hsuresh

There should be another option - full stack development. I am quite sure that many developers love working on entire application stacks.

This has been one of my favorite questions when interviewing candidates for jobs. The beauty of this question is that you can branch out and go deep into any of the several technologies that power the web - "how does the browser know it has to contact your server" or "how does your browser know how to display content" is a great filter for good devs. Best part about this question - it can be quite educative even for bad candidates.

Great game! Found a bug though. When the game is over, if you hit the browser back button, it will let you continue the game.

Another way of looking at what reddit did, is to think of them as hacking a way to provide value to the initial users. Faking doesn't necessarily have to be about lying, it can be used to provide value, even though the system is designed to work well only when there is a significant userbase.

I would't like if a startup fakes. They'd lose my credibility. However, some of the examples seem reasonable - like the case of reddit. It is more about providing value to the early adopters - clearly reddit needed more users to contribute, so no harm in creating fake users to seed the content. The example of PayPal seems bad - i am not sure if PayPal was a paid service for merchants back then, but if it was, they were just being evil.

That is the beauty of services that are easy to sell. Everything is fairly clear, it is "just" a matter of execution at scale - i know i am oversimplifying the execution bit, but most startups have trouble figuring out the product-market fit, and even if they do, often have markets that are small.

Where did you buy the laptop from? Have you tried reaching out to them. Alternately, bigger cities have authorized service centers, that is likely your best bet.

Absolutely. Pitch is a place holder for your understanding about the business you are building - the market, your team, product and your growth strategy. Just like a resume is a placeholder for your skills and experience.

Most of the case studies around A/B testing is very misleading. The value you get from testing color schemes is likely to be insignificant - unless you have a really horrible color scheme as one of the options or you have traffic comparable to Googles and Facebooks of the world.

A/B testing is overrated, imho. We have blogged about it here -> http://blog.nudgespot.com/2013/06/time-to-rethink-ab-testing.... Customers are lot more intelligent about their purchase decisions than what these blogs like us to believe.

That does not mean you shouldn't test. You definitely need to test and learn from your customers. There are other better ways of doing it, than just A/B testing as is often advocated.

I usually use an analogy to explain this. Tracking via first party cookies is like walking into a store that uses security cameras. I have even seen boards that inform the visitors that the store is under surveillance. Generally, the security camera is only monitored/used by the folks running the store.

Third party cookies are like as if the security camera is monitored and used by a random third party company who you are not even aware of. This is why it is bad.

Perhaps we should have a standard badge/button to indicate first party and third party tracking - something like https://www.safetysignsupplies.co.uk/images/product_imgs/ful... for first party cookies and a more "evil" version for third party cookies.

For those interested in this topic, Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, fast and slow" is an excellent resource. He refers to 2 systems in our brain, and how they interplay when making everyday decisions. Fascinating read.

Such a crass generalization. If you think the bulk of India's IT professionals are bad - then you should at least consider if such poor skills are "good enough" for a vast majority of IT work.

I don't even think this is sustainable. The customers that are acquired this way are likely to abandon very soon.

A lot of the techniques pointed out seem like plain spamming. Why/how does that count for growth hacking?

This is true not just at "building an MVP" stage. At my current startup, we are focusing on traction, across different channels/verticals. We have found it quite useful to test and learn about these channels by running experiments.

This has been fairly common knowledge, at least here in India, where mosquito menace is common. Another really popular product is what is known as mosquito bats (swatters) like here: http://www.hunterbat.com/mosquito-swatters.html#rechargeable...

It is sad that even though FB, Twitter and numerous other services have popped up to facilitate new ways of communicating with people, none of them are part of any (widely accepted?) standards. Could emails have survived so long if it were just a service offered by a corporation?

We, the developer community should probably focus more time on standards based tools, than Twitter/FB/Google Apis - all we are doing is just help them gain more traction.

There is another important reason why you, as a US citizen should be worried about spying on non-US citizens. Now that everyone knows about this, other countries are probably going down the same route - in fact, it looks like some already are, and this is going to be net loss for everyone - both US citizens and everyone else.

Also, animated gifs of some regions over time -> https://plus.google.com/photos/+GoogleEarth/albums/587582297...

And there lies a startup's life - figuring out what the demand is, and demonstrating feasibility/traction.

Thanks, fixed now. Clickable link:

http://www.nudgespot.com/instoreads

Thank you. I will. Let me try to rephrase the text a bit.

Hi HN, Would love to know what you guys think about this.

This is not evident from your demo. Can you include the tooltips to show up by default in your demo page? I am guessing most people would first want to see how the tooltips come up, before they get interested in editing/authoring them.

There are at least 2 types of people that are looking for jobs: One that is actively looking and second, passively. Most of the job search is addressed at the former. I'd pick the second type of folks - there are no specific channels for this section.

The way i'd go about it is this:

   - build a site that lets people log in via LinkedIn or upload a resume

   - the service then sends a monthly email with top 5 opportunities. 

Opportunities shouldn't just be keyword matched - it should sell those jobs - maybe they offer a better position, better perks or even a new city).

If you build this, keep me posted :)

Also, TC (and others) have a huge following from startup community. For early stage companies, funding and hiring have big impact, perhaps next only to customer acquisition (and that is usually not shared). So i wonder if they are only serving their big target segment well by reporting on these.

I am surprised that it costs lesser than India's unmanned moon mission (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1).

If ISRO can pull it off for under $100 million, that would be quite an achievement. Given the recent commercial interests in space, there might even be an opportunity to become financially independent by offering services for others.

Direct link to the library: http://derbyjs.com/

Ironic that i come to know about this framework via Techcrunch.

They forgot one item in the list of things they make fun of: "Create a landing page and collect emails without telling why/what they are signing up for, because it will be awesome".

Well, keep in mind that India was fairly rich till before the colonisation. From wikipedia[1], according to the Indian Prime Minister:

"There is no doubt that our grievances against the British Empire had a sound basis. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India#section_2