Disqus - Friends of zachhale

Re: The New USV.com Launches In Beta

daryn — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:23:57 -0000

I noticed the new pics too - and that while I look increasingly haggard (and increasingly bald) each time I end up on a new website - you guys are looking good!

Site looks great - congrats.

Re: The AVC Reader Census

daryn — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:11:30 -0000

Thanks! Snow Crash it is, and I'll keep an eye out for that @bfeld
thread.

Re: The AVC Reader Census

daryn — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:09:07 -0000

Everyone's always surprised that I have little to no interest in Sci-Fi. This was especially true when I started coding - but fortunately the jolt soda, cheetos, and first-person shooters stereotype has faded a little since then :)

I do hear everyone rave about Snow Crash and Neil Stephenson's other books, and I did enjoy Neuromancer in high school, so maybe I need to give it another chance. What are the first 3 sci-fi books I should read?

Re: Sarah Harmer w/ the Weakerthans - Gone For Good...

daryn — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:00:54 -0000

I'm not sure, it's been in my iTunes library for a long time. Want a
copy?

Re: Testing out the new Tumblr 'Read More' tag

daryn — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:17:30 -0000

<lj-cut> -- tumblr is slowly becoming a prettier livejournal - not that that's a bad thing.

Re: The Blog Where Everybody Knows Your Name

daryn — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:40:56 -0000

One of the things I love about Disqus is that I can use it to explore people from this community, see their comments on other blogs, and join in there as well as visit their own blogs.

Re: Hosted Mongo

daryn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:56:24 -0000

I don't understand what you're saying, but all of amazon's services are
decoupled: you can pick and choose and use any or all of them.

Here's an example of a 3rd party service that someone wrote to let you sell
digital goods using S3 as your document store, and paypal as your payment
gateway. Amazon doesn't discourage this, even though it could be done
entirely on their platform. In fact, it is one of the featured services in
the AWS showcase.

http://www.digitalgoodsstore.com/

Re: Hosted Mongo

daryn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:26:14 -0000

How do S3 (or any of the amazon web services) put pressure on retail going through Amazon? They are backend platforms that have nothing to do with retail, and you could easily build a website using s3, sqs, simpledb, and ec2, but use paypal for your payments layer instead of amazon payments. You could even build your own internet bookstore on AWS if you wanted to...

What I like about the 10gen stuff is that you can use their sdk to develop scalable software, but potentially deploy it anywhere, whether on 10gen's cloud, some other hosting provider, or on your own hardware.

At a glance Mongo looks like a CouchDB / a hybrid of SimpleDB and S3, but I haven't needed to really dig in to any of them yet.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

daryn — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:59:16 -0000

FYI, DonorsChoose does offer a subscription plan, if you make a donation today, you can see the upsell at the end!

Or, you can click this link...

https://secure.donorschoose.org/donors/lastingI...

Re: The Cohort Analysis

daryn — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:52:39 -0000

yes :)

Re: Candlepin bowling. - bijansabet.com

daryn — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:19:45 -0000

Duckpin balls are a little bit bigger, but similar to candlepin (no holes), and the pins are normal bowling-pin shape but smaller, instead of straight like a candlepin.

Duckpin bowling was the popular kid's birthday party activity growing up in Baltimore. Fun game, we don't have either candle or duckpins out here in Seattle.

Re: The aforementioned dorm room. This was my... :: Daryn Nakhuda on Tumblr

daryn — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:21:49 -0000

hah, and this was a single room... you should have seen what it looked
like when I lived in a house with 7 other guys!

Re: A friend asked me for advice: startup or big company

daryn — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:22:08 -0000

Good advice Bijan. I think a lot of people here are advising on startup v. big company in general and for the long term, but I don't think there's any harm in thinking for the short term either, especially if your friend is primarily concerned with staying financially-afloat.

I was in the same boat a few years ago (i had set a 12-month "unpaid" threshold, and stretched it to 18 before I had to make the same choice) and it's a hard one. I know startups are in my blood, always have been, but in many ways the idea of a big paycheck from a big company where I could recover and regroup was more appealing than working on someone else's startup.

Even after answering your questions the same way as your friend (wasn't super passionate about any of the startups, and was intrigued and liked the people at the big company), I ended up choosing a startup, because I thought it was what I wanted. Well, neither the culture or the product excited me, and the size and stage of the company was meaningless. I probably would have been happier elsewhere. But, the plus side is I was able to get my finances back to where I wanted them, and get re-energized, and when the right opportunity came up at a friend's startup, I was ready to jump on over (and it's been awesome!)

Re: The Sound Of Silence

daryn — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:59:27 -0000

Take the number of posts on http://www.tumblr.com/activity divided by 781
(days since your first post on tumblr -- 8/7/07).

Of course it's skewed since you used to import a bunch of feeds, but I'm
imagining it's a massive number.

Re: Ack!!!

daryn — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:14:55 -0000

...I'll give you a hint: it ends in 'atala'.

I wasn't sure if she'd want the infamy though of being immortalized in the picture if it gets reblogged :)

Re: A Great Systems Engineer Job/Challenge In NYC

daryn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:08:49 -0000

Thanks! The kayak pic was out on hood canal, an hour and a half drive from Seattle, a world away... :)

Re: A Great Systems Engineer Job/Challenge In NYC

daryn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:33:50 -0000

Dave - I know that Eric got his foot in the door at USV via a blog post / comment, and I've definitely seen a handful of these types of posts from both Fred and Albert, so my bet is on yes (would be good to hear for certain).

To me, recruiting is where you go when you've exhausted your network. For tumblr, which has a great userbase (probably full of qualified candidates), and well as great social connections both internally as well as through their investors, I'd be surprised to see them use a headhunter, especially for these dev/engineering roles.

If I had any interest in being an SE, I'd be all over this. I'm a huge fan of tumblr, and very excited for what the future holds for them. Good luck filling these roles, hope you find people on par with the rest of the rock star team.

Re: Apple-Honey Challah

daryn — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:21:14 -0000

Thanks! I'm looking forward to baking one this weekend.

Re: Don't Forget About Email

daryn — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:24:07 -0000

And by fix, they should: 1) make express more visible 2) make its
pricing available online, and 3) make the signup process
self-service.

We got caught in sales call hell with RP awhile back, where we
couldn't get straight answers on cost or features, just "what do you
want to pay?"... I know it's standard practice in the enterprise
space, but frustrating at startup-scale.

Re: Don't Forget About Email

daryn — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:20:47 -0000

sendgrid looks great isaac, very cool...

Re: yum, happy birthday to me! a 2 hour wait later,... :: Daryn Nakhuda on Tumblr

daryn — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:12:03 -0000

it was long, but it was as fun as a wait can be, with live music,
fresh squeezed lemonade, and samples coming around to remind you what
you were waiting for. And it was definitely worth the wait! Thanks
again.

Re: and that’s how you do it (I don’t like onions…) :: Daryn Nakhuda on Tumblr

daryn — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:08:04 -0000

Thanks! This, followed by ice cream at Amy's made for quite a night
of eating...

You know those Hank Jr lyrics "iced tea and corn bread have took the
place of pills and 90 proof"?

sounds about right :)

Re: Austin

daryn — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:00:07 -0000

we'll let you know how the flight goes! No paella party for us, but
Kekrops will be there on our behalf :)

Re: Why I (Still) Code

daryn — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:57:22 -0000

Great post albert, and good point, julien.

I find that even though I code a fair bit during the day, and love what I'm working on, it is always fun to go home and apply the new tricks I've learned to completely different applications. It's definitely frustrating when I go too long through meetings and management tasks, and so satisfying to get back to the keyboard and just build something. I'm sure I'll continue to write code no matter what I find myself doing the rest of the time.

Keep on truckin' Albert!

Re: Thoughts about my VC life, four years later

daryn — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:26:04 -0000

hah :)