Invite a bunch of friends by sharing posts with them. It seems to work...

Yeah, you are close. I was more thinking about what Steve Jobs said when he announced the new MacBook Air:

"We asked ourselves, what would happen if a MacBook and an iPad hooked up? Well, this is the result, we think it’s the future of notebooks."

It made me wonder what would happen if the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro would hook up. Surely Apple is taking the best of both machines when they are designing the new MacBooks. So what would the ultimate MacBook pro look like? Well, more like a MacBook Air.

As mentioned in the post "Of course we would have preferred it if the solution would have been perfect, but at least we had the chance to give it a try"...

And how is that not failing?

When you fall you've failed at walking. But we all know that this is part of learning to walk. We can focus on the fail or on the process or learning. You obviously only see the fail.

Failure is not just a setback. A doctor has no problem saying if a child failed to learn X by Y age there may be a problem. That said there are ranges of failure, and handing money back to investors before you completely run out is a better option than running a company into the ground with nothing to show for it.

When people invest money in you and you shut down the company with half the money gone, you've failed.

Sometimes it's that simple.

No. That would just mean you would lose your shares and make it impossible to ver do an exit that would satisfy the investor. He expects a x20 return on investment so unless you can turn your company into a 2 trillion dollar company, you are screwed.

Sigh. It only sounds like that if you are suffering from ultra short-term memory loss and forgot all the lines you read before that last line.

I left those details out because I didn't think they would add to the story. The big company was KPN to which I sold my WiFi Hotspot operator in 2003. The manager who told me the story was Jan Kroon and it was about a manager he reported to. See, all that info doesn't make the story that more interesting really.

Actually, it's those details that do make the story interesting. Some little details that make the characters seem real are essential to hold your audience. (At least, so says my wife, who is a writer.)

I think this manager didn't care about you being late or not. All he cared about was results. If you would have come in at 9:15 AND showed poor results and then came up with an excuse he would have punished you for it. But if you came in, with a confident smile on your face because life was good and you loved your work, he would have just smiled back at you.

Any place that enforces posted work hours for salaried employees is not a place where the enforcers are looking at the quality of the output.

If work hours or company policies are not posted, couldn't you also say that expectations aren't made clear and communication is lacking? Aren't some sort of standards still needed? Otherwise everyone would cram everything into a 4 day workweek and be MIA on the 5th day.

That's not the impression I get, with the little book and all. It's no different to the managers who walk around with hand puppets that fulfil the 'bad cop' part of his routine.

But are Apple fans just more vocal, is Ballmer not as good on stage, or are Microsoft's products less interesting?

Or all of the above? Just asking...

To me, it appears to be more than just Jobs vs Ballmer (though that would be a hands-down victory for Jobs, no doubt).

The product was fascinating; it is well worthy of thunderous applause instead of the smattering of claps it received. The way the presentation ended: "I got 10, you got 10!" was pretty cringe-worthy, if you ask me.

I have the same experience but then with pageviews and Twitter VS Facebook: Twitter users check an average of 1.2 pages on my website. Facebook users do 4.2. That means 1000 visitors from Facebook generate the same number of pageviews as 4000 from twitter.

The increased interest from facebook might be due to a kind of social obligation. Whereas when you use HN or Twitter to find links you have no obligation and less reward to stay on the page an actually read the content.

Someone who is reading a link that a friend has sent them is expected to read it, otherwise the friend may be unimpressed or you might not have anything to talk about. Plus, there is the added incentive of impressing or gaining a connect to the friend or appearing interested in your crush/gf's interests.

On HN and reddit, my only interest is whether I want to learn something or make myself laugh.

I started TwitterCounter.com as a fun weekend coding project after my partner said he wouldn't have time to start on it until he had finished some other stuff. I couldn't let it go so started coding right away. We launched 6 days later. Not it is hugely profitable and has 2 full-time employees.

More importantly: I think almost every major internet success was started as a side-project. Yahoo, Google, Apple, the list goes on and on...