the new york times has had something similar to this for years.
you can highlight words and it will show a "question box" that you can click to see more information about the word, google search, etc. it's displayed inline so you don't need to navigate away.
these are pretty sub-par questions that were probably written by a marketing person: "But completely opting out of the platform won’t allow you to play any games and other third party features on the site?"
and this is one of the first times that i have ever seen 0 comments on a NYT post, especially on a topic this controversial. am i just missing something? where are all the comments? (when i tried to post mine, i got a message that all comments are pre-moderated.)
I'm in Maine right now. Here's a warning message from chatroulettemap.com that I see when I visit:
"We'd like to advise maine.edu to stop using
student's names in their hostnames.
We've decided, at least for the time being, to
hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable
information was found in some entries."
Get in touch with your school newspaper (if you have one.) I wrote for mine throughout college and I know that editors are ALWAYS looking for articles from people like you. Trust me, the campus wants your voice, you just have to be proactive about it.
it really disappoints me to see users with very high karma levels making such obscene, unnecessary and completely non-hacker-news-esque comments. you are hurting this community: please stop.
I live outside of Boston, where the median home price is way north of 500k. And living in a rich area doesn't make you rich - I can attest to that personally, too: I rent, I eat ramen.
But I know that if someone made this proposition to me, in the Boston area, I'd expect something in return. I don't think asking for a meal or some beer is out of line. It's more symbolic than anything.
If you're not in the position to buy me a dinner in exchange for a few hours of my services, then I really wonder if you're in the position to start a company. No offense intended - but if you are about to go the VC route, then the VC will be asking you to make a lot bigger personal bets than a simple dinner.
But anyway, this is all speculation, and HackerNews isn't a place for speculation. I'd go back and edit my comment, but the edit window is expired. C'est la vie, mod me down accordingly.
I really didn't have anything negative to say about the Craigslist post - we've all seen this sort of naivety before. Most of us have even been there.
But what really bothered me personally is that this was posted in the Boca Raton Craigslist area. If you can afford to live in Boca (median home price: 420k, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bpretire/2006/snapsh...), you can afford to at least provide some form of compensation (beer? pizza? caffeine? hell, just take me out to dinner and I'll help draw up some cost estimates.)
Maybe I'm generalizing based on an area (and who has spare cash around nowadays anyway), but I'm so tired of people with plenty in the bank asking me to develop an idea for free.
If you have a "considerable history in marketing," you should know better.
do you have any links to those "well-worn rules of thumb"?
i'm looking at building a "purchase!" button, that's obviously quite important in the whole scheme of my site, so i'd really appreciate anyone pointing me in the right direction...
I think one line of thinking in acquisitions is not just to get control of a product, but rather to take that startup team under the Google wing.
I am a firm believer in the idea that the most important asset that a company can have is its employees - even Google. Granted - acquiring a company and forcing the employees to work within the Google system is a piss-poor way of getting someone to work for you, but ultimately, how else can you get those crazy entrepreneaurs to work for you?
This acquire-to-hire plan backfires all the time - under performance, stagnation of the acquired product, etc etc, but I can see the appeal to it. At least, in theory.
this is my favorite quote, from the "Be Silly" section:
"If you want to publish a paper in economic theory, there is a safe approach: make a conceptually minor but mathematically difficult extension to some familiar model. Because the basic assumptions of the model are already familiar, people will not regard them as strange; because you have done something technically difficult, you will be respected for your demonstration of firepower. Unfortunately, you will not have added much to human knowledge."
be silly. do something completely different. the normal ideas that techcrunch spits out day after day are played out, do something revolutionary.
I think it's important to note that this was not a public meeting for all CEOs of all companies everywhere - just their portfolio companies. Sequoia asked the CEOs to keep everything private, but then the notes leaked, then the slides leaked, and then Sequoia was forced to discuss it. Splitting hairs, maybe, but I think it's an important distinction.
yeah, that's fine. script kiddies run scripts that other people make. but very few people can say that they took down yahoo. i mean, that's not a typical script kiddie success story, is it?
talk him down all you want, but i remember what it was like when this guy was doing his work (however you want to judge it.) he made headlines. script kiddies don't make headlines, what they do has already been done and automated before them. there was something original to his work, even if he was just using an original combination of scripts. that makes him a hacker, imho.
I love biking: I ride a fixed gear to school almost every day, it's only a few miles and I can get to class faster if you include the time it takes to park and walk to class.
The health benefits for riding a bicycle are a fantastic reason to start and continue doing it.
But one thing I would just like to point out to everyone - you are going to pay for fuel, either way. You might not be paying for oil when you bike, but you definitely need to pay for food. If you are trying to lose weight and reduce your calories, I guess you can afford to eat less, but eventually you'll need to eat a lot (really, it's a noticeable increase) of food to make up for your exercising. And that costs money - so I really wonder about the savings gained from biking.
This shouldn't detract anyone from riding a bike, I'm just sayin'.
i come from a somewhat similar background (i'm 23).
to add on: this is why i'm very happy with .NET. the overlap between web apps in ASP.NET and client based apps is large. no mac or linux, obviously. recently i've started building a small windows app again, and i've been so pleased by how quickly and smoothly it's been - even though it's been years since i've worked on a windows app.
when i first saw this post title - i instantly thought in my head, hey - doesn't rescuetime do that?! i absolutely love their product. i'd work for them in a heartbeat if my skillz were better.
i don't think client-based apps are dying, at all. if anything, rescuetime is showing that they are on the rebound. good work, guys.
Couldn't agree more with the idea with about ignoring companies that say they need $5-$10 mil in order to be a "viable business." Today's companies (look at ycombinator) can do that with much, much less. $1-$2 mil seems like a good level - more than I would personally need! :)
To restate/clarify my original point (messed up the thread, my bad): getting a valuation of $25 mil to $50 mil, with a TOTAL investment of $1-$2 million is very hard. Google and a few choice companies may have done that, but I think that's definitely the exception. A lot of good companies are out there that aren't Googles (take over the entire market in 5 years) that deserve investment, as well.
These investments might not produce a valuation of $25-$50 mil after 5 years (like Google, etc etc) - but maybe they would after 10, 12, 15 years. This is where I think we agree.
I bristled at this:
"A business that needs no more than $1-$2 million in financing to become a $25-$50 million (exit value) company, simply by executing the core business plan."
That is an insane requirement for return. I'm not sure how that's even possible - or if any company has even managed to do that. Someone prove me wrong?
you can highlight words and it will show a "question box" that you can click to see more information about the word, google search, etc. it's displayed inline so you don't need to navigate away.
it's a nice idea, but it's terribly annoying.