blackswan's comments

This is great. I manually monitor usage quite regularly at my meter (unfortunately not easy to get a smart meter in my country yet...) but it's just a number and you need to work out the current instantaneous usage. This just gives an intuitive sense. I really like interfaces that have this 'always-on-ness' and such a low barrier to insight.

I've actually considered making a glowing light in my office to link to the conversion rate of my SaaS app. For emergency & binary type alerts I get an immediate text alert. But for slightly softer & less urgent metrics a variable color glowing light could be a good way to get across how fast I should look into things ('this week, tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon since it's looking quite orange!').

Amazing what putting a flashy UI around an outwardly boring piece of software can achieve. LIBOTS has been around since 2003 I think... Mint and Yodlee, Hipmunk and Orbitz - I wonder what other unglamorous services could be improved with a better UI? Maybe GDS?

Congrats to Jeremy for the coverage - good luck with any plans you have for TLDR!

They even used the same stock photos.

Elon Musk left SA when he was 17.

I think it would be a good idea to be able to flag articles on HN with a distinction of being either spam or linkbait.

I personally feel this article lacks sufficient specific insight to not be linkbait, especially considering both the "list of n things" style headline (http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html) and suggestion to use the authors product - but understand that other people might see differently. If there was a "flag as linkbait" option I think this would reduce comments discussing whether articles are or are not linkbait.

False positives could be a problem: i.e. maxklein's posts - on initial inspection some of these could perhaps be seen as linkbait but they actually each generated interesting discussion. So perhaps a greater quorum could be required for a submission to be rated as linkbait.

Well done on launching! What sort of software powers this? Could you tell us more about the technical side of how your system works.

I agree with what you write re: bargaining with the leasing agent - a couple of my friends have got really good deals recently by simply saying "I'll take it now if you include 3 parking bays and give us a shorter-term lease" or equivalent. Now is actually a really good time to lease space if you are certain that it's the right thing cash flow wise.

I think this is something that is highly variable - based on personal requirements, cost of living in your country and your acceptable minimum standards of comfort. I think techniques to minimise burn would be more interesting than actual rates.

One tip from my startup: I think a lot of people think getting employees and office space should happen at around the same time. I don't think office space is worth the premium you pay for it until you have more than a couple employees. We have one already and will probably only move after we have employed at least three more. Obviously a caveat here is that the house must be sufficiently pleasant for work and living and that your work is not something that requires client facing offices.

Google says "...we think there is room for more competition..." - but now they own both how most people find tickets and the service that provides the link between the airlines and the internet. My guess is that they will keep with their mantra of giving user's the fastest possible answer by providing links to buy tickets in response to queries like "cheap sf tickets". Problems for companies like Orbitz ahead?

Google is already starting to apply this approach to accommodation, another high value segment. Searches for hotels in most cities now return as their first result a Google map with listings of actual hotels - over time I expect these to become more expansive and traffic to independent hotel aggregators to decline. With the current strategy Google is moving to an approach where they scrape review and hotel data from all the aggregators and then serves this in its own listings - eliminating the need for its users to perform a secondary search with a independent aggregator.

Allowing such easy changing of the homepage is a great idea - it helps contextualise what the app does into something that might be useful to a user really fast. Good luck!

I agree that many gamers are keen for StarCraft II - but I think that the OP was describing StarCraft as a "disaster" in the context of how Activision usually approaches marketing its games. There is a new Call of Duty almost every year - keeping mass interest in the series alive continually. Thus to Activision - for whom the marketing cycle is almost annual and built on continual release so to speak - the original StarCraft could definitely be considered difficult to market in the sense that there haven't been StarCraft releases in the last few years.

Despite this, I agree with both you and the OP - few games have as much "cred" as StarCraft and I think Activision Blizzard have done a poor job marketing it despite huge anticipation. It will probably still succeed though since the game itself is actually quite good.

It will be interesting to see whether use of these stations declines over the next few decades. Surely global adoption of the internet has made it the easiest place to hide clandestine communication?

This is really amazing considering that Atlas took 13 launches before it reached orbit successfully.

Edit: It's also good for Obama's space plan - putting a new rocket into orbit on it's first launch is a pretty powerful way to demonstrate competence.

Someone should do a speech like this on the life of the travelling salesman...

This is definitely my approach as well. I have a BMW and take exceptionally good care of it - and feel that this is the best way to deal with the fact that cars depreciate. Get a really well built car and use it for a long time. Due to the "lemon" problem it is not possible to sell a car second-hand at its proper value if you have maintained it well. But this isn't actually a problem if you don't mind driving a slightly older car. My BMW has 60K on it and I expect to drive it for at least 6 more years.

Only if the value you are getting from using the asset is not more than the amount by which it is depreciating.

Owning an expensive car is actually not as bad as the author suggests. Once you get beyond around $80K cars depreciate at a much slower rate than other cheaper cars. One reason for this is that the more exotic a car is the lower the mileage it is likely to carry becomes. Another strong factor is that when you are paying more than $80K for a car you are paying a lot for the brand of the car and this is likely to be evaluated later at an emotional rather than mechanical level. A 5 year old Aston Martin is still an Aston Martin, whereas a 5 year old Honda is basically a commodity to be evaluated on its mechanical merits.

In terms of this argument the worst car to buy would be something like a BMW 5 Series - its not expensive or rare enough to ensure it would be evaluated on its emotional appeal when you are selling it - but it is still pretty expensive.

You have to be pretty confident about the inevitability of your success to do this to Sequoia!

One of the crew's edgiest pranks in those days was a presentation made to the blue-chip venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, known in the Valley for a certain humorlessness. Sequoia éminence grise and consummate power player Michael Moritz had been on Plaxo's board. Parker saw him as having contributed to his downfall. "There was no way we were ever going to take money from Sequoia, given what they'd done to me," says Parker. The firm wanted to invest in Facebook, so as a joke the boys offered to pitch the partners a Zuckerberg side project called Wirehog, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program.

Zuckerberg and another partner showed up deliberately late for an 8 a.m. meeting, in their pajamas. They didn't even make a pitch for Wirehog. Zuckerberg showed a PowerPoint presentation David Letterman-style: "The Top Ten Reasons You Should Not Invest in Wirehog." It started out almost seriously. "The number 10 reason not to invest in Wirehog: we have no revenue." Number 9: "We will probably get sued by the music industry." By the final few points it was unashamedly rude. Number 3: "We showed up at your office late in our pajamas." Number 2: "Because Sean Parker is involved." And the number one reason Sequoia should not invest in Wirehog: "We're only here because [a Sequoia partner] told us to come." The partners seemed to listen respectfully, recalls Zuckerberg, who says he now regrets the incident. "I assume we really offended them and now I feel really bad about that."

I think all the adverts lower the tone a bit. One of strengths of HN - especially when it started - is that it was an altruistic initiative by PG.

I'm also not so sure about the design - did you consider using Arc? Download it here: http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar and check out news.arc

I remember when all my friends joined Facebook - it happened between high school and university. A couple of them had MySpace during high school but everybody had Facebook by the end of the first year of university. Back then I distinctly remember some friends motivating their getting Facebook when they didn't have Myspace by explaining how Facebook only let your friends and university peers see your profile - as per the excellent parent comment.

I recently explained to these same non-tech folks that applications they have installed can see and now store all their data. They didn't realise this and I don't think they really believed me - perceptions, once formed, take a lot to change! And when only the tech media really discusses API access etc. it's not surprising that most people have not registered the change in how Facebook treats their data.

I quote a non-tech business major friend who was in the above conversation: "It's unintentional bait and switch man - he got everyone signed up by making things better than the other sites and then his investors realised how much money they could make, changed the way data is handled and all the clueless users won't realise it until its too late and Facebook runs the internet!"