dageroth's comments

There is a good podcast by planetmoney explaining it. Mostly it is because there are so many industries and interests touched that regardless of what you negotiate, there will be public outrage and pressure on the negotiators which make it much harder to reach an agreement. If that is the case though, I am not sure whether an agreement must be reached...

Anyhow, interesting podcast: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/26/417851577/episo...

Feedbackarmy.com did this a couple of years ago, with a really minimal form. Very nice to see a tuned version with more structure.

One year ago the nyt ran an article describing how one company makes a killing by angering people into giving bad reviews on such sites:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?pag...

It's rather maddening to think that by actually providing a warning about some shady company they are still helped by such review sites. Consequently I don't write bad reviews, but only recommend either directly or write about very positive interactions.

I'd find the number intersting how many users would pay, if there were no free option available - my take is that it would be much more than the one percent of users that seem to be the rule in the freemium model. Of course a free plan attracts more potential users in the first place, which means the cake is smaller, so it's hard to evaluate what yields more paying users...

The more important factor to me, though, is cost and that usually not only involves storing some data as in the case of historious, but also support requests and scaling costs - when you have a paying user base scaling just won't be that much of pain point.

So, I'll go with a free 30 Day trial period after which the user has to decide, whether he'd like to sign up and pay. That way I can easily handle a couple of thousand users on one server and have more time left to spend on development instead of suporting nonpaying customers.

Free or Freemium only makes sense to me, if the presence of more users provides value to paying users, e.g. okcupid, Skype, and other network-effect businesses.

Rational Choice Theory says you are right, but it can't explain why people vote nonetheless, even though the perceived cost is so high for the small actual gain.

Some people seem to get value out of voting itself, regardless of the outcome, which is bad news for a rational choice theory only looking at the value of the outcomes and not the inherent value of the choice itself.

Well, as the chance that the vote one casts is actually making a difference is so miniscule and the cost of informing yourself about the poltical agenda of parties rather high it is rational and utility maximising not to vote and to stay ignorant.

The "curse" of rational ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance

Another option is to set up an affiliate program and pay for leads / sales. That way people will start on the one hand to create landingpages or put your ads on some pages, but they will also try to earn money by bidding on keywords and sending traffic to your site.

If you are sneaky you can track the sources and adwords with a tracking software like google analytics to find out which keywords are working well and then start to bid yourself on those. (But that would drive away those affiliates doing the research for good keywords... but depending on the attractiveness of your affiliateprogram there might be others...)

That's too bad, I always recommended the service for easy collaboration and sharing, was one of my favourites.

But well, Facebook will hopefully make good use of the technology and the many channels drop.io had already incorporated to extend it's group collaboration options.

Well, if you are frustrated with College anyway, you might send an application to Peter Thiel's dropout funding:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/peter-thiel-drop-out-of-sch...

Starting a startup gives you immediately a lot of freedom, a focus on what you like and exciting new challenges and it will also get alot of new people in your life - even if introverted. Afresh start and clean cut is somethign I found incredibly invigorating. And aas young as you are, the risks are pretty negligible.

Great offer. Perhaps a small idea for those looking to put an original element in their CV that I used successfully:

Put your Skills in as a Tagcloud. Strong skills get a bigger fontsize than minor skills. Additionally I used grey tones to indicate which skills have been used more recently and which are older (more grey than black, paling so to speak.)

It is somewhat daring, because not necessarily everyone gets tagclouds yet - but I was invited quite a few times for the tag cloud to interviews.

Hmm, I have the opposit feeling, that is compared to me many seem to be more intelligent. I stumble into many different fields and know some basics, but whereever I go people can tell me stuff I have never heard of and seem to comprehend stuff quickly when I explain it, which took me weeks to figure out...

So I usually go with the opposit approach and believe most people can explain something to me rather than believing I could figure everything out what they know by myself ...

that's quite brilliant, it should work probably much more reliable than our guessing.

We didnot play with our own money, but with the coupons on the back of the cinema tickets. But even so, we should have made slightly less than 300 a month, but we did a slightly more on average.

We did not really have an optimal betting strategy, at least nothing that can be proven scientifically, there is no such thing. But after some time we started to bet on the wheel, e.g. "Voisins du zero" or "Jeu zero" and we knew all the croupiers and some of them had an unbelievable regular way of running the ball and spinning the wheel and the ball would thus drop in a slightly more predictable area of the wheel - at least when it hit one of the bumpers and would then drop into the wheel. So we waited with our bet until our favourite croupier would throw the ball from a place, where we felt it should land close to the zero and call a zero game.

Naturally that did not always work and we'd have losing streaks of even two weeks where we went home without any money at all, but once a month or so we'd go out with over a hundredfifty euros. On average we did slightly better than expected (400 were admittedly the better months, sometimes it was a little less than three hundred), but we remained ahead even after a long time, so my guess is we were either lucky or the idea of predicting according to the croupiers regularity worked. We had the feeling it worked on two of the ten croupiers the others threw less regular.

Anyway it was definitely more fun than just whitewashing the chips. (One was not allowed to immediately exchange the "lucky" chips one would get for the coupons for money.)

I bootstrapped my first startup by playing roulette in a casino every night. A Cinema close by was giving out 10 Euro coupons for the casino to play with, so we went first to the cinema every night, asked the people coming out for their tickets and then hit the casino to play with the 10 Euros. Each of us were netting about 400 Euros per month, which was enough to cover the ramen ;-) And that for a nice refreshing half an hour tour in the evening.

The stupid EU put an end to it by changing the gambling laws and prohibiting casinos to give out coupons for chips - someone might get addicted - instead the new coupons allowed free entry and a drink, but until then it worked like a charm.

The casino people were a little freaked out at first, shooting us suspicious looks but after three weeks they got used to us...;-)

I think two useful pieces information could be added to the ranking algorithm: the ratio of clicks/view and the ratio of upvotes/clicks - basically the conversion rates of an article, which should be more telling than just the total number of upvotes. If a story is read by 10 people and nine upvoted it, it's a much better story (although with a bad title perhaps) than a story which was read by a thousand people and upvoted 10 times. If a submission gets less upvotes and clicks because it comes in at a time with not too much traffic or comes with a bad title these factors could offset the penalty it receives.

It's not necessarily trivial to count the views of an item, since the ranking quickly changes, but at least the number of clicks should be trivial. One should also weigh the clicks and upvotes according to rank as the rank itself influences the likelihood of a click or upvote.

Also I'd take into account the number of people who submitted a story - a submission is a much stronger vote of quality then a simple upvote.

it seems to draw more eyeballs than an unveiled window, but still, cool idea ;-)

I am a fan of Wordpress in combination with buddypress. There are tons of plugins to tailor the community to what you like, from Chatmodules, groups, extended profiles, etc. And it is very easy to set up a few pages about the community, rules, etc. All you need is some virtual server to install wordpress. Mine is about 8,95 € per month...

Analysis is a hot field, so although most startups don't need a full-fledged Business Analyst your knowledge should enable you to spot an opportunity in this sector and to use your knowledge to create something to make analysis for companies easier - or for other analysts. If you are such a fine one and your fellow analysts are not, what can you do, to make them better at their job?

You still need a programmer if you want to create some software, but still you'd have quite a place in a startup as the entrepreneur developing the idea and the business.

Well, it does not say anything about the methods they are using... cross machine tracking definitely seems somewhat strange and unexplainable to me...

"Sibyl" is by the way from greek mythology and referred to a woman who could predict the future, a prophetress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibyl Wikipedia mentions there were as many as 10 Sibyls, although it does not mention that "the" sibyl was also famous for having predicted it's own death... ;-)