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rumpelstiltskinon Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Leaving the U.S

Personally, I'm looking forward to moving to India. The food is tasty, the women are beautiful.

...and the bureaucracy and corruption are out of this world. Good luck.

rumpelstiltskinon Dilbert creator's Sock Puppet Scandal

Oh come on. Scandal? Really? It's a bunch of self-indulgent ppl arguing over semantics. Scott acted like an idiot and the ppl blowing this out of proportion are even bigger idiots.

rumpelstiltskinon NYC Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson Is Rich and Grumpy

Re: making NYC a startup hub equivalent to Silicon Valley - "Problem is, Wilson himself isn’t doing nearly as much on that front as he could be."

Where's the evidence for this statement? If anything, all the evidence in the article seems to point to the contrary.

Better yet, what should Fred be doing?

rumpelstiltskinon LivingSocial Financials: $2.9 Billion Valuation, $50M In Revenue Per Month

Whats stopping said person from setting up a quick C-Corp or LLC and have the option grants be paid to the company?

rumpelstiltskinon Free phone support for AdWords advertisers

Hell has frozen over.

rumpelstiltskinon How To Keep Your Domain Name Searches Safe From Poachers

use http://domai.nr

rumpelstiltskinon Facebook Terminated Corporate Development Employee Over Insider Trading Scandal

Re: the last paragraph in the article

Considering this can potentially ruin Brown's reputation, shouldn't they wait to get solid confirmation before slapping him with the 'insider trading' label?

rumpelstiltskinon WePay (YC 09) Celebrates As Engagement Quintuples In Last 90 Days

Any ETA on when WePay is opening up to take payments as an alternative to paypal?

I'm sure your engagement will be magnitudes of order higher with that announcement :)

rumpelstiltskinon Show HN: LocalGo - bit.ly for addresses

Can you give some examples/use cases of how a small business, say an auto garage, would use this?

rumpelstiltskinon Why IE9 is a Web Designer’s Nightmare

Anyone know a good IE 9 emulator?

rumpelstiltskinon Show HN: Bootstrapped, Not Profitable *Yet*, & Proud: Pagify

Great design!

How are you taking payments?

rumpelstiltskinon Picking a fight with an 800 lb gorilla, startup marketing

Still doesn't help individuals selling products online and are stuck using paypal and risking having their accounts frozen.

rumpelstiltskinon How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors

Jason "will do anything for ink" Calacanis recently gave an about face speech claiming people need to step away from the content farm business model, and in doing so admitted that roughly everything he said about Mahalo over the past couple years was a complete lie. Surprise, surprise. The interesting bit is that the start up community - which used to fawn over his huckster PR driven ploys - no longer buys them. Jason claimed to have "pivoted" his business model again, but once again we see more garbage content. His credibility has been spent. And so have his rankings! Sistrix shows that not only is he ranking for fewer keywords, but that the graph has skewed downward to worse average positions.

Amen

rumpelstiltskinon Square Drops Per Transaction Fee

That makes perfect sense. Thanks.

rumpelstiltskinon Square Drops Per Transaction Fee

$5.45 is the tipping point where the 2.75% accounts for a larger portion of the fees than the $0.15. (EDIT: added to original comment)

There are merchants who do a small # of transactions a day w/ each transaction being significantly higher than $5.45. For these merchants, dropping the per fee transaction results in negligible savings. A lower % is what matters to them.

Basically, Square is great. It'd be even better if they offered another option.

rumpelstiltskinon Square Drops Per Transaction Fee

This is a gamechanger if your transaction price is lower than $5.45 (EDIT: the tipping point where the 2.75% accounts for a larger portion of the fees than the $0.15). The further above this price you go, the more negligible the $0.15 savings per transaction becomes (compared to having a lower % of the total transaction).

For eg. I sell a service (in the offline world) at $50 and avg about 9-10 sales per day. With the removal of the transaction fee, I would save about $1.50 per day. With a lower % of the total transaction, say 1.75%, I'd save about $7 a day.

What about an option for business owners to pay a transaction fee but get charged a lower % of the total transaction?

rumpelstiltskinon Born This Way

Relevant comment from the article -

This seems to be a textbook "AOL Way" article that Paul Miller was talking about.

Beatles? Popular.

iPad? Popular (Bonus points for featuring FOUR of them).

Lady Gaga? Popular.

Turnaround time? Few minutes.

Actual substance? None whatsoever.

Steve Gilmor's unrelenting jackassery is getting out of hand. Now that TC is under new management, can someone rein this guy in?

rumpelstiltskinon Finally: Facebook Co-Founder Opens the Curtain on Two-Year Old Asana

Are they also working on a tl;dw?

P.S. Justin Rosenstein? Co-founder of Asana?

rumpelstiltskinon Finally: Facebook Co-Founder Opens the Curtain on Two-Year Old Asana

What virality plan?

rumpelstiltskinon Visual Website Optimizer: Bootstrapped, Profitable, and over 4,000 users

Sorry if I put you on the spot, my main reason for asking was my curiosity regarding the cost of your CDN :) I figured that must make up the lion's share of your expenses.

rumpelstiltskinon Visual Website Optimizer: Bootstrapped, Profitable, and over 4,000 users

Congrats on the growth!

Can you elaborate a bit on the numbers? Specifically revenues, margins etc

rumpelstiltskinon Ask HN: I dropped out. How do I continue my CompSci education?

I disagree. If anything, it's school that can wait. Especially considering you can get a decently comprehensive CS education w/o paying mid-5 figures a year in tuition.

Rather than giving all that money away needlessly, spend a fraction of it on room and board and spend the majority of your time teaching yourself. You'll be done way ahead of 4 yrs.

And then jump into the startup world.

rumpelstiltskinon My biggest frustration with Google AdWords

Have you tried facebook? 3 yrs ago, when I first started out as an affiliate marketer, 90% of my ad spend was in adwords. At this point, my ad spend has tilted obscenely in facebook's favor over adwords.

I remember the hours I used to spend optimising my adwords. But not any more. I spend less than 5% of that time on adwords now. By xmas of this year, it should be down to 0.

rumpelstiltskinon DontEat.at: Check into a NYC restaurant, get texted of health code violations

A bunch of us decide to go out to eat. We look up retaurants on yelp, menupages etc and pick a place to go. When we get there, we check into donteat.at and we get notified of a bunch of health code violations, at which point we decide to find a diff place to eat.

Wouldn't the user experience be better served by allowing ppl to enter a restaurant name into donteat.at from anywhere (like from their desktop after reading about it on yelp) and getting the health code violations? Wouldn't this save a lot of time and hassle?

Whats the point of getting notified after getting to the restaurant?

rumpelstiltskinon Vox.io - skype in the cloud

Can you please let users sign up with their email? Not everyone has a facebook, google or twitter acount.

rumpelstiltskinon Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results

If they put johnchow.com on the list, they must be doing something right.

rumpelstiltskinon Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

Close, but wrong.

rumpelstiltskinon Goldman Sachs invests in Facebook at $50 Billion valuation

0.001% would be around ballpark.

rumpelstiltskinon Offer HN: Help on Incorporation

Any chance for a transcript?

rumpelstiltskinon Looking for NYC startup jobs? Try InsideStartups.

Most != everyone

Seriously, requiring sign up via accounts on sites like facebook, linkedin etc is a really stupid idea. Startups (I'm looking at you quora!) need to stop this bullshit.

Edit: Looks like quora now allows email sign ups. Good.