john_flintstone

The biggest problem I had - one I'm battling with right now - is that when you move successfully from being just a programmer to being an entrepreneur who sells software, after a while the software part becomes less important. You start thinking: If I can do this with software, I can do it with OTHER STUFF. And then you drift away from code and software entirely, as you realise your new entrepreneurial skills can be put to better use in other areas.

It's a huge thing to stop being a programmer, when you started out thinking it was the only path open to you career wise, and that you would be in the software business in one form or another for your entire career. But cutting that cord - as difficult as it is - can be liberating. Cause face it - if you can sell software that you wrote yourself, you can sell anything online.

This doesn't impress me. You get far better and more accurate results from running a Google ad campaign on a mocked up landing page than a survey would deliver.

An ad campaign gives you far more: number of impressions, click through rate, cost per click, key words and phrases potential customers actually use, etc. When it comes to surveys, people lie all the time (Would you hire someone from ethnic minority X? Answer: Of course, some of my best friends are...). People lie all the time, their Google search activity doesn't lie.

Sour grapes fella. How do you know she's been 'lucky' in life?

The reason I posted this link, and why I find it useful, is that it's written by the tech journalist at Ireland's Business Post, and posted on their website. It's not 'expert' advice from a blogger, it's what the journalist who covers startups in Ireland actually wants.

Every bubble is "completely different" to previous bubbles to the core group at the center of it. If they didn't think that, the bubble would never materialize.

I still remember laughing in the year before the dot com bubble burst when I'd hear all the "this time is different" talk about how Internet companies didn't need to make a profit.

That doesn't help. If I listen to the 10 o'clock news in the Netherlands, do I get a choice of languages? Newspapers in two languages? Parliamentary questions and interviews in 2 languages? Seriously?

This is not just a software/startup problem. Every single web project / eCommerce site / anything online that requires work, should be rolling out a variation of an MVP.

I had a meeting with the brother earlier today. He runs an online wholesale business (I do all the tech stuff). I've been leaning towards launching a retail arm in our one EU country, and launching 3 new wholesale websites translated into Dutch, French, and whatever they speak in Belgium.

We decided instead to translate just the landing page 3 times into 3 languages, to set up a retail site landing page, and to run 4 Google ad campaigns for a couple of weeks, dropping a couple of hundred euro on each one - to see what happens... impressions, clicks, etc.

Here's he point. On HN, we hear non-stop about MVPs, and because of the site that's in it, it's all software or web services. But the reality is that everything that points towards an MVP being a good idea for software and web services, is also true for more traditional eCommerce and info sites.

Adsense is the only Network that works consistently for me. The others simply don't have the volume of advertisers, especially if your visitor base is not US/UK. Other ad networks rarely seem to venture beyond the bigger markets.

You can in the UK.

And complete anonymity. Most people don't care about this, but some of us do, sometimes. You buy a pay as you go sim card for £10, pay with cash, and toss it a week or month later.

I'm not talking about sticking out of your pants. I'm talking about a nice tight pair that shows off your 'assets'.

>Why not? If a man (fellow coworker) has nice biceps, I say it (I'm not gay, not trying to seduce him, but being fit is very high on my values list). If a woman (fellow coworker) is cute, I say it (I'm not trying to seduce her, I just think it's nice to give compliments).

What about if a man has a nice bulge in his pants? Will you compliment him on that too? Because a reference to a low cut top is a reference to what lies under the top, and I'm not talking biceps. The male equivalent would be a not so subtle compliment on his penis.

>Google is trying to rank you highly for providing the best content...Want to rank better? Write better!

The real world doesn't always work like that. I do a lot of work for an eCommerce site that sells wholesale. Their customers have little to no interest in reading text, all they want are pictures. Which means, the catalogue pages, which are optimised for actual human visitors and not Google robots, contain little to no text, only pictures. As a result, the catalogue pages (most important part of the site) do not rank anywhere with Google, and never will. Google is unable to handle websites that are - quite correctly - all about the pictures. Competitor sites that outrank this particular site design their catalogue pages for Google, not for humans, and rank well because of it.

That's true. Chinese visa procedures are nightmarish, and can change without warning. But it's a bureaucratic and paperwork nightmare, not an inter-personal nightmare - there's no third degree. And once you land on Chinese soil, border control is a breeze. I'd much sooner take the grief weeks before the trip than when I land, tired after a long haul flight.

Not if you're travelling from Ireland. You don't need to show any ID - though technically, if you're not an EU citizen you're supposed to join a different exit queue.

>They created ruby on rails, which a few people use

A few people? Really? Now that's just petty.

I think you misunderstand them. They're poking HN with a stick, just to get a rise out of you. As in: "these guys think they matter, but they really don't, not to us." It's a little petty and mean, but I have a similar pettiness and meanness in me, so I kind of get it.

As to the response to their response, well, nobody likes being ignored or perceived as insignificant, especially those with large egos, and there are a lot of large egos here on HN.

>it's more fun to watch because it looks riskier

Then why isn't the rest of the world just as enamored by American Football as Americans? It's an almost non existent sport anywhere outside the US. If it really were more fun to watch than soccer or rugby, it would surely be more fun to watch in the UK, Germany, Brazil, etc.

It's only more fun to watch because you're used to it and your sporting culture is built around it.

>and the HTML didn't validate

Stupid as it is to go down the publicly naming route, what has the HTML validation status of the code got to do with anything? This is a measurement that only means something to guys who measure things - it has nothing to do with business generated, traffic, or the user experience of a website (the true yardsticks of good work).

Does anyone know if Usenet will be in the firing line, or is shutting that down a whole other ball game?

Well, when I hear the term "cherry popper" it's a similarly titled episode of The Shield that springs to mind. And that episode was all about pre-teen sex while pervy middle aged guys in a seedy club watched. So, even after knowing what the product is, I'd maintain that it's not a well thought out name.

You're narrowing the focus too much. The article was not about software or tech businesses, it was much more general. I've seen the same problem described in businesses selling poultry rearing products and fashion jewellery.

"groovehq.com"

Maybe I should know this, but are these guys some kind of 37signals offshoot, or have they just copied the 'hq' thing?

>Groove is a hosted customer support and engagement platform that helps companies manage customer support across all types of channels - email, web, live chat, mobile, Twitter and more.

Tells me nothing. Nobody signed their name to this piece of whatever, and I have no idea why I should be paying any attention to it. Who are they, and why are their obviously self-submitted pontifications worth my time?

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alexmturnbull

Read the comments, and I've got to say: I'm not one of you guys. I don't write code, I build products (otherwise known as software), that human beings use.

I looked up Pascal's triangle in Wikipedia, so now I know what it is, and I could write the code tonight to handle the shit out of it, but I'd probably mess it up on a white board when commanded to perform like a monkey in front of guys in T-shirts.

I own and run a software company that I started myself. I built the first 5 successful products (not code, products - there's a difference [kind of a big one too]) myself, and I don't give a crap about Pascal's triangle. I'd probably fail every coding test on the planet, but when it comes to delivering finished, polished, working products, that 1000s of human beings will actually use without picking up a phone and calling customer support, I've got that covered.

Stay classy with your 'code' guys.

Maybe, but I had a bad hair cut for 3 years, and I wish someone had had the balls to tell me.

I addressed that above:

"Of course, I should have worked harder, and I would have learned more if I had..."

My point (which I thought I'd made clearly) is that it was far, far too easy to do well, with little effort.

I graduated from one of the top 5 British universities in the mid 90s with a 2:1 degree in History, and I have to say that it was one of the easiest thing I ever did. I had class and lecture time of 4-6 hours a week, and spent another 8 hours reading and writing essays. The essay requirement, which contributed almost half to the degree grade, was only about 12 3,000 word essays a year. I had so much free time that I turned my part time job into a full time job, working 35 hours a week.

Of course, I should have worked harder, and I would have learned more if I had, but I was 19 and 20 years old and it was just so easy to get a good degree without working at all. I know I was far from alone in this.

Every degree course is not the same, and no doubt others may have worked long hours to earn theirs, but my own experience has left me with no respect for UK degrees, to the extent that when I read CVs from candidates I consider a third level degree irrelevant.

China todays always reminds me of Dickens's Tale of Two Cities:

"IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."

>The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none

Academic articles maybe, other articles, not so much. I run a website / forum in a niche area of animal husbandry, and one part of the site links to useful descriptions / information on different breeds. We've had no choice but to ban links to Wikipedia articles on individual breeds because they are simply factually incorrect, to the extent that even pre-teen site members find them funny and point out errors on our forums. Seriously, we have 10 year olds on our forums linking to Wikipedia articles and making fun of them - they really are that full of nonsense.

Just as most users don't know about Ctrl+, most users wouldn't know what "adjust text size up / down" meant either. My 60 year old father uses the Internet a lot, but he wouldn't be able to identify your use of the word 'text' with the words he reads on a website. Up or down to him would mean scrolling.