pytrin

I'd highly recommend "My System" by Aron Nimzowitsch. A deep dive into positional play instead of specific tactics

http://www.amazon.com/My-System-21st-Century-Edition/dp/1880...

Umm.. When I pay 1200$ for a plane ticket, I expect a minimum of customer service, and that's how those companies differentiate. The comparison to a free web service is not really relevant.

I think you missed the point of the post - it's not about losing a bag, it's about the customer service failure that ensued. I had bags lost on a couple of occasions, and usually they are delivered on the same day or the next to the address I stay at. If I'd had such an experience, I wouldn't be flying the same airline either.

I agree and disagree. Venture capital has become somewhat more risk-averse in recent years, mainly because the costs of building software products has become so low. But there is a lot of innovation to made in the physical world, which is currently underrepresented in investment portfolios.

On the other hand, I'm not sure the hyperloop is a good fit for a VC investment. Maybe someone out there will be willing to take a huge risk with limited upside, but it does not fit VC theory, which is still a business at the end of the day. It seems like the appropriate funding channel for something like should be the government, at least in a perfect world. Otherwise, major players in the industry are the next most relevant, perhaps companies that already manage toll roads and infrastructure.

In the context of the comment he was replying to, and the allusion to "cultural differences" it doesn't seem to be just about technical proficiency. Otherwise, the second the part of his reply is meaningless, and the entire comment seems out of context.

Some equipment might come from Israel (it's just guessing though), but I do not like your implicit hinting that Israeli developers are somehow less moral than U.S developers (because of "cultural" differences?) - especially since you don't know much about it. You seem to be forgetting which government and agency is at the center of this debacle, don't try to share the blame on other nations or cultures for developing those spying system

It's an overall strong application, but it's missing a few key components - namely, you're a single founder, and you're a bit early in terms of product and traction. That might've been enough to get in a few years ago, but competition and standards have gone up with each new batch (the single founder thing might've still held you back).

You'll probably have a better chance getting in the next batch, if your product continues to mature and you have more traction by then. If you're interested, I wrote about my experiences reviewing about 300 applications for a different accelerator, 500startups - might be useful http://www.techfounder.net/2013/08/22/after-reviewing-300-st...

Interesting to see this idea as the top rated comment here on HN. I wrote a post about a year ago about a similar concept (for different reasons - Twitter API limits, Apple rejections), and most of the HN crowd disagreed back then. http://www.techfounder.net/2012/08/30/developers-vs-bigcorp/

I'm one of the co-founders at Binpress (http://www.binpress.com), which is marketplace for commercial open-source projects. Unlike Codecanyon, which someone else mentioned in this thread, our focus is on professional development and components that are more than simple scripts. Cocoacontrols (https://www.cocoacontrols.com/) is another good example, with some of their commercial components doing very well.

We have several developers making SV comparable salaries from publishing on our platform (in the 100k$ range annually). I believe this can be a huge market - if you look at companies selling licenses to code or SDK binaries, there's quite a few who built very profitable businesses around it.

Very well known examples of companies selling code licenses include MySQL and Magento (through their enterprise versions), though they provide complete solutions and not components. Gravity Forms (http://www.gravityforms.com/) a wordpress plug-in, is another good example - it generated millions in revenue if you trust their installation counter.

The common perception is that YC is very big on pedigree (top schools, serial founders, worked at top companies). They are known for having a prototype (they liked to call it patterns) of what is the ideal founding team.

500startups for example are willing to take more risks on people and look more deeply at the product if it has traction and a business model, even the founding team is unknown / international.

There's a lot of different investment thesis, which all make sense for different reasons.

Not sure what those numbers mean - perhaps it's CPU time. I use chrome and Gmail for about 30-40 minutes every day.

You are correct. I also mention the tradeoff between discharging very low to battery life, with a link to a nice article on the topic.

Yes, you are correct, my bad :) Clicking on screen in the Settings -> Battery says screen time on is 4h 32m. So I guess in a 4 day cycle I get to a little over 5h

I used to use TaskKiller for memory clearing purposes. Haven't used it since I upgraded to CM 10

I installed BatteryStats just now, and added a few screenshots to show more detailed usage data. It says screen is at ~20% - so about 20 hours of screen time.

Like I say in the article - mileage will vary depending on usage, and GPS still sucks the battery. However, 4 days on normal usage is a nice achievement :)

Binpress - http://www.binpress.com/jobs - Mountain View, CA

We are creating a platform for developers to build profitable businesses from working on their open-source projects.

We are still a small team (5 people), and the next few hires will have major impact on our culture and future.

Our most pressing needs right now:

* Head of growth - We need someone with proven past experience in growing users and revenue through multiple acquisition channels to head our growth efforts at the company.

* Content marketer - We're looking for someone who has a knack for creating great content in all media formats, and a track record for exposing that content to the relevant audience.

Positions are ideally onsite, but we will consider very strong applicants for remote work (at least initially - hopefully we can convince you to relocate later :)

Compensation: 70k - 110k + 0.1-1.0% equity, depending on experience and background (salary would also depend on location).

If you are interested in open-source and believe open-source developers should get paid - get in touch! send us a message indicating what position you are interested in and why you would be a good fit, or apply through the link above.

People resent change. But smart VCs can see the markings on the door, and AngelList is quickly becoming the main channel for early stage financing - they need to be there or miss out on getting in early.

I think it makes even more sense for VCs to use syndicates than Angels, since they have more experience managing bigger checks and angels are typically brought in for different reasons, some of which are made void in a syndicate.

I wrote about that yesterday, from the perspective of a startup founder, might be of interest - http://www.techfounder.net/2013/09/30/founders-perspective-o...

Hi Jason,

Yes - that was the same claim I got from your support back then (score update within a second mostly) - but that breaks up a linear process into an asynchronous one (since you can't complete the purchase process immediately). Hope that makes sense - we will be looking forward to your API update.

Yes, you are right. I meant for digital goods eCommerce

We really wanted to like Sift, as we suffer from a substantial amount of fraud attempts (as most business who sell digital products). However, their model is not a good fit for eCommerce sites, and that's a shame - it seems to be built specifically for services marketplaces like AirBnb, where there is typically a time delay between payment and service provision.

I exchanged a few Email with their support previously, and there is no way to get real time fraud scoring. I would expect to receive in the response to a transaction event the risk score associated with it - something similar to what the Minfraud service does (which we use), but taking into account more factors since they collect more data via their Javascript API.

One can only hope they'll offer this capability in the future, and we'd be glad to try it out again.

Binpress (http://www.binpress.com) Mountain View, CA. We provide a platform for developers to build profitable businesses from their open-source projects. We are a funded startup that's already generating significant revenue.

--

CMO / Head of growth

We are looking for a creative thinker who is experienced with all online marketing channels, including paid acquisition, search marketing, social and online communities, and Email marketing, and has a knack for using unconventional methods to acquire customers (i.e, growth hacking).

Ideally you are intimately familiar with the software development process and with marketing developer tools. Responsibilities include:

* Outlining and executing immediate and long-term marketing plans.

* Breaking down marketing plans into action items and being accountable for getting it done.

* Analyzing marketing performance and constantly adjusting strategy.

* Coming up with creative ideas for impact growth through unconventional methods.

* Helping us build our marketing team.

* This position is an onsite position - no remote.

Developer Evangelist

we want you to help us build the online presence of Binpress and evangelize our platform to developers. As our evangelist you will:

* Reach out to potential publishers and community influencers, both inside and outside our community.

* Attend conferences and meetups as our official representative with Binpress schwag.

* Write content on our blog around the topics of open-source, software licensing, and general software development topics.

* Help us refine our core messaging through interacting with developers in and outside our community.

* Organize other people in different locations to do what you do in their local developer community.

* Remote is possible, but preference for someone local

We have a couple of other positions you can find through our AngelList jobs - https://angel.co/binpress/jobs You can connect with us through there, or by sending your details directly to me at eran@binpress.com (I'm the CTO and co-founder). If you do send your details in through either channel, please include a note about which role you are applying for, and how you think you can help us in that capacity.

Lots of gems, but this is my personal favorite:

"However… you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t get him to drink. Even if the water comes in the form of an endless supply of VitaminWater in the company fridge."

LTV = Life time value. Have a high ratio between customer acquisition costs and life time value in order to be profitable at scale when CAC goes up. Hope that makes sense now.

You're going to pay for those anyway if you are growing. The point is that those are fixed costs and not costs per costumer.

This article says the industry norm is 20-25% at the early rounds, which has been my experience as well.

http://techli.com/2012/02/the-founder-dilemma-risk-equity-di...

Like I said - it's an indicator, not a requirement.

Yes, a GitHub profile is not perfect. It's way better than nothing - you get to see the developer's coding style, commenting approach and overall code organization. You say it's not your best work? then put something you're proud of on there before you send your resume. If you don't have one project that you think is representative of your current skill, you have to understand that is problematic for potential employers. Don't want to share it on GitHub? that's fine, send code examples instead of a GitHub link. But you can't hire a developer without reviewing some of his/her code first.

Personally, I find a Stack Overflow profile to be the best indicator of a developers skill, if he has a somewhat active profile (over 2-3k points). Being able to explain technical solutions, I think, is the best way to see if someone is both capable and can work in a team

Regarding resumes - another touchy matter. When I freelanced I haven't sent a resume as such as I had a portfolio site, but now that I'm on the other side of the table, going over resumes - most of them are completely terrible. Some people are completely clueless on what to put on a resume and others try to game it - putting stuff like "raised x metric by y% on project z" - giving me zero clue to what they actually did there. It's very rare I can get an actual glimpse to what the person was doing at his previous work. That's why you'll need to tell them your story when you interview... it's too easy to assume the interviewer was just lazy going over your resume because you think you "nailed" it, but in truth your resume probably sucks as an indicator of your actual experience and ability.

It's a cute interaction, but for credit-card forms you want to be obvious rather than cute. Showing all the fields a user expects to fill out instills confidence and prevents questions like "where do I input my name and card expiry date?" "what about the security code?" "where is the billing address?" etc. People would typically not start filling out their credit-card details with those doubts in their minds.

One additional nitpick - it says "YourBank" at the beginning, so while I was aware this was supposed to a credit-card form because of the title of the submission, it can also be mistaken for a bank account number submission.

So you're saying, it's fine to start with mostly incorrect data because if you get traction eventually the data will get better? I'm not sure I follow the logic. In the meantime, they're doing a disservice to the companies they're reporting on and investors who might be buying into it.