jessepollak

Essentially, a 1.32% transaction fee for all revenue under $250,000, 2.75% on all revenue over.

Deal gets worse for the business the further your revenues are from the $250K limit.

Definitely a big deal though.

Agreed, but increasingly I find that HN actually does a pretty great job of limiting the number of posts that involve any sort of fanboyism that you mention. Many may get submitted, but the community doesn't seem interested in bringing that many of those posts (compared to other news sites/communities) to the front page.

I think you're probably right, and I'd venture a guess that HN is not in fact majority white male. I was simply using that to accentuate my point. :D

Just a heads up, I'd be careful before you characterize the author as a 'he.'

I agree. I think that there are a lot of situations where homogeneous interests/views can preclude interesting conversations, but I don't think HN is a place where this applies.

The reason is, while HN may be filled with all people who like startups--in fact, it may be primarily white males--so many people know so many different things, and have so many different perspectives, that I consistently fin conversations of a higher quality than anywhere else on the Internet.

I agree with the OP that we should try not to limit who can participate in a forum because of high barriers of entry, but I'm extremely skeptical that said limitations actively lower the quality of conversations on a site like HN.

This is unrelated to the actual product, but it's interesting that they'd choose to feature that branch on Obama. While a lot of the other branches seem to be highly informed discussions among experts who supply real evidence, that conversation seems shallow at best, very uniformed at the worst. Seemed more like a discussion you'd find in a Facebook comment thread and less like the conversations branch wants to foster. Did anyone else get that feeling?

Thanks for the quick fix!

Also, there seems to be some sort of bug with the email collection modal. It refuses to go away, even though I've signed in with Twitter and provided my email. Makes it impossible to click the features stories.

I don't think so; it seems to me that it's the opposite of appjs. The tagline of appjs is:

> Build Desktop Applications for Linux, Windows and Mac using HTML, CSS and Javascript

Pyjs is python->javascript/html/css compiler; it started as a port of GWT:

> Pyjs started life as a Python port of Google Web Toolkit, the Java-to-JavaScript compiler.

Basically, it allows you to use Python to write both web and desktop applications; abstracting out the css, javascript, and html.

Pretty interesting relationship, explained in this email from the founders of Hospitality Club:

since 12 years we have developed HC from an idea to a world wide web of 700.000 friendly people. We believe in keeping hospitality exchange free and out of the hands of private investors. However, we also need to keep the site running and were always looking for smart ways to do so. Now a great opportunity has come achieving both. You can help us - with 5 minutes of your time you can support the club and us volunteers a lot, and meet even more friendly people. In this message, we also want to give you an update about the development of the site.

We have developed a partnership with Airbnb, the largest community for paid private accommodation. Basically like Hospitality Club, with the difference that guests pays the hosts. For every hosting offer we as HC members add to their community in the next few days, HC will get a donation from Airbnb. When you host your first guest, we will get another donation. And even better - Airbnb is using HC as a test pilot to open up their platform to other non-profit organizations - every host can now decide to donate a portion or his entire hosting fee to a NGO.

We are very excited about this partnership since it allows us as a community to further spread the idea of hospitality exchange and at the same time support Hospitality Club by doing something many of us love anyway - hosting!

How can you help us?

Until July 28 (Saturday) go to

http://www.airbnb.com/partners/hospitality-club

and click on the green button in the middle of the page to sign up as a host. It is a very short form (much shorter than in HC), filling it should only take 3 minutes. Just enter some basic info about your place (you can host Airbnb travelers the same way you would HC members, a sofa in the living room is fine, just be honest; and like in HC, you don´t have to host anyone - you can always decline requests). Of course it is free to sign up.

Important: after signing up, add a description of at least 50 words (should be easy - what is your place like? what are nearby attractions? what´s the nearest public transport? what kind of guests would you like to host?) and a photo (can be of inside, outside, does not have to be professional) to your listing. Only then will HC receive a donation. If you have several places you could host people at, please add an offer for each one.

That´s it - thank you and congratulations: you have just supported HC and are now an Airbnb host! If you drop us a quick email to airbnb@hospitalityclub.org with your HC user name and Airbnb member ID we´ll be able to thank you and keep you informed about the partnership.

Now you could look around the site a bit and for example edit in your preferences whether you would like to be paid as a host or donate to HC. In this case nothing would change when hosting - you will essentially still welcome people for free, bring them in touch with the wonderful world of hospitality exchange and help us continue to run HC (we will use the income to pay our servers and are also considering to start a non-profit foundation for which we need some financial basis).

A few thoughts: the essence of HC and Airbnb is very similar: people host each other, brought in touch by a social platform. With the small but very important difference that Airbnb hosts get paid by their guests. We have always been very strict about this in HC - no money can ever be charged by hosts, because we believe that true hospitality can only be exchanged if money is not involved. We will keep it that way.

Nonetheless, Airbnb is an interesting experiment - through first hand experiences (I have hosted Airbnb members myself in the last months so I would know what I am recommending you here) and talking to a lot of people we have noticed that some of the actual hosting experiences through Airbnb can be very good. Even though guests pay, they often still love to get to know their hosts and see the place they visit through their eyes. Many people who might be too scared to try HC themselves are more easily convinced to test the waters away from hotels or hostels by a site like Airbnb. You can read more about the background of this partnership and find answers to the most frequently asked questions at http://airbnb.hospitalityclub.org

If you have any questions or feedback, you can email us at airbnb@hospitalityclub.org or get in touch directly with me by phone: +49 173 7749 365 and +49 351 656 33555, or Skype:vkuehne

Now an update about the further development of the HC site itself (we will send another more detailed update about this in the future): Ariel, an Argentinian member and programmer started some time ago to program a completely new website for HC. The web has evolved a lot in the last 12 years and we are planning to use the now available web technologies and bring you a much nicer and more user friendly site. Ariel is hoping to finish a first beta soon and looking forward to get help from other volunteer programmers. When this beta is ready, we will open it for testing to all members and then add the finishing touches together.

Again, thanks a lot for your help and greetings from the wonderful city of Dresden, Germany,

Veit and all volunteers (HC Founder, HC:veit)

P.S.: And now please go to http://www.airbnb.com/partners/hospitality-club to create a nice hosting offer :-)

I agree, I think this unnecessarily limits the charity's options. Plus, I would assume that you don't actually get $50 worth of charity work: Exec takes some, travel time, etc.

i.e. hire people to work for the charity—probably at a significantly cheaper rate than $25/hour.

Thought question: is it better to pay $50 for 2 hours of volunteer time to a charity or just donate that $50 to the charity?

I honestly don't know the answer, but would love to hear what other people think.

My quick take is that it's probably better to give the $50 to the charity because they are better prepared to make a decision on how it should be used. With that being said, I can see how a lot more people might be willing to pay Exec for volunteer hours because of the feel good factor.

Regardless, I think it's an great initiative.

Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, a label would be nice—otherwise, great job!

Really enjoyed looking at the data—nice compilation!

One quick question, what do these badges mean:

http://cl.ly/image/1X0T2E1a0T2m

Yeah, I'm an idiot. Somehow the last line when in one ear and out the other. Thanks for checking me on that.

Wow, that's super interesting. Do you know of any data on whether this has been an effective strategy for keeping costs down?

I think that OP raises a good point in this post, but I'm skeptical of whether his strategy is really applicable in the real world. Yes, there are obviously some cases where it may make sense to do the more expensive option in order to save time, but can this strategy really be used as an overarching decision making mechanism? I think not, primarily because of the fluctuations in productivity/necessity of productivity that happen from minute to minute, hour to hour.

As OP says, he "use[s the] expected values throughout this post,"—I don't think average/expected value is really an accurate way to make decisions about non-averaged decisions. Primarily, if you always choose the more expensive thing to save time, justifying because your average value makes it worth it, you will inevitably end up "saving" time that is useless; therefore, you'll end up—on average—spending more money than the value you create.

Does anyone else feel this way/think I'm crazy for thinking this?

I connected with Facebook, went through the entire registration process, and got the writing page...and still didn't know what I was doing.

It definitely needs to be more clear what @bubbles actually does (and why I would use it).

HN uses silent banning. Basically, when you get banned everything looks normal on your side, but none of your posts or up votes visible to anyone else (unless they have the show dead option turned on in settings).

If you want to, you can see banned accounts by going to your settings and enabling show dead.

I don't know if Facebook will be people's public faces. At least for me, it's a much more private thing than Twitter and I'm much more comfortable posting personal content on it. Is that not the same for you?

Also, I think Google tried to tackle this issue with Google Plus, but they were just too late to the game. Maybe if they'd come earlier, it really could have been a successful solution to this problem.

You bring up a very good point, and I don't really have a answer for it.

I don't necessarily think that it completely ruins the idea though—bigger brands wouldn't suffer from the same problem and if you could get more than a few in, the momentum would start to build.

To be honest though, this post was less about the idea and more about reflecting on thought of committing to a big idea at a young age. It's cool to see all these people giving real, and great, feedback on the idea, but I think that's kind of overlooking the idea. As many have said, there will always be huge ideas, and all ideas will always have problems—maybe that's why I don't yet feel comfortable committing a huge chunk of my life to just one.

As the OP, I might get torn up for writing this, but I thought it was worth sharing.

Agreed on the warehouse app part. The only way to really do it would be to have an app that could scan in a box and add 40 umbrellas to your inventory, then subtract 1 at every checkout. Integration throughout the whole supply chain would be crucial.

Yeah, I didn't realize they existed. They were bought by Ebay a couple of years ago for $75 million, so I guess the idea was validated. Don't know if Ebay will dedicate enough time/energy to actually make it happen, so I still think there's an opportunity. Although they do have the corporate connections, which would help in gathering stores etc.

Seems really useful. One thing I would love to see is a summary of why a certain movie was recommended. Like:

"You and your friends all liked X and Y is very similar."

thanks! I got 1 and 2 before I saw this, but we'll see how I do on 3.

It's working now! Before it wasn't even printing my user agent and info though.

same...hopefully it will get resolved soon.

anyone have any good resources for understanding the basics of all of this?