sarvesh

I use Wells Fargo, Business Account. When I started the account I asked them to waive the account minimum fee and that's the only way they were going to get my business and they waived it. There have been times when I had a low account balance and they didn't charge me anything. When you are opening the account it pays to understands these charges and negotiate with them they usually listen.

That's what I meant. Unless it gets approved as a standard it's not going to be widespread.

Isn't it premature to call it a Standard? Apple may have pushed Intel to work on it but getting it adopted as a standard is gonna take time.

I use Grooveshark and I agree that the autoplay is very naive compared to Pandora. A better autoplay algorithm will definitely help but it is hard give you feedback unless we know what you are trying to do with the new algorithm. Currently, correct me if am wrong, your algorithm for recommendation is heavily biased toward genre. It is really hard to discover new songs that I like with it and that's when I fall back to Pandora.

heyprudhvi, seems like you are new here please read the guidelines. I had to flag this. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Actually they will be helping Microsoft run their Office Online App on IE6 which is not on the list of supported browsers but Safari is, which is webkit based. So they may end up giving an incentive for IE6 users not to upgrade but just install this plugin.

Actually I have used them for business cards. You don't have to get the glossy cards, we didn't. We didn't use any of their templates but created our own and the results were good. The only issue was shipping, it takes a while. Also they don't do weekend shipping.

Zazzle

You can sync your iPod, unless it is iPod touch or an iPhone, using Winamp (http://blog.winamp.com/2009/03/11/how-to-manage-music-in-ipo...)

With shipping calculation there is usually two options you can use FedEx or UPS provided standard size boxes or you can use your own boxes. The latter option is what you are looking at for your problem. The bare minimum information you need about the shipping item is weight. FedEx and UPS both return your rates if you give their API the weight and addresses.

As for calculating the number boxes you will need to do that based on how your warehouse is gonna ship these products. This is the hardest part. Most people usually maintain the dimensions of the actual product. Based on this and how you plan to ship them you will need to figure the number of boxes. The shipping rates that you have negotiated with UPS/FedEx is usually a little lower than what the user will see, so this more often than not should cover your extra costs that you may incur.

Although calculating the number of boxes and their dimension is a little involved it gives you more accuracy. Which is better for you and your customer.

There is no official support for Linux, you will need to use moonlight. Until 3.0 font rendering was a major issue, hence NYTimes switched Adobe Air. Creating a stand alone app is harder compared to Air wasn't even possible in Silverlight 2. It still doesn't have printing capabilities even in version 3.

The bright spot of using Silverlight is the programming language, you can code in C# or F#. But considering that you will need to host the solution on a Windows makes it a more expensive to scale. That probably drives away a lot of startups.

Vi on Unix and Visual Studio on Windows (with Vim bindings). Vi and Visual Studio have one thing in common that makes them great, the customization. Developers are very picky when it comes to the tools they want to use. We like it to work in a certain way. Every good developer I know has his own customizations that pretty much is unique to him or her.

HN automatically redirects you to the page if the link was already submitted. This works most of the time. If you really want to be certain you can try searching in searchyc.com.

Don't get a co-founder just for the sake of your YC application. In fact, it might hurt you chances of getting accepted if you don't have the right person. From what I have seen in the YC application you need sell not only your idea but also your team. There have been cases where single person team have been accepted, e.g., Dropbox.

You should keep looking for a co-founder irrespective of all this. You should be able to sell your idea to someone smart and intelligent until then you really don't know how good the idea is.

Yes textbooks do help. The Levitin book is good start. I would recommend reading Cormen et al after that. If you want to get serious about designing algorithms you should refer Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, at least Volume 1.

I don't believe they are comparable. The situation, the products and competition are all different. And I really don't think they failed the first time, they may have lost of to the PCs then but they didn't perish as a company.

Their philosophy has been to create a great product and sell it in one package. And it has worked pretty good for them with Mac line of products.

With the app store model they still get to control the applications that run on the iPhone. Which does give them the ability to not approve any application that would make the user experience with the device undesirable. This control over the app store is being used for tactical reasons by Apple. But obviously whether it was intended reason from the get go, I highly doubt that. Add to this who knows what legal agreements they are bound by with the Carrier. The carrier may say it wasn't us but when things go bad between them I am pretty certain there will be a few people in both these companies looking at those legal agreements.

Whether this is a good thing for developers, no. Whether it is good for Apple, may be in short term but probably not in long term. A more open policy with the approval process would be ideal.

Yes it makes it easier for users to forget the password. Passwords should be strong enough that brute force attacks aren't easy but some websites try to enforce ridiculously hard password which eventually result in the user forgetting his password. Kinda defeats the purpose.

If you can find a course that teaches finite automata and formal languages you should definitely take that in addition to those already mentioned.

Reading your text is particularly hard with your choice of background color, you need more contrast there. The landing page shouldn't make people scroll to read about your product.

It isn't about whether it looks like Microsoft designed it not but what works effectively. There are a lot of companies that have created a product that doesn't look like it is enterprise oriented in the area you are working on example, http://www.pivotaltracker.com/. I personally don't think the macbook image would in anyway convince me, hacker & small company, to use your product. I am more interested in your product not somebody else's. Hope that helps.

You should consider redesigning the landing page. There is way too much information crammed into one page. Also a screencast the application in action will help. The tour page http://www.stormweight.com/pages/tour asks me to signup I would rather see it action before I signup. You might also want to rethink about the color scheme.

The macbook screenshot is showing off the laptop more than your application.

It's not about the money or may be it's just me I want see my products succeed not just work. If the founders left right after the funding round that just doesn't seem right to me, it isn't fair to the VC's either. I guess we'll never know what exactly transpired unless one of the founders speak up.

Seems like a case of raising too much money too soon and getting kicked out by the VCs. But I could be wrong and I am curious to know the founders side of the story.

Why don't you give your customers both the options? If you host and manage charge them a little more than what the hosting company takes in yearly fee, for maintaining it and don't order it using your credit card. If they rather buy hosting and manage it on their it is still good for you since you don't have to spend time on maintenance.

Nice, I'll be there.

.Net isn't the most terrible framework but it comes with a lot of baggage and some technical problems that would deter startups from using it.

On the web development side ASP.Net is really hard compared to other frameworks out there. Until ASP.Net MVC, there wasn't a quick and easy method to implement URL rewriting for example. On the ORM side they seem to be changing their mind every year they ditched Linq to SQL in favor Entity Framework which really doesn't work as seamlessly as they make it out to be. Add to this the fact the startup has to buy licenses for the server, the costs add up as you scale up. I know there is Mono but there it isn't easy to port everything to it, the implementation isn't exactly complete.

.Net has its place for example if you are writing a Windows only desktop application .Net is by far the easiest framework MS had to support it. I believe Xobini uses .Net. Again writing cross platform desktop applications doesn't look as appealing to me. Silverlight 3 is almost here but it still yet to get font rendering and printing right.

San Diego

Sorry, an article in businessweek doesn't disprove the fact that fact that Apple, Microsoft, Sun and a gazillion other startups were created by entrepreneurs and VCs who were willing take those risks.

Why not right? You may soon get more than just protecting 3rd party developers when the bill to regulate VC funds is passed. I think it will be big blunder. Nobody who is an entrepreneur has any delusions of safety, we know the risks we are taking. The whole reason that this model has worked so far is because people have the freedom to take these risks. Take that away and you will probably end up killing a lot of innovation.

Wow, $20,000 is quite a lot of money, I would rather spend it on surviving a few more months as a startup to make a better product to make my users happy. Who are really the only ones who will eventually make your product popular or unpopular.

May be they are targeting companies that have already been funded.

Option 1 although good it probably won't fly well. The first step to cleaning up the existing mess it to stop rewarding doctors based on the number procedure they apply on a patient to cure them in medicare. That is probably the most insane healthcare practice and I don't think it is done anywhere else in the world.

Once the doctors realize that these current practices are not sustainable they probably will come out with some novel ideas like this one http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4585.html.

It doesn't really make sense to have only for profit health insurance companies, look the executive salaries (http://www.prwatch.org/node/8425#comment-4517). With the amount of money the US government is spending on healthcare it would make a lot of sense for us to have a single-payer system.