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kurtko

17 karma · joined March 12, 2013

Digital Nomad & de facto CEO
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kurtko··on State of MetaFilter
Reddit isn't profitable yet but is much larger and keeps its staff relatively small compared to its traffic volume.
kurtko··on State of MetaFilter
Who said the founders/managers were going to lose in aggregate? They may have set aside a nest egg in peak years and not want to dip into that.
kurtko··on Show HN: Print your Facebook (re-launch)
Love it. One bit of feedback: 'Order Your Copy' should give me a bit of text before asking me to connect with Facebook - maybe just the basics, price, etc... There just isn't quite enough information for me to take that leap despite it being the immediate call to action on the page. Otherwise: great!
kurtko··on The Airbnb Economy in New York: Lucrative but Often Unlawful
I'm all for AirBNB in NYC and otherwise, but the taxation issue is the real issue. I think other laws/zoning can and should be relaxed to accommodate them, but this is business - they need to pay their taxes to put everyone on a fair footing.
kurtko··on The Monster Truck Madness 2 site is unchanged from 1998
Here's another classic ... even 2006 looks so dated today: http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/multimedia/50_science...
kurtko··on Poll: At what price would you buy Google Glass?
I would buy it as an add-on to my analog glasses at $500, assuming reasonable weight and battery life.
kurtko··on Ask HN: What is the most amount of people you have had on your site at one time?
Main Site: Around 2000 IIRC, before it crashed, anyway. This was back in the days of Digg, and less robust hosting. Average is 150-250 at a time, less at night, more during the day.

Micro-Site: We set up an experimental just-for-fun site with a bit of a viral edge and got 1.1 million visitors in one day, mostly from China - it apparently front-paged on a few major sites over there.

kurtko··on Heyzap (YC W09) adds option to pay game developers with Bitcoin
Correct, but how certain are you that it will continue to deflate? It has already once lost 90% of its value in a short period after a parabolic rise. Could it not do that again?
kurtko··on Heyzap (YC W09) adds option to pay game developers with Bitcoin
If you are sure it will keep going up at this pace, why not take everything you own, sell it, and invest in (or: speculate on) Bitcoin? That's not a rhetorical question.

Personally, given its volatility, it doesn't make much sense to me to hold much in Bitcoin outside of what you plan to spend relatively immediately. It could go up or down by 50% overnight - not a great store of value, either way.

kurtko··on Mt. Gox under DDoS attack as bitcoin price surges
The prices can't stabilize if it is to reach broad adoption. That is the essence of the Catch22 going on here.
kurtko··on We call ourselves innovators, but most of us are really just iterators
> Having enough surplus capital that we can take a three day trip to the Moon seems pretty First World to me.

Today, perhaps, but in retrospect our first manned moon mission probably bdid more for 20th-Century technology than any other single project.

kurtko··on We call ourselves innovators, but most of us are really just iterators
Iteration != innovation, but the two certainly can overlap in a venn diagram.
kurtko··on Ask HN: How important is design?
Don't confuse simplicity with poor design. Or, to rephrase that as a question: what aspect(s) of Reddit do you feel are poorly designed?
kurtko··on [dead]
For those of us too lazy to download the app, it's unclear at a glance (from the demo) whether it only offers four starting/ending locations. Like the concept, though.
kurtko··on Poll: What was your financial situation when you started your startup?
I guess I am in the majority - five years ago, I was just coming out of graduate school and gave myself three months to become 'ramen profitable'. To my amazement (and especially the amazement of folks around me) it worked out, just barely, which gave me license to keep going.
kurtko··on Wefunder (YC W13): Invest in Startups
This begs an interesting question: perhaps the way for the public to become seed investors is through diversification (i.e. index-style investing applied to small companies as well). Already, something analogous is possible through micro-cap index funds. That said, I agree that ultra-small companies are not a place to put all of your capital for the long haul, but they could provide correlation advantages with respect to the broader market in small doses.
kurtko··on Google Reader shutting down
Not just free ones - 37signals has closed down a few things they could have sold. Sure, they'll let you continue to pay them to use their now-unsupported waste in some cases (BackPackIt), but I presume that will end too.