wavesplash

Many events in the valley are run by current founders for current founders or run by angels as leadgen. The assumption is that you're either an investor or a founder that wants to give back. If you're doing it for contract leadgen (e.g. the startups you engage with are paying for your services in cash or stock) and you're not calling that out upfront you're treading on assumptive good will.

In short: If you're going to use news YC as a venue to self-promote, then be upfront.

I think you just re-iterated the author's reason for writing perfectly.

Instead of saying 'SQL' (the query language) doesn't scale, perhaps you can say full ACID doesn't scale cheaply.

We spent a bunch of time looking at large scale distribution at Berkeley for the Mariposa project. The short version: if you want to break ACID then you have to take the semantics of the data into consideration. Transactional financial data needs full ACID, many other types of data have looser needs (status updates, etc) and those looser needs can be taken advantage of.

As it turns out, even common DB's like Oracle, Postgres and MySQL can be used differently to get much cheaper scale for certain types of data. See the FriendFeed article on MySQL as a docdb (also the Friendly ruby mapping on github).

To paraphrase the author:

"ACID scales just fine if you need it (and if you need it you most likely have budget for it). If you don't need full ACID, there are plenty of other cost effective solutions you can run on low bandwidth disks/memory limited CPUs. Mix and match to fit your needs.

Please, enough with the religion."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1154198

C&D letters have no teeth. Court actions have teeth, and that hasn't happened.

Nothing to see here, really. Except laughable claims and example of poor business strategy.

What was funny to me is that Ryan set a trap and the guy (Shankman) bit the bait. It was Jason Calacanis style PR strategy at its best and clever if intentional. Why Ryan called getting a C&D a 'shitty move' is the non-congruent part. Ryan asked for it and Shankman delivered a delightfully poor response in spades. Total PR coup for Ryan.

Side note: If you run a half decent business you'll have your fair share of C&D letters and meritless lawsuits. Not worth wasting any emotion over. Just factor the legal cost into your cash projections and out-execute the heck out of everyone.

How would you feel if instead of offering to partner, I borrowed the concept of your business (after you had spent a few years proving the model) and started a competitor while only crediting you for the inspiration?

I bet you'd be wee bit annoyed, no?

I personally think HARO needs a kick in the arse, quality and innovation wise.

Bring it on.

Legally there's very little HARO can do except force you to defend a meritless case. I don't believe they have a leg to stand on. You're not violating copyright, or trademark in any form, and he doesn't have an issued patent.

The one real takeaway is never launch a business and credit the competitor on the site. It just gives them fuel to create legal hassles for you.

Next steps: Get a lawyer. Have your lawyer write a firm letter showing Shankman's lawyer that their claims are meritless and you will vigorously defend the case.

Meantime, this is a great PR coup for you. Tech blogs love a little drama, at least certain ones do. Use it for the free PR.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Though I have had to defend against bogus patent and copyright claims before.

Here's my point as a startup conjecture:

"Sacrifice the network effects of established languages/frameworks only when it gives your startup an unfair (10x) advantage."

In contrast, the Asana guys are writing their own language+framework and if it delivers on it's early promise they'll be outgunning the competition with a 10x improvement on development time and code size.

http://asana.com/luna

That's the sort of advantage Paul Graham had by using Lisp in ViaWeb vs. his competition that was mostly writing c++.

There are at least 3 areas of technical focus at a startup after you reach product/market fit: 1) ease of feature development 2) ease of hiring 3) ease of scale under load

The author sacrificed 2, needlessly created well-known scale issue that could be avoided in 3 (basic distributed systems class), for no substantial improvement over the other options for 1.

Yes, I have a bias towards startup team members factoring in their future impact on their coworkers and the company.

- Author picks Lift/Scala not on the best future interests of the company (ease of hiring, scalability, agility, maturity) but on fit for his world view about type safety and it would be fun for him.

- Author commits startup to stateful servers / scaling issues from day 1 of the rewrite.

Watching people ignore 30+ years of experience balancing I/O and CPU bound tasks and understanding kernel/userspace interaction just makes me sad.

Most importantly when the pain your product addresses becomes a corporation-wide priority. You want to get buy-in from the execs before your competitor does and knocks you out of a department level deal.

A long list of just some of the new goodness is listed here:

http://guides.rails.info/3_0_release_notes.html

Some of the best OS Kernel engineers that ever walked, walked the hallways of those two companies.

Not all standards bodies require RAND terms, and not all RAND terms are 'reasonable' for individuals. You have to look into each standard and then to the assigned licensing agencies and what they charge for.

In the case of H264, the patent pool is licensed by MPEG-LA, and they're anything but free.

Here's the overview of the broadcast licensing terms:

http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=10900

more data about licensing can also be found in the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

To me Steve seems to be saying "if you want to avoid getting replaced, you need to learn to scale your skills for each stage of the company". Managing 20 is a very different problem than managing 300.

Having lived through that transition once as an early employee of a startup that made it, Steve pretty much nails the issues we faced on the head. In the case of that startup the founder didn't scale and needed to be replaced much sooner than it happened.

I would have preferred it if the founder did scale better. Managing around your founder for his own good is some of the most soul draining work ever created.

- Take a 2-3 week vacation somewhere else far away from the valley

- Come back and see how you feel afterwards

- http://founderdating.com (not quite what it sounds like)

Don't do the EIR thing. Better to go moonlight for free for a week at companies that seem interesting to you. It's amazing how spending time around a healthy/functional startup will cause you to recover from burnout.

And yes, without a college degree you can work for some of the big guys. As long as you have relevant experience on the resume to fill in the time gap, you'll be fine.

Small stuff: bugs in the paging UI (nav disappears when I open artist info, etc - on Chrome Dev here). Why not just put fixed <- -> arrows in the top nav so it's consistently placed? Also, would love the artist info popup to be _bigger_.

Great innovation guys.

What's interesting is how agile the CCP has become. We call it 'communist' but it no longer resembles any of the Marxist ideals we usually associate with it. They react quickly and have been using capitalism/modernization/nation-building as a very effective carrot. This isn't the old stagnant hard-line Soviet communism by any measure.

I have two bits of advise that I tell all the startups I work with:

- Never give equity for one-off work

- Never work with fundraising assistants

Your background just isn't that unique here in the valley.

The Angels here give you money and will gladly help you with your pitch and intros when the time comes to do series A.

I'd suggest focusing on long term value. If you're valuable to a startup over the long haul (2+ years) then you can justify being an advisor and getting a .1-.25 percent grant. Throw in the pitch consulting for free. It's the least interesting part of building a company.

Just to add some content: 23andme never did complete genomes, they only targeted specific markers. As a consumer product there really wasn't anything compelling, and it was too expensive.

They've now changed their business strategy from consumer to B2B and let go most of the consumer folks.

The Ruby folks have done a few iterations of packaging systems and have pretty much nailed it.

Might be worth studying the whole 'gem' system (discovery, distributed publishing, versioning, dependencies, uninstall, etc).

http://www.gemcutter.com