- Deployment is only a matter of uploading application files. No Ruby on Rails-specific server configuration required!
- Built on the industry standard Apache web server.
- Allows Ruby on Rails applications to use about 33% less memory, when used in combination with Ruby Enterprise Edition (optional).
- Zero maintenance. No port management, server process monitoring or stale file cleanup required. Errors are automatically recovered whenever possible.
- Designed for performance, stability and security. Passenger should never crash Apache even in case of crashing Rails applications.
- Well-documented, for both system administrators and developers!
All the lovers will come and razz Matt and this comment, but none of them will be able to provide any evidence that facebook is doing anything but spending capital.
Matt's not saying they aren't getting a lot of traffic, or that a lot of people don't enjoy using Facebook (nobody in their right mind would claim those things). Matt's saying that it's a rare form of chutzpah that Zuckerberg possesses that allows him to make up stuff like "the social graph" as justification for his second-place social network being worth 30 times the first-place social network (he's also saying some other stuff, but I think that's the funniest/truest part). And, of course, it takes an astounding reality distortion field for him to be able to convince half the people in the valley that it's a done deal: Facebook is "the next Google".
As funny as this would be to watch, I think this underestimates the lock-in effect Microsoft has on business and everyday users. Even with Ubuntu, linux isn't going to capture the mainstream in a long time, so the only real threat to Windows on the desktop is OS X... and since you have to buy hardware to get it, Microsoft still has a pretty strong moat here.
Now if Apple were to give away their OS for non-mac hardware, that would be interesting.
As for Office, no online solution can compete until net access becomes ubiquitous. You can't use Google Apps on a plane at the moment, and a lot of users are comfortable with Word's UI.
I think Microsoft's business model is eventually doomed, but not in any time frame short enough to make the Yahoo deal matter in that regard.
It seems to me like Microsoft should leverage what it is very good at (marketing) and try to compete with IBM in the consulting business rather than try to compete online. There will always be a huge market of MBAs wasting money on overpriced tech advice!
In that case, the "let's ban valleywag" approach is even more wrong. The problem of "garbage gets voted up" is one which ought to be solved long before the problem of "people submit garbage".
if you have a great idea, build a prototype. that's the great equalizer -- if you have working code, or better yet, traction, then most concerns about being a "proven" team evaporate.
if your code isn't quite ready, build a screencast, then submit it to news.yc. doing this was probably instrumental in our eventual YC acceptance. (this lets you convey the cool parts of your idea in a way you can control even if there are a lot of missing pieces.)
otherwise, if you've only got a team and a hunch, you're in this _giant_ pile of "eh who knows if it'll work, who knows if they're good, but maybe" applications (many of which ultimately fail), and it's basically a crapshoot. yc gets enough apps w/ 1) amazing people 2) amazing products or 3) amazing traction to avoid having to place these kinds of shaky bets.
the more risk (product risk, people risk, market risk) you can eliminate on your own, the better you'll look to _any_ investor (and the more equity you'll keep for yourselves.)
obviously, there's a catch-22 that to prove some of these things you need initial capital, but for most software startups it just means locking yourself up and hacking out a prototype and letting it rip to a few people.
then just apply next cycle -- mercifully, it's not like college admissions where you (generally) only get one shot. (my first yc app was rejected a year before ultimately getting in.)
To point 1: YC backs teams not ideas. Smart early stage investors back teams.
To point 2: AT Interview stage, from one application form how familiar do you expect someone to be once you've read 500 forms. This is a pretty selfish viewpoint. Once you get into YC and get to know everyone YC (in particular Jessica) works extremely hard for you and care about what you do.
Some companies like rescuetime and heroku were well past the idea stage when they did YC. So your comments are a bit of an overgeneralisation.
As with any social app, banning sites/users/apps that aren't deliberately damaging (like spam, trolls, whatever) is basically saying your system isn't working, and you can't be bothered to change it.
It's like 'fixing' a bug in software by simply suppressing the error messages. It will come back to bite you in the ass.
I don't know when/why this became reality. On my facebook account, I only have people I know pretty well, many of them lifelong friends. It keeps my list short (Something like 40 I think) but it doesn't crowd it up. I guess that's not the norm
for starters, the title. "not really that special" is the sort of passive-aggressive thing someone says that often leads to flamewars. the text of the article continues in that same vein.
I knew Google was, in a way, similar to Yahoo (which everyone had been using up until then) but took one very critical step further. It was clearly a paradigm shift, the difference between a propeller and a jet engine.
Wasn't Yahoo using Google to generate search results when you first saw Google?
I wouldn't want to elevate PG as a demigod. Yet upon rejection this was, in many ways, how I felt. This essay comes from an analysis of these feelings. The understanding I came to later represents how I now see things. I'm proud to say we are moving on. But I'd hoped to share my experience, for others currently going through rejection, and for future, aspiring entrepreneurs.
I have been an entrepreneur for the last fifteen years and in retrospect, the two things that are hardest to learn are the following ...
1) How to embrace rejection ... not just accept it but embrace it. Most smart engineers prefer to avoid rejection by spending more time on developing technology or products and they want to get it as perfect as possible before presenting it to a potential user or customer for critique. This is wrong. Get over rejection. Embrace it. Do it early. Any chance you can, get in front of people who are not your family or your friends and get real feedback. You don't learn anything from positive feedback. Your learn a whole lot more from negative feedback.
2) How to develop a sensitivity to other people's inconvenience. For everything that is new, there will always be early adopters. It is easy to let initial success gets to your head. But to going beyond the initial veneer, your product or services have to simplify people's life, not just the smart or motivated people, but the normal and lazy people.
As my base jumping friend told me once, after about 500 jumps, you will start to realize how cold it is up there. This is just the beginning. Suck it up.
"vista will collapse" is likely too sensationalist. i'd say it's more that windows is continuing its long, slow slide into irrelevance, a trend that has been evident for several years now.
the most encouraging sign i've heard about microsoft lately is that the next version of windows will supposedly break binary compatibility. it will continue to run old apps, but only in an old-windows-emulator, much the same way macosx used to run old mac classic apps. they'll finally get to break free of the 20 years of backward compatibility that's strangling them.
that means they'll have a chance for a smaller, leaner OS. will they also take that opportunity to make a better os, in terms of user experience and programming APIs? i kind of doubt it, because microsoft is too big to get out of its own way. but it will be interesting to watch, nonetheless.
In the author's words (http://www.modrails.com), here are the main features:
- Deployment is only a matter of uploading application files. No Ruby on Rails-specific server configuration required!
- Built on the industry standard Apache web server.
- Allows Ruby on Rails applications to use about 33% less memory, when used in combination with Ruby Enterprise Edition (optional).
- Zero maintenance. No port management, server process monitoring or stale file cleanup required. Errors are automatically recovered whenever possible.
- Designed for performance, stability and security. Passenger should never crash Apache even in case of crashing Rails applications.
- Well-documented, for both system administrators and developers!