bdmac97's comments

Maybe I'm blind but I really don't see too much arrogance here. He is admitting that pair programming does NOT work for everyone and the reasons he gives are, to me, compelling and true. He's not evangelizing pair programming as a magic bullet for everyone.

The mediocrity that surrounds a good programmer at a typical enterprise level shop is astounding. It surprises me that they allow some of the people to continue working there! There are a LOT of people out there that got into programming as a way to pay the bills and for those people, pair programming would probably be like torture.

When I tried it for a week I know I didn't feel burnt out. In fact I felt more alive and less tired than I had in years doing shitty waterfall work at IBM.

The reason, for me, was that at the end of a work day I went home feeling like I had actually DONE something of value that day. I felt that way every day. It felt good. By feeling good about what I had done I felt much less like I needed to work at night. I felt that I had "earned" some relaxing time away from work.

I fail to see in that article where it advocates mandated pair programming... In fact I think it does a pretty good job of pointing out when/where pair programming does NOT work (i.e. many environments for the reasons listed). If you happen to work in an environment not conducive to pair programming and they force you to do it... well then...

Heroku!

Isn't Amazon (or Newegg) the cheapest place to buy pretty much anything like that online already?

It seems really silly that you have to CC the recipients and tell them to ignore the message and instead look for a different message from some other address... I think that's gonna be a problem. You should try to figure out another way to handle that.

The element bar guy was awesome and the negotation was fun to watch. I didn't understand the final deal though. The 4% royalty made sense when the VC was wanting to completely buy the company out from under him (100% equity) but once he talked him down to 30% equity I'm not sure what the 4% royalty was about anymore.

I've been thoroughly enjoying the show personally. There are certain parts that are obviously overdone/dramaticized for TV but I'm sure it's necessary for non-entrepreneurs to be interested.

A good sign that it's doing OK is its recent shift into a better time slot (Tuesday nights instead of Sunday nights).

The main problem I can see is that, as with most copies, you are going to lack their insight into that domain which is what makes their product so compelling. You will always be several steps behind them in usefulness and will always be trying to play catch-up by copying their new features rather than innovating. It is likely that things just won't work "smoothly" and will be integrated poorly in your clone compared to the original.

Your text on the main page needs help. You said it right above but on your site you have "Do you tweet? Sure you are." which makes no sense.

The site overall doesn't look very professional (which will make people not trust you).

I can see the use but then I already use cotweet which has this baked right in.

I just had my iPhone "scanned" at MSP at security as my boarding pass... So it's doable.

Uhm... no? Why would it be "dirty" to do that? As long as you have a valid way to access the data you're just doing your customer a favor.

I think it's only dirty if you're not upfront with the customer about what you are going to bring in from your competitor and/or what you're going to do with the data.

Ok, I will play around with that. I was/am just worried that w/out something saying "This is what we do" people will show up and go "Uhm... what?" and then leave.

Maybe a smaller tagline on the homepage not in a banner? The other thing is that banner is carried throughout the site design (and used as extra navigation in other areas) so it would be a bit inconsistent without it.

Hmm, that's not something I've seen happen before. I just tried it on Recipe Puppy and my back button was functioning normally. What browser were you using?

No offense taken. I've got pretty thick skin! Would removal or shrinking of the banner that explains the site move the screenshots up high enough?

I hope that the submissions will be community moderated soon. Downvoting them "enough" will remove them now. The Bollywood/template/static sites are leftovers from before I added the reputation system.

I would certainly pay for feedback on my sites. I have in fact done so with feedbackarmy in the past but was not impressed by the mechanical turks' responses so I made launchly to get real feedback from real people (like we get on HN). I've also used usertesting.com in the past and they were great but aren't really the same thing (although that's one of the upsells I'm planning to add to launchly eventually).

I appreciate your feedback and thank you for the clickable link.

The banner text is there to try to tell people what the site is about on the landing page. I didn't want them to have to go to another page to figure that out since normally I believe that is considered a bad thing if they HAVE to read an about page. You're right though that the information is a bit disjointed. The "What's a Launch?" link is meant to be more of a feature tour (maybe I should just call it that). The About page is supposed to serve as a standard about page that tells what the idea is, why it's different, etc etc. Is it not common to have both these days?

I have seen the problem with the voting widget before and will look into it, thank you! The pop-up is for category voting, the big up/down arrows are for overall.

To clarify, the site offers a few things:

a) Iterative (multiple rounds) of feedback. The site was basically created because this seemed to be frowned upon on HN. Maybe I won't get boo'd off stage this time since it's been two months in between! b) Analytics. We track a number of specific things pertaining to your launch and then graph them for you to track how your launch is performing over time. c) Exposure. Your launch is actively pushed out to our primary audience (and anyone else watching social media streams). You also get front page attention on our site and depending on your launch's quality you could make the hottest launch or highest rated lists as well. If your app is especially standout (like Guestlist and TweetBlocker) I'll also give it a full review/write-up on the blog.

HN and an "Ask HN" post are great ways to get feedback and exposure for your site but I think we can do better!

1) HN's primary function is not to serve as an app review forum so by using Launchly in addition to HN (all you would have to do is follow on Twitter or RSS, not visit daily like HN), HN can go back to being about... well... Hacker News! I'm not saying review my site posts do not belong here but I think there is room for a dedicated community. 2) Launchly offers analytics that are not offered here and a comment system that is better-suited to feedback (screenshot attachments are just the first improvement, more to come). 3) Many times app launches get lost in the madness that is HN and go without any (or very little) feedback. Sometimes they end up with very little exposure as a result (heavy news day for example). That won't happen on launchly so if you really want feedback, we would be a better option.

At this point in time, Ask HN may still get you more exposure than you get on launchly because of sheer numbers but we're growing and if people start participating in the community soon that won't be the case.

The pricing is still in flux and I'm not sure where it will end up. It's always easier to go down than up though! There is a Basic, free plan as I'm sure you saw. The Plus plan adds guaranteed feedback plus the full suite of analytics. I plan to add further differentiators as the site grows.

I will work on decluttering the site, thank you!

Thanks for the feedback. I really need to relocate the blog link somewhere else.

I have been playing with the tagline quite a bit and you're right, I don't think I've found one that works quite right yet.

Well for starters it would make conversions from free to paid that much more confusing and unlikely... I have to switch to a different website to get these other features???? What about all my friends on this website? Uh... wait, what? They're the same people? I'm confused!

Hey thanks for mentioning launchly jbr. That was very kind of you. Completely agree with everything you said too.

It took quite a bit of work for me to make all the necessary changes to get that reputation system in place last week and I really hope it has the positive effect that I think it will. Hopefully the amount of feedback will start creeping up.

Also note that registered users can provide additional profile details now on launchly such as a bio and link to a website. This is another possible way to promote your own startup by giving quality feedback to other startups. If people view your profile (either from your feedback or the leaderboard) they may just click through to your site/service!

My first comment is that it loads VERY slowly. I mean like ridiculously, painfully, unacceptably slowly... Nobody outside a venue like this would wait that long. Especially considering while it loads I have absolutely no clue what the site is or does.

Even your navigation is in Flash so while the huge thing loads there is literally NOTHING to do.

That's your biggest problem for sure. Fix that before you even think of anything else.

Second, is it CribSpace or CribScribble?

Third, even after waiting that painful time for it to load I'm not sure what exactly I'm looking at.