Make it free and monetize it like all the free-to-play games do:
If you want to cross of a non-top task, you have to pay increasing amounts of (real) money, e.g. 2nd task 0.50 $, 3rd task 1$, 4th task 2$ etc.
389 karma · joined March 1, 2012
Check www.screenscott.com or www.appeti.co for projects I've been working on.
Feel free to mail me at chris [at] screenscott.com
If you want to cross of a non-top task, you have to pay increasing amounts of (real) money, e.g. 2nd task 0.50 $, 3rd task 1$, 4th task 2$ etc.
With this usage we definitely saved money. And a lot of time, because you don't have to care about repairing the car, taxes, ...
My father got a new job, moved to a small city without a car sharing service and bought a mercedes. He probably wouldn't "downgrade", but he is constantly annoyed because he has to care about all the small details (changing tires in the winter, refilling oil, then often small things like light bulbs break, ...).
Worked a lot with Java, but also dynamic languages (lots of Python, but also Smalltalk and Ruby). My experience was similar: I was missing something on either side.
Currently I like Scala a lot, and it has a console as well as great collections.
You don't trust him to ask the right questions for HIS understanding. Judging from your blog post, you don't seem to trust his judgement in rejecting you - the only reason you came up with (in your blog) is that your pitch/answers were badly delivered. Maybe they were fine, but you have been rejected for other reasons (e.g. UVP not strong enough, market crowded with strong competition, customer segment too small, ...).
I guess the real value of getting into YC is to get great, personalized advice. (You can get great, non-personalized advice from books or blogs). For that, you need to let your advisers drive. If the need your input at a turn, they will ask you - otherwise let them go wherever they want to. You need to understand why they are driving the way they do. In the end, you can and probably will take a few different turns than them (because you [should] have more domain knowledge). But by understanding where they would want to drive, you learn a lot from them.
You may ask yourself, why PG was driving the interview the way he was. Maybe because he questions your UNIQUE VP (So what is Rocketr?), thinks there is strong competition solving this problem already (So it’s like a wiki?), or that your customer segment is too small (Who needs what you’re making?). Maybe because of completely different reasons.
Comparing your two answers for "Who needs what you’re making?", it is the same content, but wrapped differently. While there is definitively value in making your message as clear as it can be, I think a good adviser will be able to get to the content. And then give you the same advice, no matter how the content was wrapped.
Think about it: Would you really want to take advice from someone who would reject you with the first answer, but not with the second answer? I wouldn't.
Anyway, good write-up nevertheless. I still think it is worthwhile to try to make a message as clear and easy to understand as possible.
That said, the LinkedIn API could open certain features only if you act on behalf of a paying LinkedIn user. That way, both LinkedIn and the startups could happily co-exist, even though the startup recreates some of LinkedIns functionality.
I have no idea how to scan these. Well, maybe if I use a DSLR but not with the average smartphone.
But these are just non-arguments when the finding is "In 9 out of 10 cases, ...". The anecdote is the 1 out of 10 case.
Let's try to question anything, and when it is suspicious - by all means, say so! But, I guess what the author is trying to say (beyond the whole Downvote discussion) is that we should try to reason and make a proper argument. Especially one that is not already addressed in the research.
Once you have the german version ready, I'd suggest it to her. Screenshots look good.
I'd maybe increase the contrast on some parts of the website (e.g. support / buy on top are rather hard to read).
It didn't take long to figure out (Microsoft is one of the few companies that really puts a lot of effort into documentation, and I appreciate that).
I have two other problems with that:
- I need to think about it again whenever a (security) update is released for the software (not only including the jvm, but also the web server and, for me, scala and akka) - I have to upload that whole mess each and every time when I update my software. For my slowish internet connection, it took at least 30 mins to upload the whole stack (JRE, netty, scala, akka). [Fixed that by putting the .zips into the storage (whatever their S3 is called) and let the .cmd script download these]
Oh wait, I just remember one more detail about the webserver (taken from the .cmd):
:: 3) Place a Jetty 7.x distribution as jetty7.zip under approot in your project
:: 3.1) If you want to download the server into Azure directly from a URL instead, then
:: uncomment the next line and modify the URL as appropriate:
:: cscript /NoLogo "util\download.vbs" "http://download.eclipse.org/jetty/7.4.5.v20110725/dist/jetty... "jetty7.zip"
That is just wrong. If the eclipse server is down or changes its URL... my servers won't start. And, if I load balance my servers, I everytime use server resources of eclipse?
I really do not understand why Microsoft doesn't simply provide VM images with Java and the common webservers pre-installed. Or, at least a repository inside azure where I can download common Java versions and other common Java software. They spent big marketing dollar on their website and documentation on Java, yet when I actually used it, it felt like the engineer spent 2 hours on the Java support.
All of this is fine IF I want 100% configurable IaaS. But I'd rather have PaaS (which is what the parent comment was about), and Heroku, CloudBees etc. have so much more to offer, at least for Java.
I kept thinking that this must be a quick and dirty hack and there was a proper PaaS-like solution. Nope, that is the official support for the JVM. Pretty much the opposite of Heroku.
To be fair, they probably offer proper PaaS for their technologies. But for other things, it is basically (windows) infrastructure and you have to configure/update/etc your software on your own. I wouldn't expect any bells and whistles for the Linux support. Then again, it doesn't hurt if we have a choice.
E.g. I optimized a computer vision algorithm for using L2 and L3 caches properly (trying to reuse images or parts of images still in the caches). Started off with an Intel Xeon: 256KB L2 Cache, 12MB L3 Cache. Moved on to an AMD Opteron: 512KB L2 Cache (yay), 6MB L3 Cache (damn).
Also, the concept of the L2 Cache has changed. Before multi-cores it was bigger and the last-level-cache. Now it has become smaller and the L3 Cache is the last-level-cache, but has some extra issues due to the sharing with other cores.
The important concepts every programmer should know are memory hierarchy and network latency. The individual numbers can be looked up on a case-by-case basis.
I was trying to make the point that these numbers are somewhat arbitrary (i.e. why do I need to know the access speed to disc, when I keep everything in memory on a NUMA system?) and don't apply to all programmers (e.g. embedded systems may not have discs, L2 Caches or internet access).
What about Memory Access on another NUMA Node?
What about SSD?
Does a mobile phone programmer need to know the access time for disks?
Does an embedded system programmer need to know anything of these numbers?
Every programmer should know what memory hierarchy and network latency is. (If you learn it by looking at these numbers, fine...)
> What researchers discovered was that people bought milkshakes as a breakfast replacement because it was entertaining during a long, boring commute, and would keep them full until lunch.
How do you advertise for them on Google? If they search for "breakfast replacement for long, boring commute"?
For anyone who can match their product to search queries, Google is the way to go, agreed. But not all products can, because people are not actively looking for solving a problem/need that your product solves.
If I look at my current facebook ads, these are not things I actively search for, e.g. drinks, shavers, parties, facebook games, ... If I had to spend marketing $ on these, I'd probably choose facebook ads over AdWords as well.
The user knowingly sets the money aside for things he could access for free.
IF most of your readers don't know what you are doing. I think this was written for their community (not HN), so most of them know what Flattr is about.
Also, they have "About Flattr" in the footer - not very prominently placed, but still find-able.
As for efficiency: Threads and Processes are what the OS offers. Any parallel programming model will have to use these in one way or another, so does Node.js. The discussion is kind of similar to assembly vs. high level programming languages. You can always write an assembly program that is as fast as the program compiled from a high level language. However, it will take you a lot more time to write it.
In the end, it comes down to choosing the right tool for the job. Therefore you should try find out what people with a similar job choose and what their experiences are; and also for which job a framework has been created.
E.g. Node.js is good at a job where there are lots of events and I/O is involved. If your job is number crunching, then Node.js is the wrong tool.
And your assumption is that the potential leverage is quite big. I doubt it: I've seen many students profit a lot from 1 on 1 private lessons - from students 2 or 3 years ahead of them (or even from the same class). They are arguably nowhere near as good as a teacher who has studied teaching and has years of experience. Yet they can help the student a lot more because they can focus 100% of their time on the single student and his individual needs.
Then again, a web / mobile startup with bad graphics or design will suffer a lot from it because that should be one of their core competencies.
Sounds a lot like anything you can iteratively improve. Could also be applied to marketing, cold-call-sales, making a great coffee, ...
How is that: I imported a simple Excel diagram, tried to resize it - and Word crashed. No problem, Word creates backups, right? Only problem: When Word opens the backup... it crashes. And suddenly I didn't have any working version of the file anymore...
(git helped me out, thankfully, but I don't know how my parents would have handled that...)
So yeah, it is only at the bottom and I may give someone the benefit of doubt of not spotting that - but not if they want to be a professional journalist ;)
NewRelic did collect data of their customers (and that is what they have said), but their customers do not include Amazon. You can not just take their data and claim they are 100% of web transactions (and NewRelic has not done that). I bet Amazon does make up a big percentage of all web transactions (though smaller than PayPal).