LeBlanc

15 ms·

91.
by LeBlanc 16y ago
I cannot recommend enough "Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston. It is a series of interviews of the founders of companies like Apple, Paypal, etc about the very very early stages of their start-up before they ever knew they would be suc
92.
by LeBlanc 16y ago
So I was out to dinner tonight and got an email from my VPS saying my disk IO was high. At first I thought someone might have hacked my server, but it turns out that someone posted the link to my site on HN! I've been working on this websit
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
Everything is working fine for my linode. Dashboard is responsive and my web app is fast as ever. I'm on the California server cluster though. It may be location specific.
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
The #1 reason to start your own company is because you will have fun doing it and you have a strong undeniable urge to turn your ideas into reality. It is not for everyone, so don't be discouraged by your friend leaving, but let this be a l
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
I was in the same situation as you about 2 months ago and I decided to take the plunge and work on my own start-up. While I know that work experience and the network from working someplace awesome would help me, I had the idea, the passion,
96.
by LeBlanc 16y ago
W3Schools is one of the best free resources out there. http://www.w3schools.com/ Here are some books that I have used that have been helpful PHP and MYSQL for Dynamic Websites http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0010SEMW8/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp.
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
Hackers and Founders is a great group that meets up every other week. I've been to two of their events and everyone has been really awesome. There is a meetup this upcoming thursday in SF. http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
I'll point you to some articles written by people more experienced than I at this: anti-family: - Jason Friedman http://www.humbledmba.com/the-drag-coefficient-scoring-syste... Pro-family: - Vivek Wadhwa http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/paper
99.
by LeBlanc 16y ago
It sounds like the problem you are having is user retention. You get people to your site, but they don't end up sticking around to use your tool/service on a daily basis. This means that you do not have a strong enough value proposition (or
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
Being attached to a university can be a big advantage if the university has good start-up support, especially since you already have a network there. However, being in the bay area can also be a huge advantage, as is free rent and food. If
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
If you are willing to be flexible in terms on location, you can get cheaper rents but still be close to the city proper via public transit. Places down in the peninsula will be even cheaper, but you will have to factor in the price of the c
102.
by LeBlanc 16y ago
Depending on your location, there may be institutions similar to Dogpatch Labs or Hacker Dojo. These are places where hackers can get cheap temporary 1-2 person spaces to work. I don't know of any outside of the bay area though. I think a '
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
How about instead of using the resume / cover letter combination you ask a series of interesting questions similar to the YCombinator application? This will 1) weed out all of the people who spend minimal effort on a job app and just spam t
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
Whatever you do, don't reference specific issues the customer had or statements they made. Most people will find this very creepy and stay away from your service. That said, you can tailor your pitch to whatever pain points that customer h
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
You could also try to teach yourself. If you already understand object oriented programming, then learning ruby on your own should be doable. It really depends on how you learn best. I prefer to teach myself, and was able to learn ruby and
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
One thing you should consider is that the successful people you want to imitate are probably partially successful because they did not imitate others, but did what worked for them. Everybody is different and will work best under different c
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
I don't know if one exists, but a browser plugin that allows for cookie synching might be able to do this. If it doesn't exist, someone should make it. Chrome has built in bookmark synching tied to your google account.
108.
by LeBlanc 16y ago
You don't need to send the data to cars for wi-fi equipped traffic lights to be useful. I can imagine hooking up a traffic light with both a wi-fi device and cameras to measure traffic flow. Traffic light A could communicate with traffic li
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
Are you using any parsing tools? Like the stanford NLP? I am currently developing an API for the stanford NLP so that other web apps can easily use that parsing and word tagging tool. Cool website. I like the idea of the "where is this slan
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
It depends entirely on the person and their spending habits. Try making a list of what things you will spend money on / buy and then estimate a monthly cost for those items. Food can be one of the hardest things to quantify, especially if y
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
I think it depends on the person. I don't have any problem at all with the emotional support, but I really miss being able to sit down with someone and have a strong brainstorming session. I do talk to other people to get their advice/ideas
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
Thanks for this perspective! I recently had the opportunity to outsource some of my development to India. An Indian friend of mine had a team that was looking for a project. I ended up not working with them for two reasons. 1) the small siz
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
What matters more than whether you are happy or not is whether your users are happy or not. One thing you could try is to launch to a select number of users (generally friends and family) and get their feedback before launching to the gener
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
I am also very interested in this. I need a JRuby hosting solution and there are not very many out there. Plus I would like to learn how to run my own server. prgmr.com is out of space though. Does anyone know of anything else like this out
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
This is a great idea, good luck! These types of events are very fun and educational. One possibility you could look into is either a business plan or elevator pitch competition. Start-ups will submit their bplan or give a 2 minute pitch to
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
You are probably right that it doesn't make sense right now, just because a lot of the good suggestions in this post are more pressing. The reason I suggest it is that it would give you access to a number of users right off the bat which co
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
The online to-do list application market is very crowded. There are a whole lot of different apps out there. I like your idea of a structured to-do list next to a priority one. Have you thought about using the APIs of the other to-do list a
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
The simple and clean design is actually what I like best about the site. I'm sure you've seen www.startuply.com (which is amazingly down right now because of an asp.net web.config error, wow!) That might be a good source of job leads for yo
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
Isn't this largely a hardware problem, not a software problem? No matter what you do on the software end, your screen is still going to be made up of millions of tiny dots.
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by LeBlanc 16y ago
My recommendation is to go the start-up route for the following reasons: 1) You will be able to solve interesting problems more so than a large company which at least early on will have you doing small iterations on what they already have 2

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