I actually find it more interesting that quite a few of the obviously copied bits aren't even really worthy of copying if you're already going through the effort of building an entirely new product -- they're pieces of our product that could stand to be improved. :)
I'm a woman and a developer at Stripe. I don't see how welcoming women as well as men into the engineering -- and every other -- team at our company can reasonably be called "lying" or "dishonest." No, we can't singlehandedly change the gender ratios in the valley, but we can and will try to make our hiring process as good and fair as possible.
We certainly understand that for some specific billing situations, Stripe's subscriptions API may not be a good fit. That said, we've tried to accommodate as many use cases as possible, and I just wanted to make sure you knew we have a prorate => false flag that you can pass when switching subscriptions. We also have a concept of usage-based charges (invoice items). Your larger point of course still stands (that there are always going to be edge cases and custom billing logic).
Congratulations from another fairly new programmer. :)
One UI suggestion: I find it clunky when a site forces me to choose from price ranges that don't overlap (e.g. $5 to 10, $10 to $15, etc.). Generally people making purchasing decisions aren't thinking in terms of those kinds of ranges; they simply have a maximum budget in mind. I think it's better to allow users to specify "under $5", "under $10", etc. so that each successive group includes the previous groups. I realize there may be a case for trying to get customers to purchase the most expensive item they're willing to purchase, but more often than not having to click each range separately just annoys me and I leave the page.
Many of the included apps (like NYTimes, Amazon, etc.) have Chrome Web Store apps that are separate from their regular websites. (Of course, it's debatable whether these app versions are preferable to their standard website counterparts.) The Web Store team emphasized to us the discovery aspect of the store. They also seem to be pushing Chrome Web Store payments as a way to increase paid conversions through one-click purchases from users who need only enter their CC details once.
Thanks for the feedback. The date mixup was a typo that somehow escaped our notice despite several re-readings, but good point about reminding users what the service is. That you yourself think about your product daily is no reason to entertain the fond hope that users sign up and then immediately frame a screenshot of your site on their desk to gaze at lovingly, just waiting for the next moment they can throw you a pageview.
As Saikat said, I use Textmate. There are decent bundles available for Objective-J/Capp. I'd also add that you should use Webkit (specifically Safari) when profiling Cappuccino apps for the best results.
I'd recommend reading through some of the comments on http://www.metafilter.com/85667/Hi-Whatcha-reading for some perspectives on how men and women experience the world very differently in many cases. While the general tenor of discussion gets a bit strident and I don't agree with a good deal of what's being said, it's very relevant to several comments in this thread. It seems to me always worth trying to understand how the world looks through other people's eyes.
I'm a female co-founder (Mockingbird - http://www.gomockingbird.com). My co-founder is a guy. We interviewed with YC last year, though we didn't end up getting funded. Best of luck with weddingtype and your application; whatever the outcome, I think the process itself can't help but be useful.
At Harvard at least people didn't like that the male final clubs (which are no longer affiliated with the university) predated all other clubs by many years and came to own prime real estate in Cambridge. It's near impossible for present-day female clubs to afford similar spaces. In part it's that imbalance that rankled, I think, though I'm not sure there's a good solution.
Besides, as pgbovine points out, she didn't say she minded the fact that the clubs are male-only, just the attitudes therein.
Radiolab's "Stress" episode (http://www.radiolab.org/2007/apr/09/) mentions rat studies in which experimenters made rats sick by subjecting them to extreme physical stressors (cold, treadmills, forcing them to swim for hours until exhaustion, etc.). Other rats merely had their food put out and taken away at the last minute a couple of times. Amazingly, the researchers could make the rats equally sick by simply frustrating them. I thought that was a powerful reminder of the real physical effects of stress.
However, the problem isn't the medium or the message, it's us.
Unless you're claiming that people themselves have fundamentally changed, I don't see how the medium gets absolved of responsibility. The medium influences us, doesn't it? We're trained daily by the things we do and how we do them.
Heh, I was talking about my 17-year-old self, not my 17-year-old child (a terrifying thought). My point was more that a lot of advice has a catch-22-ish quality in that only experience makes its truth sink in, by which time it's often too late.
I wonder if there is a way to bring realizations born of other people's experiences home in any meaningful way. I sometimes think about what advice I'd give my 17-year-old self if I had to attend college again, but I admit that the younger me likely wouldn't have listened. It's hard to know what to value in the moment, and I find it's equally hard to absorb what others with the benefit of hindsight tell you. I'd bet that none of these expressed regrets really surprises any of us, but chances are we'll all have the same ones on our own deathbeds -- despite knowing better.
He's saying it's better than the first option: pursuing a business that requires a very high percentage of quality employees in order to have any chance of succeeding.
I actually find it more interesting that quite a few of the obviously copied bits aren't even really worthy of copying if you're already going through the effort of building an entirely new product -- they're pieces of our product that could stand to be improved. :)