Sodaware

Here's a stupid idea: let people buy "badges" that appear next to their name. Kind of like "verified", but to show support for their favourite celebrity/band/whatever. There are some pretty intense fanbases on Twitter.

The common sense part of me says this is far too optimistic. After all, we haven't put people on the moon in nearly 40 years.

However, the hopeful part of me thinks it's possible. In 10 years SpaceX has gone from nothing to launching capsules into space and docking them with a space station.

Even it it takes 40 years, it's good to have someone pushing things forward. I really hope I live to see the first human walk on Mars.

One thing that surprised me about American TV is just how many adverts were for medical products. Every time I watch TV here I find out about another dozen or so problems I didn't know I had that need to be cured.

Why is activity so much lower on a Friday? Is it because everyone has lots of work to catch up on and no time for HN, or is it because people are leaving work earlier on a Friday?

I'm pretty sure it all comes from advertising.

I can think of a few changes I'd make off the top.

I'd put the pricing info on the front page, right next to how much money they could bring in. The profit calculator is a neat toy, but you could summarise the info and put it on the homepage.

Get rid of that ticker in the top, or at least remove the seconds. I found it very distracting. The how it works page is also a bit tight. Maybe have some bigger number bullets and cut it down to important points.

Make a big point of the "risk free" terms. It didn't really stand out to me.

Really, the big points are:

- You can raise a lot of money in a fun way.

- It's cheap to register.

- IF you don't raise enough, we refund the charge.

That's a pretty good deal, so put it right in front of people.

Maybe you could offer some branding/subdomain options for clubs, so they can tell players to sign up at myclub.ourclubfundraiser.com or similar. Do players really need to see a profit calculator?

5 visits a day isn't really enough to find out anything meaningful. More importantly, the target audience is probably not willing (or able) to drop those kinds of fees right away. I know when I did volunteer work it could take ages to get things done, and when money was involved it took even longer.

Given the audience, I can think of a few changes that might help.

Ask for an email address and send more information. Some case studies would be nice too. It doesn't have to be anything huge, just "thanks for requesting info: here's how it works, here's how it's helped people, any questions ask away". Send one or two followup emails to see if they need help setting up of have questions.

You may have to take a more direct route to getting customers, such as emailing local clubs to see if they're interested. AdWords and Facebook ads are other ways to get a quick boost of interest, but I'm guessing the direct approach will work better.

Hope that helps!

It would be nice if Reddit could filter out content based on previous voting patterns. I know people suggest unsubscribing from the bigger subreddits, which helps a little, but rage comics/memes have a habit to leak across over time. The same goes for pun threads and other worthless (albeit amusing) comments.

The experience would be more pleasant (for me at least) if it could cut out comments & stories I'm uninterested in, possibly with a summary of the article / conversation.

Aside from moral reasons, it will be interesting to see if creating fake meat is more energy efficient than existing farming methods.

Weird. I've been using 12.04 since it was in beta and it's been stable for me. The only problem I've had lately has been with flash videos chewing up too much CPU and causing things to get a little hot.

It depends on what you mean by popular.

For a quick burst of traffic, the ever popular list posts do quite well (e.g "7 reasons you should never do X", usually tied in with a current trend). They do well on social media sites, but they attract a certain type of visitor that is looking for a diversion so they don't stick around for very long.

Current event and news posts also die off quite quickly.

Long term traffic usually comes from more helpful articles, such as "how to" or "why does" style articles. Not so great with social media, but can get decent search traffic for a long time if you pick something a lot of people have trouble with.

Looking at my stats, I have articles from 2007 that still attract decent activity, and they're nearly all "how to" style tutorials. Other posts that do well have downloads (such as cheat sheets). Least popular are my "welcome to my new blog" post and a couple of "what's going on at the moment" style posts.

As a general rule, when I write a tutorial I try to pick something that will still be useful in 5 - 10 year (depending on the subject - tech has a much shorter lifespan). These tend to be much more useful and generate more comments and search traffic than less focused posts.

Hope that helps.

If you're wanting to learn Ruby on Rails, I highly recommend http://railscasts.com/

Most of the chart could apply to other web languages, including everybody's favourite whipping boy PHP.

For me, the hardest part of rails was getting a working environment setup on my server, development and build machines.

Average time for StumbleUpon visitors on one of my sites is 1.5 minutes, but others only get about 20 seconds of their attention.

I've found visitors from search engines tend to hang around longer, probably because they were actually looking for something. Stumblers and some other social networks are just looking for something to amuse themselves for a few minutes, so tend to be pretty quick to leave.

Interesting write-up though, and I look forward to seeing how other advertising methods perform.

fiverr (http://fiverr.com) might be a good place to start. There are plenty of people who want small jobs doing, particularly things like researching or writing small articles for blogs.

The main project site has more information, as well as some screenshots: http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/

I would also advise writing to your local MP (find them here http://www.theyworkforyou.com/). It's easier to ignore 4,000 digital signatures than 4,000 physical letters. It wouldn't hurt to call them either.

I really hope that companies like SpaceX reduce the cost of space travel to the point where we can send out more probes to check things like this. It's early days for private space travel, but I think the next 10-15 years are going to be very exciting.

There's also FTC disclosures to worry about, although I'm not sure if it covers posting affiliate links to another site.

http://pinterest.com/source/amzn.to/ has lots more, and they all have the default Twitter avatar which gives them away. Lots of them have terrible or inaccurate descriptions and are in the wrong category.

A similar tool is http://todotxt.com/ - it supports projects and priorities, and is cross-platform as well.

There's also standalone version on the downloads page if you don't want to use it as a Firefox addon:

http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/Downloads.html

I've done years setting lots of goals, and done years when I set none. Even though ending the year with a list of "failed" goals is difficult, I much prefer it to not setting any at all.

Building a habit is easy to measure and gives good short-term feedback. You can end every day knowing if you've done what you needed to, and because you practice daily it's constantly reinforced.

From experience I've found the goals I achieve are usually the ones that are reinforced on a regular basis. My personal preference would be to build goals on top of habits, rather than exclusively one or the other.

It's really down to personal preference and what you're developing. If you're developing web software that will run on Linux then developing on the same platform will save a lot of headaches down the line.

Another advantage is that is doesn't take long to find and install development tools. You can go from a clean install to a comfortable dev environment very quickly.

It's also easy to automate. There are lots of little tools that can be strung together to perform boring tasks. I found that it changed my way of thinking, and I often look for command line tools or script if I have to repeat a task for than a few times.

DDG has a lot of short commands like this. There's a list of regular ones here: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html (stuff like "is it raining?").

More technical commands are here: http://duckduckgo.com/tech.html (like IP address lookups, whois commands and password generation).

Maybe combine this with LOC to find swears per line, or include the language for find which ones cause the most swears. Maybe leaderboards too (like CurseBird) to find the sweariest projects & developers.

This is pretty interesting (and entertaining).

Another idea would be the reverse - find trending videos on a particular subject and post an insult to try and get some profile views. For example, typing "star wars" would post things like "123 people said NOOOOOOO!" or "29 people think Han shot first".

I wonder if all comment systems that have some form of rating eventually degenerate into appealing to the lowest common denominator to get votes.

RescueTime is excellent for finding the things that eat your time. It's especially useful for finding out how much time is spent "just browsing for a few minutes".

I only wish there was better support for the Linux client.

I don't agree that this will "send ripples through the Indie community for years to come" as the article suggests. Perhaps people will be a little more wary about putting up cash for a project on the the promise that it will be finished one day, but that's about it. Independent games have been around a lot longer than the last few years. A little drama from one project won't upset anything.

The title of the article is slightly misleading in that it's $7,000 per person, so it's actually $14K in this case. I know that's a little nit-picky, but things like rent would eat a good chunk of that $7k.

Living on $14k is certainly possible, and the usual suspects can be cut to save some cash:

* Drop cable TV

* Same for cell phone - keep one pre-pay for emergency and use Skype for business/personal

* Stick to one car if at all possible (easier if someone can work from home or has flexible work hours). Negotiate lower insurance rates if possible.

* Don't eat out

* If internet is essential, go for the cheapest package available.

There are usually offers for new internet customers that give low rates for the first year. However, when your year expires you can call them up and ask to be put on a new special. This worked for my wife and I when our rates went up, and we got upgraded to a faster connection to boot.

That's really the biggest money saving tip of all - ask politely. It doesn't always work, but you lose nothing and can gain some decent savings over time.

Even if you're not an assembler expert, there are a lot of detailed comments that explain how things are done. Well worth a read if you're interested in the real guts of classic games.