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Yes, you can work very little and be very successful if you play your cards right. And there is nothing wrong with that, certainly. But hard problems are hard. There are a lot of easy problems I could work on, and probably get funding and then flip the hypothetical company for a quick profit, but I am more interested in the risky, hard problems that most people wisely would not invest in. If you look at the names that history remembers, they all worked their asses off to achieve something great.
I work from home and I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with my kids. I've built a successful startup and am launching another without compromising anything. It IS possible and our breed of entrepreneur is more common however underrepresented in the startup community.
I used to manage a very popular online diet subscription service.

My quick reaction is that you are addressing a pain point that many people have -- it's annoying to plan meals and map grocery purchases to them, while the "shop first and figure it out later" approach is inefficient.

BUT, in reality, people have a lot of foibles about what they do and don't like to eat, allergies, aversions, what's considered acceptable/very good/too fancy, what they will and won't buy, whether and how often they're cooking for 1/2/more, what's in season or easily available where they are, how expensive ingredients are, how long cooking takes, etc.

Before subscribing, I personally would need a lot more color on the above and probably some sample recipes.

As an MVP, it's a perfectly reasonable experiment to keep it simple, but I would think to be even moderately successful you'll need to generate some custom content based on preference variables -- or at least some profile alternatives (like, say, a vegetarian, simple/balanced meals, and foodie option per week), and some basic substitutions for things people don't like and/or aren't readily available.
I am so proud of twitter right now, that I feel words will fail me, so I shall keep this short and to the point:

It takes serious balls to admit you were wrong after you kicked off an entire avalanche that has been breaking the web ever since. Yes, a lot of us knew then it was a ridiculously bad idea and we all said so; but for them to actually take this advice after going so out of their way to go completely client-side is just fantastic. Kudos, twitter folk!
I created a tool a few years ago built on a similar strategy, but instead of only showing the best performing variation the chance of each variation showing was based on how well it was converting (so in an a/b/c test with conversion rates of 3%/2%/1% version a would show 1/2 of the time, version b would show 1/3 of the time and version c would show 1/6th of the time).

There was one major flaw with this strategy though:

Lets say you're testing a landing page and have had 1000 visitors and version A is converting at 40% while version B is converting at 30%. So it looks like so:

Version A - 200 / 500 - 40%
Version B - 150 / 500 - 30%

A new affiliate comes on board and decides to send 200 visitors to your page from some "Buy 200 visitors for $1" domain redirection service. These visitors are such low quality that they will never ever buy anything and will probably just close the window immediately (or are bots). Now your results look something like this:

Version A - 200 / 680 - 29.4%
Version B - 150 / 520 - 28.8%

And with just 200 visitors some random affiliate has killed all your results. Now you could add filtering and reports based on the affiliate or traffic source but this is more code and more attention you have to pay to the test.

If you were running a traditional A/B test your results would look like this:

Version A - 200 / 600 - 33%
Version B - 150 / 600 - 25%

And even though the overall conversion rate is lower you can still see version A is better than B.

The idea is good and I love the idea of auto optimization, but it does have it's flaws which require more than 20 lines of code to overcome.
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Tekpub has a bunch of good videos for free, including an awesome series on ASP.NET MVC. It's a little old (MVC 2) but it's great for the fundamentals.

http://tekpub.com/channels/free
Keep in mind, the "Worthless hole" designation is subjective.

I think one thing people often forget, is that you don't always get to choose what "the community" does with your comments/forum/website(/cafe/bar/restaurant/social club/sporting team/whatever).

There's clearly some "worth" to the people trolling and derailing the conversations _you_ would rather turned out differently.

(I'm on the cusp of "giving up" on a web community I've been involved with for ~14 years, partly because they've changed - but truthfully at least as much because _I've_ changed…)
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Wmboy, thats actually an old version of the article. Is it possible to remove that link?
Try out Max Payne 3. While there's still motion capture etc, the euphoria motion system is fantastic and I think character movement is a nearly solved problem.

Facial animation I just wish they went back to Brütal Legend because they were cartoony, but the most expressive faces I've seen in a game.

LA Noire was just rubbish in every way.
The way I see it, you've got three chunks of time in any work day. 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, and 8 hours of whatever you like.

Now, other things do eat into the last block, like travel and washing the dishes. But you still wind up with a healthy chunk of time every day, and that is where Life happens. So, make of it what you will.
"Stopping a test when you reach a "statistically significant" result is the wrong way to do A/B testing."

Nobody said that it was. But when you do regular split testing, you can use power analysis to estimate the length of time you need to run an experiment to get a significant result at a certain precision:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power

You can't do this (at least, not easily) when you're using bandit models, because none of the assumptions are valid.
As an American who did door-to-door sales for a little bit after college, I will say that this works in America too. The term used in sales circles is Jonesing, which comes from this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses

It's a common strategy employed by salesman to try and convince people to buy into the idea of a new product (or switching products) without doing actual research. Though, I will say it is odd to open with this in the pitch since you don't know how much the potential client knows about your product or competition.
I don't think any of those points are very true.
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Seriously, who goes to a news website to read old stories?

I do, for one.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3970011

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3891595

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3911521
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Automation is only one way to get things done faster. In truth, many jobs would take less time if people would just stop wasting so much of it — no automation required. As they say, work expands to fill the time available.
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I think the main point is, 37 signals runs a bit like a lifestyle business - agile, low stress, no overtime; because that's what they think is the most profitable way to run a software business. Even if they wanted to do overtime, or were in a more cut-throat niche (i.e. taking on Facebook) they would run their shop the same way..

They aren't doing things the way they do because they think it's glamorous, or because it's easier.
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We have a huge company-wide meeting for a week, every quarter.
This article has a lot of interesting stuff, though it tends to be largely cheerleading LLVM's design decisions, rather than delving into the really interesting tradeoffs.

For example, some compilers use multiple levels of optimizer IR, for example Open64/Pathscale. This allows them to perform more high-level language-specific optimizations. LLVM forces front-ends to lower their code directly down to its fairly low level IR, thus throwing away some of this high-level information. It's possible to use LLVM's metadata system to preserve some of it, but this is subject to a variety of restrictions, and decorating a low-level IR with high-level decorations can be substantially less convenient than just using a higher-level IR. Clearly there are interesting tradeoffs here.

For another example, the author ribs Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java for not sharing backend code, and yet, years later, LLVM has still not been proven broadly viable for such languages, despite numerous efforts. Maybe someday it will be, but it's pretty clear that there are, yes, tradeoffs in play. Having everyone implement their own x86 backend has its downsides, but trying to get everyone to use one x86 backend has its downsides too.
#1 certainly is, particularly for businesses prone to seasonal fluctuations. In local lead-gen (for instance) you see big changes in conversion based on the time of year.
Travis-CI also works for a bunch of other languages, so if you're a library maintainer, it's definitely worth checking out:

http://about.travis-ci.org/docs/user/getting-started/
This about page is awesome, http://www.makeleaps.com/en/about/

It even tells you the bank they use.
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Have there been any issues with the star rating system? I've seen that a lot of times users will tend to automatically avoid low ratings unless they have strong negative feelings about what they're reviewing: people generally just don't like to be mean.

Have you guys considered an upvote-only system (cf. Facebook, Quora, HN)? That removes the stigma of negative reviews, reduces the number of ratings that are inflated by sheer politeness, and still gives quality ideas prominence. Plus it's strict positive reinforcement (generally more addictive than negative feedback) versus no feedback at all: rather than becoming discouraged from low-star ratings, a user should be more motivated to create an idea that his coworkers respond strongly and positively to.
"Getting that JavaScript is a one-time operation, and a 304 from then on."

In theory it sounds right. However, there are a couple of cases where users will have to load JS a lot more than they should. Since most of the logic lives in the JS file(s) they will be changed and pushed out a lot more. This will force users to download the JS every time code is deployed.

Also, I am not sure what percent of "New users" land on Twitter pages, but they will have to download the JS.
I'll start! Male and 14 years old! Could I be the youngest here??? :)
Hey Matt,

Sorry, just realised that's not completely clear. We communicate 100% in Japanese with all our customers.

Those two are examples to make it easier for the English-only speaking reader to understand.

Developing your application completely in English might be very suitable for an English Language teaching tool. But not so suitable for a business critical tool.

We've had varying degrees of success with different ways to sell, but the one clear way to achieve success in Japan as you mention is social proof.

Basically the idea is to look for any way possible to display and feature users who are using your system to other potential users and customers. I've detailed a list of a few ways to do that for our kind of application. You're welcome to use those, or come up with an approach that's more suitable for your product.

Best of luck though - let me know how you go.
You shouldn't hire someone unless they are going to add value to the business. If you're not sure about that then you shouldn't be giving them a job.
In concept it is interesting, but I feel that it would add very little to gameplay beyond whats already been available. Many games feature pretty good vehicle destruction (mostly faked, but good enough to suspend disbelief).

As usual, I would prefer these companies invest their effort into more interesting AI and game mechanics. I played Crisis 2 a while back, and beyond the improved graphics, it did not feel much different from Half Life 1 to me.
Honestly, this is the kind of stuff I hate. The Google employee has suggested how best to use a sitemap to allow Google to index your existing content. You recommend writing an un-necessary article, packing it with keywords and links. That's the last thing the internet needs more of.
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According to previous polls, most people here are male and in their 20's or 30's. I am female and my 47th birthday is coming up very soon.
... and then abandoning it? Or am I missing something?
This is very common in Japan. Why argue. :)
did you try doing the same using jruby?
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I have heard great things about Game Closure including that it speeds up development time, enhances game quality, and makes games run faster. Does anybody know what exactly makes their SDK so much better than competitors? A layman's explanation would be greatly appreciated.
There's a medical app for that - or not
But perhaps one could argue that this resulted in those hours being more productive because they were more spread out. So assuming what you're saying is true, they could have gotten more productivity out of the same number of hours as another business that condensed its work more.
Is a "show advanced options" checkbox really that indigestible a concept?
If you write code and you don't have recruiters contacting you through LinkedIn, then you probably live in a city with a bad market (and you should move) or you don't have a thorough LinkedIn account.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

The only people who use "lifestyle business" as a way to downplay, minimize or trivialize a business are often people who have the "lifestyle" and are saying it to people who don't have the "lifestyle".

The best lifestyle to me? Being free of time and obligation to bills to truly chase any crazy idea you want and any funding that may or may not come it's way.

There's a lot to learn from building any business seen as a lifestyle business, namely, you pick up the end to end business skills you didn't have to go big.

The alternative? Get funded and pushed out when you don't have the business chops to grow.

Go hard or go home? Get real, I want to create great things forever, sustainably, not try, fail and go back to finding a job. The part of being successful that makes you a well rounded person is non-neogotiable. Maybe folks here are still in their 20's with no real other responsibilities or obligations or priorities. This is my second internet boom and I can say as much as I've enjoy every second, I enjoy living for a living just as much.
Are you hanging around in the IRC somewhere?
In the beginning, we definitely seeded our growth with my iPad. I still do it these days because it's fun and because the app works great on an iPad, but fortunately we've got several other customer acquisition channels right now that don't involve just me and an iPad :)

As AVTizzle says below as well, it's a fantastic way to learn more about your customers and the problems they're facing.
Kiwi?

[edit: read your profile. Actually Aus]

was going to comment that neither python nor ruby are that great if you are looking for jobs in NZ. There are more options with php, and if you are good at what you do it won't be that hard to destroy the other candidates. Java and .net will give you a lot more, better paying options.
> Why would you assume that client-side HTML generation is slower than server-side generation?

Some possible reasons:

* server hardware is assumed faster than my smartphone
* servers can share caches
* http conditional gets can now apply to rendered content (as apposed to templates and data which would require re-render client side)
Pretty easy to describe, even at the time, since that was the Unix Way since...the 1980s. NeXT invented none of that. Pretty much anyone who went to a top engineering school in the late 1980s or 1990s had this single sign on, cluster experience (e.g. MIT Athena, whatever CMU had, etc.).
I know what you mean, but I find that so brutally sad. The best, most alert, most productive hours we have, we trade away for enough money to live. That third block of 8 you mention are the scraps left over. You're lucky if you have enough energy left to do anything worthwhile with those last 8 hours :(
Every successful person I know has made their 8+ hours of work a part of their Life.
Lifestyle businesses are awesome if it is your business (ownership as in equity, not 'responsibility for all the bugs'). Be careful if you are joining someone else's lifestyle business and make sure you know what you are getting into. Depending on the person, there can be nothing worse than only being employed to maintain the founder's lifestyle with no plans for growth, company or career-wise.
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I'd love to see a breakdown of what "kinds" of customers are using makeleaps, even how that's changed over time. Also, how are you dealing with the "inkan" situation? Maybe it's less of a problem than I think to use a digital representation?
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"I work from home and I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with my kids."

That's crazy impressive. I tried working from home and was only ever productive if I worked till early in the morning. Daytime productivity was terrible with 2 little kids detracting me... perhaps my house is just too small.
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Have a reasonable and fair process for hellbanning and repealing of hellbans for people who have contributed to your community over the years.
By getting more global marketshare and by maximizing the ARPU for North American users (credits & payments). They can get more global marketshare by striking a deal with China (~500M internet users) and increased growth in Russia (~100M).

They are also going to be tapping into a new market (mobile advertising) which is a market that is seeing 1.5x-2x yoy growth. Open Graph has already been proven to propel apps that use it to the top 10 of the Apple App Store. With apps paying $1 to $5 per user, Facebook is an interesting position where they can be a HUGE channel for these app companies to spend their money.
nice product I like the idea.

just fyi: your domain http://www.onbluedot.com/ is giving a folder listing atm. Probably not what you want.

A bit of feedback:

- Validation errors on the signup, such as pw too short are too small/hard to see. I submitted the form and then was puzzled because nothing happened. Only after closer inspection did I see the error.

- The site gives a mixed content SSL notice.

This is a nosy question so feel free to disregard: You mention that you're profitable at the moment. Does that mean 'Pay the hosting bills' profitable, or closer to 'Live off of this' profitable?
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It's also very common to put the amount of capital that your company has on the about page. When looking for vendors, a lot of companies will judge your strength by the amount of capital you have listed there, which is why many companies have stopped putting that number there. ;)
You talk about a "test" like there isn't an article linked directly above wherein one of the largest web properties in the world explicitly states that server side page generation is much faster based off of real world results.
I don't understand, there is a clearly visible text input field down the page, where you insert a long URL, press enter/click, and out comes a shortlink. What's wrong? Just ignore the sign-in buttons.

(checked only 2 hours after this post)
Google, InMobi, iAds? It's a $2.6B dollar market that is growing 2x yoy. Don't overlook this market.
What is a major change?

I've seen minor tweaks to a form raise conversions by 20%. The person running a particular test may not even know that a particular change was significant, or even that it happened. The change could be as subtle as another running test realized that version x is better, interfering with existing tests.

As for #5, with an A/B test you run into these situations, you're able to break down and crunch the numbers in multiple ways, and then have a discussion about how you want to proceed. But with a multi-armed bandit approach whatever complexities you have not thought of and baked into your approach, are not going to be noticed.
But how do you know when you can do that? Particularly with the slower convergence issue, and the potential presence of confounding factors like #2?
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I don't think it isn't that we can't build robots that can do menial work (mcdonalds casheers, farm laborers, road workers) it is that the investment to get the return is not worth the cultural wall to replacing dead end depressing work for people who would otherwise have no jobs due to limited education or drive for excellence.
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In small or restricted communities, that can definitely be the case. But I've never seen a large community with good comments that didn't have some or all of the above features.

Have you?
Don't forget that JavaScript has to be interpreted every time the page loads, even if you have a cached copy of it. If it's a large chunk of code, the time to do that is not trivial.

I'm not quite sure that it's as much of a zero-sum game as you present it. I can easily think of scenarios where rendering on the server is much faster (e.g. using a compiled language vs JS, taking advantage of powerful hardware, granular caching, etc) and much more constant.

Edit: spelling.
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Search through the list with any possible terms that might indicate "something interesting"?

Advanced AI?
http://genetify.com/demo/ is an interesting related js solution.

https://github.com/gregdingle/genetify/wiki/
Spriting is very common. For example, here's how the Facebook logo on the homepage is rendered: https://s-static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yO/r/_2cdInypv2b.p...