cmapes's comments

Startups selling a business product need to focus on a salesforce, direct marketing methods that are profitable, and getting in front of real paying customers.

But startups producing social media products, or consumer applications that are freemium or passively monetized will not benefit with sales. They need marketing via PR, social media, or viral mechanisms baked in early on into the app.

Let's not overgeneralize.

I think like most things in good UI design, the rule is:

"Make common user tasks as friction-less as possible."

Now, when a common user behavior is to use the main menu to switch between many different places in the app, then yes, hiding that menu from the user introduces an additional step. That creates additional friction. A permanent menu would be a good idea in that case.

But, if the most common use case involves a user mostly navigating from a main page (like a timeline or feed), then hiding the menu becomes less of a big deal. They will "organically" navigate through content from the timeline. Therefore allowing more space for the main element (the timeline) makes sense and increases the quality of the user experience.

As a plus, removing items from the screen helps make the action that you'd prefer the user to perform more obvious. That increase conversions in a context when you want the user to do certain things.

Lets focus on good UI/X design, which is often case dependent. No need to evangelize one particular approach and condemn another as being worthless (especially when you have weak reference studies).

What a letdown, tried to buy two and realized that it was Canadian only. I was trying to hack around and see if I could get the site to accept US address info by forcing it past the JS validation and the item expired while in my cart. Seems it was a price mistake and they found out about it.

Yeah, you can't. I don't watch cable television, I just use the internet access. So unless I feel like donning a standard cable television package + HBO for $120+/mo I can't get access to HBO Go. It's a shame, I'd certainly be willing to pay for just HBO.

This is a nice step in the right direction, but I'd be willing to pay $/mo extra to get the latest episodes of Game of Thrones.

This was my first impression as well. It seems to me that if you're allowed to spend the $37m to officially "own" the property then it would logically follow that you should be allowed to alter it or decide you don't feel like having random people on it. If not, then the road should be state owned with all surrounding property private.

I recognize that there's complex case-law here that differentiates between those varying shades of grey, but that's just my (unpopular) opinion.

My Dad died from metastatic stage-IV melanoma. The gene therapies (which were extremely expensive) weren't effective beyond adding maybe an extra 6-8 weeks.

I'm interested if the tuberculosis actually "killed" the melanoma or if it caused an unusually aggressive autoimmune response that happened to knock out the melanoma. I'd like to see if there's a case study available on that treatment method.

Somehow this is extremely profound. After playing this, I feel like I need to digest my feelings for a while.

Quick correction to the article: Gwynne Shotwell is not the President & CEO, she is the President & COO. It's very well known that Elon Musk is the CEO.

This.

I just drafted a stock purchase agreement for my business partner and I on our new startup and one of the basic boilerplate additions to the stock purchase / vesting agreement is a spousal agreement to the terms of the purchase.

The communal property law only relates during a divorce were the shares are split up between the couple by the courts. Any decently written stock purchase agreement has a first right of refusal for the company to purchase back those shares in the event of an involuntary transfer.

That was a great read, I usually HATE stories that come from Slate but this partially redeemed them in my mind.

This is ballsy but cool. Being a full stack business guy, full stack developer, and someone who had done years of freelance in the past, I'd be afraid of the scope creep and complexity issues that are going to rear their head. But more power to you for choosing to try to tackle them, I hope you end up on top.

You're correct. If I'm not mistaken the RAD750 is a chip made by a BAE systems.

Sadly that's probably pretty accurate.

The biggest question is what was you and your co-founders' legal agreement in the bylaws/operating agreements regarding equity given in exchange for assigning your IP (earlier code hackery) to the entity?

If you don't have any sort of a defined equity arrangement in legal contracts, then you have a problem. It's time to speak with an attorney.

If you have some sort of share vesting schedule which will grant you an equity ownership percentage that you consider "fair" then you should consider moving from your current operational position as a software engineer to somewhere else if you want to stay in operations. Otherwise you can sit it out, keep your equity, and participate at the board level.

There will be lots of advice to just "forget about it and walk away". I believe the advice to essentially just "sit back and take it" to be idiotic. If your original positioning on the team was to be "the guy who programs the first iteration of the software that gets us to market" and you failed at that, I can understand where they're trying to push you out as a co-founder. You essentially were a technical co-founder who only partially fulfilled his/her original promise. No offence. In their eyes, you misrepresented yourself, even if that's untrue because they scope-creeped way past your skill level. But the fact is that there WAS some weight that was pulled by you. So you deserve at least partial compensation, whether or not its in the form of equity (if this was promised to you) or payment, or both.

There's some important variables here that have't been covered (mainly current legal agreements) but the main point I'd drive home is stand up for yourself and don't allow yourself to get power played. Yes the situation is sour, but you should be able to get the rest of your founders to agree that you DID contribute something, (as evidenced by the fact that the CTO wants you to leave in the future, not now) so you deserve some equity/payment even if you end up just leaving with it and participating in a liquidity event in the future.

TL;DR If no legal agreements: attorney. If legal agreements w/vague equity terms: attorney. If legal agreements w/ defined equity program you can live with: leave operations, participate at the board level, get bought out at a premium, or just hold equity and wait for a liquidity event.

Make sure there's some restrictions keeping the board from authorizing 1000000000000000 shares and diluting you out too. Good luck!

This is the important question. I've seen copy for largely untargeted convert at wildly different rates dependent on the copy quality and the quality of what's being offered.

No one has a rom? Seems less messy.

I realized that 2048 has quickly become the first code-meme of HN.

You really should do a blog post about it, the first thing I did after admiring the animation was pull open the inspect panel to see how it was done haha. I would love to read more about it.

At 1023 pages, this book should do the job.