vbrendel

So what email address should I get that will most reduce my risk of crashing my car?

The point here is not what the advantage of phone support is but to provide the service personally. You can outsource anything, but if you read the article, the learnings you get from doing it yourself are invaluably useful.

The article is clearly written by someone who has a vested interest in the incumbents who are now up against Uber and Amazon.

Uber burns cash like pretty much any funded startup but there's nothing in the article suggesting their unit economics are flawed. Is the author really suggesting that competition law should force companies like Uber to set their price higher than the competition?

It's called disruption for a reason.

Me and my co-founder refined our pitching skills somewhat. Overall I wouldn't say it's worth it.

https://www.producthunt.com/

Not generally a good idea, but please post a link to the product to get more specific feedback. A product is not a business yet. Before you sink money into a launch you'd want to go from "I think I have a good product" to "I know I have a good product" (some people refer to this as product-market fit).

Work out which company you would actually want to work with (ask questions) and just do do their friggin puzzles if that's what gets you in the door.

Does orthodontics really fall under cranial deformation? ;-)

This is more than ironic: statuspage.io was affected last week by the Amazon DNS outage! That doesn't seem to get a mention.

There is no way you can know exactly that two workers and two dynos are right. Just start off with Heroku. Maybe even pay for a worker or an extra dyno. Remember you can run multiple instances on a single dyno with eg. unicorn. Once your idea takes off you can deploy using the other posters' suggestions. By that time I thoroughly recommend Cloud 66. https://www.cloud66.com/

According to that article, the 40 comment penalty is applied to all posts. Putting "Show HN" in your post probably didn't change that.

The algorithm for the front page favours newer things and attempts to generate traction for discussions. I'm speculating here but once something hits 40 comments, not only can it be deemed 'controversial' it could also just mean the article may be able to sustain itself better without more eyeballs, and the front page can 'move on' to other newer things.

Ultimately the Hackernews algorithm should prevent anyone using it as a cheap referral source. 40 comments should have given you some valuable feedback, which is what Hackernews is good for, primarily.

The .html 'exception' shouldn't really be that surprising. How many web servers do you know that run on MS-DOS?

No need for status symbols anymore. If you want people to know you are rich, just post it on Facebook.

Take any notion of "beta" off your site. You want people to sign up thinking it's production ready and start test and improving your funnel based on a trickle feed of new visitors. Use A/B testing and talk to people that leave their details on why they did or did not use it and improve accordingly.

Watch this video for background: http://vimeo.com/54118238

Any piece of data that's out there, currently private or not, will ultimately become available to anyone as long as they can find it. This is a tool which speeds up that process.

Can't wait for the Facebook version of this plugin.

At 23 I was still at Uni, a nerd failing at all non-nerdy subjects, no girlfriend, no money, no car. I had hardly any ambitions and failure was the norm I set for myself. But I was pretty happy nonetheless.

Don't let all the hype get to you. Life is not about building Instagrams or WhatsApps, you might as well play the lottery.

So say you can't do it and then you can... sounds like you just have a pre-life crisis.

Set yourself up for a tiny win, like, try and run 10km, or get a first-aid diploma. Fist pump, you're not a failure. Then set your next target. Enrol for uni, flip some burgers. Life is the same for everybody, by the way.

The problem is, you are pretty smart; the nice thing for dumb people is that it's easier for them to be happy but you'll get there, too.

She's clearly serious about this. From her blog:

* 6. LinkedIn. Please do NOT shop through LinkedIn for all the important sounding senior practitioners in town, and ask them to connect. It comes across as bush league, it shows poor judgment, and you are ignoring the fundamental rule of connections – reciprocity. Networking is conducted between individuals who have met or worked with each other, and who can provide equal levels of help to each other. If I would be only the 5th connection you have on LinkedIn, and I’m bringing 800+ connections to the table, what you would get is the ability to harvest my contacts for job leads, and I get – absolutely nothing of use or interest out of accepting your invite.

These types of wishful connection requests come across as self-serving and tacky. Of course, if you’ve been an intern for someone, please ask them to connect. Every professional I know bends over backwards to help their interns, give them recommendations, etc. However, if the only way you met a business leader was because they came to class to speak, please hold off on the presumptuous urge to ask them to connect with you. Right now, your LinkedIn connections should be classmates, professors and the people you worked for at internships or part-time jobs.

You should never have run "Trojan Horse.exe"

Clearly not a good question to ask on HN... surprised bitcoin hasn't been mentioned yet :-)

edit: it has now. I rest my case.

If I was Zendesk, I would do exactly that, fight your trademark. Not that their objections will necessarily hold up. You could arguably defend it, but why bother?

If you say you are friendly with Zendesk, why did you name your product Zen-something if there is no strict affiliation between the companies, it doesn't make any sense, it should be lesson for others. The thing is that "being friendly" is not really tangible in legal terms. In fact it's the "being friendly" part that probably brought this on because if Zendesk hadn't heard of you and their customers weren't using Zenbilling then your application would probably have done through without hassle.

I know, and probably Zendesk do too, that what they are doing isn't strictly "nice" to you. But there wasn't any official partnership or other deal or agreement in place and that ultimately means there is no relationship between the companies.

What you are doing is right, find a new name and move on. But don't let it spoil your "friendship", and although probably there's no room for "favours" anymore, keep your mind open for mutually beneficial agreements instead.

Selling to individuals as non-business does not require any withholding

Chrome users, no need to look further than HipsterNews: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hipsternews/midncc...

Strictly speaking, no. In Australia, businesses cannot pay suppliers unless they have an ABN, otherwise their payment will be subject to Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT). You can take money as an individual without ABN however. With PayPal this is already possible. You can run a small operation eg on ebay but as soon as you call it a business you should get an ABN, but then you also have to pay income tax on what you make.

Please don't write "interwebs". It only works when hearing it, not when you read it.

Couldn't agree more. I joined BugHerd for the same reasons. Pull together and make something great. Too many people try to start companies by themselves.

Facebook's mission is "to make the world more open and connected", which to me does not imply replacing existing forms of communication. The only competitor to ye olde telephone machine is Skype.

Ah, flashback! Or just don't support IE at all (and call it a feature!): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3941799

The only difference is they can't get stolen ;-)

I see too many numbers, it's not immediately clear what for. Maybe create a 5 second test to really help optimise it. http://fivesecondtest.com/

Freshdesk is a cheap clone. I've tried it.

Once all the dust settles, it will be clear that Freshbooks IS a complete rip-off of Zendesk. 'RipoffOrNot.org'... errrm yes. You could think of worse products to rip off, so in that sense they've done well.

I'm not going to point out the obvious stolen elements. Anyone can see the app is not just inspired, but clearly deliberately copied. They've also spent a lot of time reading all the feature requests on the Zendesk forums. There is also an import feature from only one competing helpdesk product. Guess which one.

At the end of the day, Freshdesk is built exactly like any Zoho product (Girish worked for Zoho). And based on how it feels it might as well be a Zoho product: feature wise it ticks a heap of boxes and it's low cost. But to live with it has many limitations that won't stand up in actual real life, as in this case, the running of a help desk. It's seriously lacking workflow, custom widgets, the 100+ 3rd party integrations, and plenty more settings and customizations that make Zendesk what it is.

Zendesk has many decent alternatives but Freshdesk isn't one of them. If you're actually considering Freshdesk there are a huge amount of alternatives including freemium ones. Mojo Helpdesk comes to mind but really the web is full of them.