marshally's comments

Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!

I love the smell of satire in the morning. Especially Fridays.

That SMS authentication flow is slick!

The headline is inflammatory linkbait.

The article context is thoughtful, introspective, and focused mainly on what India could change internally to be more inclusive and help give people a leg up.

It is disappointing that the headline is drawing the online discussion away from the meat of the article.

But such is linkbait.

I wouldn't say I've been missing it, Bob

Refunded license for Ignition Deck: $299

Transaction fees associated with refund: a few dollars

Making an ass of yourself in public? Priceless!

NOTE: I am not connected to this firm, just thought the model was interesting.

Even engineers need a bit of the Steve Jobs mojo:

"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."

Just like in product design, a great software architecture is often defined even more by what you choose /not/ to do than what features you choose to implement.

Awesome article, thanks!

Why do I have to be an EU Citizen to use snooze? I tried to sign up for a trial account, but was blockaded. :(

Value Prop: Your value prop is clean and simple and I think you do a good job of explaining it. For improvements, you might try telling a story to build an emotional connection with the reader. I think your sales pitch is kind of feature driven, when you really want benefits. Your video might be more effective if you show how Snooze can save your ass in a story driven way.

Layout Suggestions: The class "text-3" explination bits are too tiny compared to the headline on the front page. Text is also too small to read on the Tour page.

Video Suggestions the video's placement on the homepage is jarring. especially at the start of the presentation. can you make the background of the video's splash page blend in more with the existing HTML/CSS? It currently feels kind of Picture in Picture. IMO Vimeo does a better job of removing the player's chrome (play pause stop buttons) and getting out of the way of your content.

CLI Suggestions

Read from/manipulate the crontab itself from inside your cli. Even people who love cron hate writing crontab entries. If you could turn some of that into plain english, many people would be more excited about using your service. I think many of the parsing issues here are handled in other rubygems like whenever.

example:

snooze cron - would list all of the crontabs snooze cron monitored - would list all of the crontabs that are already monitored

etc.

Good luck!

Saying that Github's switching costs are zero ignores the vibrant community that is in place. It is in effect like saying that Facebook's users have zero switching costs to jump over to Diaspora.

I picked up an MBA in 2001-2003 and I couldn't agree more.

Did I learn a lot? Absolutely.

Did I meet some great people? Sure.

Worth the expense? Hell no. I could have plowed that money into a startup and learned 10x as much in 1/2 the time.

These days skip the MBA, join a startup incubator, and use the saved hundred grand or so as runway for your startup.

Exception: Ivy League schools put you in a "boys club" for the rest of your life that will open doors at startups, banks, service providers, Venture Capital firms, etc. If you are going to spend the money, for heaven's sake go to Harvard, Stanford, or somewhere else with the killer network.

I was really disappointed when they bought Mint.com.

Now they will have solid gold toilets too?

Inconceivable!

I currently use oh-my-zsh on a daily basis, but recently I've been thinking about switching back to the plain old bash shell. I have been frequently stung when new libraries come out that only support bash.

Heroku is a great way to get your app up and out there quickly. Get in front of users and then iterate on your product. The perceived cost of Heroku won't turn out to be an issue until you've scaled out to many dynos.

Don't fret optimizing your hosting bill until it gets large enough to be an issue!

Another important factor here is the amount of reserves that are held back from each $1 of premiums input into the system.

For a single payer system, the idea of reserves is non-sensical (similar to the farce of the 'social security trust fund' which makes zero sense from a macro economic perspective). I would make the point that reserves are a waste product of an insurance based system.

or you could just use HAML (or NHaml, GHRML, etc.)

Dan Pink's TED talk on the Science of Motivation shreds the notion of bonuses and performance pay.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Joe Bob says "check it out."

Facebook is already a daters delight. It has facilitated more hookups to date than Match.com.

You can browse your social graph, find out who is single, check out their pics, their profiles, and the minutia of what they ate for breakfast last Tuesday. If you like what you see, you can send them all manner of messages through platform features (would you like to "poke" Jennifer? "Poke"? Really?). And if you wind up in a relationship with this person, you both can mark that on your profiles (and later, so can you mark your Bukowskian divorce).

Facebook Connect, Farmville, and the fact that your Grandmother signed up for an account has not changed the fact that Facebook's roots are in helping college kids hook up for date.

"Well, there's a billion people in China. If I can just gain 1% of that market, and sell one soda per year to each of them ..."

An identity stealing telephone?

The kids these days.

Back when I was your age, we had to join a secret government agency, just to get a telephone installed in our shoes! And the fax technique involved standing on a waffle iron. Can you imagine?