Summary of the evidence, from /.: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=537280&cid=23231...

1. Reiser showed up at his childrens' school the day after Labor day, the first school day after Nina disappeared and a day when Nina was supposed to pick up the kids. The prosecuter claims he was making sure the police didn't show up to ask where the kids' mother was. Reiser claims he went there to add his mother, Beverly Palmer, to the list of people that could pick up the kids. He was scheduled to pick up the kids the next day.

2. Hans' Honda CRX was missing the front passenger seat. It went missing sometime after he got a speeding ticket (after Nina disappeared) and before the police seized the vehicle.

3. Hans admits his hosed out the inside of the car. He removed the seat and threw it away. He also removed the carpet and disposed of it.

4. The car was also missing a piece of trim that Hans admits to throwing out.

5. Han's admits he was trying to hide the car from the police.

6. Nina's van was found three miles from Hans' home. Her cell phone was found in the van with the battery removed.

7. When Hans was taken into custody his cell phone did not have a battery in it. On the stand he claimed that he did not remove the battery from his own phone. He later admitted he lied about that. He actually removed it frequently after Nina disappeared.

8. Along with his cell phone, Hans was carrying his passport and several thousand dollars in cash.

9. Reiser was seen hosing down the driveway to his mother's home shortly after Nina disappeared.

10. The police found two books on murder in Reiser's car. He had purchased them with cash shortly after Nina disappeared.

11. He paid a $5,000 retainer to a criminal defense attorney just days after Nina disappeared, while the investigation was still a missing person's case. He didn't even bother to try calling her to find out if she was alive before he shelled out for the retainer.

The very first thing he did when he took the stand on cross from the DA was to admit that he had lied about a material fact of the case, allowing the jury to be instructed that the rest of his testimony was untrustworthy. He did a pretty spectacularly bad job on the stand.

I'm surprised he went down for murder 1, but there was a pretty damning array of things lined up against him. Aspergers or not, he admittedly ripped up and flooded his car while trying to actively hide it from the police in a storage locker; he claimed a 6-inch(!)-wide blood stain on a bag (not a sleeping bag, but its pouch) in that car was from having sex; and finally, he built his case not on the premise that he didn't kill Nina, but that she was still alive --- a very simple assertion for the DA to knock down.

just going through the process of failing already puts you ahead. after school, most people don't put themselves in positions where they can fail at something. it's not human nature. so congrats.

Aerons are about $400 used, last forever, and you can get $400 for it again if you want to sell it. Their utility as a symbol of excess and financial mismanagement died out in the previous dot-com bust. In fact, now that servers are cheap, you might as well spend your money on nice chairs and desks - at least they last forever.

The new metric for startup waste is the amount of time founders and their employees spend on social networking sites. If your CEO is averaging 50 TWEETS per day, you're fucked.

Sadly, we did not make it either. Since I don't have a blog, I'll just say a few things here...

Basically, we did everything we could on our end:

-Had a pretty good demo. We spent a few months working on it part-time and we had the entire thing up and running with enough features for it to be roughly usable and we had some nice mock-ups of the future stuff we wanted to put in. I even showed them that TechCrunch featured one of the UI components (that was released as a standalone widget) done by our UI guy.

-we prepared very well. We met with a few people from the local startup community (organizers of DemoCamp, a CEO and CTO of a local startup, etc) and had them pick apart our pitch. They did a very good job and brought up a lot of concerns which we worked out. People I emailed beforehand said to expect a lot of questions at the interview and to think on your feet, but because we had already gone through this 3 times with the local people, none of the questions during the interview were new to us and we had decent answers.

So why didn't we get accepted? Well, there were simply better teams around that day. The email from pg did give two reasons, but to be honest, they were pretty flaky. The first was the community aspect (ie, it depended on user generated content) and the second our planned revenue stream. We had good answers to these ready since we expected they'd be raised during the interview and plenty of previous YC startups had overcome the same problems. The way I see it, if pg's philosophy is "build something nice people want to use, then worry about the money" and he rejects you because of revenue concerns, then it's basically a nice way of saying "Sorry, I just liked the other teams better"

Of course this illustrates a one of the downsides of the whole startup thing. A lot of the things you do in life are pretty deterministic: if you spend 1hr/day learning Spanish, you'll know it well sooner or later, if you spend 1hr/day working out, you'll increase your stamina or muscles or whatever you're working on. If you work 1hr/day on a startup up.. well, its probabilistic, so all you're doing is tilting the odds in your favour, but you're never guaranteed anything - be it progress or success or whatever. So all the work on the app and all of the preparation for the demo/interview was for naught.

Anyway... it'd be a shame to throw so much work away, so we'll probably work on it a bit more, then release it as a side project or something. At least have a decent project to put on future resumes or whatever.

Probably not. Clearly, he has unrealistic expectations of success. Who would buy things on the internet?

Compare:

"Energetic detail-oriented software engineer who wants to create systems with mind-numbing performance. Should enjoy working with people, solving non-trivial problems, and communicating these solutions. Should also wish to learn more about how others have engineered high-performance systems. We desire someone who is an expert in at least some of the following areas and eager to learn the others: distributed computing, compilers & interpreters, fault tolerance, network & storage devices, high-performance computation, algorithms & data structures, os/kernel experience."

That's from my last employer, which has been around for 8 years and has I believe about 4 recurring customers. In the 2 years I was there, they got no new major customers and only a few consulting jobs. 3 key employees have left in the last 8 months.

My point is that all job applications basically look alike. It's very difficult to pick out winners just from the job-app. In hindsight, the big successful companies all require top-notch engineers, exciting markets, and confident coworkers with high expectations. But many employers have that (or ask for it; it's often hard to tell the difference until you've been working there for a while) and still fail.

Secret to life: it's about the stories.

Fifty years from now will you remember that day spent coding, or will you remember your adventure in California?

This article makes a huge mistake that many entrepreneurs also fall victim to:

You and your friends are not the Internet.

There've been studies done on who clicks on ads (one was even linked here). It's midwestern housewives, the same people who watch daytime TV and enter magazine sweepstakes. I don't know a single person who watches Jerry Springer, enters sweepstakes, or uses MySpace over FaceBook, yet those people obviously exist. They're worth billions of dollars.

For that matter, my friends usually don't pay attention to TV or print ads either. They Tivo past the commercials or get their TV episodes off BitTorrent. They skim past the advertisements in magazines. They only look at the newspaper classifieds if they're actively looking to buy something.

A bigger problem for entrepreneurs is that roughly 99% of startups seem to target the same 10% of the market - the part that doesn't click on ads. If your users come from TechCrunch or Digg or news.YC, it's a pretty good bet that they've learned how to filter out ads. Most of the big consumer-web success stories - MySpace, PlentyOfFish, and lots that we don't hear about because they're not plugged into the Silicon Valley scene - succeed because they target a demographic that most of us can't identify with.

he failed to mention, that unfortunately, in our profession you have to quit and get another job in order to get a good pay raise.

A lot of employers, once they hire somobedy, raise the salaries just enough, and a bit, but they fail to recognize that the employee is much better developer and valuable than he was a couple of years ago. This is especially true to people in their 20s.

One way to retain employees: Give them really good raises and money to stay. Let them switch projects, or groups, when they are bored with what they are doing.

Inkjets work very well at what they were designed to do: Extract fifty bucks for ink from customers every couple of months for the short life of the $80 printer. The problem is that people think they were designed to print things, which is, in fact, only an afterthought in their design.

Laser printers, shockingly, work every time and run out of toner about once every two years for the average home user. I went through four or five color inkjets before finally learning...my color laser has been working fine for three years now, and has only needed the black toner cartridge replaced once (color toner cartridges are still at about 30% full and have probably another year of service in them). Sure, it cost $800 (it's a networked model, and they've come down since then), but I had already spent more than that on inkjets and ink cartridges over the years. I expect I'll get another several years out of it, and I never have to wonder if my printer will crap out when I really need it to work (which happened numerous times with inkjets).

Not that I'm bitter.

The quote in his signature is very prescient:

"It's easier to invent the future than to predict it." -- Alan Kay