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zee007

Review my startup: Budzee.com

Hi all, Budzee is a Q&A platform where you get referrals and recommendations for almost anything in life (think of it as Quora for products and services).When you help others on Budzee, you earn points based on how helpful you are. You can then redeem these points for awesome stuff (this part is under construction).Come take a look at http://www.budzee.com. Appreciate any feedback,...

( Read More... | 4 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Re:Label.css – an easy way to label DOM elements on Friday May 17, 2013 @02:30PM (#5725959)
Dropping my props as well. Great work. Very clean and simple.
That'd be one horrible manager. I know they exist, but that's a problem I can't fix :).
Yes yes, of course. I forgot the "up to" part :).
You can only get two: 1) Schedule, 2) quality, 3) quantity. So if your client / manager insists on you keeping the schedule you figured out months ago before full information, either quality will have to suffer or you'll have to cut features. There's no other way.
Re:Why DRM is such a fucking stupid idea on Friday March 15, 2013 @10:32AM (#5380768)
This is what DRM says :-

"You could have easily downloaded our product/music/movie for free. But you went out of your way to pay us for it. Thank you. In return, we'll punish you by putting restrictions on you that you wouldn't have had if you didn't bother to pay for our content."

A logic that sadly only makes sense to out-of-touch executives: "Hey, since we can't get people stealing our stuff, lets punish people paying for it instead".

Re:In 2005 Motorola Tried to Sue Me For Unlocking Phones on Monday February 11, 2013 @10:31AM (#5201240)
I have DMCA, record companies and movie studios that make me feel like a criminal despite having paid full price. I hate them with a passion. HATE THEM!

However, in this case I can totally see Motorola's argument. Not sure in your case, but most people don't pay full price for their phones, they buy it subsidized. The reason you're locked on AT&T (in your example) is that you buy a highly subsidized device in exchange for staying with them for x years. That's precisely why I buy unlocked phones and never sign contracts. But if you signed a contract then you should honour that contract.

Re:Another awesome US immigration experience on Sunday January 06, 2013 @10:52PM (#5019197)
I don't either especially since I am not even bitter about the experience. I am just confused.

The irony is that since then I've crossed the border 12+ times a year and the experience is always pleasant (now I enter as a Canadian citizen for either vacation or a short business trip). One would think they'd have preferred me when I paid taxes there (and by the virtue of being on visa, they knew a lot more about me).

Re:Another awesome US immigration experience on Sunday January 06, 2013 @10:37PM (#5019133)
I had many similar run-ins with immigration when I worked for Microsoft in the Redmond area (brown guy with a beard, likes to travel the world [sometimes taking trips as short as one weekend]). I've missed more than my share of flights (at one time my name was in the do-not-fly list because it partially matched the name of someone they wanted).

Final straw came when one time I was returning from an international trip with my x-wife and kids when the immigration officer decided she didn't qualify to accompany me (we were married at the time).

"No big deal, she'll just fly back to Canada" (we're Canadians). We were told she couldn't do that, she had to be deported to the country she came from. "But sir, we just had a single entry visa and cannot re-enter". "That's not my problem, the law is the law. You need to be deported back to countryX". "But sir, we have no ties to countryX. We dont have visa to countryX. We have a Canadian passport, if you dont want to admit us then let us just turn around and go to Canada". "Oh y'all can come in, but she can't".

So I ask for a supervisor and he refused (I later learned he wasn't allowed to do that). Had us sit there for many hours with cranky kids after a transatlantic flight and then said:

"You can take her now (take her??) but I'll hold on to her passport. She can come before the judge in 30 days with the document and collect her passport or she'll be deported to countryX".

I had to unnecessarily waste time and money hiring a lawyer to figure out what the heck went wrong. She showed up 30 days later with our lawyer and the judge couldn't figure out why she was there. Gave us the passport. My x-wife dropped me home, told me to pack up and drove up to Toronto the same day. Even though I was about to get my green card (everything including labour cert was done) I told my employer to halt the process and moved back. For next few years I continued to work for US companies but remotely from Canada and pulled in close to $1 million in salary and stocks over the years that IRS wasn't able to tax at all. Canadian economy (not the American economy) benefited from my well over average spending over these years.

I can wrap my mind around "your name is similar to xyz we are looking for [even though xyz was a different ethnicity with a different age, height and everything]. But for me this made me realize how vulnerable non-citizens are when it comes to US immigration and border patrol. To this day I have no idea what ticked that guy off to single us out like that but I decided I did not want to live in a country where I had such little rights. I am well educated, make a lot of charitable contributions and spend a lot of time volunteering in the local community. Everything the US used to benefit from but now Canada does.

This is the worst thing they found in facebook's term of use? Really?
Re:Working alone sucks on Friday December 14, 2012 @09:15PM (#4924371)
I worked alone (from home) for 4 years. Left a very high paying job mostly for that reason. I thought if it continued I'd kill myself.

Now I am working on my startup with other smart people and man, I love it.

Re:Ask HN: How do you manage your one-man project? on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @11:09AM (#4910754)
I have a white board right above my monitor. I write a daily "to do" list there and check off items as they get done. Items that do not get done in one day get moved to the next day. I try not to let the list get too long (I know I need to do 100 things, but if I can only do 3 today then my to do list only contains 3). It keeps me sane and focused.

In the past I tried something similar to scrum (have a master list of everything I needed to do). But since I do have a day job and other responsibilities, I found that seeing a massive list got too overwhelming. Now I focus only on what I can get done now, not worrying about the pile of things waiting to be done.