Yes but don't forget the other part of his sentence : That's assuming you know the dictionary, of course.
752 karma · joined May 8, 2011
There's a huge difference between not trying to raise and not succeeding. If on these 12 startups only one really tried to raise funding and failed it really shows a different situation doesn't it? Of course if some startups do not raise because they already think they'd fail it's also another point and it would be nice to have more details on this point!
But it so reminds me of the programs you had to install at the end of the 90s to have ads displayed and you were supposed to be payed if you watched enough/clicked on enough, etc. So this kind of payment by watching ad seems "unreal" for me. Would advertisers really pay you money to fake watch ads? Cause in the end why would I stay watching the ad on my iphone if the only reason I get paid is too "launch" the ad or click on it?
Another strange point for me is the name. Goggle is typically a word you enter wrong when trying to go on google. So adgoggle really seem like you're trying to capture people searching for google ad. Am I paranoid here?
http://hackerjobs.co.uk/ It was recently launched, you'll find some posts they made here on HN.
http://www.theitjobboard.co.uk/ I've found some interesting job openings here.
You should also check the monthly post "Who's Hiring" here on HN they have some openings in London. I think I've seen at least one each month.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323597 August version
EDIT : I've kept a list of companies that I was interested in and had openings in may/june, would you be interested to have it?
EDIT2: Added link to august discussion "Who's Hiring"
Right now I've moved so I made a list of all my books in a small spreadsheet but it's not enough!
An interesting link about this : http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2011/12/22/patenting-board-games-1...
Also the paragraph about Monopoly on its Wikipedia page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Monop...
This seem to indicate that a board game can be patented not only on its design or its name but also on its rules. So this seem to show that you cannot decide to take your favourite board game, "digitalize" it and just change the name and be of the hook.
The same seem to apply to Games on TV where channels pay rights to make their own version of the game in another country for example/
You should also add an "other" option with an input field to allow developers to indicate technologies you did not put in your list especially when dealing with IDE or frameworks.
Sometimes a startup reach its peak and feels its the right moment to make a change. An acquihire can also lead to that.
You can search about the Sparrow acquisition (a lot has been written here about it). Another example that comes to mind for me is Google acquiring Wildfire and the team reaction when they learnt it : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ARPB7b0kIg
I'm guessing that most acquihires deal have a clause preventing you from leaving the company ASAP. Or at least an incentive to make you stay with the company (shares, yearly bonus, etc.). I don't think google will buy a company XM$ and see them leave right after.
Another point is that the acquiring is not "hostile". This is a deal between the startup/team being acquired and the large company so they weighed their options and chose to accept the offer - i.e. they want to work for the big company or are interested in the project they are being offered.
There is a lot of threads here on HN describing that talent is hard to find in technology and it's understandable to acquire a team that already work well together and produced something concrete.
One last thing was a comment by pg here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366621 saying that "The article doesn't mention one of the most important reasons companies do HR acquisitions: competition forces them to. If company A offers to acquire a startup and company B merely offers to hire the founders, all other things being equal the founders will take company A's offer."
Same for the media/influencer do they really use daily their work email to test applications/websites? When I was testing applications/sites most of the time I used a throwable emails first to check without fearing to be spammed later on my work email. But I'm not the target so maybe it makes sense for them?
Can we provide specific names you don't have to improve the list for everyone ?
They start by explaining also that they raised money specifically to focus on rebuilding the website and improving the mobile experience. That won't happen overnight though.
You might consider posting your site with a different title, like a "Show HN : launching a new brand of t-shirts targetting programmers" or an equivalent? Because the current title seems to ask advice on how to go viral and a lot of people might not even know your project exists even if they would like it!
About your page getting viral the problem, for me, if that the project doesn't exist. I will not recommend something that don't exist/I haven't tried first, except if I'm sure it will work/happen. If you have a real store I will definitely forward it to most of my friends that would wear this and/or like to buy this for me (like I just did with my gf who likes to buy me this kind of shirts).
For fake account you really should reconsider it. I don't think it's that easy to detect in the end (except for people trying to earn 1M$ of course), but it seems pretty easy to game the systems for 100/200$. And I don't think that tying the 1$ reward to a real order is a stopping point in the end.
For the email part, I don't know if it's a big selling point, at least not as the first description, but it could be nice to have a small description of you and your wife like on the right or an "about us" or "Meet the team" (a lot of current YC startups use this with their launchrock page). The thing is that, for me, the signup confirmation email is a bit too long.
I can understand that a launchrock page is really easier to easily garner emails and have an idea of how many people could be interested. The site/idea would juste seem more real if it was not just a launchrock page.
I like the idea to apply to kickstarter. But part of me thinks that most of the costs link to your project would be handle upfront by your customers, no? If you provide links to 5 t-shirts designs and offer a pre-order option you can ensure you have enough orders before starting producing and then don't have to spend a lot of money before being sure you'd sell anything.
The problem is that you seem to target a specific kind of people that might think like me and not immediately provide a referral link on the FB/twitter/whatever profile to have as many people as possible to signup for.
Anyway, I love the idea, this kind of shirts are 90% of my current clothes so I'll signup for it right away.
What prevents you from trying with ONE design first and see how it goes? Maybe rely on another t-shirt design shirt for your first go? In France http://www.lafraise.com/ is pretty well-known or websites like teefury.com could be a good start!
How will you handle fake accounts and people trying to game your system? Most of the time, the 1$ incentive is tied to "someone signing up AND ordering something on the site" first, no?
EDIT: Some additions, the email you send right after signup is nice but I think the first part should be on your website! It describes clearly who you are, why you're doing this project and also why your design would really be better, it would be great along with your examples.
EDIT2: Why not have part of the website already done? I have to "pretend" I sign up in the launchrock page to know wether anyone used my referral link? Why not have a "normal" login system and a detailed page where I can see who accepted the referral link? To avoid spending too much time on the websites first you could use something like www.dailycred.com to handle signups properly (this was shown on HN a few weeks ago).
Could you elaborate on why you chose PDO over MySQLi to interact with MySQL? Especially with all the "specific things to do for it to work properly" at the end of the section?
The email address validation is also a great section, everyone tries to rewrite its own and fails or forgets to handle cases (such as '+' in first part). I think it would be great to show other filters examples instead of providing a link to the documentation, like how to sanitize a username entry for example?
Another interesting section would be how to handle errors properly, like the use of trigger_error(), set_error_handler() or exceptions. Seems that a lot of people are also doing their own logging/debugging/reporting system not knowing where to start?
* You can find an explanation from pg here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704
* There was a post discussing rankings in reddit/delicious/HN here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=234749
* There are other posts discussing specifically the HN algorithm with answers from PG : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
* And you can use the tool HNPickup to tell you if it's a good time to post or not : http://hnpickup.appspot.com/
One other concern : If someone buys a book, you digitalize it and destroy it in the process. Now if someone else order the same book a week later, do you digitalize it again or do you detect it's already been digitalized before and send the previous version. The latter seems more efficient (but maybe not legal?) but the former kind of allow you to keep/resell the version bought previously (which must not be legal from what I understood on your FAQ?).
From you signup process, it seems like you only plan to develop these functionalities. Is it demo-ready yet? Or are these only mockups to ensure which functionality really matters to the users?
EDIT: minor correction, I think visualize is written with a Z but I'm not an english native-speaker so I could be wrong.