marcus

19 ms·

181.
Twitter / venturehacks(twitter.com)
3 points by marcus 19y ago|1 comments
182.
by marcus 19y ago
Use geotargeting to target a specific state or small country pour massive amounts of money relatively to the small target zone and monitor changes in consuming habits, brand reach and recognition etc. I'm not sure most consumer product comp
183.
by marcus 19y ago
Actually now that I think about it, because Google is now an OpenId provider, you can probably just accept OpenIds when you port it out of GAE and everything will work fine.
184.
by marcus 19y ago
Even if the software is commercial as long as it is open source, you have motivations to tinker with it, to adapt it to your own problems and preferences and people will still look at it to learn. Why is the fact that would the fact that yo
185.
by marcus 19y ago
I love free as in speech software, I don't mind so much if its free as in beer. I just want to be able to see the source code, tinker with it, and be able to trust it.
186.
by marcus 19y ago
But porting your GAE application to another provider is easy, it won't automatically have the scaling capabilities and the Google login is a problem but mostly they can be easily ported.
187.
by marcus 19y ago
Try using data from Interactive Brokers. You can pull up to a year of historical data on FX in minute resolution, and it is free.
188.
by marcus 19y ago
Why not write something generic that lets you follow any RSS you want on twitter in an hourly interval...
189.
by marcus 19y ago
My point is that Google's had very few exit strategies other than an IPO once it took 25M in VC money. Most YC startups have more flexibility regarding their exit strategy.
190.
by marcus 19y ago
Google raised more than 25M USD in its first year in a series A round, the largest round done by a YC backed company I could find was 12M (Loopt) and that was a B series round. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator http://www.google.
191.
by marcus 19y ago
Not really, offering you a number of shares but refusing to tell you the number of shares outstanding is like offering to pay you 100,000 a year but not being willing to tell in which currency the 100,000 are. Might be in GBP (about 200k US
192.
by marcus 19y ago
The point is that because of the lower funding they have a lot more exit options than an average VC backed company and can exit in a lower valuation where an IPO doesn't make sense. Of course some of your companies have awesome potential (
193.
by marcus 19y ago
Actually YC companies are less biased towards IPOs than the average VC backed company because of the smaller investment and lower average burn rate, and even VC backed companies rarely IPO in todays market. In conclusion I wouldn't hold my
194.
by marcus 19y ago
Henry Ford once said that if he asked his customers what they wanted they would've said they wanted a faster horse
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by marcus 19y ago
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=news.ycombinator.com&t...
196.
by marcus 19y ago
Bug was found a couple of months ago, a patch is available https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-crypto/+bug...
197.
by marcus 19y ago
There is a quote I love from the movie "city slicker" that reminds me of this article You know what the secret of life is? No, what? This. Your finger? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit. That'
198.
Lessons of Y Combinator: Things I’d do differently after 2 startups(foundread.com)
81 points by marcus 19y ago|32 comments
199.
by marcus 19y ago
It all depends on the keywords you rank highly on, and the value is almost boolean in nature. Appearing in the first 3 links can be very valuable, appearing in the third page practically worthless. Ranking first on Mesothelioma, a form of c
200.
by marcus 19y ago
Working on my YC application
201.
by marcus 19y ago
Implementing cryptography isn't that hard, the algorithms are fairly simple. You can write RSA for example in a couple of hours if you already have BigInt implemented. The hard part is the math behind the algorithms that makes them work and
202.
by marcus 19y ago
Yes we're getting dangerously close Steve Yegge length posts
203.
by marcus 19y ago
Unfortunately patenting something is very difficult to get right by yourself, learning to write patents properly is much like learning your first computer language without the benefit of a compiler or interpreter. There is a very strict syn
204.
by marcus 19y ago
Peter Norvig's solution is more elegant (he just brute forces it), it works on all puzzles and is just 100 lines of Python http://norvig.com/sudoku.html
205.
by marcus 19y ago
True, but they've been vetted for intelligence, programming skills and analytical thinking by a very rigorous selection process (much like YC) which helps with recruiting and money raising (again just like the YC brand does). And every one
206.
Tahoe: A Secure Distributed Filesystem(allmydata.org)
2 points by marcus 19y ago|0 comments
207.
by marcus 19y ago
I wanted to buy one, but in the end decided that if I buy one I'll devote too much time to it, time that I really need to spend on my startup.
208.
by marcus 19y ago
Always write your code as if the person who will maintain it is a deranged ax murderer who knows where you live
209.
by marcus 19y ago
Touché
210.
by marcus 19y ago
Code you wrote yourself, especially generic libraries will always be useful for you as long as you use it on a periodic basis. I have some C++ code I wrote back when I was 13 in my first courses in college which is part of my current startu

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