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Casson I want the world to scroll this way

There's a little "start scrolling" button in the lower right of the window. It took me five extremely confused minutes to find it.

Casson No office, no boss, no boundaries – rise of the nomadic rich

you can't be profitable with 40 uniques a day

No, that's the awesome thing about software sales: You absolutely can be!

Step 1: Price software at $20

Step 2: Assume hosting costs of $10 per month

Step 3: Convert at a ratio of 200 views to 1 sale [1]

Step 4: Profit!!!

Admittedly, your profit for the first month will be $40 - $10 = $30, and your hourly wage will be $30 divided by however many hours you worked on the thing.

But let's say the software, like BCC version 1, is basically "a random number generator attached to a GUI" (as I vaguely remember patio11 describing it once), so you didn't put in too many hours. Now if you can manage to maybe triple your daily uniques to an entire 120 views a day and keep converting at that ratio without putting in too many more hours, you already have a business that'll pay for your pizza, forever, without really all that much effort on your part.

Now, if you assume an opportunity cost at google salary for working on this, of course it'll never be profitable. But if I assume google salary opportunity cost for my work, I'm losing money at an incredible rate by being a doctor, too.

[1] Someone who actually sells software for a living could probably give you more realistic numbers here, but these don't seem entirely unachievable to me.

Casson Awakening (during anesthesia)

Just for curiosity's sake, do you mind clearing up a few things for me? Why weren't you already intubated when you woke up the first time, if they'd already opened you up? Were you not supposed to be under general anesthesia by that point? And what on Earth were they doing with the paddles? You can't have been in cardiac fibrillation if you were awake.

Casson Ask HN: Are you alone in San Francisco on Thanksgiving?

Wow, is that common where you are? It's been five years since I was a teenager in Germany, but while tons of my American friends had fake ideas, I never even heard of faking your birth date that way. Now, using someone else's ID card was very common.

Casson Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl

I, and about fifty percent of people I know, would be happy to pay a small monthly sum (say, up to nine euro) to be able to listen to and download any music we want, at any time, without risk of persecution. Ideally, this money would go to support the musicians, but that's not necessarily a requirement. Unfortunately, no such service exists right now - most of the music streaming services only work for the US, streaming's useless to many of us anyway because we listen to music in the car and need it on CD, spotify doesn't have half the musicians we like...

There's lots of grey area between "doesn't ever pay for any media, ever" and "I refuse to pay $ 12 for a single DVD with unskippable ads and warnings if I can get the movie off pirate bay in seven minutes, wtf".

Casson Low-cost Solution to Clearing Afghan Landmines

In an area where £10 might be enough money to pay for a doctor's visit for a deathly ill child, or feed a family for a month, you'd probably get a lot of people risking their life and getting killed to get their hands on just one landmine, which strikes me as a singularly inefficient and cruel way to try and clear those fields.

Casson Low-cost Solution to Clearing Afghan Landmines

How are people supposed to shear those sheep, or take care of them during lambing/when they're sick, or to feed or water them, if they can't actually enter the pen? It seems to me that sheep penned in a land mine field would either be useless, because you couldn't go near them, or worse than useless, because they'd be a temptation to enter the dangerous area.

Casson How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

Have you looked at the appointment reminder pricing? A single mid-tier customer brings in $1000 to $2400 per year. Scale that to a few hundred accounts, and you won't have to wait for retirement age to be a millionaire.

Casson The Great Dropbox Space Race

I wonder what they're going to do when the promotion time runs out. If they're going to delete or block access to a random 3 GB of data in someone's dropbox, they're going to be dealing with a lot of upset customers.

(Should these people be aware of the fact that their space is going to run out, and have up-to-date backups of their stuff? Obviously. But the hard fact of life is that people do use dropbox as their only backup, and if something goes wrong there, they're going to be a customer support headache.)

Casson Living in a Van

So he's only playing his guitar because it's conveniently located in the same room, and you're only getting exercise because you have to walk to your printer sometimes. Setting up your living space so your surroundings encourage you to do things you feel you should be doing more seems like a sensible decision on both your parts.

Casson Living in a Van

You can get a pretty decent apartment for $900 per month in most parts of the country.

Casson Living in a Van

Putting money into a house you'll presumably be able to live in rent-free once it's paid off may not be a drastically worse choice than putting your money into savings. Unless it was an impractically huge house, or otherwise somehow not a keeper, I wouldn't consider that a frivolous/non-frugal purchase.

Casson Living in a Van

Have you researched hostels? They're still not cheap by the standards of developing countries, but when I stayed in SF a few years ago, a bed at a hostel could be had for a fifth of what a hotel would have cost me, and certainly beats sleeping in a car. On the other hand, I found food shockingly expensive, and I come from Germany.

Casson So, You Don’t Have Any Disabled Users?

Firefox has the option to let you set the font and a minimum font size, and will force all sites to stick to it. (Tools -> Options -> Content -> Advanced)

I view the entire internet in Times New Roman 20 pt. I have to turn it off for more complicated sites like amazon, where having giant font in their tiny boxes breaks functionality, but it works beautifully on simple sites like hacker news, where I spend most of my time. (And by "beautifully" I mean, it's butt-ugly, but I can sit back from the computer at a comfortably ergonomic distance and read without straining my eyes.)

Casson Patio11 launches his lifecycle emails course

Yeah, my first response to seeing the price was "WTF? Raise your prices!" as well. I was expecting a number somewhere in the four figures.

I mean, I was only checking on the price out of curiosity because I'm a broke student who doesn't even sell software, but if a broke student's first response to your offering is "Hey, that's actually only a little bit too expensive for hours worth of instructive entertainment!" to the point where I was tempted to buy for like two seconds, you can be sure that you could extract a whole lot more money than that from people who'll get actual business value out of it.

Casson No Desire To Spend

"put your groceries in the front basket"

That may work fine for one person who lives alone, but the average front basket will barely fit the toilet paper and milk to last a four-person household a week, never mind the two dozen other things they'll need. And someone with two kids doesn't have time to go shopping every single day just because her transport will only hold a fraction of the groceries they need.

Casson No Desire To Spend

It's certainly easier to make an extra couple thousand by asking for a raise than by scrimping on lattes, but I'd argue that a frugal mindset is every bit as important. Unfortunately, spending every cent of $200,000 a year is exactly as easy as spending every cent of $50,000. There are plenty of people whose approach to financial management is to simply... spend their money. Doesn't matter whether that's a little bit of money or lots of money. If they make 50,000 a year, they spend 50,000. If they make 200,000, they spend 200,000. If they come into an inheritance, they spend the inheritance till it's gone.

I'm a student who's never had a full-time job in her life, and I have more money in savings than many well-paid professionals I know, simply because I actually put money into savings.

Casson Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982)

Speaking as a girl without even the least bit of interest in diamonds, "If you give up the thing you want, you can get a thing you don't want that's TWICE AS BIG" is just in no way a selling point, especially as long as her association with those stones is that they're fakes. You can try to make the moissanite seem cooler, or the lab diamond more ethical, but women are already aware that if you buy "fake" jewelry, you can get bigger stones, and generally that's just seen as trashy.

Casson What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

Insurance companies will generally be quite happy to sue anyone they might be able to unload a bill on. If you get someone deliberately or negligently hurt in Europe, their insurance won't just roll over and pay their medical bills, either.

Casson What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

The US already proportionally has the most prisoners out of any country in the world, and I'm wary of any solution that includes making that problem worse. That kind of thing has giant socioeconomic costs and, looking at the crime rates, doesn't seem to work at making the country safer. I just don't think that finding yet another reason to put a whole bunch of people in prison (average cost per month between $2000 and $4000 at a quick google) over a bike worth $1000 is really going to make anything better in the long run.

Casson Do Not Advertise On Facebook Until You Read This

When it comes to the advertising giants, it's not a bad strategy to write a blog post but send it as an email first. Realistically, no matter how long or short your email is, you're unlikely to get a helpful response from either google or facebook to your problem, especially if that problem is on the scale of "You need to change your entire ad algorithm (and also give my money back) - unless you somehow manage to turn the issue into a PR problem for them, by, for example, getting it on the front page of hacker news.

You're more likely to get on the front page of hacker news if you can show that FB is aware of the problem but doesn't care to make any changes, which you can do by posting the email exchange. And you're also more likely to get the HN readers interested in an email that's basically a meaty blog post than in a short exchange that goes "Your algorithm sucks and I want my money back. :("

Casson Two More Patients HIV-Free After Bone Marrow Transplants

It's not just the cost that's the problem, it's the huge risk of a bone marrow transplantation. I've worked in a transplantation ward, and the mortality rates are huge. In our case, about a third of patients was cured following the procedure, a third died within the first few months, and another third developed serious graft versus host disease, a complication where the donor cells attack the host body (5-year-survival-rate 53 % in our patients.)

In patients with leukemia, you usually try at least one round of chemotherapy first, and reserve transplantation for desperate cases where the drugs don't work. Even if this turns out to be viable as a cure for AIDS, I expect it'll work the same way. It's just too deadly as a regular treatment.

Casson Two More Patients HIV-Free After Bone Marrow Transplants

The thing that makes bone marrow transplantation so expensive (about € 100.000 a pop in Germany, probably more expensive in the US) is that in the time between killing off the patient's own immunosystem and the donor immunosystem taking hold, the patient effectively has no immunosystem at all. This takes about 100 days right now, during which the patient has to be isolated in an environment almost entirely free of pathogens.

So if you want affordable bone marrow transplantation, you either need to find a way to cheaply isolate someone while giving them a very high level of medical care, find a way to grow a complete immunosystem in a few days, or find a new drug that'll effectively fight off every possible infection in a body with no protections of its own. Oh, and then of course you have to affordably stop the donor cells from attacking the host's body, too. Finding a cost-effective drug to cure AIDS looks a lot more likely to me than any of that happening in my lifetime.

Casson The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

I'm not talking in hypotheticals here. I'm saying that of the many, many people I know who do in fact work closely with the badly injured victims of traffic accidents every day, not a single one has been scared away from driving.

Casson The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

I've worked in an Emergency Room. Literally every single person who worked there drove a car. Both trauma surgeons were motorcycle enthusiasts. I'm friends with pulmonologists who smoke, psychiatrists who drink, endocrinologists who are fat.

Having seen the possible consequences of a bad decision first-hand does not, in fact, stop people from making bad decisions.

Casson You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do

Interesting. I remember you talking about how it likely wouldn't make much of a difference, because almost all parents have less than eight kids, and almost all teachers have more than 20, so the number of people who'd be induced to buy the software by an eight card limit shouldn't really be much higher than the number who'd need more than 15 cards, anyway. Any theories on why it ended up mattering after all?

Casson You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do

"I have probably told a hundred anecdotes like “I just did an A/B test and increased software sales by 70% with 99% statistical confidence. The change was a two-character configuration tweak that I dismissed on a hunch six years ago.” (That totally happened this May. Ask me for details later.)"

Would now be a good time to ask for details?

Casson Germany's Leading Technical University Cancels All Elsevier Subscriptions

I studied medicine at the TUM and its sister university, the LMU (The schools teach their med students together for the first two years). Their site would reliably go down every third Friday evening, when the anatomy exam results were posted - meaning they couldn't even handle the minor and expected spike of 600 students downloading a smallish PDF.

Casson If We Told You That, We Would Have to Shoot You

There are straightforward how-tos on every aspect of medicine easily available for everyone, and no need to turn to survivalist guides, either. How do you think doctors learn this stuff? The exact same medical textbooks we use are sold freely to everyone who wants them, and there's a youtube video for practically every medical technique. I learned to suture from a textbook and an online vid, practiced on a piece of foam and some pig skin, and managed a perfectly serviceable if not quite cosmetically perfect suture on my first attempt on a living patient.

Casson Notch's next game is an MMO

it will probably work something like electrical engineering you can do in minecraft: you never need to do it at all for the game to be fun, but if you want, you can steal a plan for an automated monster-trap from youtube, spend a few hours figuring out a simple one yourself, or go crazy and spend two years building a working cpu.