cubes's comments

I find this sort of uninformed armchair analysis to be unfulfilling.

The stock swap scenario is a hedge. It allows founders to potentially realize some upside even if their company does not succeed. I think this could be a useful tool to help founders effectively mitigate some of the risk they take on.

That said, there is the danger that allowing founders to hedge there risk in this fashion would make them less motivated to make their own company succeed.

Syzygryd, a 2.5 ton fire breathing collaborative musical instrument. With a lot of help from friends. http://www.syzygryd.com

I believe it's to encourage the projects Kickstarter funds to have a specific focus, and to decrease the likelihood of fraud. If the money just goes into a slush fund, it's easy to lose track of it.

For instance, the Syzygryd Kickstarter is to fund our flame effects. Our money is earmarked for prototyping and fabricating our flame effects, and any money left over goes to buying more propane for more flamey goodness.

This is actually tricky from a legal perspective because startups are illiquid investments, and the SEC has rules that prevent you from selling shares in a non-public company to so-called non-qualified investors.

I'm a member of Noisebridge, and I think it's pretty great. If anyone is in the San Francisco Bay Area, drop by some time.

Do something else. Travel. Go to Burning Man. Get away from the keyboard.

Startups are, typically, all consuming. Of course that's going to have an effect on your relationship with your significant other. I think it's really important to keep the plans you make. Yes, sometimes the servers will crash, and it has to be fixed now, but, barring emergencies, make a concerted effort not to cancel plans you make.

Facebook uses Cassandra, and, with properly designed schema, those queries are actually cheap, and, better yet, distributed across a cluster of machines. You can read about Cassandra here: http://cassandra.apache.org/

This is not really accurate. Some NoSQL solutions, such as Memcached, MemcacheDB, and REDIS are key-value stores, i.e. hash tables.

Other solutions, such as Cassandra, MongoDB, and CouchDB provide richer semantics that make it possible to perform efficient range queries and map-reduce queries. Cassandra and MongoDB both use indices to improve query performance.

One of the primary advantages of the various NoSQL solutions is that they make it easy to scale horizontally, i.e. to add capacity by simply adding another host machine. This is in contrast to traditional relational databases, which are typically hard to scale horizontally.

My point is that religious debates, not unlike the Google Pac-Man logo, waste time. But at least Google's Pac-Man logo is fun, and nobody spills blood over Pac-Man :)

As for using both, I tend to use emacs for the heavy lifting, and vi for quick edits.

Seriously? Seriously? It's 2010, and we're still having this religious debate? Pick an editor that works for you. Learn it. Use it. Done. NB I'm a heretic, I use both vi and emacs.

Minor technical gripe, there's an annoying audio hiss, but the information is great.

Facebook did not integrate in to MySpace, and managed to unseat it. I agree that ease of use is key, and this is what has crippled cypherpunk projects in the past; it's why STARTTLS protects so much email, and PGP protects so little. Also, most people using IM service today use Adium or Pidgin, which supports multiple networks.

The average Kickstarter is not pulling down anywhere near 200k, and it would take a remarkably clever con to pull off what you propose. Why would a clever con target Kickstarter, something that is trivially traceable? Also, why target a large group of smart, motivated individuals who know quite a bit about how to track people down on the internet?

While you raise a legitimate point, I think you discount the basic fact that, on balance, most individuals behave in a trustworthy manner. Society depends on this fact. We trust people to drive cars, and not intentionally run people down. Stores trust that most individuals will not shoplift.

Will there eventually be a large scale case of someone untrustworthy duping people via crowdsourcing? Probably. Does that mean the model is fundamentally flawed? No. Plus, crowdsourcing spreads the risk around so the loss is minimized. It's not like Bernie Madoff who insisted that investors invest all their funds through him.

The reasoning in this article is pretty specious and circular. Some of the author's arguments can be summed up as:

* Diaspora will fail because it sounds similar to something someone else tried one time that failed.

* Nobody will use Diaspora because it will fail.

* Diaspora will fail because nobody will use it.

* Nobody will use Diaspora because it will never ship.

* Nobody will want to pay for Diaspora because nobody will want to pay for it.

* Diaspora will fail because the creators are young.

I don't know whether or not Diaspora will succeed. The old school cypherpunk in me wants to see Diaspora, or something similar, succeed. I would be more curious to see a well reasoned article on the obstacles Diaspora has to face with getting traction, and finding a viable business model.

I like BeautifulSoup, but these days I'd suggest using lxml (http://codespeak.net/lxml/) instead. Unfortunately, BeautifulSoup is on the slow side, and development seems to have shifted into maintenance mode.

Sigh. Mark Cuban, multi-billionaire doesn't care about your privacy. Film at eleven.

How about all the people who pay for Wordpress and MovableType?