How much it's worth to be #1 on Hacker News for a day
arshadchowdhury.com
arshadchowdhury.com
I didn't have a blog at the time but wanted to write something to submit to HN so I set one up on Posterous and wrote my post. Ended up #1 for about 6 hours, and stayed on the front page for over 24 hours.
http://www.chrisacky.com/images/stats.png
But do you know what I loved the most...
After I wrote the content and submitted to HN, I took my dog for a half hour dog walk.. and came back to this.
http://www.chrisacky.com/images/trends.png
If you write anything, providing it's: original, interesting, controversial, echo-chamber'd or otherwise a decent news-scoop, you can usually get enough upvotes to make front page.
Unfortunately, I've found that the really technical posts which are awesome never seem to stick around for that long which is why it's good to check out /new every so often too.
IF YOU DON'T WRITE IT, THEY WON'T COME.
Everyone should have a blog, and providing it's not spam, you will be amazed at how easy it can be to get readers.
That's the kind of... sad? Part of HN. Hardly anything lives for more than a day on home page. And links on /new have a few hours and then they got lost.
Not sure about others but I personally tend to look at the posts which already have a vote or two, while skipping the ones which don't. Eh, social proof goes quite far.
I think there is an opportunity for a tool which would extract the keywords from the post (not the title) and would give me some content from /new which you wouldn't have discovered from top pages. Been thinking about it for a while, what do you reckon folks?
The post: http://www.stavros.io/posts/brilliant-or-insane-code/
A rare example of words that do belong in CAPS. :-)
My one comment on the original note... I think an article that is written with the intention of being well done might be monetizable as a side effect, but I don't think the other is true. It's very hard for a low-value post with poor monetization to be voted up.
1. Have an app.
2. Get some Amazon referral links.
3. Have a blog with ads.
4. Author a controversial blog post and fill it with the above three items.
5. Submit to HN. Hope your post hits a chord on HN.
6. Follow up a week later with a meta blog post about your success.
7. Submit to HN. Hope your follow up hits a chord on HN.
8. Go back to #1.
Working on a laptop only all day long is insane. You need to separate screen an keyboard, otherwise one of them will be at the wrong height. If you use a laptop, it means you need to add an external keyboard. Everything else makes absolutely no ergonomic sense!
Here's an example of what you should have advertised: http://www.ergotron.com/ProductsDetails/tabid/65/PRDID/320/l...
Plus, you can sit and then stand up by just pushing down/pulling up the table up easily with one hand.
As for the optimal keyboard: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/freestyle2.htm (Freestyle2 VIP3; forget the "Ascent")
Some improvement is better than no improvement at all.
Congrats, though I'd say your experience happens 1 out of maybe 1000 times?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057706 had 12 votes and only made it to the middle of HN frontpage, but got written up in TechCrunch on a slow news day.
It's been a very positive experience, and I've reinvested all of the money into components for my next project. Watch this space :)
Post in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6247418
I'm going to update the Power 20 site to give equal airtime to iOS and Android.
Android sales have actually recently outpaced iOS sales because I'm able to iterate on the app's name more frequently in Android. I can find out which titles work faster on Android. With iOS, one must submit a new app every time they change the name. Crazy.
Anyways, the blog was an inspiration for me to start my own blog (which I have been putting off) and gave me some ideas for a way for it to fund itself.
Why? It doesn't cost you anything. You can delete it if it bothers you. It expires after one day (so no "from now on").