News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

mbijon

Re:Tech is moving too fast for me: I'm out. on Wednesday June 25, 2014 @09:43PM (#7947736)
Focus and time management.

Regardless of whether you're an engineer, founder, sales/account exec, or any other role, if you can't allocate time to important tasks, work them hard and then break away when other things come up (including time away for lunch or to take a thinking walk) then you won't be working at a top-level.

Cloudflare's plans that include DDoS protection are as good or better than typical hosting resellers. May not know enough about your site to make the decisions a good datacenter team could though. On the up-side Cloudflare really is there 24/7.

Unfortunately the advanced DDoS support is only in their upper $$ plans. Might be worth it to keep your site revenue going though.

I'll add another Toshiba support horror-story. It's why I haven't even looked at Toshiba products in 2-3 years:

My work laptop (supplied by employer) was a Toshiba and had a 1-year warranty. After about 10-11 months of using it, the DVD drive stopped working. Toshiba's warranty support was typical ship-to-depot, so IT pulled the drive and sent the laptop off for repairs. I wouldn't ordinarily care about a laptop our for repair, but IT supplied me with a temporary machine that was at least a generation back (ie: slow and heavy).

IT got a message that except that my machine had been received at the depot but heard nothing else for weeks and weeks after. By the time I'd bugged a tech at my company enough to contact them the warranty had lapsed ... and Toshiba refused to service the machine.

Toshiba refused to service it for several more weeks. I finally took over contacting support from the IT tech, and got the machine serviced after a half-dozen (long hold-time) calls. But for the amount of time the IT dept & me spent getting an optical drive fixed our company could have paid for two new machines.

Re:Show HN: Hashtagtee.me – A weekend attempt at passive income on Saturday November 09, 2013 @07:26PM (#6704340)
Yes, and that's your biggest risk.

Tried a niche, online T shop with a friend years ago (before Spreadshirt existed). We worked with a local T shop at first but their minimums were a drag. A big T shop in a lower income town about 100 miles from us (we were in Santa Monica) agreed to waive minimums and do drop shipping.

Problem ended up being quality we or the shop couldn't consistently control. It was great for weeks, then bad for a batch, then good again.

Returns and re-shipping costs due to low quality finally killed us.

Re:Bitcoin: The Cyberpunk Cryptocurrency on Friday March 29, 2013 @03:32PM (#5462579)
The first 60'ish slides are evidence supporting why inflation predicates cultural breakdowns, why gold has become a standard, and why a crypto currency offers advantages to gold.

For the Bitcoin-related parts of this presentation, jump to slide #66 (or #62 if you don't know the history of Bitcoin, but then why are you on HN).

Re:Ask HN: What unwanted domain names are you sitting on? on Sunday January 06, 2013 @07:12PM (#5018416)
localinbox.com boostr.com
Re:Show HN: placezombies.com on Monday April 23, 2012 @06:50PM (#3881395)
Zombies?

Where are the ninjas?!? That's right, you can't see the ninjas coming.

Re:GoFlow: a DIY tDCS brain-boosting kit on Friday March 09, 2012 @06:13PM (#3686396)
Why isn't this a Kickstarter project yet?

Forget about sign-ups, this is well enough organized to attract pre-purchases (plus I want one sooner).

Re:Ask HN: Should I fix something that is still profitable? on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @12:58PM (#3378394)
...this isn't ideal. But with $500k/year, you can possibly consider a money-at-problem solution.

(Hiring a good ops manager is its own problem, however)

Re:Ask HN: Should I fix something that is still profitable? on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @12:56PM (#3378383)
How do you think he would react if you hired an operations manager or director, who was responsible for tasking him with work?

This would free your time up to grow profits, help keep him productive, and also protect the friendship by having someone else evaluate him.

There aren't many stand-alone ORMs with last-gen frameworks, but they're increasingly important for noSQL. Would you add an ORM category?

Also, you could avoid the spatial UI problems nesting may cause if there's a tooltip with meta data & links on rollover.

Re:Ask HN: Am I getting a fair deal? on Saturday September 03, 2011 @05:41AM (#2956973)
It sounds like you're trying to talk yourself into this. Consider other options. Have you been interviewing for other positions actively (sounds like no, devs are very in-demand)? Will your current employer counter-offer (though there's nothing to counter here except a ~67% decrease)?

Another thing to consider is whether you'll ever be subject to US taxes. Unless this is a non-elective deferral you could face stiff penalties: * http://www.irs.gov/retirement/article/0,,id=186222,00.html

Re:Ask HN: Is Your Startup a Side Project or Full Time? on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @07:19PM (#2843652)
My side project is full-time (40+ hours/week on lunarmods.com) for the last 6-months, but I still do part-time freelance work to pay about half the bills.
Re:High Traffic Content Site - Who to sell to? on Tuesday August 02, 2011 @01:51PM (#2838020)
Your valuation multiple (ie: 3x annual revs) is going to vary widely for a content site. @pitchups makes a good point about profits being used instead of revs, especially if you're buying a lot of traffic.

The reason multiples are low for content sites is that content needs to have a constant rate of production to maintain much/any revenue. Non-professional service businesses (like carpet cleaning, not like accounting) have the same issue & many sell for 0.5-1x annual revs. You won't be quite as bad off though, since you should have a much higher margin than a carpet cleaning biz.

Some things that might help you attract a higher multiple: membership site with frequent logins, high growth-rate (ie: you discovered the right niche or marketing), or advertiser contacts (like direct advertiser or agency buyers, instead of revs being run-of-site or AdSense).

If you don't have any of the above going for you, then you'll have a hard time finding 3x.

Re:Ask HN: any good alternatives to Pivotal Tracker? on Monday August 01, 2011 @08:33PM (#2835173)
It sounds like you really want a free system. Redmine is a bit ugly, but it's the best free system I've used to track agile dev & it's stable.