alain94040

210 ms·

1. 1891.▲
   by alain94040 18y ago

   It's funny how none of you even question what a search engine should be. Everyone gave in to the concept that you want to find web pages. Wolfram is the first one to say that you need an answer engine. The web has data, you want answers, no
2. 1892.▲
   by alain94040 18y ago

   There is only one fallacy that invalides your arguments #1, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #15 and #16: if you offer the freedom of not going to school that you seem to advocate, and if the parents don't care about their kids' education
3. 1893.▲
   by alain94040 18y ago

   @16software: I took a look at your site. A couple of things are broken and you should fix them to improve your sales. From your home page, the link to "our products" doesn't work, it stays on the same page. So I'll never know what products
4. 1894.▲
   by alain94040 18y ago

   Yes. Join the Joel on Software community ( http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz ) would be my advice. Don't count on donations is my other advice :-) Selling consumer software: very tough, but can be done by one individual. Selling to bus
5. 1895.▲
   by alain94040 18y ago

   That's a tough one to decide. I read the patent quickly. I know quite a bit about PCI, cache coherency and prediction. I'd say whoever wrote the patent covered a good idea. Good enough to be patentable? Hum... It's clever. Not completely ob
6. 1896.▲
   by alain94040 18y ago

   Sorry, not a very good article, the arguments are simplistic and don't make much sense to me. There is a good discussion to be had about the GPL but this is not it.
7. 1897.▲
   by alain94040 18y ago

   The trick with incorporation is not the formation of the company as seen by the secretary of state's office. As a previous poster pointed out, that's a standard form with nothing that will make or break your startup. What matters initially
8. 1898.▲
   by alain94040 18y ago

   Wolfram Alpha doesn't compete with Google, it competes with Wikipedia. I expect students who use and quote Alpha as their source of information won't get the same scorn than the ones who quote Wikipedia. It will be an interesting battle: cr
9. 1899.▲
   by alain94040 18y ago

   You can read between the lines and see the work being done on Wolfram Alpha during that time period. Very interesting article to read. Plus I'm a UIUC grad and I remember driving by those offices so many times. Who would have thought they w
10. 1900.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    What they are promising to achieve is simply impossible to do. It assumes you could do logical and mathematical inferrence at the level of a Ph.D student... ... oh wait. I'm actually the one who wrote a review of Mathematica for MacWorld 15
11. 1901.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    By virtue of living of California and conducting any kind of business in CA, you'll have to pay the franchise tax. Establishing a bank account is such a case, but frankly, unless you only work for that LLC when you are traveling outside Cal
12. 1902.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Market forces are mostly to blame for the devaluation of common stock. When you negotiate that first round with the VCs, it's all about who has more power in the negotiation. A known weakness of the newbie entrepreneur is that they don't kn
13. 1903.▲
    How to balance privacy and transparency in the context of virtual companies?

    4 points by alain94040 18y ago|1 comments
14. 1904.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    This is a wife problem, not a technical problem that HN can help you resolve. Does your wife approve? Really approve? Really?
15. 1905.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Donations are no substitute for charging for products. If you have a commercial product and you make it free and ask for donations instead, your income will drop by 10X or 100X. Really! Where donations work is when there is an obvious good
16. 1906.▲
    I Chose to Support Entrepreneurs with the Founder Institute(blog.fairsoftware.net)

    1 points by alain94040 18y ago|0 comments
17. 1907.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Here are some details based on my personal experience (I have been under 6 different visa status over the last 15 years). There is a misconception that an investor visa requires cash investment (in the order of $500K to $1M). That's false.
18. 1908.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Having been through the hoops, I'd generally support this, but it's a tough sell in today's economy. Because there are emotions involved. There are already similar visas (EB-5 and E-1). Especially the E-1 category is very close and could
19. 1909.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    I wrote that blog post. Actually, one of my next posts will be about which meetings to attend in Silicon Valley. My advice (been there, done that): you don't need to show up for more than a few weeks at a time. You can find cheap tickets cu
20. 1910.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Thanks for the clarification. I updated the blog accordingly with your comment. I wasn't referring to YC specifically when I wrote the original paragraph, I had other incubators in mind. Sorry if it sounded too harsh.
21. 1911.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Does the $15K help you eat for any significant amount of time? Let's say t will take a year for your startup to take off or make it to a funding event. For 3 people, you'd be splitting $415/month. Some people can make that kind of income wi
22. 1912.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Don't get me wrong. YC is good. But not getting in is not the end of the world. It's the difference between taking a shortcut or having to do the work yourself.
23. 1913.▲
    You Didn’t Make It to Y Combinator or TechStars, Now What?(blog.fairsoftware.net)

    8 points by alain94040 18y ago|12 comments
24. 1914.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Good luck to you all, I know how tough the last hours are when you are waiting for a life changing event (especially when the odds are so bad - not because you are not good enough, but because the number of seats is limited). I wish there w
25. 1915.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    The irony of course is that the site has Google ads all over, and they all push Microsoft Word... Anyway, I'd like to hear the story of how the book rights went back to the author, that's unusual.
26. 1916.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    You mean we may get some investigative journalism going? That would be a nice change. Instead of copying and pasting press releases, making your own news will get you noticed, bring you more traffic, and establish you as a rainmaker. Ever w
27. 1917.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    1. Don't try to learn to become a programmer. You'll fail miserably since it's not your sweet spot. 2. Don't go after elance and other pay-for-hire sites. You need a technical co-founder, someone who believes in your product and is willing
28. 1918.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Simple answer: absolute power corrupts absolutely. We all like the cool kids from Google. What is starting to scare some (and soon more) is the power that Google has. With no counter-powers. Google needs to think about a better, more sustai
29. 1919.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Google is slowly losing the PR war. It starts with the geeks. It may take another two years to propagate to the general public. By then, billions of dollars in ads (think Microsoft) can't undo the damage. I'm watching to see if they are sma
30. 1920.▲
    by alain94040 18y ago

    Good advice if you can find them a small project. In other words: "date your future wife before you marry her". In the situations I faced, we were looking for the co-founder/VP Business+Sales, so it's not a position where you say: "ok, try