skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling digital products since '97. It really works.

However, the challenge for folks new to the game -- is NOT the product. Product is simple.

Repeat after me: don't worry about the damn product, worry about the salesletter.

It is that salesletter that separates the winners and lowers.

Often, it takes me longer to write the salesletter than it takes me to create the product.

I jest not.

And that's why we are all discussing the parrot's salesletter.

I've seen many folk stumble because they can't twist their brain to write good long-form salesletters.

If you want to win at this game, print out dozens of these letters, get out your pencil and highlighter and study them like your life depends on it.

Follow this simple step and I promise you can make money in the info-product game.

Most of you won't follow that simple step, will go out and create "the most amazing product ever", crank out a lame salesletter and won't make a nickel.

Seen it over and over and over and over.

And then you'll poo-poo info-product marketing the rest of your days.

(Notice how you are more apt to read a post when it's short paragraphs? That's just one "hacking for humans" technique we use.)
Off to Singapore, I suppose.
My comment about Pirate Bay makes much more sense now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500440
(and from what I know TPB get a lot more traffic than Mininova).
Intruiging idea. However it seems extraordinairily high risk for the investors. You mention choosing the recipients would be tricky and that if they fail (which I imagine would occur in a high percentage of choices) they could get a high paid job to pay it off. However:

- Jobs ar never guarateed. I know some excellent people who have struggled to find jobs. If they had to apply to a job after 5 yrs of being an entrpeneur I think they might struggle. "So what have you been up too prior to this?". "Oh, well someone gave me 5,000 a month for 5yrs and now I need to pay it off." Even with spin it doesnt sound too hot :)

- The current economy is shaky. This person has no guarantee for this high interest loan. If things go south there is no guarantee on the money. Yes the return is very good (well, sort of good) but the risk seems crazy high. Expecially as there is no feedback...

When YC funds hackers they choose projects that may or may not succeed - which is a risk. But there is a modicum of protection in the funds. They also take an involvement in the business and provide valuable advice that will help it get off the ground. In your scheme it is something of a fire and forget.

If I had 100,000 to invest/spend somewhere I would certainly play it on other risks (definitely trading 20% year on year for 10-15%) with more security.

(btw are you calculating interest year on year or per total exp? yoy your stats are ok, but per total your average is actually makign a loss of about 3% (ish)).

EDIT: I just realised you said $2000 a month - not $5000. Last year I was on the same salary (in the UK £1000 a month, which is probably a touch less). I lived at home with my parents and paid them £120 a month rent. Even then I just about managed to have any liquid income (buying foodand contributing to the house bills). Were I living on my own (payinf real rent) I dont think I could afford it :D (would be a push) and certainly not afford the facilities to be an entrepeneur.
Lets say you spend 5k/month on servers which seems low and have 5 employee that get 60k/year each after taxes that only leaves 700k or so. Tax that a bit and maybe split that between 2 or 3 founders and it is not much more than a normal salary for a lot more risk.
Fine.

I started programming on a TRS-80 Model III (in my physics teacher's office in HS), but the first one I actually owned was a TRS-80 Micro Color Computer. Not quite as old as the PC, but missed it by just a few years.
President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address by David Bergman
The jump from 34 to 35 kills a lot of people...
How long did the DVD take to create?
Let me Wikipedia that for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution
:-)
If you are just looking for fantasy that equalizes male and female practitioners of magic Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series levels the playing field. In fact, it is seriously tilted towards women for the first part of the series.
You know, I can see the logic of this from the buyers point of view. Last year bats got into my house and I couldnt get rid of them because I couldnt figure out where they came from. My GF was terrified. She wouldnt leave the bedroom without me around. I certainly would have paid $10-20 (not $80) for an ebook that even hinted at a solution.

I finally arrived at a solution, but backwards. I sealed all the entrances into my house, but I hadn't sealed the bats out, I had sealed them in. For a couple of months, whenever I moved a piece of furniture, I'd uncover another dead bat. Dead bats dont look like dead bats. They look like balls of dust. I had vacuumed up a couple before I realized what they were.
One other thought that occurs to me is that becoming a millionaire (which I think is well within the capacity of the majority of people here) is something that usually takes a lot longer than 5 years :)

Drip funding an individual for that length of time is unlikely to make them successful either - 5000 a month is enough to live on fairly well but if they are still relying on it after the first 2 years then I dont see them succeeding... a lump sum up front (or payments over 2 years) would probably have a better effect.

Giving the individual liquid funds above what is needed to live will probably show greater returns in the end :D
Maybe...

Let me share my personal experience: when I was 18-21 I struggled with advanced math in college. Now, at 30, when I re-open those books just for fun, everything makes so much sense and some aspects of it are even enjoyable.

I've failed to find a plausible explanation for myself. I haven't done much math (calculus, probability, statistics) since graduation, yet the exact same books are so much easier to read now.

I experienced a similar effect much earlier in my life: I struggled with understanding recursive algorithms when I was 12, but when I came back to them at 16 I laughed at myself - it suddenly seemed so trivial.
About the calculation, I assumed that the fund takes loans from an imaginary bank at an interest rate "r" to pay for the loans. I calculated how high the r can get for the fund to break even, and that's the result I gave. (I solved it with Mathematica.)
Tim Berners-Lee's TED Talk: The next Web of open, linked data
Watch Eastbound and Down Online
Any recommendations as to how many should be shown?
I just turned 24 today :D
Heuristics, Biases & Rationality
The study of reproducible errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes, is known as the heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology. This program has made discoveries highly relevant to assessors of global catastrophic risks. Eliezer Yudkowsky, who writes on the subject of cognitive biases at Overcoming Bias, presented at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference in Mountain View was on the subject of cognitive biases in the assessment of risk.
side note: I have a full time job and I just did this on the weekends and after work on the weekdays
I could maybe show the top tags used? What do you think?
I have a full time job so just nights and weekends.
I'd have been the target market for something like this, and I wouldn't have done it. I would have hated to have debt hanging over me. Equity funding is better than debt for high risk ventures. But I doubt one could legally buy a share of someone's future earnings.
To what degree do these results reflect the likelihood of responding rather than the actual demographics? I actually think younger people may be slightly more inclined to respond.
I just exploded the link using "/", grabbed the ID of the photo and I used the flickr api to make sure that it's a valid photo_id.
16 points
High interest loans would likely get defaulted on, as $100k isn't very much money for someone who has a house, good credit or a co-signer who can help them get more.

It'd be a small sector of people who'd qualify and among those, they'd either be ill equipped to hit a home-run the first time out or other factors would preclude them from succeed the way they'd want to.

I appreciate the sentiment, but I think there are a lot of better ways that you could reach "ordinary people" (aka, folks who don't know what Y Combinator is and would never care) without offering them high interest loans.

The barriers to entry to capital are high and programs that say "forget business plans that no one reads, lemme see what you can create in a short period of time," are the right model, but there are status quo ways to do that and the pitch of "we can create millionaires" isn't going to do much for the ones you're asking to pony up the cash.
in the first part yes.
unfortunatley in the second part all the men are just naturally more powerful and everytime a women is exposed to the male side of the onepower they freak out because oh it's so violent and hard to control, while the men have no problem dealing with the womens side.

not to mention that about half of the problems in the series are caused by women scheming and interferring because they're all thus so convinced that men are incompetent.

I remember being dumbfounded when I read an intervew with Jordan and the interviewer asked how he wrote such strong women.
... yeah if you assume strong women are all horrible humans sure I can see thinking he writes strong women.
Most of the things you've commented on are things that I actually prefer (being from the Mac world) - but a few things

* You can write blank CDs/DVDs with finder or Disk Utility easily, but the finder behaviour can be hard to work out

* PDF files show for me in the browser, unless I explicitly tell them not to (right click, open in preview) - you didn't install Acrobat Reader did you?

* Read only NTFS is reasonable. Can you read an HFS+, UFS, ZFS or EXT2 volume on your windows box?

* Having an app open, and having a document window open are two different things. This takes a while to wrap your head around, but it's much nicer to keep (say) textmate running, cmd-tab to it then cmd-n for a new window than having to do the whole start menu dance to get a new editor window open.

Other than that, I'd say you'll find it's just personal preferences and experiences that you may see the benefits of in time, particularly with regard to things like window management and app install which I honestly find vastly superior on Mac. Let's just not mention the uninstall. In a month, I imagine the differences would still grate, but personally I now find it much more difficult going back to Windows line editing (home/end instead of cmd-> cmd-<) and other Windows behaviours having been on Mac for so long.

For me, it's all a bit pavlovian I guess. Having to alter my habits to use something I don't want to use and that doesn't reward me is a bit of an affront!
A futon and a few kettlebells for the office. A power nap and a quick 15 minute workout can do wonderful things for productivity.
I think Professor Velleman promotes "Voluntary response data are worthless" as a slogan for the same reason an earlier generation of statisticians taught their students the slogan "correlation does not imply causation." That's because common human cognitive errors run strongly in one direction on each issue, so the slogan has take the cognitive error head-on. Of course, a distinct pattern in voluntary responses tells us SOMETHING (maybe about what kind of people come forward to respond), just as a correlation tells us SOMETHING (maybe about a lurking variable correlated with both things we observe), but it doesn't tell us enough to warrant a firm conclusion about facts of the world. The Literary Digest poll

http://aurora.wells.edu/~srs/Math151-Fall02/Litdigest.htm

is a spectacular historical example of a voluntary response poll that didn't give a correct picture of reality at all.
Correct. It doesn't matter how large a sample size is if the sample is biased. This should be something that every high school student knows after any high school statistics course, but it is a crucial consideration that is widely ignored.
Thank you for your honesty. If more people talked openly about non-addictive ends to drug use, people's perception would be much different than it is now. It's a self-perpetuating problem because the negative social stigma prevents people from discussing their experiences openly.
Graphic Recording of Tony Hsieh Opening Remaks @ SXSW
My guess is yes. Twitter is a new protocol, and in the past new protocols have always generated new companies. The one catch here is that this protocol is controlled by a private company. So you'd have to worry about the possibility that if you did something successful, they'd try to take it over themselves.

I think one could probably protect oneself, though, by doing something that's enabled by Twitter, but very far removed from the kind of thing the Twitter guys understand. E.g. don't try to do search for Twitter, because Twitter will probably own that. But if you did something combining, say, Twitter and real estate, they'd probably steer clear of it.
Do you want a domain of mine (WeAreBigBrother.com)? I was going to be building something like this, but it looks like you might make more use out of it.
Do you mean "a lot of people" like the last three US presidents? Obama did coke. Clinton smoked pot. It's widely believed that Bush Jr. also did cocaine.
"JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford is a good, concise, opinionated crash course in JavaScript. It demonstrates the full power of the language, but also teaches you how to avoid real-world compatibility and performance traps. One of the few books that's useful as both a tutorial and a reference.
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/

"Programming Erlang" is a good introduction to both the language and the way of thinking about programs as highly distributed, multi-node systems:
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang

"Real World Haskell" is a very fun book, with a ton of good lessons to absorb, and impressive real-world example code. Some of the later material is pretty dense, though, and I'd plan on spending some real effort working through it, especially if you haven't used any similar languages before. (I've done SML, Lisp, and Prolog, and I still had to work hard to understand parts of RWH.)
http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/
I understand that debt can be distressful, and thus might even make the entrepreneur less productive. But having a side job is distressful too.

If I had to choose between having debt, and working side jobs like I do now, I would choose the debt. I understand that you would have chosen the side job. I guess the question is, are there enough people who would have chosen the debt?

As for why I would choose the debt: I know at >99% that I could pay it. Therefore it will hardly distress me. Even if my life would turn out to be a total failure I could still get some coding job at a big company, take a separate loan from the bank, and pay it all off in a few years. It would suck, but for a worst case scenario it's not that bad.
Oni: an Embedded Structured Concurrency Language for JavaScript
Anyone who still believes that CD, DVD or Blue-Ray still have a future is deluding themselves. There is no market for spinning media, it's just that there is currently no better alternative. Flash Memory will replace all spinning media as soon as it becomes viable from a cost perspective.
Maybe I read this too quickly, but the vast majority of people you'd want to lend this kind of money to are either (a) not going to want to borrow money at 20% interest, or (b) have access to far lower interest sources of funding, even in the unsecured context. This idea doesn't make much sense to me.
The Secrets of the Talent Scout
"But having a side job is distressful too."

If people aren't willing to give you cash for equity, it's probably a bad idea for a company and you should switch projects. (It's unlikely that you're the one in 100,000 entrepreneur who has a brilliant idea others just can't see the brilliance of.) Otherwise I don't think there's much of a good argument for turning down equity financing for a high-risk venture.

It just makes a lot of sense economically: your biggest asset as a poor entrepreneur is your time and effort, and you need some capital to make your project happen. Investors have a lot of capital, but only a finite amount of time/effort to do things with it. So it's a fair trade: you put in time/effort, and the investor puts in money. If you just finance everything with debt, you end up having to incur both downsides of losing time and money -- and the downside of losing $100k in capital is a lot worse for you than for the rich investor. If the project fails, you'll have to spend time/effort to repay the $100k instead of just moving on to the next project.
For the record I agree that the chances of the data exactly replicating the reality is minimal.

If nothign else because the youngsters here are more likely to respond (and also respond correctly) even though it is anonymous :)

But even allowing for that I would reckon we can use the data to extrpolate a few guesses. For example the high number of under 20's votes (I imagine these beign the most accurate numbers because of the deomgraphic too).

Plus of course this place is probably more likely to generate valid responses because of the general demographic. I would expect the data to be more accurate than a similar poll on, say, welovebritneyspears.com :)

So, yes (and to abuse a much overused maxim :D), voluntary poll data is untrustworthy. But some are more untrustworthy than others ;)
it's actually illegal for supplement companies to make anything that resembles a health claim about their own products, even if it's demonstratively true.

Absolutely false. It is completely legal to make the claim as long as you demonstrate that it's true to the FDA and they accept your data. If the benefit were actually present, they could file safety & efficacy data with the FDA and on approval legally make the claim. The fact that they don't tells me that there isn't any benefit worth noting.
I use Pear's Flickr api library and then use the built in CI sessions library to handle login/logout.
I'd argue that entirely depends on the context :) it's a bit of a blanket statement.
The feasibility of making $700,000/month on Socialmedia, Part II
Equating that example to this poll is heading to very shaky territory. I can tgink of plenty of factors that would indicate both why that was an incredibly innacurrate poll (and polling method) and why a poll here on HN is probably going to produce at least soem form of workable data :)
the way to get the masses of C programmers to move to objects was to make the move transparent: to allow them to compile their C code unchanged under C++

Except that that is not really true: it is very rare that you can take a non-trivial C program, replace 'cc' with 'c++, and have it "just work".
Experience report: Making the bSelling add-on to Salesforce & promoting it on AppExchange
i think creativity increases as you have more experiences (plural) to draw inspiration from.
For our first web-based product we (Austhink software) decided to go straight for integration with the web-based Salesforce CRM, and put it up on Salesfore.com's AppExchange marketplace.

We've only just got it up there, but I thought that our experience may be of interest to those looking to play in the "Enterprise 2.0" (i.e. cloud-based, single-sign-on, Saas, mashed-together apps) space.
Yes all those things that you mentioned are done by default. What I'm simply saying is that you have to watch out for the temptation of adding non-critical features or rolling your own solution without doing your hw first. It's easier said than done.

In regards to design, people spend a lot of time creating photoshop mockups, then modeling it with css and html. I'm just saying, if you want to get it done quickly, just skip all that and keep it minimal.
I wonder if this applies to the HCBI system popular in Germany as well. Sadly there seems to be little technical information on it out there.
You will have a bunch of free-loaders taking the money and then declaring bankputcy or otherwise weaseling out. YC does not give that much money so it's not a problem for them (they also make you go over there so it's actually easier to ge a job for any would-be free-loader).

The big problem to solve is reputation - if you can reliably figure out who is trustworthy then you might be onto something.

Also, debt is a lousy choice - investor upside is limited and not proportionate to the amount of the value they bring to the table. Equity will make a much better choice. I don't think it should be hard to draft up a contract that says "I will give up 10% of my earnings over 100k/year up to the maximum of $1m total in exchange for $100k investment". Talk to a lawyer about this. But once again, anyone can simply declare bankputcy and get rid of this contract.

Your problem is about finding a) honest and b) resourceful people to invest into.
As for (a):
20% is considered a huge interest by most people. But that's because most people are not entrepreneurs. A good entrepreneur is a poor college kid at age 20 and a multi-millionaire at 27. That's a growth rate that far exceeds 20%.

I would personally take that loan at 30%, and even more.

For (b):
I don't have access to such a thing. I found that without a job I couldn't get a loan bigger than $10,000. I would be very happy if you showed me a program which would give me a big loan, at any interest rate which is below 40%.
I doubt one could legally buy a share of someone's future earnings

This idea comes up from time to time and someday might catch on. Here's some recent discussion:

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/june-06-08/popping-the-...

http://blog.gocollege.com/2008/11/30/paying-for-college-radi...

...and the company mentioned in the second piece...

http://www.lumni.net/

No idea if they're legit.
Looks to be closer to a Gaussian, not Poisson, distribution to me.
You actually can legally buy a share of someone's future earnings - it's the basis behind the Bowie bonds.

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

There was also a minor league player that was selling shares in himself (although I think he did so in blatant violation of the '33 Act).
jey, I think we sort of lost each other. I have nothing against equity financing.
Money and health.

Just about every problem I have right now (and for the foreseeable future) can be solved by the judicious application of money. Health can be improved by money, but not guaranteed by it.

Love and friends are also important, but I already have that.
There is a difference between a walled garden for the sake of capturing users, and a walled garden because it makes sense.

Having a universal app store would be a pain the neck because of all the different platforms that you would have to support. It makes a lot of sense to have one app store per platform. If I'm on an iPhone, why would I want my interface to be cluttered up by Android apps or vice versa.

Nor does an app store mean that the host has to decide who gets in and who doesn't. Some platforms do, some don't. Even something like Debian that runs an app repository (which is what an app store is, sans payment system) has guidelines for submission - the key that differentiates it from the app store is that you can run unapproved code.

So a system where each platform has its own app store and apps that don't go through it are allowed to run on the platform make the most sense. Platforms that do not allow installing thigns outside their model are deficient, but this is a not a knock on app-stores in general.