"Trying to solve the issues for the millions of small and medium sized enterprises out there that have real problems in a time of economic upheaval is smart, very smart.
But will these produce the big exits which VCs tend to demand? The jury is out"
In fact, I was wondering if someone who needs to talk out loud has a different approach of solving problems or if he has even has some shortcomings given that he is not able to keep things in his mind.
When children learn reading at school, the first step is to read loud, then to understand what they read out loud. It takes considerably more efforts until a child is able to understand a text she is reading silently.
That is certainly an interesting way to look at people talking to themselves, definitely correct with children. Personally I talk to myself a lot when working at home, and never when in an office (it is rude and distracting for other people). I think I do much better work at home, especially when trying to solve problems. For some reason saying something out loud can often make it clearer, easy to see something stupid you've done etc.
In theory anything you can do in a meeting, talking with others, can be done in email, but IMHO well run meetings are a very good way of bringing ideas together, solving problems etc. Talking to yourself is like having a meeting with yourself :-)
Silent reading is a historically contingent practice, and did not become typical until the early middle ages, when reading aloud began to be banned in Christian scriptoriums. Whether this was done for pragmatic or religious reasons, I don't know.
I don't think that argument is superficial. At scale, Amazon is actually quite pricey. Currently, Amazon makes most sense if your site does have large variability in usage and if it makes use of the ability to spin up/down instances on demand. If you're an event-related site where usage goes up by a factor of 10-100 for a few hours every week, for example, Amazon makes a whole lot of sense.
However, if your usage is way up there all week long, it seems to me there are significantly cheaper alternatives, e.g. Hetzner servers.
One of the biggest advantages to using EC2 is its scaling capabilities. EC2 offers 10 different instance sizes from m1.small to cc.4xlarge (with 10 Gbps clustering capabilities), 4 different regions, auto-scaling, load balancing, high availability via off-instance storage, durability via copying, GigE uplinks, and much more. You can't get that level of features from in any other IaaS cloud I am aware of. Yes, you might pay more than co-locating yourself or leasing some dedicated servers... but that isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison to EC2.
Do you have a testing environment or multiple testing environments? Does it/Do they need to run all the time? If not, you save there. Do you like being able to spin up an entire duplicate of your environment to do environmental tests? You can't do that in normal server environments without ridiculous expenditure.
What were the estimates based on? Were they specific to your business, or just to your type of business? Can you refine them from the original/related resources at all?
There's a balance to be had between fuzziness in estimates, and specificity to your business, IMHO, and by looking to SaaS averages you're looking to reduce the fuzziness at a cost of specificity. That may well be a good idea, but it should be done knowingly, again IMHO.
Founder is fine, co-founder is too. Co-founder automatically conveys that you are not a single founder, with just 'founder' someone might infer that you were either first or the only founder. It doesn't matter much in practice, either is fine. It distinguishes you from a regular hire and it is clear that you can be addressed with any issues.
I am about to start a "Sole Proprietorship" to do some VoIP consulting and system integration. I have had 2 clients before this, but I was just getting my foot in, so I didn't have a "Company Name". I am glad this came up on HN. Would 'Founder' be the most appropriate title on my biz card?
For a one-man shop, I'd just skip the title entirely. The only downside is potentially someone seeing just the card wouldn't know if you have the authority to do deals, but I really doubt that would be an issue with a consulting shop.
This article may create a wrong attitude towards customers and business imo. I believe it is indispensable to go out and talk and listen to people instead relying only on online-tools (by the way, that's what 37signals always have done, too). A company that is happy to pass the sleep-test, is very likely to start drifting off...
I don't understand why Google was not able to remove the video - which was one of the most seen on the site - in time (means within few days instead of 2 months).
How long would it have taken until such content had been removed at Hacker News? I guess not more than 30 minutes. Two months = #fail. A simple flag-feature would probably already do it... I hope Google draws the right conclusion from this failure.
That's just complete bullcrap. One of the reasons the DMCA exists in the US is to protect companies like Google in exactly this type of situation. Many EU countries have similar laws
I totally agree that this device could replace the PC for many many people. I see the iPad as the universal remote-commander for all kind of media and entertainment. Imagine you could buy a film on iTunes and beam it into your television screen...
But will these produce the big exits which VCs tend to demand? The jury is out"