skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's always an intermediate step between advertising and making money off the consumer interest it generates. The Internet hasn't changed that.

Google targets people who are searching for a keyword. In some cases, these may be people who are looking to buy a product. However, people looking to hire (say) expert C++ programmers can do better than advertising against a keyword, because searching for that term implies nothing about skill or experience. In this particular case, something like LinkedIn would be a much more valuable advertising resource, because it has much more relevant information about the audience.

Google has an extremely clever advertising model. In many cases it is much more efficient and effective than traditional print and television advertisements. But it's still advertising.
As someone who opened a similar business I thought that the ratios that were listed as rules of thumb were failry on target with my experience, but the statement "If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close" was crazy.

1.) Your potential customers are creatures of habit and it takes time to change their traffic patterns. Your grand opening is your biggest splash and a key time to get attention, but getting return customers is a struggle to reshape their patterns.

2.) A new business should ideally be properly capitalized to slug out way more than a month. Not only does it take time to get people in the door but it takes you and your staff more than a month to adjust to the unexpected, get your act together, and polish your product.

If your new business is going to be your only stream of income you need capital available before going in to stretch more than a month. This piece of planning is every bit as important as the name on your shingle.

Opening a new and not yet profitable business does suck up your whole life, but if you succeed that doesn't have to last forever. Its after this initial "slugging it out" time period that you can reclaim your life.
Great job. While such a discussion really makes me miss Startup News, the more posts like this, the merrier, for me.
I mainly commute between the city and Berkeley. The signal obviously goes dead in the transbay, but it's been pretty spotty in the above-ground parts, too.
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I don't know, just because you work well together doesn't mean you should be married.

The fact that he's saying nice things about her makes me think the opposite.
Yeah. It's kinda sad when you have a romantic idea of something, but reality paints a totally different picture.

I'm learning a new language at the moment. The romantic idea I had in my head was being able to speak it fluently with friends from that culture, read books, etc. The reality is that learning a language is difficult and and takes a lot of effort and patience.

Thankfully, I love studying it. But then if I didn't and then gave up I'd still be painting that romantic image in my head thinking i "shoulda, coulda, woulda..".

I kinda forgot where I was going with this... sorry :-(
Another great post. Wow, you guys are awesome today.
Thank you, beyond measure, for pointing this out!

It's going to help me a lot... I'll show you in a few days :)

In return, here's a more comprehensive list:

http://websearchpro.captaincaveman.nl/?id=search_engines&...

and some popular search engines:

http://websearchpro.captaincaveman.nl/?id=search_engines&...
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Stupid doesn't quite do it justice.

The first fallacy is the Malthusian fallacy: namely that humans cannot grow indefinitely. If anything, history has shown as that we can. People have been predicting the coming scarcity apocalypse every few decades and they have always been wrong (the most recent predicted famines in 1985. Then people came up with artificial nitrates...).

The second fallacy is that a certain number of borrowers must default: The money can go in a circle reflecting the value created by the borrowers in excess of interest.

Fallacy 3: It assumes that if nobody had any debt, then there would be no money. The fallacy is that the original money issue (~$2 trillion for the US) is unaccounted for. If there are absolutely no debt, we would still have that amount. (Which can go on ...)

The replacement ideas suggested are idiotic beyond words. This video starts well and quickly degenerates into loony-ville.
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Hmm... you could argue that point though.

It's one thing to have the dream of becomming a saxaphone player. It's another to have the dream of becomming a "famous" saxaphone player.
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The numbers in his example of fractional-reserve banking are wrong.

With an original cash deposit of $1111.12, and 10% reserve requirement, you should end up with $10,000 of total credit.

90% of the $1111.12 gets loaned out, but goes right back into the banking system. Repeat. 90% of that sum gets loaned out, but goes back into the banking system. The loan sizes approach zero.

Each time a loan is made, more of the original $1111.12 becomes part of the reserve. At some point, it is all reserve, which means it represents 10% of all the money circulating in the system. At that point, the banking system has $10,000 total in all accounts.
So, to summarize your Cafe 2.0 business model, if I may...

Prospective customers submit resumes to you for the privilege of being allowed to rent table space at your cafe. Those who clear that hurdle remain under constant threat of eviction unless they talk to everyone around them every ten minutes. Customers can only read hard-copy material that you prescribe, and must read it out-loud to the entire room. And they must relinquish all web-surfing mobile and laptop devices, to be replaced by a single "room librarian" who will personally attend to any web search requests.

OK.

Take this concept to Sand Hill Road. Untold riches await you.
Thanks for the kind words. Yeah, we're going to eventually partner with labels/artists, but we're doing great with just the independent/promotion route.
Ask HN: www and non www redirection issue. Somebody help!
Hi,

I have a website ABC.com the thing is that www.ABC.com is working while ABC.com is not.
I set up domain forwarding for both to point to www.ABC.com but the browser says its an infinite loop. So, I setup a subdomain in ABC.example.com and pointed both ABC.com and www.ABC.com to ABC.example.com with the URL masked. Will there be any problems from SE point of view? Right now it seems to be working fine. Also I absolutely dont want my visitors to know that it is hosted in example.com As this is a custom domain issue I dont have .htaccess or 301 redirect permissions
No, it's not a ploy to get you to visit a site that I'm not at all affiliated with. Rather, I included it in the hopes that people give it a look so that they can answer the question at hand: "how do they make money?"

There are actually three ways to make money. You can sell things, receive money for nothing (donations), or steal. I would have to agree with you that selling goods, services, or ads makes money. So, I wonder, what does AddThis.com sell, and to whom? Or are they just hemorrhaging money on the servers needed to serve (and track) 20b impressions a month?
In that case, it'd be no worse than the current system.
Hmm, I go on holiday for 2 weeks and this is what I come back to? I obviously cannot go on holiday again, otherwise HN will be full of pictures of cute cats when I get back.

As others have pointed out, this video is pure trash. I would encourage others to flag it and get it removed from the front page, where it has no place or value other than the handful of comments that debunk it (though, sadly, I'm sure they'll soon be followed by countless angry replies trying to argue with the debunkings on some emotional "bankers are evil" basis).
This is going to sound blunt, but I mean it politely: Hacker News is not for tech support.

I would suggest heading over to StackOverflow.com, or one of many webmaster community forums to ask this.
Writing this for the second time this week on HN...I should just copy and paste ;)

Coffee shops: expensive rent for owner because of prime retail location, foodservice business (therefore more requirements with less space to work with).

Workspace/office rental: not so expensive rent for owner since it can be located anywhere there is commercial real estate, is not a foodservice business (less restrictions, more space). Bonus: not as much noise and more actual office space with wifi and ethernet and places to plug in. Additional bonus for you: some of these workspaces will have newspapers and other reading material for you to check out without having to buy.

Both: offer tables and coffee and food for people who want to sit down and chill.

What a lot of people SHOULD be doing is going to a workspace (i.e. in los angeles there's theOffice and Blankspaces off the top of my head) and actually paying per table or workspace by the hour/day instead of sitting at a coffee shop where that per table pricing model is completely infeasible because of what a coffee shop inherently is. Sadly demand for them isn't as high as I would have thought, but the problem has been approached before in a way that doesn't bankrupt the owner (aka a coffee shop with an hourly per-table/seat charge).
Where's Andrew Chen when you need him?
workspace! sounds like you're in LA...you should go check out blankspaces or theOffice ;)

They both do have a monthly membership fee and to them, drinks are probably the least of their concerns with regards to profitability. Unlike a coffee shop, where space is expensive and hard to come by. Both have wifi and leave you alone...in fact, probably enforce leaving others alone too :)
Good ideas have a better chance of success - but they also take stupid amounts of work, luck, timing, skill, etc.

The t-shirt idea that he mentions, for instance, is a good example of an idea that is neither good nor bad. Basing a business around a handful of t-shirts is obviously a bad move, but a t-shirt business can certainly be created - and in fact that has been done many times already. There's nothing inherently bad about the idea.

You could say that building a search engine in 1996 is an very difficult idea - lots of hard work, little chance of success, lots of established competitors, and requires a rare breakthrough, incredible amounts of work marketing the new engine and getting all sorts of larger companies to use it, etc, etc. Does that make it a bad idea? Hardly.

Ideas are only a small component of success - execution is far more important. If the aforementioned frat boy are willing to give it their all and are competent enough, they can likely make any of these ideas succeed. Even if they fail, it's at least a great learning experience. I say go frat boys, go.
ok thanks. I am new around here!
IMHO, if you want to learn Statistical/Machine Learning, theory is the wrong way to start. The best way to start is to program a few of the simplest algorithms (linear regression, perceptron, K-Means) on your own and see them run on some sample datasets available out there:

http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/

and only then hit the theory.
Their web interface is horrible, but the few times I've had to call support, it's been top notch.

And their Total DNS control stuff is nice.
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Yegge mentions the same thing (search for "LLVM" and start reading from there): http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html
I was talking to Justin recently, and he gave the most succinct definition I've heard: A startup is a business aiming for a liquidity event.

Edit: Reading the responses to this, people clearly got the wrong idea. A liquidity event != early acquisition. But every successful startup nonetheless hits liquidity: acquisition, IPO, or substantial dividend payment to its shareholders. And that's a distinction between a successful startup and a successful small business, which are not intended to achieve liquidity.
Indeed. VMWare server is another closed source Linux application that even requires a kernel module and manages to run pretty much anywhere I've tried. Granted it might not run on some esoteric distros but you're very definitely asking for that when you hit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributio... and start browsing for something quaint.
Make sure you read the guidelines then:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't see any other super bowl thread, so I'll add this here:

Did anyone else notice that this year's ads were pretty violent? It was cartoonish. Off the top of my head, I recall someone getting thrown out of an office window, someone getting hit by a bus, cars getting destroyed, snack machines getting destroyed, snow globe tossed at crotch, and a skier falling to his presumed death... and I only watched the first half.
Hmm... when I read stuff like this, I never can tell if these are good ideas / lessons or not. There is such an immense survivorship bias -- only successful people write this stuff, we never hear from the unsuccessful people that did the exact same thing -- in writeups like these that I doubt there is any real value. You can't say if these practices helped, hindered, or did nothing... particularly when massive business success is at least in part due to luck.

That's what you get for trying to interpret a conditional probability.
I understand the distinction, but bands haven't turned out to be the best analogy. Thanks to P2P, etc, most bands now make little from CD sales, and have to pin their hopes on touring and merchandising - things that look a lot like "playing individual weddings and bar mitzvahs." And there was always the Grateful Dead, and Phish, The Black Crowes, etc, etc, which build a loyal following through their concerts, and encourage taping, thus in essence giving away millions of copies of their songs in order to promote their concerts and merchandise.

Likewise, for startups, the distinction isn't always that cut and dry. If you're an Oracle or a Salesforce.com (both of which were once startups) you probably had to do customization for every one of your first n clients in order to make the sale.

I think there are obviously businesses that let you scale easily, and ones that don't, and the quote above is a good starting point, but it's not a 100% clear line. And often what looks like a scalable business turns out not to be so, and vice-versa.
"When you love something, it tells you all its secrets."
A common argument is that it's valuable to have a partner 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 founders. Einstein needed the help of his friend Michele Besso to develop special relativity, but Besso wasn't a coauthor on Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper.

I don't see two as a natural lower bound on the number of founders. As the productivity of individual programmers continues to rise, I expect to see an increasing number of single-founder startups succeed.
I just added one (http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). For the first day, new users get a link to it in the top bar and just above the "submit" button on the comment form.
My friend and I would probably open an independent bookstore if we had no cares about making money.
Ryan Carson shared stats for DropSend a couple of years ago on Vitamin: http://thinkvitamin.com/business/will-your-web-app-make-mone...
I did not watch it either. But read this in the morning http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/business/media/02adco.html

Goes with what you describe.
They don't sell anything to anyone. The site was acquired and is operated by Clearspring, who has received $36M in funding.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/addthis

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/clearspring
I don't think they do, unless they offer some premium plan I am unaware of. We use AddThis and honestly don't have much faith in them; it took over a week to reply to our e-mail informing them of a bug that was keeping us from logging into their analytics.
I there is also a content-density issue.

Japanese and Korean Internet users will access a lot of local content... Places like Germany will access a moderate amount of local content.... Places like Australia will be largely accessing foreign content.

So Internet is bound to be more expensive in Australia. The last mile is expensive for density reasons, and most of this traffic needs to be trucked over large inter-continental cables. In high-pop, high-local-content areas the costs are bound to be considerably less.

The US is an anomaly - but they are probably in a unique circumstance where they also serve/transport a lot of foreign content.
The only thing I was impressed with about Godaddy was that I wanted to cancel my account, I called, had to wait maybe 10 seconds, told the person I wanted to close my account, and they did it and that was that. There was no "why are you leaving?" or "you might like these other services" or "if you stay with us, I can give you 50% off for a year" crap, they just closed the account when I asked.

Of course, FYI, I was closing the account because their website couldn't keep me logged in and the navigation was terrible. Also, the way they bind your account to a single "master" domain name, and then other domains are served out of subdirectories of that main domain's directory is bassackward, which made it really hard to work with someone else who wasn't technically inclined in terms of putting files on the websites I had hosted there.
m4m and m4w would not go down very well in Nigeria. The m4w and w4m split might be useful though. More useful would be photos I'd say.
I honestly don't know if the man ever wanted to be famous. I just know that he did what he loved, and that the money didn't follow.

When people implicitly tack "...and the money will follow" onto the end of "do what you love", they're missing the point. Do you what you love, and you might be successful, or you might not. If you're doing what you love, it doesn't matter.
Dogpile disagrees:
http://www.dogpile.com/dogpile/ws/results/Web/best%20search%...
OT but the coworking spaces that seen to succeed (e.g. attract a base of full-time coworkers) are providing more than a desk space for rent - they are involved in the local community. For example, CubeSpace in Portland hosts the monthly meetings of the Ruby users group. The space is more of a salon (in the Hemmingway sense) than a office space.
Honestly I think it's a location thing. Valencia Street is a place where interesting businesses would exist..I've always been intrigued at the kind of businesses I see when I visit friends in the area.

From personal experience (I've been in the market for coffee shop businesses of all types in Los Angeles for a couple years - from family owned tiny mom and pop stores to franchises), it's all about the location unless you have a lot of hype and if you have both even better. Anyone can start a coffee shop and stock their display cases with local/well known bakeries and coffee providers, but you need all kinds of customers (both the people who occupy a table with only a $1 cup of coffee all day long and the people who rush in and out, both something you can't get if you are badly-situated) and not just a little something extra. The latter is typically a way to get people to come to your store rather than another close by, or a little perk for your customers so they'll return later.

Plus, there's always Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Peet's to deal with...sigh.
No, the point is that you have a text box that always accurately answers your query. For example, you type in "hangover cure" and it gives you a hangover cure. You type in "what is the capital of Benin" and it gives you the answer. You type in "Microsoft" and it shows you the microsoft website.

The search engine learns because when the answer is wrong, people select the "next" button. If you just return a list of search results, people will often click the first link because it's first.
"Don't spend your time doing things you're ashamed of."

I just recently took the plunge and made a porn site. I'm not ashamed of it, but I feel like it could get socially inconvenient if other people expect me to be ashamed of it. Overall I would prefer not to work in porn than work in porn, but just for social convenience.

FWIW, it's the porn recommendation engine mentioned in a sibling post. It is very NSFW, contains weird porn, etc, but the URL is http://fapseek.com
Well, there's coffee shops that do that too :) Both pretty much have to get the word out to survive and that's one way to do it.
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At the start, it would suck, but if the search engine reached 98% accuracy rate, you don't need more results. The engine could even learn when results are in order - for example, asking "where is mongolia" will give you a single answer, but "tv review sites" will give you a list of search results.
Doing something professionally often takes the joy out of it. Especially when you are doing it for someone else.

"Amateur" comes from the Latin word for "lover" - amator.
Someone still has to (indirectly?) be making money from this. My guess is that this is a great source of general web analytics data, which someone will pay to have.
One of the secrets of public speaking is to pause. If you don't pause, you're not highlighting what should be construed as important.
Without load balancer assisted hardware SSL acceleration (e.g. the load balancer transparently hosts the site's SSL certificate and performs the encryption/decryption), SSL processing can cripple a server under load.
Another underlying fallacy here is the assumption that "an interface" is nothing but a limited, predictable set of widgets that are simply stacked on top of programming underpinnings to "expose functionality."

That is why your interfaces suck!
Social changes, not all bad, accompany recessions
Totally agree that having a co-founder helps, but totally DISAGREE that either that is the solution to your cold-feet, or that is absolute required to do a startup.

Also, I think there is little reason to believe that either bill gates or steve jobs got over their cold feet because of co-founders. Not to say that having co-founders might be a big reason behind their massive success. but at the same time they might have had smaller successes without co-founders.

So, to be more specific, do absolutely spend time in finding a co-founder or advisors that you can confide too, but again get over the cold-feet before that.

Getting over the cold-feet is a two step process: Do it directly and quickly.

1. Cross over to startup land by quiting your job already.
2. Burn the bridge by telling everyone, your friends, family, (now) old colleagues that you are doing a startup.

Always remember, the only way you will get around to fighting the devil is when the deep sea is behind you.
They're just animated GIFs. Nothing to see here, move along.
And the models' hourly rate.
Give engineers right tools to do their job. They will manage themselves.