curiously

The card requirement is a great way to filter out the less serious ones, if we miss one exception like yourself, it's no biggie, there's always someone who need the solution and willing to pay for it.

The only reason where I'd be reluctant to do a card trial is if it was difficult to cancel or they didn't offer a refund if I accidentally forget.

Plenty of shady people using fake cards to sign up for trial as well.

Well, I think you know the river runs both ways, they probably want to filter out people who share that mentality, not judging your views on morality or whatever but it does not support your argument at all. If you are not willing to provide a card up front it means you don't have money to spend right there and then, and those companies probably are more interested in talking to those who have shown they are able to pay if required.

THIS. Basically, most people are just following the herd. "Oh my competitor has it I better do the same", except you might not be as big as 37signals or Salesforce to be able to support such a huge ratio of freeloaders vs paying users.

With a credit card trial, you get less number of freeloaders but they are still there.

I just love hearing "We are a YC backed startup". First thing they tell me. Okay? You want a cookie now? What the hell? It's fucking meaningless, it actually tells me you don't know what you are doing, and that I should be divesting.

At the end of the day, if it's still a one trick pony, add any two random capital LETTERS, still won't save a startup, because it can fail for so many reason.

Also, what about asynchronous operations?

This is what I'm seeing. Even when I had free trials, vast majority of people were just free loaders, some even going as far as using a prepaid card to get past the requirement.

Which is why I'm hesitant to jump on the Open source wagon, I don't want an army of freeloaders now demanding and whining, like I see all the time on github.

Yeah, just add an opaque, government overseeing and controlling all information of Chinese stocks. Nothing to see here folks.

Was it worth it open sourcing your product?

Did you get lot more leads and exposure?

I'm afraid of open sourcing because I'm not sure if it will do anything for me, and that I'm giving away years of work away for free.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140420162639/http://scrape.ly/

For example if you wanted the profile of authors of today's stories

    http://scrape.ly/s/{http://news.combination.com}
    {'ueoma87'}*{'next':'Next Page'}{'karma':'331', 
    'username':'ueoma87'}

> "The lead founder of the company sends emails at all hours of the night, even 3 or 4AM and talks about how little sleep he is getting like it is a badge of honor."

and seeing how it connected to your original posting:

    "Hi HN, I left a job at a respectable corporation to 
    join a YC startup "

You made a decision to leave a stable job to join a YC startup. You realize the founder is not letting you sleep or has some weird ego about being poorly productive (no sleep means you aren't performing 100%), and now you are questioning if you made the right choice, and it seems like you have every right to question your decision based on the environment you are currently in.

A normal and healthy working environment (YC or being a startup is no excuse) doesn't have people sending emails at 4AM and expecting people to read their bragging rights on how shitty their work output will be throughout tomorrow because they didn't sleep. IF I WAS AN INVESTOR AND THIS IS HOW PEOPLE WERE BURNING MY MONEY I WOULD BE FUCKING LIVID AND IMMEDIATELY FIRE WHOEVER IS RUNNING YOUR COMPANY.

Given that core East Asian familial, I'm not surprised by the tremendous societal and materialistic pressure on men of East Asian descent. Seriously....places like Korea and China men are regarded as just...fucking money making machine and nothing more.

Downturn of Chinese economy is a serious threat to the stability of the regime. The Chinese Dream or Zhonguo Meng, is uniting force. Everyone is out chasing money. It's like a giant ponzi scheme with someone on the other end always getting fucked while enriching those before it. When the flow of money stops so do these societal hierarchies built on money and power (easily purchasable with money in China), and suddenly 500 million middle class citizens who wants to stay that way become a very big force.

United States is a true naval and aerial super power. It has air and naval ports all over the world surrounding Russia & China.

To walk, you need to crawl first. Just because you built an air craft carrier on a shitty soviet era ship doesn't mean you can flaunt it without seriously risking an international embarassment.

but that's exactly Xi Jinping's motive. People watching and making their own conclusions as long as its coming from the citizens. To Chinese public, Xi looks like a straightshooter, standing up for justice and vying for the attention of united states.

In reality, the outcome is increased internal support for Xi. The foreign policy component is a paper tiger. China has no desire or the capability to enter a military conflict with United States. No other countries can seriously oppose United States in a conventional warfare, even if they all got together and decided to attack it.

So China can be contained as long as it rejects democracy and run by a central power. This won't last long however. We are already seeing the CCP is faltering. When you live by the gun you die by the gun. Such is power in a allocated and dictated hierarchy. The challenge for China is to determine at which point do you introduce a democracy. Too soon or too late will both divide the country.

So lot of developers try different ways like cyber-begging (donations), licensing, selling support which tends to only work for people who have reached critical mass where for majority of projects and software nobody bats an eye. and in closed free software (bundling malware, ads, annoying features). The latest is crowdfunding but some esoteric video compression library for some specific distro nobody is going to take out their wallet for.

people who never pay for shit are the ones that are the most abusive. it's fucking appalling and my own negative experience of open sourcing and of other developers have made it clear that software or code is never to be released for free unless your motive is to monetize it later.

whenever you ban or make certain activity or good illegal, you create a massive underground economy very quickly, and you can't extract tax revenues and end up spending money on the problems that arise as a result of having an underground economy.

Much rather have cocktail waitresses and air conditioned halls with security guards than sneak through a seedy Chinatown restaurant with false doors and scary looking guys.