StackOverflow - <AUTHOR> http://codebetter.com/gregyoung/2012/03/02/stackoverflow/ <comment><USER2> Co-founder of Stack Overflow, here.

A lot of the people who were involved in some way in Experts-Exchange don't understand Stack Overflow.

The basic value flow of EE is that "experts" provide valuable "answers" for novices with questions. In that equation there's one person asking a question and one person writing an answer.

Stack Overflow recognizes that for every person who asks a question, 100 - 10,000 people will type that same question into Google and find an answer that has already been written. In our equation, we are a community of people writing answers that will be read by hundreds or thousands of people. Ours is a project more like wikipedia -- collaboratively creating a resource for the Internet at large.

Because that resource is provided by the community, it belongs to the community. That's why our data is freely available and licensed under creative commons. We did this specifically because of the negative experience we had with EE taking a community-generated resource and deciding to slap a paywall around it.

The attitude of many EE contributors, like Greg Young who calculates that he "worked" for half a year for free, is not shared by the 60,000 people who write answers on SO every month. When you talk to them you realize that on Stack Overflow, answering questions is about _learning_. It's about creating a permanent artifact to make the Internet better. It's about helping someone solve a problem in five minutes that would have taken them hours to solve on their own. It's not about working for free.

As soon as EE introduced the concept of money they forced everybody to think of their work on EE as just that -- work.

<comment><USER3> Joel, I think you have the right product and are sincere about this, but I believe Greg Young, the author of the article, brought up a few good points. I read the article and one analogy quickly came to my mind. EE was like AltaVista/Lycos/Infoseek, and Stack Overflow is like the younger version of Google.

\+ The latter is clearly superior in technology (or content) to the other.

\+ The latter makes user happy by giving them real value, whereas the former focused on milking the users for revenue.

\+ The latter made promises to the users (Google: "don't be evil", SO: "contents are the community's property") and the users liked it.

\+ Last but not least, "the competition is only a click away" (Google). "You can start a SO competitor in a heartbeat" (SO).

So far so good. But guess what happened to Google? They got good. They got big. They were no longer satisifed with being the king of search. They started Plus. They started saying "If you don't want people to know what you do, you shouldn't do that anyway". They now want your data to be shared among their properties and you cannot opt out. They got jealous of Apple. They got freaked out by Facebook.

I don't doubt Google started with a conscience, and a genuine focus to build a better search engine. They succeeded. Wildly. But except for the most hard- core Google believers, I doubt that many people still trust their "Don't be evil" mantra in its absolute. Frankly, do people even say that with a straight face outside of comparison with Microsoft?

I love SO and believe in the integrity of Joel and Jeff and others. You guys really rock. But time will change. Tide will change. A tidepool that is fun for little kids could become a fatal trap the very next day (sadly, this happens often). So please keep the warning in mind.

<comment><USER4> > Frankly, do people even say that with a straight face outside of comparison > with Microsoft?

This week we saw a story in which YouTube (a Google subsidiary) took away a guy's ad revenue because they claimed that someone else had the copyright on random birdsong. [http://boingboing.net/2012/02/27/rumblefish-claims-to-own- co...](http://boingboing.net/2012/02/27/rumblefish-claims-to-own-copyr.html)

Do people still say "google aren't evil" with a straight face _inside_ of comparison with Microsoft these days? I'm curious what Microsoft has done that compares in, say, the last year.

It's not 1999 any more - the biggest company in the world is is Apple ( [http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/09/apple-pips- ex...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/09/apple-pips-exxon-as- worlds-biggest-company) ) , Oracle owns Java and bundles crapware browser toolbars with the download, and Facebook and Google, not Microsoft, are totally dominant in their markets despite Microsoft's efforts. And if you're looking for a company with really crappy practices, there's always Paypal/ebay <http://www.regretsy.com/2012/01/03/from-the-mailbag-27/>

<comment><USER5> That's not evil. Youtube is at the mercy of "big content " and they have to comply with copyright claims. They're not in the business of judging whether a something can be copyrighted - that's a job for the courts.

<comment><USER4> Well, I disagree. it is evil.

The argument they "have to comply" due to third parties and presumption-of- infringement laws may be true. If it is, that is beside the point; that doesn't make it a good action.

<comment><USER6> If you consider content removal _evil_ , I think you need to get your moral compass re-calibrated. There are numerous adjectives that could describe that specific situation, like _stupid_ or even _lazy_ , but _evil_ is a stretch.

When the Feds can come kick your doors down and haul your servers out for non- compliance, what choice do you have? Not to say Google is _good_ either, but the content mess isn't really their making. In fact, their technology has helped more than hindered the spread of content.

<comment><USER4> > If you consider content removal evil, I think you need to get your moral > compass re-calibrated.

That's not what I consider in general, and I don't know how you came up with that reading. I agree that it's not the worst action ever in the history of evil (and most was just stupid), but you're not even arguing the right point: _the content was not removed_ , it was a case of automated copyright abuse for profit:

> "Youtube informed me that I was using Rumblefish's copyrighted content, and > so ads would be placed on my video, with the proceeds going to said company" > [http://c4sif.org/2012/02/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as- > copy...](http://c4sif.org/2012/02/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as- > copyrighted-music/)

<comment><USER7> First, why is Youtube evil? Wasn't the company that abused?

Second, how is Youtube evil for doing whatever they want with the ads in their own website? Sure, they claimed it was due to copyright reasons, but that doesn't make the action in itself "evil".

Google has done a lot of crap, from the obvious privacy problems to outright fraud in Kenya. Picking on that seems ridiculous.

<comment><USER4> > First, why is Youtube evil?

Youtube decided to enter into this agreement with Rumblefish. If Youtube outsouces this abuse, does that put Youtube in the clear? See also: US Army outsourcing to Blackwater, etc. It's too easy to avoid responsibility this way.

<comment><USER7> OK, but there wasn't actually any abuse. Youtube owns the site. Putting ads on some page and giving part of the proceeds to any company they want is completely within their rights.

Is Reddit evil because they don't share the ad income from a particular thread with the submitter? Doesn't make much sense to me.

<comment><USER4> If reddit offered you ad income (and there are people who make a living off making youtube videos), then took it away arbitrarily and gave the income instead to a big company that claimed copyright over random bits of birdsong, without any appeal process, then that would be at best broken and at worst abusive, yes. Also, not much sense either.

<comment><USER7> Youtube only offers you ad income if you register (and are accepted) with their Partner Program, not to any random user. The uploader said _and so ads would be placed on my video_ , which means there weren't any ads before, which means he wasn't offered any ad income. They took nothing away from her/him.

The only thing YT did was:

1\. Add ads to a video hosted on their website

2\. Take part of their ad income and give it to some company

I fail to see what exactly is evil about this.

<comment><USER4> Falsely asserting copyright over bits of nature is OK for you then?

<comment><USER7> That was Rumblefish, not Youtube. Youtube was a _victim_ of that, since they could've made more money by simply putting the ads and not sharing them with Rumblefish.

<comment><USER4> And we're back here: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3659864>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although one key difference is that EE kept the IP for all the user generated content, but all SO content is licensed under Creative Commons.

<http://stackoverflow.com/faq#editing>

<comment><USER9> This is the key difference. Stack Overflow has said all along that it would always be free and the CC license helps ensure this.

If Stack Overflow decides to put up a paywall anyone could simply put up the all existing content, perhaps using one of the existing open source SO clones [1]. Also, a lot of the current Google traffic would instead go to one of the sites which currently legitimately repost all of SO's content [2].

[1] [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack- overflow-...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow- clones) [2] [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/24611/is-it-legal- to...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/24611/is-it-legal-to-copy- stack-overflow-questions-and-answers)

<comment><USER10> Of course, it would have to link back to StackOverflow with a non-nofollowed link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> EE always had a dubious way of trying to game Google search results: have a huge advert at the top making the content you're after look blocked, followed by tonnes of filler content, then if you scrolled a looooong way to the bottom there's the content in tiny text. So Google sees the content but most humans don't. That always annoyed me sufficiently to block all EE results from search and just use SO. SO have always stated they're trying to be helpful to searchers and make the internet better. IMO it's no wonder they thoroughly beat EE and I'd think twice about trying to bring anything like EE back...

<comment><USER12> EE only had the at content at the end of the human reachable page because google was going to stop listing pages that had content only for the robot. Or at least that is what I remember happening.

<comment><USER13> And at least at some point, it was only there if you had a google referer header. Navigating directly to the page in question wouldn't show you the answers at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author's main point is that Expert's Exchange (EE) was very similar to StackOverflow (SO) _until they needed to push up the S-curve_ from a profitability perspective.

It's a valid concern since SO has relied on organic growth to fuel the necessary returns in order to sustain its current business model and then, more recently, attract VC investment.

What the author doesn't mention is what makes SO slightly different. One is the licensing of the content, which the founders never fail to point out (and has already been rehashed here by several SO defenders). This is hand-waving, since they couldn't have achieved early success to drive organic growth without this license in place (this isn't the first time EE has been compared to SO).

The other more interesting difference is the StackExchange (SE) platform and accompanying business model, which basically seeks to expand into an unending array of fields and topics. SO & SE are likely to continue being pleasant to use, as long as the StackExchange strategy is working and growth can come from the platform extension. Should that strategy fail, SO will need a growth strategy that provides the returns VCs expect and the company may be forced into some inconvenient (to users) "monetization" decisions.

Essentially, when you're a for-profit company, it's easy to "do no evil" when you're rapidly growing organically. EE is only one such example, it's easy to come up with dozens of others: About.com, Mahalo, Digg, SourceForge, Google, Ben & Jerry's, etc. Unless it's a non-profit or maybe one of those new B-Corps, history provides much more support for skeptics. After all, company leaders aren't just acting out of greed, they are _legally obligated_ to do what is best for shareholders.

That said, let's hope Mr. Spolsky hasn't forgotten about his rant on platform providers who don't realize they are platform providers (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html>). He should be able to make the case that treating users (which are like developers in a traditional software platform) fairly will drive more long-term shareholder value than tactics employed by those that came before SO.

Only time will tell.

<comment><USER15> There is a reason why Google IPOed using dual class stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The idea of the business model is to pay people in imaginary currency and > sell what they do for real currency.

That "imaginary" currency has paid off for me. I got my most recent job through Stack Overflow.

<comment><USER17> We're happy to hear you got your job with a little help from us! If anyone else would like an invite to our careers site, you can use this link for an invite. <http://bit.ly/A4CB1B>

Additionally we are actually hiring people to join the careers team right now, <http://bit.ly/xXXewd> <\- developers, and <http://bit.ly/xthTi9> <\- product manager.

I am curious how your Stack Overflow activity was used in the hiring process. Would you mind sharing?

<comment><USER16> > I am curious how your Stack Overflow activity was used in the hiring > process. Would you mind sharing?

I searched on the Careers 2.0 site and applied to a few firms that looked interesting. For one particular firm, my SO profile acted as my "code sample". I got the offer within a few weeks and have been happy ever since.

I'll note that most of the firms that advertised on your Careers site were very serious about software quality. The signal-to-noise of excellent companies was far beyond what I've traditionally gotten through a head hunter. I suspect that's because any hiring manager who actually knows what SO is has probably had tons of hands-on experience with coding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The whole point here is to make as much money as possible. If the goal were > to build up community you wouldn't need to set them up as a centralized > broker of the information, it would be distributed

I don't think that he totally gets StackOverflow.

SO has demonstrated to my satisfaction that:

1) they care about other things besides money. Sure money pays the bills, but if you do it right, being rich and famous is just a by-product to the main accomplishment.

2) SO works far better at _getting stuff done_ in the technical QA space than any "distributed" model so far tried.

</comment><comment><USER18> This article is terrible. First, it assumes no learning since the EE days. Second, comparisons to EE are weak (I do't remember EE ever being good). Third, he picked a lousy target (StackOverflow) given that FogCreek is well- known for having extreme patience, especially as it relates to commercialization. Finally, he leaves out the primary business: the StackExchange software being offered to customers to create other verticals.

</comment><comment><USER19> 20k+ rep SO user here. Early on, reputation was an incentive to answer a lot of questions because with it came graduated permissions. At 20k, there is no further incentive besides vanity. So reputation isn't an incentive for me.

Has that stopped me from answering questions? Absolutely not. Joel is bang-on that my take away from SO is not reputation, it's knowledge. It seems like some people can't grasp that you learn just as much answering questions as you do asking them.

StackOverflow could shut me out tomorrow (I hope it doesn't!) and I wouldn't feel like I've wasted time on the site. I'd just find another site like it and start over.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's a rather less paranoid article that's (partly) about SO.

[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/02/29/Undocument...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/02/29/Undocumentedness)

Seriously, _given_ that the data is freely available and for as long as it remains so, "OMG you're making money from my knowledge how dare you you cad" is about as valid a complaint as it would be if levelled at any of the ISPs in days of yore that ran Usenet servers. And it's definitely saved me more time (a factor of 100 - 10,000? I have no idea) than I've ever given back to it

<comment><USER21> I think you nailed it. I try to answer questions on SO when I have spare time. But that's mostly because of the massive value I've gained from the site. Most of the time it's not even asking questions, but looking at great answers to questions that have already been asked.

If I continue to get the same value from SO, I'm happy to keep answering questions where I can and they're free to profit off that in any way they choose as long as everything remains public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> SO has recently been flooded by people who create an account and post questions in the "fix my problem" style, often also pasting a bunch of their defunct code. There are also questions that would be more appropriate for rent-a-coder.

All in all, I'm getting annoyed and considering to leave the community.

<comment><USER2> "Fix my code" questions are considered "too localized" and should be closed as such.

<comment><USER22> I dare suggesting that this is a larger problem and trying to close individual questions is not a scalable approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was to point out that I never at any point suggested that SO would make the same mistake as EE and put up a pay gate. This was a very stupid idea. There are many less intrusive ways of capitalizing a community (I can think about a dozen off the top of my head). I would hope Joel et al are smarter than to make the same mistakes and kill the goose.

@Joel I think you need to learn more about EE's background (as do many here). It was more community oriented than SO is at this point. Hell the community even wrote large portions of the software thats still being used. They screwed up in their attempts at capitalization and alienated their community. The point of looking back at EE experiences has to do with their alienation of the community. I was perfectly happy to do it at the time and it was learning experiences. It was not also as you said "a customer getting an answer" any more than SO is, that model came later.

If you believe that you are more like wikipedia then by all means feel free to become a non-profit. Otherwise the stated goal of your company will be to grow your community so that you can capitalize off of their efforts. We can spin this in many ways but the stated goal of the company is to do this.

To the other people in this thread who think that SO is righteous. How do you feel about Facebook? Google? There are loads of examples of these styles of business models out there. The question with these business models is whether they can squeeze the necessary revenue out of a community without alienating it. Some have been good with it, some have not been so good at it.

Also for those who called me a hypocrite due to SO donating some money to charity the difference is CB donates _ALL_ profits to charity. They operate essentially as a non-profit.

<comment><USER23> Also how'd this turn out for people? [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/migration-of- se-1-0-si...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/migration-of- se-1-0-sites/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I very much agree with Joel in that SO is about, at least to me, acting as some kind of centralized destination where I know that somebody has had the same problem I'm currently experiencing, has asked it before, and has been given an answer or a few by the community. If no such question has been asked, I'll ask it because chances are somebody else will want to ask it down the line. SO is unlikely EE in that anyone in the community answers a question, and popular ones generally become community wiki answers, and I know the former to be true because after much learning, I (as a self-perceived noob) started answering quite a few questions and have built up a reputation. Do I think I wasted time in doing so? Of course not, I've helped others and I've helped keep the Rails community noob friendly. That and I can show off my earned reputation to any future potential employers.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is roughly analogous to claiming that the iPad won't work because resistive touch tablets didn't take off.

</comment><comment><USER26> Disclosure upfront: I'm an SO fanboy. I used EE back at its glory days, and I can say there's a world of difference between EE and SO. EE felt as it was a site built to make money, and the particular vehicle they used is to host questions and answers. SO feels as a site built to create questions&answers community, and they are making money out of it. There's a subtle difference about it, but it felt throughout the site - how it was designed, how workflows were organized, etc. Of course, I might be wrong and SO founders may be just evil geniuses tricking myself and everybody else, but the feeling is distinctly different from EE. Of course, SO also has much superior engine, user interface and benefit of years of experience that EE didn't have back then.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe this was before my time, but was experts-exchange ever anything more than SEO spam with no content?

<comment><USER28> Sure. Early on, it was a scraper that pulled down usenet content and rebranded it as its own with ads over the top.

I first found them via a Google search on my own name, to discover that in addition to comp.sci.*, I'd also been answering questions there.

<comment><USER29> Yep, same here. Sort of amusing to see some historical revisionism going on here from the E-E people.

I don't doubt that there were some genuine contributors, but claiming other's hard work as their own tainted E-E's brand for me.

P.S. For the young 'uns, Google Groups isn't. It is usenet re-branded. Google is now doing the same thing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I work for Google's Developer Relations department. My team just moved their technical Q&A to Stack Overflow, as have other DevRel teams. We have several sponsored tags on SO and make the effort to help respond to questions tagged in our area of expertise.

</comment><comment><USER31> If this guy's writing is indicative of the quality of EE "experts"' prose, then I'm even less surprised that place went down.

</comment><comment><USER32> Stack Overflow has made the internet a better "place"

Experts-Exchange just got in my way when I googled for answers.

</comment><comment><USER33> Regarding the undercurrent of anger that seems to exist regarding Stack Overflow making money: SO has a great model that is incredibly useful and helps many, many people. They have created massive value. SO making more money means more people being helped, and yes, a well-deserved return for the founders and team members who poured their lives into creating and supporting such an amazingly useful resource.

This is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER34> Stackoverflow is one of the best things that have happened to tech community, for that very purpose we have created a group to meet other engineers from stackoverflow community for lunch <http://www.LetsLunch.com/stackoverflow>

</comment><comment><USER35> I think spolsky hit the nail on the head with "answering questions is about learning". If I profit from it and the site owners profit from it as well, so be it. This is a very rare case of win-win.

</comment><comment><USER36> If by "StackOverflow" you mean "Tumblr" then yes, I agree totally.

</comment><comment><USER37> Lets say you go to a dance club because people come there to hangout. Is the discotheque ripping you off by not paying for making their dance club better? Are you getting zero value for it? Are their expenses zero for taking the effort to make it a good experience?

And StackOverflow does not even charge an entry fee. I believe almost everyone on that site received more value from it than they put in. The amount of time saved by SO is ridiculous and was painfully obvious before the Panda update to Google which demoted the clones in the search results.

StackOverflow is the result of tons of hard work on both the technology and the community by the founders and employees. The site scales very well inspite of super heavy traffic and the UI/UX provide a great experience. In fact, the site and their blog posts serve as a poster child for .NET based startups while using OSS software like Redis.

Is it really the end of the world if they show an ad or two? The sense of entitlement in the article is just too much for me to bear. The author can take the CC licensed content and go build a Wikipedia style site for all SO cares and instantly get a free bootstrap of millions of quality questions and answers. I think they will actually be happy if it's a better place than SO, because they set out with the aim of making the status quo better for programmers all around the globe and succeeded wildly and raised the bar pretty high.

</comment><comment><USER38> "Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?"

Welcome to real world.

<comment><USER39> _> "Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?"

> Welcome to real world._

Have you READ the fucking article, or just came here to post your "cool" one- liner reply?

Because in the article he mentions the REAL WORLD case of Experts-Exchange. And he mentions his hard earned REAL WORLD experience that such things don't end well as commercial entities, because when they are pushed for monetization they become closed and/or ad-circuses.

He also suggests using a distributed model for such sites.

You know, like, Wikipedia, which also exists in the REAL WORLD, but is not in it for making money with our knowledge, but for building a non profit community for knowledge sharing.

<comment><USER40> Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How long have you been in the SO and HN communities?

Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'.

And now you're saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre? They have been upfront about everything, they made the posts all CC ([http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow- creativ...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative- commons-data-dump/)) so the old experts-exchange and IMDB bait and switch can't happen to SO.

Go listen to their old podcasts and read their original blogs.

<comment><USER39> _Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How long have you been in the SO and HN communities?_

I'm on the SO since 2009 IIRC. (Btw, I'm over 16, non American, and my surname is not Lebowski, so I'm not a "dude").

 _Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'. And now you're saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre?_

Yeah, and Google once said "don't be evil". Corporate promises don't mean much, I'll take laws, signed contracts or systemic assurances over them anytime.

When there's profit involved and especially investors, money has a way to become the 'raison d'etre'.

Besides, Jeff has already quit Stack Overflow/Exchange: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack- exch...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack- exchange.html)

(The downvote means what?

I haven't made a reasoned argument?

There have not been many cases of corporate bait-and-switch?

It's inconceivable that people running SO in the future could attempt one, with investor money involved and Jeff retired?

Or is it simply a case of: "I disagree with you, la la la la la"?)

<comment><USER41> > Corporate promises don't mean much, I'll take laws, signed contracts or > systemic assurances over them anytime.

Then you'll love the copyright license (CC) under which they offer the questions and answers for free copying and redistribution, the contract law that binds them to this license and the other terms of their site, and the systemic assurance this creates that they cannot put up a paywall around the answers we've provided. We can just take them with us to another site; many SO clones including the full content already exist, entirely legally.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any recommended resources for computational fluid dynamics - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This 12 Steps to Navier-Stokes tutorial was posted here not too long ago can't find the original post, but here is the link to Prof. Lorena Barba's tutorial. It uses IPython to work through the equations.

[https://github.com/barbagroup/CFDPython](https://github.com/barbagroup/CFDPython)</comment>


9 Scripting Languages You Need to Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/9-scripting-languages-you-need-to-know-/d/d-id/1323218?_mc=NL_IWK_EDT_IWK_daily_20151123&cid=NL_IWK_EDT_IWK_daily_20151123&elq=fbdcf0c8c1864eb8b38d762ae9af800b&elqCampaignId=18093&elqaid=65705&elqat=1&elqTrackId=1f4f8ec209454c76a576f463311057bd <comment><USER2> I'm going to pass on JCL and Rexx. And Tcl. And PHP. And AppleScript (mostly). And VBA.

I'm going to assume this is mostly a joke.</comment>


ProgCop, open source application firewall for Windows - <AUTHOR> https://www.nrosvall.name/progcop/ <comment><USER2> That's cool similar to Windows Firewall Control, really great software, recently acquired by Malwarebytes.</comment>


Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlandish_Proverbs <comment><USER2> Small Dutch connotation: Dutch proverbs is something children are taught in primary school, and we get saddled with a pretty large amount of them, but don't expect a Dutch person to ever say "ah well, the herring hangs by his own gills". At least I've never heard anyone say that. Even though this painting (and others) are used for teaching proverbs.

Many of these proverbs are rather archaic, and I suspect a good bunch of them to have never been in popular use at all (some of them are really far fetched/oddly specific).

Dutch speakers not proficient at English often try to translate Dutch proverbs literally into English, often with hilarious results. It's a good reminder of why it's so hard to have computers translate language. Even if you know your grammar perfectly, and you know the meaning of every word, you can still utterly fail to understand the meaning of a sentence.

"Man, my boss is really making me look for nails at low water"

Said the Dutch, meaning to say that his boss is making him do annoying work with apparent low value. It stems from back when nails were relatively precious, and used in shipbuilding. Bosses would make their shipbuilders wait for ebb and then have them seek for the nails they dropped while working on the ships.

<comment><USER3> Are you stabbing the dragon with our language? Quite a lot of proverbs are still used where I work and sometimes during a presentation it leads to strange remarks, only funny to the dutch people. Such a a person then falls through the basket as a true dutchman, the ape comes out of the sleeve so to say. The presenter then often laughs like a farmer with a tooth ache. But who cares, who laughs the last, laughs the best.

Haven't you ever been sent from the closet to the wall? Life doesn't go over roses.

<comment><USER4> Using control F, I did not find this idiom on the Wikipedia page we are discussing. So I went looking.

I tried to google "stabbing the dragon" and initially only found an English urban dictionary entry advising me that "slaying the dragon" is an idiom for sleeping with a very unattractive women. More digging got me this reddit discussion: [http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/znsep/reddit_what...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/znsep/reddit_what_are_your_favorite_infrequently_used/c6687u6) which suggests that it means mocking someone.

I also found this: [http://speakwords.org/post/74048121/hes-stabbing-the- dragon-...](http://speakwords.org/post/74048121/hes-stabbing-the-dragon-with- me)

<comment><USER3> Indeed "stabbing/sticking the dragon with" means "to make fun of".

This all reminds me of an episode of TNG where Picard has to communicate with a race that only speaks in proverbs, sentences that only make sense when you know their historical context or metaphors ([http://en.memory- alpha.org/wiki/Tamarian_language](http://en.memory- alpha.org/wiki/Tamarian_language)).

BTW, an Austrian colleague just a couple of days ago told me (in Dutch) "Life is not a little lark." Which has no meaning at all to me but we started using it. Funny stuff :) In University we actually made a sport out of literally translating dutch proverbs which is why I "shook my original comment out of the sleeve" so quickly (Note that I didn't "suck it out of my thumb", that would mean I made it up whereas "shaking it out of the sleeve" means I came up with it without effort).

<comment><USER5> That TNG language was all metaphor if I recall. "Zinda, his face black, his eyes red!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is an imitation[0] of this idea in which many Cantonese proverbs are illustrated.

0.[https://writecantonese8.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/cantonese-p...](https://writecantonese8.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/cantonese- proverbs-in-one-picture/)

<comment><USER7> When that was on the frontpage I posted a link in the comments to the Bruegel painting :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This painting is fantastic, and it's great to see it unpacked on Wikipedia.

I made an app to learn more about art[1], and from looking at old works it's clear many of our modern concerns are timeless--hunger, greed, jealousy, human beauty, ecstasy, joy, desire for wealth. It's both reassuring and humbling.

A vaguely similar work is The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch[2]. It is, depending on interpretation, either a warning of human temptations, or detailing a sort of sixteenth-century Burning Man (paradise lost).

1\. [http://artfulmac.com](http://artfulmac.com)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights)

</comment><comment><USER9> We need a visual representation of this for programming lore / systems concepts :) Any artists want to collaborate? Perhaps the title could be 'Visual Arts', and the subtitle 'a language that was invented first and then people came around to try to get semantics' (referencing Leslie Lamport on UML)

9 coders = Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Nine women can't make a baby in one month.

figure dreaming of a hall of mirrors = Design up front for reuse is, in essence, premature optimization.

poster of darwin image with man deevolving to a computer = Software Architecture Paradox #3: Evolution impedes survival. We design a software system that can evolve, but in doing so hasten its death.

gps unit with a stack overflow error = All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many indirections.

mirror being installed while a surveyor surveys = One person's constant is another person's variable.

light-projected space invaders down the kryptos sculpture = One person's data is another person's program.

person in 'chief architect' office atop the ivory tower with completed survey papers, telephones, frazzled with pages of a destroyed calendar thrown across the room and playing oldschool pitfall type game (possibly with a waterfall feature in the room or out the window, and a UML book on the shelf) = Any attempt to formulate all possible requirements at the start of a project will fail and would cause considerable delays.

house being brick-layed without a clear plan by rugby players = To the extent that [Agile software development] is [an excuse for not thinking], it's a bad thing.

burning google balloon floating in the clouds = reference to failed google project

wheel as the logo atop the ivory tower = A general-purpose product is harder to design well than a special-purpose one.

someone looking at an empty parking space and buying a car = Generalized form of Parkinson's Law: The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource. The reverse is not true.

... etc. quotes taken from my fortune clone @ [https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

<comment><USER10> Somebody removing a moth from between the contacts of a relay.

Two confused looking dudes trying to label the pickets on a picket fence, one starting from 0 and the other older dude starting from 1, and getting into a fistfight over who is correct, of course.

ACID compliance, the "other" WIMP (weakly interacting massive program). A fine arts painting representation of Codd Normal Forms, is that genius or insanity?

systemd, well, that'll be interesting one way or the other. Hopefully not as boring as providing a standard internet shock pix/video and slapping systemd as the title.

Another fun one would be humanoid figures as parodies of languages or OS or software development patterns and the equally important software development ANTI patterns. Human forms representing paradigms like static / dynamic types or software paradigms in greco roman diety form "Aphrodite the magnificent goddess of functional programming" vs "Zeus the imperative".

The intersection of fine-ish art and tech is remarkably empty and fertile ground.

I would pay some money for a painting / poster / print in the Hieronymus Bosch style on programming. Probably inspired by "The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things" or "The Garden of Earthly Delights". I suppose the right side of "Garden" is a pretty good representation of Java programming.

<comment><USER9> ACID is an interesting meme ... maybe a zany ACID dealer that looks like the Oracle from the matrix? :)

Human static form = those people who pose still as statues

Human dynamic form = contortionist

A row of warehouses of differing sizes/styles could represent language or OS- specific packaging systems.

A garage maker-space of course...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic painting.

There are however some mistakes in the explanation of the proverbs. "To bell the cat" does not mean "To carry out a dangerous or impractical plan". It means: "To do something dangerous that benefits many people". If you know Dutch, you can look it up here: [https://onzetaal.nl/taaladvies/advies/de-kat- de-bel-aanbinde...](https://onzetaal.nl/taaladvies/advies/de-kat-de-bel- aanbinden)

<comment><USER12> I also noticed this. An example of an application of this saying would be a whistleblower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bruegel's paintings are magnificent. See also _The Fight Between Carnival and Lent_ ¹ and _Children 's Games_².

1\. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Pieter_B...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Pieter_Bruegel_d._%C3%84._041b.jpg)

2\. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Pieter_B...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Pieter_Bruegel_d._%C3%84._066.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER14> BBC Radio 4's fantastic "In Our Time" podcast had an episode on Bruegel just a few weeks ago. IIRC, it was more about a different but somewhat similar painting of his, but I believe there was at least a little discussion of this work as well. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/iot](http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/iot) (search for "Bruegel")

</comment><comment><USER15> "To be armed to the teeth"

I wonder about the diffusion of things like this. Obviously, it exists in English. Italian too: "armato fino ai denti".

Are they very old and have found there way into many languages, or something more recent that spreads quickly? Do people study this stuff? I would think they must, somewhere.

<comment><USER16> German as well: "bis an die Zähne bewaffnet"

<comment><USER3> In dutch as well: Tot de tanden gewapend.

<comment><USER15> I think we all took Dutch as a given, seeing as how it's the subject of the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool. There's a video on the painting in the excellent Smarthistory collection:

[https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance- reformati...](https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance- reformation/northern-renaissance1/antwerp-bruges/v/pieter-bruegel-the-elder- the-dutch-proverbs-1559)

</comment><comment><USER18> Another reason to love Wikipedia (and maybe consider donating a little).

</comment><comment><USER19> Michael Frayn's novel "Headlong" is about the discovery of what might be a lost Bruegels, and stands as an interesting account of how art historians think: [http://www.amazon.com/Headlong-Michael-Frayn- ebook/dp/B002RI...](http://www.amazon.com/Headlong-Michael-Frayn- ebook/dp/B002RI90EK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424669767&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+frayn)

As a layperson in art history I found it a fascinating look into a quite different approach to analysis.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Negligence will be rewarded with disaster"

</comment><comment><USER21> To be able to tie even the devil to a pillow - Obstinacy overcomes everything

To bang one's head against a brick wall - To try to achieve the impossible

The dip is real</comment>


Introducing Summarize - A Ruby C Binding for Open Text Summarizer - <AUTHOR> http://intridea.com/2010/12/3/summarize-a-ruby-c-binding-for-open-text-summarizer

<comment><USER2> I've seen a few "summarize text as a service" sites now. I'm wondering if they are just repackaging Open Text Summarizer or if the are actually doing something different

<comment><USER3> I can't speak to the specific technologies other sites are using but there are enough academic papers out there to allow one to roll their own implementation.

<http://libots.sourceforge.net/bench.html></comment></comment>


Google Chrome to remove Google.com's search bar? - <AUTHOR> http://danwin.com/2013/03/google-chrome-to-remove-google-coms-search-bar/

<comment><USER2> Isn't "detect features, not browsers" the current js mantra? How can they do this without browser sniffing?</comment>


Quality vs. scale - <AUTHOR> You people of full of shit. Quyality has ZERO to do with scale, fuck your tree falling in the forest analogy. Trees fall. If you don't hear or see it... too bad. Your bad luck. PERIOD. <comment><USER2> Why do you think quality has zero to do with scale? Care to shed a bit of light on that thought process?</comment>


MacRuby & Xcode 4: Build a Self-Contained MacRuby Application - <AUTHOR> http://talentopoly.com/posts/953-macruby_xcode_4_build_a_self-contained_macruby_application_-_redwoodapp_development_blog

<comment><USER2> Direct link to the actual article: [http://redwoodapp.posterous.com/macruby- and-xcode-4-build-a-...](http://redwoodapp.posterous.com/macruby-and- xcode-4-build-a-self-contained-ma)

</comment><comment><USER3> Jared Brown, why are you linking to your own site, which only links to the actual article you list in your listing?

</comment><comment><USER4> Git, MacRuby, self-contained one window for xcode and IB, what's not to like about xcode 4?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm playing around with it right now. Great stuff.</comment></comment>


Court: Chevron can subpeona Americans' email data in Ecuador case - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/chevron-ecuador-american-email-legal-activists-journalists

<comment><USER3> I'm finding this article unsurprisingly hard to reconcile with the actual opinion, which concerns something like 30 specific named accounts and no others, as part of civil discovery during an ongoing court case. At the very least, it seems like the headline is egregiously overblown.

The conclusion that we'd be better off without Techdirt (the MoJo story Techdirt hijacks is somewhat better and at least includes a link to the order) continues to be hard to avoid.

<comment><USER4> The headline and article both accurately report that 9 years worth of meta data of american citizens is to be handed over to Chevron.

You don't appear to be disputing this so what are you struggling to "reconcile" and what is so "egregious"?

<comment><USER3> The headline is deliberately written to convey the impression that Chevron is dragnetting the American population. I'm not interested in the nerdy argument we could have about whether that's true; I'm confident that it is.

<comment><USER5> The dragnet interpretation really seems to be your own. The headline simply says "Americans'". There are no superfluous adjectives such as "massive" or "unprecedented scale" which could be intentionally vague.

Deliberately is a strong claim. Do you have some internal Mother Jones memo? Since you love to give the status quo the benefit of textual evidence, perhaps you could do the same for this article, and reiterate what you consider to be factually incorrect?

You also dismissed this article because document discovery is a normal procedure. The article discusses how the discovery burden is different for citizens and non-citizens, and how the wrong burden was applied as relates to the first amendment. Do you think it is not important for courts to correctly protect your rights as a citizen through the discovery process? Why would you so pithly dismiss the article otherwise?

<comment><USER3> My comment referred to the Techdirt story to which this thread was originally attached, as you might have discerned from the fact that it refers to Techdirt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Mother Jones article is far better than the TechDirt one, and specifically includes helpful commentary. While Mother Jones decries the subpoenas as "unprecedented" the reality seems to be that courts have not acted uniformly in this area:

"But he notes that while anonymous speech made by Americans is protected under the Constitution, 'courts have been inconsistent in applying that protection against civil subpoenas aimed at identifying anonymous internet users.' In the case Dendrite International, Inc. v. Doe No. 3, for example, an appellate court held that a company was not allowed to unmask users who had criticized the company on a Yahoo message board."

What the article makes out to be an "unprecedented overreach" is actually a fairly subtle balancing of several different concerns. The first, and overriding, concern is that a litigant has the right to any evidence that might prove his case. Balanced against that is the concern that discovery could "chill" protected anonymous speech. Implicated in that second point is two issues: 1) most of the subjects of the subpoena do not seem to be Americans who can raise the 1st Amendment issue in the first place; and 2) 1st amendment concerns are weakened by the fact that any "chilling effect" would be the result of actions by a non-state actor (Chevron) who isn't bound by the 1st amendment.

The fact that we hate Chevron shouldn't blind us to the facts of the case. Chevron is fighting a $19 billion judgment against them. They have a colorable claim that they are the victims of an extortion scheme. It is the judge's job to figure out how to get them the evidence they need to prove their claim while not trampling on any Americans' rights in the process. They have a right to get that evidence to the extent that it is possible.

<comment><USER7> > most of the subjects of the subpoena do not seem to be Americans who can > raise the 1st Amendment issue in the first place

Yes, that's why we non-US people love the US.

<comment><USER6> The U.S. has been more liberal than nearly any other developed country in extending rights and privileges to outsiders.

E.g. map of countries that have birthright citizenship: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jus_soli_world.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jus_soli_world.png).

<comment><USER8> Birthright citizenship in the U.S. is hardly about a desire to "extend rights and privileges to outsiders". The 1866 law was voted during the Reconstruction after the Civil War, to guarantee civil rights for Blacks [1]. It was later introduced in the Constitution to make it more robust against repeal [2]. Republicans have talked of repealing the amendment precisely because it is used (abused) by "outsiders" [3]. I'd like to see better examples to support the assertion that the U.S. has been more liberal towards outsiders than nearly any other developed country.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1866](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1866)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution)

[3] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/08...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/08/07/AR2010080702605.html)

<comment><USER6> Regardless of the initial motivations for the 14th amendment, it was interpreted very early as extending a broad birthright citizenship: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark). And the fact is that the US has abided by it and extended citizenship to people born on U.S. soil in a way France or Germany or any of the other countries who get snooty about U.S. foreign policy never have. Those countries are quite content to have large number of people born on their soil that can't claim the privileges of citizenship (though their attitude is better now than it was in the 1970's or 1980's).

My brother was born just a few months after we immigrated to the U.S., and he was a U.S. citizen right off the bat, as much a citizen as anyone else and eligible to run for President. That wouldn't have been true in any Western European country.

To me, that suggests a pretty liberal attitude towards outsiders, i.e. making it tremendously easier to transition from being an "outsider" to no longer being an outsider.

<comment><USER8> To me the origin of birthright citizenship in the U.S. as a means of guaranteeing civil rights to Black people is more significant than having the Supreme Court interpret the text of the amendment in the rather obvious way. On the other hand, it's true that senators acknowledged the consequence the law would have on children of foreigners [1], so that speaks for extending rights to outsiders. In any case, I'd like to see other examples supporting (or contradicting) the view that the U.S. is particularly nice to outsiders. It's rather average on the issue of citizenship through marriage I think. It's obviously not very nice on issues of privacy (NSA scandal) as well as some basic human rights (Guantanamo).

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Children_born_to_citizens_of_other_countries)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The reason is "Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy." Ok...seems a bit ridiculous to me.

I'm no lawyer, but is this significant in relation to the constitutionality of the NSA spying? "(The Judge) ruled it didn't violate the First Amendment because Americans weren't among the people targeted."

<comment><USER6> It's a little relevant, because the point that non-Americans cannot complain about violations of the First Amendment, because they don't have First Amendment rights, is relevant to both situations.

Aside from that it's not very relevant. Courts have much broader powers to subpoena information than the police. They can get pretty much anyone to turn over any information, or testify about anything, with certain narrow protections (e.g. 5th amendment, certain common law privileges like spousal privilege or attorney-client privilege, etc), as long as the information is relevant to an ongoing litigation.[1]

See: [http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_45](http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_45).

[1] That is, incidentally, the key constraint on the power. Courts' subpoena power can reach deeply but within a narrow scope. That's why the "fishing expedition" question raised in the article is so relevant. It's not wrong for a judge to rule that a defendant can access peoples' e-mails. It is wrong if that allows the defendant to go on a fishing expedition with regards to people who have no connection to the litigation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033603) for discussion about the case when it first happened.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know what the evidence of the "mass extortion conspiracy" Chevron provided in order to get the judge to accept the subpoena?

<comment><USER12> Thank you. This would seem to be _the_ central question about this. If Chevron in fact has evidence that the "facts" presented in the Equidorian trial were false, then they have pretty good reason to go after somebody for fraud and extortion.

Otherwise, if the allegations in Equidor were undeniable, then their case is, what? That somebody "coerced" the judiciary there to look at what was _actually_ happening, and this is somehow unfair to Chevron???

If the premises of the Equidorian case were in fact false, then they have basis to after the "liars". Otherwise, this would seem to be a fishing expedition, the point of which is to harass the whistle-blowers to make an example of them. "Dis is what happens when youz mess wid us, M.....F.....s!".

 _IF_ there is no evidence of falsehood, that is, _if_ the case against Chevron in Equador is true, the irony of using RICO to harass the whistle- blowers is oh so rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't find this particularly surprising and that's sort of unfortunate. Chevron has large ties in global communications networks. They have a huge stake in Reliance Industries who are responsible for undersea cable communications throughout the world. It's possible this court case was simply a formality.

<comment><USER3> Huh? What does this have to do with communications networks? Chevron is embroiled in a legal battle with several people in Ecuador and the US, itself having nothing at all to do with communications secrecy, and has identified some of their email accounts. It has asked for information about those accounts as part of discovery.

<comment><USER13> I was only commenting that I'm not surprised when Chevron is involved in issues regarding access to communications since they have very large ties to some of the world's largest communications networks. I wasn't commenting specifically about the court case or the judge's decision but about the fact that it just doesn't surprise me that this would happen, and I think that's unfortunate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And again the only thing everybody is shocked about is that Chevron can get email metadata of _Americans_!

This stuff should be protected under secrecy of correspondence for all the people. Besides, it's the metadata of lawyers of the opposing party - <USER2> themselves are responsible for protecting it - they can't talk to anybody about what their clients told them and Chevron can just get it like that?!

<comment><USER15> Its shocking for americans because they're american. Much like the NSA scandal is shocking for europeans because they're europeans.

I think you're applying a causation without correlation here. Under what conditions/preconditions should things be protected under "secrecy of correspondence for all the people"?

Note I don't necessarily disagree, but there are multiple competing interests here and I don't always think that the idea of secret communication overrides societal benefits to being able to view things that aren't attempted to be secret.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do to what you don't love. - <AUTHOR>

How can I motivate myself to start and work through something that I have no desire to do?<p>How would you do it for yourself? Or am I the only one who is struggling with this :/? <comment><USER2> Set modest goals and measure your progress.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is it?</comment>


Hacked Knitting Machine Can 'Print' Designs from Photoshop - <AUTHOR> http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/cheap-or-clean-the-energy-dilemma/?src=twr

<comment><USER2> I think this is the link that goes with that title: [http://www.pcworld.com/article/210046/wear_pixel_art_on_your...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/210046/wear_pixel_art_on_your_sleeve_with_hacked_knitting_machine.html?tk=hp_new)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wrong title. Points to Cheap or Clean? The Energy Dilemma from the energy and environment blog</comment>


Could a massive CA/WA earthquake severely damage the Internet? - <AUTHOR>

We know that both regions have survived earthquakes in the past. But both regions are quite vulnerable to earthquakes far more powerful than any seen in the last 100 years.
For the Los Angeles region, see this: http://news.discovery.com/earth/los-angeles-earthquake-overdue.html
For the Seattle area, see this: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/09/seattle-earthquake-fault.html <comment><USER2> There are only a few places on earth where you can get a 9 earthquake. Seattle is one, but CA is not., probably an 8ish is about the worst. The internet infrastructure is relatively immune to earthquakes, by weight mostly cables and UPS's and it's quite widely distributed. In spite of appearances earthquake damage can be quite localized. I lived about a dozen miles noth of Loma Prieta and suffered no damage. SF and Oakland were another 30 miles to the north.

The internet was designed to survive all kinds of damage. Larger companies usually have multiple data centers and colos so they can continue operations.

When the big one hits SF, I will probably have to walk a dozen miles to my car. Then I drive home 200 miles south, plug in to the Internet, and see what I just went through.

EDIT: I expect to survive because of tough CA building codes and decades of seismic retrofits. My homes survived two 6.5-7.0 earthquakes, because one of the first things I did after moving in was to make sure of the basics, like foundation ties and reinforced cripple walls.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, good reply. What about server racks though? An entire array of hard drives could fall down and get destroyed. And many laptops will also fall down from the quake

<comment><USER3> I spent quite a few years building out server rooms, large and small, in California. They were all braced against seismic activity, even when installed in closets. All the critical equipment was mounted on rails and bolted in. Yes, there were the occasional towers sitting on shelves and rack mount systems that were not secured against sliding out, but in general, the server rooms were the least likely places to get hit by falling equipment.</comment></comment></comment>


Can Big Data Measure Livability in Cities? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.placeilive.com/can-big-data-measure-livability-in-cities/

<comment><USER2> I am digging their approach, even if not all of the data is perfect, it still gives you way more perspective than without it.</comment>


How to speak (2018) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY <comment><USER2> There are so many great lessons in this video, Patrick was not only a great AI Researcher but also a great communicator. I curate tips and tricks on technical communication to make us better at public speaking, writing using storytelling etc in a monthly high quality newsletter, you're welcome to subscribe here : [http://tinyletter.com/suyash](http://tinyletter.com/suyash)

</comment><comment><USER3> This video made a lasting impression on me. Speaking is really one of the most important skills not taught at school.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848034)

<comment><USER5> Hi Dan,

Re: your comment from a few years ago regarding LLVM: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11054682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11054682)

 _So what 's the best way to tackle the learning curve of what you're suggesting? If I know zero about LLVM and I want to make something like the OP, what should I do?_

At the time, I was hoping for an answer to this too — my experience with LLVM was zero.

This lab from MIT 2014 turns out to be a minimalist useful example: [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~junfeng/14fa-e6121/hw/hw2.html](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~junfeng/14fa-e6121/hw/hw2.html)

It's a bounds checker rather than a compiler, but it seems to show how to use the full LLVM pipeline. When I realized that this might be an excellent starting point toward your original question, I thought I'd mention it in case it was helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got this video recommended to me too today on youtube

</comment><comment><USER7> His death was a loss for humanity.</comment>


A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation   - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/71x/a_crash_course_in_the_neuroscience_of_human/

<comment><USER2> Excellent article; skip the pre-preface which is meta (start at the banner). PDF just looks like a printout from browser.</comment>


Code Cards: Letterpress printed greeting cards for nerds - <AUTHOR> http://www.code-cards.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> A friend of mine put these cards together. Pretty great.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Appreciate the link.

I'm totally open to suggestions for other kinds of cards too, my programming skills are weak and I know you all have great ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome!</comment>


Indie Hackers: Learn how developers are making money - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com <comment><USER2> Very cool, but also a bit misleading.. I was wondering how the hell wub machine actually makes 900$/month, so I read it.

> Record high was $850/mo, record low was $40, with the average month bringing > in around $300. Certainly not quit-my-job money, but it helps.

Posting the all-time high instead of the average is a bit off-putting imho, considering it's supposed to represent "paychecks." This is more like getting lucky once. Anyways, haven't read the rest of the stories, and I think it's pretty inspirational. I'd just appreciate more honest revenue reporting on the front page. (It actually says $900/mo, not just $900, so it's not like I'm reading this ambiguously..)

Edit: On second thought, it's not clear to me from the description whether he means that it made $900/mo for some kind of long streak or just one month.

<comment><USER3> Similar thoughts here. However, the one project Apex Ping, says he's making $600/m but not cash flow positive yet. I'm confused as to how that's even possible. I can run that service on a handful of VM's for ~$60/m.

He says he's using Lamda, perhaps he should rethink that decision if his overhead is really that high.

<comment><USER4> There's a lot more to it than that, and I'm currently supporting ~2000 users on the free plan as well (though I'm phasing that plan out).

Ping is running in 7 regions, has an Elasticsearch cluster for logging, another for the check data itself, thousands of checks running each minute and thousands of alerts running each minute. RDS for the primary store, SES for emails, EC2 for hosting the app itself. Add on extra services such as Baremetrics and these things add up quickly. Run 7 EC2 nodes and you're already well over $250, not to mention the loads in each region are different.

Lambda's pricing is indeed not competitive with VMs right now, but that will go down with FaaS becoming wildly available from other providers. The more important thing to me is that it's close to zero maintenance, no bastions, no AMIs, no provisioning, no third-party monitoring, etc.

If you've ever worked with Elasticsearch you'd also know that it requires a pretty substantial set of resources to function well. I'm happy to over- provision for the beginning if it means providing a better experience. Nothing would be worse than under-provisioning IMO.

<comment><USER5> >(though I'm phasing that plan out).

Would you recomend starting something with a free tier and phasing it out if it's not working over charging up front from the beginning?

I can see pros/cons to both sides.

<comment><USER6> I've been looking into myself recently.

From successful bootstrappers in B2B, nearly 100% of the advice that I've gotten is to start without free and add it later as a lead-gen mechanism if it fits your business. Early on customer acquisition is a slog and generally relies on 1:1 conversations often with a pre-existing relationship (in- network). Hopefully feedback from these people help you get close enough to product market fit that outsiders will consider using the product. From there it's a marketing and lead nurturing game where freemium may make sense.

Advice for B2C would be quite different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is very cool, but can I ask you a question?

Some days ago I posted a very similar website here ([http://www.transparentstartups.com/](http://www.transparentstartups.com/)) and I didn't get barely any vote whereas this one is getting totally viral (385 votes and adding).

Please let me know what I'm doing wrong. The only thing I can think of is that I didn't mention some key words like "developers" and "money" but "startups" and "transparency". Or is there anything else I'm missing here?

Thank you in advance.

UPDATE: I'm learning a lot today, thank you guys for the feedback.

<comment><USER8> Hi. My startup was listed in IndieHackers, and here is my experience, which I think might explain why this thread did as well as it did. A few weeks ago, Courtland, the dev who built IndieHackers contacted my via email with a polite request for me to list my startup on his upcoming site.

He had obviously done a lot of work scouring HN and Reddit threads to pick out people who fit his criteria of starting independent apps and emailed them one by one.

I was interested, so signed up on his site and started filling in my profile. And here is the clincher - I've filled out my startup profile on LOTS of sites, but IH was the only one where the creator emailed me back and asked for more information and clarification about my story. It felt more like an interview than a straight up submission, and it also lead me to believe that someone actually cares.

Then, yesterday, I received an email from Courtland mentioning that he would be posting about his site to HN as a "Show HN" post and asked me to support it by upvoting.

By this stage, I had totally 'bought in' to the whole deal, and when I woke up this morning, eagerly sought out the thread to participate and upvote. I was actually alarmed when I couldn't find the thread. A quick email and response from Courtland indicated that the thread name had been changed from a 'Show HN' thread.

I am thinking that it was the personalised contact with the participants, then the email follow and actual request to support the thread which lead to it getting the response that it has to date.

<comment><USER9> aka vote brigading

<comment><USER10> Nothing is organically viral

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd be interested in learning from founders of full-time businesses that started as side projects, how they made that transition from side project to full-time.

The amount of time you need to spend on a side project to grow probably increases faster than revenue. So inevitably there will be some point in time where your level of effort is much more than what you'd call a side project, yet your revenue is much less than what you'd call a business. I bet that's a frustrating point for many, as you can't just quit your job and stop paying your bills. I'd love to hear creative ways people have gotten past that hump that don't involve mortgaging the house, selling all your possessions and depleting your life savings.

<comment><USER12> I found two useful solutions to this problem:

1\. Work as a contractor, rather than full time. That gives you some flexibility in how much time to devote to your side project as it grows.

2\. Compete with a Yahoo! property and wait for them to do something stupid.

<comment><USER13> _Work as a contractor, rather than full time. That gives you some flexibility in how much time to devote to your side project as it grows._

My upvote won't be visible to others, so I'm also posting to second the above explicitly.

Working independently usually means you have more flexibility in both time and money than you typically get as a regular hours, salaried employee. You can balance how much contract work you take on against what you need to do for your side project. There may well still be a point where you have to give up a relatively large amount of immediate revenue from the (absence of) contract work in return for much less immediate extra revenue for your side business. However, if you think the side business will grow in the future based on that work, you might consider that a worthwhile investment.

Another advantage is that operating independently also usually means you have a contract to work on one specific project. That contract would normally be explicit that things like the IP rights transferred to the client are only those relating to that specific project. In contrast, an employment contract is usually broader, and shady employers often try to include clauses that claim IP rights to pretty much anything the employee ever does, out of hours or otherwise. This is a legal minefield and the effect of those clauses depends on where you are, but in any case the last thing you need if your side project starts to become successful is a dispute with a past employer's lawyers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a very useful contribution.

The only thing I would add is how many man hours the project took over what period of time.

I have to click on them and sort of guess if that site took 5hr/week for 10 weeks, or if it took 10 people working 10 hour days for 2 years.

Since you already ask for the tech stack, this would also help launch a dozen "which tech stack is more productive?" studies.

On a final note, I appreciate that you also ask about marketing. Maybe the marketing efforts and man hours can be summarized too?

<comment><USER15> I'm the founder of Complice, one of the sites featured. It took me a bit under 2 years to reach my "poverty threshold" target, working an estimate of 20h/week on average. To break it down further, it was more like 5-15 hours/week for the first 7 months, then 30-50h/week that summer when I was off from school, and other similar fluctuations.

These are all total ballpark estimates that I made a couple weeks ago: I've used various time-tracking systems but none that give accurate overall time spent. Based on my within-Complice stats though, I can tell you that I've done 2800 tasks towards Complice. That's not very specific, but still kind of a neat figure.

I don't have a good breakdown between programming and marketing time, but I would estimate that 80-90% of my time was spent on things more product- development related. Only 75% of Complice tasks, but the programming tasks are more likely to have been eg 8h working on a single feature.

<comment><USER16> Thanks Malcolm! Discovering your site has been a real eye-opener.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Founder of Complice ([https://complice.co/](https://complice.co/)) here, one of the sites featured ([https://indiehackers.com/businesses/complice](https://indiehackers.com/businesses/complice)).

I'm game to answer questions that people have that weren't answered in the interview!

<comment><USER17> In the interview, you said that you had 10 paying customers before you even started coding or had a company. My question is:

How did you get those people paying you, and how much they paid? Since you have a monthly service, surely they haven't been paying your usual monthly fee for all that time while you were coding?

<comment><USER15> I reached out to some friends of mine, pitching them something like "I'm developing a system to help you achieve your goals. It's based on daily planning and reflection. Paypal me $10 for the first month if you're interested." The actual conversations were much longer than that, in which I explained a bunch of the high-level thinking behind it, mentioned that I was looking for some beta testers, etc. I probably also mentioned that I'd trialed the basic system myself and informally with another person.

One of the nice things about offering "I'll help you achieve your goals" is that pretty much anyone wants it if you can actually do it. The latter part is of course hard. But yeah, because of this I probably asked only 15-20 friends and got 10 to pay based on that. It also helps that I have friends who are willing to experiment and who trust me not to just run off with their money.

Part of what also helped, I'm sure, is that I reached out to people I knew individually and they got to have the sense of being part of this early group of testers.

I followed the "do things that don't scale" approach. At the start, I didn't have custom software, but I queued up emails manually using Boomerang, to bug people each day at the time they specified, to plan their day and reflect. They replied, and I put their data into a spreadsheet and elsewhere. I spent about an hour per week for each of those users at the start. I was giving them value manually/personally, rather than with software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If I was personally making thousands a month from a web app I made, I don't think I'd want to advertise that. Partially because it motivates competition, and partially because I feel like public information about my income could later be used against me (no concrete examples other than alimony/child support). I wonder why these people aren't bothered by this.

<comment><USER8> @harmegido is correct. I am one of the founders listed (HR Partner), and things like this go down as part of 'marketing' for me. I have already had hundreds of hits on my site this morning from the post in IndieHackers and the mention here, and a few sign ups, which is great.

I normally hate divulging figures too, but these days I have given myself permission to do so. I realised that in the past, I was acting from a scarcity mentality and was afraid that people would steal my ideas and concepts. But of late, I have realised that this is simply not true.

I am grateful that in my previous posts here on HN and on Reddit, when I have asked questions about marketing and sales, the most helpful answers have been from other developers of HR or Time and Attendance apps (Special shout out to the founders of StaffSquared and Tanda). We dance in the same space, but we all recognise the difficulties inherent and look out for each other, rather than steal from each other. In fact, I have actually referred some of my customers on to these competitors when I have realised that we don't fit their needs 100% and that someone else's solution will be a better match.

<comment><USER19> >But of late, I have realised that this is simply not true.

why not?

<comment><USER6> The theory is that building something and turning it into a company are wildly divergent things.

Yes, someone could copy your idea and implementation.

But are they going to dedicate themselves to this full time for a year like it took you before you reached a poverty level income? Are they going to cold call 10 people per day for three months? Are they going to learn to write, nurture a following of people and provide content and value to those people in the hopes that <5% convert to customers? Anyone who starts by copying an idea probably doesn't have the same drive to make the idea successful.

The actual trouble isn't that transparency invites competition. The trouble is competition that already exists somehow using the transparency against you. Numbers, to me, don't seem like the type of thing that an outsider could use against you. Effective marketing tactics and growth hacks on the other hand can be gold.

<comment><USER19> Interesting. What does "The trouble is competition that already exists somehow using the transparency against you." mean, how does it use the transparency against me?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, sure thing: I've seen it happen a few times mostly with companies whose founders I listen to regularly on podcasts. It's almost always tactical growth advice, something that every startup struggles to find early on. Where are our customers hanging out, consuming content, how do we engender trust with them etc.

Basically a founder says something like "We've recently discovered that paying a couple of talented designers to re-purpose our blog content as SlideShare presentations works surprisingly well for."

Companies have tried SlideShare as a means of creating additional distribution around their content marketing. It works for some and doesn't for others. It's basically target market dependent. Some markets have bloggers/curators who will pick up the Slideshare content and embed it on their site. Other target markets don't attach to that kind of content.

So, this founder shares this (and keep in mind Slideshare is just an example, it could be any marketing tactic) and the week after his podcast is released their largest competitor starts publishing content on Slideshare. Maybe their marketing team just decided to run an experiment? If the same thing happens three more times? Eventually that founder is going to start doing a cost- benefit analysis of this particular brand of transparency. He could continue sharing some stuff, their MRR and ARR seem like fair game to me but he probably wants to hold back on being specific about growth tactics.

<comment><USER19> why do they share that advice then? to disinform their competitors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So I went to the site in Chrome and tried to back arrow to HN and the site cleaned out the history queue in Chrome. I stopped there. This is bad form in opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry! It was a bug due to redirecting from / to /businesses. Therefore clicking the back button would take you to / again, which would automatically redirect to /businesses. I just fixed it by using replaceState. I hadn't tested this before, because I just launched the site and therefore hadn't previously linked to it -- I'd always visited directly.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for clarifying and fixing.

<comment><USER6> As a quick tip, I don't think any modern browsers allow a site to wipe out history from previously visited sites. In this case for example two quick hits to the back button should have worked.

You can click and hold the back button to move backward more than one history instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi all, founder of HR Partner ([http://hrpartner.io](http://hrpartner.io)) as featured on Indie Hackers here. Happy to answer any questions that anyone has. As we are 'pre revenue', I would also appreciate tips and hints with respect to marketing and B2B sales from anyone who has been there, done that. :)

<comment><USER21> what was your first sale like?

<comment><USER8> Well, since our beta a few months back, we have had about 180 companies sign up, but all are under the 10 employee limit, which at the moment is free, so we haven't actually had anyone pay for a higher tier as yet.

Of that 180 sign ups, about 30 or 40 are quite active and visit the site often, although it is hard to judge because some only need to revisit the site once a month or so to update details and respond to reminders etc.

We are looking at scrapping the free 10 employee limit soon, and making everyone pay (except the early sign ups - we will honour their free tier pricing indefinitely).

<comment><USER22> How did you find your first customers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Founder of Commando.io here ([https://indiehackers.com/businesses/commando- io](https://indiehackers.com/businesses/commando-io)). Let me know if you have any questions.

<comment><USER24> Looks like a great service, I'm actually sorry to say I don't have a need for it. Best of luck growing!

<comment><USER24> Who the hell downvotes this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That you include actual numbers is awesome. Kudos

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think hearing these types of stories is a lot more useful and educational when actual revenue and growth numbers shared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm very confuse with sentence:

      sideProject.generate(8500, 'dollars').per('month');

Those are not side projects

<comment><USER27> Well, some of the ones making that kind of money probably started out as side projects. Obviously once you're making $8.5k/month, you can probably afford to focus on it full-time.

<comment><USER28> If you're making $8.5k/mo on something _without_ focusing on it full-time, why would you give it more of your time? Just quit your job and enjoy only having to do a "side-project" amount of work to live comfortably.

<comment><USER29> Business is very much a timing/market thing. The money faucet could turn off any day. If you come across easy money you generally want to see if you can turn it in to not so easy but still efficient use of time money in exchange for getting a lot more of it while you can.

<comment><USER30> Also, it's a great time to diversify. If you have one successful project, you can leverage that audience to help get your next project off the ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Great site, considering sharing some of my projects.

> Learn how developers are writing their own paychecks.

Would love to see a forum dedicated solely to "indie hacking" for developers. ie. threads related to all the ins-and-outs of independent product development, idea validation, market research, dealing with customers, marketing strategies, founder Q&A, etc.

<comment><USER32> While there are certainly nuances and specifics to marketing independent software, the truth is that market research, market validation, business plans, customer service, etc. are skills that are independent and not tightly coupled with software. Reading entrepreneur / business / marketing books can be very useful. You can take lessons learned from one business and apply it to your software business.

But yes, I've been looking for a a place where sharp solo tech entrepreneurs can talk, and even created a failed slack channel once, but I have yet to find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> On very rare occasions, there's a post on HN that I wish I could upvote so much it would pin at the top of the home page until everyone had a chance to see it. This is one of those rare posts: fascinating, well presented, and I can see it being practically useful for a lot of people who aren't there yet as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is awesome. Soon, I'm going to devour all the stories. How do the companies get to know your site and share their story before you were on HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> I spent a lot of time scouring "Ask HN" and "Show HN" posts to find people who were running revenue-generating businesses. I think I compiled a list of over 140 people. I was able to track down about half of their email addresses and Twitter accounts. From there, I got in contact with everyone I could, and told them about the site. If they wanted to share and were comfortable revealing revenue (lots of people weren't), I sent them a Wufoo form I made. Then I edited their answers into the format you see on the site. There are still 20+ people who were interested in being included but haven't gotten me their info yet.

EDIT: A few people have submitted their businesses since I posted this Show HN, too.

<comment><USER34> Good hustling and startuppy stuff :)

<comment><USER34> Of the right kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd like to be able to subscribe via RSS

<comment><AUTHOR> Added to my to-do list!

<comment><USER36> Please send an update to email subscribers when this is available. Thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's not every day I'm happy to give out my email. very nice.

</comment><comment><USER38> This actually motivates me a lot. Thanks for making this.

UI nitpick: when I navigate to the project's page, the if the project name is long, it goes out of screen on Nexus 5X + Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER39> Cool project! One forward-looking idea for your site: You could start to incorporate a community platform where people can post side-project ideas, skills they're willing to contribute, skills they're looking for, etc..

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd like to see an additional question asked: How did you go about designing the interface of your app?

I'm blown away by how good these and so many "show HN" entries usually look. Everything I've put online is functional but looks so obviously "designed by a programmer" that it's embarrassing to mention.

Do people first work on a prototype and then run it by a graphic artist/UI designer to make it look decent? Where do you find these people?

<comment><USER15> I'm kind of a jack-of-all-trades, so I did all of my own design. I don't know that I could get hired by a big company to do design work, but I'm good enough to make my own UIs.

One thing that has helped a lot is doing a lot of "hallway" tests: you watch someone sign up, then you cringe at how bad your UI is, then you fix it.

(I'm the guy behind [https://indiehackers.com/businesses/complice](https://indiehackers.com/businesses/complice))

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Nice site, I enjoyed reading it.

I like the effect when transitioning from grid view to list view. Is that just CSS or is there some Javascript magic doing that?

</comment><comment><USER42> I think this site is Awesome! IndieDevs love to find out what worked and what didn't. Can I make a suggestion? Perhaps, you can add a section or another site that lists how any successful businesses got their start, especially with elaborate insights on distribution as this is the number 1 barrier to entry for most start ups. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER43> Great work. Please provide an easy way to clear all the filters in one click. Subscribed and will be eagerly following.

</comment><comment><USER44> Was literally lying in bed sleepless last night thinking about which side project on my list to start. Was digging through "Ask HN: How do you make recurring revenue" posts. There's always someone asking in HN. Didn't even think about researching side projects as a side project.

</comment><comment><USER45> Very motivational that some apps can make those numbers - thank you for making this! (subscribed!)

</comment><comment><USER46> I really like this idea, and even signed up for the mailing list. I've been scratching my head for years trying to crack income diversification without a lot of money to begin with. It's good to see some success stories.

</comment><comment><USER22> Very important question but isn't mentioned much is: How do you let other people know about your business after launch?

</comment><comment><USER47> Great site for inspiration. Gave me the same feels reading revenuenumbers.com (posted here a while ago) did.

</comment><comment><USER48> Great job, subscribed! But here it is a simple question: what is the business model of indiehackers.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no business model yet! What I'm focusing on right now is how to make the site as useful as possible, so I can sustain the kind of traffic I've seen in the past 24 hours that this has been on HN's front page.

<comment><USER49> Find out what tools and services the startups/projects are using. You can then put a link to those services and get a commission.

:)

<comment><USER48> Something like builtwith.com([http://builtwith.com](http://builtwith.com)).

This reminded me of the story of Builtwith, which started without knowing the commercial potential ([http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is- perhaps-one...](http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is-perhaps-one- of-australias-most-profitable-online-companies-and-has-zero-staff/))...i wish you to reach the same results!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It would be great if there is a comment section, or private Q&A, to ask founders questions.

<comment><USER51> I'm the founder of Instapainting. Feel free to ask questions here!

<comment><USER52> Techcrunch article you refered to, mentioned Instapainting is YC Backed company. Quick look at CrunchBase says "The company is backed by Y Combinator and Start Fund (SV Angel and Yuri Milner)."

I thought the site was about self funded single developers? I am missing something?

Either way congrats and best wishes.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no rule on the site against having external funding of some sort. It really depends on the circumstances. I wouldn't accept a company that has raised enough money to hire a bunch of people or to spend months building out a complex product full-time, because most indie hackers can't do that.

Chris, however, was working alone when he started Instapainting. His funding had dried up and he was in significant debt. And it only took him 2 days to build and launch his product. So there's a lot there that we can all learn from, and nothing that none of us could do without relying on personal savings and a lot of creativity and hustle.

<comment><USER52> I definitely think it was a good success story.

I am merely asking whether Instapainting was YC Backed company as mentioned in TC Article as reading TC and looking at CrunchBase gives different picture from whats mentioned on Indie Hackers.

Hope the question is not out of line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Sorted by revenue only seven make more than my Amazon affiliate site. I'm not sure if that type of site would fit in there but I did develop quite a bit of code for it. It's not a review site but rather a searchable product catalog.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would definitely fit, and I'm already intrigued just hearing that! You should submit if you like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Feature request: it would be nice to be able to communicate with the indie developer within your website. Maybe though a comment section at the bottom of the page or a community FAQ.

Anyways, nice website I will come back! Looking forward the rss feed ;)

</comment><comment><USER55> Having the month and year of the "interview" would be helpful. Down-the-road, it will help give context to the information. A neat idea would be to allow for follow-up "interviews" later.

</comment><comment><USER56> Cool idea, I hope to build something one day that I can publish on it.

</comment><comment><USER55> I like that you can filter on solo vs. multiple founders. Very cool.

<comment><USER51> Interesting that there is only 1 multi-founder project listed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Really good read, the structured Q&A format is great.

</comment><comment><USER58> Great. I wish there could be charts of the monthly cash rate, also it would be nice to mention how much maintenance time and cost of servers and such...

</comment><comment><USER59> This is very cool and one of the most handsome designs I've seen in a while.

</comment><comment><USER21> wow, very interesting reads. Many of them make me inspired and frustrated at the same time. Inspired because of how cool the ideas are, frustrated because "why didn't I think of that?!"

</comment><comment><USER60> Cool. Although the site breaks my back button on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, thanks for pointing that out. I need to fix the redirect from / to /businesses.

<comment><USER61> Same here on Safari Version 9.1.2 (11601.7.7). Just adding some data points to help you fix :). Certainly not meaning to pile on.

I like it and I have subscribed.

Very useful to see practical working examples of options for passive income in the field. I say passive because I could see myself doing something as a side business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Nice site, but it hijacked my back button. There's no excuse for that.

</comment><comment><USER63> Evil site, blocks back button.

<comment><USER64> Why do sites do this? To make us hate them?

<comment><USER65> Yeah, unless it's just a redirect bug.

<comment><AUTHOR> This! Will be fixed shortly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Could we get a less link-baity title? Something like "Viable Single-Developer Businesses" or the like?

<comment><USER67> I think the current title does a better job than the title you suggested.

<comment><USER66> Title when I wrote that didn't day "Indie Hackers". Those were a magical extra two words ^__^</comment></comment></comment>