michelleclsun

Hackbright paved the foundation for me to start my own company. Couldn't be more grateful for that!

-- Well said. Hackbright has repeated this process 3 times in the past year.

Twitter also has the dailiy / weekly digest functions, but it's organized by most popular tweets (https://twitter.com/settings/notifications). Sometimes I just want to know what my cousin back home or an ex-colleague tweeted about, which is useful for.

One thing I'd like to see is to make more than one list, or be able to set email digest for some of my existing lists.

Leo's story is one of humility and gratitude - I have always found them(the Buffer team) as an inspiration not just because of their startup's traction (which can be unpredictable) but more because of their character, endless seeking of improvement professionally and personally, and passion in giving back to the startup community.

Just a thought, you might want to think of yourself as "an entrepreneur that failed once" rather than "a failed entrepreneur". In psychology that makes a big difference in how we label ourselves. Relate the failure to an incident in our lives, rather than an attribute that we belong to.

Also, just curious, what made you decide to give up? What are your plans now? All the best.

Another example is, if I learned programming in python, what do I do to get to the next level?

As a new full time coder, I experience coder's block perhaps few times a week at the job. I think tomasien's suggestion to write things down is very useful, something I've started doing and help me get through some difficult problems.

Specifically, it is helpful for anyone that is solving a problem whose scope is not clearly defined. Writing, instead of talking, helps to map things out and takes out the pressure in verbalizing an eloquent solution / interpretation, which usually comes a lot later in the problem solving process.

I resonate with the post a lot. Recently moved to the bay area, after spending undergraduate years in chicago, working in nyc, hong kong, beijing, I feel that where we live determines a lot of how we live our lives, and people we associate with.

I disagree with the comments here that the author is suggesting that happiness is a goal. He's merely, in my view, presenting the fact that we should strive to make difficult decisions on our lives before it's too late. Choosing where we live is one of the most difficult things to change, however, all changes can start small.

Two years ago I took a sabbatical from my finance job, and never went back. It was a zig zag path to where I am now, but I would say the inconvenience and uncomfortable situations are worth it. So many people tell themselves, I'll stay in this job / city / relationship for one more year, till I get more experience / savings etc. Making difficult decisions (instead of putting them off) forces us to clarify our values. We might decide in the end to never leave the city, or the job, but we are happier because we decide consciously to, not because we dont' have a choice.

One thing I missed was to navigate to topics from my home feed. Before I used to be able to on the right menu I think, now I need to click into my profile every time to go back to my subscribed interests.

It was useful to be able to view by topics because the home feed is a mashup of all topics (which can range from work to personal interest). Would love to hear your thoughts as well!

I'm currently reading Python for Data Analysis but feel like I can read about how to use a library but it's hard to retain specific syntax use cases if I'm not using those libraries immediately / frequently.

One book I really like is Collective Intelligence (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do), which has some good examples on social network analysis.

I'm curious about your experience running your own early stage startup and raising kids at the same time. (I was also inspired after meeting with Joel to start blogging!)

When did you start YouSites, was it before or after having kids? What was the reason behind that decision? As an entrepreneur and a new parent, what experiences have been most rewarding, and what would you have done differently?

At Hackbright however, I found learning with CodeCademy to refresh some knowledge is helpful, especially with a teacher around to ask questions. Most of the time, the questions confirm that my solution is also valid, but it's just different from the CodeCademy answer.

There may be some people in the community that are considering attending one of the full time programming courses in SF/NYC, and I'm happy to share more here about my experience and answer any questions.

1. How are the dynamics between engineering team, product managers and data scientists. Understand that LinkedIn's data team plays a huge role in creating and improving features (like People you may know), how is it like at Facebook, and in general other companies?

Engineers build things, managers make decisions, data scientists answer questions

2. What are the tools you use ( I see R mentioned in the thread), what books would you recommend? I mostly write in python, use D3 and gephi for visualization. Am also taking the Coursera course on Social Network Analysis (https://class.coursera.org/sna-2012-001/class/index) and reading the course book Easley & Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds and Markets. Thanks for sharing again.

In addition to these questions, I'd also think about how to reach a point where customer feels a high switching costs. It seems that a service like yours can be offered by many, but the important competitive advantage is that the more customers have stored data on your service, the more 'expensive' for them to switch.

What part of your service increases in value the longer someone uses it? Is it the historical data of the customer's own app, or is it the cross-sectional data of apps in other categories? As mentioned above, mixpanel is a good example, so is new relic.