ssebro

Most definitely - we love honesty. Can you flesh out your comment a little? I think most businesses have problems getting traction to start out - what specific challenges are you seeing?

Great feedback. You can press esc to exit the nudge dialog - we purposefully made it hard to exit because we wanted people to engage in seemingly silly questions, because in our experience, that's when you have breakthroughs. As an aside, we've also noticed that the tool doesn't work unless you have a legitimate problem that you care about and are trying to solve - made up problems just don't cut it.

I agree that we could do better at communicating progress and more about the process - I think this is one of the major things we need to work on.

We're not thinking about charging for it right now, it's just a proof of concept to answer the question "Can software make someone more creative"?

We're not worried about people leaving and applying the skills elsewhere, since what we've seen in practice is people who've paid thousands of dollars to learn these skills revert to their old habits once real problems pop up.

Thanks a lot for giving it a shot, and for your feedback!

The URL is http://beta.monsterlumen.com, and I'll be sticking around in the comments to get your feedback!

Please, please fix "I am a good writer, the content that I create is quiet good (I think)". That's the first line of your paragraph about gramatical oversights, and you say "quiet" instead of "quite". Also, the "(i think)" makes me feel like you're not a professional.

ALSO, I'm sure you can hire someone on craigslist to give your work a second read for gramatical mistakes, if that's really a blind spot you care about.

But I worry, are you even trying to get better? It sounds like you've accepted your current skill level as a fixed balance that can't improve, when that's probably not the case.

I agree. I can't help but feel that MIT's brand is being terribly tarnished. It certainly wasn't worth it.

I would imagine they would give the digital good away for free, and add it as a separate line-item in checkout, so vat would be 15% of $0.

I think the average InstaCart customer doesn't realize that per-item prices are higher. I didn't.

I noticed you guys used the same form UI as Barack Obama's donation page. I like it!

I agree with most of what you said. Sharing needs to be #1 to have viral growth. Large audiences are required for IAP and Advertising to make sense (I'd also add freemium to that list). An intrinsically leaky funnel needs even heavier viral growth to get to those large audiences. Heavy viral growth is probably going to be at odds with privacy.

But I think you need to pay attention to what others are saying. If you can't get users to complete a series of tasks to get to your value proposition, either the (expected) value you're offering is too low, or the expected probability of getting that value is too low.

In other words, with a high enough value proposition, you should theoretically be able to get someone to do something EXTREMELY difficult.

What stops other investment firms from making identical blanket investments, or how do you guys plan to stop that?

This is patently not true, and a very low-value article. Pay per use has been around just as long as SAAS, and most businesses prefer knowing what they will pay rather than getting variable bills, because

1) they're risk averse and want to know what pricing they're signing up for (pay-per-use is often much more difficult to figure out what you'll wind up paying in the end)

2) most businesses operate within known budgets, and introducing new software on a pay-per-use basis may hurt their ability to accurately plan those budgets.

What's the difference between your site optimizer and cloudflare's optimization?

That's an interesting powerpoint at the bottom of the techcrunch article.

I see your argument that slower page loads leads to less engagement and higher bounce rates, and I'm somewhat skeptical - how do you know that your data isn't saying that more engaging websites are faster because they're more engaging?

If being engaging is correlated with delivering more value, they're likely more profitable and more able to invest in higher quality engineering & infrastructure than other sites. This would likely lead to decreased load times. In other words, how do you know the cause from the effect?

I think the only way to make the argument you're trying to make is to compare each website with itself when loaded slower.

I think you missed my point. I'm saying that fizzbuzz is very, very unlikely to be something you should use for evaluating someone's experience.

What I'm pointing out is a fundamental problem with coding problems.

FizzBuzz is a relatively simple problem to solve, so if fizzbuzz fails as a test for coding ability, then it's fairly likely that all coding problems fail.

There's are probably better metrics (faster, more uniform, etc) that you could use to figure out how good a coder is.

For example, one thing I've noticed is that I'm fairly aware of the skill levels of everyone I've ever worked with. I think it might be interesting to see how peers rate each other (A players can tell A players, and so on)- maybe that would be the metric that's most useful. All I know is that FizzBuzz probably isn't it.

One last thing I need to add: the people who are dramatically more productive coders are not always dramatically more productive because they code faster or better. It's often because they enact/enable processes that amplify the other developers. (e.g. the developer who pushes the company to have a hackathon, or the dev who creates machine images preconfigured for deploying test and dev builds).

Yip. I wonder if it makes more sense to focus on bd (for hn, this was building the YC brand) once you reach some measure of product market fit... Very interesting observation.

A better metaphor would be those things happening and your boss saying "solve fizzbuzz in 10 minutes or we'll fire you". (or we'll fire you == not getting the job/failing the interview).

The big difference between the two metaphors is that mine has direct impact on your personal life and negative consequences are gonna be seen as your fault, while yours is a company threat - fixing it will get you seen as a hero, not a disgraced villain.

I have to agree with this one. It sounds absolutely crazy that the average engineer can't write fizzbuzz during an interview.

But if you take a second and think about it, how the hell could these same people who fail fizzbuzz write production code in previous companies? Are you really saying that you believe that fizzbuzz is more complicated/difficult than their previous work?

As someone who's run lab experiments and who's seen a bunch of surprising results, trust me when I say that shocking results usually mean that you're running a test that you don't understand.

In this case, you're probably testing for a host of things that have nothing to do with day-to-day engineer performance.

Done.

Thanks for that feedback - I'll add a "tour" section in the near future.

If you're interested in doing this for your work life, check out my startup: www.impacttrail.com . We're currently in super early MVP, but it's open to the public.

I think they would have done better to design a dongle for keys instead. People are already used to keyfobs.

Context is what matters here. You're a terrible programmer for established businesses building products they know people want (so it has to be rock solid and easy to maintain/upgrade). But you're great at churning out MVPs, which is really all startups need. The second a startup moves from an MVP, it no longer is a startup - they've proven their business and are building things like betas, where they know exactly what users want and are delivering on that.

If you try to sell this to the distributor, either they'll clone it, buy it outright or ignore it.

Actually, I take some of this back. If the upstream provider can make significant profits by selling this as an add on, then you're in business.

It's usually easier to sell to someone who's experiencing a pain than it is to an upstream provider. In other words, if it was a big enough issue that you built something to fix it, and your apartment complex hasn't fixed it themselves, you probably aren't going to suddenly convince them to buy in (since they don't see the pain, or don't care).

Sell pain killers to people in pain.

Check out how Lockitron is marketing their product - yours can deliver similar value, except to residents of apartment complexes. https://lockitron.com/preorder

I would first figure out the size of the market, then pick a price point (informed by the size of the market + the pain solved by your solution), then a marketing strategy (target either building management or individuals).

While most people on HN are telling you to market to the apartment complexes, I think you might want to market towards individuals, since they are the ones who feel the pain that you alleviate. You can target apartment complexes if you alleviate some pain that they have (maybe having your system is something they can include in marketing materials, which will get them more occupants/better occupancy).

The best thing about targeting individuals is that you may be able to get them to market for you (see dropbox), and that they will cross pollinate your solution to new apartment complexes when they move.

You're clearly wrong: if using TLDR didn't deliver some sort of value, nobody would do it. Your argument is similar to how my parents argue about texting - you just don't get it, and because of a cultural mismatch, you probably never will. But as an entrepreneur, you need to be able to notice when you don't understand something, and you need to be above disregarding trends because you don't understand them - you should be trying to understand rather than just giving up and saying "this is stupid".

Separately, there are several reasons why people read tons of news articles they don't really care about. In general, they fall within rewards of the self (desire for mastery, completion, etc). For more info, check out http://www.nirandfar.com/ and pay attention to his explanations of the different types of random rewards that drive behavior.

His point is that he thinks that many people with the square card reader never read any cards. He's right - unless there's a government subsidy that I don't know about, Square does not make money from every user.

I've had a similar thing happen to me, but I was able use a python script to pull the (hidden, old) files from a cache on my machine. http://www.dropboxwiki.com/TipsAndTricks/RestoreFilesAndDire...

I'm seeing this ploy more and more - come join us, and if you're awesome we'll fund you and help you get set up. But the pitch doesn't scale (unless you're not just running a company, but also an investment firm). Is there a place for a company that helps you scale this?