skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you just put all the videos on a DVD every 6 months and sell the DVD for $40?
"No debt" really means not enough debt so that you don't own a super-majority of equity.

Giving away a few percentage points for enough cash to keep the lights on is fine. But I've seen arrangements where founders didn't end up owning their companies, even after an ostensible "seed stage" round.
Actually I thought it was pretty well written..what specifically do you mean? Some of it was somewhat funny.
we as in who? Google?
The thing that's rarely answered sufficiently is the question of how to find a good co-founder. The answer is often "Find someone you worked with or went to school with that wants to start a company with you"

The thing is that there are a limited number of people to pick from based on these criteria. Out of these you have to find someone that's smart, gets things done and has the stamina to do a startup. For most people this amounts to a grand total of zero people.

I've done startups where I slacked on the co-founder criteria, thinking "Oh he's not the smartest guy I know, but he's a hard worker" or "he knows everything there is to know about this domain, but he's not 100% motivated" and I've been disappointed every time.

If you don't have a perfect match I'd recommend going it alone.
Just because it's written in legalese doesn't mean it's remotely enforceable, even within the US.
The Therac-25 is one of the first things Georgia Tech CS students study in our CS Ethics course. If you're interested in more such events see http://measure.cc.gt.atl.ga.us/classes/cs4001_fall_2009/
I think you provide a lot of value and have every right to charge for it.

I would think about the option of all videos being free forever but a monthly subscription to access a Mixergy forum, a members area, where people discuss the interviews and talk about the issues they raise.

Use the interviews to create a high quality community that people are willing to pay to join.
Adobe’s H.264 encoder in Flash Media Encoder is so utterly awful that it is far worse than ffmpeg’s H.263 or Theora; they’re practically assuming users will go use x264 instead.

Why is x264 GPL licensed instead of LGPL like FFmpeg? It would make x264 the de facto H.264 encoder.
Which he mentions in the actual keynote
Jason, did you even read my article? This isn't about the traffic those autogenerated pages get, it's about the fact that through the minuscule amounts of PageRank that they are each capable of grabbing, you are now able to rank your mediocre pages with absolutely zero influence from the rest of the web.

We're not talking about stub pages, it's all the fully automated bullshit that you are generating. They not only need to be deindexed, they need to be nofollowed or removed altogether.

How is it you are out there playing the wounded puppy when apparently you haven't even read the articles or followed the reference links? You can't just skim this one and then craft a rebuttal and think you've addressed the issue. There's a lot of data in those paragraphs you apparently just skimmed over (if that even).

You have over 500,000 pages listed in your xml sitemap, and Google appears to have over 330,000 of them indexed. Click on this link, please, and actually go look at 10-12 of the pages we are talking about here:

http://tinyurl.com/yzmxq7b

Tell me how long it takes you, just by clicking through, to find even 3 pages that have any human interaction in them whatsoever.

Maybe, just maybe, you really don't have a clue what is happening. I personally don't believe that's the case, but if so then whoever it is you have working for you that set this up knows how to spam like a pro.
Wow: he was unfamiliar with how an option plan should be structured for an S-Corp and ended up having to do substantial research sounds like a lawyer unfamiliar with some stuff that I would expect to be basic. As ever, read what grellas says, and his $2k o $3k is what I as a consumer of such services have come to expect.
The issue I see here though is that people will pay a lot of money if they think that they can get really high value out of your videos, such as you claiming to have a short cut to millions.

Andrews videos are useful but they aren't your short cut to millions, start ups are still going to be a lot of work and a big gamble no matter how much wisdom you have gained from people on the subject.
For what it's worth, Topsy is doing the same for tweets. I've seen Google show a Topsy search page more than once while searching for things recently.

For example, links such as http://topsy.com/s/toyota+grand+jury+subpoena are submitted into google to be indexed.
I would just stick a piece of tape over the lens. Try writing software to counter that.

(And the administration complains, their "evidence" is "I was trying to take a picture of you getting undressed, but I got a piece of tape instead." Nobody is going to say that, and so nobody is going to "call you" on your tape-sticking.)
This is probably the best analysis of the VP8 situation I've read. One takeaway: if Google wants to make VP8 ubiquitous on the web, it probably could (by leveraging YouTube), but that wouldn't kill H.264. It would more likely set up two competing codecs, which would be good for everyone except the patent holders.
It looks like Andrew's motivation is to drive more traffic to his site.

It's like a having a "sale" every week by making new interviews free.

By putting older content behind a paywall, he's going to drive more traffic to his latest interviews since people would want to get them for free.

I actually like it and I hope it works.
As the author, this is sufficiently similar to my argument that I'd say we agree, mostly. At the very least, please shop your incorporation business and get bids. However, I still don't think the corporate veil you get as a sole founder in a quickie incorporation is worth the cash.

Doing a quickie LLC then fixing the quickie incorporation later (doing the merger transaction and dissolution of the quickie LLC) can often be more expensive than just waiting to do a C corporation the right way.
I was responding to the $/minute equivalent to song licensing earlier in the thread.
That's not a bad idea.

Yet another alternative: Pay for access to the live interview (which might mean you get the opportunity to suggest a question that gets asked). Make the archived videos free after, say, a week.
Backtype does the same too as far as I can tell so there are definitely quite a few companies out there with such activities.

This is a bummer as this just serves to increase the noise to the detriment of getting good results.
I don't know, Andrew. I think there are two questions here. You asked our opinion, so here goes.

1) What charging model drives the most quality and response from readers? (This seems to be the crux of the argument from your blog)

2) How do I, as a startup founder, get the most from the internet and how do you fit into the picture? If I have to pay for material, why would your material be any better than, say, a few books, free videos, or making friends with other cofounders on a place like HN?

It very well may be that you had 6,900 viewers of the PG interview, but here's the dirty little secret nobody talks about enough over here: there's about 500 tire-kicker, wannabe entrepreneurs for every real one. Probably a lot more. So your "audience" is probably largely consisting of people who like learning as much as they can without actually doing very much. The get a certain cachet out of participating in your interviews.

If that's the case, then I say target those people: work towards more and more famous people and more and more quasi-in-depth interviews. Charge for older material. Set up a "Gold Ring" Entrepreneurs Circle or some other premium brand. This puts you in the startup media business, just like book sellers or the pay-for-feedback guys.

However from my end I think we'll part ways here, at least as far as your paid service goes. Startups have about a thousand different facets and I need to know just enough about each of them but not too much. That means I need instantaneous feedback and a conversation, not an hour-long video from famous person X on how tough it was ten years ago to make their first million. That works great for mass media, but I need to know how to roll out a beta of a social networking site on a limited budget. I need to be able to ask questions about specifics around this topic and I need to know it within the next couple of hours. HN gives me that immediate feedback, and as the amount of material on HN grows, I get all sorts of historical information in easily-searched text format without having to pay anything at all.

Hope that makes some sense to you.
manhalo and seo are the reason HN need a friend-foe system like slashdot.

Every time you post anything about it, you prove you don't deserve to exist. Or you are a spam bot.
Nothing a good 50-100 years of mainland reforms won't fix, though. Ancient civilizations can and do think and plan in the long term.

In principle, it's already agreed that there is but one China. It's also understood that any military action by the mainland towards Taiwan will result in some number of American aircraft carriers showing up. The rest is a matter of time.
One of the things I greatly dislike about the search button is sometimes it has a function inside an application, sometimes it's just a web search. So I have to use trial & error to figure out which apps actually use it and which ones are just going to send me off to an unwanted Google web search.
No, what's frightening is that they did hire competent staff, and they did understand the liability issues. Then they did this anyway.
Reiterating my comment from that page:

It's good that you wrote this Andrew,

I like that it has some creative thought behind it.

I don't think there is much of a business model in directly selling this kind of content, but I may be wrong. I'm also a bit suspicious of attempts to manufacture scarcity, but I am certain there are ways of doing this that are not wrong. You put at risk all the benefits of Free: long tail traffic (I think you could be doing a lot better on search, especially video search), goodwill (or avoiding this strange hate against charging), letting a newcomer dive into mixergy content, cherry-picking interviews they think they'll like and becoming a fan.

All that said, I'm glad you are experimenting. You may discover something really valuabl. As long as you aren't locking yourself into a model, I think it will be worthwhile either way.

* I suggest considering a serious redesign to support this sort of approach and giving it the best chance. I think you may be bending the blog form a little further then it'll go.
I've been working on a todo list app for vim, loosely based on org mode. It doesn't cover many of org mode's features right now, but if you want to take a look anyway, the source is at http://git.mivok.net/gitweb/?p=vimtodo.git;a=summary
300 is the goal right now.... we're making plans right now.

.... keep the attacks up, only makes us more motivated.
And also the Turkish ö. But not `coöperate' from the New Yorker.
Best line in the post:

...I bet you if I stop charging for it for just 1 week, people would jump on it for the limited time it's free... Suddenly, old is valuable.
The PRC is a bad example for that; they're also likely to execute you:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/china-executes-corrupt-offi...

Nigeria or even Russia would probably be a better example; at least they're not famous for killing people for corruption.

That said, your main point is completely correct: this is the system working.
Killing employees at least is relatively easy, because their cost is obvious.

Killing features and code, while often at least as important, usually turns out to be practically impossible - because so many people will always argue that they "have no cost".
What does Smart Money want to imply with this headline?
> It is interesting the way we come to expect certain speaking patterns based on how most people communicate.

Isn't this what language (and other practical conventions) are all about?
Machine Architecture slides back online
I request this from Google every couple of months. If I could remove an entire domain from all my personalized search results, I'd be soooo happy.
> I'd argue that Wal-Mart is probably the single greatest force for helping the poor in the world.

Replace world with USA and you are perhaps closer to the truth. There are other retailers elsewhere in the world. Some even more competitive than Wal-Mart. ("Walmart leaves Germany" http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/07/walmart_leaves.php)

Also shipping containers have done more than their fair share in getting consumer prices down.
I'd like to understand more about this situation. If you are in a position where there is a reasonable chance that you will incur large amounts of debt with no ability to pay it off, for example your free facebook game unexpectedly gets way more popular than you expected and you didnt read the fine print of your hosting agreement that says you suddenly owe them a zillion dollars in bandwith usage fees, then it does make sense to incorporate against this kind of liability but I'd like to know how the particular situation you are referring to came about.
Over the last several months your interviews have worked their way into my routine and I often turn to them for motivation and inspiration. I think that the opportunity to help other entrepreneurs is a big factor in folks being so candid with you and I hope that they continue to be so willing to participate.

I'll gladly pay for your stuff, but I don't know that I really want subscribe to a service. What about charging for a podcast like product that rolled your transcript, interview, and bonus content into a single purchase? Throw it on iTunes and I'd give a few bucks per interview.
If his videos don't have a value to you, go buy books. People who will find value in his material will pay for it. I really do not see a point of comments like yours.
There is a big difference between stating an observation and an attack. You can (and have) dismissed the Google guidelines as irrelevant. But you shouldn't slag off others as spammers if you are going to do far worse.

You are the one who attacked people. We are simply tracking how well you performed in your efforts.

Hold yourself to your own standards or close your mouth. Period.
It already is the de facto for many situations--but for the reason you mentioned--primarily only on server-side apps.

The GPL is used for historical reasons; relicensing would be hard, obviously, because we have to contact everyone who ever wrote a line of code. Ironically we are doing that right now, but for a dual-license scheme (GPL/Proprietary).

The reason we didn't choose LGPL for the relicense is because one of the main devs (not me) refused; he saw releasing the source as LGPL to be effectively throwing away any chance to ever make any money off of his work, while keeping the code as GPL would at least reserve that option for the future. The dual license is a good compromise IMO; commercial applications can support development through license fees while free software gets to use it for no cost.
It also depends on what [Google's] target is: would try to push hardware support too?

A while back there was an IamA on reddit from a video codec hardware engineer. I found this comment interesting:

We've been asked to support ON2's VP6 and possibly other codecs. Google isn't done entering the video market, and this is part of that push. I can't really divulge anything more sorry.

See http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9q7pp/for_my_fellow_ge...
Are you sure this isn't a troll? It's so easily disprovable.

Here's a sound clip of an adult male speaking, followed by a young boy.

Do you honestly have trouble understanding the number the boy says?

http://soi.kd6.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sound.mp3
And I would agree with your additional point as well. A quickie incorporation is fine if you are intending to start as a sole founder and anticipate remaining that way. If you plan to add a founding team and anticipate needing a more sophisticated set-up, then you should be more cautious about doing it right from the start (we often get "instacorps" brought in for such repair jobs and, yes, it is true, it can cost more to repair them than it would have to do it right in the first place).

Great pieces by the way (I don't want to come across as just a critic - my points really touch on your argument at the edges, I think).
I guess they should in fact plan less in America. Onerous zoning laws and rent control aren't really helping cities.
It probably has something to do with pg frequently reminding us that "single founder" is a top reason that startups fail[1], and saying his top advice for single founders is "find a co-founder."

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
I am thinking that a custom OpenBSD firewall with some good logging and some counter measures for specific monitoring software might not be a bad idea.

This story is just getting more wrong with each article.
Report: Wal-Mart to buy Vudu, raising stakes in Amazon rivalry
So why didn't Google nip Maholo in the bud when it was starting out? Insider connections?
Not everything that uses the phrase "SEO" should be painted with the same brush. A lot of SEO best practices are making the HTML markup more semantic and human-readable. White-hat SEO dovetails pretty well with a human-readable web and accessibility standards, and is one of the better business cases for kicking the Flash habit. Just because Calacanis makes his name by abusing loopholes in the algorithms doesn't mean that's the only sort of thing that the name "SEO" applies to.
News of these accidents motivated some of our approach on a more
recent radiation therapy machine project. Here's a short paper I
wrote about it.

http://staff.washington.edu/jon/cnts/iccr.html

The software we wrote has been used without incident for more than ten
years.
That is the angle Jason used when he created his steaming pile. It doesn't mean that anyone in the industry agrees with Jason's strategy.

And if you want to place the blame where it belongs remember that Google is the company funding all this content scraping with their ads programs.

I just tried searching for a recent post from an official Google blog (about AdSense using referral data for more relevant ad targeting) and found a scraper site with their ads outranking them for their own content. Pretty sad.
I still think this is the wrong approach.

Interviews are tough to monetize because the benefits are pretty intangible.

The Charlie Rose model is better I think. Where you do long 1 hr interviews and get sponsorships to help pay for costs. It depends on growing an audience but it can work.

Another idea -- what if Andrew was able to put together conferences/events given the ties he has. He could charge for admission and have a panel of start up entrepreneurs where he interviews and moderates Q&As between the audience and entrepreneurs. Conferences are generally pretty profitable and could be worth exploring.
Here's the infamous paper by Nancy Leveson: http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html

(original PDF if you have access to the IEEE: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=...)

And an updated PDF: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

It's one of the first paper's read in 6.033 (Computer Systems Engineering) at MIT, which is actually taught by rtm.
Doing a quickie LLC then fixing the quickie incorporation later (doing the merger transaction and dissolution of the quickie LLC) can often be more expensive than just waiting to do a C corporation the right way.

It would be interesting to learn these actual costs from a lawyer, or someone who has gone through this process. I've worked at 4 different startups that changed from an LLC to a C corp. I wasn't privy to those costs, but I don't remember anyone being too worried about them.
Amazon.com recognized as America's most trusted brand
Wait, you're going to allow paying members to embed your paywall-protected videos on other sites to be viewed by non-members for free? If so, could I just register mixergyfreeinterviews.com and offer your entire archive there?

The free-embed idea is definitely risky, but it might help if you require there to be a certain amount of unique text/editorial surrounding the embedded video in order to avoid abuse. Otherwise, I'm going out right now to register that domain.
The Therac-25 was much more of a management and engineering failure than a technical problem, though. While the immediate cause of the deaths was a race condition in the software, it was only capable of causing harm because the hardware safety mechanism had been removed as a cost-saving measure, without proper verification that the software was capable of doing the same job. Worse, it was widely known among the Therac's users that the hardware safety would regularly trip during normal operation without apparent cause, yet the problem was never investigated until after the deaths.

Ultimately, the Therac was a failure of software engineering more than a software failure. I don't blame the technology any more than I would blame a girder for buckling because a careless structural engineer didn't realize it was overloaded.
I really enjoy your work Andrew and no doubt think it has value beyond even what you are asking for it.

Maybe you should have posted this before making the switch. I think people would have been less harsh and more likely to offer advice. As bad as you got "ripped", remember that most of us here put your work in very high regard.

You've created so many great interviews that I keep telling myself that I'll eventually get around to watching as many as I can yet only watch a limited selection here and there. Perhaps this will force me to watch more in the first week or pay the price but I hope I don't stop watching.
The dutch social network Hyves introduced this a few years ago, and set it on by default. They got a LOT of comments over this (which they handled quite well: sending around flowers and all). But within a day it reverted to off by default. You can still switch it on, so others see your visit's, but I think it's not that common.
Power users (paying) do get some aggregate stats tho (last month, 40 people, of which 54% girls, visited your profile.)
the headline says "Tech Stocks slip as Palm and RIM decline"
I really like this idea. The one setback here is the initial quality of the video isn't the best (skype) so it may not look so hot on HDTVs. The video could be spiced up a bit by keeping the low res skype talking heads in the corner and filling the rest of the screen with supplemental information such as bullet points of key topics, demos of products and other similar, relevant information.

This way Andrew can keep the basic skype interview on the site for free and charge for the DVDs that contain all of this exclusive bonus content. You could even bypass the DVD and just put the improved videos behind the paywall which gives viewers an incentive to actually pay.
Apple removes 5,000 apps from App Store
The Charlie Rose model only works when you're interviewing less niche figures. Rose has on lots of brilliant people, but they tend to be talking about current events, business, books, literature, art- it's a wide variety, and that helps build a broad audience.

Mixergy's about successful entrepreneurs. That's niche. That just doesn't have the potential size to be pushing a large enough volume that sponsorships matter. To get a larger audience it'd be necessary to expand the subject matter, and that would dilute the value of the site itself.

A better option might be to interview successful figures about how they became successful, and expand more outside of tech entrepreneurship. There's been a couple of interviews like that, and weighting it 1/3 tech, 2/3 successful figures in other arenas, there's a much larger potential audience.

At the same time, keeping the laser-like focus on the nuts and bolts and numbers would craft a high-end audience, the kind that advertisers absolutely love.