AlexMuir

The Independent has a daily circulation of 60,000

My site How a Car Works has a fairly engaged daily readership of just over 10,000.

The site earns around $50 per day.

Apologies, I didn't notice it was a fork.

If you're in Hungary and know ruby and/or JS then give me a shout!

I never mentioned spare time or working for free.

My first filter on recruiting now is: "Has this person built anything I can see?"

A website, an app, a repo on Github. If the answer to that question is 'No' then my assumption is either a) this person isn't interested in the work, or b) they don't know how to code in the real world and I'll be paying them to learn.

I'm constantly amazed at the number of people applying for dev positions who claim years of experience and have absolutely nothing tangible to point out.

I run a small operation so I can't comment on big firms.

TLDR: Build something recruiters can see, and preferably use. It'll put you instantly in the top 10% of applicants.

Generating Facebook accounts in bulk is not easy. I'm not suggesting that it's a panacea, but if you're looking for something to indicate a real purchase this would be strong. If someone logs in with Facebook and has 10+ friends then I'm going to say they are 99% legit. Plus you can look at their profile manually if you're in doubt. Of course you also offer email but those orders get more scrutiny. HN is an echo-chamber of hate for Facebook login but the real world (and I suspect your target market) does not share this.

I think Facebook or Twitter logins would go s long way to solving credit card issues. A credit card purchase backed by a 10+ friend FB account is unlikely to be a scammer. Legit Facebook accounts probably sell for more than the cc being tested.

This guy is sending my bullshit detector off the charts.

I'll bet that the story here will turn out to be that he's built a backstory around being Satoshi in either an attempt to get famous, or some fraudulent scheme to profit from it.

On reading the tax stuff, I'm wondering if he's told the Australian Tax authorities that he is Satoshi.

I just added it to the page :)

OT: WB, I'm making a space for people building project cars. Sounds like you'd be into it: drop me an email me@alexmuir.com, I'd love to get your thoughts.

There are good points here and the flow diagrams certainly apply to startups in the Adtech space. And particularly those targeting other startups.

But these startups are trying to take market from the incumbent Google, and increasingly Facbeook. These established businesses have paid back their investment and are now cash cows for their owners. The flows for Adsense for example will be in balance between cash in from advertisers, and cash out to publishers and Google shareholders. I've been in all three of those positions, often simultaneously, and been happy with the outcome.

When the VC tide goes out Adtech startups will be running up the beach trying to cover their white bits. But with less loss-making competition it could be very good for Adsense and Facebook.

As an aside, I see a future where digital advertising is equally split between Google for transactional (buy something today) adverts, and Facebook for brand awareness and engagement. I think Facebook today is in the same position that Google was when it was only selling ads against its search result pages. When Facebook launches adverts beyond its own property then the cash is really going to start flowing.

On further investigation that address is also used as a Chinese food supermarket.

http://www.oriental-food.co.uk/contact-us/

Here's an example from the UK. This seller has been operating for months on eBay selling millions of pounds worth of Apple gear.

15" Macbook Pro. 2.2GHz Processor. 256 GB Storage

===

from Apple [0]

£1,599 including VAT

£1,332 exc. VAT

--

from Electronic King Inc. on eBay [1]

(shipped from UK)

£1,219 presumably no VAT.

--

Apple USD price $1,999 = £1,328.

--

The seller has a UK address as contact details. And is using a mobile phone and a gmail address (ebayprincess05--@gmail.com).

There must be something more than avoiding VAT happening here. I thought for a while that this might be a fraud. Even with them evading the VAT I can't understand how they're turning a profit. My assumption was that they're building up feedback before just disappearing with a week's worth of sales. But 46,000 feedbacks is way beyond what's needed for that. Some of the feedback definitely looks suspicious - a high proportion of low-feedback buyers have bought exactly two of the same item.

[0] http://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro

[1] http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-Apple-Macbook-Pro-2-2GHz-2-2-G...

That flagging is a joke. This was an excellent read, a relevant article and by a respected person. I missed the story until today because it dropped so quick off the homepage.

Nikita, this is brilliant. I've been doing some experiments with creating 3D models for How a Car Works using threeJS (there's a very basic alpha proof-of-concept at http://www.howacarworks.com/3D/charging-a-car-battery ). I'd love to commission you to create some moving models of car components - drop me an email if you're interested me@alexmuir.com

The journey to learning vim is so long that people at different stages will have things set up differently. I'm still adding and removing things as I learn and understand them, or conversely, as I no longer need them. I'm not kidding when I say it's a 10-year learning curve.

OT: This page loads the full article, flickers for a moment, and then hides everything but the first three paragraphs. Instead I see a button to 'Show the full article'.

What is the reason for this? I've seen this pattern in a few places and assumed it was to speed up mobile page loads. But seeing as it loads the full page before hiding it I'm now not sure.

I drove down to Salton City and wandered around the beach of fish bones. It's a surreal place - grids of streets but almost no houses, and electricity poles just about still standing. There are couple of rows of palm trees on what might have been the drive the Salton City Yacht Club, but is now just some boulders. People also live here, but it's about as far from the romantic beach resort of the 50's as one could get.

I drove on to Salvation Mountain and Slab City.

I can't recommend it enough!

29x39cm

We converted the original PNGs to vector using Illustrator's image trace, then cleaned up some noise and removed some bits of pixelation before scaling them up and resaving them as raster.

A great story well written.

I completely understand why people use Adblock - it improves the user experience. Ironically hiding adverts is a just a side-effect; the improvement comes from speeding up page loads, and cutting down on cpu usage and bandwidth use. (I install Adblock for my mother to stop her seeing scams, but that's another thing entirely.)

I've spent the past week optimising How a Car Works for speed (mobile is 55% of our traffic now).

The average uncached weight of an article is 1.1 MB, of which 70% is Google Adsense and Facebook (the only two 3rd party scripts I include). I can't trim it any further and it's very frustrating - suggestions welcome btw.

Almost the only suggestions that Google's Page Speed tool has left are to minify the scripts that Google and Facebook themselves are serving.

I use Adsense because it's easy, pays fine, and the ads seem reasonably relevant. But the weight of crap being downloaded is absurd and I hate the idea of wasting some Kenyan's precious data allowance on an irrelevant advert that might earn me $0.01.

In fact, I'm going to use geolocation to not include Adsense in countries where I earn nothing.

Yeah, I emailed a couple but heard nothing. It's not something that I've spent much time on to be honest. I know when people email looking for links I just delete their emails, so I'd expect the same treatment myself.

That seems extremely low - what's the site?

I'll embed that video shortly.

Fantastic! I'd be delighted to have them - drop me an email to me@alexmuir.com and we'll have a chat.

You'll find a graph of growth at the page above from 2013. It basically continued with linear growth at exactly the same rate from the day i launched it.

You're right - the order to Basics is somewhat chaotic - I'm going to fix this today. I'd reordered it to push heavily trafficked articles to the front page for SEO reasons. That was a bad idea with hindsight.

Good points. We do have articles on there about fuel injection and diesel engines but it's clear that I'm not surfacing this in the best way. Thanks.