Mark Ayzenshtat

I thought noncompete agreements were already unenforceable in California. What did this decision change? - Tudor Bosman

Hope that stands and expands. I've seen some particularly onerous noncompetes in the radio business: employees making at or near an area's median income -- not even managerial people -- prohibited from working anywhere within 100 miles of their current homes for 6 months to a year. Outrageous. - Chris Baskind

Congratulations ! - Sanji (Jean-Daniel S.) via twhirl

Awww and I still had invites left!! - thepete

For $5 per month (or only $45/year, because we’re bad at math), you can upgrade to a premium account. Premium users have their upload quota raised to 500 megabytes of new notes per month and get a number of other goodies, including enhanced security through SSL for all data transmission (free users only get SSL for login), priority access to the recognition queues (for much faster image recognition, even during peak busy times) and premium customer support. - Jigar Mehta

Woooo hoo.. I love this 40 MB space every month!! Evernote rocks.. Free users will keep all of the features of the closed beta, including automatic synchronization between Windows, Mac, Web and mobile phone clients and advanced image search. There is no limit to the total number of notes that you can store. Free accounts can upload up to 40 megabytes of new notes into the service every month. - Jigar Mehta

Evernote is really very cool and I love the option of accessing my notes using the web interface. You guys really rock! - Sudar

excellent and welcomed news as I use Evernote more intensively for work. I love it. - Eric Sausse

congrats evernote! i´m still not sure when to bookmark and when i should use evernote, but i try to figure it out in my daily experience... - Dieter Schwarz

no way. Top 10? - Christian

not Top 10, not Top 10 - hunter walk

ha, that's a good one too. my friend back in michigan told me they sold out hill auditorium (holds ~4000) in minutes. i had no idea they were that popular - Karl Rosaen

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wo... - Dmitry Chechik

(Edit) Idea * Judgment * Ability + Timing = $$$ - Louis Gray

Is there a difference between "judgement" and "execution" except for the scope of the decisions being made? I'm not sure there's a sharp line anywhere between deciding the structure of a for-loop and deciding what product you're building in the first place. - ⓞnor

Louis, I think Timing is a combination of Judgment and Luck. I've updated the equation accordingly. :) - Paul Buchheit

Dan, I don't know that there is a sharp line, but I think of judgment as deciding what to do and execution as doing it. To use the mountain climbing analogy, judgment is choosing the path, and execution is following it. Maybe I'm misusing the words though... - Paul Buchheit

Your analogy would make a good children's book. Mountains are the new black! If you can figure out how to incorporate a zebra into the story, Pixar may buy it. (according to the ew Shaw Report, zebras are the new "pandas", which were formally the new "penguins.") - Ginger Makela

+ Determination + Persistence - Greg K.

I like the fact you added luck. And that I wasn't dismissed outright! - Louis Gray

Good point. This equation keeps getting more complex :) (though I think it's a multiplicative effect, and determination and persistence seem pretty similar) - Paul Buchheit

Is there any way - besides bookmarklet-ing it myself - to get this entry into my FB mini-feed? Nothing hits better than a well constructed visual allusion... Certainly on par with Buffet's Squanderville letter - http://tinyurl.com/2dnkn7 for the pdf - :) - Will DeLuca

Paul's got a 100% hit rate on TechMeme. http://www.techmeme.com/080331... - Louis Gray

"The idea has value because it comes from someone who has a history of being right." I'm not sure that the picking-good-ideas skill transfers over from past successes as much as good judgment or execution. The idea seems like the most nebulous part of the equation after luck. A skilled climber who finds gold at the top might have been a lousy prospector, and he wouldn't necessarily be able to recognize another gold-rich mountain while staring up at it from the ground. Overconfidence from past climbs might even make him prone to quixotic diversions in the future. - Mark Ayzenshtat

William, we're planning to add a "reshare" feature, but for now you just need to either paste the info into the share box at the top of your feed, or use the FriendFeed bookmarklet (or share from delicious, reader, etc). - Paul Buchheit

Mark, having heard product and startup ideas from a lot of different people, it's pretty clear that some people have better judgment about these things than others. That said, the biggest successes often come from people with no history (in part because there are so many of them). - Paul Buchheit

There's one thing with these mountains though: unless you already found gold, you never know if you already reached the top. I.e. it will be almost impossible to know the difference between a bad idea on which you might want to give up trying, and a good idea which you haven't pushed through with long enough. Real mountains have a rather very well-defined top, compared to that. - Philipp Lenssen

Paul, Why is success only measured in pots of gold, couldn't it also be something else, like knowledge, friendship, feel good factor? - Shakeel Mahate

Hey FriendFeeders, I was going to favorite this video on YouTube, but realized that then there would be a third copy of this in the feed for the folks who are friends with Bay, Kevin, and me. Are y'all working on a way to aggregate links to the same content, or should I get used to redundancy? ;-) (comment stolen verbatim from Keith P.) - Stephen Mack

This is even more interesting than the "how people count money" video. - Brad Lauster

Ditto what Stephen said - Shannon Jiménez

If you all favorite it, it might make it that much clearer to us just how important this feature is. (hint: we know and are working on it really, but favorite away!) - Kevin Fox

It's funny how she has no accent when she does the California and Seattle ones. ;) - seth

Actually, I found that she has a bit of a common British accent on the 'i' in 'twenty-five' in the California accent. Also, I never noticed till today just how My Fair Lady-ish Los Angeles is, but her accent is Santa Monica-Westlake Village. - Kevin Fox

I grew up in Santa Monica, and that's not how people I knew talked. More like Spicoli in Fast Times, or listen to the Dogtown documentary. At least that's how it was in the 70s. I agree she throws a British lilt into a couple of the CA phrases. - Chris White

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and went to school over the hill. There are a lot of UCLA folks who sounded like this 15 years ago, and they were the SoCal folk. - Kevin Fox

Well, I don't want to get in a valley vs dogtown fight over friendfeed. :) - Chris White

Yeah, you don't want me to gag you with a twinkie. - Kevin Fox

I'm going to guess she is originally British, because I find it seeping through on a few of the non-British accents, although she's definitely good. - Chris White

Chris: I think her first and third British accent sound a little bit off. They're good, but if I heard someone talking like that in the UK I think I would suspect they were putting the accent on. For example, the way she says "i'm" and "old" in the first accent is a little unusual for a upper-middle class London accent. Possibly she was born in the UK and left, but if so I think some non-Britishness has crept in one way or the other. - Simon

There isn't even such a thing as Web 2.0. It's just media hype. Get over it, and think of the supposed new version of the Internet as a simple increase in understanding and use of advanced technologies. - Voyagerfan5761

Question: What's this crawlmanager status page? Is that an internal thing? It sounds interesting. - Voyagerfan5761

Yup, it's an internal page that allows us to keep an eye on the crawl system. - Paul Buchheit

changeset: 50bb94a18270 user: bret date: 2008-02-26 13:23:50 description: Undo shitty code. - Benjamin Golub

@Paul: Figures. I wanted to look at it. :D @Benjamin (we really need the ability to insert line breaks in comments!): I saw that one. It's quite amusing, isn't it? The things developers put in their version control commit comments... - Voyagerfan5761

Is there a friendfeed-changelog user or should I just imaginary-befriend it? - Urbansheep

I just added it to my feed, so you can subscribe to me - Bret Taylor

Sneaky way to get more subscriptions :) - Glenn Slaven

thx, @bret, you already were in my deck of subscriptions before. :) - Urbansheep

Slippy approves of the phrase "Delicious factor", as well as "better error reporting" when it's immediately followed by "even better error reporting" - Slippy Lane

Oh, and I vote we rename Web 2.0 to Web Country. - Slippy Lane

@Frederic: Sharp corners hurt. Rounded corners are safer for kids. - Amit Patel

So how many cuss words in a changeset description does it take to get filtered? - David Vasileff

At my last weekly meeting my boss asked our group that we not swear in our commit logs anymore; he was concerned about someone reading them and using it as a way to say "John Doe has a history of aggression, look at these logs!". But sometimes you just need to vent when committing at 3am :P - Benjamin Golub

I find swearing in comments and commits admirable and often very funny. - Chris White

I actually got an entire team of folks canned one time because of my variable names and comments. When I worked at Nokia, my team was all under the same contracting agency. I was laid off with about 500 other folks, but a lot of my immediate team members were kept on for another month or so after I left. I had a habit of when I coded using wrassler names for my variables - and one of the Finnish higher ups got a hold of one of our code reviews and slated the rest of my team for removal based on the fact he "didn't find it funny or professional." - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

@Mark: lol. @Benjamin, Chris: I agree that venting in commit logs is something that is just fine. I see all kinds of stuff in the revision history (Subversion) of MediaWiki. - Voyagerfan5761

btw, i really like that you can't insert line-breaks in comments. It helps keep them short, and I think the current range of comment lengths is just about right for what ff is. - j1m

Bret, did you really work for 24 hours straight on 2/23? Did that IE spacing bug really take 5 hours to fix? Or do you only need 3 hours of sleep a day? :) - Marc Chung

Interesting thoughts. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Look at the lower graphs. Who says mainstream media is dead. If anything, mainstream media is the enabler of new media. - Omar Ismail

it isn't dead, but it is dying. it isn't the influence that is the measure of its lifespan, but their ledgers. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Looking at those graphs, my conclusion is actually press doesn't matter, it creates a curiosity pop that quickly goes to zero. What matters seems to be organic growth. Somewhere around July '07, users started sticking, the baseline slope became nonzero, and traffic took off. I guess press pops are good for giving you feedback early on, though. - ⓞnor

Love David's openess. Really interesting graphs - Immad Akhund

where is the friendfeed's various logos to choose from for pasting on blogs? - huixing

slope became nonzero? you mean right after the Time article? Also, why are you ignoring the massive step increase that's precisely synchronized with the Newsweek article? - j1m

It seems hard to believe that the Time article created a long-term positive trend (when lots of previous press had not). The Newsweek step function, maybe could be something. I guess it boils down to what they say: make a product people will actually stick to, and then get some press to start the exponential accumulation rolling. - ⓞnor