prpon

So you are one of those who says "Please close the door right after I get in". "We came during the time when America needed new talent."...well, the kind of talent that got in is not cutting it right now. May be we need a new crop of immigrants to stir up the economy? or the kind of wage drops that you hate will cause the profitability of these companies to go up and stir the economy.

"Once you submit your order for Membership, it is nonrefundable. Only in cases of fraud will the payment be refunded. This policy is in place due to an abuse of credit card chargebacks and theft of information. All requests for refunds due to fraud MUST be made in writing and physically mailed to freedownloadzone."

What they are doing at freedownloadzone is exactly that "theft of information and abuse of credit cards".

Makes me nostalgic and depressed at what we thought was cool at that time. In 1996, I made a javascript image slide show hosted on geocities for pictures of me and my girlfriend. She was really impressed at my thoughtfulness and effort. She showed it to so many of her friends...a modern day equivalent of that would be to post a youtube video with annotations on how beautiful she is and do status updates on facebook/twitter about that video 900 times. :)

For my local 7/11 or gas station, I 'repair computers'. For my relatives who are not into software, I am an 'Engineer'. Working on 'open source enterprise service bus' was the most nebulous thing to explain, even to programmers who were doing SAP implementation or web design.

Nice site. I would use it to decide which movies to watch based on the ratings. And I would like the movies playing now to be at the top (not the one's coming soon).

During the process of deciding, I might encounter a movie that I watched, I would vote for it.

BTW, what is the incentive for people to vote other than what I have described above? I would suggest adding comments apart from just ratings. Sometimes a movie appeals to me so much that I look forward to write something about it. It works the other way too. I've seen enough horrible movies that I come home so pissed that I need to vent. :-)

Is there a way for me to test drive the app without having to sign up? I do not want to give my email address then regret that this app is not something I am interested in.

May be if Yahoo put up a contest and asked Flickr users to create a logo with Yahoo branding, it would have created a good PR, a better logo and time for Flickr users to digest the fact that this is coming.

Here's an article from Entrepreneur magazine this month that talks about people who are successfully doing it. http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2009/octob...

It would be hard to imagine being profitable (or sustainable) just focusing on hardware. It can sustain itself if you broaden your audience.

Or you can find out whom you are gonna join when you get there :p

And then you walk into a subway store and pick up a sandwich, the spinach you wanted for good health had E.Coli. You contract Gastrointestinal infection and then you die.

My dad used to say "At the end of the day we all are alive because of the trust we have for one another". Whether you know that person or not, we inherently place that trust in others.

Working for a startup taught me more of "how not to screw it up" than anything positive I saw the existing company/founders do. There were some great lessons learnt at the expense of my personal time.

Good to see that someone is acting on it. However, the following quote makes me worried about the bureaucracy.

(1) set up a non-government board consisting of credible VCs, entrepreneurs, and lawyers to vet applicants.

It probably is a better solution than what PG proposed in his original essay. "let the market decide. Startup investors work hard to find the best startups. The government could not do better than to piggyback on their expertise, and use investment by recognized startup investors as the test of whether a company was a real startup."

PG's version would eliminate anyone who would bootstrap a startup without external funding. Brad's is a little inclusive.

I would rather prefer to leave it at "let the market decide."

Any interesting ideas as to how you could convert that statement into an actionable policy for immigration authorities to follow?

Do it. It's no crazier than this girl who set out to the end of the world back on a tractor collecting dreams of people.

A great interview on NPR at http://www.pri.org/theworld/?q=node/14897

and more information here: http://www.tractortractor.org/english/

In the example of editing wikipedia it mentions: "This imagined paradox is caused when the percentage is provided but not the ratio."

We see this so many areas. China's GDP is growing 12% every year and the US has grown just 2% type of arguments.

I haven't been able to improve on my yearly salary raise of 300% in the last 15 years when I went from 5$/hr to 15$/hr

I guess 91% of us are saying "Don't sweat the small stuff such as a degree". However, I wish unlearning the college stuff would have been as easier as a switch to linux :)

FYI, When I click on the link `Books` on the landing page, the URL it redirects to http://www.cookupbooks.com/my_books does not show up in Safari (version 4.0.2) , it appears ok in firefox.

A startup I worked was started by HBS guys and hired professor from MIT as their first employee. They pretty much interviewed and hired folks from the top 5 math and computer science schools only.

I looked up to these guys because of an inherent bias that, I never went to these schools and these guys must be gooood. After working with lots of them for a few years, if there is one thing I can tell you its this. HBS didn't teach the founders anything about startups or the business world. Ivy league schools didn't teach much about how to deliver a product to the guys.

BTW, The worst hacker in the group was the professor :-)

Very well said. I could be saying any of these statements and if these were things that were non-existent, it would not be as appealing. I would like to find out if Branson would fund me for the following:

"Provide health care to everyone, employer subsidized, co-ops, non-profit".

"solar powered clean drinking water for rural areas".

I might as well say "Space time continuum, user generated, freemium"

I moved from Berkeley to LA several years back. I worked for a startup and was involved with the startup community in east bay. I have not involved myself actively with the LA startup community but I have to say, it does not come close. Here's a sampler. The Tie.org in silicon valley has this week "The Art of Writing a Business Plan - Silicon Valley"

the LA chapter has: "Franchising: The New Solution" Featuring Rajiv Trivedi, VP of La Quinta Corp"

Tech startups in LA are few and far in between. I visited some outfits out of UCLA campus and the attitude in general was "Me and my professor are world renowned in this field, I don't need to answer anything about our business model"

A conversation with my wife would probably go like this:

Wife: Who is "Roy Fielding"?

Me: Some guy. He’s smart.

Wife: Oh? What did he do?

Me: He helped write the first web servers and then did a ton of research explaining why the web works the way it does. His name is on the specification for the protocol that is used to get pages from servers to your browser.

Wife: Oh, sorry, I thought he was in that movie with Jennifer Aniston.

Me: The web is pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason.

Wife: Can you please stop it. I've been trying to catch the finale of ER for the longest time.

Me: But HTTP is really simple to explain.

Wife: Some other time honey, not now.

Good arguments. Anything taken to the extreme is bound to have negative implications, including meritocracy.

I would disagree about how much choice we have once you are down and out. I would like to think otherwise but I'm where I am because of where I was born, my family, friends and circumstances. May be some choices I've made here and there might have made a difference. On the other hand, I've know so many people who were much smarter than I will ever be, end up in bad social standing because of the things I've mentioned like family.and circumstances.

I've made use of Yodlee so much so that over the years, I've told it to anyone within earshot. The most common excuse I get from even the tech savvy programming crowd is "I do not want to have all my account information in one place, it's a single point of failure".

While true, the same holds for all information that we have online that is important to us. But it's a big mental block that both these sites need to overcome. Yodlee kinda shifted that burden by selling software to financial providers whom we already trust by opening accounts.

I've been a long time user at yodlee.com which powers the backend of Mint.com and other account aggregators. Yodlee gave up on the idea of trying to monetize the customer information they have. They instead reinvented themselves as the technology provider for all other financial institutions.

I am sure Yodlee.com is a profitable company but I do not think their investors will ever see much return on the 110 million dollars worth of investment since 1999.

If you take away Yodlee powered backend, Mint.com does not have much going on for them other than the subscriber base. If you have a hard time monetizing from the subscribers you have, It's just going to be a long painful ride for everyone involved.

I started thinking how hard can it be to build a web resume? But your implementation bowled me over. Kudos guys. Great job.

I would suggest to make it obvious that users have a URL that they can share. Give suggestions during signup for their preferred web address. eg: http://jobspice.com/firstname

Goodluck to you.

Why do I not show up on the map? Is there something a HN user need to do to show up? I looked around all of Los Angeles area, I don't show up.

"By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback." The above statement holds true for me. It's only after investing way too much energy on stuff that does not help me in being closer to a MVP do I realize it.

I agree with what you are saying. You could download images in an hour or design a logo in 2. Unless you are planning on releasing websites by the dozen or have existing relationship with providers, you probably will spend more time, fret and expend more mental energy on whether they will deliver.

I grew up in India and I half joke that I don't know how to swim because I grew up in a place where drinking water is hard to come by, forget the swim part.

At least where I grew up, water was always hard to come by. If you ever jumped into our water well, you would die at half way to the bottom from heart failure. It's probably half a mile deep :-)

One of the reasons often cited for the structure that existed was 'it would distract developers working on the product from meeting the deliverables'. There is a role for support on a complex product where user errors often are the reason for tech support calls.

However, If you have a problem that requires code fixes, I cannot imagine having to deal with a long line of people who have no power to make those changes.

I would second your thought. I worked for a enterprise software company that had developers building the product, a maintenance team that fixed bugs and 3 layers of support.

The only people who knew what was going on with a huge product were the developers who actually wrote it. But you had to go thru so many layers to get to the developers, irrespective of silver or gold or platinum support. I would never ever pay for support of another product that comes from a big corporation.

We went opensource with our products and every developer responded directly to questions from customers. It made a big difference to the users.