willarson

8 ms·

91.
by willarson 19y ago
My point is that it is a bad point among successful startups, not that it is a bad point among startups in general. Looking at startups in general isn't particularly interesting for an entrepreneur compared to looking at those that are par
92.
by willarson 19y ago
In general I would like to throw PlentyOfFish out as a bad data point. His experience has been atypical, although he doesn't seem to agree. He was a single founder, and he did everything himself... which is better phrased as 'everything tha
93.
by willarson 19y ago
Good point. I try to do the same, which is why I post semi-frequently here, and never post on Reddit. This community tends to reward quality responses, whereas larger communities tend to evolve to the point of rewarding asinine negativity.
94.
by willarson 19y ago
I would love markdown, when I rewrote my blog software I switched everything to use markdown. The worst part is that YC news does accept much of the markdown syntax... but then does different things with it. Humbug.
95.
by willarson 19y ago
The first thing I wonder when I see sites similar to yours is "How can you stop gaming?" I don't want to invest my time in yet another site like yours when I am fairly confident a competent programmer could write a script in ten minutes tha
96.
by willarson 19y ago
done
97.
by willarson 19y ago
done
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by willarson 19y ago
done
99.
by willarson 19y ago
lethain @ gmail
100.
by willarson 19y ago
Is Yahoo's model worth fixing? The massive portal/service centers (Yahoo, Microsoft, Google) are trying to do everything. To be everything to everyone. Isn't this a bad idea? Isn't this an awful idea? Small agile companies can focus on
101.
by willarson 19y ago
Hints at some interesting stuff but doesn't say too much outright. If Amazon claims databases are the way of the past, I'm not sure what the way of the future is. Hashtables stored in flash memory?
102.
by willarson 19y ago
This, somehow, seems like it might belong in the Feature Request section. :p I don't think the site has the user base to sustain subfeeds at the moment. Also it isn't really intended to be a one-stop source for everything, feel free to crea
103.
by willarson 19y ago
10. Debating isn't time wasted unless the participants are closed minded. When working with others I respect, I have always found that both sides are willing to defect to the other side, they just want to make sure their side is considered
104.
by willarson 19y ago
I (like everyone else) dislike logins, but accusing the people who require users to login to use their content of being greedy is simply asinine. Expecting to be compensated for your content and your work isn't greed, and its a hell of a mo
105.
by willarson 19y ago
I'm about 75% of the way done moving my old wordpress blog to a Django powered site I built, its been a pretty interesting experience. That said, all these showcases show is that the people who built them are good visual designers, and doe
106.
by willarson 19y ago
I have noticed the drop off too, I has associating it with the end of the application period for YC... That said, the dreary pace does allow us to slow down and focus. I think this would be a great time for us to start some broader discussi
107.
by willarson 19y ago
Risky for the employees, but the founders are already wealthy enough that taking the risk probably doesn't bother them much.
108.
by willarson 19y ago
a) Completing a CS degree does not a programmer make. b) Geek/boring stereotypes have never seemed overtly powerful in my experience, the worse perception is that CS is hard , and many college students don't like that word. c) This probl
109.
by willarson 19y ago
A lot of this has to do with the quality of your palette. Some people are simply amazingly sensitive (I think Gladwell has a chapter in Blink about such people), and others are... not. I tend to group myself into the second category. Then a
110.
by willarson 19y ago
Pretty sure that Flex is going to be open sourced "real soon now", which I think will be a real boon.
111.
by willarson 19y ago
I don't use social bookmarking, it has never appealed to me. Browser based bookmarking has always been sufficient for me, and I don't spend much time "browsing" the internet, I am typically trying to find something specific, so a general se
112.
by willarson 19y ago
The pruning method of choice seems to be evaluating developers based on their contributions to open source projects. You have to be at fairly proficient to successfully submit code to a well run open source project, because bad patches usua
113.
by willarson 19y ago
Yes, which is how the American car market has worked for the past seventy years, and also the reason why we'll hit the peak oil point in the next -5 to 30 years. But you're right, learning from mistakes is so passe.
114.
by willarson 19y ago
I don't think its so much a Rails issue as a Ruby issue. Of late a new breed of Rubyists has emerged, and they are surprisingly militant. Here's hoping its just a phase. More options are indeed good, ands its weird to see the users of a lan
115.
by willarson 19y ago
I remember reading a post by Matz about how he hated to leave Japan because his connection there was so much faster than what he ended up with elsewhere. This kind of reminds me of the the gas consumption issues though, maybe instead of co
116.
by willarson 19y ago
This isn't really a hacker/non-hacker issue, its just an issue of having vision, and having good people with good ideas. A company that relies solely on its founder for innovation is not a healthy company. I don't have much love for third
117.
by willarson 19y ago
I recently read that PlentOfFish had 5-10 servers in a nearby center. Hosting 12 billion page views (per year) off one server seems a bit much, but Kawasaki isn't a technical guy, so I won't hold it against him. I am still very uncomfortab
118.
by willarson 19y ago
I can understand how this might eventually become an issue, but this is less unlikely because of the nature of YC (people here are trying to represent themselves well to the yc 'crew', and to others who they might work with one day). The si
119.
by willarson 19y ago
I've been writing web analytics software for the last couple of weeks, that tracks users statistics, etc. Safe to say that there is no foolproof way to track users who don't want to be tracked.
120.
by willarson 19y ago
I like Scala, and I think Lift is very promising, but to answer the rhetorical question, I'd use Ruby because Rails is at a more mature stage in its lifetime than Lift is (I think Lift list just had its 0.2 release). There are some very pro

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