birken

52 ms·

451.
by birken 12y ago
I'll preface this by saying I'm not a big YC apologist. I've never been through it, I've never applied, I've directly competed against lots of YC companies, yada yada. But I disagree. I've dealt with VCs befo
452.
by birken 12y ago
Lots of people will give you money if they think you will turn it into more money. VCs, YC, techstars, rich people, angel investors, your parents, your dentist, etc. Having dealt with many varieties of these before, they all generally sha
453.
by birken 12y ago
This is akin to somebody breaking into Jason's house while nobody is home and placing an ad for their startup on his coffee table. Nobody is physically harmed but it is a gross violation of privacy. I assume this is against the law,
454.
by birken 12y ago
This is what the press does. The median or average case isn't interesting, so they find interesting stories that are outliers and write about them. Is it illustrative of what normal people can and should expect? No. Is it useful in
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by birken 12y ago
I like how the news story says "acquired", but the actual blog post ( http://blog.twitpic.com/2014/10/twitpics-future/ ) doesn't use that word and says that Twitpic is essentially just giving the
456.
by birken 12y ago
Wow, I had to do a double take when I saw the name. He is a well known SVP at Google, and at least when I was there he was in charge of the majority of engineering. Good for him.
457.
by birken 12y ago
Great purchase. I've done a fair amount of looking at stuff on Redfin and then typing the address into Walkscore for more info. Can't wait until it is integrated.
458.
by birken 12y ago
Uh, I got some of these "wrong" that aren't wrong. As in, in the past I did the advice given in "wrong" answer, in the context of building a startup, and it was wildly successful. The problem with making startup ad
459.
by birken 12y ago
This is of course the main problem with this type of idea. It is very likely that I will live longer than this site will, therefore it doesn't make sense to use it. What did you do with the people who had signed up for you site?
460.
by birken 12y ago
I think if you are concerned with swapping out to a different system as you scale you should use a "search as a service" company and then bring it in-house if the cost becomes too much. The interface provided by a "search as
461.
by birken 12y ago
Yes, which I think in simple cases is a benefit. For example if you are using an ORM, the massive queries in the OP are really a pain to deal with. With Sphinx, you perform the search using the search API and get back some ids, then just
462.
by birken 12y ago
Well the article is right in one sense: Postgres full text search is probably better than you think it would be and is very usable at non-massive scale However, I still wouldn't recommend using it. The queries and indexes are all unin
463.
by birken 12y ago
Well really at the end of the day all that matters is whether this statement (from the video) is true: > Even if you joined Facebook as employee #1000, so you joined it in like 2009, you still made 20 million dollars. I find it hard to b
464.
by birken 12y ago
When Google went public the valuation was ~$23 Billion (they raised just under $2 billion in the IPO) [1]. However to your point this was around 6 years after founding, whereas Facebook was valued at ~15 billion by Microsoft in 2007, 3 yea
465.
by birken 12y ago
I really like the post but I don't agree with the conclusion. > don’t make the mistake to think that those who don’t fit your specific environment are unworthy human beings > don’t let yourself fall into the trap of thinking you’
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by birken 12y ago
Well when Thumbtack was raising the angel round things weren't as rosy as they are today, so I'd say it is well deserved.
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by birken 12y ago
I'm sure they could pull this data from the craig^H^H^H^H^H mysterious data source if they wanted. For reference, I've lived in 2 1BR apartments which were around the median prices listed here and both were newer buildings, 600-7
468.
by birken 12y ago
Looks interesting. One minor thing is that if the sorting of the bus lines was numeric rater than lexical I think it would be easier to find a specific bus line. Also the limited lines should be right after the regular lines (like 5L shoul
469.
by birken 12y ago
This post is making the completely wrong conclusion. The reason companies like Instagram, Imgur, etc are able to service large #s of users with 7 engineers is mainly because computers and tools are a lot CHEAPER than they used to be, not si
470.
by birken 12y ago
Well there is massive survivorship bias here. For all you know there is another VC that invested 20MM into 5 equally great-looking YC companies that all went bust, and now that VC is out of business and the former partners are homeless. Se
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by birken 12y ago
Look, I agree with a lot of what you have said, but at the same time it is a little unfair to paint this as some universal truth. > There is nothing noble about being willing to sacrifice everything for success. Maybe not to you, but man
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by birken 12y ago
Equity clearly has some value though, based on the fact that in any successful startup investors pay a lot of money for it. If you are considering taking equity, you should treat it like a potential investor would. Ask hard questions. Loo
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by birken 12y ago
Or they were subsidizing the service with their talent that could have been more productively used elsewhere. People who don't understand this just don't understand business. Even great HN heroes like Elon Musk (who sold paypal t
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by birken 12y ago
Not to be too negative as I think all of these things are theoretically good, but they are all just copying things Google does, and Google is a much better example of a successful company than a 20 person startup. FYI I'm sure many co
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by birken 12y ago
Well written. One thing I always find funny about the startup world is the idea that hardship is good. Hardship isn't good. Hardship sucks. Sometimes hardship is something you need to survive to accomplish your goals, but not alway
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Typeracer – Improve/test typing speed via online typing races(play.typeracer.com)
61 points by birken 12y ago|26 comments
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by birken 12y ago
For the people that believe that getting into YC is a necessary part of startup success: This site is not giving you an impartial view of the startup world. Obviously we are on the site for Y combinator right now and note that I have nothi
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by birken 12y ago
Pandas (data analysis library for python) has a lot of cython and C optimizations for datetime string parsing: They have their own C function which parses ISO-8601 datetime strings: https://github.com/pydata/pandas&#x2F
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by birken 12y ago
Another little secret is the first priority of those speakers who are telling you their startup story and giving you advice is to impress you, not actually give you any useful advice. Whatever stories of their startup they tell you are whit
480.
by birken 12y ago
Another potential solution is to maintain your simple free usage flow for non-risky accounts, but require a credit card or human review for accounts which seem risky. Determining risky accounts would have to be something you figure out by

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