prpon

The technology is pretty cool and all but I fail to understand why I need a 3D view of a 2D world.

It is human nature to over estimate the impact of events or things we do. Every one looks at the world with their own view point. They are the center of their own universe. That's all the world we know.

May be not failing often is the reason why we take ourselves so seriously. Your current view point of looking at things as isolated events is a great way of looking at life.

Granted that when you are working for someone else, the incremental improvement/hardwork that you put in does not translate into recognition or reward.

Is it still true in the business world? Especially when you are running your own business doesn't hard work translate into something?

For me, When you are trying to get started in the business world, the temptation to keep churning day in and day out is pretty high. It may not necessarily be the right thing.

I thought this article would be about which one of the two (local food or less meat) is better for you health wise, with data. It talks about carbon footprint of each source.

I have gotten opinions both ways. People who do not want to critique an idea until they see something they can lay their hands on aka demo. And the other side where people who want to make sure the idea has market before they write a single line of code.

I am not sure which one works. Being a coder and as someone who tends to code before evaluating, I would like to know specifics on how to do evaluation before execution.

And the name is?

The difficult part is knowing what people need more.

It's just an opinion until you find out for real. We all bring our own biases into what is essential/pain point for people.

Until the rubber meets the road, you never know.

The problem I see with recurly for non-technical people is that non-technical people will find it complicated to embed a widget, tab, javascript etc into their sites.

Yeah, it comes down to execution. But if you can execute it so well that it is dead easy and doesn't require any technical know how, you might win over even technical people.

That is a really long and verbose questionnaire. Exit interviews when I left some jobs weren't even that long.

With the attention spans the way they are, I would be surprised if their completion rate is anything more than single digit percentages.

I am not an expert at these things but if something didn't take off despite your marketing efforts. Your product probably doesn't have a market. e-books might be hot but not the niche balloon business. You should move onto the next e-book. Hopefully it will do better.

If you want someone to just bounce things/ideas off, hit me up, email is in the profile.

In what way do you think you did not execute properly? What would you do differently if you were to make it successful?

Yeah, I would have liked to see specific things he learnt at apple. Load testing tools, algorithms for caching, how and which metrics they measured etc.

I am trying to figure out who would find this article useful without any details.

A story from meeting Donald Knuth. During the dotcom days, our startup team was sent to meet Donald Knuth for due diligence by some VC. Our startup was doing Location based stuff before it was cool. Our CTO went on and on about all the potential applications of location based services. Prof. Knuth cut him off in the middle and said, 'You would use all these services because you are part of the lunatic fringe'. :)

I feel for your situation and realize that you cannot change it overnight.

In the short term, put in your profile what you can do: - What skills do you have? (coding, marketing, etc.) - What was your project(s) that failed.

It doesn't matter that your startup failed. What did you do in that startup? Thats all that matters.

You would be surprised how many of us are willing to take a chance. Yes, we might not be able to pay you the best money out there but it will help you get back into things.

An unrelated question. "unternehmensgründerförderung" is that a real word or you just made it up? I would make up such words when I am mad at something and can't express my frustation in real words :)

Your best bet would be to go to the nearest airport and talk at the ticketing counter. They have a chart on who is allowed to board and who is not. In my case, my spain visa was category C which apparently requires transit visa. HTH.

I hold an Indian passport and I recently got thrown out of a plane to Spain via Heathrow right before it took off. They said, I didn't have a transit visa. I was changing planes in the same terminal and the total time I was to spend in Heathrow was 2 hours.

I have a Schengen visa. No, that doesn't work for London. I begged and pleaded for hours at the gate. Nothing. The worst part is, I did the same route for years with no problem. Apparently rules changed recently.

Trust me, It really is awful being that person who gets discriminated based on where you are born.

I find that groupon using most of its funding from last round to payout people questionable.

I can understand founders wanting to cash out a portion of their equity before going public. However, when you are raising money say 10 million to fund growth etc, what % is considered reasonable to pay founders before it raises red flags to investors?

More than likely it is because of the bandwidth usage. It is really easy to host it using ec2 or rackspace but the bandwidth costs are gonna kill you if you are scraping HN. How often do you get data from HN?

This is as minimum as an MVP can get. Why not spend some time with google api and import the email addresses directly? Here's one way to do it. http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/docs/2.0/developers_gui...

Saving the contacts as a csv file is an add-on feature.

wow! that was a really quick sale right after the launch. Mixergy had an excellent interview with founder Dan Shapiro in April. http://mixergy.com/dan-shapiro-ontela-interview/

I have a different experience from you. I am a rookie at this entrepreneurship thingy. When I ask for advice, I really am looking forward to following it. Try it and see where that leads.

My biggest skepticism is advice from people who never tried it themselves. They are successful so they feel the right to give advice even if they don't have any experience.

The best quote about startup advice that I've ever heard comes from Paul Buchheit, Limited life experience + Over generalization = Startup advice

Having coded in VB6 in my past life, I was very happy to get away from the 'dll hell' of VB6/COM. Next up, Java. The more you deal with it, you realize the 'jar hell' is the same as before, just in a different form. Now, I get to deal with ruby gem nonsense.

I wish they open sourced VB6 15 years back. Too little too late (at least for me), even if the news is true.

If you want to know, I tried shorting it at 110 just for the heck of it. tdameritrade says 'this stock not available for short sell'.

With 2 million in income for the last quarter unless LinkedIn has something up their sleeve, 4.5 billion is a little too much. About having something up their sleeve, I haven't seen any innovation from them in the past 4 years or so.

Can't find the 'pivot table' option from my account. They said they are rolling it out, any one else able to use it?

If recognition from YC is the only piece that is missing from a startup's puzzle, I would be disappointed if they cannot make it on their own. Many of us are at different levels of competence at being a successful entrepreneur. Many drop off from the startup world altogether, some drop off from applying to YC and endup with a small business, a tiny few will show up as groupons of the world.

I would be interested in knowing the reasons why that startup was so far behind. Is it the constant feedback about the startup/idea from mentors and other YC members that make the startups better Or the ability to solve technical issues quickly because of help from others?

In the past 15 years or so, there is an explosion of engineering schools and the number of graduates. I've been part of the crowd that lamented the decrease in the quality of Indian engineering graduates.

When you look at it in a different way. Would you rather have more engineers than less? I would go for more.

As an individual, having an engineering degree is better than having a degree in arts. An engineering degree provides these guys with better employment options even if our notion of quality is shattered.

India is coming of age and the days when 'I studied roman history because I am passionate about it' are not far off. As of now, livelihood trumps passion.