neoterics

Not a feature, but a mention - https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/memory-mo...

Although you can easily pay someone to drop a mention in an opinion piece.

I wish there was a better way to connect entrepreneurs of varying skills together. I am in a similar boat as you, but on the other end.

I am a marketer and at times I have ideas (for websites or apps) that I would like to get built, but since I have to pay for that and since not all ideas are going to be winners it can become an expensive proposition.

Although threads like this can be valuable since I can reach out to developers who have created a product that I see addressing a real need in the market and reach out to them to see if there is any scope to work together, but these are few and far between.

I work in the insurance industry and for them to extrapolate the average customer acquisition cost for car insurance to a renters customer is actually pretty laughable.

I would pick a third option: SojournBikeTours.com

-There would be a high likelihood of that domain name being available as opposed to buying the KEYWORD domain from a squatter for thousands.

-Having a brand or name would give it more authority and a feeling of a mom and pop store.

-It is still descriptive.

Not to mention that if you do decide to go through the KEYWORD domain route you will be competing with a lot of people that are scouting for KEYWORD domains to build spammy affiliate websites or if by any chance the website has some history and backlinks then you will be competing with people who want to snatch it to build PBNs.

This sounds intriguing, care to share any insights? Is this for Amazon?

That's awesome! Any insights on how you did marketing for this service?

I came here for my undergraduate and then went on to H-1B, but that requires you to be in a position where the company deems you valuable enough for them to spend time and money to sponsor your visa. Also with the quotas getting filled on the first few days itself, it is literally a lottery.

If you are a little flexible, I would suggest applying for immigration to Canada, the path to US would become a bit easier that way (through TN - but that has it's restrictions too).

I've been in US for more than 13 years and my future in this country is still uncertain because the Green Card process is tied to employment and takes forever, I still have a 4 to 6 year queue in front of me. In the meantime, I applied for a Permanent Resident status for Canada and just got it this past July, without ever having stepped into that country! My plan is to work in US for sometime and move to Canada, live there for few years to get my Canadian passport and then decide where I want to live.

Nice, this is very useful, thanks!

Yep be careful, I had my account banned because of this.

I even had balance in the account which they only let me withdraw after a 6 months hold (for any chargebacks that could occur), but the account is effectively useless now.

It really sucks, but that's their draconian policy.

It is not a question of morality, it's a question of risk tolerance.

Most SEOs will advise you to err on the side of caution, but most SEOs work with large businesses that already have a lot of link equity and brand dollars thus making the point kind of moot.

People say create good content, but good luck creating the best content in the world and thinking that Google will feel obliged to rank you.

The reality is that with any venture you have to take risks, specially in the beginning, and if done smartly, buying links is a pretty balanced risk-reward scenario to kick start your property.

Lastly, in most cases a few well placed links are all you need. Once you start gaining traction you'll automatically get the motivation to create more/better content and do other forms of link building which are safer but much more time consuming.

Ha not sure if this counts, but around a year or two ago I found out a cheap source of page rank which I pointed to one of my loans lead gen website which resulted in me ranking for some fairly decent money keywords. I was making few hundred a day for a couple of months before the website was penalized by Google.

I mostly dabble in whiter-hat stuff now but the progress is slow (but hopefully it lasts longer) and make a few hundred per month.

I wonder if this applies to listening to audiobooks.

I know people generally hate long commutes but honestly if it wasn't for my commute, I would never spend 2 hours a day listening to audiobooks or reading. Now I easily finish 2 to 3 books a month due to it and I wouldn't have it any other way!

Those are the buzz words they use - "collaboration", "energy" etc. but to be honest has there ever been a study done to show if that is indeed the case? Also, I see no reason why those can't be achieved with high walled cube sections.

Our whole floor is open, we have different departments, and even then I mainly see only a single group talking/collaborating, it's not like suddenly the lawyers are more social and are breaking their cliques and interacting with the marketing teams.

With the last sentence, I am going to assume you are more outgoing and extroverted, because a noise-cancelling headphone will not do much to reduce the external stimuli that I'm receiving from my other senses.

I guess there is a certain level of coziness, safety associated when the world is not able to look at me and vice-versa and it may be hard to explain, but it is vital for me to focus 100%, and I'm sure a lot of people towards the introversion end of the spectrum feel that way.

Right, but even if the percentage of such a person is 50%, then you are only catering to half the crowd.

I realize giving an office to everyone is not the best (or the most realistic) solution, but I think a compromise can be found, some parts of our office have these large cubes where 2 to 4 people can sit, this keeps you together with your team and makes for easy interaction/collaboration, but at the same time the high walls surrounding you keep the background auditory and visual distractions to a minimum, this way there is something for both the groups of people.

Are there any studies that show the advantages of open space offices? I loathe them so much, constant distractions with people on the phone, clickyty clacks of tens of keyboards, people laughing & talking loudly etc. etc.

How do people think that this open environment can be conducive to productivity? It just blows my mind. We see such studies all the time about silence, yet most companies (especially in the Bay Area) are moving towards the open space layout. Are they just incapable of rationally thinking about this and doing it just because it's the new and cool thing in town and others are doing it?

I always end up being the most productive during holiday season (I wish our company gave us the option to work from home).

I think the act of opening an LLC on H1B is not the issue, but if you show any income/profit on it, that's when you will run into legal issues, this will also be vitally important if and when you are applying for your Green Card as you could be in muddy waters regarding your eligibility status during the time you were operating the LLC.

Also if you have even a single founder who is a US citizen or Green Card holder, you could get a relative of yours who is not in the US to be an additional founder for the LLC. This way you (your family) retains control of the company. They will need to apply for an ITIN number in this case. I can vouch for the legality of this option as we had hired a lawyer and I got my dad (non US citizen) to be a part legal owner of the US based LLC that was formed.

Also, non US citizens can get an ITIN number in place of SSN.

Just started Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach. Pretty entertaining so far.

Apparently when you're eating, your experience of flavor is about 80 percent olfactory!

Ha those evaluation website tools are worthless BTW.

I would suggest posting it on dnforum.com. There are some knowledgeable members there and they may be able to give you a better estimate on it's worth.

In SEO, all PR is good PR, the amount of links they are getting from all this news coverage could easily make them rebound from this. They need to cease these practices, disavow links and they'll be back, even stronger. Reminds me of that sunglasses website that was ranking really well even after the negative press. Obviously in that case Google had to do something drastic to save face. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?_r=...

This is nothing but a media trial. If this didn't blow up on HN, it would have been largely ignored by Google and they would have just gotten away with a slap on the wrist.

Google likes to do this to send a message, but the funny thing is they do this to ACT like it doesn't matter who is breaking their guidelines, could be Fortune 500 or even Google itself, they will penalize you.

But the reality is that in each and every case, once the media moves on to the next shiny thing, the penalties were reversed:

http://searchengineland.com/interflora-gets-google-rankings-... http://searchengineland.com/90-days-later-google-lets-j-c-pe... http://searchengineland.com/google-chromes-paid-link-penalty...

Spamming and grey hat SEO practices are like speeding, everyone does it, but only a few get caught.

Wow, these companies are really overdoing their minimalist design nowadays.

You know what's more depressing when I read the Cochrane summaries about health studies...most of the medicines and treatments are no better than placebos!

Doesn't the Cochrane Institute already do something similar?

They perform meta analysis of studies and talk about the validity of their statistical methods. http://summaries.cochrane.org/

Read about it in the book Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.

Your site may be banned since it is not in the index, I would file a reconsideration request http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...