jadence

Excellent point. In many ways I think the networks get a bit too much credit for Hulu.

I thought a bit about it think and I think the accolades are largely because people didn't expect much after the fiascos of the RIAA and the MPAA. How many of us here expected the networks to be able to embrace, adapt, and deliver like they did with Hulu? I know I sure didn't.

Sure many readers here could've built something equivalent or better given rights to the content and half the capital injection but IMO the networks still deserve recognition for Hulu.

Excellent point but I think it may still be useful to see a list of profitable sites that don't charge. Perhaps some common patterns can be found and we'd all learn from it.

That said: I mostly agree with you and I think we'll take a look at the list and realize that they're all extremely lucky and/or happened to be at the right place at the right time.

I posted this as I was reminded of it when I read through the comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432299

Thought it was an excellent blog post and still relevant today and so I posted it after a quick search revealed that it hadn't been posted yet here.

Reminds me of this DreamHost Blog post on the web hosting industries so-called reviews:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/04/web-hostings-dirty-laun...

This is not what the folks at Engine Yard told me. Between namecheap and Engine Yard I have more faith in Engine Yard's expertise though based on the moding of my comment and dcurtis's comment it looks like namecheap was the correct one here.

Snippet from a support email from Engine Yard regarding my questions of how important the order was since namecheap wouldn't let me specify an order per Engine Yard's instructions:

In the words of one of our engineers, it's importantish ;-)

Essentially d.ns.engineyard.com is the local primary, b.ns.engineyard.com is an offsite backup and e.ns.engineyard is a local backup. If you can't put them in that order don't worry to much about it, but if you can make d first that is preferable.

I use namecheap as well and have one complaint. They don't allow you to specify the order of your nameservers! Regardless of the order you input your name servers the primary, secondary, tertiary nameservers will be assigned randomly with no way to specify the order. I sent a support request to namecheap and got the following response. Grrrr

Hello,

It does not matter which order they are listed, because when the nameservers are queried, they are queried simultaneously, and the first one to answer is assigned by the Registry to that particular query as "primary" at that point in time.

What this means is that regardless of how they are listed, the order of the listing does not determine which nameserver is queried first.

The order that the nameserves appear in the Registry is not up to the Registrar, and cannot be changed by the Registrar.

Woohoo! Sample size of 48!

Also relevant - their predictions from last year for 2008 (subscription required to read the articles) http://www.economist.com/TheWorldIn/index.cfm?d=2008

I'm not seeing where the excuse is in that quote. Seems like a rather honest assessment of the situation without blame on external factors.

What stories do you use if step 3 is needed?

Also - by "sneak into" concerts you mean that you get yourself into concerts without having to pay or that you get into otherwise sold-out concerts but still pay?

Don't have the video auto-reply/loop. Just play once.

Also I would tweak the demo video so that you're explaining what problems the product solves and how the product helps rather than explain how to use the product. There are some lines such as "Notice when you view this page your cursor is in the first form field automatically. You can just start typing" that I don't think really help to sell the product. I say just use the product while you explain how the product helps the user and why the user should use it.

TC has two pretty good articles on how to demo a product:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/09/how-to-demo-your-startu...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/how-to-demo-your-startu...

Joel also has a pretty good article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/11/16.html

PS/OT - For future reference, what did you use the create the demo video?

Evite does the same thing. My friends and I frequently forward our invitations around to each other with the note "If you're interested bump up my RSVP count or add yourself with the 'invite more people' link on the right.

I think it's fine in this case for the added convenience of not having to register/login. It's an invitation system not banking.

I was a beer keg

Did you come up w/ that joke on your own? I ask because it's awfully similar to a highly moderated comment left on /.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1009471&cid=2553...

If you borrowed it from /., I would imagine that giving credit to the creator (who happens to be "Anonymous Coward" in this case) would be appropriate.

Not that I'm planning on getting knee surgery (more rehab . . . sigh) but I'm intrigued.

Care you expand on that?

Yes, iamelgringo's reaction does seem irrational but I can relate.

I've been dealing w/ a knee injury for a year+ and recently decided to bite the bullet (it's expensive!) and have it checked out. (Being an bootstrapping entrepreneur tends to have the side effect of having less-than-comprehensive health insurance) When the results of the MRI and X-Ray came in I found myself rather disappointed that there were no tears or fractures. I guess I just wanted a definite answer to why my knee was messed up so I could put a rehab plan into place and get back into running and mixed martial arts. Hearing "Don't know what's wrong. Rest it" was rather frustrating.

I know that Whole Foods does this though in a more evil way. If some small local gourmet place's stuff sells well within Whole Foods then Whole Foods will clone the product (don't know if the make it themselves or outsource it elsewhere) and then cut the small local place out.

Interesting. I supposed I'm just spoiled by Northern California weather!

In any case I don't mean to suggest that traffic lights should be only different shapes but rather that shapes be used in combination with colors. I feel like it would be an easy transition to make as the shapes would be a supplement to the existing system and thus traffic signals can be changed gradually.

The article's idea of making the green light blue would certainly help me but it does nothing for people who are completely colorblind and present the problem of transitioning a standard.

Really? Do you have trouble distinguishing the left/right turn signals that are shaped as arrows from a distance? I've never once had problems with that and, as far as I know, none of my friends have either.

My previous camera had the one LED that was on/off and I never had a problem with it. When I first plugged it in I would insure that the light was on and then I'd just leave it alone until the light was off. I tend to charge my batteries though in an area of the room where it won't be disturbed and likely to accidently get unplugged or whatever.

I see your point but I'd still prefer one LED that was on/off than the LED that's red/green which I can't tell the difference between at all. They just had to use the two colors that make up the most common form of color blindness . . .

No, my advice is to read well regarded forums (John Stone Fitness is one of them) and to read the stickies which are posts that have been deemed ("moderated," if you will) by the readers and the moderators to be the most informative.

As a red-green color blind person myself I can only cheer on articles like this and wish more people would pay consider color blind in their designs.

Off the top of my head, some UI's that suck due to my color blindness:

- MS Word 97 (haven't used anything beyond that) underlines misspelled words and grammar mistakes with two different colors that look the same to me.

- Civilization 2 has those villages that blend right into the background for me. I quickly gave up on the game after looking forward to it for a very long time.

- My digicam battery charger has an LED that's red when charging and green when the battery is fully charged. Um thanks . . . why not just have two separate (labeled) LEDs or just have one LED that's turned on/off?

- Settlers of Catan's board. Darn lumber and bricks look pretty darn similar to a color blind person which makes it difficult to quickly skim through the board and make analyses for your next moves.

- Traffic Lights - Why not use shapes also? In some areas (Castro Street in Mountain View comes to mind) the green lights are very close in color to the street lights themselves. I have to concentrate really hard when driving on Castro at night. Also I don't know WTH additional reading article "What about Traffic Lights?" is talking about. I rely very heavily on the order of lights which makes driving at night difficult because you can't tell if the light is on the top, middle, or bottom.

- Sushi Restaurants with the conveyer belt where you take dishes off the conveyer belt and you're charged based on the plate color/pattern. I once went to eat at such a Japanese restaurant with three other color blind people and one non-color blind person. We were constantly asking the non-color blind person how much each plate was as it passed by, as a result usually miss it, and have to wait for it to loop back around (assuming it was still there).

Oh and when you find out someone is color blind please don't randomly point to nearby objects and ask "what color is that?" If you want to know what it's like see http://www.vischeck.com/examples/

I've skimmed over a few the articles in this series and I'm confused as to how it keeps making appearances on the front page of HN.

There is nothing specific here that applies to start-up founders/employees/entrepreneurs (despite the intended purpose), the articles are poorly written and far from complete, most of the advice is common knowledge, and the rest of the advice is of dubious value.

For anyone looking to get in shape, I highly recommend reading the stickies in the John Stone Fitness forums: http://forums.johnstonefitness.com/

I don't get why Quote Unquote Records is bothering fighting w/ the host to get the site back up. Granted I don't know if they're stuck in a contract or otherwise have reasons to sick w/ their hoster but my gut reaction is to go find another hoster and give the original hoster the finger.

I tried local colleges (http://www.academyart.edu/) but found the rates the students want to charge as much as the more experienced designers though they had much thinner portfolios.

So far all the designers I've hired have been through recommendations of friends and they've worked out well so far.

For logo design (yes, I realize a bit off topic) I recommend http://www.designoutpost.com