hipsterelitist

Showmanship/Entertainment. The whole point of being in Vegas or on a cruise ship (prior installation), is to have a spectacular experience. An efficient, mundane, McD's dispenser isn't quite the same.

Just thought I'd add a bit of "color" to this submission since it seems to be dropping:

Honestly, for most of my career, I can say that it was far more than 10k a year. In the last few years, as more people have posted salary information, did I realize my salary was way below market and below most of my peers. I was just happy to be in tech... Only now, with over 10 years of experience, am I drawing a median salary and that took going through a recruiter.

Early on, this was precisely what they did.

Maybe you wouldn't, but this is why financial reporting is important and often a requirement. These people bet on someone else's gambit and lost, but according to all the signs they could see, things were sparkling.

I've used this for years and love it.

As someone with a formal design education and a uhh "technologist", I think this argument is pure crap. You're looking at "designers" in tech and making a very valid critique of the industry at large, but these designers have very little to do with it. Yes, they're pumping out derivative cloying work like every start up does because that's what they get paid to do. I think you might need to step out of the tech bubble before throwing stones at others for sitting in it.

Most of the designers I know aren't in tech (mostly so they can have autonomy and greater impact, slightly less to do with finding it wholly un-interesting and trivial) and your whole critique just doesn't seem to hold water for them.

I can say I've had similar experiences all across California with AirBnB.

These guys made an electric bike/scooter hybrid a few years back that had some buzz here in NYC before release, but just seems to have fizzled. I'd be curious to know what happened.

I think this is relevant, since it launched today and no one in the last 7 hours has provided context:

https://www.urbancompass.com/

http://www.businessinsider.com/ori-allon-has-hired-63-ex-goo...

_why is both an attempt at a symbol and a person. Most of the interest around the persona was generated by the eccentricity in hiding as much as (if not more than) around the other theatrics and unique works created. That's not how you create a symbol, that's how you create curiosity and interest. I know its a dirty word, but its marketing (and marketing that the ruby community needed, it certainly helped to popularize things in the early days). In going into hiding and ripping away his works, he actively destroyed the symbol and very concretely attached it to the actions and whims of one man.

Its nice to think that it could be a symbol, and maybe it is... but it would only be due to the actions and desires of the ruby community.

Then how would you properly incentivize someone to come in to take a company out of such dire circumstances?

Someone with the talent to take a 500M loss and reduce it to 10M certainly would command the same salary with more upside at a solvent company.

I'd hardly call Dan a "very green" CEO.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/danporter

I'm glad this happened in such a public way. I once heard him speak at a VC event about his firing practices with the same sort of attitude. I won't get into the details, but I was shocked that such an individual could be so championed, but he's quite business savvy and very personable... I guess as long as you're on his good side.

Very good fit for Zynga.

I think most of you are missing the point of the title (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal). His suggestions are not meant to be taken seriously, and as others have pointed out, it is quite likely that TPB's suggestion may not be entirely serious either.

It might be worth considering that the whole reason they put forth the idea of drones or LOSS or however you want to define them was to a) inspire technologists to consider creative ways of dealing with draconian policy/enforcement, b) draw parallels between the projection of power manifested by drones operating in US interests overseas under questionable/controversial legal circumstances and their own situation.

It actually wasn't single founder when YC funded them, Dan Albritton was the other founder. Really nice to work with them back in the day.

Be surprised. Living on the LES or Nolita can very easily be done on 75k without the 20 minute crowded commute on the L train.

Plus there is quite a lot to do, I don't understand this Brooklyn-centric view of the world that developers and the NYT's have developed.

All things aside, there seems to be more talk about Arrington than the possibility of racism in start-up culture. I see this as a very big win for his hype machine.

4 years and over 200k dollars seems like quite a bit. I understand being meticulous, but this is a bit absurd.

40% better?

Perhaps I'm spoiled by living in NYC, but I don't see a way that this could actually work here.

San Francisco is a notoriously awful place to catch a cab, but I hardly see how taking advantage of a local policy/market failure represents something that might be disruptive to a whole industry... particularly at a 40% mark-up.

Interesting.

From what I recall, LucyPhone is based near you guys. You might want to link up, at least for a powwow. Mike is an awesome dude.

"The refer 3 friends for an invite" promotion is rather annoying considering you don't disclose anything about the product.

I'm rather impressed that this was started by someone with so few followers.

How does this stack up against something like AlchemyAPI (http://www.alchemyapi.com/) which seem to roll in a lot more than simple sentiment analysis in a far more flexible product?

we got him to cater a lunch at our start-up... i think most of us weren't very keen on the sandwiches, though we thought it was great in the abstract.

At least they didn't use the word "jihad..." it is one thing to alienate your customers, but to bring a whole load of sensitive cultural bagage with it is quite another.

In any case, I feel as though both these strong armed legal tactics and the "jihad" label are really losing their strong meaning in these situations.

heh, please see my reply to the post below this.

We actually have weeks with free submissions and we're strongly considering changes to the pricing structure.

Our main argument for the current fee has actually been to discourage a huge amount of submissions so that we could take time to evaluate the viability of each submission. However, as we've grown (we're just over a year old now), the fee certainly seems to have become more of a hinderance to good ideas and the community has actually become a lot better at actually judging and filtering out products based on their viability.

Oddly enough, the people that actually love those backseat catalogs are our core audience at the moment. This current incarnation was more of a following rather than leading our audience.

We're in the process of remedying this "kitsch" right now.

We're actually looking at this very issue right now. At the moment most of our submitters tend to be spare time tinkerers that actually really believe in their products, so much so that they're willing to spend $99 dollars on the chance to see it in production.

Outside of that, we actually give them back all of the data from the 'popularity contest' in the form of pretty detailed analytics package, so they can refine their idea and take it elsewhere or give us a shot again at a reduced price.