ryanjmo

I found this funny:

"Still, 55 percent of the posted comments were positive about the real Zuckerberg, according to Alterian.

A negative turn

However, the vibe turned 51 percent negative this week as Alterian, at The Chronicle's request, analyzed the buzz following Sunday night's broadcast interview with "60 Minutes" correspondent Leslie Stahl."

I think the really important thing about his public image to note, is that people truly care about these statistics.

Autocomplete!

This post reminds me of the David Platt post on why the iPhone will fail: http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut-...

Both articles essentially state that the company (Apple/Facebook) should not try to innovate, because their implementation will suck and then go on to mention problems that are rather trivial and will not actually be problems.

Sorry, but I think Facebook is good enough at product design that they can pull this off. Facebook doesn't need Steve Jobs; Zuckerberg is pretty bad ass at making products people like and use extensively. If you need evidence you should look at Facebook, a lot of people REALLY like that service.

I would pay $20 to have this set up for two weeks for me. That would give you $6 you could keep for yourself. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Business here possibly?

No don't do it. PhD's suck.

-Dr. Moriarty

>>Why the hype?>>

So my goal for the last year while I have been doing startups my goal has been to get ramen profitable and we did that just a couple of months ago.

The reason this was so important to me is because now, I feel like I am "living off the land" or "surviving in the wild" and answering to literally no one. The amazing part about start-ups is that they make me feel truly alive and independent, while working for someone else makes me feel trapped and dependent. Right now, I'm really happy.

I'm also looking forward to the next part of our start-ups growth, which staying with the analogy, will be like growing a clan of like minded people who want to build on what we started.

Also, I read once in 'Stumbling on Happiness' that people are happy when they can actually have an impact on things. In less than a year, we have already significantly impacted the YouTube space and will be continually impacting the entertainment industry. The exciting part is in my opinion we have done this for the better and that as promised in the book that does makes me happy.

I guess in some ways, I'm some sort of new aged tech-hippy, but at least I'm not alone: http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

Our company is exactly at this point right now where we are looking to raise an angle round and this is a super useful pod-cast. Fundraising info starts around 25:00.

I had this exact problem. This is one of the reason I have found the Android app market horrible when compare with the iPhone market. This rule is so arbitrary and non-intuitive.

I actually made my app free for testing purposes and had to create an entirely different app once I made it free.

In my experience with the Android app store, Google has no idea what they are doing.

Edit: Independent of this weird issue, I say this mostly because we sold literally 20x less of the exact same app on the Android market vs. the iPhone market (the apps were marketed the exact same way). This is in spite of the fact that the Android phone sales are apparently equal the number of iPhones phone sales...

Another one of my biggest gripes, while people are listening, is that you can not get a URL for your app for the Android store (or at least I don't know how). How are you suppose to sell anything on the web without a web address. We have a link to our iPhone app and for then Android app we need to give people a search term to enter into the Android app store! This is crazy to me!

Finally, and this is the last thing I promise, when you submit and app to the Android store you use a keystone to sign it. Well, I ended up losing my keystone (cause I'm an idiot), so I could never push an update of my app. So, I ended up needing to go through and literally refund 100 people's purchases (by hand) and create an entirely different app. This was actually the same app that I made free, so I literally have 3 versions of this app submitted to the Android App Store (but two are no longer public).

We used our paid iPhone Apps to get to ramen profitability. Then raised money and made them free. They saved us for sure.

So yes it has happened and we are one such company.

Put a LAMP stack together for him and have him create basic website stuff that he sees everyday.

Definitely not the article you want to read because it is 4 in the morning and you can't sleep... shit.

I think what I find annoying/confusing is that on HN articles that have to do with PhDs are voted up and people are generally pretty positive about PhDs, rather than emphasizing that they are a waste of time to people interested in start-ups.

HN doesn't seem like the appropriate place for PhD info.

Maybe I am just bitter because I feel like my PhD was a waste of time (and I did finish), but I feel like doing a PhD is a failure in itself.

On HN a lot of people seem interested in Doctoral study and seem to praise it as a good thing, but I am wondering, are there many people out there who found their years of a PhD helped them much on their start-up?

I feel my years of PhD study and the degree have not helped much.

Maybe someone can help me out here, with something I don't understand.

What happens to the convertible note if you never go on to raise another round, but you still have a successful business that generates a lot of cash for yourself?

There is a difference between vocational school where you learn how to get a job and YC where you learn to create an expandable company.

>>>The airline industry is also clearly trending in this direction, as is higher education. Once an industry is at the bottom of an ethical slope, it is ripe for disruption by young companies that can sell through an honest, straightforward process.>>>

Sometimes I hope that companies like YC will disrupt the higher educational system in the US.

Going through YC is a much more strait forward process than education. The process is essentially join YC and work your ass off to make yourself a job.

This makes a lot more sense to me than, pay a bunch of money for college, learn a bunch of random junk, get a degree after a set period of time, then show that degree to people who will hopefully be impressed and possibly give you a job.

1) The very first thing you need to do is keep working like the aquisition is not going to happen because these things more often fall apart than go through and it can really screw up your start-up if you start planning for it going through.

2) Next, you need to decide if you want to stop working on your own thing and start working for someone else and figure out the minimum price you would do that for. If you would accept one dollar less that is not a minimum price.

3) Next, you need to find out if this company will meet that price.

4) If they will meet that price, only then should you get a lawyer.

Getting a lawyer as a first step is terrible advice that will cost you a lot of money and a lot of time on something that 1) you many not be interested in 2) may not actually happen.

We were in a similar situation a month ago and this was basically the advice we compiled from angels, people at YC and pervious YC companies that were bought.

We ended up mostly ignoring the acquisition talks because we weren't that interested in being acquired and (as people told us would likely be the case) they did not go through. It would have been a huge waste of time and money if we got a lawyer like some people on HN suggested, before actually figuring out steps 1-3.

So, we work with these guys and I can tell you that right now this is definitely low in terms of an estimate of the money they are making.

In addition to what they make from ads, a lot of YouTubers will get paid to make videos that involve a product, etc. For some (most?) that is actually a larger source of income than the AdSense.

Also there are many many more than 10 YouTubers who are doing very well from their channel.

How is your traction? It wasn't mentioned in the article.

What do you mean by 'wholesale DNS-based blacklisting'?

We don't use git-flow because we don't have any problems managing our code.

I had this same issue (can't believe someone beat me to posting about it), just move the button you click to the top or something so it doesn't move anywhere.

The thing that helped us the most were Paul Graham's essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

My personal recommendations are: http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

I think these essays were both necessary and sufficient for making our start-up successful (in terms of reading, lol).

I agree that is makes sense to respect companies you are working with wishes.

In this post though we are merely speculating as to the reason for the meeting and looking for advice from the HN community. If the company had suggested to us that we should keep the fact that we are having a meeting with them confidential, we certainly would have. It is definitely the right thing to do if people ask.

Thanks for the advice, but we are not concerned with ruining the prospect.

We are ramen profitable and are going to succeed with our without an acquisition. We would just be on a different path.

A large reason we put this post out there, is to determine if it is something we are actually interested in.

Also, being able to be open with the world about what we are doing is one of my favorite parts about being in a start-up. One of our main goals with our startup is enjoy the experience. If YouTube really doesn't want to work with us because we mentioned our meeting publicly, it is an indication that it is not somewhere we want to work!

Can you launch any sooner? How about tomorrow?

I actually prefer not having multi-tasking on my iPhone. I really like that when I close an application it is gone and not running in the background taking up memory or doing unknown things.

No multi-tasking keeps things simple, which is how I like them on a device with a such a small screen (since you can only look at one thing anyway).

I also think not allowing multi-tasking encourages good development practices. It encourages software that can deal with a quick exit by the user at any time, but at the same time get them back to where they were. I find a lot of the iPhone software nice for this reason.

In my opinion, no multi-tasking is a feature. If it were an option on iOS4 I would turn it on.

So, I am suppose to go out of my way to make sure what I am doing isn't linked to my karma. Not likely.

In my opinion karma is suppose to be a by-product of our actions on a site; they are not suppose to dictate them.

Believe it or not, Karma on this site is not that important to me. I care more about exchanging ideas and thoughts with fellow people doing start-ups. Please answer me this, why would you think that was my main intention?

The point of my post was this, what this site was trying to accomplish can be accomplished better using already available tools. Pre-populating the post with my favorites was a necessary part of that.

Can you explain to me how I could set this up without 'whoring-karma'?

Be Good: http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html