skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging

I don't have a lot of cash on hand, so when I talk about buying when the market is down I am fine thinking in terms of the next 5 years. I am cutting costs and increasing my rate of investment not dumping a lot of money into the market at the same time.

PS: If you get a large chunk of money it's best to get into the market over the course of 1-3 years vs going really aggressive the day someone hands you all that cash. You might miss out on a little interest but your odds of buying at a peak are greatly reduced.
Your article is very timely. In fact I have a start-up that I have been building with a small team paid by sweat-equity. I also have an excellent and motivated business partner & co-founder who I trust and I keep on admiring his dedication and motivation despite having the most difficult time in raising seed money (apparently a requirement/excuse for VCs to event get involved). We are building a Web utility that facilitates information consumption. We are testing it with friends and family and the results are very encouraging. Given the state of the economy and the lack of financial resources, we have decided to continue to boot-strap our business and we will be releasing our Web tool for people to use. By the way, I found your article this morning using our product. The idea is to introduce it and demonstrate its usefulness through actual usage and viral distribution. We are also reducing our initial set of features to reduce the risk and wait for a measurable adoption rate to make a stronger case for funding. We are not serial entrepreneurs and deeply believe in what we have. We are convinced that with our passion, on-going re-enforcement from our users, the academic community and peers, we have what we need to fuel our passion and success. We are confident that we will succeed regardless of the investor community’s current mood. Thanks for a great article!

Thierry Hubert
Except that it doesn't. It only shows something about Miller-Urey + 55 years extra reaction time. The experiment needs to be repeated for anything new to be known about it.
The East London Line was closed for several days the other month when a rather large bomb was found during work on the Olympic Park.
> The idea that people will continue to upload the file after they have downloaded it seemed silly before someone actually did it.

This part had been well-validated before BitTorrent came out. People were already using Napster, Kazaa, and AudioGalaxy, all of which relied on people leaving files available for upload after they finished downloading them.

Using an HTTP tracker was a pretty courageous act though, and I don't think the rest of the protocol would work without it. At the time, everyone was doing desktop clients and trying to make things as anonymous as possible, since they were all afraid of copyright-infringement lawsuits.

I kinda wonder whether Bram really didn't know it would be used for copyright infringement, or if he just says that because he's smart enough not to get sued. Every other P2P filesharing system was used to share music, and the mainstream media was going on and on about how Napster was the death of the music industry. You'd have to be living under a rock not to make that connection.
But isn't also BitTorrent much faster than other protocols of that time, because of the way it distributes packages? (Meaning that all downloaders become uploaders almost at the time they start downloading)
Preparing for Badminton Matches
While preparing for a badminton match, one has to remember preparations at two levels: Physical preparation and mental preparation. Physically, one has to prepare oneself by practicing well and hard. It is very important to be sincere with oneself while preparing for any sport. After all, practice makes a man perfect.
Nope. I'm saying, a syntax can make a language that you do know harder to read.

Heavily stacked pointer/array operators in C require "language lawyer" personnel in some shops.

In this case, it's professionals helping other seasoned professionals. I was not talking about noobs here! You get a C- for reading comprehension!
Data Is a Loaded Gun
I find one thing really, really interesting:

If you introduce several different people to the same ingenious and perfect thing, only very few of them are really able to see the perfection (and to open/change their mind accordingly).

And -- on the other side -- many of them will stay the same, or change their opinion only marginally...

So, it's not enough to expose someone to something perfect -- one has also to be so gifted to actually recognize it (and to have the courage to actually change the mind -- and this is work).
I don't want to push the point in an irritating way, but I think you should think about amending the post flow....

Currently you have people selecting a region and THEN selecting what they want. It would be better to have people select what they want and THEN select how important the proximity is.

That solves (i) The arbitrary city/region issue and (ii) Lets you advertise on the home page the scope of what people can shop for, rather than advertising all the cities in a country.
There goes the rest of the Amazon.
I am an American, but I have been thinking the EU is more a supper power when it comes to basic science than the US. IMO if you want to see what the next supper power's are doing look at who is building ITER. In today's word tech > power and a military is just a dead weight without the economy to back it up.

PS: Web 2.0 sounds great but look at Iceland to see what happens when you build an economy on Ideas.
An amazing story about Cohen. As an engineer, I know it is hard sometimes to break oneself from the confines of logic and structure to take a more emotional intuitive approach to understanding the world.

There are two books that I must recommend for any engineer that is in the same situation as Mr. Cohen.

Blink, By Malcom Gladwell. This book explains the concept of intuition and thinking with the subconscious. I think this is something that is lost to a lot of science people that have to rationalize everything in life with concrete details. In my opinion, I think that our subconscious is a much more logical real life processing unit than our conscious because it can link concepts much more quickly. As the old adage says, sometimes you have to trust your instincts.

How To Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. This book goes into incredible depth with a bunch of narratives explaining the proper way to deal with people. Very interesting book, in fact, this is the one book PG recommends EVERY startup entrepreneur to read, and I couldn't agree more.
everybody pre-games those things anyway
Agile Solutions To Future Recessions
Analysis confirms Buffett's conclusion that stocks are now cheap
We did it as part of a group and found that to be highly advantageous. I recommend finding someone near you who is also interested in learning Erlang and work through it together.
I thought I was going to read an article about how the author tried the freemium model and it did not work, and then he switched to something else and became rich.
Well, you know what they say about opinions...
It's making billions of dollars in the gaming industry (particularly with the play for free, pay for added content MMOs). I don't think it's the fact that the concept of "freemium" is flawed for consumers, but you need to have very compelling premium content. Just be sure you pick segments where there's a strong incentive to upgrade as a natural progression of the service.
I agree that there are risks involved with the freemium model, but I think there is still a lot more merit to those that use it.

I think one interesting case study of the Freemium model is iPhone games. It seems to me that most people want more than 1 or 2 levels and are willing to play only after they get a chance to test if the game is actually fun.
Sounds great. Best of luck. However, golf isn't time being pissed away. Just imagine how many rounds you'll get in once you hit that payday.

As for the whole paperwork & equity. Naive or not I would also choose to trust your partner seeing as he's a long time friend. Hope it works out, and if it doesn't for some reason, let us know eh?
"This is where the semantic Web comes in," Solomon explained. "Businesses finally understand the Internet, and recognize that advertising is a good business model - if you can make it work."

This guy's a genius. Trading hot dogs for cars is a good business model, too, if you can make it work. He's basically saying nothing. I wonder what his non sound-bite remarks were...
Creating amino acids isn't really has difficult as it was thought to be back in the 50's. Amino acids that aren't known on Earth have been found in various meteorites and the like. Although they can be considered bio-markers, they aren't very good ones.
As I understand the article it suggests that the free side of freemium is feature full enough for almost all users leaving very few users willing to pay.
Isn't this then just a case of balancing the features in the free and pay versions so that a larger chunk of users would need a entry level pay version for doing anything beyond the basics?
Facebook Music: It’s Back
Warren Buffet is a national treasure.
That is an interesting historical perspective, one that I had not considered before. Still, if anything, it supports the notion that the US is faltering as the world power.

BTW I'd be interested to see a comparison with deaths in rural Soviet Union under Stalin with the Irish situation. Seems to me like a similar situation and yet the deaths are pretty much attributed as murder under Stalin.
Benchmarking Flash Player 10
Wow, I can't decide if that was a great presentation or the greatest.
> We don't want you to to be subservient.

Are you sure you don't? Can you explain to me why your new foreign policy states that "The United States must remain the world's only superpower, unchallenged by any other nation."?

( http://web.archive.org/web/20071012015838/http://www.crf-usa... )
( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/wolf.... )

BTW, Tell me how it goes with China...

> Whenever something big needs doing, the question is "how do we get the US to do it?"

Please give me examples of "something big that needs doing" that the US did, so that I can refute you. The US mostly only does what is best in its self-interest (actually, nowadays, in the self-interest of a small elite, but let's not have that discussion) - and this is perfectly reasonable. Do we need a group of self-appointed cops of the world?

And if we do, do you think the US would be a good model (start a war - were people die, woman get raped, etc - for nothing - remember - there were no WOMD and Bush knew it)?

> BTW - We know that you're talking smack because you're not afraid of anything these days.

Of course. Because the US is currently driven by fear, right?
Fear of terrorists - ok, "let's drop all our freedoms to pretend to be doing something about another attack - the rich and powerful can surely take something of this."

And if you think about, it is scary how many of your freedoms were dropped (if the government want, they can have you arrested right now, with no charge, for as long as they want), how many laws were broken and ignored (immunity for the telcos - hahaha), etc.

Fear the economy will collapse? "ok, let's take 700 billon dollars from the taxpayers and give to irresponsible and stupid (well, maybe they are not so stupid after all...) bankers - this will surely help."

Fear your kids will get violent? "ok, let's ban violent video games and stuff. They must be the reason why kids fight so much each other."

Yeah, right. I wonder what comes next.
G1 gives iPhone some competition
That's how I read the article. The model is sound and has been used outside of the web for years: where we go wrong is how we tactically apply the model.
Aren't the people who play game number 1 largely responsible for the current financial mess? Maybe not day traders per se, but that sort of mentality of everyone thinking they are in the top few percent of investors and able to beat the market.
Up mod for Ben Stein homage.
not really; that is leveraged buying. I'm talking about only buying things you actually have the cash to pay for.
Germany (and WWII) has got nothin' on Laos (and Vietnam) in regards to dropped bombs and unexploded ordnance.
10 Laws of Building a Saas Company - 51 minute webcast
The only difference between the US and these empires of yesteryear is that we didn't invade new lands to obtain a diverse population. The diverse populations invaded us.
Seems to me that making money has always been a common theme in pg's essays. The "you should start a startup" message is stronger than ever, but that's always been there to some extent as well.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
Seems to work well for Xing.
I agree. If I was designing a programming language, then appending to the end of a file, appending to the end of a string, and writing to stdout would all look the same.

Actually, I am designing a programming language, and they look like this:

fileHandle << data;
aString << data;
out << data;
Misleading title. Freemium IS a business model. Giving away things for free is not.

If anything, this article is a good description of how freemium can work. It seems to work well in the corporate market and it doesn't work when there are only minor differences between the free and pay versions of a product.
I love how in an article describing how data can be manipulated to meet any conclusion, Matt cites that the stock market has on average gone up 10% every year and real estate has gained 1% since the great depression.

Who here has money invested from the original great depression? Anyone?

I get his point, and agree with the entire piece but using one set of data to show how using another set of data can be misleading is ... silly.
Did Matt even read that Gladwell article? If so, I'm not sure how the only thing he got out of it was the racetrack anecdote. He makes it out like that was the primary focus, and supporting evidence, of the article.
Hmm... it would be a huge twist of irony if these can be developed in conjunction with OLEDs to create paper-based displays.
Invest what you can afford to lose.
It's not the greatest example (since there are various ways to get SQL queries from a live mysql db - tcpdump/ngrep, query logging or strace from a client - you could strace the server but mysql appears to die when you strace it - dunno why).

Everyone who I know who has used dtrace loves it - so it seems likely to me that it is great+useful tech - but can someone come up with a real-world example of info it can give you that you can't get with tcpdump/strace?
Another instance of xkcd seen in a "serious" context: page 14.
Data is found to confirm a theory. News at 11.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
But an economically balanced model might not be palatable to consumers. If you don't make the free side full-featured enough, then people get annoyed and leave. And lets be frank, free users are the majority on most sites. So if your business requires the network effect (ie, any social network, etc) then losing those users makes your product less useful to people on an exponential scale.

The fact is, I don't think its a business model either. Its more like large scale marketing. The real business is the paid model, and offering something for free is merely a way of getting users to come to your site and gives you an opportunity to convert them into paying users. And as a marketing method, its pretty bad for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
The real genius of bittorrent is how it brings together many people who are interested in sharing the same file all at once so you get great download/upload speeds. This mostly isn't even due to the protocol itself but in the way that torrent sites tend to present the torrents chronologically.

Plus there is no bandwidth wasted on sharing content other than what you are interested in. Almost every other client wants to make you share all kinds of other stuff to even use the network: emule, freenet, tor, i2p, gnutella, etc.

Finally, pure luck has allowed the laws to progress in a way that hasn't resulted in the immediate shutdown or blocking of popular torrent sites. It should be noted that in certain countries this isn't the case and bittorrent has been a total failure there.

Also, on the majority of American college campuses today, bittorrent is a huge failure because it is easily fingerprinted and will get you banned from the network. Maybe they have finally added some stenography to protect against this but not that I know of. Then, there are the large ISPs that are degrading or blocking bittorrent now.

Of course, everyone knows that the real reason bittorrent beat freenet is because bittorrent was python and freenet was a big steaming pile of java:)
For Oxford's earliest students, graduation could be a bloody affair.
Flickr is the perfect example of a well worked out Freemium example. Same story for last.fm.
You can do it, but I think that the features you're offering 'extra' are not just 'extra' but great and enhanced adds to the service they're already experiencing.
Well said. Most people should follow Mark Cuban's recent advice:

http://blogmaverick.com/2008/10/15/where-to-put-your-money-r...
5% is the normal ratio
Freemium is flawed because most people don’t need more features than what they can use for free.

I guess wholesale stores like Costco and Sams club are flawed because people don't need more food than what they can get at a cheaper unit price. Just like buying groceries wholesale gets you the better deal by virtue of unit price, it's the same with Freemium.

Let's look at BaseCamp. BaseCamp under Mark's logic is a flawed product because no one ever manages more than one project at a time, which is what you are limited to with the free version. It only makes sense to buy in bulk what you can get for free because more often than not, you get more for what you pay for.

I don't think freemium users are missing the point of business, I think Mark Evans is missing the point of business: make money.
yep, that's not a problem with web-apps, that's a problem with traditional VCs...
Agreed. Recessions flatten the mediocre but reward the great.
There is always a competitor willing to give more away for free with the bet that they can make up for it once they control the market.

This is for the WEB though where cost/user is low and cloning a product is easy. Other platforms are vastly different.
Another bit of advice: if you don't need your money for 20 years, you shouldn't lose sleep over short-term drops in the market. And if you are investing for the long run, you can afford to lose 50% of your portfolio today.
Freemium is just another name for the old Razors/Razor Blades model.

It's all about finding the right complements of your core business that people will pay for. Whether it's an ad-free service (flickr,basecamp), access to critical resources (most every dating site), or nice software that works best w/ your hardware (iTunes on windows).

The two variables you want to track especially closely are the per customer cost of acquisition and profit per customer.

//the OP is either linkbait or just dumb

//O yeah. http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=buckpost
Most of the paper comes from tree farms.

The Amazon is being fucked because of two things.

1. Furniture - old tropical tree are too valuable for paper.

2. The Brazilian government subsidizes farmers turning jungle into farmland. Because jungle is "unproductive" and farm products can be taxed.
PG was right about how spam will look...
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

Assuming they could solve the problem of the headers, the spam of the future will probably look something like this: Hey there. Thought you should check out the following: http://www.27meg.com/foo

The spam I get to gmail today looks like:
Confirm your free sample

To unsubscribe click HERE

This email contains an advertisement from ABCNews,
7 WEST 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.

-----------------

So are spammers losing the battle? Is it as profitbale for them now as 5 years ago?
Some Buddhist ideas about peace. « IG’s Peace Blog
Microsoft has always been a little slow on the uptake
Get something in writing even 60 (him) - 40 (you) is a reasonable number, but it's easy for him to think 75 - 25 when you think 50 - 50.
If there is a foothold for freemium, it’s the corporate market where customers are willing to pay for high-quality services as well as customer support. This is why companies such as 37Signals and Freshbooks have thrived because enough customers want more than freemium services.

Which means "yes, it is a business model."

The key to Freemium is the same key to crippleware: give away enough that a user can experience enough of the product to acknowledge its value. Keep enough back that you can charge for it. That balance is hard, but not impossible.

The strange thing that I've found over the years is that the balance requires creativity to pull off. Using a magic number (>1000 accts, >100 friends, >2G of space) is a mark of being lazy. The question whether you can offer substantially new abilities to the customer. Something that makes the product different in a way that isn't a simple extrapolation of what it already does.
In a time when VC money is scarce, fewer can play the "accumulate users and charge in the unforeseen future when all your competitors have died". In this type of market, freemium is a tough play.

Which is nice. I prefer old-fashioned biz models where you put out a product and quickly find out if people are willing to pay for it.
Nope. NO!SPEC is concerned only with design spec work, which should be blindingly obvious if you have ever read their page.
I'm particularly curious about this market. It's definitely comparing apples to oranges, and thus this article can't really be said to speak to freemium MMOs. The market is different, the products are different, just about everything is different. I am wondering if anyone has done any in-depth research about MMO business models; working for an MMO company, it's obviously something I'm very interested in.

Most 'freemium' MMOs are Korean. I don't mean to make a generalization, but is the Korean gaming culture much more serious than the US/EU one, and thus this model is much more successful in Korea? Many (if not all) of these Korean MMOs are available in the US, but I have no idea if the nonpaying/paying gamer ratio is better or worse, and those figures might unfortunately be private.
Who wouldn't want to make money for their great games? Online "casual" web-based games have been extremely hard to monetize, historically. The standard route has been to monetize with a preloader advertisement. Unfortunately, these advertisements have extremely low click-through, and ultimately, do not generate much revenue unless multiple millions of people are playing your game everyday.

We think game developers should make money based around things people actually want. Items.

People love your games. People would love to buy upgrades to your games. We will make it possible for people to buy items that you create for your games - and you make the money.

http://developers.iminlikewithyou.com/articles/view/advantag...

SO it is sketchy and maybe untested but its interesting.
I explained it in the second paragraph:

"If you’ve never used wyUpdate, here’s a quick intro: wyUpdate comes in two parts. The first part is the wyUpdate Designer to manage your versions and create your updates. The other part is the wyUpdate Client which you include with your application, and it does all the checking and updating of your program."

But you're right. It's not immediately apparent. I have to fix that.