"We may provide information to service providers to help us bring you the services we offer. Specifically, we may use third parties to facilitate our business, such as to send email solicitations. In connection with these offerings and business operations, our service providers may have access to your personal information for use in connection with these business activities."
Email solicitations from third parties ? .. makes me real reluctant to sign up.
Yeah second this .. loose the registration to vote. I'd love to vote on some of this but just won't do it if I have to register.
I observed that search doesn't work on option's. So although "which cola drink do you prefer? " has pepsi as an option .. searching for pepsi yields nothing. The reason it's important to have this is often I'm looking for what people feel about some product (pepsi/iphone/ubuntu) etc I don't want to guess what the question is.
Also I don't know what your monetization strategy is .. but I would hate to see something influence the choice of votes. like this http://www.betabooth.com/poll/What-Non-cola-Sugary-Drink-Is-...
If you want to have adverts make it non related to the questions asked.
I often do not live up to it, but this is important:
The good news about Jesus can transform your life. Jesus died for our sins and rose again from the dead. If you become his follower, you will have salvation (moksha).
For a startup looking to attract co-founders I'm don't think this is very judicious. I'm not saying don't be religious just leave out any mention of it on company sites, that's what personal blogs are for.
I know the NASA thing was meant to merely underscore a point but I've seen this comparison so many times that it bugs me and I wish folks would stop using it. The average NASA sw engineer develops a ridiculously low number of lines of code a year (I think I read something like less than 100 ines). A 6000 line patch has 2500 page spec.
The dynamics are vastly different than in any commerical software.
A nice article on the process is here http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.html . Makes a good read.
I've interned at the NASA software testing facility (IV&V) for a couple of years. Their practices for V&V are really quite amazing and thorough, and even more so for validation of unsupervised neural networks.
It very much puts to shame conventional software practices for software assuredness. The fast company article mentioned seems to only glance at the level of complexity they employ to consistently obtain correct software.
I thought this was a good article but one of your points touches on one of the reasons why purely engineer-driven start-ups fail: no business sense. I agree that the MBA-types need to stay away from the engineers on a day-to-day basis, but I've seen too many start-ups shoot themselves in the foot because they launch a product without any market research and no understanding of how to make partnerships that will help them scale.
...why purely engineer-driven start-ups fail: no business sense.
I'm not sure how you managed to draw that conclusion. His bonus point is that the CTO didn't even do work, that's hardly engineer-driven. And they had a Stanford MBA, who was apparently a drain during product development.
Most successful technology startups are engineer-driven. Google is the ultimate example of just how far a couple engineers can go without any "business sense".
What does it mean to invent a product? Adwords is just a name. The actual system was built and rebuilt and improved many times. Eric did do a lot to make it a success though -- he's part of the reason why Google makes so much more money than Yahoo.
Great deals(once you get all their coupons and upgrade your own memory) on developement strength machines and it's good to support initiatives that provide alternatives to MS.
Even though we're using Ubuntu for our server, the Mac UI is well beyond the UI that Ubuntu can offer. If I am able to get things done faster with the Mac machine given its superior UI, then it is worth the extra $$. Otherwise your direction makes sense. My partner also has the Dell Inspiron 9400 and is going to wipe MS off of it and go with Ubuntu in the near future. My problem is that I still need XP to run my Revit CAD app, and the Mac lets me do this without having to reboot - which is a big productivity gain.
I've been using GTD for the past year and its worked out very very well.
It's strange that I've always used this philosophy of "what is the next smallest increment of code that can be written?" for development but never applied this in other areas
In startups its all the more important that you don't let little things slip.
I've done the polyphasic sleep thing for ~3 months last year. You can forget about coding for the first 10-12 days or so while you acclimatize (or at least I found it very very hard). And if you don't initiate yourself exactly right you'll find you've wasted a whole month just getting dog tired.
While you do suddenly seem to get a lot of time it makes any kind of socializing hard since you have to sleep every 3-4 hours. Even after a couple of months if I missed one sleep session I would hit a massive wall and all coding would come to a stop.
Lack of time can sometimes be a good thing. It forces you into creative solutions. The funny thing is, although I produced more lines of code during the polyphasic experiment
I think the quality suffered (not much but when I look over those pieces it always seems I could have structured it better). I don't know what to attribute that to since I didn't feel any different while coding in or out of the polyphasic state after the ramp up period.
Agree with everything you said (especially the difficulty socializing part).
My solution to most of the problem is to "ease" into the schedule. Keep a core sleep period of like 4-5 hrs at night but continue to take your naps. As you acclimatize, try shrinking/eliminating the core sleep gradually. That way you dont feel like you're getting hit by a train like you do if you try and jump right into it.
As far as code quality, I find mine is actually much better.. The period just after each nap I feel really refreshed and can concentrate. Theres actually research out there that proves this is true. Again, I think its all about avoiding a rough acclimation period though..
jsjenkins168 wrote:
Theres actually research out there that proves this is true
hmmm.. I found research in this area very lacking. The only scientific study seemed to be from sleep researcher Claudio Stampi and his essentially said "If you absolutely can't keep regular sleeping schedules (like in long sailing races) then polyphasic sleep is a better alternative".
If you have pointers to papers I'd appreciate links sent to the email-id in my profile. I might try this again someday.
The only good research I've been able to find is contained in the book "Why We Nap" by Stampi and Broughton. Sounds like we're talking about the same source. Unfortunately, its no longer in print so therefore very very hard to find..
I'll shoot you an email if I find more.. My co-founder knows more about this stuff than me I'll ask him.
For eg my preference would have been "pay pal" , "amazon fps" and finally "credit card".