cedsav

I really like reading design critics like this one. It's detailed and most points are well supported. I stopped reading though when the OP offered his "better" version.

It's not that his version is bad but redesigns by outsiders necessarily introduce their own new flaws. They don't know what constraints drive a specific design, so there's little to learn from a mockup that fixes, say a white space issue, but did not consider if usability or conversion rate could be impacted.

Thanks for offering your perspective, it's the best thing I've read in this thread...

what are you working on?

I started my business on my own (and that's one of the downside of starting late, none of my friends where up for this kind of adventure, plus I'm an expat, so the people I knew and trusted best were 4k miles away), so I did everything myself: web development, graphic design, business, legal stuff, etc.. I'm by no mean an expert in any of these domains, but it's all stuff I've done at one point or another in my career. I build the thing, got customers, and was lucky enough to find a few good people to help me run this thing.

If you're going to wait before going on your own, just make sure you get the most out of your job. Avoid boring and routine stuff, venture out of your comfort zone, learn skills beyond your own specialty.

For what it's worth, I had a 'drag' score of 7 when I founded my startup. Without a wife and a child to motivate me to try harder, and without 10+ years of experience in technology, I would never have been able to accomplish half of what I've done.

From the FTC website, the list of "reasonable steps" that twitter (and really, any web app) should have taken:

* requiring employees to use hard-to-guess administrative passwords that are not used for other programs, websites, or networks;

* prohibiting employees from storing administrative passwords in plain text within their personal e-mail accounts;

* suspending or disabling administrative passwords after a reasonable number of unsuccessful login attempts;

* providing an administrative login webpage that is made known only to authorized persons and is separate from the login page for users;

* enforcing periodic changes of administrative passwords by, for example, setting them to expire every 90 days;

* restricting access to administrative controls to employees whose jobs required it; and

* imposing other reasonable restrictions on administrative access, such as by restricting access to specified IP addresses.

[http://ftc.gov/opa/2010/06/twitter.shtm]

Hey, we're interested in telecommuters. What's the best way to contact you?

looking forward to hit the $1M mark and be featured by you guys :)

minor, but I object to your "Non-funded startups typically don't have employees" statement. Or perhaps profitable startups don't qualify as startups anymore?

Maybe the examples aren't great, but it's a very nice tool, and certainly useful if used wisely.

Reminds me of The New York Times app on the iPad. When you changing the orientation, the content is reorganized to fit the available space.

Great work.

and unless you plan on working alone, you'll have to hire people. You can't hire people the same way you talk yourself into entrepreneurship. They're not going to be co-founders, they won't have a great upside, they're going to be paid a salary to do a job for you. Figuring out how to hire the right people is probably harder than anything else I've done.

A real case illustrating what Jerf helpfully explained to me just 45 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1154379

You're indeed correct, both on the technical issue, and the more general question of exploit demonstrations being the best way to understand vulnerability issues. Thanks for the detailed explanation.

For it to be a XSS, the javascript has to run in a different context (someone else browser). I'd say the issue you found is worrisome, but not in itself a vulnerability.

Good showcase. Are you paying for the SMS out of pocket? FYI Couldn't check https adress.

Very true. We show our uptime report to our customers. That in itself is probably worth more that what we're paying Pingdom.

You probably underestimate the added-value that (most) webapps provide over open-source tools or the code-it-yourself approach.

We pay for Pingdom's service because:

* our time is precious, we'd rather not do it ourselves.

* we don't want to be monitoring our monitoring tools to make sure their work.

* they provide a lot more features (reporting, API), which we actually need and use.

It's not a zero-sum game. If they do well, it doesn't mean at all that you're going to fail.

With a large team and large funding, your competitor has set for itself a very high bar for success.

You, on the other hand, can declare victory by building something (some) people want (TM), even if it's not making you a lot of money (assuming you have other source of income).

It's a non-profit. They're not interested in maximizing revenues.

While I find junk mail material sometime entertaining, I can't help to think that it's designed to sell to a certain category of people. Especially long copy. It's often for questionable products, dubious benefits or almost scams. And while I don't doubt it works for them, I'm not sure at all it would work for my target demographic.

I think a good version of 'long copy' is something like this: http://highrisehq.com where a lot of info is packed on a single page, and it's very far from "junk mail" copy.

Looks good. I wanted to try it but I couldn't complete the sign-up process.

First I couldn't see the sign-up form because the vimeo video overlaps it. Then the tool I use to generate password (supergenpass) wasn't visible (presumably because of the lightbox effect). Finally, once I signed up I was redirected to a page not found error. Guessing here it doesn't like email addresses as username...

I think you missed the part of the footer where it says to not print the email and save a tree...

oh, and free plan says '1 user', but I can still invite coworkers, so what's the '5 user' plan for?

Just took it for a ride with a coworker.

One thing we noticed quickly is that we can't see each others highlights.

Also when we were done, being able to see a quick diff of the change would been nice (but perhaps it's in the 'save as' options?). We had to end our chat with 'so, what did we change again?'.

another misc. suggestion: resizable chat window.

Beside that, looks pretty solid. Congrats!

I'd venture to guess that you are already better than most CS graduates. I'd rather hire someone like you, who has hobbies and interests that directly reinforce his job skills, than a a straight A student that thinks programming is just a job.

Whatever remains for you to learn, you'll get it from experience and interactions with other developers, not by sitting on the fence.

"neutrality" is a charged word. To claim neutrality you would have to agree that there are legitimate claims on both sides of a controversy. I wouldn't blame RC for taking a stance if they believe their point of view to be correct. Did they ever claim to be 'neutral'?

[edit: to be clear, I never visited RC before, I don't know how they cover or are supposed to cover the debate over climate change]

I understood the part in brackets as being an editor comment, not part of the actual email.

The quote is: "Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [RealClimate.org - A supposed neutral climate change website] Rein any way you think would be helpful.".

HTML 4.01 Transitional DOCTYPE: Perfectly fine, use STRICT for l33t designz bonus points.

<table> (For layout): ok, we heard that one before.

<td>: that could be handy if you like your table to have cells.

<tr>: same, very useful for tables that need rows.

<IFRAME>: sometime useful, that's why you may want to stick to transitional doctypes.

<frame>: see frameset.

<frameset>: ok, don't use that. It's bad UI/UX.

<hr>: fine to use, but hard to style with css.

<br>: line breaks are fine too, just don't confuse them for paragraph breaks.

<font face=”Arial” size=”1″>: yeah, dont' use that, use CSS.

<bold>: use <strong>.

<strong>: use it, it's good semantic (strong emphasis).

<center>: ok, don't use it. Use CSS for presentation.

<map name="Map">: yeah, rarely useful and bad for accessibily/SEO.

<area>: see map.

<b>: use <strong> instead.

I noticed that when I use the expression "the ball is in their hand", I don't really care about the outcome. I'm just happy I don't have to deal with it right now.

It's funny how accurate the expression is, now that I think about it. Handing over the ball is a sure way to prevent you from scoring.

What's obvious to the people who downvoted you is that the YC program is about much more than $5k. http://www.ycombinator.com/about.html