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What's the YC company that lists electronic parts for sale? | bockris: octopart.com ? |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | brk: I remember, but it wasn't as significant.This is likely because I used (and at one point ran) BBS'. We had FIDONet, CyberCrime net, Usenet gateways, phreaking, and other ways to communicate internationally. The Internet just made it faster and more graphical and allowed you to multitask. |
Is there a name for the 'web shortcut' services? (tinyurl, tinypaste, cli.gs, etc) | AlexeyMK: (just found this) lifehacker is calling them "url shrinkers" - http://str8.to/best-url-shrinkers. |
What's the YC company that lists electronic parts for sale? | ksvs: http://www.google.com/search?q=y+combinator+electronic+partsGoogle would have found it for you on the first try. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | jcapote: SEFLIN FreeNet baby. |
Most cost-effective method of achieving physical redundancy | lsc: 1. is the cheap way. as someone else said, you can use BGP instead of dns for failover to improve downtime, but then it's no longer cheap.Personally, this is my preferred solution. keep as much as possible in MySQL cluster and have the rest built on a central dev server and pushed out when there are changes.San is not cheap, and it's pretty easy to screw up the whole san. It's still a single point of failure. (I ran prgmr.com on a san for the first few years, and I switched away from SAN not because of cost, but because of reliability. With a san, it's really easy for the new guy to accidentally trash everything.)so yeah, I'd do #1. if you can use a active-active VPS, that's best, if you want to save money, run a smaller active-active site with ec2 images standing by (remember to test weekly) - the problem with 'cold' backups is that they are usually broken. active active means they are up all the time. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | brlewis: I don't remember the first time. It was before the WWW existed. But I get that feeling more often now than I did then. These are good times. |
iPhone? Blackberry? Android? Prayer? - How do you remotely monitor your startup? | cbarning: iPhone |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | brm: I have to ask, what need are you addressing that already existing social networks don't provide? |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | pasbesoin: Coming back from Europe in 87, to a small town in the Midwest, to realize that I was now a few keystrokes away from Europe -- via BITNET.SLEEPY, where are you? I still remember your text files. |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | qhoxie: It seems like a well-designed application to me. While I am not intimately familiar with the need for such a social network, I will trust that you and others can make that assessment.A couple notes on the design:- Focus borders on the username and password fields are different.- I like the clean look overall, but the contrast is a bit too low in some places: Large buttons, Registration form header.- I think a little more top and bottom padding on the search bar would be nice. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | nuclear_eclipse: I certainly don't miss the days of Internet Exploder 3, or Geocities, or AOL domination, or ....I certainly do miss the days before commercialization and marketization of the internet, when sites were genuine repositories of information and not cash grabs or click-thru whores, and you didn't get 100 times more spam in your inbox than legitimate email even after the filtering.... |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | raquo: It was in 1997 or 1998, don't remember. I was ~10 years old, in LA in some summer school (I live in Russia) where I also got acquainted with Word and some 3D dinosaur game (I've never seen a computer before back then). The internet was the "fun" part, allowed after we completed all the tasks at the lesson. I did not know what on Earth I was supposed to do with it, and the teacher did not explain (considered it evident probably), and I was too shy to expose my dumbness and ask. I saw only some weird page which was probably talking about URL, servers, locations, etc, and there was a Camel drawn on it. So I had to spend time listening to endless 'your-mommy' jokes that other classmates were sharing and wondering where did they get them and why they were so dumb and wtf to do with the camel.And then there was my own Pentium 2, LivePix, 3dsmax, NFS 2/3, HL (!), Diablo, Borland Delphi, html teach-yourself book (without CSS!)... |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | tyohn: The design is nice. Is this addressing a real need? I am very close to the "media outlet environment" and I'm not sure if we have a need for such a resource? What are the tool-based things you are talking about? Maybe I just need more convincing? |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | axod: I remember using the www at high school, you had to load up trumpet winsock, as windows didn't support tcp natively. This would be about '94 or '95 I believe. It was sort of cool, but at the time I was more into writing games in assembly so I don't think it grabbed me then.The thing that really blew my mind was in University I got into talkers - chatrooms you visit by telnetting into them. Think the one I used to haunt was "The village". I was just amazed at how cool that was and trying to figure out how the hell it all worked and how you could write a server. I wanted to have my own chatroom. For me that was so much more useful and clever than what at the time were pretty static websites.Now years later I sort of do with Mibbit ;) |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | sarvesh: Yes I do but didn't use WWW for a while. Before I used WWW I thought the Mouse was a useless invention and GUI applications were slow and tedious. To be honest I didn't think it would take of in this scale until the WWW. I understood after struggling with my mouse for a while that this thing is great invention, it will be useful for everybody not just developers. |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | browser411: Would prefer to see some sort of demo that doesn't require signing up. Maybe a interactive demo, simple flash presentation or at least graphical use cases.Nitpick: big buttons at the bottom don't seem clickable. |
iPhone? Blackberry? Android? Prayer? - How do you remotely monitor your startup? | e1ven: I find that it takes a combination of tools, the key is a Blackberry and Nagios-Nagios is a tool to automatically check machines for problems- It's very convenient in that I can highly vary the configuration for each machine- Dev machines might only be checked every 15 minutes, where productions machines might be checked every minute.I have it parsing a variety of log files, and sending me emails when it finds different errors, or warnings.The Blackberry is irreplaceable in this context- While I have an iPhone for my home calls and for testing mobile versions of our product, the iPhone mail client is next to useless.It doesn't have any filtering or searching at all- That's fine for emails to friends, but it's worthless for monitoring.The Blackberry, on the other hand, allows me to set a filter for certain messages, such as those with "ERROR" in the subject, to be "Level 1" messages, which I can treat differently.For example, a normal message might vibrate the Blackberry, where as a Level 1 message is set to ring my BB increasingly louder until I manually check and clear it..This ensures that if I'm sleeping, and we have a site-down-event, it'll wake me up and make me respond, even if I'm rather out of it.With the iPhone, on the other hand, it's all or nothing.Ideally, I'd prefer an app using the iPhone's push notification (whenever it arrives), that would allow me to use XML push requests for different alerts.. I could send an XML Warning, Error, or Fatal Error, for instance.I'd settle for an email client with proper filters on either device, though..The second point is search- The iPhone doesn't allow me to search through prior emails, which is ironic given the publicity of spotlight on the desktop. With my BB, I can search by day, sender, subject, etc; This is a necessity when trying to understand the context on a discussion.Third- The BB email is much, much faster. Because it has real push email, I can get messages before they appear on my desktop- This is crucial for alerts. There is no good way to do this on the iPhone, without forwarding all my mail through Yahoo. Zimbra on the server side, connecting to a BES server is a cheap and reliable solution.So far, I haven't been impressed with ANY terminal applications- The iPhone's screen is too small, and too much space is taken up by the virtual keyboard on these, and the BB doesn't include any useful keys, like pipe or backtick on the default screen. Normally, I use the phones to receive information, and then fire up my laptop + Aircard to fix it. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | okeumeni: I remember the cost, how expensive it was to use the internet; Stories of people living in shacks while putting all their money to pay for the connection. I do miss Netscape navigator. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | simianstyle: Pokemon! |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | pedalpete: my two comments would be
1) make the "tools based" either link to a page describing what that means, or find a better way to describe it. I think I know what you are getting at, but I'm not sure most people (non-tech) would.2)the "Journalism" and "PR - Business" links at the bottom of the page that are somewhat greyed out. They look good in the sense that they don't draw too much attention, but I'd think that the least they should darken when I hover to make it apparent that they can be clicked. The way it looks right now, I'd think that they were greyed-out as in unusable. |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | brandnewlow: Can I join and mercilessly spam the heck out of media outlets?Also, what's the play here? Are the tools supposed to pull people in? Do you have any journo or PR cred behind the project? |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | ambulatorybird: I first started using the internet back in '96. I think I was actually most excited about being able to play Quake online. But getting e-mails was kind of exciting, too -- as an actor in an AOL commercial said, it was like "getting a present". |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | geuis: Ah, the days of the "local" freenet based out of Tallahassee. That was circa 1993-1994 for me. I was 14 in 94. We got our first actual computer with a modem, a Macintosh Performa 635CD. 2400 baud dialup modem.The first time I connected to an online service was fun. My cousin was over and we had pooled our money($20) to buy the Internet Phone Book. Thick book filled with several thousand websites. It came with a CD that offered dialup access to a company in Portland. Obviously my mom had a problem with long distance fees, so we ditched that before we started.I had no software to actually do a connection, but my computer came with Clarisworks. Clarisworks actually had a COM program built into it. I got the number for the Tallahassee freenet from my local library. After a lot of trial and error we were able to type in the right modem commands (ADTD... etc) and it dialed up. Woot, we were "online"!Pretty quickly we figured out about local BBS's. Spent most of 94 and into 95 on those. By this time had upgraded to an actual telnet client. One of the BBS's also offered dialup PPP access. Finally got that working in late 94 and was on the Internet itself finally. My cd from the Internet Phone Book had a copy of Mosaic 1.0, so I installed that. Then we loaded our first webpage. Forget what it was, but it took forevvvvver to load.Spent a lot of time over the next couple years on BBS's, then MUDs, and a LOT of time on IRC. As I upgraded modems over the next couple years access got a bit faster. GlobalVillage modems FTW! My first exposure to firmware was when my 28.8k GV modem was upgradable to 33.6 via a software update. Talk about me being a newb and having no idea how software could update hardware. =) |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | blender: I remember when it was conspicuous when a corporation included their website addy in a commercial or in print or on the radio... now it is commonplace.Cheers |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | rsheridan6: That would have been about 1991. The web did not exist, or at least I wasn't aware of it, and for me the internet = Usenet. I printed out copies of something called The Terrorist's Handbook ( http://www.capricorn.org/~akira/home/terror.html ) and sold it for $5 at school (and in 1991, this was perfectly acceptable behavior. It didn't even occur to me that I could get in trouble for this). Mostly I read stuff like this on alt.tasteless:
http://www.tocotox.net/bedtime/smut/beaver-and-mr-ed.html
(Warning - do not click on that link)But the internet didn't really make a big impression on me until I saw NCSA Mosaic (precursor to Netscape) on a Sun workstation a few years later. I knew the web would be huge. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | hbien: I remember it was a lot of fun. My friends and I were geeks and we had these RPG clubs, where we pretend fight in AOL chat rooms.It was like D&D, we all had a certain amount of health and used dice rolls to attack.Someone even made a whole program out of it based on Final Fantasy, that kept track of health and automatically did dice rolls for you. It even had great music clips to go along with it.Oh man, those were great days. Making fan sites of Final Fantasy and other games just for fun.I'm glad my girlfriend doesn't read hacker news or she'd dump me. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | brianm: Ah, gopher, newsgroups, and muds.... |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | zacharye: Playing around with it now and so far:1. Love the design. Simple, clean, effective.2. The "tools" sections need to be much more apparent. This is in theory the main purpose of the site.3. 140 characters is hot as Hansel right now, but there's no way someone can pitch me effectively in 140. I think that needs to be upped significantly.4. I'd like the homepage to be more of a personal dashboard. History of direct contact, recommendations of new releases that fall in line with my "public collections" (I don't like that terminology, 'groups' maybe?), etc.I focused on the negative because those are the areas I think need the most work, but overall I think you're off to an awesome start. I could see this becoming very usable for me - ie, button on my blog and a note that I will only consider pitches delivered via Ivylees. Man, that sure would help my inbox... |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | thomasmallen: Irony is 68-point font telling you to "whisper, don't shout" |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | okeumeni: The design is nice, the opened page is very facebook like I don’t think it has to be, use your talent to stick to your originality.I don’t know much about journalism and PR work but I will suggest you find a way to source your content from other sources in other to attract users don’t count much on user-defined content, I get this from watching a friend of mine struggle with his content driven social site.I must give you guys an A for your design, I have not tested it usage (will do so when I have a minute) but I will strongly suggest to make some content visible without sign-on. Sign-on-before-you-see scenario can be a turnoff for most people. |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | shergill: I used iUi to build a web app. It was surprisingly simple! |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | unalone: I can't use this and know if I'm really giving useful feedback, but: everything is pretty except for the Search bar up top. It takes up a lot of space and doesn't provide much, and I don't like the blue.Also, you have something like three different effects when I focus on three different fields. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | unalone: * Making a web site when I was a wee tyke and being told not to mention my name, or my location, or my interests, because according to my father anything online would be used to stalk and kill you.* Going on Newgrounds and being utterly awed; submitting something to Newgrounds and realizing that the people I fawned over were actually people.* Going to my home town's message board and fearing for how incredibly stupid a lot of people sound online. Realizing that having a commanding voice online doesn't make you cool offline and vice versa. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | jaydub: I must have been 11 or so, and I remember having a brief instant message exchange with Hoon Im, one of the founders of Electric Gravity (they made "The Village", which Microsoft bought became the basis for what is now MSN Games). I don't remember exactly what was said, but after the conversation I started learning how to program. Good times |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | pavel_lishin: I remember realizing that I could use JavaScript to fake include()s so I wouldn't have to update every page on my crappy middle school website. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | zacharydanger: My first Internet connection was a 56k dial-up connection out of, and I kid you not, "Bryan's Auto Supply" in the next town over. A quick Google search found them again. http://www.ebryans.com/More though, I remember the fist fights between my older brother and I for who was going to get to use the connection. |
What if I don't have an idea? | akkartik: http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/2353544/all-you-see-is-t... |
How are your startups weathering the economic crisis? | nostrademons: Original startup is dead, but I think that's mostly because it was a marginal idea, my cofounder quit, and without my cofounder, I didn't have all that much passion for it.Thinking of doing a new startup, in a more clearly-defined pain point with more immediate profit potential. But I'm seeing how job apps go in this market; I need more time to scope out the market and do some prototypes anyway.When this crisis was first starting back in 2007, I said that "recessions force honesty upon businessmen. The marginal businesses get flushed out, forcing people to focus on useful stuff." That's as true now as it was then, even if my own startup was one of the marginal ones. |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | danielhodgins: You have picked an interesting niche within a large market of professionals. I assume you have done your homework re: competition, present options for solving customer problems, and therefore demand for your product.There are many market niches that are presently underserved by current businesses. Do you really think Craigslist, Ebay, and Facebook will still be the only solutions for their users in 20 years time? I highly doubt it. Smart entrepreneurs find a way to snag users from sites with proven appeal by creating a unique spin on what the market leaders do.For example, a startup in France (not yet in the States, hint hint) operates an online marketplace for specific, high-demand categories of goods such as electronics (ie Iphones) and digital cameras. You can choose what you want to sell for, but the price must be 50% below retail, regardless of the condition of the item. So- specific goods at 50% or more below retail is a unique sping for an online marketplace that hasn't yet been done in the States. There- I have just released one of my startup ideas. Anyone want to have a go at that one? |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | milkmanjr: i remember when i ditched AOL in favor of free internet..altavista was my preferred search engine.*netzero, lycos, altavista were some of the people who offered free dial-up internet. |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | omarseyal: Interesting niche.One comment on the front page - I think it's great and clean, but I think it undersells what you're doing. The "highlights" that you have (linked form the pale buttons at the bottom) are very compelling arguments to try your startup ... but they're hidden one click in. |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | jedc: I remember how much better Mosaic was than Gopher! |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | sfphotoarts: To me it looks just like you implemented a few parts of FB, and copied their style guide. |
How are your startups weathering the economic crisis? | ScottWhigham: Awesome - up about 15% from last month and about 22% from August. |
How are your startups weathering the economic crisis? | Godino: In case of a starup that doesn' require so much money to run, like http://www.quotag.com it's not the recession that affects them most, but the moods of customers. I mean, in the pre-funding phase there is not much to screw up :) |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | timcederman: Further reflection -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268307 |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | jwilliams: This is a genuine nit-pick, but I don't like the light green ivy leaves on the blue background (top left)... Maybe I had "blue and green should never been seen" drummed into me too much... |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | rgrieselhuber: I think it's a cool idea for a product. The Journalism / PR space can use some innovation. The struggle, perhaps, will be getting people to start using it. I'd recommend getting to know people / users at places like OJR.org, MediaBistro, etc. |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | daveambrose: Will certainly take a look at this in more detail when I'm on my laptop, as I'm on BlackBerry now, but I find the concept interesting.I work at a PR agency and a tool such as this to help "push" the advancement of new and relevant technology/services is really welcomed. This can cut into territory like Cision's for media database lists considering users of the site actively generate content.A few questions/tips;1.Can I cull some of my other SNS information and port it to your site? Maybe even just an OpenID or Clickpass account?2.Have you done any self-marketing yet, perhaps even reaching out to the larger agencies for a live demo? May be a nice idea to generate interest at a target market.I'd be happy to have you guys demo something in the future.Oh, one other thing in terms of an idea: Set private networks based on agency email address.So, as I said above, take my comments for what they are worth on a BB, but I'll check the site out in more detail. Just wanted to add here that this is a very good niche for something like this. Good luck! |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | cpr: Whew, that would be in 1972, as a frosh at Harvard, back when there were about 20-30 hosts on the ARPANet (the precursor to today's Internet) in the whole world.I remember fondly telnet'ing from machine to machine (back then, most were PDP-10's running TOPS-10 or TENEX, and all had open guest accounts), seeing how many telnet sessions one could chain before something broke.And I remember the first ARPANet mailing list, hosted at BBN (the inventors of email), which was about (recursively enough) email clients and mailing lists.I remember sitting at a TTY (physical teletype--no CRTs yet) next to the IMP (the ARPANet node processor) late at night and getting calls from BBN to reboot the IMP if it hung. We had high-speed 56Kb leased lines to MIT, BBN and a few other local nodes!FTP seemed like a miracle at the time, and we had access to a data store at CCA down the street which had an IBM data cell, which could hold gigabytes (which seemed infinite, given that our PDP-10 had 256K of 36-bit words and maybe a few hundred MB of large disk storage). |
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | shadytrees: 1998: Yahoo was the hottest search engine around, getting Hotmail was a rite of passage, Neopets was just about to become popular, and I was reading tech news from this gray-on-black website that let me tick off which websites I wanted to aggregate. (I miss that proto-RSS website.) |
iPhone friendly Hacker News? | xtimesninety: I use Google or Skweezer to "mobilize" any website :)http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=news.ycombinator.comhttp://skweezer.com/s.aspx?q=news.ycombinator.com |
If you have ever played WoW please critique my new site | truebosko: I don't know what your site actually does without signing up or clicking around. The first page gives me a vague explanation and some weird browser-in screenshot.I would recommend trying to make it easier to understand what you do in your opening page. I see after clicking through that it looks like a journal for your WoW character |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | trevelyan: The name makes me think of "Ivy Leagues", which makes me think it is something for students. Also... white text on a light-coloured background is quite hard to read. |
Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing? | drcode: The reason Clojure is successful right now IMHO is because: 1. It isn't afraid to revisit the basic design tenets of Common Lisp and Scheme
2. It has reasonably useful libraries (both through the JVM and written in native Clojure)
No other Lisp dialect has done this recently. My point is that its success doesn't have much to do, from what I can tell, with the actual design of the language. Clojure does fix annoyances in CL and Scheme (low hanging fruit) but I personally still prefer other modern dialects, like arc, in terms of basic language design.The reason arc is crashing and burning right now is that it doesn't address #2 at all. Plus, arc is suffering from an absentee benevolent dictator. |
Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing? | twopoint718: There is a video (http://clojure.blip.tv/) by the creator of Clojure which argues (quite convincingly) that it is really Java, the language, that some people may have problems with and that Java, the runtime environment, (JVM) is a great platform in which to target your code.Lots of work is being done in areas such as JIT and adaptive optimization in the runtime environment. By targeting the JVM you get to take advantage of all that work put into optimization and thousands of libraries; it gets you a lot of leverage fast. |
Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing? | gtani: arguing about clojure vs. scala is the next big religious warhttp://www.cio.com/article/print/454520http://almaer.com/blog/the-next-big-language-theory-practice... |
Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing? | markessien: Lisp will never be popular. We are humans and our brains are wired for a certain type of thinking. Lisp breaks this model, and so it's difficult for people to pick it up.The trend has always been to easier and easier languages - I don't remember any case where a more complex language, no matter how useful, has become the next big thing.The only thing that can make lisp popular is a framework or API based off it. Something that offers something new or something easier. |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | AlexeyMK: Interesting idea. How are you going to keep signal vs noise ratios worthwhile for Journalists?If I'm launching a start-up and want to have to send out a press release, I need to either hire a PR agency or find a list of people I should email, which means I am at least minimally competent. If I understand correctly, on IvyLees, I could just sign-up and issue a press release into my industry. Assuming the site becomes popular, won't Journalists be more interested in the companies that are capable of reaching out to them 'the hard way' rather than issue a massive press release? |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | wheels: - Whisper. Don't Shout is cute, but it doesn't tell me anything. That's a lot of screen real estate for something that's just cute.- The term social network is somewhat tired. Everything is social now. Building a social network was sexy three years ago. Now it's just a category of sites that hearkens to the passing bubble. Say what you do. People will expect it to be social anyway, and besides, when was the last time you went looking for a "social network for $foo"?- Connected to those two, your two key points seem to be "Create and share news releases." and "Get new story ideas or pitch your own." Those are your message. That's the reason people will be landing on your site. Those are the ideas that you want to hit people over the head with in the first seconds that they land on your site. Bonus points if you can convey that graphically. |
Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing? | ivanstojic: I find that after a year of Common Lisp, I don't really care about Clojure. On the other hand, through the JVM and the Java API, it offers for free some of the things which were never available as a CL standard feature.However, CL is a language specification, while Java is for better or worse much more than that. |
Rate my startup: IvyLees | tdonia: interesting idea - clear target audiences. trick will be getting those audiences to use this. seems like a relatively good problem to have, especially for a communication network play, though by no means cake.two design tweaks:on my pretty good lcd, the 'sign up today', 'journalism' and 'business & pr' calls-to-action lack enough contrast for the white type to pop without me adjusting my screen settings.looking at the press release template - your logo is huge. which is ok - once i realized that that's where the (my) companies logo would go. even then it's a little large. regardless of the size, though, i would think about changing your example press release to something other than your own company as understanding whose logo that is is a subtly you don't need to create. |
Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing? | Dilpil: Good luck teaching the unwashed masses lisp. |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | Dilpil: You could move back to India and run the buisness from there....yeah our immigration policies are pretty bad aren't they. |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | run4yourlives: I know nothing regarding US immigration law, but what do they define as "working"? In other words, could you contribute for "free" and just pay yourself via dividends?Otherwise, why don't you just incorporate in India, or wherever else is applicable? If you're going to sell via web payments, nobody really cares where you are. There may be a few issues with corporate clients, but for 95% of people it would be seamless. |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | gexla: Incorporate in a country like Hong Kong which has no corporate taxes for income from outside of the country. |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | DaniFong: Hi Steve Smith,There is a little known visa known as an O1, for 'extraordinary persons'. This is the visa that many foreign founders obtain. One is allowed to found and work for a company in the US while one is on it. I think they last 3 years.Generally, PhD level people can obtain it, though it is a pain to do so. I have heard of people straining to get 10 eminent people to write supporting letters for one's visa petition. A good link is here:http://www.hooyou.com/o-1/faq.htmlThere's a fairly extensive list of what may be accepted as supporting documentation there. I think these are the criteria the government uses:Receipt of a major, internationally recognized award, such as the Nobel Prize; or at least three of the following forms of documentation:
(1) Documentation of the alien's receipt of nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence in the field of endeavor;
(2) Documentation of the alien's membership in associations in the field for which classification is sought, which require outstanding achievements of their members, as judged by recognized national or international experts in their disciplines or fields;
(3) Published material in professional or major trade publications or major media about the alien, relating to the alien's work in the field for which classification is sought, which shall include the title, date, and author of such published material, and any necessary translation;
(4) Evidence of the alien's participation on a panel, or individually, as a judge of the work of others in the same or in an allied field of specialization to that for which classification is sought;
(5) Evidence of the alien's original scientific, scholarly, or business-related contributions of major significance in the field;
(6) Evidence of the alien's authorship of scholarly articles in the field, in professional journals, or other major media;
(7) Evidence that the alien has been employed in a critical or essential capacity for organizations and establishments that have a distinguished reputation;
(8) Evidence that the alien has either commanded a high salary or will command a high salary or other remuneration for services, evidenced by contracts or other reliable evidence. |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | gojomo: Previous threads:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115590http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=67268Maybe you can technically work for your US company from some overseas office, but be in-country for nearly 3-6 months a year on temporary visas?Or maybe a real expert can set up legal structures such that you're moonlighting for a foreign corporation, instead of a domestic company other than your H1B sponsor. (I have no idea if that's as serious an issue as moonlighting for your own US-based company.)Definitely get expert legal advice rather than trusting a comment thread.And on behalf of all reasonable USicans, I apologize for our stupid immigration restrictions. |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | comatose_kid: I thought that an EAD holder could own a company. Is this not correct? I just received mine, and it supercedes my existing TN visa. |
How are your startups weathering the economic crisis? | JustGuy: 8 out of our 13 IT ppl (developers, tester, BAs) are made redundadntwww.linkme.com.au |
How do you bill your clients? (for your app) | callmeed: If you're doing it in Rails, I'd recommend the ActiveMerchant plugin and a gateway/merchant account from Braintree.That's what we use on our main Rails app (as opposed to PayPal on our other main subscription-based offering). It works great. The only hangup has been accepting international currencies (we're having to work with a different company for that).The transaction fees are low, too–which actually makes a difference when you start getting a lot of subscribers.http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/
http://www.activemerchant.org/
https://peepcode.com/products/activemerchant-pdf |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | white: Not a lawyer, so don't take my advises as is. Incorporate in India, then transfer it all to US when you're ready. Develop the code yourself, then have code acquired by your company, or prepare letter of intentions (that when you can do this legally, the code will be owned by the company for your stake increase). And my understanding is that they don't care that much of you writing code for company either paid or free. The government doesn't want everyone to create their own companies and get employed by themselves, getting legal status in US because of this. Your case looks different though. |
How do you bill your clients? (for your app) | jasonlbaptiste: check out zuora. if youd like an intro drop me an email: jason[at]publictivity.com |
How do you bill your clients? (for your app) | wave: Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198502 |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | jwilliams: For anyone interested, this infographic isn't a bad summary resource:
http://www.reason.com/images/07cf533ddb1d06350cf1ddb5942ef5a...It summaries the various processes to become a citizen... |
Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing? | schtog: It is possible to write very dense and abstract functional code that is hard to understand but some Lisp-code is so readable you wonder if it is actually code!That said I don't see Lisp becoming big. Scala probably has a better chance.Scalalooks great on paper and is better than JAVA in my opinion. However in practice it still feels very heavy and kind of JAVA-ish. Not for me but perhaps a natural step for a lot of JAVA-developers. |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | unohoo: I think Loic (seesmic founder) had a post on a similar topic, a while back -- ie, when he moved from france to the bay area to start seesmic. |
Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing? | michaelneale: Anyone played much with compjure? I loved the ideas in it - last I tried however I wasn't able to make changes and refresh - I had to restart the app to see changes. Interestingly (and nicely) it "compiled" the changes up front, telling me of any errors. That part was nice but having a F5 refresh/change cycle for web apps I think is expected now. |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | louislouis: 1.Incorporate the company in US.
2.Incorporate another company in India.
3.Outsource work from US company to Indian company.
4.Indian company hires contractor (you) in the US.Is something like that possible? I'm just guessing really. |
How do you bill your clients? (for your app) | jcapote: Try railskit or servicemerchant.org |
Awesome talks/video available online? | sidsavara: Love TED. Another great one was the New Yorker conference:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/conference/conference20...Also, if you want you can see all the ones I've bookmarked on my delicious account:http://delicious.com/sidsavara/videoSome may be off topic, but in general I think it's as good a place to find videos as anything else. I tend to bookmark 1-3 a week, if it is tagged +someday or +todo then all bets are off on quality, as it means I saw it referenced somewhere or tweeted and bookmarked it for future reference. |
Awesome talks/video available online? | lacker: Here's some specific suggestions. I was most recently fascinated by this video on head tracking "virtual reality".http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-UwAnother cool thing if you're into DIY robots (not really educational, but I found it inspiring) is the Yellow Drum Machine.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RyodnisVvUNot sure why I got on the robot tangent but here's another good one, a 4-legged robot that's pretty good at navigating hills and obstacles. Especially the recovery from a fall sequence around 1:25.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1WwAnd here is hacking the Wii Fit controller and a Roomba to do a sort of vacuum-by-surfing... thing?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLbprdjTX0w&feature=relat... |
Awesome talks/video available online? | kalvin: Stanford has a weekly speaker seminar class called Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders that has a free podcast. (You can't see the video unless you log in as a student, but hopefully that will change in the near future.)Not all of them are great, but there's enough that you're bound to find a topic/speaker that you're interested in:http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html(Past speakers you might be interested in: Marissa Mayer, Reid Hoffman, Mitchell Baker, Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, Sue Decker, Larry Brilliant, Vinod Khosla, William McDonough, Mark Zuckerberg, et. al)(Also, I highly recommend David Rothkopf's talk if you're interested in policy/current affairs/the world.)edit: I guess I should add that I help out with the class, but I'd have posted this either way :) |
Awesome talks/video available online? | michael_dorfman: The SICP videos are awesome.http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma... |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | jhancock: As to intellectual property, I would have an offshore entity (Cyamans, BVI) hold everything until an investor makes you restructure it into something else. Then a simple piece of paper signed by all people developing the IP assigns ownership to this offshore entity. For onshore operating, you simply license the IP to your U.S. entity for a small fee. You can get away with this approach for quite a bit.There is no good answer for how you maintain visas once you quit you day jobs. This part sucks. One "straightforward" option may be to strike a partnership with an IT outsourcing company that manages employees in the U.S. from India and give them a small piece of the company for handling your employment. You may find that such a partnership would work well as such an entity is an automatic HR and accounting department for your growing entity. You focus on creating a great product and your partner focuses on the housekeeping. |
How do you bill your clients? (for your app) | cbrinker: You can integrate your system with Quickbooks. They have an API. I don't know if you want to deal with their software, though. |
Awesome talks/video available online? | Glimjaur: I enjoy listening to the audio podcasts from SXSW and FOWA, they are both available in the iTunes store. |
How do you bill your clients? (for your app) | justinkelly: i use Simple Invoices - http://www.simpleinvoices.org to bill my clients for freelance workcheersjustin |
Awesome talks/video available online? | tlrobinson: It seems like there's a Google Tech Talk for just about everything.YUI Theater also has some good web stuff, not just YUI related: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ |
Awesome talks/video available online? | chrisbroadfoot: There are some nice ones on InfoQ. I just watched this one today:http://www.infoq.com/presentations/gosling-jvm-lang-summit-k...Gosling talking about how the JVM came about. Great stuff. |
Awesome talks/video available online? | narag: I would very much appreciate talks with written transcription. They're very valuable for us struggling with spoken English. |
Awesome talks/video available online? | riklomas: The last Future of Web Apps conference in London now has most of the talks available online:http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content |
Awesome talks/video available online? | djm: Have a look at http://videolectures.net/ |
Awesome talks/video available online? | ntoshev: http://videolectures.net/Supposedly on every topic, but the machine learning selection is especially good. |
Awesome talks/video available online? | Alex3917: It's becoming pretty standard practice now for authors to put their book talks online. There are a few websites that host them, including CSPAN's book talk. When authors come to talk at Google their talks usually get posted on Google video as well. There are lists of the best free documentaries floating around too. |
The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? | joubert: You could incorporate in another jurisdiction? |
Awesome talks/video available online? | alex_c: Also see:http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=181164 |
Awesome talks/video available online? | rami: http://sciencehack.com/ |
How do you bill your clients? (for your app) | nextmoveone: billingcircle.com ?
ariasystems.com ? |
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