jsherry

I'm not even sure he was looking for sympathy. There's very little 'woe is me' in this story. I read it as a cautionary tale more than anything.

This piece very easily could have been titled "Whistling Into a Tap Recorder" and had sent the same message (and a worthy message at that). After all, neither New York not the East Coast are mentioned until 90% through the article. But then again that title likely wouldn't have gotten as many upvotes on HN b/c apparently everybody likes a rivalry.

New Yorkers who play any serious role in the tech startup scene - whether it be as company, investor or advisor - know what Quora is. Please don't let this shallow piece of reporting steer you into believing otherwise.

From your profile ;-)

"Curiously, I'm always looking for a way to slay pain points, get more done with less effort for everyone, and build great experiences."

Read from an article on CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/19/tech/us-spacex/index.html):

"This is not a failure," Shotwell (SpaceEx President) told reporters. "We aborted with purpose. It would have been a failure if we lifted off with an engine trending in this direction."

Perhaps that's PR spin, but I think that it comes from a very responsible position. Well said.

"I find the (algorithmically-applied) importance marker completely useless and would remove it if I could, but I use the stars quite heavily."

You can remove the importance markers: Settings > Inbox tab > Importance Markers.

I guess if they are tracking 80% of tickets resold (and make the assumption that this 80% is accurate), you can back into the numbers pretty easily.

For example, the table for the Springsteen concert shows that 1540 tickets were resold. Let's assume this was 80% of everything resold, which grosses the total number of tickets resold for this even up to 1925 tickets. Now let's assume that the venue holds 20,000 people (this data is easily attainable - I'm just using 20k for illustration). That means that the other 18,075 tickets were purchased for face (another data point that is easily - albeit tediously - attainable).

So really the data is all there - the big assumption that this all hinges on is that the site tracks 80% of all tickets resold.

"While it’s difficult domain to penetrate"

I'm deeply sorry, but couldn't resist...

Mind mentioning some of the "many companies" that USV invests in that "profit from invading privacy"? Perhaps you're right, but that's a serious accusation without some backup. Aside from Zynga who has definitely had their fair share of well deserved criticism in the past (but has since cleaned up their act), what are the others?

New York, NY

CB Insights is a National Science Foundation-backed company using publicly available data sources to assess the health of private companies: http://www.cbinsights.com/ http://www.cbinsights.com/mosaic/

We are seeking a software engineer who is proficient in PHP and MySQL, and has an overall passion for big data. Pluses include experience plugging data in JS-based charting libraries (such as amCharts), building APIs and integrating third-party APIs.

We've already hired 4 engineers in 2012, so we're growing aggressively. If this sounds like you we'd love to hear from, so please shoot us a resume and a note expressing your interest to career@cbinsights.com.

"In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month."

'Plunging' people into 14 hours of darkness per day? Does this sound like a scientifically sound way to determine the natural sleeping patterns of humans?

This reminds me a bit of a 2010 post written by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame re: his visions of a "Facebook Killer": http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/facebook_killer/

Basically a place where you can specify your future wants/plans as opposed to something that simply logs your past (i.e. current day Facebook).

"They go hiking rather than clubbing, look with a hint of impatience at their less social-media-savvy elders, are picky about their sushi and unhappy with iceberg lettuce."

There is nothing necessarily wrong or untrue about this statement, but it's definitely an unflattering generalization that made me chuckle during my lunchtime HN binge.

Cuil immediately came to mind after reading this: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/technology/28cool.html

The irony is that if SOPA passes, Rep. Steve King's experience "surfing the internet" to "kill time" would likely be significantly less interesting with less content available to view/read.

The NYC v. SF/SV debate might be a headline grabber, but frankly there's no data supporting the fact that NYC is catching up tp the west coast. A more interesting discussion can be found when comparing NY to Mass when it comes to tech:

http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/new-york-vent...

We haven't published the updated figures through Q3, but the trend continues: NY is consistently outpacing Mass in venture tech investment and has been dating back to 2010. We don't publish a similar comaprison of NYC vs. SF/SV for obvious reasons: it's not very interesting. But NYC has made recognizable strides in building a tech ecosystem over the past couple years nonetheless.

Dude a cannonball was fired within clear sight of a residential neighborhood. Regardless of what you thought of the news reporting quality, it's pretty indefensible, negligent behavior.

Question for those who've used this, how does it handle really long receipts that don't fit in one picture?

I'm not here to promote the idea of children under 2 should watch TV, but statements like this largely invalidate studies such as this:

"The pediatrics group’s guidelines point out that research to date suggests a “correlation between television viewing and developmental problems, but they cannot show causality.”"

If you're going to back up sensitive information, I'd recommend spending a few extra bucks and using somebody reputable and established like Dropbox or SugarSync.

As all the comments here have covered, it's a reseller account for LiveDrive and the site itself has a number of issues, not the least of which includes sending plain text passwords via email.

Bottom line: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is...

If he titled the article "I got screwed by a guy named Ted", it might have been suggestive of something different.

I'm still confused at how the down-vote is supposed to be used. This person is getting down-voted for posting an opinion that people here disagree with. But it's a constructive opinion that has generated 5 constructive responses, which in turn has become a discussion. No reason for a down-vote here.

This paragraph encapsulates it pretty nicely:

"In the financial press you're called a "rogue trader" if you're some overperspired 28 year-old newbie who bypasses internal audits and quality control to make a disastrous trade that could sink the company. But if you're a well-groomed 60 year-old CEO who uses his authority to ignore quality control and internal audits in order to make disastrous trades that could sink the company, you get a bailout, a bonus, and heroic treatment in an Andrew Ross Sorkin book."

Mailchimp.

I'm sure that Starz gets it: the future of content is streaming. Everybody gets it. And it's frustrating that we don't have everything streaming today b/c the technology is there and has been there for some time. But the bottom line is that cable is still alive and well today, and the margins are much better there than what Netflix is offering.

Pirating is not the burning platform here like it was for music. Netflix is not iTunes. Content providers still have the option to make plenty of money through cable and they're going to do just that until that medium becomes completely disrupted and they no longer have that as a lucrative channel. Starz sees Netflix streaming as cannibalizing their cable business, and to a reasonably large extent they're probably right b/c Netflix streaming has gone mainstream. The day will come when cable will no longer support Starz (and others') content and they know it's coming. Until then, sad to say but this is just smart business.

That wasn't a Eulogy.

Most of the author's points have some merit. However, just to balance the argument out a bit, here are a few truths of the MBA:

1. If you want to become a Goldman (or similar caliber) I-banker or work at a top flight consulting firm, a top MBA is the way to go.

Yes there are other ways to get these jobs, but the recruiting processes for these firms are highly targeted and organized when it comes to hiring people from prestigious MBA programs. It truly is the path of least resistance. And if you truly set your mind to becoming employed by one of these firms, you can likely attain it once admitted to a top business school. We can argue the merits of joining one of these companies, but that's another argument entirely.

2. If you go work at said type of firm, your employment options thereafter are wide open.

I don't have statistics to back this up, but having worked in corporate for a healthy portion of my career, Goldman and McKinsey candidates were often ear-marked for positions that they applied for.

3. The MBA is good for "career changers".

Assuming you want to go the corporate route, an MBA is a very versatile degree. If from a top school, it practically forgives whatever you were doing before the MBA and enables you to transition into something largely unrelated if that's your wish. You need to do a whole lot of networking and build your story to make this happen, but with two years to do so, there's plenty of time. And the fact of the matter is that, regardless of how you regard MBAS, plenty of highly regarded corporates (including Google!) formally plug into the recruiting process at top schools.

EDIT: I understand many of the arguments above may not apply to the HN community as it skews entrepreneurial and perhaps academic, but I believe they have merit nonetheless.

"Yeah but Einstein wasn't just great according to a number of subjective measures, he was brilliant by just about any objective measure."

- Me

One more point to add to the "pro" column for starting a company in a down economy: your opportunity cost is typically lower. Fewer promotions and larger numbers of layoffs occur in large companies during the bad times.

"My period of greatest creative output was during my corporate years, when every meeting felt like a play date with coma patients."

Love that line.