If you're dumb enough to pay money for this, you're dumb enough that your site will never make any money. The only ones who will get rich from this are the owners of the site - they are selling you a dream, and you are paying for it.
Spend the money on some proper SEO services instead, it will do you more good.
And let me give it to you square - your site will NEVER get funding. It's not hot, it has little potential of becoming huge. It's the type of site that can make solid money, but only by targeting the users directly. When you are making good money, the angels will come to you.
If you are trying to raise funding for your site, you are in the business of dreams, not reality.
Obscurity will NOT HELP YOU avoiding a Google index. They have many sources of data, including receiving toolbar data from users, and they very pointedly do not mention all sources they use to generate the crawl lists.
If you want to not get indexed, use the nonindex meta tag, or sign up for their webmaster console and remove that particular URL from the index. (Somewhat counterintuitively, robots.txt-ing out a site doesn't prevent it from being indexed, only from being crawled. They will still include it in their search results if it has external indicia of trust.)
We have a plan to make money this year. But then again, so did the last start-up I worked at, and it took us a while longer than a year to post revenues of any kind.
For TrailBehind, we think we can start bringing in revenues this summer (or a large enough audience for institutional funding), but our fallback is to seek additional angel funding. And Plan C is to accept some consulting gigs. We're also going to apply to YC, but that's more for the intangibles than the money.
This month, I brought on our first employee (besides the two founders, who are hackers), to execute our sales and marketing plan. We have multiple paths to revenue that he is charged with exploring, along with seeking out additional funding.
Because our website is devoted to the outdoors, the market is cyclical, and I have determined what that cycle is using Google Analytics. So, we have been developing for a few months, and we'll have a major go-to-market push in the late spring as the hiking season revs up. We're also using the next few months to begin laying seeds with potential partners and additional investors.
It's a tough business selling the domain name ideas.
I make a buck or two on each sold domain at http://HotNameList.com. But it's too easy for users to skip your link, or have an ad blocker etc. Then you get nothing for the sale.
Web apps were a temporary fad. They are good for some type of applications that are similar to document based (e.g facebook, flickr, HN news), but for others, web apps are terrible (twitter, photo editing, making phone calls).
There is space for both types, and web apps are not going to replace desktop apps.
I think "fad" is a little strong. Plenty of folks are using gmail and Google docs, for example.
I do think there are limitatations to running in a browser; World of Warcraft isn't likely to do so anytime soon. But I don't see any reason to believe that more apps need a desktop environment than don't. Rather, I see web browsers gradually getting more and more capable (especially within organizations that can make the choice to skip IE compatibility).
Everything except the first sentence is right. Normal people have always used computers mostly for document-oriented work. Just the consumption of text on the web is probably dwarfing actual real productivity in GUI applications.
Sure, web-based application sacrifice A LOT. But in return you get dead-simple, cross-platform, accessible (sometimes), no-install apps. What would the GUI developers of 20 years ago trade for those benefits?
They are good for some type of applications that are similar to document based (e.g facebook, flickr, HN news), but for others, web apps are terrible (twitter, photo editing, making phone calls).
I'd like to know why you think this is true.
That observation may be true today, but it is getting less and less true every day. The evolution of technology infrastructure over the past decade has been in the direction of making web applications more and more powerful. (Javascript, Flash) The overarching trend points to web apps taking over the domain of desktop apps inch by inch.
Name any popular desktop app and I can more likely than not point to some company or other porting it to the browser.
I definitively believe that there is a future for webb apps.
Looking at icloud.com, a "web os", you'll find that there is a potential for many apps to migrate to the web.
We have seen that browsers are getting better at rendering JS, i.e. Google Chrome and Firefox 3.1, meanwhile functionality such as Canvas introduces possibilities of creating more elaborate apps that might require photo editing etc.
Well said, yet completely wrong. People are thinking this stuff, so why should they not say it? The internet is different from real life - everyone with an opinion lands here, and can give their honest opinion. Let them give it, for those of us who grew up in the old polite days, this may be strange, but it's the new world! We are entering a time of REAL freedom of speech, and now that you are confronted with it, do not run away.
Look at YouTube comments, that's how the world really is like. You want to regulate this away? You think you actually can? Welcome to the new world, it's not worse, it's just different. Insulting people is the rock 'n' roll of 2009, if you can't deal with it, well, there's a cable plugged into your wall that you can simply pull out.
Times are changing, folks. Profanity, insults have become way cheaper, because anonymity also has. Arrington may complain, and all the people in this little community of ours make shake their heads and nod sorrowly and agree that something has to be done, but do you realise exactly how small your community is? You are reaching nobody, and nobody can hear your voice.
What we have is a herd of elephants thundering down a slope, heading towards a world of extremely democratic and free speech, and a bunch of rabbits form a council on the side and decide that they choose that the elephants should all start walking the other way.
Pointless, I say! Change sometimes goes your way, but sometimes change goes the way you don't like. This time it is that way, and very frankly, all these beard stroking and discussion about this will have little effect.
So, we can't just all grow up, because the internet is young. It will stay young, so if you want a place where everyone is grown up and civil, build a gate and hide behind the walls.
And don't forget to tap hard on the walls when the rock 'n' roll music of the neighbours gets too loud.
Look at YouTube comments, that's how the world really is like.
I think the better way of putting it is "Look at the Internet; that's how the world really is like." YouTube is not the world. Many people never comment on YouTube. (For the record, look at the comments on classical music. They're cultured and sophisticated an learned. Piano virtuosos comment on amateur videos giving tips. Isn't that incredible? My favorite pianist comments on videos on YouTube. That's marvelous.)
Insulting people is the rock 'n' roll of 2009, if you can't deal with it, well, there's a cable plugged into your wall that you can simply pull out.
Kind of a bizarre way of putting it. Isn't the idea that if you can't deal with insults, you just make a community with fewer insults? Freedom and all? Freedom from insults is also a potential solution.
You are reaching nobody, and nobody can hear your voice.
Right now, my professor is having a discussion about the suicide on Justin.TV, a YCombinator company. So here's one classroom that's been affected by something that I read on Hacker News.
What we have is a herd of elephants thundering down a slope, heading towards a world of extremely democratic and free speech, and a bunch of rabbits form a council on the side and decide that they choose that the elephants should all start walking the other way.
Wow. Not at all. If you think trolls are as powerful as elephants you've got to take another look at the world around you. If 4chan is considered powerful, then Google has to be looked at too. I'll take a million trolls to a company that's making a lot of people billionaires and is doing some social good with their work, too. I think the billionaires have a bit of elephant in them too.
This time it is that way, and very frankly, all these beard stroking and discussion about this will have little effect.
It's that way until somebody reading this decides to fix the problem. The cool thing about the Internet is that one person can change it all. And Hacker News is an incubator: it's a place for smart people to talk about things.
It will stay young, so if you want a place where everyone is grown up and civil, build a gate and hide behind the walls.
It's already old. The most-visited sites online are sites like CNN and Fox: the ancient bogies of the media. They won't last forever, but the sites that replace them will not be the Gawkers. The replacements will be just as civil and just as everyman-friendly.
And don't forget to tap hard on the walls when the rock 'n' roll music of the neighbours gets too loud.
Online it's more, "If the music gets too loud you can always create an alternate universe where you dictate all the rules."
You don't get what I mean. YouTube is representative of the general internet, and by extension, the general attitude of people. The cool thing about the internet is that one person cannot change it all. Everyones voice is equal. Nobody can change it.
CNN and Fox are not civil and friendly. They are heavily filtered - they don't allow their readers to say anything.
And please stop patting your back that this community is so smart. It's just a bunch of HTML makers who want to become rich by joining Paul Grahams incubator. Slashdot has people with real indepth knowledge about topics commenting, here it's just a bunch of opinions from people without deep knowledge.
The entire premise behind this community means that it's not smart - it's a bunch of college kids with ideas gathering here. There's a lot of talk, a lot of ideals and little real knowledge and experience.
So stop patting yourself on the back - go to usenet, you'll see real smarts. The comments here are really not that smart.
The problem is that when your measuring yard is reddit, even this place seems smart by comparison. What other sites do you visit that you use to measure this place by? Do you have an appropriate yardstick?
You don't get what I mean. YouTube is representative of the general internet, and by extension, the general attitude of people.
You don't get what I mean. There is no general Internet. There is only the Internet. Youtube is no more indicative of the entire Internet than MetaFilter is. The places I frequent look much more like Metafilter, in fact.
CNN and Fox are not civil and friendly. They are heavily filtered - they don't allow their readers to say anything.
That's what I mean by civil. They're popular because they don't let external sources muck themselves up. And it's working for them.
And please stop patting your back that this community is so smart. It's just a bunch of HTML makers who want to become rich by joining Paul Grahams incubator. Slashdot has people with real indepth knowledge about topics commenting, here it's just a bunch of opinions from people without deep knowledge.
The one Slashdot article that stuck in my mind was the article where CmdrTaco called the iPod lame upon its announcement. I don't frequent the site because the articles that don't interest me, but the few times I've read the site it seems like the people are no smarter than people anywhere. The Slashdot people merely have more time to kill.
"Smart" isn't the right word, though the people here certainly are smart. "Mature." That's the word I want. A bunch of people with ideas who don't steamroller over each other.
The entire premise behind this community means that it's not smart - it's a bunch of college kids with ideas gathering here. There's a lot of talk, a lot of ideals and little real knowledge and experience.
Ideals are what matter. They always are. The people that move the world forward are very rarely the people who've spent 20 years doing generic work, it's the people who think they can do everything, then do. Hacker News has got some old and experienced people, and it helps temper the community out.
So stop patting yourself on the back - go to usenet, you'll see real smarts. The comments here are really not that smart.
Usenet? I've been there a few times. 99% of it is spam. What's more, it's ugly spam. I've never seen a Usenet interface I like. And I'm one of those people who thinks that a part of intelligence means flocking to something that feels good to use. Pretty sites attract people who care about pretty, and I care about pretty.
The problem is that when your measuring yard is reddit, even this place seems smart by comparison. What other sites do you visit that you use to measure this place by? Do you have an appropriate yardstick?
I measure everything against everything. I don't compare HN to Reddit: I don't care much for Reddit. I compare it to Tumblr, SomethingAwful, Metafilter, Slashdot. I compare it to the blogs I read. There's not much more I can compare it to.
This is the most stupid essay I have read in my life. Most scientific advances have not been made in democratic governments - The old Islamic Discoveries, the old Chinese Discoveries, the old European Discoveries were all made under King-like dynasties. A huge number of inventions were made under Fascist Germany.
Democracy is in fact really bad for science, because in a democratic society, you need to convince many people you are right. In a fascist or monarchist society, you just need to convince the king.
And then stupidly equating this with china - china is where it is right now because of a very strong central government with tight control. Without this government, the chinese people would have collapsed into civil war and split up - it would not have been at the level it is at now at all.
Old men with limited experience should not go meddling with systems they do not understand and that seem to be working, based on their ideology. The alternative could mean the death of millions - look what happened when they thought to bring 'democracy' to Iraq.
That is not a good model either. Sure, you get a lot of problems solved, but they are all very immediate and pragmatic. Plus, America would have been defeated by China, USSR, Nazi Germany, etc. if this were true.
The best way is to decouple science from politics as much as possible.
Most scientific advances have been made in the last century, nay the last fifty years. The pace is exponentially accelerating. That means, unfortunately for your case, that most advances have been made under modern goverments, i.e., democracies (or rather democratic republics)
Then you kind of went on a tear about old people mucking in things which they don't understand, which I have no idea what you are talking about -- funding of research? Selection of who gets grant money? Retirement home members playing WoW?
Sorry for the downmod, but posts that do not parse and are obviously false should go further down the list. I'd give you one or the other, but not both.
If you cannot learn C++, you are either plain old stupid or you don't belong in programming. C++ is very easy, the syntax is picked up in a week, and you can work without any libraries, you mostly just need to learn the API of the host system. If you can program in Ruby, you are capable enough to program in C++, and the only thing stopping you is just this 'myth' that C++ is hard.
You can learn a part of C++ in a week or two weeks, but really internalizing all the subtle gotchas takes longer. Static initialization order fiasco? Exception-safety without needing catch (...) { ... throw; } clauses? Why X-is-a-Y implies pointer-to-X-is-a-pointer-t-Y but not pointer-to-pointer-to-X-is-a-pointer-to-pointer-to-Y? Why do I get a long pause when I exit this scope where I destroy just one object? How do I debug a segfault? How do I debug multithreaded deadlock? When should I use a virtual base class? Etc.
You can't learn all that stuff in a week or two. And maybe you shouldn't learn it at all; for many applications there are things that will work better than C++ without so much complexity, whether that's C or Java or Python.
In college, where I majored in English, I thought I'd have an adventure and take a class in programming. They taught us C++. I never tried programming again.
the appropriate language for any given situation is largely dependent on the environment you're writing for. writeroom is a macosx program, so it's overwhelmingly likely that it was written in objective-c. you can google up beginner's guides all day long.
What's the hard part of the syntax compared to a language like ruby? Interfaces? Classes? Inheritance? Templates? Exceptions? Ruby has equivalent interface elements, and there is not much of a difference in difficulty level between learning the one or the other.
I learnt C++ in 2 weeks 7 years ago, and it was easy. The difficulty comes with learning to use the libraries and host APIs, but that is exactly the same for every other language I've learnt since then.
- ugly libraries (STL, ATL, MFC, COM) yeah, i said STL is ugly.
- templates (Ruby doesn't need templates since everything is dynamic)
- No language level string data type (our product has at least six representations of strings here and there that need to be converted at the bit level).
I've seen several 'hard' engineers (physicists with Matlab experience) learn C++ in a couple of weeks. It's doable but... as you might expect, the code they pump out is terrible. There's a huge difference between doing basic C++ and being productive and efficient in it.
Most C++ haters (e.g. me) can program in C++ and probably even do program in it sometimes, but just don't like to. I can certainly do anything in C++ I could do in any other language, just with a hell of a lot more cursing and kicking things.
C++ has many flaws. Let's have a C++ bashing party, hooray. However, a discussion of the merits of C++ boils down to C++ vs C as far as getting things done in the real world and in the domains where C++ and C are applicable. C is absolutely horrible. I cannot imagine why anyone would start a new program or module to a higher level language in C rather than C++. It's like choosing BASIC over a modern scripting language.
I largely agree with you. If I "hate" C++ so much, why do I program in it? The answer is that sometimes I need my code to be very fast, and C++ has language features making abstraction easier than C or Fortran. I think the main reason people choose C instead of C++ is that it is common to overuse C++'s language features, and if you target C, this is impossible. Otherwise, just take "new" and "delete" and write the rest of your program in C...
This does not mean that C++ is difficult. It just means that you may be used to easier languages, and your brain is not flexible enough to deal with C++.
Entrenchment. The main product I work on is 3.5 million lines of C++, built with MCF and ATL. We can frankestein other technologies into there, but its expensive and clunky. The cost of rewriting the whole thing is prohibitive, so C++ it is.
Spend the money on some proper SEO services instead, it will do you more good.
And let me give it to you square - your site will NEVER get funding. It's not hot, it has little potential of becoming huge. It's the type of site that can make solid money, but only by targeting the users directly. When you are making good money, the angels will come to you.
If you are trying to raise funding for your site, you are in the business of dreams, not reality.