Hacker News Reader

jon_dahlon Apple boycotts Fox News because of Glenn Beck

You're downvoted not because you're right or wrong, but because this is not a political discussion forum. (This whole post is borderline, but at least most people have stuck to talking about the Apple/Fox News issue, not which side is destroying the country.)

jon_dahlon Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

re Zencoder: thanks for the mostly kind words. We've run a lot of numbers of a few hundred thousand files on representative websites, and we chose that pricing model because it was (1) pretty competitive relative to other options, and (2) it aligns incentives with our customers well.

But we'd love your input, so if you don't mind, I just shot you an email.

jon_dahlon Swagapalooza (YC W10) live on Justin.tv

Nope, it's a conference for individuals and companies to pitch their stuff to top bloggers. So bloggers get free stuff - books, physical products, etc. - and in exchange, they get the opportunity to present to the kinds of folks in a position to spread the word on their product. It's a really cool idea.

Props to the Swagapalooza guys for throwing a conference on Demo Day. That's fortitude.

jon_dahlon How to Kill a Great Idea

Looks like less - $26M according to Crunchbase.[1] Far less than the capital it raised. Maybe you mean FriendFeed?

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/friendster

jon_dahlon Revenge of the Fat Guy

I like Ben's point that being lean isn't a goal in itself for a startup. Dominating a market and not running out of cash are the goals. Running lean often helps with these goals, especially early on, but if fattening up a bit helps you dominate the market or not run out of cash (through revenue), that's what you should do.

I had a friend who ran a small business, and was overly concerned with costs. It was almost like he was more interested in reducing the expense line than increasing the revenue line. So that's what happened - both numbers went down, and he's working on his own today.

jon_dahlon Still Face experiment: What happens when a mother shows no response to a child?

One reason: parents need sleep too. Some parents will be better able to care for a child if they sleep through the night, and after about a year, many kids are ready to sleep through the night themselves.

At around 1.25, we decided to see how our daughter would do if we let her cry a bit - we'd wait through 5 minutes of crying before going in. It was really hard for us all, but it took exactly 2 nights before she was sleeping through the night without crying.

It's totally ... inhuman.

Also, that's a little strong. At a point (e.g. 6 months), this is totally true, but at a point, families need to figure out what works for them.

jon_dahlon 5 things I knew (or should have) before my startup, but didn't learn until now

It is extremely helpful. I'd say hour-for-hour, my team is twice as productive working full-time on a startup than doing it on the side. We're more focused, more resourceful, and when we aren't working, our subconscious is spinning on this particular problem, not our day jobs or other projects. Combine that with the fact that our startup gets more hours than it did when it was a side project, and that's a major increase in productivity.

You also need to be able to pay the bills, so save up or raise some money. Friends and family money is good here, because raising from professional investors is usually a full-time job in itself. Or you can consult at a high rate and use the margin to fund a startup. We did this for a few years, which was fine - it was our only option, really - but full-time work is so much better.

The good news: you'll be more motivated, since you see the dwindling bank account balance. You know that you need to move things along quickly so you can pay the bills.

jon_dahlon 5 things I knew (or should have) before my startup, but didn't learn until now

How business savvy are you? As a single founder, you might be better off with a hybrid co-founder who can code and do business stuff too.

Like sales - the ability to sell is probably the most important non-technical skill for a startup founder. Startups need to sell all the time - to customers, partners, investors, journalists, etc. It doesn't hurt to have 2+ founders who can sell.

jon_dahlon Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

Edit: this guy shouldn't be downvoted. He asked an honest question (what's the difference between Heroku and AWS) - unless I'm missing something, he isn't trolling. No need to vote him down.

jon_dahlon Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

They're very different things.

EC2 is bare Linux; you install apache/passenger/REE/memcached/postgres/etc/etc/etc. If you want to scale past one server, you're on your own there. You take care of backups, security, system monitoring, etc.

Heroku is a platform that abstracts you from these things. You just push out your app, tweak a dial or two on your Settings page, and they take care of everything else for you.

If you want CPU-by-the-hour, go with EC2. If you want to host a Rails app, go with Heroku.

jon_dahlon Programmers: What To Do If You Get Fired

You see unprofessionalism. I see creativity.

Fortunately, you moved from PHP to another good language - most of us in the Ruby world have a lot of appreciation for Python. You never hear good Ruby people badmouthing Python. Programming language selection doesn't have to be based on ad hominem.

jon_dahlon Shit I Learned Burning through My Family's Life Savings on a Failed Startup

I hate the macho startup cliche as much as you. 100 hour weeks don't help a startup - they hurt - and it's never a good idea to dig a hole deeper than you can get out of.

But if you count your own time, which is worth AT LEAST $20/hour (if not $100), then you aren't going to get very far if you're only willing to commit $1000. Even if you don't count your own time, many opportunities require significantly more than $1K.

Success in a startup comes from tenacity more than anything else. If you aren't willing to make a real commitment (as the GP was suggesting), you're setting yourself up to fail.

jon_dahlon Shit I Learned Burning through My Family's Life Savings on a Failed Startup

If you're only willing to spend $1000 on a startup, and you count your own time (which you should), then you're going to have a rough time as an entrepreneur. Startups require risk and sacrifice. Maybe not bankrupt-your-family sacrifice, but sacrifice nonetheless.

jon_dahlon Advertising is mind pollution

I resonate with this article. More often than not, I find ads annoying and obnoxious, and give me a negative impression of the advertising company. Maybe my awareness of a brand is increased, but I end up going out of my way to avoid brands or products that pester me with annoying ads.

The problem is that advertising is broken. I shouldn't see ads for feminine hygiene products, cars, McDonalds, or Verizon. I'm not the right market for any of these things. It's a waste of my time and the advertiser's money, and I do experience these things as "mind pollution". On the other hand, I'd be happy to watch ads for Google, Apple, books, local restaurants, good movies, and good beer.

Whoever figures out how to apply Permission Marketing to mainstream advertising is going to make a lot of money, and will make the world a better place.

jon_dahlon Etacts (YC W10) releases first implementation of Gmail OAuth for IMAP

This is a big deal. I'm not going to share my Gmail password with anyone (except my wife, maybe) - which was too bad, because Etacts is a really useful service. Now I'm able to sign up without giving them my password. Hopefully other mail providers will do the same thing.

jon_dahlon I wonder if this will work - Roger Ebert on website monetization.

The bigger problem, I think, is not being able to control costs. I'd rather pay $12/month for Github than $0.02 per commit, for fear that I'd have a really productive month and end up with a bill for $200.

jon_dahlon I was the one who came forward about the Macbook Air

LF: No emails from Jason were in any way involved in the making of this story. Nothing was spoken about, reprinted, or transmitted by me in any way.

JC: Bad on me for sending this to Loren. I honestly didn't even read the whole thing... I was like "oh here is an email from the dude who got extorted cool... " I actually didn't think it was that big of deal.

jon_dahlon I was the one who came forward about the Macbook Air

And if down-voting should have a purpose ... then it should definitely be for filtering out people not in HN's demographic.

That might be true for people who want to use HN to talk about politics or religion, but Jason is definitely in our demographic. He's a web startup founder, whether or not his startup sucks.

jon_dahlon I was the one who came forward about the Macbook Air

I look at HN voting in the same way. If you upvote what you agree with and downvote what you don't, you end up with Reddit, where "lolz your mom" gets +12 and reasoned disagreement ends up -30.

I actually end up upvoting a lot of <1 point comments, even ones I disagree with. If the comment is reasonably coherent and not trolling, it usually shouldn't be below 1.

jon_dahlon The Decline of the English Department

put my future outside of my own hands

Unless you're going on for further schooling, grades don't matter at all. Employers certainly don't look at them. Study what you love and work hard, no matter the grades.

jon_dahlon 200 years after his birth, Chopin remains a key composer

I resonate with most of your list, especially Bach and late Beethoven quartets. But I don't listen to much Chopin. Any recommendations?

jon_dahlon Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of Internet video

Depends if both codecs need to be implemented by every site. If Flash or HTML 5 supported both, content owners would be able to choose one or the other.

jon_dahlon Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of Internet video

This is probably the best analysis of the VP8 situation I've read. One takeaway: if Google wants to make VP8 ubiquitous on the web, it probably could (by leveraging YouTube), but that wouldn't kill H.264. It would more likely set up two competing codecs, which would be good for everyone except the patent holders.

jon_dahlon 5 million Dropboxes

The good news for video pirates is:

-- Every time a video is encoded, it hashes differently. So a studio could find a torrented file and find people downloaded that exact copy, but they couldn't just ask for every copy of a show.

-- If this became a problem, you could toss some random metadata on a file and it would hash differently. Or zip a file/program with a text file containing a guid. Etc.

jon_dahlon H.264 to Remain Fee-Less for Free Internet Video Through 2016 (via DF)

No hands-on experience, but VP6 was a pretty good codec - at least XviD/DivX/MPEG-4 level, and quite a bit better than Theora. If VP8 > VP6, and it was free, then it would definitely be worth using.

jon_dahlon No, you can't do that with H.264

I don't disagree, and I'd love a free open-source video codec that compared favorably with H.264. I wouldn't be surprised if we have one soon. But we don't yet.

jon_dahlon H.264 will remain royalty-free until 2016 for free Internet content [pdf]

(For the PDF-adverse):

MPEG LA’s AVC License Will Continue Not to Charge Royalties for Internet Video that is Free to End Users

(DENVER, CO, US – 2 February 2010) – MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as Internet Broadcast AVC Video) during the next License term from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2016. Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video continue to be royalty-bearing, and royalties to apply during the next term will be announced before the end of 2010. MPEG LA's AVC Patent Portfolio License provides access to essential patent rights for the AVC/H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) digital video coding standard. In addition to Internet Broadcast AVC Video, MPEG LA’s AVC Patent Portfolio License provides coverage for devices that decode and encode AVC video, AVC video sold to end users for a fee on a title or subscription basis and free television video services. AVC video is used in set-top boxes, media player and other personal computer software, mobile devices including telephones and mobile television receivers, Blu-ray DiscTM players and recorders, Blu-ray video optical discs, game machines, personal media player devices and still and video cameras.

For more information about MPEG LA’s AVC License or to request a copy of the License, please visit http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Intro.aspx

jon_dahlon No, you can't do that with H.264

H.264 is a far superior codec to Theora. For a large site, distributing video in Theora would significantly increase bandwidth costs, and would hurt user experience. I've seen the articles that claim that the two are basically the same, but it just isn't true - you can cherry-pick cases that look close, but those cases are a minority.

That said, the world needs an open-source video codec, and I'm glad that Mozilla is taking a stand here. MPEG-LA is much more likely to offer favorable licensing terms if it doesn't have a monopoly on web video.

jon_dahlon No, you can't do that with H.264

You can license H.264, for the purpose of encoding video, for free or cheap, if your volume is modest. [1]

Whoever handles the video distribution (you or your customers) also needs to license the codec. This too is free or cheap. It could all change in the future, but who knows if that will happen.

Personally, I'd be more worried about other parts of the encoding chain. What format are you using? MP4 requires a license. What audio codec? Both AAC and MP3 require a license, and they're more expensive out of the gate. And what about decoding inputs? You need to license decoders for whatever input you accept.

[1] http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsS...

jon_dahlon Corporations Cannot Have Natural Rights… Duh

This seems like a false dilemma - either corporations are legally protected as individuals by the Bill of Rights, or they are totally unprotected. Wouldn't it make sense to treat them as something other than people, since they are not, in fact, people, and give them a separate set of protections?

To expand, corporations came into existence so that an entity other than an entity other than individuals could own property, and so that the individuals could take on risks without bankrupting themselves, right? Couldn't that be honored without treating corporations like individuals?