reidman

"The boy down in ballistics got in a shootout" is not something our hypothetical police chief would say.

The title also implies some level of surprise that 'girl' 'figured out' this 'giant computer'.

It might seem like a nitpick, but stuff like this adds up. I used to call women 'girls' occasionally, but I stopped when I realized that I'd rarely use 'boy' if the gender was flipped.

Using fake data to scare the masses is beyond shameful — it’s exactly the kind of tactic employed by the RIAA and every other evil corporate lobby in existence. It’s like Batman trying to catch a bad guy by stealing his gun and shooting at him.

A legitimate cause deserves better.

"You might wonder, Hey, don’t you feel like a jerk walking around the city talking to your phone? But here’s the thing: Siri, by default, kicks in when you hold the iPhone up to your ear, so you can talk to it and it looks like you’re on a phone call."

I started the website as a senior design project in 2005. My team won a $10k entrepreneurship contest, but we were all finishing college and drowning in debt, so we split the prize up and went our separate ways. I intended to sell, but never got around to it.

A year later: Etsy.

I learned this the hard way when I presold books through Google Checkout. I mistakenly read the UK ToS which, unlike the US ToS, allowed preorders. Once we'd amassed more than $40k, they contacted us via email to let us know we had run afoul of their policy.

I pleaded with them to give me time to fulfill the orders, and to their credit, they did. They kept 100% of the funds until I sent them notification that I had shipped every package.

Nowadays, even though I only use them to process a couple thousand dollars per month, they are perpetually sitting on $1,000 of my funds as a protection against chargebacks/fraud. I was told that if I wanted that money, I had to close my account and wait 3 months for the funds to "clear". I've asked for the cap to be lowered, but they never bothered to respond.

I had just gotten my hands on a few thousand dollars that I knew would otherwise be wasted on an unnecessary purchase, so I signed up with Ameritrade (back in 2004 when it was much less user-friendly) and had to read the book before I felt confident enough to actually place an order.

The book advised me to buy what I knew, and to only buy something I planned on holding for a long time. Luckily I had just tried out a Powerbook for the first time and was blown away, so I bought a bunch of Apple stock.

I can never take this guy seriously, even when I want to.

So for example, if you had a small neighborhood looking to fund the purchase of a $5,000 water well and they only raised $4,000, everyone who donated was supposed to get their money back.

(Also, TipIT doesn't seem to suck.)

For the uninitiated, Fundable was a site where you could input a dollar amount and accept donations towards that 'goal'. If the goal wasn't reached within a certain time period, the money was returned to the individual donors. If the goal was reached, the money was released to whoever initiated the campaign, minus a hefty 7% commission fee.

As far as I could tell (I used it back in 2007 but quickly jumped ship when I realized how rickety it was) it was pretty much a giant Paypal API with bad UX and even worse customer service.

I've been a personal customer for 7 years and a business customer for 3. A little over a year ago I opened another business account for my startup. Last month I went to them for a line of credit (or even a credit card), and even though the branch manager attached a recommendation to my credit application, it was still denied.

Perhaps this is the case with any large bank, but the bureaucracy is endlessly frustrating. I'd go straight to a small-town credit union if we weren't planning to move the business out of state in a few months, so instead I'm negotiating with Wells Fargo.

In a roundabout way, I suppose monetization is the root problem -- I didn't (and still don't) have the time/money/connections necessary for a Twitter-style 'build it and the money will come' business plan.

http://reidesign.us/misc/veracifyWebsite3-5.png

Promises are used like credit, but the tab often goes unpaid because people forget. Politicians, blogs (especially Apple blogs), and talking heads have made an art of exploiting this 'loophole', so it would be nice to have a website where you could track their past performance re: promises and predictions.

It seems pretty obvious that 37signals, when talking about 'plans', refers to the massive business plans which are the hallmark of people who don't have a chance of seeing them through.

But this is really just a debate between a guy who happens to sell business plans and a bunch of guys who happen to sell un-business-plans, soooo...

It was tedious at first, but people raved about them. Eventually we wised up and started offering store coupons to the community's artists in exchange for drawings. It's really added value to our products and simultaneously strengthened our community. Win/win!

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/checkout-merchants/lab...

In addition to the rate hike which now puts them in the same fee range as Paypal, Google Checkout is missing basic functionality.

True story: you can't download your complete transaction history. You can download one day of transactions at a time, but if you want something to give to your accountant at the end of the year, you've got to download 365 .csv files and combine them yourself.

I dare anyone to figure out how much it costs to renew a domain name with GoDaddy. It took me a full 5 minutes, and that was with a logged-in account.

Excellent advice! And, incidentally, Dallas was one of the places I was looking at, so it's good to hear that it's well-connected.

We're expecting pretty linear growth, so scaling isn't a huge deal. Up until now we would regularly switch to a better server, stay there until we outgrew it, and then jump again. It's kept us relatively lean/current and our costs have stayed low as the cost/quality of hosting has changed (and we've gotten better at sniffing out good hosts).

Places like linode and slicehost would have been decent options in the past, but we serve 1-2 TB of data each month, so we like to have lots of bandwidth available. And while many dedicated servers offer that, our server admin is pretty picky about the hardware, so she'd like to be able to manage it on her own.

Out of curiosity, how easy is it to 'hook up' two separate Xen instances, assuming Xen is what slicehost and Linode run on? I'm not a server guy, but I actually share a slicehost plan (separate from this particular venture) with one of our fellow News.YC hackers, so I'm familiar with how excellent the company/service is. If they're really that easy to connect/scale then it might be worth the extra cost...

Several of us who are involved with the business are going to be moving, and it would be nice to know what kind of facilities will be nearby. The reason we're not looking at CA or east coast is purely preference, though I should note that Oregon/Washington are fair game.

For the record, we've been running on dedicated servers for almost 10 years now, and since we finally got around to making a business out of it we're looking at our upgrade options.

As a prosper borrower, I loved the service (which helped fund my startup - http://fangamer.net ) because it was kinda like high school -- easy to excel with nothing more than a little effort. Not hard when your 'competition' is a picture of a dog and the words "gotta pay credit cards im very trustwrothy w/ $$$".

I haven't gone back to Prosper since I paid off my loan much earlier this year, though, so it's depressing to see that such a brilliant idea was handled so poorly.

Hopefully some enterprising young turks can find a way to make it work...hint