brico

why should it be worthwhile and why should it add value to society? if registering were free i'd see your point or if not everybody were allowed to register

how would you play football? for every goal a team scores you have to score an own-goal or let the others score because it would be unfair otherwise?

some say that the future will be app-based and that domain-names and tlds will be a thing of the past, we'll see.

I know a lot of people who say they hate squatters, then they have an "awesome idea" for a project, they'll register 10 domains, the project is never finished and they put their page on sedo in the hope someone clicks on an ad or buys the domain and they won't let go because it's just $10 a year and maybe they'll someday finish their page.

I honestly don't get the hate for squatters, they registered the domain, they were quicker than others and why should they sell their domainname just because someone else wants it badly? that's not how business works.

if you really want or even need a domainname then offer $3k and you'll get it, otherwise look for alternatives, but stop whining

Yes it's mind-boggling, e.g.: Bayern Munich is valued at $1.2 billion

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/17769654

What I don't get: couldn't you build something like Evernote for let's say $500mm from scratch? It's not a company, it's a smartphone app!

Maybe you can register a domain or add a directory to an existing domain of yours where you create a project page.

You can blog about your progress, you can offer adspace on your page which might sell better than a name/company in the readme.

Kickstarter let's you basically preorder a product that lacks investors.

Being a startup investor has become the game rich people love to play. There are people who'll fund anything in return for a small percentage of the company in the hopes it might be the next Google/Facebook/Paypal ...

Billionaires don't want to be in the smallprinted section of the forbes-list, they want to be "legends" like Peter Thiel or Andy Bechtolsheim and want their name in the history books

How is the service able to verify the key? In the screenshots it says "Could not decrypt data (Wrong key ?)"

Shouldn't a wrong key decrypt the text to just unreadable garbage?

This has nothing to do with their politics, it is simply the fact that they offer an alternative, people will vote for them because they don't feel represented by the other parties.

They are new, they are cool, they have an "anti-authoritarian" vibe, they will achieve nothing and be forgotten in a couple of years.

The funny thing is, the "Greens" are considered old, they have achieved nothing (there's still a massive oil dependency, there are still nuclear reactors, ...) and now they panic :)

Edit: the Pirates can gain traction by promising people "if we only had the power, we could do this or that" and they can increase their popularity by simply critisizing the current parties in power ("we would have it done some other way, we would have [insert popular opinion]") but in the end they will change nothing, just read up on the history of the Greens and just replace the name with Pirates

I've got the feeling that because of the Google/Apple/Microsoft-rivalry a lot a companies are bought just so that the others don't get them.

Company X wants to buy this popular startup? Ok, we don't need it but if they want it, they need it and we can't let that happen, let's buy them.

I can't stand the "good enough" crowd, I hate it when people aim for mediocrity.

It takes the same amount of time and energy to go from zero to "OK" as from "OK" to "good". From "good" to "very good" is even harder. So a lot of people (I see this a lot with artists, I'm sure it's the same with startups) stop at "OK", then see how hard it is to stand out from the crowd and how much more effort it takes and hope to being discovered (=someone doing the work and taking them to the next level and making them rich) And then they start whining because everybody tells them how talented they are.

Exactly! Good record labels book venues, organize travel, handle the legal stuff like insurance etc, they are well connected and know people at the radio stations and know the bloggers, they can introduce them to other bands/producers/video editors, ... in short: they make sure that the band can concentrate on their music and that the target audience knows about them

So record labels won't go away, they should maybe rename themselves because of the automatic negative response you get when you hear the word "record label"

The technology is awesome but the commercial I saw yesterday doesn't do it justice.

Show someone repairing a car and the glasses display vital information while both hands are somewhere on the engine or show someone cooking a meal while a chef from the other part of the world is watching and giving advice. You are on holiday in a country you don't speak the langugage of and the car breaks down, you say "find me the nearest mechanic" and you stream live to a garage where someone sees what you are seeing and sends help with minimal "conversation"

I honestly don't see a market for every day use like they show it in this video.

If I saw this on the streets right now I'd get a "bluetooth-headset-douchebag"-vibe

They ask it because they have a cool product but don't know how to use it. I doubt it will be used the way they promote it, this is cool stuff you come up with when you are brainstorming with some friends + beer but when you think about it, it doesn't improve your life, it adds noise.

In different areas however it could be a big improvement, if you are repairing stuff with no hands free in a dimly lit area and you need info from a manual or you want others to see what you see and help you.

No, it's not over. Not yet. I think only a small percentage of developers make $50k / year per game/app.

And Stage3 is way ahead of what one day hopefully WebGL will offer. There's no way (at the moment) of producing the same quality application in HTML5/js with the same effort you need for Flash.

Mozilla released their cute browserQuest game yesterday, something "Realm of the Mad God" did 2+ years ago in Flash.

HTML5 is very likely to be the future but there's no way they can compete with Flash at least in the areas of Games (and Audio) at the moment..

It's still a long way to compete with Flash in the area of games but it's nice to see this effort.

When I talked to Flash developers, their main concerns were having to worry about different browsers and their belief that everything became "open source" automatically because you can just view the source. They don't want to spend weeks on a project that sets them apart from other competitors only to be copied by the next guy within a day.

I first saw pictures made by Timur Civan with a similar technique and an even older lens:

http://colt-rane.com/timur-civan-1908-wollensak-35mm-f50-cin...

I stopped using it because I just hate that I'm logged in to googlesearch and YouTube automatically. While some interesting people post on g+ it's more a blogplatform, the contentarea when logged in is too narrow and I noticed that I am very hesitant engaging in a discussion with my real name, not so on reddit e.g.

i had a similar problem: I worked on several projects parallel, had sheet after sheet with notes of "awesome" ideas, was interested in everything, read photography-blogs to recipe-sites, listened to podcasts and so on.

I lacked focus and once I shut off everything I realized that I didn't really need to know all that stuff, it cluttered my mind. With my projects, once I hit the first wall I prefered to start a new project or do something different than spending some time on fixing my problem with the other project.

so what helped for me? I tried to create an environment at home where I could focus: there is only 1 book on the nightstand and I'd rather not read one night because I'm not in the mood for this particular book than starting a new one as I once did.

I plan my meals for 1 week with the supplies I have and I only go shopping once a week, this prevents me from coming home, not knowing what to eat, losing time and energy on something trivial because once I had a problem with one project I suddenly found myself shopping at the supermarket in order to try out a new recipe I just read about on some forum.

So I just sit there and do my stuff and it has worked wonders. I write down which parts I want to have finished by the end of the week and even if I don't meet my goals I'm still going to bed satisfied because I know I couldn't have done better that day and I'm eager to get out of bed on sunday because I know exactly the night before what I will be working on the next day. And interesting enough, once I finished some small projects I suddenly was able to dismiss 90% of my ideas as not worth doing

The only book I've read on this subject is "self discipline in 10 days" and it helped me with getting back my focus. Once I snap out of my workflow and my mind starts wandering I use my "inner voice" to remind me that I have to focus and it works :)

if you are an investor and you don't have a look at the team behind an ambitious and promising idea you will soon run out of money, this is nothing Yc-specific.

edit: ok, another try, people don't like the word "luck" so let's call it a hail mary pass :)

the core surely is anti-commercial but the main subreddits like r/funny or r/pics and the like are so huge that the majority consists of "normal" internet-consumers that visit other sites as well and are used to commercials, the reddit-frontpage is mainstream, it's no longer an obscure site that some nerds know about

and in addition they could have very targeted advertising for the highly specialised subreddits.

but aggressive money-making surely would destroy the community and turn the site into a superficial link-collection with comments in the style of youtube but you could milk it for a couple of years and earn a lot

sorry for not being clear: not the people running OMGPOP were lucky, the investors were, they just couldn't have known how things turned out to be. When they invested in the initial round my guess is that the idea behind the startup and the business ideas were completely different from what the company represents now

because they are very concerned about annoying/destroying the community.

in the hands of a purely profit-oriented company they would make enormous amounts of money and milk the site until its demise a couple of years in

Yes, but this one was pure luck.

They didn't plan on building games for android and iOS. I remember them for being a 100% flash-site that offered a mediocre tetris-clone until they were sued by the tetris-copyright-holders.

"Draw Something" was an extremely fortunate product: a) they finally had a hugely popular game which took everyone by surprise and b) they made so much money that Zynga decided to just buy them instead of spending weeks/months on copying them and losing money every day they didn't have an alternative to "Draw Something"

I always wondered what apple's plans were for the next 10 years.

The iPad is close to perfection, the next iterations surely will improve but only slightly and in maybe 3 or 4 years most people won't need the newest device anymore.

The same will be for smartphones in a couple of years, the limitations will be in the speed the carrier provides.

how many percent of customers would the other carriers lose if apple made the iphones/ipads apple-carrier-only?

have a look at http://www.webfaction.com/

or for an overview: http://www.lowendbox.com/

I always assumed the 12-24 month-rule only applied to "content"-sites like a blog or a forum, but Dan built a unique service that cannot be copied with the same effort as a techblog or a bulletin board

congratulations on your experience!

It really is difficult to name a price, I would have ignored any offers below 10-15k but on the other hand you can now concentrate on a new project and for 6 months from 0 to sale is remarkable.

I wonder if this technology will be used to add "watermarks" to objects, to guarantee authenticity, like print a logo on a clockface of your rolex