Honestly the reason I wrote the post wasn't to advertise the sites or brag about the money (which isn't all that much to brag about anyway).

I originally started the blog with the goal of focusing on these type of side projects, whether they are mine or not. Check out the original mission statement: http://web.archive.org/web/20070224000551/www.pseudocoder.co...

I'd since gotten away from that, but it's something that still interests me. I posted this because I wanted to be transparent with my sites and hoped it would inspire others to do the same.

As for people copying the sites...go nuts. Enjoy the long nights and dashed dreams...I know I did.

This is Hacker News, you are free to do that. It inspires us actually.

This is why I go back to Hacker News everytime. I list the reasons again: 1) Because bunch of smart guys hang over here. 2) There's just so much to learn especially on starting a startup, this is one topic that I love because it teaches us something. 3) Because of PG.

And I think this topic teaches everyone of us something worth posting here in HN.

To be honest, I think that ideas on their own are worthless. Its the sweat that needs to go into building something that is a real business that is the difficult part. I agree that you might think that people would want to clone it, but cloning something alone does not guarantee any kind of success. There are hundreds of examples of sites that do very well, where other people have tried to emulate them only to fail. Personally I put it down to a lack of passion on the cloners - its not really their 'baby'. They've not agonized over what to create, how to create it and this probably makes (part of) the difference between success and failure.

Personally I often find it inspiring when people do discuss how much their startup makes. Inspiring on the "I could do it too" scale and sometimes there are good lessons in these stories - not so much this one I would hasten to admit!

Free publicity? I had never heard of RSSTalker - until now...

Its one thing to say 'rate my startup', but to say 'look how much I'm making' is something totally different.

The latter will probably generate considerably more interest?

I notice that ending your statement with a question mark seems to help in avoiding downvotes?

Actually this was a big feature of the new PC intonation that appeared in the late 80s and early 90s. Undergrads started saying declarative sentences with interrogative intonation-- as if they were actually questions. This allowed one to disclaim some responsibility for whatever one was saying, and yet at the same time to compel a response from the other person.

This way of speaking has now passed down to high school students and isn't associated with any specific sort of ideas (unless you count the empty set as a type of idea), but it was originally quite a nasty piece of conversational jiujitsu.

Interesting, but I would like to point out that there is also the "rhetoric question" which I think predates the PC movement.

Rhetorical questions are still phrased as questions. It was "declarative sentence structure married to a question mark" that I was joking about. HN didn't think it was funny, clearly. :)

I for one am thankful that you have saved me from "question mark creep" (hopefully).

Wow, really? What else made/makes up the PC intonation?

Since we're clarifying things, I believe you meant "jujutsu" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujutsu ).

Imagine how a posh, and possibly a bit poncey Englishman might say "who", and you should be close to the sound of the U's in "jujutsu". The first U is elongated, and the rest are short.