Disqus - Friends of desaraev

Re: Why The iTouch Is Inevitable

dlifson — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:16:21 -0000

For people with Mac Minis in their living rooms hooked up to big screen TVs, I'd love to use my iPhone as a keyboard and mouse. You can do this today: set up a VNC server on your Mac Mini and install the Mocha VNC client from the iPhone App Store. No more clunky keyboard while you are on the sofa. Plus, it's super fast since it's running over your home wifi network.

Once I get a Mac Mini (waiting for the next release), I'll be setting this up.

Re: Twitter is not public infrastructure

dlifson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:58:23 -0000

Wait a second though... nobody builds infrastructure because it's fun.
Serious time and resources are put into building infrastructure so
that it is used, because that usage is a meaningful part of their
business. If Twitter doesn't want to bear the cost of providing an
API, then they should stop doing so. The result, of course, would be
disastrous for them.

Putting it a different way: if Twitter made money on every API
request, like Amazon Web Services do, would you feel the same way?

Re: Twitter is not public infrastructure

dlifson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:31:35 -0000

I think StockTwits is a good example of a company reliant on Twitter that would not be successful (due to network effects) on its own.

Re: The AVC Music Meetup

dlifson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:35:11 -0000

Definitely a great show. I had their music in my head all the way home last night and when I woke up this morning. I feel lucky to have seen their first show in the US.

My top two favorite Canadian Bands are Stars and Malajube (http://www.last.fm/music/Ma.... These guys are now on that list.

Re: RachelGab- GPOYW - hair cut and color edition. Bye bye...

dlifson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:01:16 -0000

I love it! Lookin' hot. Can I take you home with me?

Re: NYC tumbls

dlifson — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:06:19 -0000

See you there!

Re: 32/365

dlifson — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:21:26 -0000

What, you're not going to model it for me? Where's my sexy Rachel pic?

Re: Tonight.

dlifson — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:38:28 -0000

What's the occasion?

Re: Life is hard. Here is someone.

dlifson — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:46:25 -0000

I use Charles Schwab, and they are great, but come with constraints.

Pros:
1) You can use any ATM you want, and they pay the ATM fees. This is because they don't have any ATMs themselves
2) Your checking account is interest bearing (if you get the investor / money market account)
3) You can buy / sell stocks straight out of your account
4) The customer service is really nice

Cons:
1) They don't have many branches outside of major cities. There are a few in Manhattan, none in Brooklyn. You can mail in checks no problem.
2) You cannot deposit cash at all. You can go there and deposit checks, but no cash.

By the way, BofA definitely screwed me with the same debit card fines 3 years ago. Just an awful company.

Re: Announcing Start@Spark

dlifson — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:11:07 -0000

Hi Bijan,

Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik (the guys who started Etsy with Rob Kalin) and I have started a company that launches next week. We've also received an offer from DreamIt Ventures to participate in their summer startup incubator program. At what point should we be applying to Start@Spark? Is it too late? Santo's blog post wasn't clear (to me).

Thanks,
David
david.lifson@gmail.com

Re: Kara broke up with me tonight.

dlifson — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:37:01 -0000

:) Thank you.

Re: Jumble thoughts

dlifson — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:46:11 -0000

I would love that. If I ever am visiting your neck of the woods, let's
do that :)

Re: Jumble thoughts

dlifson — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:18:29 -0000

I don't own them, but I think I watched them all on iTunes...

They're great, though. I'm not a huge sci-fi geek, but this show went
beyond that. You just start to love the characters.

Re: I hate it when I burn myself on the oven.

dlifson — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:14:23 -0000

Now I'm curious who the commenter is... Reverse DNS lookup of
68.38.180.134 resolves to nj.comcast.net. Who could that be?

Re: Jumble thoughts

dlifson — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:51:23 -0000

Starting a business is, oddly, something I never thought I would do.
But then I realized I had an idea, the team to do it, and access to a
little money ($15k, initially). So we kinda just started working.

If you ever want to talk at length about it, send me email.

Re: interstellar perversion

dlifson — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:15:21 -0000

My ex, Lisa, bought that same book. I guess now I know at least two copies exist in the world.

Re: Jumble thoughts

dlifson — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:21:27 -0000

I don't get it either, and I had to take 6 semesters of math in
college. But the fact that you said Sierpinski's Triangle makes you
awesome.

This might be a stretch, but if you are into biographies about
mathematicians who are too smart to function normally, there is an
amazing book about Paul Erdos called The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (http://www.amazon.com/MAN-W...
). This guy was completely unable to take care of himself, but is
credited with the most mathematical discoveries in the modern era (and
second to Euler for all time). Some real fun stories in there, and no
real math. There is even a concept of an "Erdos number", based on him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
).

Re: Books are better than boys - Yesterday afternoon I went to Big Chicks Sunday...

dlifson — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:28:50 -0000

I don't think that's a bad photo!

I really want to visit Chicago again... there just isn't a good time!

Re: interstellar perversion

dlifson — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:14:38 -0000

Amazing. I reblogged this because I thought it would be something you would like. Turns out, you do!

Re: MDF

dlifson — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:27:05 -0000

Thanks for the compliment! (waffl is my company.)

By the way, I just realized that we know many of the same people. I'm dlifson on tumblr. :)

Re: MDF

dlifson — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:23:37 -0000

She hasn't uploaded many photos, but innonmillcreek.waffl.com is
pretty amazing. On the water, surrounded by 125,000 acres of National
Forest. They're near Asheville, North Carolina.

We just launched 2 weeks ago, so it's still got some rough spots, but
getting better every day. The search page definitely will be improved
(e.g. plotting results on a Google Map, perhaps?), so thanks for your
patience. We've signed up over 100 innkeepers in our first 2 weeks, so
things are going well :)

Re: Easter Candy Purchases 2009: The damage

dlifson — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:58:30 -0000

Re: Books are better than boys - Yesterday afternoon I went to Big Chicks Sunday...

dlifson — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:58:31 -0000

Haha. Your friend isn't doing much better in that photo.

I dunno, the squinting is kinda cute.

Re: Caterpillar Cowboy

dlifson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:00:46 -0000

I think you're misunderstanding the analogy. The key is web presence
and a sense of ownership.

Etsy created subdomains for every one of their users, which they were
told were "theirs". This web presence (and associated technologies)
was what drew sellers to the site. Etsy is not the Yellow Pages, or
other sites that list businesses under one brand. It's more like the
aggregated of hundreds of thousands of individual businesses - all
with the potential to succeed purely based on their web presence -
aggregated together to create a marketplace.

So you could build a very simple CMS backend and skinnable front end
for restaurant owners (this is what tumblr has done for blogging,
actually) and all of the reservation technology that they need to run
their business. But, unlike all of those $100/hr freelance web design
companies, you build it once, as a platform. You can offer it all for
free. You get thousands of restaurants to sign on. Then, you can
aggregate them all into a searchable marketplace and provide them with
tools for reaching out to people (social media marketing), and make
your money either through reservations (though open table is hard to
compete with) or online marketing tools that most restaurants still
haven't figured out.

Re: Caterpillar Cowboy

dlifson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:56:04 -0000

Completely agree. I'm not sure how I would measure happiness either.
If they had changed the title to something more transparent (related
to finance in some way), I would have had no issue.