_lex

That was the first objection they raised. I pointed out gramatical issues and other flaws in the contract that made them have to send it back to the lawyer anyways, and it came back w/o that clause.

I don't understand. You want me to outsource calling my mom on mother's day? Is this for actively deployed troops or something?

Ask for an out. Explain that it's how you keep your skills up to date, and that it lets you be a more productive and effective employee. In the past I've had this clause in my contracts and had them take it out. They did.

This is pretty cool Jason. It's clearly not perfect, but that's a feature rather than a bug - it means you launched at the right time.

This is true for facebook, but false for 99% of other companies. At the end of the day, revenue - costs (profit) is what you're optimizing for.

I think dmor's point is that revenue can be a lagging indicator, and that some startups can suddenly turn on a revenue pump that makes watching revenue silly.

I agree with her - in 1% of cases. The problem is that for dmor, that 1% of cases is all that matters - because those cases are going to be the all or nothing billion dollar company cases, which is what she's aiming for. Facebook, AirBnB etc - all would have terrible numbers while starting up, then suddenly their numbers start to look great.

Employers already do - but they pay places like linkedin, craigslist, monster.com and every other job board out there instead of paying you. Listing a job can easily cost $400.

No problem - nobody's perfect.

USA taxes citizenship, as well as residency (both physical and legal). As a non-us person, I paid more taxes than my friends did. As a permanent resident, I still have to pay taxes if I leave the US - even though I'm not a citizen.

I like it. To limit spam, use twitter for auth and connect ideas to twitter profiles, then let people flag other people as spam - and hellban their account.

If you don't want auth, you can still just let people flag spam and hellban machines spitting out spam.

Edit: You can also use basic ratelimiting - maybe only allow 1 post per 10 seconds.

Grammar issues:

1)You can expect regular update to InstaBilling, based on your feedback" - Please pluralize update - (make it updates).

2)Timesheet made easy - Please pluralize timesheet - (make it timesheets)

3)Simply add your clients and tasks along with your hourly rate, and start tracking your time from everywhere. - Change everywhere to anywhere. You can't do ANYTHING from everywhere because you can only be in one place at a time.

Good luck - from your testimonials, it looks like you've got a good solution to a real pain point!

Apparently, one of their innovations is a longer loan term - it might be 7 or 9 years.

Programmer market is ~12M. I agree that very few will pay though.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developer...

I don't think a visual regex debugger is a tiny market- it's every programmer who doesn't totally understand regex, or who will have regex that he needs help decoding. This is probably close to 99% of programmers.

See my answer above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5614106. It's more rational, and more about focus than it seems.

This is slightly less stupid/mean than it seems. Supporting only one set of systems (only mac, on latest OS), is much less complex and makes surviving hardware failures easier. At this stage, they probably don't have a guy managing hardware and helping when things break, so it really helps to reduce the number of moving parts, or (in this case) the diversity of moving parts.

I do run the site, and you can email me at lexsebro@stanford.edu if there's anything else you want to add, or to continue the conversation privately.

Yip - I need to add a favicon, and I've been playing with the amount of content to figure out if shorter pages convert better than longer pages - the jury's still out on that one. Each content section is meant to answer a question that people asked themselves when looking at my site and talking out loud.

I always appreciate advice - thanks for taking a second to look things over and give me yours.

Thanks a lot - it's really appreciated!

@bvdbijl - I'm on it. Looks like a S3 issue.

Also, it looks like the link to follow myclean on twitter in the upper right corner of the website is broken - it links to https://twitter.com/mycleandotcom instead of https://twitter.com/myclean

We're building a company in a similar, but different space (http://www.massagejoyspa.com : in home and office massage therapy), and I'd love to spend 15 minutes on the phone with you picking your brain - can you add a contact email on your HN account, or shoot me an email at lexsebro@stanford.edu?

Thanks!

The biggest problem for her and her company may be that this exotic arrangement may make it difficult to fund her company.

This is a really just a disguised angel investment - it converts between a 100% ownership in her company and 10% of her salary for 10 years, at HER preference. It's actually a great deal for her - she's got very little skin in the game:

If her company fails, she'll just convert the investment so she doesn't have to actually pay out a cent and the investor gets 100% of zero (the value of her failed company).

Also, even if the company succeeds, she'll be working on her pre-revenue startup for a few years, and she won't have any meaningful income for a significant portion of those 10 years.

That sucks.

Thanks for responding - I've been wondering about this ever since I heard the story behind ZeroC. It adds a different sort of color to things, and shows that you were trying to help him reach his goal of doing a startup the whole time. Kudos.

When you had him book orders for your friends, did you see it as a business opportunity, or just a problem that needed solving?

His argument seems to say that the LIQUID supply of bitcoins is shrinking because people are hoarding them. You can make the same argument for stocks or anything else that is traded for cash, but it's wrong. Everybody will have a price that they're willing to sell at - it's the fundamental idea underlying every exchange market.

I think evil is a little strong. It's similar to the "pay with a tweet" and the "sign up to our newsletter for a discount" schemes companies regularly run.

Check out http://teamtreehouse.com/ as a basic business model that's similar and works.

It'd probably make sense for you to suggest that the user tries a different browser - like IE, Safari or Firefox for uploading. For the average user, that's a much less difficult thing to do than disabling pepper.

He gets better data, and the ability to restrict how people vote. For example, HN polls allow you to upvote several options simultaneously.