JayNeely

The article says this isn't an issue for subdomains of established domains, but the issues it describes match what we experienced setting up a game wiki for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint at https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/ -- almost a year of not having any pages show up in search results, even though we were getting good links to it and there were no better alternatives that should have ranked (we never started the wiki for this game on any centralized site; at most all they had for it was a placeholder page).

Only after months of making sure our Steam news posts were consistently linking to pages within our wiki did we eventually see Google suddenly open the floodgates and start connecting searchers with the info they were searching for.

I've built out highly-ranked content sites before, and none of what I'd learned from getting those started seemed to work with this wiki, for no apparent reason. Google Search Console showed plenty of pages on the wiki were indexed; it just wasn't displaying them. Seeing this post I fully believe the premise that there's simply an arbitrary Google Jail for independent wikis. That sucks for search quality.

This is a common issue for game communities too. Discord works better for bringing together game communities not only because it's a more active and responsive experience, but because it's a centralized platform where users are already spending time across multiple communities. But chat's not publicly indexed, so lots of valuable game knowledge Q&A isn't accessible through search engines.

I'm working with a game studio that's self-hosting their most recent game (Cyber Knights: Flashpoint)'s wiki for the first time: https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/

It's going well content-wise, but it's insane how hard it's been to get it ranking in search results at all, much less outrank Fandom.

I canceled Soylent a couple of years ago after two silently-failing billing errors within a year and a rude customer service response. Looking for replacements, I ended up going with Huel.

It's been fine; I have had a couple of bad batches (too salty / bitter), but they replaced them. Switching from Soylent's ready-made drinks to Huel's mix-with-water powder was a small adjustment, but Huel's shaker bottle makes it easy. Soylent was fine unflavored for me (I'd describe it as "cheerio milk"), but with Huel their "original" flavor wasn't doing it for me so I've been ordering the chocolate. It's 1g of sugar, which doesn't bother me.

I'm just using it for a daily breakfast shake. I've never been that hungry in the mornings so can't comment on if you'll feel sated by it, but it works for me as a way to get some easy nutrition.

I'd encourage you to expand the book-promoting paragraph to include a bit more info / some interest-generating hooks about what the book offers that the article itself hasn't already provided.

If you really want to make this model sustainable long-term I might even make the recommendation paragraph dynamically customized based on referring source (here's a WordPress plugin that would let you do this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/if-so/). History enthusiasts are likely to be intrigued by a different set of things from the book than HN's business & systems-thinkers or an RPG community interested in world-building inspiration.

Lots of people will read a general-interest article (quick & no cost), but to get conversions to an actual sale, you need to target specific interests.

Well for one, the trend is hugely toward people consuming media on mobile devices, where resources like processor power and battery life are much more limited and unsuited to effective crypto mining than even a standard PC is.

Why do you feel it didn't really generate revenue?

What would you do differently if you were going to do it again?

Could you talk a bit about what you've done to promote it? Or has it been a hands-off, 'whatever traffic the marketplace provides organically' kinda thing?

I'm curious if other assistive software solves this need at the OS level, or if you other similar tools are already known to the community that it would be useful for.

Windows has built-in speech control that lets you scroll and click, doesn't it?

Would you be able to spend four weeks in Boston?

We have an EdTech accelerator here, LearnLaunch, with a program specifically for scaling startups that are already growing after achieving product-market fit: http://learnlaunch.com/x/#programs

The Name of the Wind, and The Wise Man's Fear -- great fantasy books by Patrick Rothfuss.

Hey team, it'd be nice if the landing page actually explained what the software is, not just the benefits of it. Is it an embeddable video player (and if so what am I being asked to download) or is it a desktop video player (and if so how is it different from VLC?).

Mostly I just found the landing page confusing. It took a bit to see that the page wasn't scrolled down you just have half a screenshot, "video player that loves the internet" doesn't really tell me anything, and nope, that play button doesn't do anything either that's just part of the logo. =/

I've relied heavily on search traffic / SEO, because it provides ongoing benefit even if I step away from it for a while.

It's an easy fit for the information-focused sideprojects I've typically created, providing the content needed to rank with no additional effort, but it can work for any project creator willing to put a little effort into creating content about their project and promoting that content (to gain links to their domain). And most importantly, it keeps me focused on creating something people want, because I'm typically expanding the project in areas where I see there's a high volume of searches (through keyword research tools).

"you get the same response rate when you write one-sentence cover letters as you do when you put a lot of effort into them" is faulty thinking. There are many reasons an employer might not be interested in an applicant, and many reasons why they might be. The frustrating part of the hiring process is that not getting a response doesn't provide you with visibility into any of them.

But assuming the cover letter doesn't matter is as much of a mistake as assuming industry experience, or years of experience, or having gone to a particular school doesn't matter.

a) different companies prioritize different things, even if the requirements list is the same.

b) small things can get your application silently rejected (or more often, delegated to a 'maybe we'll come back to them' virtual pile), because employers get dozens of applications (hundreds over multiple positions) and the cost of interviewing is high (and worth noting, much higher than your cost of writing a cover letter).

Did you negotiate royalties with individual content providers at the beginning, or find the content through a marketplace of some kind?

I'm wondering how you can find good content cheap enough to be profitable at $2/month.

Because IP addresses are often shared resources. Your ISP gives each customer an IP address (often a temporary one), and then that customer's router system handles assigning private, local-network-only IP addresses to any devices connecting through the network.

So if a DNS provider starts banning public IPs (which are the only IPs it sees), you could end up with an entire college getting banned because of one hacked webcam in one student's dorm room.

Or someone in an apartment somewhere with (unknowingly) a hacked thermostat finds their internet no longer works (DNS provider has banned them), so they reboot their modem, which causes their ISP to provide them with a new IP address. Guess what happens to their old IP address? It goes back into the pool of available IPs that that ISP can assign to other customers, and more and more banned-from-DNS addresses keep getting passed along to innocent, un-hacked customers.

I was writing about this for some friends recently. A lot of people don't "get" twitter because it's a very multi-purpose tool; it's not built around a central use case.

I find there are 5 useful ways to think about twitter:

1. It’s a way to follow people you’re most interested in. (Friends, authors, celebrities, professional mentors, restaurants you like.)

2. It’s a way to follow publishers of content you like. (Comedians, news, industry pubs, local events aggregators, food bloggers, magazines.)

3. It’s a tool for actively finding content you like or things you want. (Discussion about a show you like, jobs, deals, feedback.)

4. It’s a platform to get people interested in what you have to say, and be followed by those that already are.

5. It’s a quick, accessible opportunity to communicate with a peer, influencer, business, or supporters.

If you're interested in the rest of what I shared with friends (more actionable stuff on how to find what you want, how to handle noise, skimming other basics), you can find that here - https://medium.com/@jayneely/how-you-can-use-twitter-a-guide... - but the above is probably what's most interesting to the HN crowd.

If I spend my grandmother's retirement fund on lottery tickets, maybe I'll win her a lot more money, maybe I won't -- should I try?

Of course the likelihood of effectiveness matters. As does the potential harm you're risking. What the article is arguing is that keeping the site up allowed for a much greater distribution of the photos -- to potentially many, many more individuals who continue to elude prosecution, and may continue to spread those photos themselves.

At the time the FBI took over the site, there were 11,000 weekly user logins. During the additional time they ran it, it grew to 50,000 weekly user logins. Out of a potential 50,000 individuals, the FBI is able to prosecute only 186. pavel_lishin is asking a fair question when he wonders if allowing a potential 39,000 additional individuals to download those photos and potentially distribute them elsewhere actually resulted in any additional prosecutions, and if so, is that number worth it compared to the (potentially massive) amount of additional distribution the FBI enabled?

So basically, I install a browser extension, do social sign in so you get my friends list, and now any time I go to a page not previously in my browser history, it's anonymously added to the feed of any of my friends who also have the browser extension installed? And the hope is this stream of passively broadcast stuff from your friends is more interesting than Facebook or Twitter's streams of stuff your friends have curated and chosen to share?

Ignoring all privacy issues and ways to deanonymize, one big area of risk I see for you is in your ability to filter content. One of the main benefits of people actively sharing is that they tend to add context as they do it. They comment on it, add tags, editorialize the title, and even based on where they're sharing it you can assume a little more about the content.

Without all of that, your only option for "applying filters" and determining "type of content user wants" is to do some kind of machine analysis. How reliably are you really going to be able to provide that? Especially for images, which on platforms like tumblr and imgur are often shared without any context (even titles or tags).

With Amazon's Subscribe & Save option available for a lot of the major brands' anti-dandruff shampoos, I think your idea really banks on being able to create a better (and better-known) brand than them.

How will you out-compete Head & Shoulders, Dove, Selson Blue, etc. purely in terms of reach?

1) What legal risks are you taking on in providing this service, and how will you offset them? Providing the wrong information (two people with the same name, user input error you didn't validate, analytics calculation error, etc.), downtime at a critical moment, client or other confidentiality issues, etc.

2) Where do you get the data from, and how scalable are those sources (e.g. does it vary by municipality)?

Just want to echo others saying it's great to hear how many customer interviews you've done.

Are you aware of / how are you different than BevSpot (https://www.bevspot.com/)?

They seem to be solving this problem from the restaurant management side, which builds the demand-side of the marketplace, making it easier for them to sell distributors on the supply side: https://www.bevspot.com/distributors/

1) Love the idea of repurposing residential garages, but are these spaces as available (with all the criteria for your needs, like bathroom access) / convertable as you think they'll be?

2) Is the plan for home owners to clear their space, renovate it in the hope you'll accept it, then list their space in an AirBnB-type model? Or is someone on your team seeking them out, signing a long-term rental agreement, and converting them yourselves? With a cut to the homeowner, cost of renovations, cost of cleaning after every use, cost of supplies & refills, how much utilization do you need for a space to cover setup costs and then maintain a profit?

3) Beyond the community, a lot of artists who use creative studios do so because they're working on projects that won't get completed within a day or two. How do you address needs for storage of things like wet paintings, clay sculpture, large print templates, etc.? Right now your booking system doesn't seem to support needs like "3 hours today, 3 hours tomorrow, 3 hours after the weekend" without multiple bookings / risking getting out-booked and kept away from stored items.

4) Do you see your target market being more artists currently in a studio (or that have used them in the past), or artists that have never yet joined one (primarily worked from home)?

1) What user inputs do you need, for this to work well, and what's the process for getting them?

2) Let's say I open up Gmail, spend about an hour writing 5 emails to 4 different people about 3 different projects. Could you walk me through how Moonlighter identifies how much time I just spent on each project?

Could you talk about how you're promoting on social media?

Are you building relationships with influencers and getting promoted to their audiences, or have you found tactics / channels to drive traffic directly that works well for you?

1) 99 Designs for Voice Acting.

Particularly for videogames / commercial video production, there's a lot of small parts that are strictly scripted, and where I'd imagine it's inefficient to spend a lot of time searching through voice actors' portfolios when what you really want is just to hear a good take.

2) WordPress-native, content-aware, publisher-friendly analytics

There's a big gap in analytics software for analytics that are tightly integrated with the CMS, and focus on providing insights about content, not just pages. The same piece of content appears in many forms, in many places across the site, for varying lengths of time. How does content length affect bounce rate? How long should content stay in a particular slot before it starts getting diminishing returns on traffic? How much traffic do articles with a particular tag typically get within their first week since publishing vs their first year?

Most publishers would be totally unable to answer those questions without a month-long data integrations effort from multiple sources (assuming they've done some of the setup work with something like Google Analytics event-tracking to have the data in the first place), even though it has big implications for everything from site layout to editorial guidelines to long-tail traffic potential for content around a topic.

3) Street team marketplace, dynamic printing, and verification system as an app.

An elance-for-street-team-members site that could let companies post 'missions' for people in any major metro or college campus who want to do street team tasks, who have signed up through an app. Flyer posting, handouts, chalking, etc. Street teamers verify their work with the app through a combination of photos and location-tracking during the time they mark they're working on a mission.

Companies could optionally use the marketplace's software to create the flyers or handouts, which allows for the marketplace to both make sure it's print-shop ready and provide dynamic URLs / QR codes unique for each flyer or handout, for additional verification and results tracking.

I wouldn't let a single requirement that you don't meet deter you from applying -- if you're a 90% match for a company's requirements list, and truly believe you'd be a good fit for the job, chances are you're a better candidate than many other people applying for literally everything that has a particular job title, regardless of their experience. It doesn't hurt to apply. Just make sure you're pursuing other opportunities as well.

Since you're a Stanford student, I'd guess Facebook actually comes to your campus for some recruiting events as well. Check with your career center to find out. Meeting one of their recruiters in person would be a good chance to ask questions about their requirements and how your experience might match.

I started using DDG this year. I've found the main thing that drives me back to Google (and frequently) is searching for anything where freshness of results matters; that's where I'm seeing the biggest difference in quality of results.