rebekah-aimee

I have a big soft spot for HB. I saw this bundle and immediately thought of two people I know who are very likely to want it, so I sent them an email and attached one of the books from my bundle according to what I thought they'd like best.

I told them the publisher was reputable and if they had $15 to drop on the whole thing, as I had, then they should go for it--but if they just didn't have the money, I offered to send them anything else they wanted from my own download provided they tell anyone else they thought might be interested about the deal.

This straight-up doesn't hurt anyone. If my friends don't have the cash anyway, there's no opportunity cost--but now they know about Humble Bundle and they're probably going to tell other people because it's such a good deal. (And they get at least one new book.) A common and effective marketing tactic is to put the product (or a sample) in people's hands and then ask if they want to buy it, and everyone likes freebies.

I think being DRM-free helps to spread the word more than it hurts, and it also acts as a giant "We're Not Evil" flag. I'd hazard that No Starch does this kind of thing more in order to increase its brand awareness (and its affiliation with good-karma organizations like HB) than it does to actually make money.

I found out about the deal from No Starch's web site, because I have a print copy of Clojure for the Brave and True and had gone looking for the associated files. I'd barely heard of the publisher before, but now I respect them almost as much as O'Reilly. CftBaT is actually available free in HTML form, by the way, and earned itself a big link on my blog.

Basically, this kind of thing is actually really common when you think about it! It kind of reminds me of open source, but without the ability to modify. Then again, you can always write your own book.

Anyway, if someone goes looking for something for free by questionable means and they can't find a pirated version of it, how often do you think they actually go out and buy it instead? I would say almost never, unless whatever it is is in high demand or well known--that tends to not be the case among Humble Bundle items, which are from indie developers and publishers.

There are cities that are trying actively to become startup hubs to compete with SV, which are currently cheap but probably won't stay so. Kansas City will stay cheap long enough for a startup to take off.

Also, if we're talking about being frugal rather than relying on VC money, why not pick an area with a good university but not so much of a "city scene"/VC-land-ness, and hire college students? For example, Urbana-Champaign, IL. That way you're drawing from a pool where not all the talent has been snapped up yet, and the rent is usually reasonable because students have to live there.

But then all your programmers have private offices, which has been thoroughly established as dramatically important to productivity, as well as a bargaining chip in recruiting the best people.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper... (Kind of old, but still applicable.)

Supplying an allowance to rent somewhere with a good workspace or set up an office is still mostly cheaper than renting an inner-city space with private offices... and then you don't have issues with VCs thinking you're burning their money unnecessarily.

I was referring to YC, but I'm glad to see there are others following this model. I'll have to keep an eye on Make School; thanks for the link!

One could argue that the text or simple image ads are not a moral sinkhole like the article suggests. A lot of the text ads, I've found, are just the people who would normally rely on word of keyboard, except they're trying to get their first hundred users or whatever. Sometimes I would be part of their initial user base because what they're selling would genuinely make my life easier/better. That's not wrong.

The big, flashy ads (you know, the ones that are animated, or play sound or video, or do something dumb if you mouse over them for 1/4 second) are generally purchased by makers of lesser products in order to manipulate users into choosing them, because they can't rely on the quality of their products to advertise for them. I don't feel bad about blocking them.

So, I don't think unobtrusive ads are so bad. The trick is figuring out how to let them through. I turn off AdBlock on certain smaller sites with less obnoxious advertising and find that sometimes the bar is set too high for what's considered unobtrusive; the ads would theoretically be acceptable under the AdBlock description of what's unobtrusive, but get blocked anyway somehow.

As the market improves, advertising may gradually go away. That first clause is kind of difficult though.

The other question is how we can support people making content like blog posts and so on... without limiting the people who actually can't pay for stuff like that (kids with no jobs, etc). It's the same question as the one faced by music and software producers. When you can find an answer to that, well...

This has to be really cost-effective for MIT; I mean, they aren't really putting much in the way of resources towards these online students. But I think it's an attempt to solve a problem that's already in the process of evolving into a non-problem.

Most of the good programmers I know just go to school mostly for the credentials and to socialize with other programmers there, and then go home and self-teach for actual skill. School centers around getting a job. But it's starting to become not the only way to get a job. (Leaving out startups, of course; you don't really need credentials there except to impress VCs.)

Some companies are recognizing that formal education in programming is not very effective, and are paying more attention to StackOverflow and GitHub accounts and that sort of thing. Our work and expertise is becoming more visible through the Internet. That suggests that maybe we're not going to have to worry so much about credentials.

My older brother is doing very well for himself as a developer, without any formal training past some classes in high school back in the 90s. As for myself, I'm leaving for Kansas City once I'm done with my Associate's degree, and I'm going to UMKC there... for a few semesters, until I find a job and/or a cofounder. I don't intend to finish the degree I'm going to sign up for. They let slip during my visit there that they're already having issues convincing students to finish their degrees rather than let themselves be hired out.

But I do intend to go, in order to meet other programmers. That's the real power of universities: they collect bright, ambitious people and let them work together. Online classes don't have that power, and the credential problem is already being solved better, so I don't think this is going to go very far. But maybe it'll help accelerate the current solution by giving more credence to self-teaching and online study. Good try, but it'll probably be irrelevant in the end.

Kind of begs the question of whether one could recreate the social aspect of universities and leave out the expense of formal classes as they are now? For instance, whether you could make a sort of hackerspace-modelled university where all the "classes" were projects that one student was looking for help with? I'd attend that.

Hmm... sounds familiar, doesn't it? ;)

This post is beautiful. I have to show this to my mom.

Was that last example Obfuscated-C or something? I can't even tell. It's just that lovely. Of course I want to live in a world where that wins contests.

There's just something wonderful about a culture with this much openly acknowledged absurdity. People who sometimes literally dream in code, who have an unstoppable urge to grep books, who have had others point out grammatical errors because they reflexively ended a sentence with a semicolon;

But there's a lucidity about it. "Yes, I taught my computer to speak orangutan. As a side project, I scare normal people. What are your hobbies?"

In programming, you don't have to pretend to be reasonable. You can genuinely like what you do, and that usually makes you so good at it that you can get by with having your boss hear that your computer now knows fifty definitions of "Ook." And there's something incredibly special about making hardened bureaucrats take that without losing dignity.

I can't tell if the writer actually dislikes programming or not. (May seem an incredible statement.) But for how much programmers half-seriously complain about how ridiculous their work is, I don't know a one who would've gone back in time and told their younger self not to learn programming. Maybe they'd have said not to try to make a corporate career out of it, but that's more the brokenness of corporate structure than of programming proper.

The phrase "considered harmful" is considered harmful, remember?

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/considered-harmful.html

Mine does. They called it "Intro to Computers" but it was really just a giant ad for MS Office. The only part of it that most people wouldn't already know was the Access databases... which they had in the curriculum for some reason. I don't know of anyone who actually uses it at work.

At least they let you test out. The only reason I know Access is in the curriculum is that I BSed my way through that part of the test. Probably the reason it was there was so more people would have to spend money on taking the class.

One has to be very careful about conclusions based on the assumption of someone else's ignorance.

There are a lot of people who spend lots of money doing something in a stupid way (look at big software companies), but even they have an underlying reason: it's difficult to pick good programmers and value them accordingly unless all your managers are also programmers (and who picked them?).

When you say, "The normal approach to X is stupid; we're going to do things differently," you have to understand how the normal approach came about so that you can avoid ending up there yourself regardless, and also so that you can avoid whatever problems it adapted to avoid.

There are situations when assuming by default that other people are reasonably intelligent is a bad or dangerous idea--while driving, for instance, or during basically anything involving casinos or Black Friday. But when a market governs a motivation as powerful as money and is sufficiently discerning, you'd better start really questioning whether those people are actually stupid or you just don't understand what they're doing.

What if colleges started offering this as an alternative to the basic MS Word class most schools make everyone take? Then people who didn't know how to use a computer would be too intimidated by it, but students who already knew the basics could move on to this more interesting course.

You should still be able to test out, though. That way, if you're totally uninterested, you can test out of the MS Word class and move on.

I think there are enough students sufficiently interested in computers that they'd check out the harder course if its name didn't sound too obscure.

Grammatical error alert!

Creator’s can seek funding

^^ should not be a possessive, should be "Creators"

If I were you, I'd show off the gem that is your pricing system on the front page. There are a lot of PR firms; show right away what makes yours different.

Couch it in friendly language, like: "We'd love to help you X! For $400 a month, we'll Y to help you get there--or check out our other pricing plans [here]."

When people see "Sign up for free!" on a web site, they're used to having it mean, "Give us your email and we'll send you a ton of ads for free until you hit unsubscribe!" So, not a great tactic. Being up-front with your deal in that space instead will make you seem a lot more legitimate.

I'm a pretty good writer. If you don't mind, I'd like to give a little free nitpicking--er, editing advice about your front page.

>"Publicize is a next-generation PR company.

>"We help leading technology startups grow faster."

"Next-generation" is a pretty meaningless phrase. It may have been meaningful at one point and I can see where you're getting it, but it's become an overused buzzword. Avoid. Plus, you're using two sentences to say not very much. It's just clutter.

How about: "Publicize is a PR company tailored to the needs of lean, fast-growing technology startups. Here are some of the services we offer:" and then list your services so it doesn't seem like they're just randomly stuck there.

>"I had a great time working with publicize"

Did you mean to capitalize "Publicize"? From what I can see, it's not one of those always-lowercase names. Be careful about how you represent the writing on your web site, especially if you're offering a service that manages press releases! Capitalizing your company name is like fixing a spelling error; it doesn't invalidate the quote as long as you're not intentionally trying to warp what he said.

Greg Laughlin's review sounds genuine and earnest, but it has a problem: its sentence structure doesn't quite flow. I suggest basically keeping it how it is to preserve the quote, but maybe make Alan Grant's review the one that shows by default instead. It has a more professional feel, better punctuation, and better flow.

Just suggestions! It looks like you've gotten a lot of good feedback already on this, but a little bit of polish on the writing on your site would really make it shine. When you're a PR firm, you have to really make sure your own marketing is stellar. If you can't market yourself really well, customers will assume you won't do any better for them.

Look up this organization called "World Relief." They might take you on and help you with visa troubles. This is definitely in their department and they're super nice people; I volunteered with one of their families for a while.

Good luck; we're rooting for you.

If you're better at coming up with different names, as PG apparently is (he mentions in the article), then yeah, this would be a net win to just change your name.

For most of us who are pretty awful at naming, it may not be a great idea to focus on the name when there are other TLDs out there like .io, .co, or most recently, .tech. And there's also the highly acceptable alternative of using a derivative of your name, such as (name)app.com, get(name).com, and that sort of thing.

It's also notable that a startup registering its domain name is probably early stages and their name may change anyway, because their idea may change. You don't want to spend hundreds or more on lavalamps.com and then later decide you're actually going to sell those puzzle/IQ lights. Doing that might even make you hesitate to change your idea.* But if you spend $12 on lavalamps.net, the cost of heading for greener pastures is epsilon.

If you've got another name stashed on a scrap of paper in a drawer, dig it up and check whether its .com is available. But if figuring out a new name is going to take you a week, just take what you can get for now.

Probably you don't want to use (name).ru, though. ;)

---

*Although if you were that foolish and then that inflexible, you probably weren't going to get anywhere anyway.

That's cute! I didn't know that, thanks.

I'm glad they went with ThingsWeStart. That was a much better name... I've already forgotten their other ones. Their previous favorite didn't sound as credible, either.

Plus, ThingsWeStart is probably not the Ukrainian word for an item of ladies' underwear or something.

Have you checked HN's jobs section? You'd probably get more attention responding to a thread there or maybe posting your own if that's in the rules.

If you pitch in with non-technical founders, be prepared to have them question a lot of your recommendations and decisions. Do you have the patience for that? Be sure to choose wisely... your advice probably won't turn around a couple of clueless suits. You can't run a startup the same way you'd run a big business, and anyone with that in mind isn't going to, on faith, listen to the contrary advice of a hire.

In other words, don't do this as an act of charity for someone you think will fail without you. You're investing your time, so spend wisely. Just a reminder.

I think it's getting better. Tablet-like devices are still a relatively new platform, and improvements like what you're asking for are inevitable as more hackers gain expertise in the platform and all its nooks and crannies.

Browsers in particular improve by necessity, because of the issues with security. In particular with mobile devices! And of course if the code isn't allowed to become stagnant--if it's always being changed in some way--other improvements will likely show up too. Of course, we can speed up the process of making a better browser. Firefox for Android is a thing, albeit one I haven't personally tried yet; maybe it does a better job with things like web forms (which are a pain to fill out on phones).

The browser is only part of the problem, though. The fact that web site maintainers would rather have you download an app client than let you just work off their site (on a young platform they aren't really familiar with yet, remember) is nothing new. I think it often makes things easier on them, programming-wise. But the problem becomes that they compete for space on users' phones. I don't keep a lot of apps on my phone, and I don't like downloading new ones for services I'm ambivalent about or won't use often.

It's worth remembering what happened to email clients. Most people don't use them any more on their laptops; they use Gmail, which is online. Yet on phones, we're back to using email clients (probably because the browsers are pretty awful). The space problem will, I think, help cause demand for better browsers, and then website apps will shift back online.

Also, there's this. https://xkcd.com/1174/

There are certain apps that should be apps, though. Some apps can be web sites, and that'd be a good thing. Other apps--the ones that are useful when you're not connected to the Internet (which is infrequent but happens)--should stay apps. It's nice to be able to disconnect the Wi-Fi and still play Tetris.

I wouldn't mind a BuzzFeed app if it downloaded and compressed certain articles based on filters I defined, and let me access them offline to kill time in a doctor's office or whatever (this is probably way beyond the BuzzFeed folks, though--just an example). I wouldn't mind a HN app that downloaded the top stories as cached/compressed versions, either. Again, this would be the shape of an email client, but convenient time-killers always have a market.

This might be a good startup idea if anyone wants to take a crack at it: a content aggregator that stores articles (based on user-defined filters) from certain sites, as compressed archives on your phone. I'd do it myself, but I'm already working on something!

I think I was 13 when I met a Bulgarian guy over a psychology forum who stayed a regular email pen pal for several years; I helped him find his MBTI type.

I wonder if there are actually a lot more weird Internet friendships like that than people think, or if it's just another expression of my bizarre high school experience.