35 karma · joined December 8, 2010
co-founder of rough-sea.com
I'll add the "sound of html" there, now that you mentioned it!
http://lazerbahn.com/soundof.html?url=https://news.ycombinat...
It has been said before: not Flash is the devil. It's people who program but who have no clue how it's done. They have destroyed the reputation of a not-too-bad platform.
The problem I see is that it makes people easier to frame if 'soft evidence' suddenly becomes 'hard facts'.
Here is a highly constructed unlikely case as an illustration: Suppose, someone sneaks into someone else's house. He performs a few searches on fundamental religious topics and bomb building and plants some large quantities of questionable substances in the garage. Then the intruder tips off the police anonymously. How do you think the home owner will get out of this?
I don't know. I'd be at least a little bit worried.
Worst of all: 45 gardeners and no garden? Brilliant! I'd really like to hear their explanation of how these people ended up on their pay-roll. Maybe they all made offers the hospital could not refuse?
Well, talk to them. Just don't do something you don't feel like doing. If you want to open-source your stuff do it. Put it under a business-friendly license and there should be no worries.
I guess, they just saw a lot of potential in your abilities. They're probably interested in powering up their work force a bit.
If you get a bad feeling about what they propose: don't do it. And don't make any decisions on right the spot. Don't let the pressure get to you.
If you should bring people or not depends on what kind of meeting it really is and what they want. Can you find out more about them? Well, they are talking about collaborating, so I'm fairly sure you don't need to bring a lawyer IMHO. I'd go alone.
Amazon has hardly changed. Wow, it already looked great back then!
And Apple ... um ... really has gone a long way in design since then. Phew, that Apple page was ugly!
There are other things to consider. If you spell out your domain name over the phone, a not-so-techie person might not know what to do when you say 'hyphen' (as in spell it out or use "-").
Besides, since the word 'hyphen' is usually only used when you spell out the domain (it's not actually part of the company name) people will probably forget about it.
If I should ever do a start-up again, I'll go for boot-strapped as well. If people give you big wads of money they often try to influence your business too much ... sometimes even beyond recognition. Aw... ugly memories.
Unfortunately, I seem to have terrible latency problems in Chrome and Firefox. I also do not really understand how the keys are mapped to the notes as there seem to be strange gaps. I would have expected a setup as you can find it in most trackers.
Well, great experiment. I would not yet use it for live performance, though.
-> This leads to a situation where you see customers asking questions in a forum and you (as a developer) are not allowed to answer because this is what the investor's support team is supposed to do. Thus, answering will be slow and of low quality. This builds a bad reputation. I will never do that again.
I have questioned my being a software developer also in the past. I seriously thought about going back to university to become a teacher. I decided against it. Mostly because of the financial losses this would have caused and because I just try to find outlets for my desire to teach in my current job as well as spare time.
It's usually a shame if you basically throw away 4.5 years of working experience to do something completely different. Unless you really hate what you are doing, I'd recommend trying to slightly steer you career into the direction you want to explore. Drastic changes often come with high losses.
In the end, it boils down to "an idea isn't much worth. It's the execution that matters." Just try to be quick.
One thing that we did was, we gave all the people who started our company a small share. With this, everyone involved in the early stages had a good reason to keep quiet about our prototype. Worked for us. May not be the best for every start-up though. Especially if you want to hire people abroad.
I just had that. No fun! Right now I am going back to a regular day job. And I'm actually looking forward to it.
I'm still going to work on new projects ... but I'll do that in my spare-time also.
Besides, I like you attitude. Making stuff work for everyone is a great and noble goal! Unfortunately, that's only worth your time if your goal is to learn, not to earn money.
IMHO there are only two possibilities:
(a) It's the css-font-definition-stuff they're doing (b) google analytics script is causing the problem
Actually, I do think it's google.
Too bad, people should check their websites on mobile devices, too, before release. I believe I am not the only one who enjoys his/her daily dose of hacker news from a mobile device reclining on a couch. :-)
Yet, I derived motivation and pleasure from the technical challenges and the creative atmosphere created by the crazy geeks I have the privilege to work with. Besides, the rather short development cycles with hardly any maintaining after release make for fun projects: Code and forget.
Something else to consider: If you don't like their product, you may be able to help them to turn the product into something you can enjoy as well, and with this they may be able to open up to new audiences. Sometimes, the naysayers can actually be useful, or so I like to believe.
I simply keep checking that folder once in a while to see if I received what I ordered.