Emmett Shear

"I hate video, and don't mind slides. I prefer the submitted form." - Emmett Shear

"Your code does not accomplish the required task. The goal is to return nil when there is no match, or the nth match if there is. >>> re.search('a(x)a', 'axa').group(1) 'x' >>> re.search('a(x)a', 'aya').group(1) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'The idiomatic python for the job is: match = re.search("`([^']*)'", caller[0]) if match: match.group(1) else: None(or some nonsense involving try/except, which would be even worse)." - Emmett Shear

"The short answer is just a google search away:http://www.webpronews.com/topnews...... The long answer:Like any site with UGC, we have to deal with the issue of copyrighted content. We deal with it by going above and beyond the requirements of the DMCA and working with copyright holders like Fox (among hundreds of others we have relationships with) to make sure their rights are respected. I'm a founder of Justin.tv. This hasn't been reviewed by a lawyer." - Emmett Shear

"One of the few startups where my first question when I met them was "when can I buy it"? I hope it's effective as I've heard. Pre-ordered." - Emmett Shear

"The real problem is exactly what you say: decreasing monthly expenditures on music. Increasing usage will depress per-song revenue but per-song revenue is irrelevant; what matters is absolute revenue. Artists don't (or shouldn't) care about getting non-zero remuneration at the margin; they should care about getting non-zero remuneration in absolute terms." - Emmett Shear

"No, at some companies people really do have the QA department ensure "code quality". After all, it's Quality Assurance, so they must know about code Quality!" - Emmett Shear

"The hardest part is: if Hibernate came with a license that was not completely open and free, would it ever have been adopted as the standard? Probably not. So you can't really charge developers directly. What if companies that make money using open source software created an endowment that rewarded developers who produced widely used open source software?" - Emmett Shear

"Try submitting YouTube comments to the demo. This is shockingly accurate." - Emmett Shear

"Justin.tv has about 15 engineers (counting designers who work on product as "engineers") and we have 30 million unique users, so our ratio is almost 2 million to 1. This is definitely possible." - Emmett Shear

"Grew up in the same neighborhood and went to elementary school and college together." - Emmett Shear

"Which web software startups would you label as technologically disruptive (outside of YC)?" - Emmett Shear

"Just include screenshots of a few sample sheets as images; there's no need for a screencast." - Emmett Shear

"A common quote from balzac, inaccurate though. The real version is: “The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been discovered, because it was properly executed.” http://www.thevalve.org/go...... (please excuse the marxism)" - Emmett Shear

"Text files are just a wire protocol. It would be nice to have a standard (similar to http) for what you send over the wire in general. Great post by the way, very thought provoking." - Emmett Shear

"Easy. One of the arguments to the create_email call would be a phone number or IM or existing email. The captcha would be mms'ed/im'ed/emailed (along with an explanation of what it's for), and the account would be created when the person replied with the correct response." - Emmett Shear

"Right, definitely not, but this is leaving aside all the other kinds of data you might want to save, and there's a lot of that too. I'm just pointing out that the quantity of hours we're talking about is not nearly as absurd as you'd think at first." - Emmett Shear

"From 2005 to 2007 to 2009, the largest available hard drive grew from 500 GB to 1 TB to 2 TB. This is the normal historical trend for hard drives[1]. Projecting that trend out a mere 10 years in the future, we anticipate 64 TB drives to be available, reducing requirements to 32k racks. 10 more years in the future and we have 2 PB drives, reducing requirements to a mere 1k racks. The trend of course might slow before then, but the point still stands that if you're planning on a scale of a decade or two, those numbers stop seeming impossible and start seeming inevitable. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki......" - Emmett Shear

"Which is only about 1 billion years of video. Presuming they wanted to video every person in the United States (let alone abroad) you'd fill up that many hours in a little less than 4 years. Now, you do get a nice multiplier from compression (10-100x, depending on the video and the quality) but that only brings it up to 100 billion years of video, max. What if you wanted to store all the video ever recorded? Bear in mind that the amount of video being recorded is currently in the exponential increase growth phase." - Emmett Shear

"More generally, downvotes exist to provide negative feedback into the system. It's a useful and well understood engineering principle that negative feedback is a useful tool for molding the output of a system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki..." - Emmett Shear

"Dispute between two sovereign powers vs. a separatist movement. It's a pretty clear and important distinction. Also, I'm not exactly sure how it's any more "part of India" than it is "part of China". Says who?" - Emmett Shear

"I'm not sure what you mean by this. There's a very real territorial dispute between China and India right now, which are both sovereign nations. The area within the dotted lines is under dispute, as to who it belongs to. It's not clear that the default answer is India." - Emmett Shear

"You could say the same thing for many separatist movements around the world. Just within the PRC alone there are 6, 3 of which have who have claims that seem equal Tibet's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...... Google's policy seems consistent to me: actual territorial disputes between sovereign nations are handled one way, and separatist movements are handled another. What would make Tibet special?" - Emmett Shear

"You need comment moderation :-(" - Emmett Shear

"Probably because Tibet isn't a country. No one disputes that Tibet is currently part of China, just whether or not it should be." - Emmett Shear

"Most software is priced like a disposable commodity item on the iPhone because it is a commodity. You haven't developed your own distribution channel, and you haven't developed in any software 8 other people haven't already made, so your software is not worth much money per item. Those with difficult to reproduce software like navigation systems companies can charge $50 on the iPhone, quite successfully. A candy bar costs $0.50 and each one has to be physically manufactured, distributed, and occupies retail space. But that's not a bad business - Mars Co is incredibly profitable. Pricing is an optimization problem, and there's no moral issue here. You are free to charge whatever you like; some prices make you more money. It sounds like World of Goo has made a good deal of money selling their software for $20, and managed to make a good deal more by offering a temporary sale (much like a department store). What's wrong with that?" - Emmett Shear

"The last time this stupid analogy was used, I wrote this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item..." - Emmett Shear