lloyddobbler

“A 30% revenue share can easily be the difference between a company that can afford to scale, hire new employees, and reinvest in its product, and one that is perpetually struggling to stay afloat.”

This brought up a fun thought exercise for me. Pretty sure that Y Combinator would argue that giving away 7% of one's company for access to intangible (but beneficial) things like funding, advisors, etc, is completely worth it for a company. Pretty sure that they also fund companies that pay salespeople fairly significant commissions on sales.

Interesting to see them argue that asking a company to give up 30% "commission" on revenue for access to a large market stifles competition and innovation.

Is Y Combinator's forcing companies to give up 7% of their companies for access to advisors and funding stifling innovation and competition? (Spoiler: I don't think so. I think both Y Combinator and apple should be able to capitalize on the access they provide.)

I mentioned it above, but FusionAuth is supposedly good. They offer a paid cloud and free self-hosted version, so you get the benefits of rolling your own without as many risks. (No affiliation with the company on my part, so I can't speak to any specifics - they're just local and I continually hear good things from friends who know and use them.)

Have heard good things about FusionAuth. (Not a user, but friends speak highly of it).

Interesting. Yeah, in Los Angeles, Denver, and Atlanta, it’s always worked to my advantage as the buyer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In the U.S., at least, I've never known a seller's agent to do that (having done a good number of real estate transactions). In fact, in my experience I find it to be the exact opposite. Seller's agents are incentivized to not work with buyer's agents, if the situation arises where they're approached directly by a buyer.

If the seller's agent is comfortable acting as the intermediary, and recognizing the limits of conflict of interest, then it's in their best interest to keep all of the 6% commission instead of giving half of it to the buyer's agent.

Agreed. I was a professional actor 20 years ago when digital and streaming were first coming into play, and the seeds sown in the agreements from that time were painfully lacking for working actors. The precedents set have continued to this day.

I'm torn on the AI/copyright issue. On the one hand, for actors, having your image and likeness digitally reproduced in perpetuity without compensation goes against the very profession of acting.

On the other hand, the act of writing is a more interesting gray area to me. There's a different between physical property and intellectual property. If a machine can learn better than a human and put out compelling content, I'm conflicted as to how restricting that helps us progress as a society (just like I'm conflicted as to how allowing it helps us progress as a society).

So many gray areas. I'm just glad a tentative agreement has been struck, and hopefully it's equitable and forward-looking for all sides.

This. Consider the market. Samsung also doesn't add its newly-engineered, top-of-the-line solutions to its lower-end new models.

Almost all the people on this forum are in the target market for the Pro. The standard iPhone is not built for us, nor will most of its users have a problem with 480Mbps-over-wire transfer speeds.

It's the internet. Everyone is an expert!

(/s, if it wasn't blatantly obvious.)

Hello - Kipp from TextExpander here. Great question that we get a lot (and rightfully so - security is of paramount importance to both our customers and us).

We wrote up a brief FAQ on the topic of snippet security here: https://textexpander.com/learn/accounts/security/how-textexp...

…and you can see our general security practices info here (including that we have a SOC 2 security certification): https://textexpander.com/security

In the healthcare space, we often see practitioners using fill-in snippets to input patient information or notes into an EHR or other system while keeping a standard format to improve searchability. In the interest of security, personally-identifiable info (PII) entered into a fill-in snippet is ephemeral, and remains on the user's local machine. You can learn more about fill-ins here: https://textexpander.com/learn/using/snippets/advanced-snipp...

Please feel free to drop me a note with any further Q's - happy to help.

With the possible exception of the lyrics "rain on your wedding day," which in some ways seems like a bad thing, but is supposedly good luck.

Aside from that, the entire song is filled with non-ironic scenarios, yep. Agreed: the most unintentionally ironic song ever.

> I'd put my money that they included 'online scoreboard' as the first phrase in the `<meta name="description" content="Online scoreboard"> tag per Google's recommendations for SEO which put them ahead.[0] Also, to this one point of many when searching for `online leaderboard` you get the top spot because leaderboard is not included in the other website's description.

While I like the thought progression you're going through, this is a "not really." Google has confirmed a number of times over the past 15+ years (going back to the Matt Cutts era) and even in the document you linked that the meta description does nothing to influence ranking in the SERPs. However, the meta title does influence ranking.

I'm on mobile, so unable to dig in right now - but my guess is either this has something to do with the meta title, or the specific anchor text of the backlinks that are getting inserted via the app in question.

Aside from that, agree 100% with your other assessments.

As a writer, I hate apps like this. As a web writer, I love them.

I've been using this app for at least the past 7 years. I wouldn't use it for any other type of writing. However, when the medium dictates succinct, direct writing without fluff, this app is an amazing tool.

Agreed. My family has actually looked at moving away from Denver, with all the influx of people. The cost of living is no longer as attractive, and the politics that are coming in from out-of-state are much more slanted. I moved away from California 10+ years ago - now it seems like a lot more are doing the same thing, but bringing the same things with them that has made California less attractive.

That being said, as someone else mentioned, if your goal is to escape high taxes and the super-expensive housing costs of SF, all while living in an area that supports your life outside the office, Denver is a good place to look at. Even if its cost of living is rising.

As someone else mentioned, one reason is it's cheaper...for now. The "for now" is key. Having lived in Denver for more than 10 years, our housing and costs of living are growing incredibly quickly (relative to the Bay Area at least). Our total housing costs are definitely not in the same ballpark as the Bay, but we're creeping up on L.A. levels.

Add to that a good quality of life for employees (low pollution, the outdoors, etc), as well as an abundance of talent, and a city (or three) that's been very focused on nurturing its tech/startup community for the past 10 years (including Denver Startup Week, the largest free startup-focused event in the world)...and it's a no-brainer.

TBH, one of the biggest recent macro-challenges for Denver is the sheer number of people moving here, a large portion of which are from California.

Me, looking over the printed product images...

...is that a double-decker couch I see?

I'm impressed as well - but I do think many of us here are overestimating the size of the audience that sort of technical messaging would apply to. It being open is a big deciding factor for us on HN - but there's a much larger audience for whom it would simply dilute the messaging. (I'm guessing their product marketing team did a substantial bit of research on this before going live).

I could, however, see them building out a 'developer community'-focused microsite. But I wouldn't expect them to put anything related to that on their homepage, as it would likely be confusing and irrelevant to their target audience.

As someone who's marketed consumer apps to iOS users (with in-app purchases) - you speak the truth.

One freemium iOS app I worked on did nearly 5X the revenue compared to its Android counterpart (others were at varied-but-similar multiples). I imagine the ad-supported business would reflect the same - the iOS audience is just too lucrative for advertisers to ignore.

edit to adjust multiple. I went back and looked it up.

See also: The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. Great read (based on a previous work, Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse) on the need to play on a different playing field than the one that supposedly has a 'winner' and a 'loser.' Applies to companies, individuals, organizations, relationships...you get the idea.

To beat a dead analogy, if you're climbing to reach the top 'ledge' you started out looking for, you might not start...or you might climb with such a singular focus that you miss another path that would take you off to the side and up another, higher route.

Edited for formatting.

History repeats itself. This is straight out of Microsoft's playbook from back in the day.

> I have no idea why I'm spending my time writing this, but I do appreciate the post as I vividly remember being enthralled with the prospect of money popping out of a coke can as a child and wanting to then rip-open the can to see how it worked. Though this never happened for me or any of my friends who were pretty avid coke drinkers back in the day :_(

+1 on all counts. I still remember this promotion vividly from my time as a kid. In spite of the mishaps, it was pretty effective marketing.

This book is great. Although anytime I see it, my mind jumps to the meme about "If the people who wrote computer programming books wrote math textbooks."

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/71/40/36/71403664364a825e76f0...

Yep to the catnip.

As others have mentioned, though, the big benefit of the first million-dollar homepage was the SEO value - along with the fact that for a few hundred bucks, you could have a bold ad that caught someone's eye amidst the chaos (FREE HOSTING comes to mind). The novelty of the project sold it to mass-market PR, which then sold it to the public, who then shared it with their friends.

As pretty as this project is, I think there's a lot less novelty here.

The novelty here is more WebGL, as well as the "Hey, someone's doing this again." WebGL implementation will attract the attention of a select few people; the "here we go again" will likely also capture a few clicks, but none like the first time around. The story just isn't as good for mass-media to run with.

So while my right brain starts to go through 'how can I work with this?', my left brain chimes in with 'I can get a whole lot more ROI from $2k worth of Facebook ads this time around.'

Still a cool idea and very pretty to look at, though. If you get in early (so you can stand out), it might be a good buy.

Yeah - I moved to Fraser (next town over) a year-ish after Marv’s wild ride. Always interesting to see this come up.

IIRC, the story was much more complex than this article paints it (& much more sympathetic to Marv). There were apparently some blatant conflicts of interest with the zoning committee, which painted a picture of a corrupt town government. Additionally, due to the changes, his business had virtually no access, meaning that he lost the livelihood he had worked years to build. IOW, they really painted him into a corner, and left even his shop’s land/building value worthless.

By all means, what he did was crazy. But most of us who knew the town wished both sides had been a little more yielding. Either way, always interesting to see it come up.

As a Russian hacker I think this is a REALLY great idea because of the security implications surrounding it.

This. The thing about "get out the vote" campaigns is, they're intended to draw out the least-involved, least-informed members of the electorate. Which in my book is a bad thing.

Voting is not the only civic duty - educating yourself on the issues at hand is also part of that civic duty. If someone doesn't want to vote because taking the legally-mandated time off to go to the polls or fill out their mail-in ballot is "too much work," I'm not sure they're living up to their end of the bargain as a citizen.

Exercising your right to vote doesn't mean you value it. Shouldn't we be asking how we can get people to value their vote enough to be engaged?

Irrespective of that, haven't we already witnessed the mass security issues that come with making voting machines digital? Do we really want to subject that flawed scenario to even more flaws by putting it out on the web? Do we never learn?

They've done some really interesting brand work, for an early stage startup in an industry notorious for long development cycles. Here's a video they did for an airshow (Paris? Can't remember) earlier this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbAQTGqHkik

Ask any 18 year-old 3-star high school senior football recruit whether he's going to play in the NFL. Let me know how many of them tell you "maybe, but I'm not sure I'll get there."

Then ask the 4- and 5-stars.

> I think the ideal use case for a MVP is exposing it to a limited subset of users.

This. So much this.

MVP has a key role in product development - but its place is not necessarily at the phase of "launch it to the public with a marketing campaign." It comes before that.

Well-said.

This makes me circle back again to the concept of "Minimum Viable Product." It's been said that as a startup, if you're not embarrassed when you ship v1, you waited too late. But what's often not looked at is "just how embarrassed is embarrassed enough?"

Going against the concept of launching an MVP is the idea of "you only get one chance to make a first impression." Which is why a number of founders started talking less about launching Minimum Viable Products, and more about launching Exceptional Viable Products.

Those few extra details can be crucial levers to determining your product's success with customers. Of course, the key is determining which of those key details are the ones you need to pay attention to, and which ones you can pass over for now.

Here's Rand Fishkin on MVP vs. EVP: https://qz.com/work/1277369/the-lean-startup-methodology-wil...

They did - explicitly in the section that starts "Obsessing with Customer’s Experience is a Win."

That being said, when writing engaging content, it's usually better to show, rather than just tell. That's also what they did here.

Last thing - they wanted to convey the message to as many people as possible. If the article was entitled "Put the concerns of the customer first before yours," virtually no one would read it (and no one on a site like HN, Twitter, or Facebook would click through to it).