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Comment by victork2 | Hacker News Reader

Take that in your faces "Elite" startups, you wouldn't be selected, you're not even "Ultra elite"!

More seriously though, I respect the initiative, but I would love to hear why this particular vocabulary is employed (from the website and the company's website): [ "ninja", "ultra", "elite", "brotherhood", "sisterhood" ]. I don't believe you say that randomly and you want to appeal to a certain population with these words but don't you think you'll only attract bozos and pretentious people?

For your website ( given in the comments) please no violent transitions like that, it's really bad for slow computers like mine. If anything I would have think that ninjas love discretion...

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Key phrase is "alternative to".

About attracting bozos... maybe we will. We think that instead of trying to weed out the bozos, let everyone in and see how well they perform. If a "bozo" can ship and gain traction with their product, then they aren't bozos are they? But if the bozos flake out, that's ok too. What will be left is the "elites".

Yeah, we're joking around with marketing on our site. We figure it's better than being ultra serious. But I'm sure there's a balance that we're going to need to eventually get to.

Thanks for your answers.

I am genuinely interested by what words carry and in your case the kind of people they are going to attract. I actually write a bit on that. If you emphasize a lot on ninja/ elite etc... I would guess you will attract a lot of immature people who have ego probably bigger than their talent.

If you look at the phrasing of Y Combinator or even Facebook ads for developers you can see that even if they add some words to be fun they are careful about their use not to send the wrong signals.

Anyhow I wish you the best for your initiative!

Cool, thanks a ton for your feedback!

Maybe I live in a bubble (downtown SF), but it seems the best devs I've ever worked with on open source and consulting project tend to have a pretty weird (maybe immature) sense of humor. In most early stage startup offices here, it's not weird to see grown men (and brilliant devs) run around the office and shoot nerf guns at each other.

> it's not weird to see grown men (and brilliant devs) run around the office and shoot nerf guns at each other

1999 called, it wants its startup cliches back.

Well, I was in high school in 1999. Very sad to have missed the previous generation of nerf time fun.

The thing about a weird sense of humor is it's likely not the same weird sense of humor any particular other person is likely to have. The problem with "ninja" developer and the like is by now it's starting to get played out, even among more serious advertisement such as job postings. At least some of the best devs you work with in SF (I know some I work with... in SF) are long since tired with the whole ninja, zombie meme.

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