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As frictionless as reddit is, yc news takes this further.

The farthest I've seen this taken is in web apps which let you fully use them, but only complete some of the actions you've performed when you finally sign up. This is the model that I will likely use on my next app.

Have fun basking in your honesty, all alone on your fantastic new site.

(if you were against it, that is.)

"""So, if you are a student, don't get that summer job just to fill the summer."""

A huge regret of mine.

"""I can do a follow-up post on lots of the tricks we use to get there."""

Hey, that would be great.

Specific and interesting suggestions. Nice ideas.

I usually sidestep political discussions..

But you have got to be kidding me.

Very true. Gmail misses misspellings all the time. Often I have to fire up emacs to double check.

heh. Was joking.

Still, I think that toying around with other's code in order to make it do something new is an excellent and fun way to learn a new language.

SwellJoe: Nice comment at the top of this page, most agreeable one here.

I personally volunteer to mentor anyone who is desperate enough to take this path.

So now that the big guys are demonstrating that they can quickly recognize opportunities and take advantage of them, of how much value is it to stay "under the radar"?

How can a new startup bring unique value that facebook couldn't just duplicate with a few outsourced coders overnight?

this has caused me to burst out laughing.

That's what we need. A thread on explaining to your girlfriend that you won't be with her this summer, and what protective gear to wear when you tell her.

Your acceptance is based entirely on your idea (even though ideas are worth "nothing," heh) and your past projects. So learn some lisp to score brownie points and outsource a resume-filler project of your design to some cheep foreigners. You'll be ready to go.

As for hacking in general. The only way to learn is to create real programs. Books are a very small part of learning. I wouldn't recommend any.

Oh and don't tell the YC guys that you are hardly a hacker. They wont like that.

Then why can't I stop laughing?

complexity that could only come from the mind of a perl coder.

examples?

I'd pay 100$ for a really good one that describes one of my sites in a non-limiting way, and has ALL of the good qualities that a domain name should. I am just nearly certain that all of these that consist of any keywords that describe my sites are taken.

So, last night I registered for a similar service for 50$. But feeling guilty for spending money that I don't really have without exhausting every other option, I wrote a program to use letter/letter combination frequencies from a number of various data sets to find the best available names consisting of pseudo-words that are left.

It's man against computer, and this time I'm betting on the computer.

Their success speaks for itself in this case.

Hey sure, will do.

OK. A "friend" of mine never brags about accomplishments. wtf is the difference?

Well I never claim to be good at programming, or much of anything. In fact I've found that trying to improve your skills while thinking of yourself as only marginally capable is great inspiration to keep trying harder, even when you've surpassed the best. Is this not a defining characteristic of some of the most talented?

He can claim not to be a programmer or entrepreneur and that's just fine - But his actions speak louder than words.

By the way, webpy is great. It will be the foundation of many web products. Who gives a damn if everyone's going to ignore the value that it brought to reddit.

"""Early 2000. Our first official offsite. Every single person in our 20-person-ish crew went to this place, which had no cellphone or pager reception. The site went down and was dead for an hour."""

Hah

Needs readline support! Really.

This is a great move for myspace. They finally figured out how to charge their users real money for those picture filled profiles -- all while being able to act like nice guys who give away everything for free. I predict that they will actually make a nice return on this investment.

More interestingly though, myspace has now put captchas in place for editing myspace profiles and similar actions that photobucket and many web2 sites have been using extensively. For example, photobucket could automatically put pictures in any section of your profile just by supplying photobucket with your myspace username and password.

Is myspace trying to crush future competition? Yes, yes they are.

There are many services for this. Forums such as digital point or software auction sites like rentacoder work well. Even paying outright for your users is very common. Numerous large social sites with money have used affiliate systems such as commission junction, usually offering from .75$ to 2$ per user. Finally, youtube, myspace, every big social site has done contests that award people who refer the most new users.

I find the ways of getting users without paying for them directly to be more interesting though.

"""These days, enlightened web users want to see a "puritan" approach"""

I believe that this is now absolutely critical. I'd like to see some research to back this.

I think he was focusing on raw implementation time.

You could really spend thousands of hours in design of something with so many connected parts as a dating site.

The "paste" button? Never would have guessed.

Am I the only person left who thinks that blogs are generally a big waste of time? At least if some product I'm designing fails, I will have advanced my skills by creating it. Is having written a failed blog supposed to make me a great writer?

By displacing it with positive pr;)

So we must wonder... what are they trying to cover up? hah