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knightinblueon DuckDuckGo on This Week in Startups

makes him more worthy of respect

From people like you perhaps. In which case, knock yourself out.

I do agree that TWIST maintains a high quality of guests tho.

knightinblueon Ask HN: Payments/Subscriptions Based Startups and Niches

I'll start -

groupon.com

match.com

pandora.com

knightinblueon [dead]

In other news, Mr Kitty the cat took a poo in his favorite litter box, exiling 7 grains of sand from their family in the process who remained in the litter box, many now clinging to feces.

When Mr. Kitty was asked for comment, he hid under the bed.

P.S. Don't they normally reserve crunchnotes for this sort of irrelevant petty bullshit?

knightinblueon Ask HN: accounting resources for startups?

+1 for pulse. It reduces accounting of your cash flow to simple data entry.

Just keeping in mind that at some point, you will have to hand over all the data to an accountant.

knightinblueon Ask HN: Startups and In-House Mailing

Thanks kinetic!

We're planning on sending 1 daily email to each subscriber. Let's say we want to be prepared for sending 100,000+ per day.

We're currently on rackspace's cloudservers, so we have no problem spinning a separate instance for a mail server. Just needed some guidance in terms of setting up the server and start mailing.

Can you point me to a resource where I can do some reading and educate myself a bit more?

knightinblueon Ask HN: Startups and In-House Mailing

One of the reasons I'd prefer to run it in-house is because users' emails are valuable data and we prefer to keep it with us rather than outsource to something like Aweber.

Another reason is the cost. Once email lists get into the tens of thousands, it becomes expensive to have someone else like Aweber handle them. I have a feeling it'd be cheaper to run it in-house. I don't really have any hard data to prove this of course, just assuming based on the fact that most startups do it this way.

Finally, based on the little bit that I've read, it's the initial setup (servers, IPs, subscribe/unsubscribe requests) that takes effort. But once it's automated, things will be humming along nicely, provided there's regular periodic monitoring of course.

I'm pretty sure startups run email delivery in-house for the reasons above and more. Take Groupon for example - I'd be willing to bet they do it in-house.

knightinblueon ReMail (YC W09) Acquired by Google

Congrats!

How much?

knightinblueon [dead]

The only real shame in this case is that HN is becoming a place for people to air their trivial meta nonsense.

You got an unwanted piece of email? Take a second to mark it as spam and be done with it. Sweet mother of god, you got it via HN?? Once again, take the exact same second to mark it as spam and be done it. But don't assume that it affects the big scheme of things concerning HN, because it doesn't. A single company trolling for emails is orthogonal to the evolution/erosion of HN.

P.S. You're feeling 'sad'? This is all it takes to make you feel sad? Jesus.

knightinblueon Bowkett: This Is Why You Should Pay For Advice

What's this guy's beef with HN? He harps against it repeatedly in various posts.

knightinblueon Students from public schools do better in math than ones from private schools

When it's your own money on the line it takes on a different aspect than dropping junior off at the gate

More so than the fact that it's your own kid? I'd think that that would be the ultimate motivation for parental involvement...

knightinblueon Behringer's Clone of Apple's Homepage

Lots of Hacker News users are musicians.

Citation? Not being confrontational or anything, just really curious.

knightinblueon Quotes From PG’s FBFund Talk From Today

Not if you realize that determination is just one factor in the path to success. A founder could push his determination to the absolute limit and still fail, since there are so many other variables at play.

knightinblueon Is Crowd-sourced Journalism Making You Dumber?

The average intelligence and professionalism demonstrated on this site is pretty darn high.

knightinblueon Chicago's top crime blogger is a 16-year-old with autism living with his mom

What's with the 'living with his mom'? Where else would you expect a 15 year old to live?

knightinblueon After a 30-Year Run, Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Wall

If you read the article, it says he invested heavily in Lehman Brothers.

knightinblueon Starting a Bank

Goldman Sachs just paid out 16 billion dollars in bonuses to their employees. If we had an extra 16 billion dollars lying around, we’d put it in the bank for a rainy day. (If Goldman had never paid out bonuses they never would have needed government intervention.)

A flawed comparison. Goldman is an investment bank that needs to pull in incredible returns percentage wise. Safebank is a watchman guarding a vault. Basically, Goldman needs to pay out bonuses to attract top-shelf talent, while Safebank doesn't.

knightinblueon A simple formula to gauge a freemium model's success

Love it! This is precisely the kind of analytical thinking that can push a business forward.

knightinblueon What Entrepreneurs Should Not Do

You gotta give the guy credit for writing 3 whole pages without saying a single, solitary, concrete fact about what exactly the company does. It's almost like a challenge where he's daring the reader to figure it out.

knightinblueon Olark (YC S09) Is A Dead Simple Chat Widget For Site Owners

The feedback button on the olark homepage directs to a getsatisfaction page set up under their previous domain name, hab.la.

Aside from this, anyone else like the name hab.la much better than olark?

knightinblueon Lessons I Learned Earning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program

Annoying is putting it mildly. Downright useless is the way I'd describe it. Virtually every single post is a 'paid review' where, in return for $500, John will shill anything you want him to. Literally. There is no screening process whatsoever. You pay him to talk about flaming dogpoop and as long as your money gets deposited, he will talk about it.

He has basically made it clear that his only goal is to drive readers to subscribe to his newsletter (so that if they stop coming to his blog, he can still chase after them in their inboxes) and through the newsletter, get them to sign up for some of the most useless crap under the sun and collect commissions.

Darren Rowse aka Problogger on the other hand, seems to genuinely want to offer info that can help ppl generate money online. What sets him apart from the rest of the 'me-too' probloggers is his standards. He rarely has any aff links in his posts and when he does, it's usually for something that he's personally used and wants to recommend.

knightinblueon Why I Don’t Use Twitter

No. It didn't.

knightinblueon Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?

Blending in isn't really an issue when you're on the other side of the world, hence the attraction. Documents can be easily obtained. And as long as you don't have to work or do business, you rarely have to deal with the authorities.

If the problem is money however, then that's a valid issue. Because all of the above cost significant amounts of money.

knightinblueon Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?

I'm surprised all of these ppl stayed in the US. I would imagine it's a lot harder to track someone down if they disappeared to the other side of the world.

knightinblueon Y Combinator Starts Seeding Ideas To Startups

Good luck to both of you :)

knightinblueon Y Combinator Starts Seeding Ideas To Startups

I see. Sounds interesting. When are you guys planning to launch?

knightinblueon Y Combinator Starts Seeding Ideas To Startups

Care to elaborate a little? Is it a mobile app? A niche site?

knightinblueon A New Experiment: The RFS

Would the right answer be niche reporting? Basically sites like Talking Points Memo or Techcrunch where a small but focused group produces quality reporting on a specific niche?

knightinblueon Ask HN: Are you a founder?

Love this one.

knightinblueon Fred Wilson: Doubling down (in VC/PE)

humans are twice as upset about losses as they are happy about wins

Any research to back that up? I always thought that was a subjective thing, in that it varies for everyone.

knightinblueon My Advice to Fox & MySpace on Selling Content – Yes You Can

The maverick is starting to sound like a disconnected old coot.

Cutting off access to aggregators - Mark feels that this somehow makes the content more valuable and convince readers to come directly to the site. Bullshit. If a site blocks access to a particular news story for an aggregator, the aggregator will simply link to another site that has another article on that same news story (Breaking news? more like leaking news. It takes a grand total of about 2 min for someone else to write up the same story).

The whole point of staying on top of aggregators is that when readers follow a link from an aggregator, they will stick around and go deeper into the site - thats where money can be made. Instead, if they let the aggregators link to other sites, they just took another giant leap towards extinction.

John Gruber said it best - the way for newspapers to make money is to cut the bloat. As opposed to the current model where the editorial staff makes up only a fraction of the total head count at major newspaper and magazine companies, they should become lean and mean organizations with little or no management bureaucracy. Operations where nearly every employee is working on producing actual content. Gruber cites the example of Talking Points Memo (which is profitable and hiring) and I wholeheartedly agree.

Welcome the aggregators to link to you. Keep your organisation wire tight. Those are the first 2 steps newspapers should be taking.

P.S. Reuters has the right idea - http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/08/04/why-i-believe-...