jexe

I don't know what that means, but you've got my attention. Could you elaborate on what you have in mind?

Some personal favorites:

proprietary and confidential: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22proprietary+an...

do not distribute: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22do+not+distrib...

this article is great, in a way. People pay ransoms with extreme agony, but because they are supposed to be effective. If they don't work, there goes the only reason to pay. this is exactly the article the DDoSers don't ever want to see written about them.

I agree with that. Because of the network effects of social apps, it's not really 2x for launching on another large platform - we got about 10x results from launching Dasher on Android. We probably waited too long to do it.

My second dot-com (in NYC) almost bit the dust in 2001 after bunches of layoffs, but management incredibly figured out how to make it through another five-ish years.

The thing that stands out to me the most about that period in time was how flat it was. No significant pay raises, no new hires, nobody leaving (where wasn't really anywhere decent to go). The team and the work fortunately stayed interesting.

Take that for what it's worth - I'm just one data point. Also, the last couple years have been too good to us in our industry, but I don't think it's anything like the absurdity of the late 90's, so I would be surprised if there was a crash that hit as hard.

Also, to echo what others here have said, we didn't know we had it so good until we suddenly didn't. If you're in your first job in a fabulously-funded tech startup with bizarro perks, brace yourself that it may not be normal. :) But appreciate it while you've got it!

So has anyone built a site that lets you put limit orders on airline seats yet? I'd love to, say, have something automatically book a $250 flight across the country if the price happens to cross that threshold in the next week.

Great read, thanks for sharing the story.

I think I echo the others here, four rounds isn't bad at all. Not exactly the same thing as a YC application, but raising our seed round @ Dasher we were rejected 48 times from angels and VCs before we got our first "yes." Startup myth goes that Pandora's founder was turned down 300+ times.

I'm also very impressed with the specific attention YC paid you when turning you down. Rather than a generic answer, they took the time to give you very thoughtful reasons and things to improve. I really wish we had that much care paid to us by anybody during our earliest conceptual days.

Dasher (http://dasher.im), uses socket.io. We're using socker.IO-objc for our iOS client: https://github.com/pkyeck/socket.IO-objc

And will be launching a web client in the coming weeks.

So far, so good. We do handle the reconnects ourselves, but otherwise it's been treating us well.

I guess the consolation prize from this fairly offensive point of view is that since my company doesn't share this bias against women, we're hiring all the great engineers that you're overlooking.

Sounds like we have the competitive advantage.

Do you have a link to the MS talk/article about their work with Metro? I'd be very interested.

That's exactly it. It's like telling someone that my software is worth $1700 because that's what my laptop cost.

This reminds me a little of how familiar I am with certain classical music, because of watching Looney Tunes so much as a kid.

Interesting, I would have argued the opposite: well thought-out subscription businesses are goldmines. Once you have a customer, you aren't billing them a single time -- often, you're billing them repeatedly for the option to use your service, whether or not they actually use your service. A customer has to take an additional action to stop paying you.

Are you arguing that non-subscription businesses don't have customer acquisition costs? Or just that CAC for subscriptions are higher?

"Name a few successful subscription businesses. Successful (in my mind) means PROFITABLE. Revenue does not mean sh. Come-on, name 'em. (Those that you do name will have some sort of monopoly or exclusive right to a physical asset)."

What about most SAAS businesses? Or most magazines? Hosting providers? World of Warcraft?

But I totally agree with you about the content providers like Starz calling the shots and ultimately deciding whether Netflix lives or dies.

It seems like a purely promotional placement, Amazon isn't giving you money that neither you nor they received -- that seems perfectly reasonable to me. If you don't want to bear the auxiliary costs like server load or customer service, you don't have to agree to it.

If Amazon is correct, though, this promotion should mean that post-promotion sales are higher than pre-promotion sales. But the chart ends on the day of the promotion. Though there's a little text about it, I'd be curious about more detail on how things are shaping up afterwards.

Either way, up to them of course, but it feels a bit extreme to me to abandon ship because of agreeing to an unsuccessful promotion and because they're behind in features vs. the Google market.

It's funny, Tim Berners-Lee feels pretty much the opposite way:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-r...

It does, actually. Most - not all - of the "hacks" are cited and linked to doctors, studies, the American Nutritional Association, etc.

A few don't lead anywhere, guess that's a symptom of linking out of a two year old ebook?

1. If you're a great developer, just pick an idea that you love so much that you'll weather the inevitable storms that come. It can seem mundane or 'solved', you'll make it interesting. The 'killer idea' is usually a label applied afterwards to a kick-ass execution of a normal idea.

2. Screw business books and tech blogs, read science fiction. :)

That is the thing that mystifies me about this lawsuit so much: it seems totally frivolous. Someone Facebook's size must be batting down inane lawsuits like this continuously. Why is this one getting so much attention?

I'm assuming he's trying to both get a good scoop AND stop the damage these angels can do to startups - the longer he waits, the more damage might be done.

I think he's struck a pretty good balance here by saying what needs to be said and no more, while still keeping it interesting.

Well, at least one investor seems to have accidentally included himself in the mess (from TC's comments)

http://twitter.com/speechu/status/25083299594

Does anybody believe that software patents are not broken? It really seems obvious that they are, but have been looking for a counter-argument. There must be somebody out there with a good defense.

Not tough at all - the company I joined is another (larger) startup, so I think that if anybody understands this kind of choice, it's them. :)

I took the leap a couple years ago, started a startup, ran out of cash, and got a day job again.

Incinerating your savings at a startup only to end up back as a cube warrior is pretty sobering. Even so, I never looked back on the (great) job I had with regret. Aside from not seeing some good friends every day, I didn't miss it at all, and now I'm at a far better gig than I was at the last time I was a happy wage slave. And I'm lucky to have gained some amazing experiences and a big network for the next time around.

I'm sticking to the HN party line on this one and saying that good things will come from taking a risk on what you really want to do.

You know what else is interesting - the means to produce music and movies is moving down market, fast. My friggin phone records HD, and my Mac comes with some basic music production software, I can self-publish my own books on amazon or just host them electronically myself.. and this trend is only accelerating.

So will we see less art in the future? Absolutely not - we'll be seeing huge amounts more, and from people who may not have had access to, say, a recording studio in the past. The economics are changing on both ends of the "business," which I think is a net positive.

Taken on its face, this is pretty bad advice, especially for technologists. Do you really wish you were still writing DOS bookkeeping apps in Pascal, because that's what you were good at?

Think hard about the things that actually make you excel at what you do, it's probably much less concrete. Richard Branson started several totally different businesses - but he's sticking to his core competencies of being a ridiculously good showman and businessman, and being able to get shit done.

I'd figure a good gigolo might be good at understanding how to give people what they want.. which translates pretty well to anything.

Not so sure that these huge gestures are necessary, depending on the technology - You can play games perfectly fine on the wii with little more than the flick of your wrist.

Yes. My macbook is the single most important device that I need to do my job. It goes pretty much everywhere I go, and I will use it every day until its untimely demise / upgrade.

It's worth paying a little extra to help ensure my source of income doesn't go up in smoke (literally?).

Isn't HN's particular distortion the point of the exercise?

What's happening here is probably similar to Apple's position on coverflow imitations - there have been lots of rejections for apps that imitate coverflow poorly, even without private APIs.

Speaking with somebody directly about this, and basically, their stance is: coverflow is an experience owned by Apple. If you imitate it poorly or inaccurately, users will have a bad / confusing experience (Apple's call what 'poorly or inaccurately' means, of course).

Seems like the real threat here is training a user that it's ok to use third party web sites to tell them what password to use. That's a very bad habit.