If you're dumb enough to pay money for this, you're dumb enough that your site will never make any money. The only ones who will get rich from this are the owners of the site - they are selling you a dream, and you are paying for it.
Spend the money on some proper SEO services instead, it will do you more good.
And let me give it to you square - your site will NEVER get funding. It's not hot, it has little potential of becoming huge. It's the type of site that can make solid money, but only by targeting the users directly. When you are making good money, the angels will come to you.
If you are trying to raise funding for your site, you are in the business of dreams, not reality.
Web apps were a temporary fad. They are good for some type of applications that are similar to document based (e.g facebook, flickr, HN news), but for others, web apps are terrible (twitter, photo editing, making phone calls).
There is space for both types, and web apps are not going to replace desktop apps.
You don't get what I mean. YouTube is representative of the general internet, and by extension, the general attitude of people. The cool thing about the internet is that one person cannot change it all. Everyones voice is equal. Nobody can change it.
CNN and Fox are not civil and friendly. They are heavily filtered - they don't allow their readers to say anything.
And please stop patting your back that this community is so smart. It's just a bunch of HTML makers who want to become rich by joining Paul Grahams incubator. Slashdot has people with real indepth knowledge about topics commenting, here it's just a bunch of opinions from people without deep knowledge.
The entire premise behind this community means that it's not smart - it's a bunch of college kids with ideas gathering here. There's a lot of talk, a lot of ideals and little real knowledge and experience.
So stop patting yourself on the back - go to usenet, you'll see real smarts. The comments here are really not that smart.
The problem is that when your measuring yard is reddit, even this place seems smart by comparison. What other sites do you visit that you use to measure this place by? Do you have an appropriate yardstick?
Well said, yet completely wrong. People are thinking this stuff, so why should they not say it? The internet is different from real life - everyone with an opinion lands here, and can give their honest opinion. Let them give it, for those of us who grew up in the old polite days, this may be strange, but it's the new world! We are entering a time of REAL freedom of speech, and now that you are confronted with it, do not run away.
Look at YouTube comments, that's how the world really is like. You want to regulate this away? You think you actually can? Welcome to the new world, it's not worse, it's just different. Insulting people is the rock 'n' roll of 2009, if you can't deal with it, well, there's a cable plugged into your wall that you can simply pull out.
Times are changing, folks. Profanity, insults have become way cheaper, because anonymity also has. Arrington may complain, and all the people in this little community of ours make shake their heads and nod sorrowly and agree that something has to be done, but do you realise exactly how small your community is? You are reaching nobody, and nobody can hear your voice.
What we have is a herd of elephants thundering down a slope, heading towards a world of extremely democratic and free speech, and a bunch of rabbits form a council on the side and decide that they choose that the elephants should all start walking the other way.
Pointless, I say! Change sometimes goes your way, but sometimes change goes the way you don't like. This time it is that way, and very frankly, all these beard stroking and discussion about this will have little effect.
So, we can't just all grow up, because the internet is young. It will stay young, so if you want a place where everyone is grown up and civil, build a gate and hide behind the walls.
And don't forget to tap hard on the walls when the rock 'n' roll music of the neighbours gets too loud.
This is the most stupid essay I have read in my life. Most scientific advances have not been made in democratic governments - The old Islamic Discoveries, the old Chinese Discoveries, the old European Discoveries were all made under King-like dynasties. A huge number of inventions were made under Fascist Germany.
Democracy is in fact really bad for science, because in a democratic society, you need to convince many people you are right. In a fascist or monarchist society, you just need to convince the king.
And then stupidly equating this with china - china is where it is right now because of a very strong central government with tight control. Without this government, the chinese people would have collapsed into civil war and split up - it would not have been at the level it is at now at all.
Old men with limited experience should not go meddling with systems they do not understand and that seem to be working, based on their ideology. The alternative could mean the death of millions - look what happened when they thought to bring 'democracy' to Iraq.
This does not mean that C++ is difficult. It just means that you may be used to easier languages, and your brain is not flexible enough to deal with C++.
What's the hard part of the syntax compared to a language like ruby? Interfaces? Classes? Inheritance? Templates? Exceptions? Ruby has equivalent interface elements, and there is not much of a difference in difficulty level between learning the one or the other.
I learnt C++ in 2 weeks 7 years ago, and it was easy. The difficulty comes with learning to use the libraries and host APIs, but that is exactly the same for every other language I've learnt since then.
If you cannot learn C++, you are either plain old stupid or you don't belong in programming. C++ is very easy, the syntax is picked up in a week, and you can work without any libraries, you mostly just need to learn the API of the host system. If you can program in Ruby, you are capable enough to program in C++, and the only thing stopping you is just this 'myth' that C++ is hard.
Linux fails because the creators are too arrogant. They want people to switch, but remember, those people were doing fine before you came along. If you want people to switch, compell them with something they want. All linux gives is problems and headaches. Even though I am a developer, I have never had to use the internals of linux, so the fact that it is open source is irrelevant.
What really kills linux is just the arrogance of the developers.
I hate working from home now also, after doing it from near to 8 years. It sucks, it's lonely and it's difficult to get motivated. Also, you are in an insular bubble, you are not exposed to different ideas, and the years tend to repeat themselves.
That's why I'm giving up this life and going to work in a lab.