rpm4321

When they say natively, I think they mean as a primary language. My impression is that there's only a small percentage of people on the West Coast who speak it daily, but Gaelic used to (and may still be) required in a lot of schools as sort of a token secondary language (kind of like Latin in US Catholic schools, or Hebrew schools for Jews), and a fair amount of official government business was/is done in Gaelic.

EDIT: "secure" talks about this further down the page. He says it's still taught in sort of a token way in the schools, but that he didn't run into any Gaelic in his dealings with the government.

Sjf wrnsd asdf wioefj cszkl asdlk oiajf asdnw wsafa awsfadswef.

- Actually, I just sat on my keyboard cuz I wanted to fit in :)

Just curious - is Gaelic still required in schools and in some dealings w/ government?

Hey Eoin, couple of quick question for you if you don't mind. I know you're probably not a tax lawyer, but what's the personal capital gains situation like over there?

Also, just wondering what "morale" (for lack of a better word) is like now, given all the bailouts, budget crises, and even church scandals. All you hear about Ireland in the US media these days seems to be doom and gloom.

Is there a chance, given the public's hostile reaction to the bank bailouts and economic crisis, that Ireland could tack left and start rolling back its advantageous tax rates?

Thanks in advance.

12.5, or 10 if you are manufacturing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republic...

Obviously Groupon's situation isn't a perfect parallel, but with lots of competitors smelling blood in the water and circling a nascent, rapidly growing, revenue positive, high profile market, it seemed apt.

Also, regarding barriers to entry, Groupon and its competitors felt the need to hire all those sales reps and writers to put together deals. They may have been able to scale more efficiently, but all those hires were certainly a barrier to entry, to say nothing of their exorbitant land grab marketing budgets.

Also, I think the Ponzi scheme rhetoric is way overblown. You could argue that its investors were sold an over-hyped bill of goods, but Groupon's core product was/is sound. If they can scale down their head count a bit, maintain market share with only a maintenance marketing budget, and hopefully expand into local ecommerce, they can still do well. It just might not be a 30 billion dollar business.

Finally, Uber has gone from a near standstill to disrupting a major industry in record time, with almost no experience in the industry. As other commenters have pointed out, one of Uber's chief competitors is now Hailo, a rapidly growing service built by people with tons of industry experience and connections. I don't really see insurmountable barriers to entry here for their competitors, especially given that Uber's detractors would argue that its main competitive advantage has been to simply thumb its nose at what should have been its own barrier to entry: regulation.

Do you mean like pirated avis and mp3s? I think the difficulty in finding DDLs is partly a feature. If they are easy to find, they get DMCAed immediately.

Yeah, I think we fundamentally agree that they haven't paid nearly enough attention to the political end of things.

I guess I just have trouble seeing how you can effectively grow a startup at half speed. PG recently wrote a very persuasive article on growth being pretty much the only metric that matters for a startup: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html, and the accepted model seems to be break-neck growth at all cost.

Granted the minefield-like political/regulatory environment may make this a special circumstance, and I definitely understand and respect your reasoning, but I still have trouble seeing "slow and steady" as Uber's path to victory.

Hi Pekk, I posted this headline, and I copied and pasted it almost verbatim - adding only the "Uber:" label at the beginning for clarity. NYT sometimes changes headlines on stories, and even uses alternate headlines for some links.

If you go to the NYT home page and scroll down to the Technology section below the fold, you should see the link/headline I used.

When I click through to the story, I still see the headline I used and I can't seem to find the one you are referring to, so maybe it customizes the headline based on which link you clicked?

I didn't mean to imply that the political process is purely transactional and that they can just throw money at the problem, but from all of the mainstream coverage I've read on Uber - and all of the quotes attributed to various politicians and regulators contained therein - it's clear that they are currently losing the political war. As you yourself stated, they are clearly in the right, but that's no guarantee of victory. Extensive PR and lobbying, while not a cure all, could go a long way towards rectifying that imbalance.

Regarding the land grab, I really disagree. They already have a handful of domestic competitors cropping up, and I wasn't even aware of that Hailo company that objclxt mentions above, which sounds pretty formidable.

If they sit around doing a bunch of navel gazing on the nature of the political process and civil discourse, they are toast.

>> My advice to Uber? Slow down. Figure out what the other side is about, and I mean all about, good and bad.

I agree with most of what you said, except for this. They are in the land grab phase. If they don't continue to expand aggressively, someone will eat their lunch, ala Groupon.

My advice is for them to take some serious funding, and start cutting checks to lobbyists, PR, and god forbid, politicians. Play the game.

I feel horrible saying it, given that it helps feed the machine, but it's their only option to build a truly disruptive business in an area that needs disrupting mainly because of regulation and bureaucracy.

Google and Microsoft both learned this lesson too late, and it's hurt them both dearly.

I hate to be mean and kick them when they are down, but quite frankly this might speak to their ability to execute on their final product.

$28 dollars shy of an all-or-nothing $50,000 in free (relatively) seed money, and they let it slip through their fingers? Call your Grandmother and get her to kick in.

In your defense, after the first few rounds of YC I remember VCs and bloggers squawking about all YC companies being features and not products, and that you were deliberately mass producing acqui-hires.

To me, it's clear that the quality of the average YC company has gone up.

I suppose that depends on how pervasive patent trolling has become.

But yes, I would say that the development of the vast majority of inventions worth protecting would necessitate more than some scribbling on a bar napkin.

If the process begins with some vague "inspiration" about where an invention may lie, and then promptly ends with a call to your lawyer - no feasibility testing, no fleshing out of the concept, no iteration of thought, I would say that the patent system is fundamentally broken.

For an inventor or a patent troll? I'm disputing them being characterized as anything but the latter.

There was a lengthy article I read a number of years ago - the source escapes me (maybe Technology Review) - that described their process at length. To call what they do "research" or "inventing" is to twist those words beyond all meaning. They contract with a number of domain experts in various fields, fly them into Seattle as consultants, and hold multi-hour brainstorming sessions where they basically throw a bunch of loose concepts at a whiteboard and see what sticks.

Like all patent trolls, they basically identify where a valuable invention is likely to occur sometime in the future, have lawyers draw up a sufficiently vague patent application, and spray and pray - and then prey.

There is zero follow up - no prototyping, no CAD files, no R&D, no clinical trials, no betas, no execution - it goes from nebulous "idea" straight to the legal department. If Myhrvold is an inventor, then Arthur C. Clarke's estate should get royalties on every satellite in orbit, and Gene Roddenberry's should get a piece of every iPhone sold.

Wait, I take that back - Myhrvold is an inventor after all. He's the Henry Ford of patent trolling - a pioneer in its mass production.

God I hope so. This Zynga/Angry Birds model that we're constantly being told is the future of gaming is depressing as hell.

It's kind of odd that you would randomly happen upon this thread otherwise. And within 40 minutes of Patrick's post?

Faxanadu was really great, but nobody has heard of it. My first RPG, depending on how you want to classify Zelda.

I find it slightly disturbing that I was able to picture in my mind the exact cover image before clicking the link.

I certainly hope that if I had been alive back then I would have had the front page of the paper the day after the moon landing similarly etched into my brain.

Here's to wasted youth!

Spotify is obviously still in the land grab phase. I pay $5 a month for it, and would easily pay at least 6 times that, maybe more.

Furthermore, the vast majority of its users are still freeloaders. I think a sizeable percentage would convert to paying customers if Spotify started to throttle back the free accounts or play more ads. Its an incredible service at a great value, especially when you cough up a tiny bit of money to get rid of the ads.

Patent pending... ;)

Oh, I didn't know that. I saw YC S12 and assumed they had just launched.

Here's the other one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_6bSCW_UI0

Nope, the author uses coffee and caffeine pretty interchangeably, and probably refers to caffeine more than coffee. It's clearly about both, although there is a brief mention of some of the purported additional health benefits of coffee that caffeine might not be responsible for.

Just curious if anyone has heard about the acquisition price? Not sure if that sort of thing is verboten on HN for a YC co., so apologies if that's the case.

Also, is this the new launch-to-acquisition record for YC?

I didn't downvote you, but I think whoever did assumed that you were mocking Bufferbox or being sarcastic. I'm not sure how prominently linking to your site from your blog, while generally good advice, would directly lead to an acquisition.

Thanks. So it's deliberately not on the nav anywhere?

I've been thinking that this could be an interesting idea, especially when you consider that the Webvan model now seems to be becoming a reality. A larger size delivery box for everything from dry cleaning to packages, maybe with a refrigerated portion for groceries. Maybe with some kind of access control so they couldn't be targeted by thieves, with codes that could expire?

How do you submit polls? Is it unlockable? </tangent>