skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in a very similar situation to Andrew. (We've spoken over email a bunch, but for the sake of furthering this discussion, I'm just going to make this public.)

I'm also doing a video interview series, albeit on a smaller scale and even more niche (on getting traction). I plan on ramping this up significantly over the next few months, and eventually doing other niches I think will be valuable to this crowd. I also don't need the money, but I agree with Andrew that it sets an example and it creates a seriousness in the project (whereas with a hobby you can get lazy, which I have certainly been).

However, my core motivation (and I think Andrew's as well) is to help aspiring entrepreneurs. To do that, I think you want as wide an audience as possible on the videos.

There is an empirical question here that is unanswered: whether a paywall will actually increase video usage or not. Andrew will be able to answer that shortly, but I suspect it will not increase usage of the older content.

This is why I've made the decision to keep all interviews online and free. Instead any monetization will be done by books and/or DVDs. So here's one more possible trajectory for you:

1) Segment your interviews into sub-niches.

2) Get good transcripts.

3) Add synthesis and commentary around each sub-niche.

4) Sell books/dvds around each sub-niche.

5) Post the full transcript on each video page to get random SEO traffic.

6) Upsell your books/dvds (but not annoyingly).

Yes, I realize a lot of the book value will be on the Web (in both video and text form). But I think people will still buy your books.
chicken breasts with no additives, no antibiotics or hormones, and that were fed a purely vegetarian diet

Not to quibble, but this is nothing to be proud of: chickens are omnivores and scarf down anything they can fit in their beaks.
This applies to farming. I learned that, in order to grow a crop, the important thing is not keeping it alive as much as keeping everything else dead. Parasites, competitors, predators. Dead. The idea is to make leave the crop alone in its personal, practically desertic garden of eden with all the water and sun and shade and nutrients it needs.
Try Haskell
Edit: I'm not the creator of this, I just saw it on programming reddit and thought it would interest people here. With that said, if you want to give feedback to the creator, there would be a better place: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/b58rk/try_haskell/
I guess I just want a recipe rating system that is consistent and has some sort of meaning. I want to know of the people that like coriander and made a dish with coriander in it, what recipes did they find the tastiest (the ones with extra cumin or not). This is not possible when coriander loving people rate the coriander containing recipe 5/5 9 times out of 10.
StatSheet (http://statsheet.net) is "One Person Profitable"
They are different colors: the links are #000141, the bold words are #242424.
Think about what would happen if I were to donate a pallet of laptops to my niece's school, and then one of the parents accused me of spying on their kids through the camera.

My house would be raided by a SWAT team and everything electronic in it would be taken...TVs hard-drives, computers, computer monitors, networking equipment, routers, servers, camera equipment, everything.

The fact that this isn't happening to the school administrators is hideous. Not only did they admit that what they're being accused of is possible, they demonstrated it!
Ahem... I'm gonna take the liberty of reposting my comment from another thread where this "review" cropped up.

When you hit the home button, the previous application keeps running, which means it keeps eating memory, keeps using processor cycles, and keeps eating battery.....To truly quit most applications requires a multi-step navigation that is neither intuitive nor well-documented.

That one is one of the most pernicious bits of misinformation about the Android platform. Applications that are no longer visible to the user are NOT "background" applications like they are on a desktop OS. Applications that are no longer visible to the user are stopped. They no longer consume CPU resources, but the OS does hold them in memory in case the user returns to the app. Stopped applications may be killed by the OS, thereby freeing up the memory used by them, at any time by the OS when it determines it needs resources. Think of it like caching. The app state is cached in memory so that if you switch momentarily to another app (to answer a call for example) you can return immediately to the previous app with minimal delay and minimal resource cost (ie, the app doesn't need to be re-loaded, etc). The Android developer docs have more information: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html#....

The only things that truly run in the background on Android are service process. These are somewhat like worker threads that are created specifically to handle long running background tasks (like playing music, or downloading data over the network, etc).

There is absolutely no need to go through any "multistep navigation" to quit apps, nor do non-visible apps continue "using processor cycles and eating battery" (with the exception of course of apps that are supposed to be using processor cycles, ie, music players, etc. running in a background service process).
I believe some of the value that Andrew offers is in the description of his videos. When I click on an interview I have an idea of what topics are going to be discussed. If I have certain information that I am looking for one of the ways I research is by looking at the Mixergy archives. I understand what you are saying about the value of immediate feedback, however the next best thing to me are Andrews interviews.
There was a post a while back suggesting having a few of your previous ratings display beside the rating scale.

It requires more of a slider approach though, which is something you have to spend more time teaching users about.
If there were a lot of single founders with good ideas YC
might consider creating a new program called 2and20. If
your single founder application is accepted you have 20 days to get 2 additional founders and resubmit for a second approval?
David Galenson, Geniuses & Conceptual Innovators
I'm pretty sure the administrators thought they were behaving in the best interest of their students. But that's a sad commentary on the state of today's world.

Even if they did have the best of intentions, I think that they should be absolutely ruined. Make the very idea of such intrusions so thoroughly toxic that no one, even the most conniving, dare attempt it for fear of the stakes involved.

After all, turning America into the panopticon is the highest stakes around.
Fair point about the world comment. Though it's possible that Wal-Mart's infrastructure improvements have become a model for the grocery industry that might be stretching it a bit far.
Agreed. The trackball is awesome for moving back and forth within a text field (to correct a missed typo for example). I also find it nice when browsing websites with lots of close together links.
I don't understand. If people do not think that Andrew's product is worth $25 a month, then so be it. This is the nature of product pricing - there will always be people who you will piss off and who think it's not worth it, and there are those who will be willing to pay up. The audience you're talking to pays for many other services, whether it's basecamp, their linode instance, pingdom, etc, not to mention their internet access.

Quit patronizing people for not wanting to pay for a service. Andrew could've said he'd charge $100 a month, and you still would've made the same comment. There's nothing wrong with charging your customers, but when you decide to, you're setting yourself up for this kind of resistance, and that's ok. It's how it works.

I love Andrew's work, but at this time, I simply cannot 'waste' $25 on it. I don't have a steady income and am trying to save.
It's also a good bet that billions of BOFH's sperm died horrible deaths in wads of kleenex while he was looking at them. Ugh. I can't believe how much balance they put in this article when there's no balance to be found.
EDIT: not in the blog post but in one of the news articles it links.
I just checked and I unfortunately do not have the epicurious rating data. I did just check their website and they have a guide for rating 1-Okay 2-Good 3-Delicious 4-Exceptional.

Their rating system is not broken to the degree of these other websites.
I believe the use case at hand is, given person Tom who has purchased a premium WordPress theme, is the theme a derivative work, allowing Tom to redistribute the theme to whomsoever he chooses?
I don't have a steady income and am trying to save.

This is the case for most college students and entrepreneurs who haven't been successful yet. These people, including myself, are who mixergy's interviews might be most valuable to. We know that the interviews are invaluable, but we don't always have the $$$ to show for it.
Looks very interesting. Does anybody know if any of it is going to be webcast?
well, we're not ridiculously profitable, and I didn't do it by myself, but, uh, I do have all the equity.

I believe that if I didn't have all the equity, it would have died from one of my many early mistakes. There is no way I'd have expected anyone else to pour money into a hole for three years.

Also, even though I kept the equity, I had a lot of help. There is no way I'd have been able to do this by myself.

Of course, I'm the first to say that sometimes you should give up, but I'm pretty happy with how prgmr.com turned out. It probably hasn't yet paid out what I put in, but it's getting there, (and according to offers, it's worth about what I've put in now)
Nope. Those are both terrible examples of what can go wrong. I provided some examples of it not going wrong.

So the question is, do we throw out the entire notion of concentrating power in one person or small group of people, because they might abuse it? Or is it possible to devise a system that retains the advantages and minimises disadvantages? Because we know the consequences of giving that power to several hundreds of people - deadlock.
Actually, he's completely wrong about multitasking on Android, and BTW, your father-in-law is (IMHO) wasting his time with "Advanced Task Killer". That app is in general a waste of time. Refer to my post elsewhere is this thread for more detail, but the short version is that apps don't need to be specifically killed on Android. Apps do not normally run in the background at all, they are stopped as soon as they're not user visible anymore. Apps that do wish to do things in the background, like play music, can register a service process, which is kind of like a background worker thread. The service process is the only thing that actually runs in the background.
"....saving about $100,000 since installing its five boxes 9 months ago"

Might be a naive question, but can anyone please explain to me the economics behind this?
I think we might be coming at it from the wrong angle. Fundamentally, why does the Internet enable businesses which scale (out of proportion to headcount, out of proportion to budget, out of proportion to time, etc) in ways which are difficult to imagine for businesses historically?

I think you could identify a couple of things here: Google (and the App Store and Twitter and Facebook and all the things you cool people use) is a huge force multiplier for distribution. OSS is a force multiplier for software development. Modern web frameworks are a force multiplier for software development. The whole lean startup ball-o-wax is a force multiplier for customer development. Cheap outsourcers are a force multiplier for any sort of easily described, easily checkable, repetitive work. The astounding variety -- an ecosystem of ecosystems -- of companies/APIs which you can just throw trivial time/money at and hook an enterprise-scale solution into your business is a force multiplier for, well, pretty much anything you can think of. ("Oh effity I have no accounts receivable department full of people whose only job it is to chase down folks who owe me money, get their money, and then make sure it gets to my accounts. Wait, you mean Paypal makes that irrelevant? For like a buck a transaction? And it can be integrated into a website in like an hour? Whoa!")

Heck, some of these are less multipliers and more exponentiators.

The question is -- which if any of the above are not available for you if you have one person but might be available if you have two? And the answer, I think, is none of them.

The barriers are getting further lowered all the time, too, and the things force multipliers are getting better. A great example of this -- and I swear, it will create several multi-million dollar businesses this year -- is Twilio. You can now run a telephony company from your freaking kitchen. Holy "#$&"#$"#$"# we are living in the future.

It's a great time to be single. (Not that it's a bad time to have co-founders -- I wish y'all the best, too. Make awesome stuff and have lots of success doing it.)
Apart from the usual Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Larry/Sergey anecdotes, there's little evidence that two is a natural lower bound on the number of founders. It's sometimes claimed that a startup is "too much work" for one person, but the productivity of individual programmers is not fixed; with today's tools, solo founders can be as productive as a dozen developers from fifteen years ago. Another common argument is that you need a cofounder as a sounding board and as a source of moral support. These roles are vital, but they don't necessarily have to be filled by a cofounder. Einstein needed the help of his friend Michele Besso to develop special relativity, but Besso wasn't a coauthor on Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper.

Unfortunately, the need for cofounders is a deeply entrenched belief among investors, so much so that it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I really enjoy using org-mode for personal notes.

However, there's a few general issues I'd like to see improved upon:

* External Collaboration (how can I get my PM to work with me on org-mode docs?) - Something like ikiwiki that works back and forth between web edits and emacs edits.

* Searching - Ideally, this would be part of the external collaboration piece. Spotlight/rgrep is ok for now, but not great.

* Easier linking/file creation - I'd love for org-mode to incorporate some of ideas/features in VoodooPad/Tomboy for easily creating new docs and linking to them. Could probably hack something together (and I have made a shortcut for file-links that uses ido-completion), but it'd be nice for this to be a central focus.
Speeding up SSL: ECC 279% faster than RSA
It's only valid for pages built with FBML. So it's good for tabs (sections) but not for the main page itself. The main page is a newsfeed where you just can't put any FBML. So it makes an interesting tool to track subpages but in general it's pretty useless.
Clever idea though.
They also allegedly put in place official policy designed explicitly to prevent students and parent from ensuring their safety and privacy. Disabling the camera was an offense punished by expulsion.

To put that in perspective, I think most school districts punish students this way if they bring a loaded rifle to school.
Cilantro really is awful from my perspective so I would be one of those people that hate it, I love Spanish food but I live in New Mexico so I really just love New Mexican food which really is quite different from Mexican food.

It really is hard to find a native New Mexican, other than those raised in Mexican households, who actually prefer or even like cilantro compared to the other ingredients we have available.

I guess I'm just furthering your point but some people may prepare those dishes with no Idea that coriander tastes the way it does and just don't have so much hate to decide to review it (or maybe they just think they lack the cooking skills to make a dish).
Movie-Quality CGI For Games
You miss the OP's point that none of these hours were spent at advertising, the core of Google's business success.
You’ll Never Get Sustainable Progress For Free
And tcpdump, too.

Anyway, if you're looking to build that custom OpenBSD firewall / gateway, might I recommend the Alix 2d3 board. It is so choice:

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm
The big problem with consulting is that it takes so much /time/ and when you stop working, the money stops coming in. There is a lot to be said for owning a product business as your primary means of support.

Product companies often allow you to invest capital at a much higher rate of return. (I get several hundred percent return on my hardware purchases)

Product companies also allow you to avoid more of the work you don't like, and to work more on your own schedule. (Personally, I think it's quite a chore to wake up at the same time every day; as a product company, nobody cares.)
Do it yourself: Recycled skateboard art
I just found the thread. Interesting
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910976
Try site:kosmix.com or site:righthealth.com

Kosmix always had noindex in their "search results" - Now stop whining like a baby and get your ass back to work instead of justifying your mistakes.
Have you tried Ledger (http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger/)?
My lawyer gave me a LLC agreement that had C corp conversion language built in. He says it saved him the headaches he normally encountered when doing so. So, perhaps it's worth asking about when shopping around.
I'm looking forward to seeing this implemented in digital cameras. Lotsa of improvement the easy way.
I don't think recipes themselves can really be rated; we probably have to rate the person who created the recipe or the person evaluating the recipe. Let me explain:

The number of people that come back and rate a recipe is probably small. And how many people who had a middling experience with the recipe would make the effort to come back and rate it? Or even a good experience, for that matter? A bad one? You bet they're going to rate it.

So right there, you have all kinds of bias problems with the data. And just to make it more fun, how many of those people rating the recipes prepared it properly? How many substituted ingredients that just completely ruined the dish? You see this all the time on these sites - "This recipe is horrible. I vomited for 3 hours straight. BTW I didn't have any red onions so I used pickled cocktail cherries instead."

Somehow you have to find a more indirect way of evaluating a recipe's worth. Maybe it could be a measure of how many times a person comes back to look at it (on the theory that each hit is presumably them coming back to look up that recipe again)? Or perhaps how many people chose to make it.
Hi Andrew, I really enjoy a lot of what you do, however, I think you should offer additional value for paying customers besides just the old archives.

Maybe do special premium interviews just for paying customers, or write a startup e-book, or get rid of all ads etc.

Also, one of my issues with the interviews is that they're all really really long. I don't have a lot of time in the day, and sitting through an hour+ interview can be hard. I'd suggest mixing up the lengths of interviews and maybe doing short quick interviews where the responder can only respond with one sentence or word.

Anyway keep up the good work.
Andrew:

I've been a Mixergy fan for awhile. I watch what I can, when I can. The interviews are long, but definitely substantial. In other words, they should be long. Your preparation, the quality of the content, and the selection of your subjects, are all excellent.

Pay for it?

I haven't decided yet, but probably. I think a lot of other people will as well. The key is to make the subscription help bridge the gap stated above. Busy people are making money and will spend some of it to save time and get straight to the content they need. Bored people are not making money and won't pay for Mixergy content because they have all the time in the world to look on torrents or elsewhere.

Your free vs. pay formula:

I believe this current version of it sounds very savvy. You are giving a lot away, and at exactly the right place, while the premium charge is also mostly for the right things. By making new content always free, you make it easy for people to post and discuss in places such as here on HN. By allowing free embedding on blogs and other sites, you encourage conversation elsewhere. This is important and you've obviously thought about it.

Bottom line, let busy people pay to save time and attention. Understand that bored people can't/won't pay, but they may still be loyal fans. Cheers, and good luck with the changes.
Taking a page from the OKCupid marketing department? Bravo! Smart way to attract people to your service.
For smaller publishers, it's usually three blocks of ads plus two blocks of link units. For those not familiar with AdSense, link units are the horizontal or vertical lists which take the visitor to a search results page rather than straight to an advertiser's page.

I think a strict definition of MFA is always going to be a little grey, but there's clearly something wrong with pages that are nothing other than widgets, scraped content and the like.
In Biology, most of the paper seems to be spent explaining why the new result is relevant and how it differs from previous work. It's usually dry as a bone but I wouldn't call it obfuscated. Readers should probably have Wikipedia handy for defining terms.

Long papers tend to have a heck of a lot of research. A short paper could be about a single experiment, but often a writer will publish a larger body of work in one paper. Value added, I suppose.
How about a two-stage version of social bookmarking: in the first stage, there's just "save" and "hide." (You save things you'll make; you hide things you know ahead of time that you won't—because it has coriander, etc.) Then, after a suitable period (e.g. how long it would take to cook all the stuff you saved), you can vote on your saved/cooked dishes (and only those.)
This is not only a problem with recipe sites, but with most user input. http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina...

YouTube noticed a similar issue.
Getting users to rate on a star rating just isn't effective. You may have more luck with a simple 'yes/no' option. Would you make this again? And offer the opportunity for comments.

I find the comments in the reviews on epicurious to be very influential in how I follow the recipe, and if I cook it at all.
Enhance!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk
I thought those interviews were in the spirit of inspiring people to start something, not "strategic intelligence to other businesses". I didn't think the average viewer was there to glean some little tidbit which might help him increase his conversions by 0.4%. I thought they were there to get inspired by past greats to start their own company in the first place. They seem to be about attitude and confidence, not SEO tips.

$25/m is a VPS. My advice to wannabe entrepreneurs? Skip the mixergy and get the VPS.
"... f your single founder application is accepted you have 20 days to get 2 additional founders and resubmit for a second approval? ..."

Informally YC appears to be doing something like this anyway. cf Swartz & Reddit. Is there more?
Real-Time Search Stumbles Out of the Gate
Slight tangent: anyone built a recipe site that works by presenting a common item (chicken, flour, milk, etc) with "Got this? Yep or Nup" and so on to build a list of search terms?

CookThing seems similar I guess, but not quite the same.
Cool! I really like what the Haskell community is doing lately to reach out to new users. As someone who didn't know anything about functional programming a year ago, I can say that I've learned a lot just by messing around with it a little bit.