flavio87

what are your experiences with working in the same place you sleep? isn't it nice to be able to go to an office? Isn't there a risk that you'll start wasting time on stuff you'd never do if you were in an office?

I know this is just self-control, but if you can trick urself into being more productive because your in an office environment I feel this could be worth the additional money spent on rent.

actually live with our parents right now to keep costs even lower ;-) but yeah I've seen incubators for 600$ for a cubicle that would fit in 2 people.

Isn't it interesting that this country, which was filled up with everything from very low skilled to very highly skilled immigrants in the 17th, 18th and 19th century, that owes EVERYTHING to immigrants now has such a trouble of letting people from everywhere come in and live their American Dream? Removing the cap on h-1b visa is a very good first step. what about all the other people that would not qualify for h-1b but are still very skilled and/or ambitious?

Of course people are afraid of losing their job to foreigners, but if you look at the big scheme of things: every worker is also a consumer. Meaning every immigrant and his family will also buy more American products, go to the hairdresser, pay taxes etc. and thus indirectly create work for other people.

I really hope Obama is free market enough to make the moves in that direction.

Yeah I can relate to that. Selling to teachers/schools can be very tedious, and they are sometimes "anti-business", they don't want to see someone make profit in the classroom. You migh have an edge since your that young --> people will think it's very cool that you start something and you'll have "junior bonus". Try to capitalize on that.

This is like running a casino. People that play know the odds are against them. They still play. It's about the fun/excitment, the possibility that YOU could beat the odds.

trading the stock market has negative expectancy as well, if you count in trading costs (against just owning the index like the S&P 500 or the MSCI world, with almost no trading costs) Is running the NYSE immoral?

Why would that be wrong? Think about the client. What matters most to him? What is valuable to him? If he doesn't mind that someone else might be using that design (someone in his industry is extremely unlikely), I would absolutely do that. In fact I've done it already and it worked very well. Most clients want a good, solid design. They don't care where it comes from. I didn't have to lie to him, I told him I picked it off the Internet, and of course there were some modifications to do.

That is why I really wonder why you say you look people's News.YC accounts in the application process. Someone with a lot of karma must be spending a lot of time on the site.

How about all those people who have little karma because they're working so hard?

I have run some more or less successful Adwords Campaigns. It is absolutely possible to make money with them, but it requires a lot of testing. You need to run different ads, at different prices, on different keywords. After 2-3 Weeks you can find out that while certain keywords generate more clicks, people who clicked on those keywords stay on the site much less long than those who clicked other, less popular keywords, etc.

As with Rescuetime I think it could be tough to make it worth while. The product is so great I believe you'll get much more bang for the buck with mouth 2 mouth recommendation. I've already told a couple about it ;)

Think about how much a (non paying) user is worth. (Multiply the conversion rate times the worth of a paying user). That number will tell you how much you should be paying per conversion from Adword Click to free user. I just checked, you pay an average of 10$ for the keywords rescuetime would be interested in. If you achieve a conversion rate of 10% for somebody who clicks your ad and then signs up to the service (which is pretty good in general), you're paying 100$ for a free user. You'd have to have extremely good conversion rates for this to be worth it.

He's right.

it looks really nice. you needed less than 4 hours for the design, the ajax, the server side scripting etc? either you are extremely efficient or your watches are not entirely correct ;)

very interesting to compare to 2004: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2004/

I think coworking certainly has it benefits, in terms of networking, helping each other out etc.

but also, there is quite some overhead attached to it, especially when compared to working from home.

a) the commute. that is time essentially totally unproductive and costs you either BART tickets or gasoline.

b) the distraction: while it's fun being around other people, I've seen how much people talk to each other, in terms of productivity it is not that great. there are a lot of people coming in from everywhere, and everyone is interesting to talk to. but that's exactly the problem. while you're talking to them you're not moving your product ahead. of course you need to have a healthy balance of networking also, since you can generate sales/hire/partner leads with it. but for that, a cowork space is just not focused enough

c) equipment/food etc. if you work from home, you need everything just once, you have 24h access to your fridge, you don't have to carry laptops around or screens etc. and you will save money since you don't have to go out for lunch and can just cook or eat frozen food at home.

I am lucky since a have a cofounder, I guess that makes it easier to stay and work from home.

Then again, I would seriously think about getting a cofounder, I feel it's much more productive and fun.

Don't forget you can also send messages to the regular inbox, so no need to be running the app at the same time, which would, as you said correctly not exactly a way to replace SMS. As to the penetration rate, the people that I communicate 95% of the time are all on facebook. Maybe I need to add some older people to my social circle :D

While it is not directly hacker news, I believe it's of utter importance to know what's happening with the currency you earn most of your money.

Take my example. I currently live in Switzerland and am now moving to California, for entrepreneurial reasons.

But I must say it has become less attractive if you look at the Swiss Franc to US Dollar: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=usdchf

In 5 years the Dollar has lost 25% ! That means that now Americans in average are 25% poorer compared to Switzerland than they were 5 years ago.

And the worst that can happen to America is if the smart, driven and hard working people it has been attracting for centuries stop coming. They are the ones that drive America's growth. And with the dollar down the tubes they might think twice before following their American Dream.

I really wonder how this can happen in the UK. Here in Switzerland it's the opposite. We have only like 300-400 people a year graduating with a CS degree and 2-3k jobs open. It's a real crisis, and companies are outsourcing to anywhere. Not to save costs, but because they simply can't find people. In my school ETH Zurich, in 2000 there were over 300 people starting CS, this year it was less than 100. I think salaries just have to continue raising until they meet bankers so that engineering and CS starts getting attractive again...

get out.

yeah. what I did is that I emailed some professors or phds and asked them if they or someone I knew could show me around. just tell them you're a student and interested in what they are doing. they certainly like to show you their stuff. just pick the areas from the website above that interest you and email the folks, most of them are very open.

checkout MIT CSAIL

http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php

just walk in and ask someone to show you around. they got some pretty cool stuff going on