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SebMortelmans's comments

SebMortelmans | 14 years ago | on: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

I don't have figures to back it up, but Facebook in Belgium also feels like it's declining. Not necessary new users, that may be still even rising. But mainly active users becoming inactive. Im daring to bet that's declining big in Belgium.

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: Joel Spolsky: Lunch

I always felt there is something special about sharing food with others, it gives a sense of bonding rarely seen elsewhere. For building up a great company culture, food plays in my opinion a pretty big role on many layers.

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: Last.FM for TV Shows

I'm a longtime user, probably one of the first. This has proven to be a vast asset for me to track tv shows.

One negative point though is that since I've discovered this app my tv shows I follow probably increased threefold, which at times has had its consequences regarding productivity :p

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: Why we don't schedule deployments during off-hours

I'm a big advocate of gradual deployment, both in terms of features (limiting your changelog) as towards userbase (not deploying it for everybody at once if it's a sensitive update). Not really too concerned anymore about what time of the day, I think OP has a few valid points there.

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: The Square Grid - New CSS-Grid

I like the idea of designing with a grid in mind (I use the 960 grid for many of my projects), but I never use the CSS framework to convert it to html. I just don't see the point, every design is unique and handcoding is always more perfect/cleaner, yet doesn't take much longer, if at all, to write.

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: How to make your YC application stand out

I think we had 3 or 4 retakes, almost all because we end up laughing. (We have almost an half hour bloopers besides that with random rambling though :p). We did prepare some general subjects, mainly cause my friend had a hard time getting out of his words. He really didn't like doing it but realized it was a necessary evil to being even remotely considered for YC. In hindsight it's far from perfect and our idea has somewhat progressed, but I'm not really going to make him suffer through a re-take so our video stands. It's not perfect but hey, it puts a face on the words, and hopefully it conveys some of our passion, which is the most important about it anyway.

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: Why Startups Should Only Hire Good StarCraft Players

I've did a lot of gaming when I was younger, and always on a super competitive level. I think it's more that personality trait of close to obsessive competitivity that translates into being good employees, or anything they put their mind to for that matter. Some of the things you list are very concrete in-game examples, but I feel can all be summarized as a result of people taking the game more "serious". But you definitely have a point.

Would I ever mention anything about my gaming history on a job interview though? Unless I know the interviewer would be really into it, sadly, no.

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: Bribing maitre d' to skip the line

In Vegas where at check-in, if you slide a 20$ bill with your CC & passport and ask for "any complementary upgrades", you can get a free room upgrade. If you do a quick search you'll notice how common this trick is, and the success rate for most hotels is in the 80-90% region.

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: Heavy drinkers outlive nondrinkers

This is so skewed. 1800 participants, all with different health backgrounds, then divided into 3 groups of heavy, moderate and never. That's not really a sample size to get any definite conclusion from. These results might be a reason to do a more trough research at the most.

The variance on this thing is huge. To tie their drinking habits to their mortality, negating all other factors, on this sample size, is ridiculous.

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: Arcade Fire meets HTML5

I really liked the idea, although a bit rough executed in the beginning, from the letter onwards upto the finale it really all fell into place.

I loved how the birds that flew off the letters were kinda synced with the other 2 popups.

SebMortelmans | 15 years ago | on: DuckDuckGo on This Week in Startups

Great guest indeed.

Jason is a true salesman. He knows how to get people's attention. Controversy is great in helping him just do that. But see through that (obvious) persona; he has incredible insight to share based on his years of experience as entrepreneur. He loves what he does, although he is not directly a hacker, he still is an entrepreneur. One that is willing to share everything he knows and is actively helping the community. He can call me a nerd all day for that.

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