nbashaw

Again, I am not an expert on Thorium but it's my understanding that the health and safety risks involved are much lower than traditional nuclear plants.

I disagree with your argument that email lags behind web design due to pack of effort. Have you ever tried to code a HTML email like you would code a website and looked at the result in email clients? Do this once and you'll see what I mean.

Email clients are definitely to blame.

Whoops! Thanks for catching that

I was hoping for more analysis of the game mechanics, rather than the UI.

I love how letterpress is really a territory game disguised as a word game. Instead of rolling a dice like you do in Risk, you find words to form your attacks. Rather than trying to pick up words with obscure letters, or lengthy words, you try to capture strategic tiles and expand your controlled area. Once you cover a large area of dark blue tiles, you choke out your opponent's ability to score points, and the game slowly snowballs further in your favor. It's really fascinating.

I was there, and he used much of the same slides and material from this talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-LBSqm3xh4

I was there and nothing was said that was very controversial

Or a modified version of the follow model would be interesting.

Not everyone knows (or wants to learn) HTML & CSS. I can see this service being valuable for those people

Looks cool! As a designer, i must say you have kind of a lot going on and it's a bit unclear to me what to look at first. Maybe simplifying your front page a bit would help?

My response: http://nbashaw.com/post/28654441223/consumer-internet-isnt-d...

In a nutshell, I think there's still a lot of value in creating web and mobile apps for consumers, it's just that there's been a glut in the market, especially for mobile. Too many apps that aren't very differentiated.

In the long run I still think consumer is a good play, though.

Reminds me of http://olark.com/targeting

Nathan from Olark here - make sure you give us the full URL (e.g., "http://clientname.app.com/settings). That should fix your issue.

The second rule you wanted to use probably can't happen just yet, but we'll look into adding it!

The third rule you can do if you use our Javascript API: www.olark.com/developer

Thanks for the feedback, and you can always email us at support@olark.com if you have any other questions!

That'd be my fault :(

Fix is forthcoming - thanks for reporting

Good question! We already had a feature called "greeter" that was on par with snapengage's proactive chat. Targeting is something bigger.

Targeted chat lets you take a variety of actions other than just automatically starting conversations (label visitor, hide chatbox, show chatbox, route to operator/group) based on a wider variety of conditions about the user (too many to list here).

Take it for a spin and let me know if you have any more questions! Always happy to help.

"Once" isn't a news story. It's something you already know but need to be reminded of from time to time. Giving it a functionally descriptive title would spoil the effect.

Word. I should make that a footnote. You're totally right.

It ok - user acquisition is tough! It takes a lot of work, and submitting your link to Hacker News is not really work.

I'd start out by doing some user testing. Have people look at your site and tell you what they think. Then maybe a bit of usability testing - tell people to perform actions (like signing up or adding a product to their list) and see where they get stuck. This is called funnel optimization.

Then you can focus on finding channels - ways people discover you. You'll probably want to spend some money on google adwords, but definitely also try to get some press through traditional media and blogs.

You haven't failed - you just started!

That law doesn't mean you can invest in any privately held company. True, there is a lower bar to entry, but the startups need a reason to want you to invest in them.

Congrats to Doingtonight! Big fan of your app

It's a gradient transition. Being employee #10,000 is different from being employee #100 is different from being employee #1.

Starting a startup is not equally risky for everyone. Some people have their own safety net (family, saved up money, etc) while others don't, making it too big of a risk to start a company.

Most entrepreneurs I know didn't take any crazy risks. They knew they'd be ok if their startup failed. Many people don't have that luxury.

I've been volunteering once a week at a local school teaching 6th graders how to code, and it's really amazing how quickly many of them pick it up. Even small things like learning to mix blue and red to make purple using rgb(255,0,255) is utterly fascinating to them.

I asked one of the kids how he would like it if they taught programming as a subject in school. His eyes just lit up and said "that would be awesome".

It's also fun talking to kids about startups - the fact that you can use code to solve problems for people and start a business. They're usually more interested in building a fun game but still, you can see some flickers of awareness lighting up. A lot of these kids are selling candy to each other at school anyway, so they're pretty entrepreneurial by nature.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying that teaching kids to code is one of the most rewarding and challenging things you can do, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone on the fence.

I'm surprised Marco didn't mention the most empirically effective alternative - make our own legislative investments. Where is the tech industry lobbying firm? Are the industry leaders like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook pumping money into it?

Obviously this is a short term solution that ends up making the root problem - money's influence in politics - worse. But sometimes you have to pick between the lesser of two evils. I'd rather have a good set of laws brought about by an unfair process than a bad set of laws brought on because we sat around complaining about how unfair the system is.

It may be normal now, but it won't be for long. Sunir said it better than I could: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3471464

The point is not that his product is better, it's that his method of ensuring customer privacy is better and should be industry standard.

When I watched the documentary the only thing I could think about was how similar Shockley and Steve Jobs's personalities seemed, except things worked out all wrong for Shockley because he pushed his people over the brink to quit.

That's the whole point I was trying to make here.

Not sure what you mean - can you explain?

Why does this guy keep getting upvoted on HN?

I've had the opposite experience.

I started messing around in photoshop making paintings of websites and dreaming up ideas in high school. In college, I convinced a programmer to help me build one of my ideas, and he agreed on the condition that I had to code the front end HTML and CSS. So I learned how to do that and surprisingly enjoyed it.

Then I realized I could quit my job making websites for people, so I got even better at building and deploying static sites.

I started going to meetups and built more side projects and sites with friends and started to get more comfortable with Rails, JavaScript, Git, etc.

After college, I went to work for Olark (YC 09) and realized that I could be far more useful if I knew how to program. So I've been working hard to get better at the various languages and frameworks that comprise our stack. And I'm well on my way to becoming a desingineer.

Here's a better article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/world/middleeast/panetta-i...