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rustartup

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What you have just said is exactly egotism. From wikipedia: "Egotism is the motivation to maintain and enhance favorable views of self."

and also:

"Various forms of "empirical egoism" can be consistent with egotism, as long as the value of one's own self-benefit is entirely individual."

It just comes out in the difficult situations like doing a startup (in a war, etc).

That particular thread shows how people fight to remain egotists. Seems like me alone do not care about favorable view of myself (think karma)

a good thing to remember is that almost everyone out there and here on HN is a egotist first and a hacker (worker, etc) second

There seems to be some confusion among the HN user about the actual starup definition. Many people call a startup even outside projects and websites made for fun.

PG says "The essential task in a startup is to create wealth", that pretty well rules tarsnap out as a startup, I guess.

What I like about techstars - they don't pretend to be unique. Instead of going to some bizzare place like NY or whatever (they seem don't like SF) just to generate buzz they go to Boston, the most logical place for them to go to to attract more healthy attention. But people still generate buzz :)

Great work, but ... looks like an example of completely missing the basics of the customer needs. Do we really need good design to start taking shots? Think about us already missing a year of pictures. Sorry for making it sound sharp.

Keep in mind that you don't have that much time. More than one RoR bastard will know about your website soon and frankly it takes only couple of weeks of fulltime developement to produce a service like yours.

Well, you won't talk to hundreds of applicants after the initial text-only review. And to talk to rest - in my opinion - could be much more valuable in the sense of not putting people into uncomfortable position, if only its not the exact goal of that approach.

Now these rejected will start asking themselves how bad they had been presenting.

I've had experience of beign rejected by both, and have got better feelings with TechStar :) Well, the ideas were different too, so it triggered different reactions.

But overall, techstars do good job offering more opportunities for the startups.

I wouldn't call 'Free trial' the 'original freemium model' Surely, its the original 'try-before-you-buy' model.

So we're left with only two options:

1) Active free users - adding value by doing something, like creating content

2) Passive free users - adding value by just using the service, like attracting others on a dating site

Users that neither do something useful nor attracting others should be forced out (?) or forced into the paying group (maybe by offering a fix length period).

This will be another way to look at 'try-before-you-forced-out' model, where one can prove her usefulness to the service

"And almost without exception, organizations are run by people who want to protect the old business, not develop the new one."

Even this alone is enough for a smart startup to succeed in the field of horrible and established competition

they didn't change it for the same reason that they didn't do nice design, IMO.

tagworld.com is really complex thing despite its simplicity from the outside. It has unique user base and handles around 1000 requests per minute. It uses around 20 web servers and 20 other servers for db, file storage, video/photo converting.

All code is written from scratch and .Net is great in maintaining the developement process. C# compiles and most errors get caught before deployment. In addition there is a buit in mechanism for validating dynamic pages, which also helps a lot. For some time we used to deploy the whole thing daily, with active users on the site.

.Net is more for the corporate world with lots of legacy code and outside apps. It just can't be done almost with any language except java.

All spoken here do not understand .Net enough. I worked for tagworld.com and this web project is "quite" big. Viewstate and drag'n'drops and the like are nowhere used.

.Net is NOT for web sites, it is for web projects, really big and heterogeneous, with lots of services behind.

For other please use php and the like, with "quick submit to db" approach.

read this great post: http://www.gobignetwork.com/wil/2007/1/5/forget-about-the-so...

The smartest entrepreneurs aren't the ones who figure out the solutions to big problems, they are the ones who actually understand the value of those big problems. Smart entrepreneurs focus on the very essence of why the problem exists and the pain it causes. Then, when they find a solution that works, they know how valuable the solution really is.

Windows server software changed since and its now can be just the right platform as well as Linux/Apache.

Though Windows costs more, its not thousands and even not hundreds of dollars difference, its only 25-30 USD for the Windows Sever 2003 license per server. Client software doesn't matter at all.

For that price you get complete set of all required for web app technologies and tools: Windows Server 2003, IIS 6, Asp.Net 2.0, SQL Server developer edition.

In addition there is a free version of MemCached for Windows.