experience who have had past successes.

vab@mit.edu

It would be nice if it's in Cambridge or Boston proper. I suspect many people who would attend would also go to something like Mass. Innovation Nights. But, those are all the way out in Waltham, MA. So, I never go. There's a lot of start-up/opensource stuff out on 128 that I never go to.

I taught myself acoustic guitar. First, I learned from books and websites. Then when YouTube came out, I found a lot of very good "How to Play Song X" videos on it. I really enjoyed learning to play. Spending 5-10 hours a week away from my computer, and not looking at a screen for most of that time, significantly boosted my productivity and improved my morale. I was pretty burned out and looking for something to do besides computer work, and reading about computers, when I started picking it up. I haven't played in a few years, though. As I got older, I kinda lost interest in music (both listening to and playing).

My comment is tangential to the actual discussion. It doesn't so much apply to companies with $5MM in funding as larger competitors. But, I'll post it here anyway because it relates a scenario that a founder needs to be concerned about when taking on a competitor with more resources than they have.

Beware of opening yourself up to any kind of legal attack. Many well funded companies will sue a competitor they know has limited resources just to force them out of business. They view the legal expenses that they incur from such an attack as a cost of doing business.

Many years ago (~15) I had a friend who had started a successful start-up in SFBA that provided specialized HA clustering software for large *nix machines. The start-ups funding rounds totaled ~$12MM IIRC, and the company had about ~50 employees, was cash positive, and growing quickly. After a couple years of nice growth, the company reached a size that caused it to be noticed by one of the large players in the HA space. The large player knew that the start-up, even with a multimillion dollar annual cash flow, did not have the resources to fend off a significant legal attack. They also knew that one of the start-ups' employees (not a key employee in product development or a founder) had worked as a software engineer on their HA product offerings before resigning to join the start-up. They sued. They claimed that the employee had walked out of their shop with IP that was used in the start-ups' products.

My friend flat out denied this, and I believe him. But, there was no way for him to prove it. The start-up did the only thing that they could - have their corporate council counter sue and fight back as much as was possible. After a few months in court and seeing the burn rate associated with such a legal battle, the founders realized that they were pretty much done. They didn't have the money to win, even if they were in the right. They laid off most of their staff and directed all of their remaining resources into the legal fight. They found it impossible to get new funding or customers because of the IP dispute. Then, they started to lose existing customers because of the dispute and the doubt those customers had about their ability to survive it. After all the cash on hand was burned through with legal costs, the company closed up and shut down completely.

The moral I got from the story is to be very careful about IP. VC's and Angels (and usually founders) are very good about doing due diligence on IP that is used to start the company. But, you have to maintain vigilance in regard to having clean IP and avoiding any liabilities.

I'm the person responsible for administering the server that powers this open archive. The type of data you mention is being included in the archive when ever possible. Further, the research group I work for has existing specific open data efforts in multiple fields including, and beyond, computer science. For example, today I'm working on setting up an architectural open access archive with the staff here that will include CAD files for humans and semantic web triple store data for search engines.

BTW, the archive system software is open source: http://dspace.org/

One way that you can do this is through a retail stock broker, like TD Ameritrade, with CurrencyShares ETF's ( http://www.currencyshares.com/ ).

I've done this with positions in the AUD and Swiss Franc. Those two currencies tend to move in opposite directions since the Swiss Franc is a safety currency due to Switzerland being a relatively insulated mature modern economy. AUD on the other hand, tends to be a growth play since Australia's economy is heavily based on the export of natural resources (think mining). The two currencies tend to move in opposite directions increasing the likely hood that your wealth will be protected in most cases. You can also use options to protect your positions on the ETF's.

I keep 10% of my savings in foreign currency (via CurrencyShares) and 10% of my savings in precious metals (Gold & Platinum Coins (Philharmonics and Maple Leaves)). The rest I keep either in a targeted retirement fund or my local currency (USD).

Obviously, this portfolio hasn't worked out very well for me, recently. :(