zmitri

I did the J-1 trainee program for 18 months and went into an H1B from that. It was ideal for me because I came right out of school without work experience and it made the process very easy.

One downside was that I had to stay in the US between filing for H1B status and receiving it (you file in the spring, but get the status on October 1st) because the H1B is a dual intent visa (meaning you can state that you want to stay in the US permanently and it is not just a temporary visa) in case they questioned me at the border about the conflicting status of my J-1 and H1B petition.

Agree with you. I'm actually unclear what exactly this is a decision tree for because its steps are so subjective.

Definitely isn't the decision tree from first contact to investment - that would be much deeper. It would also have to factor in how much heat there is behind the deal already - which for most seed firms is probably the most important signal! Seems accurate as a decision tree to take a meeting with someone though.

As an exercise, try running some of their portfolio companies through that decision tree and see what kind of results you get.

Getting the attention of the American media is one thing, but Klein was a political dynasty.

Ford has yet to claim that longevity.

Not much worse than Ralph Klein ;)

In case HN wasn't completely aware, most bank "research papers" are content marketing designed to try and get you to buy products from their desk. They are often very biased and should be analyzed with caution.

I don't know much about bitcoin, but I've seen enough "research" from desks to know the analysis is very slanted - hence the page of disclaimers at the end.

Unfortunately I can't make this, but here's an automatic music hack I built at music hack day this year in Toronto:

http://tap-pad.herokuapp.com

It uses cellular automatons to generate music and is completely open source: https://github.com/dmitric/tap-pad-web

there's even an iOS version: https://github.com/dmitric/tap-pad-ios

If someone there wants to play around with the idea I'd be honored!

I noticed this recently as well. I had not seen any ads for a long time as I use AdBlock and AdBlockPlus for Chrome but they have started slipping through in the past few weeks.

Here's the google trends link btw http://www.google.ca/trends/explore?q=twitter#q=twitter&cmpt...

You can see that Twitter survived off blog hype and early adopters for 2 years.

You could argue the same thing about twitter.

Most twitter users don't tweet, they just follow. Getting the big users on board and figuring out they everyday people don't need to tweet was one of the big epiphanies.

If you look at the google trends, they were basically stagnant until 2009 when they made that realization and focused on activating users by getting them to follow a certain number of consistent tweeters.

With consumer stuff, nothing is ever cemented, but I can assure you that RG is doing quite well wrt to growing that community.

I've posted the article to Rap Genius http://news.rapgenius.com/Alex-pham-nmpa-targets-unlicensed-...

I wouldn't be surprised if in half an hour to an hour a lot of that information is annotated for you.

It's hard to see the power of Rap Genius unless you use it, but once you do, you realize it's very much a new protocol in the same vein that pg called Twitter a new protocol in 2009. What's special is that a company owns that protocol, and you don't feel like it's owned by someone else.

I took an interdisciplinary course in University and one of the CS professors did a whole lecture series on research in music and analysis. A lot of beat analysis, understanding rhythms and predicting popularity of songs based on the distribution of the timing between their beats. It was very cool and extremely creative.

Here's his homepage if you want to learn more http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/

Edit: Looks like he recently published a book on it too http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466512023

I use a similar service called Orchard that has a "heroku-like" command line wrapper around the docker client. It's quite nice https://github.com/orchardup/orchard-client

I appreciate you offering up fair counter points. I think anyone who reads this article should take a look at your response to understand what "long hours" can mean in a good way. Definitely agree there's a lot more to discuss.

It's worth noting that the original article is content marketing for that company and they do not explicitly state that "culture consulting" is their business in the article. So it's fair to say they are using this as a mechanism to get more customers, and offering a fair point of view is secondary.

I was talking about a bootcamp they had faith in. Investing money means they have some faith in it.

They invested in One Month Rails (https://onemonthrails.com) so I am guessing they have some faith in that one -- or faith in their growth numbers.

If you don't mind me asking, what percentage of page views are non logged-in users?

I recently had an App rejected too under 10.6 because they said it needed to use more of iOS' features.

I replied back letting them know, that the App was greatly enhanced by the multitouch interface, and asked if they had any suggestions. The App Store reviewer was actually very nice (almost excited that I wrote back?) and reasonable. Their biggest concern was actually relating to lack of iPad specific features/views on the iPad version. It seems Universal apps are reviewed a little more harshly.

I think they have a lot of rules, and sometimes it's hard to keep up the manual review process when they don't see the immediate value of the app. In general, they are quite nice however and will let you know what they are thinking.

For what it's worth I opened sourced the rejected app anyway https://github.com/dmitric/tap-pad-ios

Thanks, I appreciate you being straight up. Would love to know how the articles and writers stand up in your mind.

Pullback started about 2 years ago.

I wrote about my experiences here trying to raise a seed round for an app that had considerable traction for the stage we were at http://blog.zmitri.com/startups/2013/06/14/you-need-a-millio...

Path was just well financed enough to make it this far.

Hey, if you don't mind, would you take a look at this http://www.beaconreader.com and let me know what your thoughts are?

Readers pay a single $5 a month fee, but get access to everything on platform (Over 40 professional journalists). Example of an article http://www.beaconreader.com/eric-randolph/what-one-refugee-s...

This is great work. Would be cool to see some songs that contribute to each data point.

Eg. I would love to know how much http://rapgenius.com/Migos-versace-lyrics and variations contributed to this http://rapgenius.com/rapstats?q=versace

Interested to know what you think about them shutting down then. Seems like they were quite far along... Any insight on what changed their mind or what you will do differently?

All these journalists are established professionals who are hand picked and have followings in the thousands to tens of thousands.

We've had quite a high conversion rate, so I'm pleased with it too. We're selling the journalist as the atomic unit instead of the story, so although people often say "why not show more content?" I don't believe they would convert anyway -- and at such an early stage, I'd rather focus on the people who are passionate about the product and journalism.

Thanks for your thoughts. Really appreciate hearing them. For what its worth, we just launched 2 weeks ago so I would be surprised if you had heard of it.

I'm well aware of the lack of mass consumer appeal right this instant, and you're quite right that niche journalism is exactly what we are going after right now. The pitch will become much more consumer oriented in a few more months when our offering becomes more appealing to "random visitors."

For what it's worth, we think we are building a wedge that ties nicely into this http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html

Hey Paul, I'm the founder of Beacon http://www.beaconreader.com - would be interested to hear your thoughts (if you have any) on the space now. Can I send you an email?

Just setup a sample python web app --> http://162.243.30.160

This is a game changer. Very easy to use, and nicer than using Heroku since you don't have to deal with all the marketplace gouging. Great step forward for Docker.

That is amazing.

The thanks to Moriarty is a nice touch pg.

In response to The Future of Journalism: http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html

You can read a bit more about our thinking on our blog here http://blog.beaconreader.com/post/61376491652/the-reader-wri...

Would love to hear your feedback and thoughts!