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necrecious

311 karma · joined February 14, 2010

Game programmer turned general tech startup founder
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necrecious··on Sometimes the product innovation is the distribution
Can you expand and maybe give an example of what you are saying?
necrecious··on Zynga to Lay Off 520 Employees and shutter NY and LA Offices
I think it can be triggered automatically when a major shift happens in a stock. I remember a few of these back in the 2000s when things were crashing left and right.
necrecious··on Why Startup Founders are Always Unhappy
Is there any poll that show that this founder unhappiness is real?

Are founders less happy than population as a whole? Or is it that we expect founders of successful companies to be happy?

necrecious··on Apple’s in-app purchasing process circumvented by Russian hacker
This has been out in the wild for a while now. I first noticed it when I added IAP to my application.

My app will call on our server to verify receipt and I was getting bogus receipts that actually caused that part of the code to crash.

Apple's receipts are proper json objects and what I was getting was this string "com.urus.iap.30297356." The last part keeps changing, so I am guessing the developer actually tracks usage.

So the moral is to always verify your receipts and don't deliver content unless the receipt is valid.

But most developers won't have resources to do this and creating a general service for them would be too much custom work. I think SDK platforms should have this capability built in. Pay $10/mo and we'll verify your receipt and return a file based on the IAP product id.

necrecious··on Ubuntu for Android
Can you clarify the phrasing of your cloud issues? Do you mean there is no solution for trust/privacy issues, or do you mean there is no solution for licensing?

As for paying, this is a non-issue, you are going to pay either way.

necrecious··on Why I Wish Google Circles Were Reversed
So essentially blog categories?

This feature is only useful for a very minor audience. Most people don't create a lot of content, and won't bother tagging their short tweet/status.

Power users who do write a lot should already have blogs like the one the author is using.

necrecious··on Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
for vested shares. I am assuming most will not have all their shares vested yet.
necrecious··on Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
They probably have to wait a bit before selling their shares. So you won't see an exodus until probably a year or two down the road.
necrecious··on Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
I would assume for the benefit of the last round of investors and employees.
necrecious··on My project, updated: Trending Tech News. Feedback appreciated
It looks like you are doing a simple frequency analysis to determine words for titles. In some cases it works, in others it reduces to just brand names. The Linux tab is filled with "Linux" for example.

Perhaps you need a learning filter that catches words that are too common and filters them out.

necrecious··on 12 Companies Hiring Developers in Boston
I am looking for a first technical hire for a bootstrapped startup with thousands of paying subscribers.

http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/jobs/

necrecious··on Lodsys Responds to Apple, Files Lawsuits Against App Developers
WBC style trolls are those who abuse the legal system for personal gain, by legal but not necessarily moral means.

Patent trolls are exactly in this mold, the question is if there is a way to make money off of them?

Any system will have parasites. You can change system, i.e. patent reform, or introduce a predator for the parasite.

necrecious··on Lodsys Responds to Apple, Files Lawsuits Against App Developers
Wonder if there is a way to get WBC style trolls to go up against patent trolls.
necrecious··on Meet the 20-Year Old CEO Redefining Mobile Advertising
Man, way to cheapen your emotional experience. I was never a fan of achievement anyway, too often it cheapens the experience of playing the game.

Microsoft should just make achievement points a virtual currency that you can buy coupons with.

necrecious··on This Tech Bubble Is Different
The headline is terrible. The idea that much of the value generated in startups is by quants optimizing numbers is interesting.

The critique that web companies don't leave a technical legacy is not really valid. Most businesses don't leave a legacy.

necrecious··on Facebook Questions Goes Where Quora Can't
The question is, do you trust all your Facebook friends' tastes?

Perhaps I just want to ask a few people that I trust in <food/fashion/movies>.

Of course, the questions will be a great way for companies to get information about you.

necrecious··on What's so special about Y Combinator?
The last one had some great speakers. Really enjoyed Bob Metcalfe's talk.
necrecious··on On pivoting: how we're trying to deal with the unintended use of our product
Hey Jon, good to see you on HN. I guess that's one draw back on a descriptive name, it is much harder to change your branding.
necrecious··on It’s Easy to Be Great… It’s Hard to Be Consistent
I think the point of the article is that being productive outside of the madness is more important for success than what you do during it. 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.
necrecious··on Why Groupon Is No Ebay
Groupon and the like don't promote customer loyalty. They promote disloyalty. Why go back to the same restaurant when I can try another restaurant for 50% off?

Each vendor would have to evaluate with ROI with Groupon and no one really know how good or bad it is because it is likely to be kept secret. No one likes to be shown to be a sucker if it is bad, and no one will share if it is great.

necrecious··on The $100,000 Twitter hitcher: How Baydin got Dave McClure to invest
Too bad Baydin is moving to Cali. I learned a lot from the public pitch they did a few weeks ago at Capitalize. Guess the pitch was good practice for the west coast. :)

Wish these guys good luck in SV.

necrecious··on Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website (2004)
Haha, I logged into Slashdot for the first time in 4 years to check my Slashdot ID. I remember it seemed so high when I signed up. Now 100K users is par for the course for social websites.
necrecious··on How to Break the Trust of Your customers in Just One Day - Lessons Learned
The easiest way to make money is to ask for it directly from the people it benefits.

I suppose I could try selling user data or use advertising. Either require massive number of users and a lot of upfront time to get going.

necrecious··on How to Break the Trust of Your customers in Just One Day - Lessons Learned
I switched away from Freemium for my company yesterday. Should have done it a while back.

Free users are harder to support, more vocal and less likely to upgrade. Even a token amount of money initially is probably enough to discourage the "pathological" customers and the sunk costs mindset might encourage spending more money with your service.

necrecious··on How Twitter increased conversion rate to 29% by adding 1 extra step.
I was slightly confused by the graphic and though step 2 was the redesigned step 1. I thought it was clever to see what your friends are up to before you join.

Selecting hobbies and interests beforehand is good as well, since some people might not have social circles that use Twitter.

So I agree with the author in that if account creation was last, it would be the most interesting.

necrecious··on Ask HN:Who's Looking For a Cofounder? (October 2010 Edition)
Looking for a biz dev/marketing/sales co-founder in Boston or San Francisco.

Short term, I've got a profitable iPhone app that has over half a million downloads and will be working on converting free users to paid subscriptions.

Long term, I am looking to disrupt the Dell/HP model of selling physical computers by selling virtual computers.

Disrupt the web by freeing developers to use any technology to develop applications that can be accessed instantly.

Disrupt the social by making users control their own content and run services on their virtual computers to manage their social graph.

necrecious··on Ask HN: I have users, I have traction, How do I get paid?
You guys don't but the credit card companies does. Perhaps I am reading my statement wrong from my processor, but I got a lot more authorization charges than transaction charges.
necrecious··on Ask HN: I have users, I have traction, How do I get paid?
As most people have said, PayPal is incredibly easy to get started. I am still using their website payment standard which involves no coding to get started taking payments.

You'll need code later for doing IPN and customizing and encrypting the buttons. But it is definitely the lowest barrier to entry. It is also probably the cheapest option, at least when starting out.

I added Recurly for credit card payment for flexibility and credibility. The costs are much higher per paying user than PayPal. Each credit card authorization costs about 30cents, and if a customer input bad credit card info and you have dunning on, it can cost more than a dollar to have a nonpaying customer.

necrecious··on The Genius and Tragedy of Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
Self promotion is a tricky thing. In an ideal world, value should be recognized through the process of your work. Unfortunately, the transparency of your work is a multiplier in how people perceive your value.

That's why great coders aren't valued at 10x or 100x that studies say they should be from a productivity standpoint.

Self promotion is a further multiplier on your perceived value. Some people do it enough to counter act the transparency problem and some use it to mask their lack of intrinsic value.

TL,DR: Perceived value = Intrinsic value * transparency of process * self promotion

So self promotion isn't bad in and of itself.

necrecious··on New EC2 Features: Tagging, Idempotency, Filtering, Bring Your Own Keys
Idempotency and tagging are the big ones for me. Makes automating instance operations easier.
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