noelsequeira

Reminds me of a tweet by Angus Davis I stumbled upon a couple of months back.

Amazing how many brilliant minds and millions of dollars have been applied to enable people to share photos.

From a comment at the end of the follow-up article put up by the blog in question.

I guess there will always be kids that want to build the sandcastles and the kids that just want to knock them over.

If I could weigh in on the entire controversy here, in hindsight, I wish I hadn't read either of the articles - I'm none the richer after the consumption of a ton of vitriol.

And here's why, in my opinion. Both Justin Vincent and Alex Payne have different perspectives / world views, shaped obviously by their life experiences. And neither of them is entirely wrong. Or right.

But when they attempt to offer universal advice and proselytize the entire world, their opinions degenerate into religion. Which is exactly why we've had passionate commentators weigh in with an almost religious fervor... and intolerance.

Please let's put paid to this nontroversy with a simple "to each his own", and get back to what we all do best - building stuff (that may impact a handful or billions).

In one line: the classic dichotomy of opinion just degenerated into a vitriolic debate.

If only sanity prevailed, most commentators would probably dismiss this entire conversation with a "to each his own".

Dwell on the entire conversation for a couple of minutes, and it's immediately apparent that it smacks of religion. I'm ashamed to say a lot of individuals I have a tremendous deal of respect for, have dropped their guard in an unabashed attempt to proselytize the masses.

Yes, I get it. You feel strongly about it, and your unequivocal about how you feel. That's why it's called religion. Just don't shove it down other people's throats.

If there were ever an embodiment of Paul Buchheit's words "ADVICE = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization", this would likely be it.

Agreed. But this then essentially translates into a "jobs for founder visas" scheme for relatively larger companies that can afford to immediately hire 3 American candidates.

This will, therefore, probably mean a deluge of applications from across the globe and the consequent generation of several more US jobs (which works out great for everyone).

Only I'm not too sure we should then call it a 'Startup' Visa.

The answer depends largely on intent (is the bill meant to be exclusively for startups or are the terms more inclusive) and consequently, on how you define a 'startup'.

Let's assume a hypothetical company in operation for 15 years outside the US with > 100000$ in revenue from the US market. 3 American hires now effectively represent an immediate ticket to a Visa for the founders. If I might hazard a guess, there'll be thousands of companies clamoring for a piece of the pie.

If this is intended for, I stand corrected (and I must add I think the bill is revolutionary). But 'Startup' Visa might then be a bit of a misnomer.

I'm an Indian entrepreneur, and much as I'd love to see #3 see the light of day, I have this sinking feeling it's just way too ripe for exploitation.

Foreign entrepreneurs whose business has generated at least $100,000 in sales from the U.S. Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue.

A ton of companies that aren't really startups could easily misuse this clause. And even if there's fine print to guard against the same, due diligence in each case will translate into a ton of paperwork and enormous bureaucratic delays, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid in the first place, right?

That said, no one hopes I'm wrong more than I do right now.

I know this is an aside, but if there were ever a Disqus comment thread that came close to the conversations on HN for quality, the one at the end of this article would pretty much be it.

Some heavyweights have weighed in with some insightful thoughts, there's far more signal than noise, and a variety of opinions on offer. Well worth the read!

>The (registration) fee is based on the formula (number of users * $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay.

Love that they're completely transparent about their number of users and how they're using it as a bargaining chip to convert fence-sitters like me.

Looks like it might really pay to be an early adopter.

A year and a half into our first startup, I can see why determination (or should I go out on a limb and say downright stubbornness) is so highly rated.

We built a decent product in roughly 6 months, and began engaging with enterprise customers. 6 frustrating months of trade shows / cold calls / presentations later, we had a couple of potential customers but things seemed way too stagnant; their intent to purchase just wasn't apparent.

We were running low on cash and the first visible cracks in our patience were emerging, but we stayed put. And that's probably because we've known each other for over 5 years and each of us didn't want to let the others in the team down.

And then suddenly a month later we received our first purchase order. Okay, it wasn't exactly sudden - we'd followed up a million times with the client and iterated on the product each and every time. But nothing else had changed, we hadn't done anything significantly different in that one month. And that had us convinced that patience can be a real virtue.

We've not exactly dug ourselves out of a hole yet, but we're getting there (with several promising leads in the pipeline) and more importantly, a repeat order as well as a testimonial from our first customer.

EDIT: Just in case you thought the story above was manufactured, here's the a link to the testimonial [PDF]

http://creativeriot.com/resources/[Enpower]%20CoreLogic%20-%...

Fascinating example of PR done right (by Foursquare, NASA and and JESS3). Quite sure this is going to be picked up by pretty much every blog and newspaper.

Yup, not everyone has quite the same leverage, but you have to hand it to these guys for pulling this off!

We're on the same wavelength - this is the exact flow I have in mind! Now to get back to work.

Agree that it's nice to have. I wouldn't die without it myself. Which is why I don't really have plans to monetize it. It'll be a fun project to work on made even better by the knowledge that it's solving a problem for a niche.

Yup, the service at its very core is a list of words you've looked up so that you can go back and repeat.

Quizzing sounds like a good way to make repeating fun, so I'll put that on my to-do list.

I conceived the idea with the vocabulary-mastery use case in mind, but as you've pointed out, it seems to fit the get-proficient-at-new-language use case quite well.

I used to do that myself. Until I discovered I'd looked up "proselytize" on 6 different occasions and it just wouldn't stick. So I began building a personal list of to-revise words until it became bloated and unwieldy.

I completely agree this isn't for everyone - until a couple of months back I used to overlook tough words or try to interpret their meaning in the context of what I was reading.

I've discovered though, that making a conscious attempt to identify these words is quite rewarding and I recognize that's my personal opinion.

Success for me will be helping a few folks scratch this itch. I really don't intend to monetize the app.

Awesome, the first HNer whose frustration resonates with mine!

I must admit, internationalization didn't cross my mind. It shouldn't be too hard though, all we'll need is a decent API / site that we can scrape.

catch.com seems to be similar to Evernote or SimpleNote. My app intends to be a dictionary-integrated word list for words that you discover and want to remember, not a note syncing app. So you might eventually find it useful.

That said, "words of the day" is an interesting feature (although it isn't on my roadmap for v0.1).

While I haven't tried them out myself, GeoIP should be a good bet (you can check if they meet your needs rather quickly by hitting their API) http://www.maxmind.com/app/api

So, in hindsight would you change anything / be a tad more secretive? I'm guessing you wouldn't, but would love to hear your take.

Thanks for your inputs, they're insightful. Tapping into my local network might work only so much in my case - most folks aren't too active on Twitter.

But I'm not going to give this up so easily - i will give it my sincerest shot. I guess the hard part's figuring out what works and what doesn't.

My goal is an online social initiative that changes how people seek and receive real-time help.

A lot of deserving folks without an online voice struggle to put the word out when in need (An urgent need for blood, a sudden need for funds for a critical operation). I'm thinking we can tap into influentials to help spread the word (who can earn karma in return).

Bottleneck: As step 1 in this project, I've launched http://www.saveaplusk.org , but ironically it's suffering from the very same problem I want to solve - I have too small a voice to get the word out.

A few more:

http://www.amcharts.com/ has an extremely comprehensive stock chart in addition to decent flash charts

http://www.rgraph.net/ is an html5 charting library you might want to look at.

I've worked with Fusion Charts for a while now, and their charts 1) have a very comprehensive API 2) are plain beautiful, especially the 3D charts.

JS charts look very promising, and I'm really excited about Highcharts and gRaphael.

If you're looking for something similar to the map component that Google Analytics uses, take a look at http://www.ammap.com/ or http://www.fusioncharts.com/maps/

@dacort - Thanks for pointing me to protovis. Expected it to be more of a hobby project (from the url), but was blown away by how comprehensive it is!

I think you make a point that I was blind to because it's hard for me to look at the app purely from a first time visitor's perspective.

The reason we've kept our description on HN very matter-of-fact is: we feel most readers on HN will likely want to know the concept for what it is rather than have it sugar coated. I'm not sure I want to turn that into a sales pitch. Should I?

Yes, we do plan to tie up the APIs and build a game on top them. We look at it as a universal game that you can play irrespective of the check-in service you use (Your Yelp check-ins will fetch you points that will let you lock horns with Gowalla and Foursquare users). I guess being more loud about 'universal' might help. And we hope to see some very interesting conversations around purchases that should help users discover new stuff (think hollrr.com meets location). If it does get traction, we'll be able to offer users some pretty sweet deals from the locations they check-in to / shop at.

That being said, I recognize that we haven't answered the "what's in it for me if I sign up now?" question convincingly. Since this value will become apparent in the future, do you think its alright to beat a drum about how cool it will be and make promises we might (possibly) not be able to keep?

+1 for Sendgrid.

There's an extremely interesting post by Jeff Atwood about sending email programmatically. It's a good read - explains why a lot of mail ends up in spam. ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-sen... )

SendGrid takes care of everything in Jeff's post and it handles both bulk and transactional email, so it's a great pick.

we could definitely make that change.

We've stated explicitly that these are "INCREMENTAL" savings. We do not assume that your PC is on 24x7. If it's on all the time, you'd stand to save much more.

Why don't you sign up and have a look at how much users are saving? We've had 36 downloads over the last week - friends in our immediate network. They're your average joe user - none of them leave their PCs on at night. Enpower kicks in when they forget to power down, and you'd be surprised to learn how often that is.

Please don't call an app from a startup spyware. It's unlikely we'll ever have the resources to do what it takes to look "squeaky clean" from your lofty perspective.

Green Facebook apps have seen much more adoption than we aspire to achieve. Little Green Patch, a social gardening game has 1,889,557 active monthly users. (http://www.facebook.com/applications/%28Lil%29_Green_Patch/7...) They state their advertisers will donate towards reforestation if you exchange "packets of seeds" with your friends. I think our effort could be just as meaningful, if not more. I do admit that a download is a significant barrier and we're not aiming to reach magical numbers within a week. It'll be slow, and we're ready for it.

And finally, if 30 million kWH means so little, why spend a 100 million dollars of taxpayers' money (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Nellis-Solar-Powe...) to pump that amount of clean energy into the grid? Surely, the Government must know better.

Thanks. We're glad you like the concept.

We've laid emphasis on aggregate stats and huge figures as we want to tap into the sense of gratification that one gets from being part of a large and meaningful movement.

That being said, we understand that most folks on HN will analyze the data objectively and therefore we've been modest at best with our numbers.

PC Power Management is not a new concept. Giving it a social spin with a game, we believe, is.

That's an extremely interesting point and makes for good debate.

And I'll surprise you by saying I subscribe to the school of thought that believes ideas are cheap. I honestly do.

However, over time, i'm assuming you develop an ability to subject your idea to fairly rigorous evaluation based on experience; and confidentiality might then mean much more to you.

It's really amazing though, the feedback and the varied points of view.

I must compile a list of disclaimers to be prepended to the article. 'Don't be naive about your idea' definitely will be one of them!

But it wasn't an accusation at all.

I've written clearly that both venture funds under discussion are too big to bother about a team that goes to another fund.

The fact that these companies are similar and graduated at similar times from their respective funds prompted me to think about confidentiality irrespective of what really transpired between them.

My stream of thought led me wonder how disclosure to an irresponsible fund (there are hundreds of funds all over the world now and you might have a black sheep - i'm sure you could allow me that assumption) might mean that a startup will have a clone to contend with when it graduates,and felt like sharing my thoughts.

I'm not trying to implicate anyone (I could never gather the evidence for it, and even if I managed to, it would be an exercise in futility) and quite obviously none of these companies owe anyone explanations - they're quite wonderful. In fact over the course of compiling the article, I've read a fair bit about them and appreciate the effort each has put in into identifying differentiators and competing with a rival/rivals.