Hacker News Reader

lquiston Things San Franciscans Should Be Thankful For

San Francisco has nearly 40 restaurants per 10,000 households, which is 40 percent more than the second highest city.

Is this the right way to determine the variety of restaurant options available to a city resident? I think maybe a better metric might be restaurants per square mile? As somebody who has lived in both SF and NYC, I'm a bit confused by a result that says that SF has more restaurant options than NYC. Just a thought.

lquiston How We Bootstrapped AirPair to Ramen Profitability (and YC W14)

Don't mean this as a dig, but if this is the definition of bootstrapping, isn't almost every YC company bootstrapped?

lquiston Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you

If you’re working in any startup hub, you almost certainly have friends that are working on their own startups. Ask them to help you. The first question should be, “Am I ready to fundraise?”

I would actually phrase this another way, "Be honest with me: If I asked you to refer me to one of your investors, would you recommend me to him/her or is my startup not there yet?"

lquiston Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you

another top tier VC once told me that out of the thousands of business pitches he receives in his office every year, his firm has never funded one that came in completely cold.

Referring to Chris Sacca (http://lowercasecapital.com/prospecting/) perhaps?

lquiston There's No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work

Sure!

The product is priced highly ($10k minimum) and provides a tremendous amount of value. We only need ~350 customers to get to $5M. (The serviceable market is something like 10M in the US alone, so it's not very niche either).

I think HN gave us a great launching pad, and because we have a lot of friends who read HN, it was easy to push our product announcement to the front page. Wouldn't have been easy to do on Reddit. Techcrunch still won't cover us :) That said, we've been covered by larger outlets than Techcrunch and yeah, they have a similar effect to HN.

lquiston There's No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work

I didn't say that our case was representative of the situation at large. I merely gave one counter example.

lquiston There's No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work

Posted about it under a different handle. This is my "venting" handle. I didn't want to talk about the product under my real handle for competitive reasons. The amount of money that we're making is not immediately obvious to outsiders.

lquiston There's No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work

Good try, but not an impulse buy and doesn't target devs. Actually, very few devs would be attracted to the product.

lquiston Want: The airbag scarf that replaces a bulky bicycle helmet, inflates in 100ms

Why not have this cover more of the body? E.g. a vest or something?

lquiston There's No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work

Myth: All I have to do is get TechCrunch. That’s marketing. Reality: You’ll have 2,000 unique visitors today and zero tomorrow. Spend five hours on the HackerNews front page and get a few thousand uniques from the most cynical, judgmental visitors you can imagine. Traffic from press outlets and link aggregation sites are NOT primed to buy your product and thus come and leave.

We've built a bootstrapped $5M Revenue (70% pbt margin) run-rate business in ~1 year on the back of a HN post. Generated business that led to something like $500k on the first few days alone.

lquiston AOL Smacks Startup for Using CrunchBase Content It Gave Away

I've only had one interaction with Crunchbase CEO Matt Kaufman: he rescinded my friend's offer to work at Crunchbase because my friend tried to negotiate the offer. Matt was clear that the attempted negotiation was the reason for the revocation and was quite judgmental about the whole thing.

lquiston Measuring America's Decline, in Three Charts

It seems ironic to me that this story has been submitted to Hacker News, a social news website at the center of Silicon Valley, an extraordinary fount of innovation unequalled worldwide. American "progress" or "success" will be determined much more by the pace of innovation than by the abilities of the general population.

lquiston Cards for Humanity: a fast-paced online game (built in Angular)

I hope you guys have the rights for this...

lquiston Software engineers tell Glassdoor that Walmart pays more than Facebook

This won't apply to everyone, but before applying to Walmart/Walmart Labs, do remember that Walmart will ask you to pass a drug test.

lquiston Software engineers tell Glassdoor that Walmart pays more than Facebook

Entry level (i.e., junior dev) salaries at Walmart Labs are $100k. This is based off of multiple data points.

lquiston Coding Interview Tips

Sure, but that's what code samples are for. If I send you code samples, and I can't explain to you what they mean or how I built them, or describe a variation of your choice about them, then you can assume that I don't know what I'm talking about. You can do this over the phone. There are endless, quality, revealing questions you can ask about provided code samples that are far, far, far, far superior to asking the equivalent of reciting the ABCs.

That seems like a reasonable idea, but we've tried that before, and it's just a terrible filter. Let me try to make a more general claim: anything that lets the candidate have outside resources or unlimited time is going to be a bad filter. In this case, the candidate can prep the code sample and be able to explain it well.

lquiston Coding Interview Tips

As a senior engineer with 7+ years in the field, I shouldn't need to prove the equivalent of my ABCs to you. It should be understood.

You'd be surprised how many 'senior' engineers can't code their way out of a cardboard box.

Background: I've interviewed hundreds (if not thousands) of engineers.

lquiston Open Corp Dev: An Idea Too Bold For Facebook Or Dropbox

As someone who is thinking about shopping his company around: YES YES YES

There is no transparency in this market, and advice is especially lacking for those that have no VCs.

lquiston Kit Kat's homepage is currently a parody of Android announcement page

The video is clearly a sendup of an Apple product announcement.

lquiston India is bad for entrepreneurs.

Any country that demands that you commit illegal acts to be an effective entrepreneur is one that is openly hostile to entrepreneurship. Plain and simple.

lquiston Invite HN: Phileas & Fogg, the globetrotting startup

One benefit might be separating yourself from personal connections and other "distractions." A luxury most easily afforded by youth!

lquiston Those Mac Pros are going to be expensive

This is exactly the price point they should be at. The majority of people buying these desktops are professionals and they are willing to pay big prices for performance.

lquiston Is Amazon Art a Doomed Venture?

One indication that buyers may be ok with this is that art buying (bidding, really) has been done over the phone in the past.

Also, try to realize what this means for Asian bidders who may not have the time (or inclination) to fly over to the West to purchase a work. Or vice-versa.

lquiston How to Prep if Your Startup Gets on TV

Well, my advice would kind of be the opposite: don't expect a TV appearance to send your traffic skyrocketing. TV is just not a traffic generator.

This.

Even major print publications. Doesn't even come close to the big online traffic drivers.

lquiston 'Virtual Lolita' Aims to Trap Chatroom Paedophiles

jcromartie means that adults attracted to 14 year olds are hebephiles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebephilia), not pedophiles.

lquiston Ask PG: Will you post an update to "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"?

Not sure that your example proves that YC is no longer interested in RFS #5. I think RFS# 5 covers companies that could be huge, but I'm not convinced that I would ever want to code on a tablet.

lquiston Monocle

Very hard to read grey text on a white background.

lquiston I quit my job to walk across the world doing live Google+ hangouts

Reminds me of a scene from Pulp Fiction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPfPYVVNgVw. Doesn't seem so ridiculous to me.

lquiston I quit my job to walk across the world doing live Google+ hangouts

It's a cold substitute, but for those who are interested in life in the American Midwest, Malle's film gives a small taste.