"You can win 6, 12 or 24 months of membership to AiGameDev.com PREMIUM if you place third, second and first in the contest respectively. We'll also provide any single person team that ranks higher than our official bot three months of AiGameDev.com PLUS — our brand-new part of the site that launched last week."
he must be excited. until google puts out non-trivial problem sets and offers non-trivial prizes i'll save my upvotes and cycles.
i'm still surprised you haven't ceded admin rights to the HN facebook group to PG. have you asked him about it? how is your facebook group squatting any different than prateek's hackernews.in (now hackerstreet.in) debacle? you're leveraging someone elses brand for your own personal gain ("look at me, i'm the hackernews group facebook admin. i approve or reject members to my group at my discretion.")
a) I actually don't want to have to approve/reject people. Facebook forces me too. I clicked 2,000 approve buttons on day one.
b) pg doesn't have facebook. he and anyone who knows me, knows I would cede admin rights.
c) I'm not leveraging it for my own personal brand, it's a Facebook group. I get no personal benefit out of it. I love the community here and set it up as a benefit to everyone else.
If you have any other questions or quarrels about this, please email me: j@jasonlbaptiste.com. This thread or any on HN isn't the place for this.
what about your HN experience has made you feel that the community here would not welcome india-related discussions?
i would love to hear about the issues, projects, and things in general that startup founders, hackers, techies, and tinkerers around the world have to deal with.
why slice by region?
as i see it you're segmenting across the wrong vertical. look at the stackexchange model: are they spinning off "stack exchange: china"/"stack exchange: india"? -no, its stack exchange: physics, stack exchange: math, etc. they're differentiating based on general subject matter. is that model something that could be replicated in the context of "all things hacker"? sure (hardware, software, gadgets, networking, cracking, blackhat/whitehat, security, etc). would it succeed? who knows.
Stuff like maths, programming and physics are pretty universal. A problem in maths is a problem everywhere.
However things like payment gateways, local events, feedback on startups focused on Indian markets are not very global and may not interest a large majority of hackers here.
I never implied HN will not welcome such discussions or disapprove of it. I just feel (as others do too) that its hard for these discussions to get enough visibility here (for the reasons mentioned above).
I don't think anyone here has any issues with you creating a site for the Indian community, I think most people disagree with your use of "Hacker News". Why don't you just create a site, call it something else and link to it from here? That's probably the better approach
I think your argument about visibility is valid. Personally though I would rather see a /india added than a fork of the community here... and ultimately I think we would all benefit more from collective engagement (and perhaps some "technological adaptation"-- a la code pushes from pg/contribs) rather than divisive isolation (HN is niche enough already)
"However things like payment gateways, local events, feedback on startups focused on Indian markets are not very global and may not interest a large majority of hackers here."
I personally would love to read articles or posts on payment gateways, how they differ region by region, who controls what market, major players, how their systems work, how their businesses and pricing schemes work, highlights of their unique adaptations, or things certain providers are doing that set them apart or allow them to succeed in their particular market.
I think that's exactly the sort of discourse that should be taking place here; "what's hot in silicon valley" is great --and we get plenty of that-- but broader discussions on things like opportunities in emerging and rapidly growing markets should as well.
I think there are genuine needs for something like HNI. For instance there was a thread there about good quiet coffee shops for hacking. Its very India specific and I would know the frustration where that thread comes from. I do not think that such threads would be very well received here at HN, in the sense that it is unlikely to float up to the front page.
Its the notion of helping oneself to the brand without earning it in anyway that I find disagreeable.
IMO, this new site could be helpful for the 'Startup Ecosystem' in India.
HN community has been absolutely wonderful all these years, but for startups every geographical region brings in its own set of challenges. If we need to spur on the innovation and startup culture in India, we would have to connect and help each other out whenever required.
I never knew about some of these startups and especially who are the folks behind it. This thread would obviously have got lost had it been posted here.
I see the new site's value in setting up a platform for collaboration amongst hackers/entrepreneurs of India. It cannot replace HN for me, but can be a useful add-on forum.
i've been working on an extended digital version of hackermonthly that i should mention here for all you HM subscribers.
it's a 100% digital interactive magazine (click through it!) that on a daily basis takes the 30 "most interesting" posts from hackernews and puts them all on a single "front page".
as a bonus i've included not just a few dozen comments but HUNDREDS of comments (for your reading pleasure). the "front page" subscription service costs only $.99 a month and gives you a daily "front page" in a digital, interactive, and browser-friendly format (ipad & kindle too!). i've also put together a "more page" subscription service that gives you access to not just the top 30 stories but ALL STORIES -- in 30 page increments.
if you act now, each additional 30-story "More" page can be accessed for the ridiculously low price of $.25/page.
but that's not all. if you're a student and respond to this post in the next 30 minutes, you'll get daily access to not just the "front page", not just a "more" page, but EVERY PAGE in the entire hackernoobs archive for just $1.99/month.
for me the key has been to develop a surgical/tactical approach to knowledge acquisition. whereas in school it's important to read the textbooks cover to cover, after having established a solid foundation in the fundamentals of computing and language my approach now is to read only exactly what it is i need to read to solve the problem at hand.
what niche? the niche for online ticket purchasers who prefer gantt-style interfaces? the niche describing the set of customers who rely on a single provider (orbitz.com) for their ticket-purchase decisioning data?
"in a highly monetizeable market"
i'd love see your CAC, CR/CRR, AMPU/AMPC, etc breakdown for the online air ticket space.
"Things are looking good for the team at Hipmunk."
when your only competitive advantage is a gantt-style interface, your outlook is not often described as "looking good".
i wouldn't consider a large base of online fanboys to be a significant competitive advantage in an industry where your competitors are 10 years established and have revenues in the billions of dollars.
"it's a great opportunity for Chris"
in the sense that it's probably better than staying at conde? --sure. in the sense that it will likely result in a significant payout down the road? --again, that's debatable.
Startups are not exactly the sum of their current business frozen in amber. For example, at the moment they're tied at the hip to Orbitz and get very, very little of the value created by a ticket purchase. I bought a roundtrip to DC with them for ~$300, and they probably saw $3 or so from that. However. If they prove in micro-scale that people buy more tickets through their interface than the interface of competing providers, then the carriers have a huge, huge incentive to deal with them directly and cut Orbitz out of the loop. And then its like "Hey, we're 1% more efficient than the current leader of a multi-billion dollar market which has no switching costs." I wouldn't regret being in that situation, because there is a range of predictable next actions and almost all of them result in good stuff for the founders.
And if they can't sell tickets with all the gnarly fulfillment and credit card processing done by Orbitz, great. Learn the interface paradigm doesn't add value now before you spend several million on building out the company to support it. Their core source of business risk is the hypothesis that demand is not extrinsic: that you can increase the number of tickets sold by making the process suck less. (The working hypothesis in the travel industry is that the economy offers exactly X trips per year, X is both unknowable and cannot be altered, and marketing/pricing merely distribute X among the various providers. This is what the experts think. If the experts are wrong, Hipmunk walks away with money hats. If the experts are right, they're not necessarily sunk.)
i wouldn't consider a large base of online fanboys to be a significant competitive advantag
I'd consider that virtually a license to print money in a high-value vertical with an SEO that knows what they're doing.
Wow. That is the most mean-spirited thing I've read about a new startup in a long time. I also bet it turns out spectacularly wrong and deserves to be preserved in a glass case somewhere.
Come to think of it, someone should collect the worst comments like this for posterity. It would help immunize new founders to see how the predictive value of these things is zero.
> to see how the predictive value of these things is zero
Just because the response was blunt doesn't mean it wasn't well-founded. I would actually -love- to hear the dirty internals of Hipmunk, the best you'll get out of Techcrunch is a sugar-coated hype story detailing how nice their house is.
>i wouldn't consider a large base of online fanboys to be a significant competitive advantage in an industry where your competitors are 10 years established and have revenues in the billions of dollars.
And who would have thought launching a search engine in 1998 would have paid off?
The entrenched travel sites are established, but painful. If Hipmunk can add a few more features and further refine their site, they can easily claim a chunk of market share.
I'm not sure what their funding model is, but they might try looking at advertising a lot more than they did with Reddit. Look what it did for Priceline, travelocity, etc.
what's to keep you from going live right now?
credit's cheap.
max out a credit card?
trade on margin?
you really have no access to capital? --or you do but you'd rather use someone elses?
pivot?
i GUARANTEE you that people are already trading based on twitter data. i doubt you're really as bad off as you think.
..or maybe you are. yes. actually, your position is hopeless. might as well go open source with it now. sourceforge link pls?
having only myself to feed i'd be concerned about the quantities of food per container. being obliged to consume the 236 servings of eggs after opening one of the 6 cans in that set would be a tall order.
i've always understood "ramen profitable" to be a figure of speech. does anyone seriously eat that filth?
i think a real hacker would be aware of their body and its various biological processes ("know thyself" in a sense), and know that putting crap like that into your "human experience system" is foolishness regardless of your budget or time constraints. i work 12-14 hour a day 6 days (minimum) a week and still cook for myself.
when my budget was tight my crock pot was my best friend. dried beans, frozen veggies, minimal cheap starches, cheap fresh fruits, onions, garlic, canned tuna/cheap lean meat, a few cans of seasoning and some olive oil were still under $100/month.
nowadays i eat like a king for $400/month and i'm eating the sort of meals i'd have to pay $20+ a plate for at a restaurant. if you're looking to cut your budget learn to cook. it's easy. it's a process-- optimize it. takes me 10 minutes. dont eat filth. crap in -> crap out.. neglect your body and live with the consequences. until we can grow replacements or figure out how to preserve them indefinitely, it's foolishness.
he must be excited. until google puts out non-trivial problem sets and offers non-trivial prizes i'll save my upvotes and cycles.