skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch site, no inbound links, nothing indexed in google, buy ads, get subscribers. Now, 6 months later, pages are getting indexed and starting to rank higher for keywords that actually convert. About about 40% of signups now come from adwords the rest organic.

Putting videos on youtube proved to be a quick and dirty way to get visibility in search results while the site was nowhere near the top 500 in search results.

Only problem is it's a small, niche market and it's hard to get much quality traffic. Still, an extra 2-3K a month is always nice to have around.
Perhaps it's not the default rate - but the overhead. Those loans are pretty small.
Granted, but I was referring to the phrase from the message above -- "direct incentive." These are both indirect and completely unmarketable to boot.

I am a strong believer that everything we as human beings do, no matter how "selfless" it seems, is always done because it benefits us in some way. These two indirect methods are good examples of that and I'd be the last person in the world to say I do anything "just to be nice."
SEO Quick Tips
I suspect that location could be a big factor - we don't all live in the Bay area. How do you value my car against your similar vehicle when they are several thousand miles apart.

Plus the Nigerian problem will also raise it's head.If you can't sell a laptop on Ebay any more then will you be able to sell it here?
This is awesome stuff, Sanj, thank you for sharing. Your "about" section in your profile is blank, do you have a blog or site or anything?
Scrap a negation and you have a fine comment:

If people are poor after you profit from them, you need a new business model.
Well, potentially...

http://termie.pbwiki.com/HowToDevHouse
How about Ubuntu instead of pirating Windows?
that wouldn't be amusing.
But aren't there actually cases where a user would want the ability to have an "instant on" web-browser, email client, etc. without having to load a full OS? Seems like a nice feature to me.
At least in the U.S.
Sure. I ended up with a Newton from school when Apple was dumping the MP100s. A buddy and I started writing stuff for them -- some games and a VT100 emulator.

Bits of them here: http://web.archive.org/web/20041210150544/http://www.scrawls...

The game I mentioned is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20030811081833/scrawlsoft.com/pro...

When the Newton disappeared on 1997-02-27, we got call from the guys at Palm (mostly ex-Newton folks) to lure us to code for the PalmOS rather than WinCE. We only wrote one neat bit: http://www.powermedia.com/pilot/index.shtml

About a year after that I helped cofound PatientKeeper, http://www.patientkeeper.com, where I wrote the first 7ish versions of the handheld app before we hired some really talented engineers to hand it off to. I spent the next several years writing the server side of that system while watching them take ideas I'd had to new, amazing places.

My last project there resulted in this:
http://www.patientkeeper.com/news_and_events/press_releases/...

Which, by my calculations, represented ~70% of their $45m FY08.
...but if the borrower is on the same thin financial ice when the loan is due as he or she was when the loan was taken out, and rolls the loan over, then things get out of hand very quickly. This is how the people offering paycheck-anticipation loans rack up their profits.
Piracy is theft, but what really hurts is the reactions companies have against piracy -- they make legitimate ownership more cumbersome!
I could download a lot of MS software for free because they have a partnership with my university.

I even used it to get WinXP to play some games. It's kind of strange to have a burned CD-R lying around - that is actually a legitimate copy.
Yet it's possible to run a current account on far less? I doubt that's the problem.
The teams I know that were able to attract early customers had a sales pitch (a clear benefit, demonstrable difference from alternatives, and a reason to believe) and were "open for business" (had a company and a way to accept payment). It's hard to tell where you are in the cycle but those would be two places to start.
You should sell tobacco.
Interesting stuff, and thanks for the reminder about keeping the sign-up process super-simple. We are indeed aiming to make something super-simple. Getting to know the customers is top priority--hence this post.
i posted here on hacker news and got 3 subscriptions out of it when my product first launched.

http://corduroysite.com/
Steve Jurvetson:  Top 10 trends debate
Or perhaps it is just a sign of an immature market. They charge so much because they can get away with it.

With competition the rate should go down. Even if it is mainly caused by overhead, as companies will figure out how to operate more efficiently.
As one commenter noted on their site, the lust to learn and the rate of success should be linked to the socio-economical situation, rather than the technological argument. Bluntly put, children from the rich families have a higher probability of success than the children from poor families.
I'm not the one who compared leaving your wife to rape and genocide. It's preposterous to do that and then to say that you're not equating "blame" with "moral condemnation." And since you reiterate your consistency, I can only assume that when a woman leaves an abusive husband, she too is solely to blame, or when a man leaves his unfaithful wife, he is solely to blame.

That's a silly position, which considers only proximate causes, and that's my problem with PG's "outrageous" counterexample. I don't think you can show the statement "both partners in a failed relationship are at least to some degree responsible for its failure" to be false.

To take PG's "outrageous" husband--people don't wake up one morning and say, "Well, I'm arbitrary and evil, I think I'll leave my wife for no reason whatsoever." Causes beget causes, and in any long-lived relationship, they do so in such a tangle that you can't possibly ever assign fault, responsibility or blame entirely on one person, even if all that you can see is that one partner chose wrongly at the outset.
But where would the wordplay be in tobacco selling?
This is exactly right. By making money day trading in the market, you are creating very needed services - adding efficiency and liquidity. Without these things, the markets wouldn't exist.
I felt strongly enough about this to post a reply as an article:
http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/asus-linux-whether-you-need-it...

Bottom-line: You're going to be loading your full OS when you come to work in the morning anyway.... How often are you going to need your Skype and you're PC isn't already on, running your full OS?
I would be more impressed if he had already built a sustainable company to a point that the company is generating more cash than he knows what to do with, but he is putting $17M into his own pocket and give up 10% of the company such that he can continue to build and morph it into a $1.7B company (10X again). Reading the article, it was not clear why he did it except to say that he now has $17M in the company's bank. It is even less clear why he brags about it. My own past experience is that whenever I boasted that I was the smart parrot who swallowed a fat mouse, I always ended up having to deal with indigestion. I think he is a great entrepreneur but I am curious.
Gack! Piracy IS NOT THEFT. It is copyright infringement. The copyright lobby would like you to believe that it is theft, but it is not. If you pirate a $10K software suite, you will not be charged with grand theft: software.

Theft, by definition, transfers value from the original possessor use to the thief - a zero sum transaction where the thief gains at the owner's loss. Copyright infringement does not do so. It only deprives the original possessor of potential future value. (You could even argue within some legal jurisdictions that there is copyright infringement only when the pirate derives commercial gain from the copy.)
audio books on a road trip? how about greatest hits by queen.
Managing processes with launchd
An interesting, useful new web service
this is actually a repost of a popular comment from the thread about that daily wtf article.
I've actually had some success on the shyness front. I did two things here: took a course on improvisational comedy, and hung out with some pick-up artists who showed me how they start conversations with women. These things got me into the mindset of "when something looks like I couldn't possibly do it, test that hypothesis." Last Saturday, I actually got a date by walking up to a woman on the street and asking her! Later that night, I had dinner with her and her family. Even a year ago, this would have been unthinkable.
Actually I misread your original post. I thought you were referring to a legal drug with the thought-process benefits (but lacking the psychedelic effects) rather than the psychedelic aspects alone.

I am familiar with a few legal psychedelics, but it's not something I'm interested in :(
Doing a qualitative PhD for 4 years meant it felt like starting from zero again :(
This is indeed a useful service. Its certainly not new (http://tinyurl.com/ynvea7). Combine this with www.jott.com and you have a pretty good system.

I am more of the Hipster-PDA user as I don't always have internet connectivity so I can't get to my lists from everywhere. Plus I happen to like pen/paper :D
Find the biggest communities dedicated to the niche your software services. Big Boards is a good starting place.
http://www.big-boards.com/

Then jump into the forums and start posting responses. You don't want to come off spammy, but definitely try to slip in references to your site whenever applicable.
On a somewhat related note: Have you ever thought about re-selling on ebay?

Say an item has a really shoddy presentation/page and it is obviously keeping the bids down. You could buy it, make a better site and let the original seller ship it to your buyer instead of you.

For example you could ask the original seller for more photographs of the item.
How about that the people who need it dont even know what ubuntu is.

PS: I use ubuntu :)
Ask YC: Search feature for YC
wouldn't it be cool to have a search feature on YC where we can search for links based on keywords? It would ofcourse add load to the system, but the feature would be useful in case we need to find links :) Just a thought.
"If I did that, it says I don't trust anyone"

So you don't have locks on your home either?
My company blog needs more comments before it'll be worth reading!
Seconded. This is what I did with a company I started three years ago (and sold, at a good profit, last year). The audience was there, and they were used to getting similar services for free. By having a few extra killer features and being more innovative generally, 5% of free users converted to paying subscribers.

Sadly this percentage was far too low for it to become a 'big' business and my knowledge of how to grow a company was very poor back then (I used to believe you got the product right, then sold it.. no sirree, that's not how big business really works).
"The law doesn't even agree with you."

My lawyer would beg to differ with you.

"Copyright is not a natural right"

Neither is land ownership.

"In this case, if everyone is pirating, then it's absolutely moral for an individual to do it."

Thanks for the new counterargument. This one is even better than "They've already ripped me off, so I'm just getting them back." I guess I'll be using it in next month's post.
For some, the question of "that which is expensive, or that which is not available" is irrelevant. If a good is priced such that it's out of reach, it may as well not exist.
I never said anything about who is hurt. In fact, you've just presented one of the counterarguments I discounted.
What were the services and new features? And of course, how did you find those first few customers, so you could tell that they really liked the new services and features well enough to pay for them?
What did you make that people wanted?
1. Yes, you write a communication mechanism. You can either use an existing one (like Thrift) or use the Erlang binary protocol. Erlang expects you to be acting like an erlang message-based process, like an actor.

2. No. Erlang is not an OO langauge, although its concurrency model is the actor concurrency model, which sometimes feels like Smalltalk's object model.

3. The cost of communication. Having implemented a few systems that do this, I've found it to be fairly small, even using a slow glue layer like ruby. See https://github.com/KirinDave/fuzed/tree ... Powerset uses almost exactly this codebase to manage query analysis on its frontend before dispatching to our results retrieval layer. Thus far, it's been one of the most flexible and robust parts of our architecture.

I felt this way too, and it is the case in some very specific scenarios. But the truth of the matter is that Java itself is often the wrong tool in these cases, so it's somewhat of a red herring to say that.

4. http://erlang.org/documentation/doc-5.6.1/lib/jinterface-1.4...
Or because they are mathematically distinguishable from each other. E.g. They are certain relations between options with different parameters - an algorithmic trader can then provide the liquidity even for continuous parameters.

Unfortunately that does not seem to be the case in the exchanges right now. They stick mostly with a carefully restricted set of parameters that was useful in an era of human-only trading.
Did you prefix your comment with "@Joshwa" as a clever way of pointing out that some people don't care if the comments are threaded, when the comment count is low?
I thought GMail was done with Google Web Toolkit. Maybe part of this library was already released as part of GWT in some way?
Your kids will turn 18 soon ;)
You gave "It's not hurting anybody." as a false counter-argument.

I'm clarifying that you believe, as a matter of fact, that every single movie download hurts someone.

After that clarification, I will ask for a clarification about who is hurt and point out particular cases of downloading where, as a factual matter, I don't see that they (the people you say are being hurt) could make an argument that they were hurt. Certainly not one that could hold up in court (which is the appropriate standard for determining if the person really was hurt, correct?)
Thanks for sharing your experience in this field. But (and forgive me if I'm mistaken) your application was a special exception where the option of using the touchscreen UI made more sense, just as the Nintendo DS has a usability edge with its touchscreen. But for the more-general "productivity" applications - from email clients to word processors to graphics design software (where the "word bias" isn't an issue), I don't see touchscreens being the more efficient way to go.

In my opinion, delight is great, but not when it comes at the expense of productivity. For games and leisure, productivity is a non-issue and - you're absolutely right - delight and simplicity should be the developer's number one focus. But for productivity tools, making things easier and quicker to get done is the most important thing. There's nothing more frustrating than banging out an email on a touch-screen keyboard; for productivity tools, increased productivity is the delight.
Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
Is it worth paying for Textmate or can I find a free one that will do, like TextWrangler? I'm just starting to learn how to code so I think my needs are pretty basic.
cough searchyc.com cough
I think it depends on the demographic of your prospects. For some demographics "user" and "customer" aren't so far apart.
"self righteousness might be a tad misplaced"

So now insisting on honesty and ethics in business is "self righteousness"? I really don't know how to respond to that.

Your example of the charity is the pure definition of situational ethics. I guess you can rationalize any kind of wrong behavior if you tried hard enough. Just out of curiousity, I wonder how clergy people would react to receiving stolen goods to benefit their charity.

"Its easy to take the moral high-ground"

No, it's easy to flow with the crowd. Sometimes it's really hard to stick with your convictions. Have you read this thread?
by the way law is sometimes created by the lobby - in short people who are going to gain a lot ... they own the politicians and make a law , which sometime is not acceptable by general public ... if a particular law is going to impact masses then why not to have referendum before making and passing a bill to create a law.
"I'm clarifying that you believe"

You're not clarifying. You're assuming. And your assumption is incorrect.

It would be silly for me to argue that anyone is getting hurt by downloading a movie. It's a difficult argument to make.

I'm arguing that it's wrong. That's all.
How do you know that long-term changes in brain structure and function do not include harmful side effects?
'...memory locations, which are just wires turned sideways in time'

I hope I'm not the only one who finds this hilarious.
It's really refreshing to see someone say 'computer science is no good 'cuz it's not engineering', instead of 'computer science is no good 'cuz it didn't help me get a job as a website-janitor.'
Es: A shell with higher-order functions
Nice logo.
Jerry Yang prepares Yahoo troops for proxy battle
I didn't assume. Hence the question mark.

So, if it's not true that someone is hurt by every movie download, then why are the movie downloads, where no one is hurt, ethically wrong? Why is "it's not hurting anyone" a bad ethical argument in the cases where it's factually accurate?
I'd like one where I could use my hands on the screen with an appropriate UI at a reasonable price.

I have a wacom intuos tablet which can be sweet for the likes of Photoshop, but I got an iPhone a year ago and (with the exception of badly designed apps, of which there are plenty) it's just not the same.

In fact, every single LCD I use has fingerprints all over it because sometimes I forget they're not touchscreens and I touch the display to do something.

But the iPhone just feels different from most touchscreen-based systems I've used. Probably the UI. It's a lot more responsive and intuitive.
It could be argued that the reason they touch is because they haven't learned to use other (more efficient) senses in-tandem with the unique human ability to deduce and comprehend. We can touch things to see what they do, or we can process what we see and hear to arrive at the same conclusion but with less physical effort and in less time.
App Engine Launcher for Mac OS X
I love how I somehow get downmodded for pointing out a relatively simple fact.
BTW, I think PG is 'very happy' for finally having the 'V' word on the front page...
Hats off to your own web business
Sugar Labs created — New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
Something like this would definitely make me move towards using Disqus.

Two other (smaller) problems I see:

Disqus doesn't use my registration system. Currently I have bbPress and Wordpress using the same registration system.

This makes it convenient for users to contribute to comments and the forum--because they automatically have an account at both places.

Using Disqus would change this. I don't see an easy solution here--and this isn't a problem for most people.

One possible thought is expanding the API, it seems pretty limited right now: http://disqus.com/developers/

I think it would be best to provide a standard solution that works for most users. The other chunk (people like you/me) can develop on top of the API creating whatever custom solution we need.

This is a win/win.

The other problem I see is being able to customize the comments.

I haven't played with Disqus enough to know this--but being able to customize the comments (IE: Strip out CSS and customize with my own, re-organize using my own markup, strip JS if I choose to) may be an issue for me.

Disqus looks the same across every blog I visit. Adding a way to customize comments would be extremely helpful.

As joshwa said, both of these problems could be solved with a better integrated WordPress plugin. Not to mention it could easily be extended with a more developed API.

The good news is Disqus seems to be listening. I see them replying everywhere they're talking about--which is great.

These are the primary reasons holding me back from using Disqus, any thoughts on adding these Disqus?
Yahoo seeking Open Alliance with Google
"10 principles of effective leadership"? Really?

What crap! Who is voting this up? I want my story-downvote feature!
If you are selling advertising then your customers are your advertisers, not the audience that you supply them. Users may be customers in larval form, but it is a significant step for a subscription model business to convert a user to a customer. Many startups fail to pay attention to this soon enough (e.g. before they go broke).
Robert Rauschenberg on process, change, boredom, and more
I think it's an interesting idea only in that it seems to be a case of throwing a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing if any of it sticks.

It allows you to do a whole bunch of things, none of which I want to do. You can sell/buy stuff, but as others have mentioned evaluating quality seems like a huge problem. You can make a list of all the stuff you own and find out what it's worth, but since that's an awful lot of effort and all my stuff is worth less than I paid for it, why would I want to? You can tell everybody about all the stuff you own, but that just seems kind sad. And you can ask people about the stuff they own, but there are plenty of online review systems which make getting the opinion of random people easier.

But of all these services, there might be something that's of interest to some subculture somewhere. Maybe obsessive stamp collectors, or obsessive [something] collectors will find one or more of these features to actually be useful, and that might be enough to build a business on.
It's about size. And the mouse is not less efficient than the keyboard for certain tasks. For others (especially, I'd imagine, the hacker news crowd) it can be less efficient, but I don't think that's so much of a general rule.

I love the keyboard on my full-sized computers. But lately, I tried to ssh to a server to fix an issue from my iPhone and typing was a bitch. Despite gestures and shortcuts and my aliases, I couldn't really get anything done and gave it up to do later.

I don't know what your idea of productivity is but some things are very amenable to being grabbed and manipulated. It's just so much simpler and faster. For example, I use irssi on my phone when colloq stops working to get on irc, and I wish I could flick back and forth between windows...or I wish I could manipulate and split windows with only my fingers zooming in and out and dragging things. No, I have to type it out and it is a very annoying pain in the ass. I know irssi isn't a mobile app, but it sure does make a good example.
How to Be On Time Every Time
I found a torrent with all of Steinbeck's audio books. There's a great Of Mice and Men read by Gary Sinise. On the off chance you haven't read that yet or are a Gary Sinise fan, it's pretty great.

I really liked Cannery Row too.
How to create ideas