The load balancer could keep track of how long requests for a specific path tend to take, and what servers are currently handling and use that information to be smarter about routing requests. I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if that already exists in things like haproxy or nginx.
There\u2019s issues where people stuff data into the URL, like ids or keywords for SEO. But that\u2019s possible to workaround."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Random Load Balancing Is Unevenly Distributed"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.evanjones.ca/random-load-balancing-is-uneven.html"}},"_tags":["comment","author_slashdev","story_37308469"],"author":"slashdev","comment_text":"The client doesn\u2019t know anything about your request implementation, so sending that via a header doesn\u2019t make sense, unless it\u2019s added by some middleware that does.
The load balancer could keep track of how long requests for a specific path tend to take, and what servers are currently handling and use that information to be smarter about routing requests. I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if that already exists in things like haproxy or nginx.
There\u2019s issues where people stuff data into the URL, like ids or keywords for SEO. But that\u2019s possible to workaround.","created_at":"2023-08-31T14:25:11Z","created_at_i":1693491911,"objectID":"37337637","parent_id":37337575,"story_id":37308469,"story_title":"Random Load Balancing Is Unevenly Distributed","story_url":"https://www.evanjones.ca/random-load-balancing-is-uneven.html","updated_at":"2024-09-20T15:00:26Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jmstfv"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"I run a small, independent software company. First timer.
> I estimate 2 weeks
It is going to take longer than 2 weeks. And it is going be harder than you think.
Building a product is only the beginning. You will have to write copy, find customers, implement billing and charge folks, offer support, do maintenance, build features, again find customers, talk to them, again build features, tweak copy, handle legal/accounting, combat fraud, ride emotional rollercoaster, etc... Not to scare you off or anything, but writing code is only one part of building a software business.
Don't start before you have (rough) answers to these questions:
* Who is it for? No, it can't be for anyone. It can't be for a $LARGE_GROUP_OF_PEOPLE either ("any only service that is focused on user privacy, whistle blowing sites, vpn services").
* What problem does it solve? Do you know anyone who would pay for that?
* How are you going to reach potential customers? This is more important than you think it is. Assuming that you have a product that solves a real problem for a particular demographics (and they are willing to pay for it), you will have to find distribution channels that consistently send traffic your way. It can be SEO (takes a long time), blogging + newsletter(s) (takes a long time), direct sales (?!), marketplaces, paid acquisition (takes skills & budget), affiliates (you have to have an existing userbase for this to work), etc.
> I'm not sure if I should do it or if there's an actual market for it, how can I tell without giving too much away? There is no product like this that I can compare against (maybe because its not that important?)
Competition is a good proxy that there is money to be made in the market. I believe that true validation is people paying for what you have built. You can gather rough signals, but these signals can only take you that far: https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-a...
Build it, and they will do absolutely nothing. I learned it the hard way."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Should I Build This?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_jmstfv","story_21878824"],"author":"jmstfv","children":[21880353],"comment_text":"I run a small, independent software company. First timer.
> I estimate 2 weeks
It is going to take longer than 2 weeks. And it is going be harder than you think.
Building a product is only the beginning. You will have to write copy, find customers, implement billing and charge folks, offer support, do maintenance, build features, again find customers, talk to them, again build features, tweak copy, handle legal/accounting, combat fraud, ride emotional rollercoaster, etc... Not to scare you off or anything, but writing code is only one part of building a software business.
Don't start before you have (rough) answers to these questions:
* Who is it for? No, it can't be for anyone. It can't be for a $LARGE_GROUP_OF_PEOPLE either ("any only service that is focused on user privacy, whistle blowing sites, vpn services").
* What problem does it solve? Do you know anyone who would pay for that?
* How are you going to reach potential customers? This is more important than you think it is. Assuming that you have a product that solves a real problem for a particular demographics (and they are willing to pay for it), you will have to find distribution channels that consistently send traffic your way. It can be SEO (takes a long time), blogging + newsletter(s) (takes a long time), direct sales (?!), marketplaces, paid acquisition (takes skills & budget), affiliates (you have to have an existing userbase for this to work), etc.
> I'm not sure if I should do it or if there's an actual market for it, how can I tell without giving too much away? There is no product like this that I can compare against (maybe because its not that important?)
Competition is a good proxy that there is money to be made in the market. I believe that true validation is people paying for what you have built. You can gather rough signals, but these signals can only take you that far: https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-a...
Build it, and they will do absolutely nothing. I learned it the hard way.","created_at":"2019-12-25T17:32:16Z","created_at_i":1577295136,"objectID":"21879480","parent_id":21878824,"story_id":21878824,"story_title":"Ask HN: Should I Build This?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T05:23:51Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"davemel37"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"I think the Biggest mistake people make is asking, "does it work" about any marketing strategy!
The question itself begs for an anecdotal answer that is completely irrelevant to your circumstances...
More importantly, the amount of people who have given up on strategies too soon or because it wasnt done in a way to provide empirical evidence, is staggering... and the amount of misinformation that flows out into the wild built on those flawed premises is really problematic for those without the context of your situation and the relative context of the situation where those opinions were formed.
The second problem is that opportunity cost is rarely measured by marketers. The third problem is that your resource allocation relative to your objectives is arguably more important than any other factor or opinion about a strategy.
Marketing decisions should be made in the context of your resources, goals, and your broader marketing mix.
The idea that you can evaluate a specific strategy and measure its return in a Silo without considering the opportunity costs and other available strategies relative to your specific resource limitations is very dangerous and needs to be killed off!
The ideal scenario is to optimize to cashflow relative to lifetime value and time value of money...or get as close as possible to this...and choose strategies within the context of this calculation.
You want an SEO strategy? First, figure out if your audience is there and the cost to reach them with paid search and how long it takes to turn into cashflow and the lifetime value of that customer...than evaluate the costs to optimize to rank for that keyword, and how long it will take, than look at your other resources and strategies relative to the likely costs and returns and time to get cash returned relative to those strategies and decide if its worth investing in ranking there...
Once you identify a proven keyword and have context for the cost and value and time and oppirtunity costs, than figure out how to rank for that keyword... maybe you buy a site that is already ranking. Maybe you advertise on sites already ranking. Maybe you think about the user and find a way to create a resource that Google will want to rank because of its utility... and than create empirical tests to measure progress and than you invest !!!
------\nThe shortcut SEO strategy i like is to ask yourself, what resource can I create for my industry that is not online but would offer so much utility that google has no choice but to optimize their algorithms to rank my resource... like wayne gretzky, go where the puck will be in the future...
When is SEO is done right, its Google trying to optimize its algorithms to rank your content, not vice versa!
Just my two cents."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["does","seo","work"],"value":"Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_davemel37","story_16858053"],"author":"davemel37","comment_text":"I think the Biggest mistake people make is asking, "does it work" about any marketing strategy!
The question itself begs for an anecdotal answer that is completely irrelevant to your circumstances...
More importantly, the amount of people who have given up on strategies too soon or because it wasnt done in a way to provide empirical evidence, is staggering... and the amount of misinformation that flows out into the wild built on those flawed premises is really problematic for those without the context of your situation and the relative context of the situation where those opinions were formed.
The second problem is that opportunity cost is rarely measured by marketers. The third problem is that your resource allocation relative to your objectives is arguably more important than any other factor or opinion about a strategy.
Marketing decisions should be made in the context of your resources, goals, and your broader marketing mix.
The idea that you can evaluate a specific strategy and measure its return in a Silo without considering the opportunity costs and other available strategies relative to your specific resource limitations is very dangerous and needs to be killed off!
The ideal scenario is to optimize to cashflow relative to lifetime value and time value of money...or get as close as possible to this...and choose strategies within the context of this calculation.
You want an SEO strategy? First, figure out if your audience is there and the cost to reach them with paid search and how long it takes to turn into cashflow and the lifetime value of that customer...than evaluate the costs to optimize to rank for that keyword, and how long it will take, than look at your other resources and strategies relative to the likely costs and returns and time to get cash returned relative to those strategies and decide if its worth investing in ranking there...
Once you identify a proven keyword and have context for the cost and value and time and oppirtunity costs, than figure out how to rank for that keyword... maybe you buy a site that is already ranking. Maybe you advertise on sites already ranking. Maybe you think about the user and find a way to create a resource that Google will want to rank because of its utility... and than create empirical tests to measure progress and than you invest !!!
------\nThe shortcut SEO strategy i like is to ask yourself, what resource can I create for my industry that is not online but would offer so much utility that google has no choice but to optimize their algorithms to rank my resource... like wayne gretzky, go where the puck will be in the future...
When is SEO is done right, its Google trying to optimize its algorithms to rank your content, not vice versa!
Just my two cents.","created_at":"2018-04-17T19:36:42Z","created_at_i":1523993802,"objectID":"16861574","parent_id":16858053,"story_id":16858053,"story_title":"Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T02:22:00Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"mcknz"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"One thing I did was check out members of local tech community groups -- googled the names and found something about them (say an article/post they wrote). Then I would write a personal email with some comments directed to that person specifically, with a quick note about me and how I might be able to help them. It's time consuming but does get responses if you choose people carefully, and don't spam.
I also did pro/low bono work for organizations with lots of members -- it's a good way to get your name out b/c you're identified as a potential local resource.
Most people/orgs that I work for want fixed pricing -- I handle that by writing up an estimate that breaks down each task/feature, how long it takes to implement that feature, and my hourly rate. That way you still give them a set price, but you get the hourly rate in their heads, so you have a basis for pricing changes/enhancements. You can also give first-time clients a \"first project\" discount -- that way they are more inclined to hire you, but also have an idea how much your \"real\" price is for future work. If you are really good, they will hire you again.
For an hourly rate I think the advice already posted is good -- I started low and bumped up my rate with each new client. I typically charge for-profit companies more than individuals/non-profits. If you think your rate is too high, it's probably right on target. :) You can always renegotiate down if the rate is a dealbreaker, but you can't renegotiate up.
Scope creep can kill you -- in my estimate I write as specifically as possible what I will do (based on requirements discussions), and more importantly what I WILL NOT do. You can't catch everything, but that goes a long way toward resolving conflicts. When there's a material change/addition, you can then price that new task accordingly. People will take advantage of you if they can get changes/additions for free.
A good web presence is important -- I get calls from out of the blue from people who have seen my web site, and those have turned into long-term relationships. Do some SEO to make sure you're visible to your local area."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["how"],"value":"Ask HN: How do I get started freelancing?"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["comment","author_mcknz","story_1419917"],"author":"mcknz","comment_text":"One thing I did was check out members of local tech community groups -- googled the names and found something about them (say an article/post they wrote). Then I would write a personal email with some comments directed to that person specifically, with a quick note about me and how I might be able to help them. It's time consuming but does get responses if you choose people carefully, and don't spam.
I also did pro/low bono work for organizations with lots of members -- it's a good way to get your name out b/c you're identified as a potential local resource.
Most people/orgs that I work for want fixed pricing -- I handle that by writing up an estimate that breaks down each task/feature, how long it takes to implement that feature, and my hourly rate. That way you still give them a set price, but you get the hourly rate in their heads, so you have a basis for pricing changes/enhancements. You can also give first-time clients a \"first project\" discount -- that way they are more inclined to hire you, but also have an idea how much your \"real\" price is for future work. If you are really good, they will hire you again.
For an hourly rate I think the advice already posted is good -- I started low and bumped up my rate with each new client. I typically charge for-profit companies more than individuals/non-profits. If you think your rate is too high, it's probably right on target. :) You can always renegotiate down if the rate is a dealbreaker, but you can't renegotiate up.
Scope creep can kill you -- in my estimate I write as specifically as possible what I will do (based on requirements discussions), and more importantly what I WILL NOT do. You can't catch everything, but that goes a long way toward resolving conflicts. When there's a material change/addition, you can then price that new task accordingly. People will take advantage of you if they can get changes/additions for free.
A good web presence is important -- I get calls from out of the blue from people who have seen my web site, and those have turned into long-term relationships. Do some SEO to make sure you're visible to your local area.","created_at":"2010-06-10T16:08:53Z","created_at_i":1276186133,"objectID":"1420539","parent_id":1419917,"story_id":1419917,"story_title":"Ask HN: How do I get started freelancing?","story_url":"","updated_at":"2024-09-19T17:00:35Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"taskfireai"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"Title:\n Show HN: TaskFire -- Pay-per-task AI agents that do actual work (not another chatbot)
Body:\n\n Hey HN,\n\n I built TaskFire (https://taskfire.ai) because I got tired of paying $20-200/month for AI tools I used twice. The subscription model for AI tooling is broken -- you're paying for access when you should be paying for output.\n\n TaskFire is a marketplace of 10 AI agents, each built to do one specific job well. You describe the task, pay $1.99-$7.99, and get structured results in minutes. No subscription. No chat interface. No prompt engineering.\n\n The agents:\n\n - Competitive Intelligence ($7.99) -- deep analysis of a competitor's positioning, pricing, tech stack, traffic, and weaknesses\n - Email Outreach Writer ($6.99) -- researches a prospect and writes personalized cold emails with multiple variants\n - SEO Content Brief ($5.99) -- analyzes top-ranking pages and builds a content brief with structure, keywords, and angle\n - Landing Page Roast ($4.99) -- tears apart your landing page with specific, actionable feedback\n - MCP Ecosystem Monitor ($4.99) -- tracks the Model Context Protocol ecosystem for new servers, patterns, and opportunities\n - HN Trend Scanner ($3.99) -- analyzes Hacker News for emerging trends in a given domain\n - GitHub Repo Analyzer ($2.99) -- evaluates repo health, code quality, activity, and community signals\n - CSV Data Cleaner ($2.99) -- cleans messy CSVs: deduplication, normalization, type fixing, validation\n - Tech Stack Analyzer ($1.99) -- detects what technologies a website is running\n - API Health Checker ($1.99) -- tests API endpoints for response times, error rates, SSL, and common issues\n\n What's interesting technically:\n\n The backend is Python FastAPI workers orchestrated by Inngest for durable execution. Each agent is a multi-step pipeline -- not a single LLM call. The Competitive Intelligence agent, for example, runs 6+ parallel research steps, synthesizes\n findings, then structures the output. If any step fails, Inngest retries from that step, not from scratch.\n\n Payments use Stripe's manual capture flow: we authorize the card upfront, run the agent, and only capture if we deliver results. If the agent fails, the hold is released. This felt like the right thing to do -- you shouldn't pay for a failed\n task.\n\n The frontend is Next.js with real-time progress updates via server-sent events, so you can watch the agent work through each step.\n\n I priced these based on how long they'd take a human to do manually. Competitive intelligence takes 2-3 hours of research -- $7.99 felt fair. Checking a tech stack takes 10 minutes -- $1.99.\n\n Looking for feedback on:\n - Are these the right agents? What tasks would you pay $2-8 to automate?\n - Does pay-per-task pricing make sense, or do people actually want subscriptions?\n - The cold start problem: any advice on getting the first 100 paying users?\n\n Happy to answer questions about the architecture or share what I've learned building this. Body:\n\n Hey HN,\n\n I built TaskFire (https://taskfire.ai) because I got tired of paying $20-200/month for AI tools I used twice. The subscription model for AI tooling is broken -- you're paying for access when you should be paying for output.\n\n TaskFire is a marketplace of 10 AI agents, each built to do one specific job well. You describe the task, pay $1.99-$7.99, and get structured results in minutes. No subscription. No chat interface. No prompt engineering.\n\n The agents:\n\n - Competitive Intelligence ($7.99) -- deep analysis of a competitor's positioning, pricing, tech stack, traffic, and weaknesses\n - Email Outreach Writer ($6.99) -- researches a prospect and writes personalized cold emails with multiple variants\n - SEO Content Brief ($5.99) -- analyzes top-ranking pages and builds a content brief with structure, keywords, and angle\n - Landing Page Roast ($4.99) -- tears apart your landing page with specific, actionable feedback\n - MCP Ecosystem Monitor ($4.99) -- tracks the Model Context Protocol ecosystem for new servers, patterns, and opportunities\n - HN Trend Scanner ($3.99) -- analyzes Hacker News for emerging trends in a given domain\n - GitHub Repo Analyzer ($2.99) -- evaluates repo health, code quality, activity, and community signals\n - CSV Data Cleaner ($2.99) -- cleans messy CSVs: deduplication, normalization, type fixing, validation\n - Tech Stack Analyzer ($1.99) -- detects what technologies a website is running\n - API Health Checker ($1.99) -- tests API endpoints for response times, error rates, SSL, and common issues\n\n What's interesting technically:\n\n The backend is Python FastAPI workers orchestrated by Inngest for durable execution. Each agent is a multi-step pipeline -- not a single LLM call. The Competitive Intelligence agent, for example, runs 6+ parallel research steps, synthesizes\n findings, then structures the output. If any step fails, Inngest retries from that step, not from scratch.\n\n Payments use Stripe's manual capture flow: we authorize the card upfront, run the agent, and only capture if we deliver results. If the agent fails, the hold is released. This felt like the right thing to do -- you shouldn't pay for a failed\n task.\n\n The frontend is Next.js with real-time progress updates via server-sent events, so you can watch the agent work through each step.\n\n I priced these based on how long they'd take a human to do manually. Competitive intelligence takes 2-3 hours of research -- $7.99 felt fair. Checking a tech stack takes 10 minutes -- $1.99.\n\n Looking for feedback on:\n - Are these the right agents? What tasks would you pay $2-8 to automate?\n - Does pay-per-task pricing make sense, or do people actually want subscriptions?\n - The cold start problem: any advice on getting the first 100 paying users?\n\n Happy to answer questions about the architecture or share what I've learned building this.She also is an evangelist for CSS Grid and why that should be the layout engine of choice instead of a framework.
I think a catering analogy is in order for those people that say that this basic stuff is not important and you have to take the frameworks if you work in a large team on these mythical mega projects. The analogy goes along the lines of 'can you cook for yourself' yet it doesn't really apply if you want to work in McDonalds. In a hotel kitchen that does 200 head wedding dinners clearly you need to be able to use the catering supplies and not necessarily know how to do actual cooking. I will work on the analogy, but there has to be a better response to the comments provided by people engrossed in complex build tools, frameworks and esoteric TLAs.
You are right though, and there is no reason why some vast modular behemoth of a system cannot write the proper HTML tags, e.g. aside, section, nav, figure not to mention main, header and footer with people knowing what they are doing rather than using these elements because they might be better for SEO. There is also a problem with the design process that does not put content first and takes a visual mockup as the starting point with nothing on the mockup having semantic value.
I regularly look at 'view source' to see how bad the sea of divs and class tags gets. It all goes against Google's performance recommendations yet it gets churned out by people that should know better. So long as you are with the delusion of grandeur that your website is so much more enterprisey and complex than these little things Rachel Andrews works on then you are going to stick thinking that way - pay cheque depends on it.
I think that there needs to be more of a movement like what happened with responsive design or flat design, a new thing that people understand even if they have no practical skills. The tools are all there but it requires as much unlearning as learning. Few in the industry have the circumstance to forget everything and go to proper HTML with vanilla javascript and CSS that uses grids and CSS variables. But it is a good entry point what we have now, coding for evergreen browsers, with time saving arguments that are compelling.
When I do view source and I see a couple of HTML5 tags and a sea of divs I think that the web page is by a team of people that actually do not know HTML. They have their excuses but when you look at it there is no logic to it. I got told off once for using an address tag around the copyright notice in a footer, as if I was insane. I was told to replace it with a div."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2019/01/30/html-css-and-our-vanishing-industry-entry-points/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_Theodores","story_19106922"],"author":"Theodores","comment_text":"Rachel Andrews is a great inspiration to me but the post here is kind of mid conversation, normally she emphasises document structure and accessibility.
She also is an evangelist for CSS Grid and why that should be the layout engine of choice instead of a framework.
I think a catering analogy is in order for those people that say that this basic stuff is not important and you have to take the frameworks if you work in a large team on these mythical mega projects. The analogy goes along the lines of 'can you cook for yourself' yet it doesn't really apply if you want to work in McDonalds. In a hotel kitchen that does 200 head wedding dinners clearly you need to be able to use the catering supplies and not necessarily know how to do actual cooking. I will work on the analogy, but there has to be a better response to the comments provided by people engrossed in complex build tools, frameworks and esoteric TLAs.
You are right though, and there is no reason why some vast modular behemoth of a system cannot write the proper HTML tags, e.g. aside, section, nav, figure not to mention main, header and footer with people knowing what they are doing rather than using these elements because they might be better for SEO. There is also a problem with the design process that does not put content first and takes a visual mockup as the starting point with nothing on the mockup having semantic value.
I regularly look at 'view source' to see how bad the sea of divs and class tags gets. It all goes against Google's performance recommendations yet it gets churned out by people that should know better. So long as you are with the delusion of grandeur that your website is so much more enterprisey and complex than these little things Rachel Andrews works on then you are going to stick thinking that way - pay cheque depends on it.
I think that there needs to be more of a movement like what happened with responsive design or flat design, a new thing that people understand even if they have no practical skills. The tools are all there but it requires as much unlearning as learning. Few in the industry have the circumstance to forget everything and go to proper HTML with vanilla javascript and CSS that uses grids and CSS variables. But it is a good entry point what we have now, coding for evergreen browsers, with time saving arguments that are compelling.
When I do view source and I see a couple of HTML5 tags and a sea of divs I think that the web page is by a team of people that actually do not know HTML. They have their excuses but when you look at it there is no logic to it. I got told off once for using an address tag around the copyright notice in a footer, as if I was insane. I was told to replace it with a div.","created_at":"2019-02-07T22:38:13Z","created_at_i":1549579093,"objectID":"19109340","parent_id":19108723,"story_id":19106922,"story_title":"HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points","story_url":"https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2019/01/30/html-css-and-our-vanishing-industry-entry-points/","updated_at":"2024-09-20T03:39:25Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"PaulHoule"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"The search was terrible before the AI mode was introduced. Personally my take on the enshittification of search was that it was a thing long before Doctorow came on the scene, in the late 2000s I rubbed shoulders with grey-hat and darker SEO people and by 2010 or so the people doing affiliate marketing had mostly given up on spamming the SERPs and had become well-behaved buyers of AdWords.
Since that time this blogger
has been relentless about how unfair it is so when I see people upset about how their precious posts are being hoovered up for ChatGPT I can only think \u201cJesse they are really slow on the draw, maybe ChatGPT would be better off not hovering that stuff up\u201d
But to take that hat off, AI mode works on many queries that would never have worked with the old Google. If I am having a conversation with somebody in a language I barely know I can go back and forth to make very precise replies and ask it \u201cwhy does it have \u2026 in it?\u201d and get a good answer. If I remember there was a scientific paper that came to a certain conclusion I can describe the conclusion and\u2026 get it first thing. No way that would have worked with the old google, pubmed, arXiv search\u2026
Of course, if Google didn\u2019t come out with a useful search engine based on the new tech, somebody else would have."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["to"],"value":"Ask HN: Why) are you using AI to browse the web?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_PaulHoule","story_47052525"],"author":"PaulHoule","children":[47054543],"comment_text":"The search was terrible before the AI mode was introduced. Personally my take on the enshittification of search was that it was a thing long before Doctorow came on the scene, in the late 2000s I rubbed shoulders with grey-hat and darker SEO people and by 2010 or so the people doing affiliate marketing had mostly given up on spamming the SERPs and had become well-behaved buyers of AdWords.
Since that time this blogger
has been relentless about how unfair it is so when I see people upset about how their precious posts are being hoovered up for ChatGPT I can only think \u201cJesse they are really slow on the draw, maybe ChatGPT would be better off not hovering that stuff up\u201d
But to take that hat off, AI mode works on many queries that would never have worked with the old Google. If I am having a conversation with somebody in a language I barely know I can go back and forth to make very precise replies and ask it \u201cwhy does it have \u2026 in it?\u201d and get a good answer. If I remember there was a scientific paper that came to a certain conclusion I can describe the conclusion and\u2026 get it first thing. No way that would have worked with the old google, pubmed, arXiv search\u2026
Of course, if Google didn\u2019t come out with a useful search engine based on the new tech, somebody else would have.","created_at":"2026-02-17T21:50:28Z","created_at_i":1771365028,"objectID":"47053916","parent_id":47053399,"story_id":47052525,"story_title":"Ask HN: Why) are you using AI to browse the web?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:34:41Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"throwaway_burn"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"It's a commonly heard phrase in my office.
I'm the only developer where I work, based in a [car] dealership, which is one of the franchise locations of a car dealer group which owns [more than a few] (or so) other dealerships in quite a large area of the United Kingdom. For the record, I am not writing this on company time [half an hour lunch break, although he still does this even if I AM on my lunch break]
I build websites, web apps, microsites, soon to be Android Apps and iPhone apps. I am in charge of slicing and dicing photoshop templates which we get from our designer (Who sits behind me in the same office) into HTML templates to use with Drupal, CakePHP et al. I am in charge of inputting the copy for said microsites and websites from MS Word documents, this copy is written by the \"Marketing Manager\", who currently sits behind and to the right of me. To the right of where I sit, is my boss, the son of one of the Managing Directors of this company.
Do not get the tone of this post wrong, I love my job. I love the people, I love the fact that it's only twenty minutes down the road from my house, I love that parking is provided (although, not on site, about a quarter of a mile down the road). I even love my boss, he's a good, capable man and just wants to get things done and do what's best for this company.
However, as my work load has increased over the last two years, and things have gotten more difficult for me (harder problems, taking longer to solve and a lot more thinking) my brain has gotten tired. I've become burnt out maybe three times in the last two years, and have had to take a week off in some cases just to recover from the last project. (Considering we get 20 days holiday and zero sick pay, whenever I AM actually sick, I need to take holiday or I don't get paid for those days).
Sometimes, when I have really lost focus, or a problem has just circled in my head for too long to be solved without taking a break from thinking about it, I'll browse HN or reddit, not for very long, just for about 5 or 10 minutes until my head clears. More often than not, I'll be searching for the problem I have and reading articles about it.
My boss has the tremendous habit (when he is actually in the dealership), of coming into the office and looking straight at my screen, with the now dreaded words, \"Is that work?\", usually followed by \"Come on [throwaway_burn]! Focus! Get some fucking work done!\".
Now, my boss is a very visual person. If he can't instantly see results, he assumed I'm not doing any work. I've just spend four or five weeks creating a completely bespoke front end for building car quotes based on a completely experimental Web Service API built by a car valuation service. They usually make you host an MSSQL server, and they push or replicate their data to your server so you always have an up to date set of data to build cars with. My boss decided that this wasn't the way to go, because it's quite expensive so usually a single dealer group couldn't afford it, hence why you have aggregation systems, and people have it built into their customer management systems. [The web service company] probably lets us use this system for cheap as it is so undocumented when I first started using it, and it very slow, which means I have to pull down the data and store it on a MySQL database anyway, which basically means I had to code a script to automatically get the data from their web services and store it in our database every night. There is a huge amount of data in their systems and I only pull the data for four manufacturers.
So I built the scripts. I built the front end, even though certain things weren't documented, I managed to get them to finally send me some documentation on how to use their data effectively, and as of yesterday, the site is finally complete and finished.
Needless to say, it doesn't really look like it should have taken four or five weeks of work to produce the site, considering some other sites I've done, excluding the bespoke car price quoting system have taken two days at most. In fact, the actual site only took two days to build around the drupal module I made to interface with my back end data. As far as my boss is concerned, I've been sitting on my ass browsing HN and reddit for four weeks, and then took a week and a half to complete the site once I was bored with not working.
It has come to the point where whenever he starts his rant, I put my headphones on, or I shout at him, or I get very angry and walk off for a while. I really cannot work under these conditions for very much longer, and to be honest I am really ashamed with how I am handling his rants and outbursts.
I have built so many sites, systems for publishing stock to stock aggregates, systems for publishing stock to our own websites using different data we get back from the other dealerships, loyalty systems, niche seo websites, you name it, I've done it. I have made this man and this company a lot of money, and it's cost them a little over two years of my salary, which is paltry to say the least with how much I've worked.
They even outsourced me to develop a ticketing system for a [potentially recognisable car service] company, to the tune of more than half my annual salary for four weeks work.
It's an abusive environment, regardless of the fact that it's overlooked if I come in 20 minutes late in the morning, so long as I make it up at the end.
I'm in horrible position though, I really do like my boss in every other capacity other than a boss. His lack of understanding of what it is I do, and the fact that he can't seem to a) estimate how long a project will take me, and b) realise that not all programming work is instantly visible makes me think that I am going to quit in an epic fashion of diving off the balcony head first into an R8 Spyder and break my neck on the fucking windscreen.
Therein lies the problem. Where I live, there are no jobs. Some statistics recently suggested that a snowball had a better chance of opening an ice cream shop in the deepest layer of hell than I have of getting another job.
Although I have two years experience (more than double that if you count the freelancing I have done in a non salaried position) in PHP, MySQL, HTML, Javascript, LAMP Server administration, networking, etc, there aren't enough jobs to go around the unemployed in this city, let alone some guy with no degree.
Trying to discuss this with him really isn't working. Any advice?
TL;DR: Does anyone else browse the net in work when they are having a hard time focusing, but not blatantly trying to hide it and yet get rebuked even when the only other option is to sit, knuckles dragging drooling on the keyboard whilst staring at the screen because your brain no longer works?"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["work"],"value":"Ask HN: \"Is that work?\""}},"_tags":["story","author_throwaway_burn","story_1842719","ask_hn"],"author":"throwaway_burn","children":[1842764,1842792,1842797,1842800,1842816,1842840,1842862,1842865,1842872,1842888,1842889,1842904,1842909,1842923,1842924,1842943,1842966,1842971,1842988,1842992,1842997,1843005,1843032,1843100,1843115,1843116,1843147,1843254,1843266,1843275,1843301,1843355,1843439,1843508,1843535,1843724,1843773,1844811,1845025,1845238,1845807,1852862,1852937],"created_at":"2010-10-28T13:17:17Z","created_at_i":1288271837,"num_comments":105,"objectID":"1842719","points":83,"story_id":1842719,"story_text":"It's a commonly heard phrase in my office.
I'm the only developer where I work, based in a [car] dealership, which is one of the franchise locations of a car dealer group which owns [more than a few] (or so) other dealerships in quite a large area of the United Kingdom. For the record, I am not writing this on company time [half an hour lunch break, although he still does this even if I AM on my lunch break]
I build websites, web apps, microsites, soon to be Android Apps and iPhone apps. I am in charge of slicing and dicing photoshop templates which we get from our designer (Who sits behind me in the same office) into HTML templates to use with Drupal, CakePHP et al. I am in charge of inputting the copy for said microsites and websites from MS Word documents, this copy is written by the \"Marketing Manager\", who currently sits behind and to the right of me. To the right of where I sit, is my boss, the son of one of the Managing Directors of this company.
Do not get the tone of this post wrong, I love my job. I love the people, I love the fact that it's only twenty minutes down the road from my house, I love that parking is provided (although, not on site, about a quarter of a mile down the road). I even love my boss, he's a good, capable man and just wants to get things done and do what's best for this company.
However, as my work load has increased over the last two years, and things have gotten more difficult for me (harder problems, taking longer to solve and a lot more thinking) my brain has gotten tired. I've become burnt out maybe three times in the last two years, and have had to take a week off in some cases just to recover from the last project. (Considering we get 20 days holiday and zero sick pay, whenever I AM actually sick, I need to take holiday or I don't get paid for those days).
Sometimes, when I have really lost focus, or a problem has just circled in my head for too long to be solved without taking a break from thinking about it, I'll browse HN or reddit, not for very long, just for about 5 or 10 minutes until my head clears. More often than not, I'll be searching for the problem I have and reading articles about it.
My boss has the tremendous habit (when he is actually in the dealership), of coming into the office and looking straight at my screen, with the now dreaded words, \"Is that work?\", usually followed by \"Come on [throwaway_burn]! Focus! Get some fucking work done!\".
Now, my boss is a very visual person. If he can't instantly see results, he assumed I'm not doing any work. I've just spend four or five weeks creating a completely bespoke front end for building car quotes based on a completely experimental Web Service API built by a car valuation service. They usually make you host an MSSQL server, and they push or replicate their data to your server so you always have an up to date set of data to build cars with. My boss decided that this wasn't the way to go, because it's quite expensive so usually a single dealer group couldn't afford it, hence why you have aggregation systems, and people have it built into their customer management systems. [The web service company] probably lets us use this system for cheap as it is so undocumented when I first started using it, and it very slow, which means I have to pull down the data and store it on a MySQL database anyway, which basically means I had to code a script to automatically get the data from their web services and store it in our database every night. There is a huge amount of data in their systems and I only pull the data for four manufacturers.
So I built the scripts. I built the front end, even though certain things weren't documented, I managed to get them to finally send me some documentation on how to use their data effectively, and as of yesterday, the site is finally complete and finished.
Needless to say, it doesn't really look like it should have taken four or five weeks of work to produce the site, considering some other sites I've done, excluding the bespoke car price quoting system have taken two days at most. In fact, the actual site only took two days to build around the drupal module I made to interface with my back end data. As far as my boss is concerned, I've been sitting on my ass browsing HN and reddit for four weeks, and then took a week and a half to complete the site once I was bored with not working.
It has come to the point where whenever he starts his rant, I put my headphones on, or I shout at him, or I get very angry and walk off for a while. I really cannot work under these conditions for very much longer, and to be honest I am really ashamed with how I am handling his rants and outbursts.
I have built so many sites, systems for publishing stock to stock aggregates, systems for publishing stock to our own websites using different data we get back from the other dealerships, loyalty systems, niche seo websites, you name it, I've done it. I have made this man and this company a lot of money, and it's cost them a little over two years of my salary, which is paltry to say the least with how much I've worked.
They even outsourced me to develop a ticketing system for a [potentially recognisable car service] company, to the tune of more than half my annual salary for four weeks work.
It's an abusive environment, regardless of the fact that it's overlooked if I come in 20 minutes late in the morning, so long as I make it up at the end.
I'm in horrible position though, I really do like my boss in every other capacity other than a boss. His lack of understanding of what it is I do, and the fact that he can't seem to a) estimate how long a project will take me, and b) realise that not all programming work is instantly visible makes me think that I am going to quit in an epic fashion of diving off the balcony head first into an R8 Spyder and break my neck on the fucking windscreen.
Therein lies the problem. Where I live, there are no jobs. Some statistics recently suggested that a snowball had a better chance of opening an ice cream shop in the deepest layer of hell than I have of getting another job.
Although I have two years experience (more than double that if you count the freelancing I have done in a non salaried position) in PHP, MySQL, HTML, Javascript, LAMP Server administration, networking, etc, there aren't enough jobs to go around the unemployed in this city, let alone some guy with no degree.
Trying to discuss this with him really isn't working. Any advice?
TL;DR: Does anyone else browse the net in work when they are having a hard time focusing, but not blatantly trying to hide it and yet get rebuked even when the only other option is to sit, knuckles dragging drooling on the keyboard whilst staring at the screen because your brain no longer works?","title":"Ask HN: \"Is that work?\"","updated_at":"2026-03-25T04:40:22Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"HaphazardGuess"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"Hello there,
Long time listener, first time caller over here. I\u2019ve been meaning to try A.I coding capabilities for some time now. I wanted to focus on a problem that is simple enough for me to execute all the way to the finish line.
I didn\u2019t want to mess with any backend complexities or deal with a website that requires APIs or some such. I figured a simple timezone conversion tool would be a decent choice. It is a solved problem to the point of becoming a commodity and all I\u2019m doing is adding, subtracting time and making some tweaks here and there.
I don\u2019t know if someone out there has already coined a term for this workflow of mine but I\u2019m claiming a stake and naming it \u201can Intervibed project\u201d.
I\u2019ve used multiple different A.Is to code everything and I can assure you that I\u2019m actively suffering from \u201cPrompt Fatigue\u201d\u2026\u2026.so what about this one? has this term been coined yet? I damn sure hope so!
The project is being hosted on Lovable, I run my initial prompts thru chatgpt 5.5 Pro and then submit the results to Claude Opus 4.8 Max and then I submit the final execution order to Lovable.
I initially used Lovable\u2019s own design capabilities to do the UX/UI but when Claude released the design feature I ran the whole through that and I\u2019m using a new design now.
As for SEO/GEO, I created this project six months ago and at that time the Lovable websites were not getting crawled by search engines. After the recent Lovable update, they have pretty much solved that issue (or so I\u2019ve been told?). \nI recreated the project on the new tech stack and I have no issues with Google Search Console crawling and indexing.
I\u2019m also promoting this website on Facebook and once again I\u2019m using a similar workflow to create\u2026.or rather generate posts for socials\u2026.I\u2019m very curious to see how and when will the artwork start to drift. I have locked down a \u201cmaster spec\u201d for every asset but still every time I generate something new from my existing assets it looks a bit off.
It\u2019s definitely been quite an experience and I\u2019ve learned a ton about how these A.I products approach a problem, their limitations, strengths. All of this can become a write up on its own in the future and It\u2019s a gonna be a one long rant guaranteed.
I feel like I can make some unbelievably basic UX/UI and productivity recommendations to the product managers in charge of these multizillion dollar companies.
A.I is supposed to save us time and effort and it sure does, but the actual mechanics of using the A.I tools is still residing in the stoneage\u2026is \u201cA.I Stoneage\u201d a term yet? It should be.
I will give you one example, why am I not able to collapse specific prompts responses inside a chat? Why am I not allowed to delete a specific response within a long chat? This is simple stuff folks, forums were doing these things back when dinosaurs roamed the earth\u2026.I remember very clearly\u2026.anyways.
I would like for you all to take this lil\u2019 website of mine for a test drive and tell me what do you think.\nYour positive feedback will encourage me to keep on going and the negative\u2019s ones will help me do a better job. Boy oh boy I do want to be doing a better job.
Keep in my mind that this is just a fun side project that I spend 2,3 hours a week on and it\u2019s all been done in good fun!
Thanks much,\nP"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Clockjumper \u2013 An Intervibed Project"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://clockjumper.com/"}},"_tags":["story","author_HaphazardGuess","story_48747630","show_hn"],"author":"HaphazardGuess","children":[48792048],"created_at":"2026-07-01T14:41:10Z","created_at_i":1782916870,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"48747630","points":1,"story_id":48747630,"story_text":"Hello there,
Long time listener, first time caller over here. I\u2019ve been meaning to try A.I coding capabilities for some time now. I wanted to focus on a problem that is simple enough for me to execute all the way to the finish line.
I didn\u2019t want to mess with any backend complexities or deal with a website that requires APIs or some such. I figured a simple timezone conversion tool would be a decent choice. It is a solved problem to the point of becoming a commodity and all I\u2019m doing is adding, subtracting time and making some tweaks here and there.
I don\u2019t know if someone out there has already coined a term for this workflow of mine but I\u2019m claiming a stake and naming it \u201can Intervibed project\u201d.
I\u2019ve used multiple different A.Is to code everything and I can assure you that I\u2019m actively suffering from \u201cPrompt Fatigue\u201d\u2026\u2026.so what about this one? has this term been coined yet? I damn sure hope so!
The project is being hosted on Lovable, I run my initial prompts thru chatgpt 5.5 Pro and then submit the results to Claude Opus 4.8 Max and then I submit the final execution order to Lovable.
I initially used Lovable\u2019s own design capabilities to do the UX/UI but when Claude released the design feature I ran the whole through that and I\u2019m using a new design now.
As for SEO/GEO, I created this project six months ago and at that time the Lovable websites were not getting crawled by search engines. After the recent Lovable update, they have pretty much solved that issue (or so I\u2019ve been told?). \nI recreated the project on the new tech stack and I have no issues with Google Search Console crawling and indexing.
I\u2019m also promoting this website on Facebook and once again I\u2019m using a similar workflow to create\u2026.or rather generate posts for socials\u2026.I\u2019m very curious to see how and when will the artwork start to drift. I have locked down a \u201cmaster spec\u201d for every asset but still every time I generate something new from my existing assets it looks a bit off.
It\u2019s definitely been quite an experience and I\u2019ve learned a ton about how these A.I products approach a problem, their limitations, strengths. All of this can become a write up on its own in the future and It\u2019s a gonna be a one long rant guaranteed.
I feel like I can make some unbelievably basic UX/UI and productivity recommendations to the product managers in charge of these multizillion dollar companies.
A.I is supposed to save us time and effort and it sure does, but the actual mechanics of using the A.I tools is still residing in the stoneage\u2026is \u201cA.I Stoneage\u201d a term yet? It should be.
I will give you one example, why am I not able to collapse specific prompts responses inside a chat? Why am I not allowed to delete a specific response within a long chat? This is simple stuff folks, forums were doing these things back when dinosaurs roamed the earth\u2026.I remember very clearly\u2026.anyways.
I would like for you all to take this lil\u2019 website of mine for a test drive and tell me what do you think.\nYour positive feedback will encourage me to keep on going and the negative\u2019s ones will help me do a better job. Boy oh boy I do want to be doing a better job.
Keep in my mind that this is just a fun side project that I spend 2,3 hours a week on and it\u2019s all been done in good fun!
Thanks much,\nP","title":"Show HN: Clockjumper \u2013 An Intervibed Project","updated_at":"2026-07-05T07:32:45Z","url":"https://clockjumper.com/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"eranation"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"My personal experience is this: writing software is easy, building a business is hard. I love writing code, I hate doing A/B testing / funnels, SEO blog posts, drip marketing, calculating LTV/UAC and all that, I'm not good at it + I don't like it.
and I also hate getting delayed results, when I code at my day job, I see results immediately, although it's gradual, it's still a direct feedback to my actions, I put code, I get working software, I do a code review, I get immediate feedback and quickly implement it.
So unless you are ready to do the business side of things (or know someone who is good at it and likes to do it) then doing someone else's dream is probably a good choice. As long as they pay you what you deserve. (how do you know what you deserve? take the highest salary you find for your role in indeed.com or glassdoor / payscale, and ask for it in your current / next job). There is no other way to know.
But if you are OK with delayed gratification, have a LOT of patience, are willing to speak with customers, do sales, experiment, do follow up calls, accept failure again and again and still try to make it work by changing one aspect (AKA pivot). If you are willing to lose some money to gain money later (e.g. pay for some failed ads just to know the click through rate and validate an idea), and if you are OK working your a off with potentially zero gain for a long time, then you should probably start your own business (even if you don't have an idea, find someone who does, or take an existing idea and do it better)
Even doing freelancing can work, all you need is someone (can be you) who can bring customers, and someone (can be you) who can keep those customers happy in a good hourly rate without too many non billable hours.
My advice to my younger self - try it while you can, it's harder for me now with a family to stop it all and start my own thing.
You always can do the side project thing, but don't expect it to become your main income source without either a lot of work or a lot of luck. I had a few side projects some of them made money, but it was a lot of work to maintain.
Look at the successful startups out there, yes there is a lot of execution and technical talent that drives their success, but I say this is not the main reason they are where they are, it falls down to ability to get users to come and ability to get users to stay.
I see those companies fall into one of 2 types - either they have a very high growth curve (the "Viral" / network effect startups) which are statistically very hard to re-create (getting users is REALLY, REALLY, HARD, a single Show HN in the front page + a techcrunch review + good SEO is not enough. You also need people to keep returning to your product, and tell more people about it) these include free products like Facebook, or market places like AirBNB - they need lot's of users to make it work
The other type is startups that sell something (product / service, one time or subscription), in this case you can have revenue from day 1, so I would recommend this route, but it is known to have a very slow ramp up [0]
As popular to say, YMMV... but this is my personal view on this.
[0] http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-..."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["how"],"value":"Ask HN: How do you earn your money?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_eranation","story_7449728"],"author":"eranation","children":[7450678],"comment_text":"My personal experience is this: writing software is easy, building a business is hard. I love writing code, I hate doing A/B testing / funnels, SEO blog posts, drip marketing, calculating LTV/UAC and all that, I'm not good at it + I don't like it.
and I also hate getting delayed results, when I code at my day job, I see results immediately, although it's gradual, it's still a direct feedback to my actions, I put code, I get working software, I do a code review, I get immediate feedback and quickly implement it.
So unless you are ready to do the business side of things (or know someone who is good at it and likes to do it) then doing someone else's dream is probably a good choice. As long as they pay you what you deserve. (how do you know what you deserve? take the highest salary you find for your role in indeed.com or glassdoor / payscale, and ask for it in your current / next job). There is no other way to know.
But if you are OK with delayed gratification, have a LOT of patience, are willing to speak with customers, do sales, experiment, do follow up calls, accept failure again and again and still try to make it work by changing one aspect (AKA pivot). If you are willing to lose some money to gain money later (e.g. pay for some failed ads just to know the click through rate and validate an idea), and if you are OK working your a off with potentially zero gain for a long time, then you should probably start your own business (even if you don't have an idea, find someone who does, or take an existing idea and do it better)
Even doing freelancing can work, all you need is someone (can be you) who can bring customers, and someone (can be you) who can keep those customers happy in a good hourly rate without too many non billable hours.
My advice to my younger self - try it while you can, it's harder for me now with a family to stop it all and start my own thing.
You always can do the side project thing, but don't expect it to become your main income source without either a lot of work or a lot of luck. I had a few side projects some of them made money, but it was a lot of work to maintain.
Look at the successful startups out there, yes there is a lot of execution and technical talent that drives their success, but I say this is not the main reason they are where they are, it falls down to ability to get users to come and ability to get users to stay.
I see those companies fall into one of 2 types - either they have a very high growth curve (the "Viral" / network effect startups) which are statistically very hard to re-create (getting users is REALLY, REALLY, HARD, a single Show HN in the front page + a techcrunch review + good SEO is not enough. You also need people to keep returning to your product, and tell more people about it) these include free products like Facebook, or market places like AirBNB - they need lot's of users to make it work
The other type is startups that sell something (product / service, one time or subscription), in this case you can have revenue from day 1, so I would recommend this route, but it is known to have a very slow ramp up [0]
As popular to say, YMMV... but this is my personal view on this.
[0] http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...","created_at":"2014-03-22T19:23:57Z","created_at_i":1395516237,"objectID":"7450444","parent_id":7449728,"points":null,"story_id":7449728,"story_title":"Ask HN: How do you earn your money?","updated_at":"2023-09-06T22:29:18Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jillesvangurp"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"Interesting writeup. I think tools like claude cowork are an interesting hack to adapt agentic coding tools for business use. If you put the security issues aside (and there are significant pitfalls and risks here) and balance the risk against the value add, there's a strong argument to be made for the kind of tradeoffs that Simon is knowingly making here. And given he actually coined the notion of prompt injection, he is of course not ignorant of those risks. That's not dismissing those risks but balancing the risks against the cost of doing things manually. Making progress on addressing these risks is going to be a massive challenge. But there's a lot of short term value if you are not that risk averse as well. That's why codex and claude code have slightly scary command line flags that are widely used. The --yolo flag in codex is a big wink at this topic. "You know you shouldn't but YOLO."
More broadly, my observation is that the type of tools that developers use are naturally suited to be scripted. Because developers do that all the time. We work with command line prompts, lots of tools that can be scripted via the command line, and scripting languages that work in that environment.
Tools like Claude Code and Codex are extremely simple for that reason. It's a simple feedback loop that in pseudo code reads like "while criteria not met, figure out what tools to run, run those, add output to context and re-assess if criteria were met". You don't need to hard code anything about the tools. A handful of tools (read file, run command, etc.) is all that is needed. You can get some very sophisticated feedback loops going that effectively counter the traditional limitations of LLMs (hallucinating stuff, poor instruction following, assertively claiming something is done when it isn't, etc.). A simple test suite and the condition that the tests must pass (while disallowing obvious hacks like disabling all the tests) can be enough to make agents grind away at a problem until it is solved.
In a business context, this is not true yet. Most business users use a variety of tools that aren't very scriptable and require fiddling with complex UIs. Worse, a lot of those tools are proprietary and hacking them requires access you typically don't get or is very limited. \nGiven that, a life hack is to translate business workflows into developer tool workflows and then use agentic coding tools. Claude can't use MS Word for you. But it can probably work on MS word files via open source libraries and tools. So, step zero is to "mount a directory" and then use command line tools to manipulate what's inside. You bypass the tool boundary by swapping out business tools with developer tools. Anything behind a SAAS web UI is a bit out of scope unfortunately. You get bogged down in a complex maze of authentication and permission issues, fiddly APIs with poor documentation. That's why most of the connectors for e.g. Chat GPT are a bad joke in how limited they are.
Simple example. Codex/Claude Code, etc. are probably fairly useless doing anything complicated with say Square Space, a wordpress website, etc. But if you use a static site builder, you can make these tools do fairly complicated things. I've been working for the last two weeks on our Hugo website to do some major modernization, restructuring, content generation, translations, etc. All via prompting codex. I'm working on SEO, lighthouse performance, adding complex new components to the website, reusing content from old pages to create new ones, checking consistency between translations, ensuring consistent use of certain language, etc. All by prompting codex. "Add a logo for company X", "make sure page foo has a translation consistent with my translation guide", etc.
I got a lot more productive with this setup after I added a simple npm run verify test suite with a simple AGENTS.md instruction that the verify script has to pass after any change. If you watch what codex does there's a pattern of trial and error until the verification script passes. Usually it doesn't get it right in one go. But it gets there without my intervention. It's not a very sophisticated test suite but it tests a few of the basics (e.g. tailwind styling survives the build and is in the live site, important shit doesn't 404, hugo doesn't error, etc.). I have about 10 simple smoke tests like that.
I think we'll see a big shift in the business world towards more AI friendly tooling because smart business users will be flocking towards tools that work with AI tools in a hurry as they discover that they can shave weeks/days of grinding those tools manually by switching. This is a process that's likely to take very long because people don't like to change their tool habits. But the notion of what is the right tool for the right job is shifting. If it's not AI friendly, it's the wrong tool probably.
Long term, I expect UIs and dealing with permissions in a sane way will be easier to deal with for AI tools. But meanwhile, we don't actually have to wait for all that. You can hack your way to success if you are a bit smart with your tool choices."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"First impressions of Claude Cowork"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://simonw.substack.com/p/first-impressions-of-claude-cowork"}},"_tags":["comment","author_jillesvangurp","story_46612919"],"author":"jillesvangurp","comment_text":"Interesting writeup. I think tools like claude cowork are an interesting hack to adapt agentic coding tools for business use. If you put the security issues aside (and there are significant pitfalls and risks here) and balance the risk against the value add, there's a strong argument to be made for the kind of tradeoffs that Simon is knowingly making here. And given he actually coined the notion of prompt injection, he is of course not ignorant of those risks. That's not dismissing those risks but balancing the risks against the cost of doing things manually. Making progress on addressing these risks is going to be a massive challenge. But there's a lot of short term value if you are not that risk averse as well. That's why codex and claude code have slightly scary command line flags that are widely used. The --yolo flag in codex is a big wink at this topic. "You know you shouldn't but YOLO."
More broadly, my observation is that the type of tools that developers use are naturally suited to be scripted. Because developers do that all the time. We work with command line prompts, lots of tools that can be scripted via the command line, and scripting languages that work in that environment.
Tools like Claude Code and Codex are extremely simple for that reason. It's a simple feedback loop that in pseudo code reads like "while criteria not met, figure out what tools to run, run those, add output to context and re-assess if criteria were met". You don't need to hard code anything about the tools. A handful of tools (read file, run command, etc.) is all that is needed. You can get some very sophisticated feedback loops going that effectively counter the traditional limitations of LLMs (hallucinating stuff, poor instruction following, assertively claiming something is done when it isn't, etc.). A simple test suite and the condition that the tests must pass (while disallowing obvious hacks like disabling all the tests) can be enough to make agents grind away at a problem until it is solved.
In a business context, this is not true yet. Most business users use a variety of tools that aren't very scriptable and require fiddling with complex UIs. Worse, a lot of those tools are proprietary and hacking them requires access you typically don't get or is very limited. \nGiven that, a life hack is to translate business workflows into developer tool workflows and then use agentic coding tools. Claude can't use MS Word for you. But it can probably work on MS word files via open source libraries and tools. So, step zero is to "mount a directory" and then use command line tools to manipulate what's inside. You bypass the tool boundary by swapping out business tools with developer tools. Anything behind a SAAS web UI is a bit out of scope unfortunately. You get bogged down in a complex maze of authentication and permission issues, fiddly APIs with poor documentation. That's why most of the connectors for e.g. Chat GPT are a bad joke in how limited they are.
Simple example. Codex/Claude Code, etc. are probably fairly useless doing anything complicated with say Square Space, a wordpress website, etc. But if you use a static site builder, you can make these tools do fairly complicated things. I've been working for the last two weeks on our Hugo website to do some major modernization, restructuring, content generation, translations, etc. All via prompting codex. I'm working on SEO, lighthouse performance, adding complex new components to the website, reusing content from old pages to create new ones, checking consistency between translations, ensuring consistent use of certain language, etc. All by prompting codex. "Add a logo for company X", "make sure page foo has a translation consistent with my translation guide", etc.
I got a lot more productive with this setup after I added a simple npm run verify test suite with a simple AGENTS.md instruction that the verify script has to pass after any change. If you watch what codex does there's a pattern of trial and error until the verification script passes. Usually it doesn't get it right in one go. But it gets there without my intervention. It's not a very sophisticated test suite but it tests a few of the basics (e.g. tailwind styling survives the build and is in the live site, important shit doesn't 404, hugo doesn't error, etc.). I have about 10 simple smoke tests like that.
I think we'll see a big shift in the business world towards more AI friendly tooling because smart business users will be flocking towards tools that work with AI tools in a hurry as they discover that they can shave weeks/days of grinding those tools manually by switching. This is a process that's likely to take very long because people don't like to change their tool habits. But the notion of what is the right tool for the right job is shifting. If it's not AI friendly, it's the wrong tool probably.
Long term, I expect UIs and dealing with permissions in a sane way will be easier to deal with for AI tools. But meanwhile, we don't actually have to wait for all that. You can hack your way to success if you are a bit smart with your tool choices.","created_at":"2026-01-16T04:52:27Z","created_at_i":1768539147,"objectID":"46643100","parent_id":46612919,"story_id":46612919,"story_title":"First impressions of Claude Cowork","story_url":"https://simonw.substack.com/p/first-impressions-of-claude-cowork","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:25:42Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"johnerik"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"Hi HN! We built a MacBook Upgrade Program inspired by Apple\u2019s iPhone Upgrade Program, so you can finance a new MacBook (with AppleCare+) over 36 months\u2014and upgrade after 24 months if you want the latest model. It\u2019s live at getupgraded.com (US only for now).
I\u2019m @johnerik the cofounder/ceo and I\u2019ve been running upgrade programs for other retailers in Scandinavia for the last 8 years. Now we\u2019re building our own! I just moved (back) to Austin.
## Why?
- Because we\u2019ve wanted a MacBook Upgrade Program since Apple launched the iPhone Upgrade Program, in 2015! (I personally have been on the iPhone program since it launched. I\u2019ll admit that I have skipped some years and not upgraded, but have been loyal to the program.)
- Because the whole process of buying a MacBook in cash and selling on Facebook Marketplace when you\u2019re ready to upgrade is a hassle. (I would end up with devices laying around because I disliked the selling part so much.)
- Because if we can get this flywheel started \u2013 where we get devices back frequently, repair them when needed and then quickly find them a new home \u2013 I think we can increase the useful life of a given device, and therefore reduce the total number of devices that need to be produced overall.
- Because as a team we have a ton of experience doing this. Since 2016 we\u2019ve been running upgrade programs for retailers and brands (including Apple and Microsoft) in Scandinavia.
- Because we think there\u2019s an opportunity to build the next great American electronics retailer. New MacBooks are just the start. Used and refurbished devices are the future.
## How does this work?
- The program divides the total cost of a new MacBook and AppleCare+ into 36 monthly payments.
- After making 24 monthly payments (two-thirds of the total), you're eligible to upgrade your MacBook.
- To upgrade, you\u2019d just choose your new MacBook, and we'll ship it to you right away.
- We'll temporarily pause all payments for 30 days while you have both the old and new MacBook.
- You'll transfer your data from the old MacBook to the new one, then send the old one back to us using the provided prepaid return box. (We\u2019re considering including a Thunderbolt cable to make migration super fast \u2013 love to hear if you think this would be useful.)
- After we verify your old MacBook is in good working condition (normal wear and tear is acceptable and expected), we'll pay off the remaining 12 payments (the final one-third) for you.
- You'll then start fresh with a new set of 36 monthly payments on your upgraded MacBook.
If you don\u2019t want to upgrade, no prob. Just make all 36 payments (pay off all the principal) and you\u2019re done.
## How do the economics for this come together?
Our main partners are
1. Gatortec, an Apple Authorized Reseller, \n2. Citizen Bank, also the lender for Apple\u2019s iUp Program, and \n3. A bulk buyer for the used devices.
- Gatortec has a direct line to purchase Apple devices/services below MSRP and they share the majority of the margin with us.
- Citizens gives our 740+ credit customers 0% interest and 640-739 customers a variable rate between 29.99 and 12.99%. In exchange, we give them half our margin. And keep the rest as our upfront take rate.
- Our bulk buyer has guaranteed to buy the used MacBooks for 37% of MSRP. We are buying them from customers for ~33% of MSRP (it\u2019s actually slightly higher on loans with interest because of how amortization works, but I\u2019ll skip that here). So we theoretically will make that spread. Though our actual plan is to refurb these devices ourselves, resell them again on our marketplace, and give as much cash back to customers as possible \u2013 keeping just enough to cover our expenses.
In summary: We make a little bit from the purchase itself, and a little bit more from the upgrade. The goal is loyal customers, and therefore a higher lifetime value.
## What\u2019s our tech stack?
- Ruby on Rails backend, because it\u2019s what we knew at founding and we wanted to move fast.
- No fancy JS framework or SPA. Just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (leveraging Rails tooling).
- Heroku hosting, because it Just Works.
- Some AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, DNS, CDN, S3, ...) because Heroku doesn't always Just Work (especially with things that need to scale).
- SaaS tools like Sentry, Algolia, Posthog, Mailgun, \u2026
- Tons of great open source libraries (and we contribute where we can, especially with bugs or features). Again, try not to build stuff.
- We've settled on Windsurf as our AI-driven IDE, but Cursor is also great. The space is moving so fast so we might be using something else next month (but we try not to switch too often).
- We have a large, multi-regional, internationalized codebase with 10-years of history, so we're constantly refactoring, cleaning, pruning, updating (linters, tests... this part is still not easy to hand off to AI, but maybe soon!).
- A Wordpress marketing site (:vomit:... not fun to work with or maintain) because someone said it's the best for SEO, but we\u2019ll likely rebuild and host in Framer soon.
- We maintain our retailers' Shopify store, and we can yarn dev the store, but it's clunky to have so many moving parts that don't run on our Macs (airplane mode FTW).
## Where we are going
- We want to create a new kind of online electronics retailer. One that has A+ customer support, sells both new and used devices, serves both consumers and businesses, and has various ways to buy and sell.
- Long term, we want to be a one stop shop for managing all your devices. Families are like small businesses now, both have 20 devices! We\u2019d want to build an app where you can track all your devices, see when certain ones are due for an upgrade, compare prices, and more. Love any feedback here.
- I\u2019ll also just say that for me personally, I know we are selling brand new MacBooks right now and that\u2019s super high-end, but for now we\u2019re just starting with the most expensive device and we will work our way down. This whole idea of taking care of devices, fixing them, and using them again is very much the vibe I grew up with. My dad is a mechanic so we were way more likely to repair something than we were to buy something new.
## Finally, I\u2019d love your feedback/questions on anything above, or here are specific questions:
- User experience/design: How clear is our flow? Is the site layout friendly and accessible? What questions are not answered? We know it\u2019s super Apple-like.
- Features: Any must-have features you\u2019d expect from a retailer/upgrade program?
- Financing vs leasing vs subscriptions: The underlying financial instrument today is a term loan, but we kind of squeezing something that\u2019s similar to a lease or a subscription into a loan.
- B2B: We\u2019ve tested leasing to a few friends' companies? Would you want this for your company?
- Leanings from other countries: We\u2019re currently US-only\u2014is there anything cool in your country/locale that we could learn from?
- Feel free to test our customer support chat.
- Future product categories: Which devices or brands should we consider adding next?
- Circular Economy: Would you want to know your COe savings are? Or is that just greenwashing at this point.
THANK YOU!"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: Upgraded \u2013 A MacBook Upgrade Program"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://getupgraded.com/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_johnerik","story_43561492"],"author":"johnerik","children":[43561573],"comment_text":"Hi HN! We built a MacBook Upgrade Program inspired by Apple\u2019s iPhone Upgrade Program, so you can finance a new MacBook (with AppleCare+) over 36 months\u2014and upgrade after 24 months if you want the latest model. It\u2019s live at getupgraded.com (US only for now).
I\u2019m @johnerik the cofounder/ceo and I\u2019ve been running upgrade programs for other retailers in Scandinavia for the last 8 years. Now we\u2019re building our own! I just moved (back) to Austin.
## Why?
- Because we\u2019ve wanted a MacBook Upgrade Program since Apple launched the iPhone Upgrade Program, in 2015! (I personally have been on the iPhone program since it launched. I\u2019ll admit that I have skipped some years and not upgraded, but have been loyal to the program.)
- Because the whole process of buying a MacBook in cash and selling on Facebook Marketplace when you\u2019re ready to upgrade is a hassle. (I would end up with devices laying around because I disliked the selling part so much.)
- Because if we can get this flywheel started \u2013 where we get devices back frequently, repair them when needed and then quickly find them a new home \u2013 I think we can increase the useful life of a given device, and therefore reduce the total number of devices that need to be produced overall.
- Because as a team we have a ton of experience doing this. Since 2016 we\u2019ve been running upgrade programs for retailers and brands (including Apple and Microsoft) in Scandinavia.
- Because we think there\u2019s an opportunity to build the next great American electronics retailer. New MacBooks are just the start. Used and refurbished devices are the future.
## How does this work?
- The program divides the total cost of a new MacBook and AppleCare+ into 36 monthly payments.
- After making 24 monthly payments (two-thirds of the total), you're eligible to upgrade your MacBook.
- To upgrade, you\u2019d just choose your new MacBook, and we'll ship it to you right away.
- We'll temporarily pause all payments for 30 days while you have both the old and new MacBook.
- You'll transfer your data from the old MacBook to the new one, then send the old one back to us using the provided prepaid return box. (We\u2019re considering including a Thunderbolt cable to make migration super fast \u2013 love to hear if you think this would be useful.)
- After we verify your old MacBook is in good working condition (normal wear and tear is acceptable and expected), we'll pay off the remaining 12 payments (the final one-third) for you.
- You'll then start fresh with a new set of 36 monthly payments on your upgraded MacBook.
If you don\u2019t want to upgrade, no prob. Just make all 36 payments (pay off all the principal) and you\u2019re done.
## How do the economics for this come together?
Our main partners are
1. Gatortec, an Apple Authorized Reseller, \n2. Citizen Bank, also the lender for Apple\u2019s iUp Program, and \n3. A bulk buyer for the used devices.
- Gatortec has a direct line to purchase Apple devices/services below MSRP and they share the majority of the margin with us.
- Citizens gives our 740+ credit customers 0% interest and 640-739 customers a variable rate between 29.99 and 12.99%. In exchange, we give them half our margin. And keep the rest as our upfront take rate.
- Our bulk buyer has guaranteed to buy the used MacBooks for 37% of MSRP. We are buying them from customers for ~33% of MSRP (it\u2019s actually slightly higher on loans with interest because of how amortization works, but I\u2019ll skip that here). So we theoretically will make that spread. Though our actual plan is to refurb these devices ourselves, resell them again on our marketplace, and give as much cash back to customers as possible \u2013 keeping just enough to cover our expenses.
In summary: We make a little bit from the purchase itself, and a little bit more from the upgrade. The goal is loyal customers, and therefore a higher lifetime value.
## What\u2019s our tech stack?
- Ruby on Rails backend, because it\u2019s what we knew at founding and we wanted to move fast.
- No fancy JS framework or SPA. Just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (leveraging Rails tooling).
- Heroku hosting, because it Just Works.
- Some AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, DNS, CDN, S3, ...) because Heroku doesn't always Just Work (especially with things that need to scale).
- SaaS tools like Sentry, Algolia, Posthog, Mailgun, \u2026
- Tons of great open source libraries (and we contribute where we can, especially with bugs or features). Again, try not to build stuff.
- We've settled on Windsurf as our AI-driven IDE, but Cursor is also great. The space is moving so fast so we might be using something else next month (but we try not to switch too often).
- We have a large, multi-regional, internationalized codebase with 10-years of history, so we're constantly refactoring, cleaning, pruning, updating (linters, tests... this part is still not easy to hand off to AI, but maybe soon!).
- A Wordpress marketing site (:vomit:... not fun to work with or maintain) because someone said it's the best for SEO, but we\u2019ll likely rebuild and host in Framer soon.
- We maintain our retailers' Shopify store, and we can yarn dev the store, but it's clunky to have so many moving parts that don't run on our Macs (airplane mode FTW).
## Where we are going
- We want to create a new kind of online electronics retailer. One that has A+ customer support, sells both new and used devices, serves both consumers and businesses, and has various ways to buy and sell.
- Long term, we want to be a one stop shop for managing all your devices. Families are like small businesses now, both have 20 devices! We\u2019d want to build an app where you can track all your devices, see when certain ones are due for an upgrade, compare prices, and more. Love any feedback here.
- I\u2019ll also just say that for me personally, I know we are selling brand new MacBooks right now and that\u2019s super high-end, but for now we\u2019re just starting with the most expensive device and we will work our way down. This whole idea of taking care of devices, fixing them, and using them again is very much the vibe I grew up with. My dad is a mechanic so we were way more likely to repair something than we were to buy something new.
## Finally, I\u2019d love your feedback/questions on anything above, or here are specific questions:
- User experience/design: How clear is our flow? Is the site layout friendly and accessible? What questions are not answered? We know it\u2019s super Apple-like.
- Features: Any must-have features you\u2019d expect from a retailer/upgrade program?
- Financing vs leasing vs subscriptions: The underlying financial instrument today is a term loan, but we kind of squeezing something that\u2019s similar to a lease or a subscription into a loan.
- B2B: We\u2019ve tested leasing to a few friends' companies? Would you want this for your company?
- Leanings from other countries: We\u2019re currently US-only\u2014is there anything cool in your country/locale that we could learn from?
- Feel free to test our customer support chat.
- Future product categories: Which devices or brands should we consider adding next?
- Circular Economy: Would you want to know your COe savings are? Or is that just greenwashing at this point.
THANK YOU!","created_at":"2025-04-02T20:59:13Z","created_at_i":1743627553,"objectID":"43561498","parent_id":43561492,"story_id":43561492,"story_title":"Show HN: Upgraded \u2013 A MacBook Upgrade Program","story_url":"https://getupgraded.com/","updated_at":"2025-04-02T21:26:41Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"bmelton"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["how","long","does","seo","take","to","work"],"value":"In lieu of telling 500 friends (for reasons I'll mention later), I'll be as constructively critical as I am able.
It takes how long it takes, largely depending on how effectively you can increase retention and how presentable your content is. You have to acknowledge that yours is a niche audience. That means that 1) Even if you have helped me with your content, I almost certainly don't have 500 friends to hawk it to. At best I have 1, or a handful. In my life, I am thankful to have no one I know that could benefit from your content. (Not meant to be a dis, but at least at this moment, knock on wood, all my friends and family are whole and healthy.)
Looking over your sites, I see content that was likely written over a long period of time derived from a wealthy knowledge store, but that contains typos (goes to credibility) and are put forth in an unattractive format with a giant wall of text that is largely unbroken by a good narrative.
Break your content up into more bite-sized pieces. Create 'teaser' headers in intervals that people can see them from the paragraph they're on and want to get to the next section. Include high quality pictures to make the content look more appealing and for the love of anything holy, get a much more attractive theme to your content.
You need to follow every piece of advice Patio11 gives out so that you can master SEO. You need to have people be able to painlessly opt in to email updates when you post new content. ALL content is initially forgettable, and it takes a long time before any site becomes a site you visit every day, so you need to find ways to allow interested parties to be notified when you post new content. You also need to post content much more frequently. You also probably need to be paying for clicks, but that means that you'd need to attract relevant, high-paying ads -- they exist, and for your type of content, they are exceedingly high, though as your mantra seems to be \"do not use anything my advertisers would be presenting\", it may be an uphill battle.
One of the guys I learn from (Marty Schwartz) teaches guitar, and I subscribe to his site and newsletter because he is great at giving solid guitar advice. He also makes a living off of doing this, and he has a few tricks he uses that I should also share:
- Your blog posts are 'teasers'. You should have much more comprehensive information that you can sell, in either ebook, video or whatever tangible format that people feel as valuable. Marty has a set of DVDs that he sells for a hundred or so dollars (depending on the week) that are basically video lessons he has compiled.
- Make videos. I realize that while homeless, that may present a challenge, but since you seem to be able to so actively post on HN, I figure it's probably doable in some way. Post those videos on YouTube and hope to get an audience. Embed those YouTube videos in blog posts so that you are cross-promoting. Do not reveal all of your secret sauce in one video, but lure people in with helpful tips and techniques that, over time, will be a part of your grand strategy for wellness or whatever. As you compose these videos, include them as part of your 'tangible' sale thing.
- Release content to new users regularly. You need to be on their minds. If they genuinely need your advice, they'll welcome the emails, and return. You can track the return rate with MailChimp (and probably other mailing list managers.)
- Track everything. Split test everything. Test, test, test. Throw away what doesn't work, and re-split and re-test everything that does until it works better, or at least enough that you're retaining people better, or you are making money.
You're basically starting a startup, which is what all \"things trying to make money\" are. It's a content startup, which is especially hard in even the easiest genres, but you're also in a very very niche genre arguing a fairly contrarian viewpoint. Don't expect a huge audience, but do try to maximize the experience for every single person that gives you a minute of their time. Ask for a minute more. Ask for an email. Ask for the ability to reach out to them when you make new updates. Make the content worth their while, and make it easier to use / consume / interact with.
I'm out of steam, but those are basically your steps. I know that I specifically ignored the topic at hand, but I believe this to be better advice than to expect others to publicize for you."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["how","to"],"value":"Ask HN: How can get people to stop gushing at me and, instead, promote me?"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["comment","author_bmelton","story_4212044"],"author":"bmelton","children":[4213014],"comment_text":"In lieu of telling 500 friends (for reasons I'll mention later), I'll be as constructively critical as I am able.
It takes how long it takes, largely depending on how effectively you can increase retention and how presentable your content is. You have to acknowledge that yours is a niche audience. That means that 1) Even if you have helped me with your content, I almost certainly don't have 500 friends to hawk it to. At best I have 1, or a handful. In my life, I am thankful to have no one I know that could benefit from your content. (Not meant to be a dis, but at least at this moment, knock on wood, all my friends and family are whole and healthy.)
Looking over your sites, I see content that was likely written over a long period of time derived from a wealthy knowledge store, but that contains typos (goes to credibility) and are put forth in an unattractive format with a giant wall of text that is largely unbroken by a good narrative.
Break your content up into more bite-sized pieces. Create 'teaser' headers in intervals that people can see them from the paragraph they're on and want to get to the next section. Include high quality pictures to make the content look more appealing and for the love of anything holy, get a much more attractive theme to your content.
You need to follow every piece of advice Patio11 gives out so that you can master SEO. You need to have people be able to painlessly opt in to email updates when you post new content. ALL content is initially forgettable, and it takes a long time before any site becomes a site you visit every day, so you need to find ways to allow interested parties to be notified when you post new content. You also need to post content much more frequently. You also probably need to be paying for clicks, but that means that you'd need to attract relevant, high-paying ads -- they exist, and for your type of content, they are exceedingly high, though as your mantra seems to be \"do not use anything my advertisers would be presenting\", it may be an uphill battle.
One of the guys I learn from (Marty Schwartz) teaches guitar, and I subscribe to his site and newsletter because he is great at giving solid guitar advice. He also makes a living off of doing this, and he has a few tricks he uses that I should also share:
- Your blog posts are 'teasers'. You should have much more comprehensive information that you can sell, in either ebook, video or whatever tangible format that people feel as valuable. Marty has a set of DVDs that he sells for a hundred or so dollars (depending on the week) that are basically video lessons he has compiled.
- Make videos. I realize that while homeless, that may present a challenge, but since you seem to be able to so actively post on HN, I figure it's probably doable in some way. Post those videos on YouTube and hope to get an audience. Embed those YouTube videos in blog posts so that you are cross-promoting. Do not reveal all of your secret sauce in one video, but lure people in with helpful tips and techniques that, over time, will be a part of your grand strategy for wellness or whatever. As you compose these videos, include them as part of your 'tangible' sale thing.
- Release content to new users regularly. You need to be on their minds. If they genuinely need your advice, they'll welcome the emails, and return. You can track the return rate with MailChimp (and probably other mailing list managers.)
- Track everything. Split test everything. Test, test, test. Throw away what doesn't work, and re-split and re-test everything that does until it works better, or at least enough that you're retaining people better, or you are making money.
You're basically starting a startup, which is what all \"things trying to make money\" are. It's a content startup, which is especially hard in even the easiest genres, but you're also in a very very niche genre arguing a fairly contrarian viewpoint. Don't expect a huge audience, but do try to maximize the experience for every single person that gives you a minute of their time. Ask for a minute more. Ask for an email. Ask for the ability to reach out to them when you make new updates. Make the content worth their while, and make it easier to use / consume / interact with.
I'm out of steam, but those are basically your steps. I know that I specifically ignored the topic at hand, but I believe this to be better advice than to expect others to publicize for you.","created_at":"2012-07-07T22:18:37Z","created_at_i":1341699517,"objectID":"4212912","parent_id":4212090,"story_id":4212044,"story_title":"Ask HN: How can get people to stop gushing at me and, instead, promote me?","story_url":"","updated_at":"2024-09-19T18:42:26Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"orangethirty"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["how","long","does","take","to","work"],"value":"Grab a cup of coffee, this is going to be long.
Let me get a couple of things out of the way first. Your startup is not your website. The website is the store front. What you are asking about is not promoting the startup but about how to design a good marketing plan. A marketing plan is a combination of marketing tools/resources combined and used to achieve one goal: profitable sales.
Ok, now let's talk about the two different ways you can approach this problem. In marketing there are two main audiences: general and direct. The genereal audience is anyone and everyone that may read/listen/watch your marketing tool. The direct audience is composed of people who are the most likely to buy your product because they have bought a similar product or fit your ideal customer description (The ideal customer descirption is basically you saying that people who bought X, have Y, carry a given credit card, live in Z are most likely to buy my product).
Ok, which do you use? In my experience, marketing to a general audience is a waste of resources, because it just eas away too much time and money. It is also harder to measure and keep track of. The direct approach has always proven itself to be, well, direct. It is completely measurable, and depending on the marketing tool being used, can be modified on the fly to see if something works better. Direct marketing is about talking directly to the customer. The best definition I can come up with is that it is as if you were sending a professional sales person through your marketing tool. If your tool is a targeted email, then imagine as if you were sending a sales person through the email message and the sales person pitching the sales message to your prospect directly. This is why direct marketing is has a better profit/cost ratio. It allows you to test, test, test marketing tools directly with the customer without having to buy expensive advertising campaigns/spots.
What are some good direct marketing tools? Almost all marketing tools available out there can be used as direct marketing. TV? The late night commercials selling pots and pans are evidence that it works. Radio? Same. Print? You betcha. The question should be: what combination of marketing tools do I have to use to make up a good marketing plan? Let's answer that below.
What you want is to: first, define your ideal customer description. If you don't have a clue, then look at your competitors. Who is buying their products? Second, find how can you reach those prospects. Is it through email? Regular mail? A video brochure sent to their office on a thumb drive? A skype call? A telephone call? Third, find out how they buy. Some people (include companies) buy when presented with a lot of print materials. Others require a sales person to visit them. Other might enjoy a night out drinking. Find that out.
The point to the marketing plan is to define a general multi-step pattern that will allow you to duplicate any succesful marketing efforts without much problem. For your business it might be a direct sales letter inviting the customer to visit your website to watch a two minute video presentation. Then a scripted telephone call with the customer that will focus on answering any questions. Then if you cant close on the sale, an email highliting your offerings, and giving the person a chance to get some special order. And so on.
When you think of marketing, don't think of funnels. Think of ladders. What steps do people have to take in order to get them to where you want to.
Ok, break time. Think of puppies for ten seconds. Now back to this.
What are some good marketing tools that you can start with? Depends on your business. It really does. I can't give you any insight into this because I dont know if you sell cars, chairs, or helicopters. The product has a lot to do with how you market it. You don't market a Rolls-Royce in a shitty youtube video, just like you don't market cheap web hosting on the Wall Street Journal.\nThe internet does make this a bit simple. You can create a simple marketing plan to get things rolling. In general terms, an email campaign is a good start. But how do you get those email addresses?
Welcome to the second part of this post.
Have people find you. This is going to sound wrong, and against everything I've said about direct marketing. But, direct marketing is not a one way deal. Direct is about talking directly to your customer. Doesnt matter who starts the conversation, as long as it takes place. You can make people find you by creating content that they find valuable. Things like blog posts, newsletters, podcasts are great tools that allow you to start a conversation with the people that want/need your product. Just dont fall into the trap of limiting your marketing to these tools only. It is a huge mistake to do so, because it limits how much you can sell.
Create a good landing page (a squeeze page), a blog, the miriad of social accounts and what-nots, and start crunching out valuable content. Do you sell diapers? Talk about diaper rash, diaper fitting, how to dispose of diapers properly, but dont talk directly about the diapers you sell. You want to give people a taste of your knowledge, and then have them give you their email address so they can learn more. Information is priceless. People will feel indebted when you give it away for free. Remember that.
What about those bloggers, journalists, and news people? Forget about them (for now). Not worth your time. Focus on getting the customers directly. Fact: if you sell enough of your product, the bloggers/journalists will come knocking on your door.
Now, some random thoughts, because it is 10:10 PM and I have to go to sleep.
-- Talk to everyone you know about your product. Just do it casually.
-- Do not be afraid of selling. If you can't pick up the phone and call a customer, then work on that first. In fact, email me and I'll call you! Email in my profile.
-- Realize that marketing is a full-time job. In fact, it is the most important job in your startup/business. Become fairly good at marketing and your business will grow.
-- Your startup is a business. The word startup is wrong. Think of it as a small business. Just because you dont have a bick and mortar store front doesnt change the fact that it is a business. A business lives or dies on marketing.
-- Your startup is not about the software. Whatever you sell is your product. Dont obsses about: programming language (pick whatever makes it easier to prototype), framework (ditto), design too much (make it pretty but dont go broke on designers), the website, the name, the address, the office chair or desk (the $22 desk was interesting, but unless you sell desks it wont help you much). Focus on selling the product. Not on the produc itself.
-- Email people in the industry (the industry you are selling to). Do you know how much valuable contacts I've made by just sending an email with the words: Hi, I really like what you are doing with X. Wish you great luck with it. Tace care, orangethirty.\nDo you what happens next? They either ignore me (which saves me the hassle of dealing with assholes) or (most likely) they will answer with a thank you. Most will ask what is it that you do, and the rest is just easy. Dont be afraid to email people. You are not spamming them. You want to meet and ge to know them. Most people are worth meeting, even if through an email.
-- Print some nice business cards, but dont pay more than $50 for them. Also dont hand them out to everyone.
-- Advertise your email address, and please dont put a contact or sales @yourstartup.com. Use your name or a fictional name. Makes people less resistant to contacting you.
-- Read some marketing books.
-- Hire a good copywriter. If you need help with this, email me. I can help you with making the choice. The words used to sell your product must be carefully engineered. Just like you dont write variable names like this amount_ofProduct_leftOn_inventoryPer_disctrict, you jus dont write sales copy without a basic guideline.
-- Realize that marketing != lots of money. It does require a lot of thought and detail.
-- Realize that everything Ive said may not work for you. Huh? Maybe you can sell your product with a SEO campaign and a landing page. But that would still constitute a marketing plan. So think about that for a second.
- Be open to new ideas. You know who is rich? The guys that decided to sell advertisements through internet searching (yeah, google). Test all ideas, and be open to re-testing them in the future. Dont label anything permanently.
-- Reach out and help people. Good sales can come from helping local organizations with their needs.
-- Above all, dont ever, ever think that marketing doesnt work. It does work. You just have to become good at it.
-- All free advice is cheap advice. And cheap advice dont work. Hit some books, contact some professionals, and get working.
Ok, so now I have to go. Sorry for the huge post, and I deeply apologize for the mess of a post Ive made. Im tired and need to sleep.
If you need any help, just shoot me an email.
PS. I dont want to sell you anything. Hell, I dont have anything to sell. This post is not some thin-velied attempt at getting some gigs."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: What is the best way to promote your startup?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_orangethirty","story_4161813"],"author":"orangethirty","comment_text":"Grab a cup of coffee, this is going to be long.
Let me get a couple of things out of the way first. Your startup is not your website. The website is the store front. What you are asking about is not promoting the startup but about how to design a good marketing plan. A marketing plan is a combination of marketing tools/resources combined and used to achieve one goal: profitable sales.
Ok, now let's talk about the two different ways you can approach this problem. In marketing there are two main audiences: general and direct. The genereal audience is anyone and everyone that may read/listen/watch your marketing tool. The direct audience is composed of people who are the most likely to buy your product because they have bought a similar product or fit your ideal customer description (The ideal customer descirption is basically you saying that people who bought X, have Y, carry a given credit card, live in Z are most likely to buy my product).
Ok, which do you use? In my experience, marketing to a general audience is a waste of resources, because it just eas away too much time and money. It is also harder to measure and keep track of. The direct approach has always proven itself to be, well, direct. It is completely measurable, and depending on the marketing tool being used, can be modified on the fly to see if something works better. Direct marketing is about talking directly to the customer. The best definition I can come up with is that it is as if you were sending a professional sales person through your marketing tool. If your tool is a targeted email, then imagine as if you were sending a sales person through the email message and the sales person pitching the sales message to your prospect directly. This is why direct marketing is has a better profit/cost ratio. It allows you to test, test, test marketing tools directly with the customer without having to buy expensive advertising campaigns/spots.
What are some good direct marketing tools? Almost all marketing tools available out there can be used as direct marketing. TV? The late night commercials selling pots and pans are evidence that it works. Radio? Same. Print? You betcha. The question should be: what combination of marketing tools do I have to use to make up a good marketing plan? Let's answer that below.
What you want is to: first, define your ideal customer description. If you don't have a clue, then look at your competitors. Who is buying their products? Second, find how can you reach those prospects. Is it through email? Regular mail? A video brochure sent to their office on a thumb drive? A skype call? A telephone call? Third, find out how they buy. Some people (include companies) buy when presented with a lot of print materials. Others require a sales person to visit them. Other might enjoy a night out drinking. Find that out.
The point to the marketing plan is to define a general multi-step pattern that will allow you to duplicate any succesful marketing efforts without much problem. For your business it might be a direct sales letter inviting the customer to visit your website to watch a two minute video presentation. Then a scripted telephone call with the customer that will focus on answering any questions. Then if you cant close on the sale, an email highliting your offerings, and giving the person a chance to get some special order. And so on.
When you think of marketing, don't think of funnels. Think of ladders. What steps do people have to take in order to get them to where you want to.
Ok, break time. Think of puppies for ten seconds. Now back to this.
What are some good marketing tools that you can start with? Depends on your business. It really does. I can't give you any insight into this because I dont know if you sell cars, chairs, or helicopters. The product has a lot to do with how you market it. You don't market a Rolls-Royce in a shitty youtube video, just like you don't market cheap web hosting on the Wall Street Journal.\nThe internet does make this a bit simple. You can create a simple marketing plan to get things rolling. In general terms, an email campaign is a good start. But how do you get those email addresses?
Welcome to the second part of this post.
Have people find you. This is going to sound wrong, and against everything I've said about direct marketing. But, direct marketing is not a one way deal. Direct is about talking directly to your customer. Doesnt matter who starts the conversation, as long as it takes place. You can make people find you by creating content that they find valuable. Things like blog posts, newsletters, podcasts are great tools that allow you to start a conversation with the people that want/need your product. Just dont fall into the trap of limiting your marketing to these tools only. It is a huge mistake to do so, because it limits how much you can sell.
Create a good landing page (a squeeze page), a blog, the miriad of social accounts and what-nots, and start crunching out valuable content. Do you sell diapers? Talk about diaper rash, diaper fitting, how to dispose of diapers properly, but dont talk directly about the diapers you sell. You want to give people a taste of your knowledge, and then have them give you their email address so they can learn more. Information is priceless. People will feel indebted when you give it away for free. Remember that.
What about those bloggers, journalists, and news people? Forget about them (for now). Not worth your time. Focus on getting the customers directly. Fact: if you sell enough of your product, the bloggers/journalists will come knocking on your door.
Now, some random thoughts, because it is 10:10 PM and I have to go to sleep.
-- Talk to everyone you know about your product. Just do it casually.
-- Do not be afraid of selling. If you can't pick up the phone and call a customer, then work on that first. In fact, email me and I'll call you! Email in my profile.
-- Realize that marketing is a full-time job. In fact, it is the most important job in your startup/business. Become fairly good at marketing and your business will grow.
-- Your startup is a business. The word startup is wrong. Think of it as a small business. Just because you dont have a bick and mortar store front doesnt change the fact that it is a business. A business lives or dies on marketing.
-- Your startup is not about the software. Whatever you sell is your product. Dont obsses about: programming language (pick whatever makes it easier to prototype), framework (ditto), design too much (make it pretty but dont go broke on designers), the website, the name, the address, the office chair or desk (the $22 desk was interesting, but unless you sell desks it wont help you much). Focus on selling the product. Not on the produc itself.
-- Email people in the industry (the industry you are selling to). Do you know how much valuable contacts I've made by just sending an email with the words: Hi, I really like what you are doing with X. Wish you great luck with it. Tace care, orangethirty.\nDo you what happens next? They either ignore me (which saves me the hassle of dealing with assholes) or (most likely) they will answer with a thank you. Most will ask what is it that you do, and the rest is just easy. Dont be afraid to email people. You are not spamming them. You want to meet and ge to know them. Most people are worth meeting, even if through an email.
-- Print some nice business cards, but dont pay more than $50 for them. Also dont hand them out to everyone.
-- Advertise your email address, and please dont put a contact or sales @yourstartup.com. Use your name or a fictional name. Makes people less resistant to contacting you.
-- Read some marketing books.
-- Hire a good copywriter. If you need help with this, email me. I can help you with making the choice. The words used to sell your product must be carefully engineered. Just like you dont write variable names like this amount_ofProduct_leftOn_inventoryPer_disctrict, you jus dont write sales copy without a basic guideline.
-- Realize that marketing != lots of money. It does require a lot of thought and detail.
-- Realize that everything Ive said may not work for you. Huh? Maybe you can sell your product with a SEO campaign and a landing page. But that would still constitute a marketing plan. So think about that for a second.
- Be open to new ideas. You know who is rich? The guys that decided to sell advertisements through internet searching (yeah, google). Test all ideas, and be open to re-testing them in the future. Dont label anything permanently.
-- Reach out and help people. Good sales can come from helping local organizations with their needs.
-- Above all, dont ever, ever think that marketing doesnt work. It does work. You just have to become good at it.
-- All free advice is cheap advice. And cheap advice dont work. Hit some books, contact some professionals, and get working.
Ok, so now I have to go. Sorry for the huge post, and I deeply apologize for the mess of a post Ive made. Im tired and need to sleep.
If you need any help, just shoot me an email.
PS. I dont want to sell you anything. Hell, I dont have anything to sell. This post is not some thin-velied attempt at getting some gigs.","created_at":"2012-06-27T02:39:37Z","created_at_i":1340764777,"objectID":"4165247","parent_id":4161813,"points":null,"story_id":4161813,"story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best way to promote your startup?","updated_at":"2023-09-06T20:40:39Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"the_jesus_villa"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"I've done all of that except the butchery part (because that wouldn't make sense). She is homeschooled, and working with me on software projects is part of her homeschooling. Sometimes if the project is fun it could take all evening (like when we make videos demoing stuff for documentation).
As a kid, I went into dirty crawlspaces, helped my dad weld, and went on roofs, which for a little boy was pretty much the coolest thing imaginable. Whenever we were with a client who had a pool, my dad would ask the client if I could jump in, and they always said yes. I learned so much about technology from working on air conditioners. The process of troubleshooting, how machines work, and tons about sales and how to work with customers. My dad was also aggressive about SEO once that became a thing, but even before then, he did all kinds of marketing stuff himself.
I'm a freelancer today and wouldn't be able to if I hadn't been "forced to skip school for long evenings in the butchery", to put it into a phraseology that more matches your own. I think people have an idea of kids working based on school textbooks, which is sometimes (but not usually) accurate. When school textbooks teach the history of laws, it's always in this naive, doe-eyed kind of way.
Right now I'm in Guatemala, and child labor is everywhere, and to be honest, none of it seems as dreary as school does. Imagine as a kid being forced to do an office job where you sit down and do nothing for 6 hours, surrounded by friends who you cannot speak to, skipping play hours so you can study textbooks that teach a completely made up version of your country's history."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"2022Q4 real compensation revised downward to -4.7% from +0.7%"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm"}},"_tags":["comment","author_the_jesus_villa","story_36171514"],"author":"the_jesus_villa","comment_text":"I've done all of that except the butchery part (because that wouldn't make sense). She is homeschooled, and working with me on software projects is part of her homeschooling. Sometimes if the project is fun it could take all evening (like when we make videos demoing stuff for documentation).
As a kid, I went into dirty crawlspaces, helped my dad weld, and went on roofs, which for a little boy was pretty much the coolest thing imaginable. Whenever we were with a client who had a pool, my dad would ask the client if I could jump in, and they always said yes. I learned so much about technology from working on air conditioners. The process of troubleshooting, how machines work, and tons about sales and how to work with customers. My dad was also aggressive about SEO once that became a thing, but even before then, he did all kinds of marketing stuff himself.
I'm a freelancer today and wouldn't be able to if I hadn't been "forced to skip school for long evenings in the butchery", to put it into a phraseology that more matches your own. I think people have an idea of kids working based on school textbooks, which is sometimes (but not usually) accurate. When school textbooks teach the history of laws, it's always in this naive, doe-eyed kind of way.
Right now I'm in Guatemala, and child labor is everywhere, and to be honest, none of it seems as dreary as school does. Imagine as a kid being forced to do an office job where you sit down and do nothing for 6 hours, surrounded by friends who you cannot speak to, skipping play hours so you can study textbooks that teach a completely made up version of your country's history.","created_at":"2023-06-14T15:51:44Z","created_at_i":1686757904,"objectID":"36327802","parent_id":36173918,"story_id":36171514,"story_title":"2022Q4 real compensation revised downward to -4.7% from +0.7%","story_url":"https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm","updated_at":"2024-09-20T14:21:54Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"dirtyid"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Thanks for taking the time, some roughly structured thoughts:
First some PRC numbers to contexualize actual cost of current PRC demographics, 600M undereducated stuck in informal economy, ~20% (200M+) farmers most of whom who could be replaced by machines, trillions of SEO inefficient waste poured into essentially make-work jobs. Height of PRC manufacturing employed like ~300M. All of which is to say PRC HAS too many people, only fraction of demographic divident was exploited to essentially address global demand, while huge % have always been demographic drains, and the sooner they clear off the demographic balance sheet, the "stronger" PRC's actual geostrategic/geoeconomic posture will become. PRC excessive population has (IMO) on balance been more demographic curse than divident.
There are two demographic shifts happening in PRC.
1. Net demographic decline which will only reduce PRC import dependancy and increase strategic flexibility (less mouths = more energy/food security).
2. Massive demographic boom in high skill workforce - PRC generating as much as all OECD countries combined in skilled talent. That's largest high skill demographic divident in human history, not the poverty farm to factory transition, but profitable factory to laboratory one, with decades left to milk.
What does this mean? Medium/long term PRC is shifting towards more strategic independance and advanced economic development. Yes, there will be some heavy social pressures weathering the transition, but PRC is culturally and structurally well calibrated to weather demographic decline. Unliked developed welfare states, PRC is a modestly developed society with high home ownership and high savings rate because, bluntly there is no expectation of comprehensive safety net. Look at civil protests in the past few years, it's mostly developed societies protesting losing perks, not developing countries protesting to get perks they are not fathoming in the first place. Don't get me wrong, PRC society will be way more stressful than developed economies, but it will also be able to maintain political serenity easier because governance in developed countries with huge welfare obligations has more brittle modes of failure than PRC's alternative of having their citizens largely own their own homes and retire on their own savings. There's also additional dynamic of wealth transfers that will stimulate currently stubborn consumption because all this money is locked away as nest egg. Or that the poor in PRC are so poor (huge income disparity) that it doesn't take huge wealth transfer to keeps "dregs" from uprising, not that they could because they're old, and whatever welfare they get from the state will likely be better than what they grew up with. PRC decline will be one of "stagnation", western decline will be one of "loss" especially drama with increased immigration, it's easier to govern/manage the former than latter.
> directly affects
IMO less than one thinks.
I'm bundling your (familiar) points under the customary PRC demographic collapsist narrative that tries to insinuate social pressures that will lead to inevitable stalled ambitions/developement or decline. But a country can decline in terms of QoL but still improve in PRC's nomenclature - "comprehensive national power". Consider all the Asian Tigers with shit tier TFR that move up value chain (especially semi) simply because more % of population became high skill over time. They've all experienced fair share of economic and social drama in past decades, and relative to boomers, current QoL are in continuous decline. Yet these mid to large sized (20-120m) societies managed to specialize in some strategic high value industries to become very competitive economies.
And this is again where PRC is not like any other country.
1.4B pop with even bad TFR by virtue of base effect is enough to generate surplus talent to necessarily develop every sector simply because there's too many excess bodies not to. While current 20% youth unemployment is nothing to brag about, nor is lying flat not upsetting, but these are indicators of excess talent and extremely competitive labour enviroments. Sure, not good for society, but great for cut throat development. It's high skilled hunger games. Big reason TSMC thinks US fabs might fail is "cultural" issues (read: American's don't slave hard enough).
Consider USA at peak of hegemony had ~250M pop to maintain technologic autarky in the 90s; IMO where PRC is trending towards is highly developed and competitive tier1/T2 coastal region with multiple times the skilled talent of US (maybe on par with OECDs), that will close parity and then lead in SciTech in the coming decades. Combine with cheaper labour from T3/T4+ regions (ability to arbituage regional labour costs great for PPP/maintaining all that infra) and PRC acquiring more automation / industrial robots than next 14 countries combined, and we have recipe for a PRC were social fabric will be increasingly miserable, but with almost foregone potential to leapfrog in comprehensive national power, with capacity to lead in many sectors while maintaining much larger modern military due to talent and PPP advantage. Like this is not how one would structure a society to maximize human flourishing or per capital wellness but it is well calibrated to maximize comprehensive national power for great powers competition.
>buyers
Covid export bump aside, PRC or US are not particularly export dependant countries (14% vs 20%)... with exports to west accounting for ~10% of PRC GDP. Ergo US/PRC dragging on trade war, because ultimately both countries run on dominant internal markets. And IMO, long term west will keep walls up anyway to potential competitive PRC products that encroach on their high value niche (look at what just happened to YMTC). PRC's long term game is to chip away at emerging market share and deny domestic market access. The new export controls could cost western semi 1/3 of revenue (PRC huge semi market) and have to scale back R&D / competitiveness. When PRC catches up, they'll start hammering industrial policy to make western products increasingly uncompetitive. It will not be about selling to west, but denying west sales, taking their sales from other markets, and reducing competitiveness of western industries to the point where they become loss leading strategic sectors sustained by billions in subsidies / industrial policy. My long term trend guess is convergence where PRC will grow slowly, but every unit of PRC growth will soon come at cost of more units of western growth."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"US Government's new export controls are wreaking havoc on China's chip industry"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://twitter.com/jordanschnyc/status/1580889341265469440"}},"_tags":["comment","author_dirtyid","story_33203340"],"author":"dirtyid","comment_text":"Thanks for taking the time, some roughly structured thoughts:
First some PRC numbers to contexualize actual cost of current PRC demographics, 600M undereducated stuck in informal economy, ~20% (200M+) farmers most of whom who could be replaced by machines, trillions of SEO inefficient waste poured into essentially make-work jobs. Height of PRC manufacturing employed like ~300M. All of which is to say PRC HAS too many people, only fraction of demographic divident was exploited to essentially address global demand, while huge % have always been demographic drains, and the sooner they clear off the demographic balance sheet, the "stronger" PRC's actual geostrategic/geoeconomic posture will become. PRC excessive population has (IMO) on balance been more demographic curse than divident.
There are two demographic shifts happening in PRC.
1. Net demographic decline which will only reduce PRC import dependancy and increase strategic flexibility (less mouths = more energy/food security).
2. Massive demographic boom in high skill workforce - PRC generating as much as all OECD countries combined in skilled talent. That's largest high skill demographic divident in human history, not the poverty farm to factory transition, but profitable factory to laboratory one, with decades left to milk.
What does this mean? Medium/long term PRC is shifting towards more strategic independance and advanced economic development. Yes, there will be some heavy social pressures weathering the transition, but PRC is culturally and structurally well calibrated to weather demographic decline. Unliked developed welfare states, PRC is a modestly developed society with high home ownership and high savings rate because, bluntly there is no expectation of comprehensive safety net. Look at civil protests in the past few years, it's mostly developed societies protesting losing perks, not developing countries protesting to get perks they are not fathoming in the first place. Don't get me wrong, PRC society will be way more stressful than developed economies, but it will also be able to maintain political serenity easier because governance in developed countries with huge welfare obligations has more brittle modes of failure than PRC's alternative of having their citizens largely own their own homes and retire on their own savings. There's also additional dynamic of wealth transfers that will stimulate currently stubborn consumption because all this money is locked away as nest egg. Or that the poor in PRC are so poor (huge income disparity) that it doesn't take huge wealth transfer to keeps "dregs" from uprising, not that they could because they're old, and whatever welfare they get from the state will likely be better than what they grew up with. PRC decline will be one of "stagnation", western decline will be one of "loss" especially drama with increased immigration, it's easier to govern/manage the former than latter.
> directly affects
IMO less than one thinks.
I'm bundling your (familiar) points under the customary PRC demographic collapsist narrative that tries to insinuate social pressures that will lead to inevitable stalled ambitions/developement or decline. But a country can decline in terms of QoL but still improve in PRC's nomenclature - "comprehensive national power". Consider all the Asian Tigers with shit tier TFR that move up value chain (especially semi) simply because more % of population became high skill over time. They've all experienced fair share of economic and social drama in past decades, and relative to boomers, current QoL are in continuous decline. Yet these mid to large sized (20-120m) societies managed to specialize in some strategic high value industries to become very competitive economies.
And this is again where PRC is not like any other country.
1.4B pop with even bad TFR by virtue of base effect is enough to generate surplus talent to necessarily develop every sector simply because there's too many excess bodies not to. While current 20% youth unemployment is nothing to brag about, nor is lying flat not upsetting, but these are indicators of excess talent and extremely competitive labour enviroments. Sure, not good for society, but great for cut throat development. It's high skilled hunger games. Big reason TSMC thinks US fabs might fail is "cultural" issues (read: American's don't slave hard enough).
Consider USA at peak of hegemony had ~250M pop to maintain technologic autarky in the 90s; IMO where PRC is trending towards is highly developed and competitive tier1/T2 coastal region with multiple times the skilled talent of US (maybe on par with OECDs), that will close parity and then lead in SciTech in the coming decades. Combine with cheaper labour from T3/T4+ regions (ability to arbituage regional labour costs great for PPP/maintaining all that infra) and PRC acquiring more automation / industrial robots than next 14 countries combined, and we have recipe for a PRC were social fabric will be increasingly miserable, but with almost foregone potential to leapfrog in comprehensive national power, with capacity to lead in many sectors while maintaining much larger modern military due to talent and PPP advantage. Like this is not how one would structure a society to maximize human flourishing or per capital wellness but it is well calibrated to maximize comprehensive national power for great powers competition.
>buyers
Covid export bump aside, PRC or US are not particularly export dependant countries (14% vs 20%)... with exports to west accounting for ~10% of PRC GDP. Ergo US/PRC dragging on trade war, because ultimately both countries run on dominant internal markets. And IMO, long term west will keep walls up anyway to potential competitive PRC products that encroach on their high value niche (look at what just happened to YMTC). PRC's long term game is to chip away at emerging market share and deny domestic market access. The new export controls could cost western semi 1/3 of revenue (PRC huge semi market) and have to scale back R&D / competitiveness. When PRC catches up, they'll start hammering industrial policy to make western products increasingly uncompetitive. It will not be about selling to west, but denying west sales, taking their sales from other markets, and reducing competitiveness of western industries to the point where they become loss leading strategic sectors sustained by billions in subsidies / industrial policy. My long term trend guess is convergence where PRC will grow slowly, but every unit of PRC growth will soon come at cost of more units of western growth.","created_at":"2022-10-18T07:18:04Z","created_at_i":1666077484,"objectID":"33244025","parent_id":33240439,"story_id":33203340,"story_title":"US Government's new export controls are wreaking havoc on China's chip industry","story_url":"https://twitter.com/jordanschnyc/status/1580889341265469440","updated_at":"2025-09-01T00:28:37Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jodrellblank"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"> "If it's not too much to ask, can you better explain me your reasons? Is $500 a large amount of money for your budget?"
BitCoin has no associations in my mind except distasteful scams, hustle and the seedier side of life. The feeling is that you're trying to convince me to buy into Amway or an MLM scheme or a holiday time share. It wouldn't just be "wasting $500" it would be "being scammed". Wasting $500 would be mildly annoying, being scammed while watching it happen and thinking "this is a scam" and still going along with it would be infuriating.
I could spare it. If I lost it, the loss would not inconvenience me. But you are acting as if BitCoin is doing something new here - I can already hold some high-risk/high-return investments, and they are some that I think have a chance of increasing in value for reasons that I understand at least at a high level. For one example, Segway had a very understandable business model: invent and patent a new vehicle, make and sell it. The risk was that nobody would buy, and they didn't. By comparison, I don't understand at any level why BitCoin's price is what it is, and have no confidence it won't collapse suddenly and completely instead of going up. I don't know what it would take to make the price go 50x higher to get any feeling if that's likely or unlikely. I don't know why it would happen to Bitcoin specifically instead of Litecoin, Namecoin, Peercoin, Dogecoin, xRipple, Nxt, Monero, Stellar, Ethereum, etc. Buying a cheap speculative thing and losing it is one thing, throwing away money on an idea I think is supid and overpriced and then losing it, is another.
> "After the 50x happens in about 30x years"
Did you notice that several stocks went up >50x this year alone? Stocks related to speculative COVID-19 vaccines, for example Novacyt went up from \u00a30.14p in January to peak at \u00a311.94 in October - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NCYT.L?p=NCYT.L&.tsrc=fin-sr... - that's 85x in 12 months, still ~60x after the pullback from the peak. As a speculative high-risk gamble, 50x in 30 years is not all that compelling.
Are you beating yourself up for not investing in NCYT? Somewhere, on some market around the world, some stock is jumping large multiples every year, or quarter, or month - and missing out doesn't affect you at all. Instead of chasing those, you're chasing something with much less substance, and longer term outlook, why? Is it because you have no information better than anyone else to pick a 'winning stock'? Why do you think you have with BitCoin? Especially if you can't even convince your own kind - techno-geeks?
Worse than all this, if I make a bet with an established regulated gambling company, or visit a casino, or buy penny stocks from a regulated share trading company, or buy some Tesla CFDs, I have some idea what I'm getting and some trust that they will be basically honest - they might fiddle the prices a little, but if I sell up and request money, I'll get some money, and if they go under, the UK government's financial regulation may cover some of my losses (not gambling or investment losses, but company mismanagement or fraud).
With BitCoin, the most famous exchange was Magic The Gathering Online Exchange (MtGOX) which got hacked, had its bitcoins stolen, then CEO(!) Mark Karpeles joined in the fun and stole a million dollars of bitcoin for himself, then another three million, then maybe they got hacked again, then they went bankrupt. Other exchanges have had lots of people able to buy bitcoin, then when they try to sell the exchange gives them the runaround and won't pay any money:
Googling "bitcoin won't let me withdraw", I see "Kraken won't let me withdraw...", "Bittrex won't let me withdraw...", "Binance won't let me withdraw...", "withdrawals disabled on Bitpanda", "my coin is frozen at Paxful they won't let me withdraw it", "WTF IS GOING ON WITH GEMINI NOT LETTING ME WITHDRAW", "Polonius still won't let me withdraw my funds".
Presumably some exchanges are secure and trustworthy, but importantly I won't find out until either they lose my coins, lose my coins and don't notice and don't tell me, or I try to sell out for a large chunk of money and can't, and it's too late and I have little legal recourse since they're quite unregulated or not in the same country, etc.
> "even if it won't make you rich, it will have clear upsides for you, like a new car"
I am in the lucky living bracket where I have enough money for daily life, and some rainy day savings. Ungrateful though it may sound, $25k wouldn't make any difference to my daily life, it would go in a saving account and change nothing short term; I sure wouldn't spend it on a new car just because I had it. The financial amounts that would make a big difference are: a free house (pay off mortgage / buy a property outright), or instant retirement and freedom from work forever. Stable low-risk long-term investments with regular contributions have a reasonable chance of getting me to retirement money by retirement age, which is useful, though unexciting. Risky short term investments that stand a small chance of high return - I already have as many of those as I can stand, and am aware of a few more that could soak up the $500 if that's what I wanted to do with it, that I have more confidence in, and less disgust for, than BTC.
> "personally, I don't want to ever depend on a payment provider that I don't fully control. "be your own bank" is the killer app for me.
Why? What does that gain you? And what about the obvious objection that you don't fully control BitCoin? Do you mean you don't trust savings in US Dollars? There's other currencies and other asset classes - precious metals, real estate, that can't be inflated away as easily by central policies. At least growing your own food keeps you alive whether or not anyone else values it, money only has value as an exchange with other people who value it similarly, and more people value dollars than bitcoins. "Be your own bank" is uninteresting to me like "be your own home owner's association" where you get to vote with yourself on your own bye-laws about how to keep the value of your property by forbidding yourself from painting it orange, which you didn't want to do anyway. Without all the people in the same area agreeing to the same rules for collective value increase, "do it yourself" can't really do anything.
> "Exactly what I thought! The hacker spirit is a taste for risk and fun, as understanding things allows you gain more control of your destiny ; it's a bit like "work hard play hard", along with a hefty disdain of the mainstream."
The hacker spirit I respect is Fabrice Bellard writing a JavaScript virtual machine emulator comprehensive and fast enough to boot a Linux VM in a browser[1] or Matthias Wandel's Pantorouter[2], John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, or Tom Stanton's flywheel trebuchet[3], Paul Lutus' works, or even things like early SpaceX. It's an engineering inventiveness, building something new or modifying something for an unexpected use, a techno-engineering-playfulness for its own sake, nothing to do with money. The "hacker spirit" of today seems more like growth hacking your Wordpress blog with SEO while you arrange some poor people on an outsourcing site to drop-ship nutritional supplements in your name so you can spend your free time writing a TEDx talk about how you attended a weekend hackathon and got a sneakerbot running on a Raspberry Pi so it can scalp limited edition sneakers and sell them on eBay at a huge markup. It's a greasy, used-car salesman, self-aggrandizing world, it's focused on self-gain, riches, exploiting systems in ways like lootboxes and dark patterns to increase customer retention with borderline-addiction mechanisms. Hacking is at best orthogonal to making money, and at worst corrupted by the influence of money. And to me it's not about disrupting the incumbents; SpaceX wanted to go to Mars, they didn't set out to "do whatever spacey thing made the most money" or "put ULA out of business", if those happen it's a side effect of inventing ways to build cheap reusable rockets on their way past that to a loftier goal.
A world with BitCoin and a world without BitCoin ... really what difference will it make?
> "After the 50x happens in about 30x years, you may not remember this conversation but I will remember how yet again I was unable to make someone take a clear beneficial action."
and what? Are you sad for me that I didn't buy Apple or Amazon stock in 1999? Are you upset that I didn't invest in Segway (assuiming that was an option)? That I didn't buy BeOS? I don't remember the VA Linux IPO, but would you have encouraged me to invest in that? Facebook's IPO?
Isn't there supposed to be more to life and more to people than how much money they have or how much they want to participate in various markets?
I think Dr Burns TEAMS Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is probably a world changing thing, I've spent many hours listening to his podcasts and think it has the potential to upturn mental health treatment; but there's nothing to invest in and it's a 1:1 therapist/client thing, it won't be web scale or built with AI, and it will likely be sidelined and ignored by mainstream therapists who want repeat custom, can't deal with facing their failings, or get kickbacks from drug companies.
I think giving up sugar would be clearly beneficial, I can't make myself do it.
Life goes on.
[1] https://bellard.org/jslinux/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wZ1v4PIsYI
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVT5i4nhIGs"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Exotic Programming Ideas"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/exotic04.html"}},"_tags":["comment","author_jodrellblank","story_25314106"],"author":"jodrellblank","children":[25391561],"comment_text":"> "If it's not too much to ask, can you better explain me your reasons? Is $500 a large amount of money for your budget?"
BitCoin has no associations in my mind except distasteful scams, hustle and the seedier side of life. The feeling is that you're trying to convince me to buy into Amway or an MLM scheme or a holiday time share. It wouldn't just be "wasting $500" it would be "being scammed". Wasting $500 would be mildly annoying, being scammed while watching it happen and thinking "this is a scam" and still going along with it would be infuriating.
I could spare it. If I lost it, the loss would not inconvenience me. But you are acting as if BitCoin is doing something new here - I can already hold some high-risk/high-return investments, and they are some that I think have a chance of increasing in value for reasons that I understand at least at a high level. For one example, Segway had a very understandable business model: invent and patent a new vehicle, make and sell it. The risk was that nobody would buy, and they didn't. By comparison, I don't understand at any level why BitCoin's price is what it is, and have no confidence it won't collapse suddenly and completely instead of going up. I don't know what it would take to make the price go 50x higher to get any feeling if that's likely or unlikely. I don't know why it would happen to Bitcoin specifically instead of Litecoin, Namecoin, Peercoin, Dogecoin, xRipple, Nxt, Monero, Stellar, Ethereum, etc. Buying a cheap speculative thing and losing it is one thing, throwing away money on an idea I think is supid and overpriced and then losing it, is another.
> "After the 50x happens in about 30x years"
Did you notice that several stocks went up >50x this year alone? Stocks related to speculative COVID-19 vaccines, for example Novacyt went up from \u00a30.14p in January to peak at \u00a311.94 in October - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NCYT.L?p=NCYT.L&.tsrc=fin-sr... - that's 85x in 12 months, still ~60x after the pullback from the peak. As a speculative high-risk gamble, 50x in 30 years is not all that compelling.
Are you beating yourself up for not investing in NCYT? Somewhere, on some market around the world, some stock is jumping large multiples every year, or quarter, or month - and missing out doesn't affect you at all. Instead of chasing those, you're chasing something with much less substance, and longer term outlook, why? Is it because you have no information better than anyone else to pick a 'winning stock'? Why do you think you have with BitCoin? Especially if you can't even convince your own kind - techno-geeks?
Worse than all this, if I make a bet with an established regulated gambling company, or visit a casino, or buy penny stocks from a regulated share trading company, or buy some Tesla CFDs, I have some idea what I'm getting and some trust that they will be basically honest - they might fiddle the prices a little, but if I sell up and request money, I'll get some money, and if they go under, the UK government's financial regulation may cover some of my losses (not gambling or investment losses, but company mismanagement or fraud).
With BitCoin, the most famous exchange was Magic The Gathering Online Exchange (MtGOX) which got hacked, had its bitcoins stolen, then CEO(!) Mark Karpeles joined in the fun and stole a million dollars of bitcoin for himself, then another three million, then maybe they got hacked again, then they went bankrupt. Other exchanges have had lots of people able to buy bitcoin, then when they try to sell the exchange gives them the runaround and won't pay any money:
Googling "bitcoin won't let me withdraw", I see "Kraken won't let me withdraw...", "Bittrex won't let me withdraw...", "Binance won't let me withdraw...", "withdrawals disabled on Bitpanda", "my coin is frozen at Paxful they won't let me withdraw it", "WTF IS GOING ON WITH GEMINI NOT LETTING ME WITHDRAW", "Polonius still won't let me withdraw my funds".
Presumably some exchanges are secure and trustworthy, but importantly I won't find out until either they lose my coins, lose my coins and don't notice and don't tell me, or I try to sell out for a large chunk of money and can't, and it's too late and I have little legal recourse since they're quite unregulated or not in the same country, etc.
> "even if it won't make you rich, it will have clear upsides for you, like a new car"
I am in the lucky living bracket where I have enough money for daily life, and some rainy day savings. Ungrateful though it may sound, $25k wouldn't make any difference to my daily life, it would go in a saving account and change nothing short term; I sure wouldn't spend it on a new car just because I had it. The financial amounts that would make a big difference are: a free house (pay off mortgage / buy a property outright), or instant retirement and freedom from work forever. Stable low-risk long-term investments with regular contributions have a reasonable chance of getting me to retirement money by retirement age, which is useful, though unexciting. Risky short term investments that stand a small chance of high return - I already have as many of those as I can stand, and am aware of a few more that could soak up the $500 if that's what I wanted to do with it, that I have more confidence in, and less disgust for, than BTC.
> "personally, I don't want to ever depend on a payment provider that I don't fully control. "be your own bank" is the killer app for me.
Why? What does that gain you? And what about the obvious objection that you don't fully control BitCoin? Do you mean you don't trust savings in US Dollars? There's other currencies and other asset classes - precious metals, real estate, that can't be inflated away as easily by central policies. At least growing your own food keeps you alive whether or not anyone else values it, money only has value as an exchange with other people who value it similarly, and more people value dollars than bitcoins. "Be your own bank" is uninteresting to me like "be your own home owner's association" where you get to vote with yourself on your own bye-laws about how to keep the value of your property by forbidding yourself from painting it orange, which you didn't want to do anyway. Without all the people in the same area agreeing to the same rules for collective value increase, "do it yourself" can't really do anything.
> "Exactly what I thought! The hacker spirit is a taste for risk and fun, as understanding things allows you gain more control of your destiny ; it's a bit like "work hard play hard", along with a hefty disdain of the mainstream."
The hacker spirit I respect is Fabrice Bellard writing a JavaScript virtual machine emulator comprehensive and fast enough to boot a Linux VM in a browser[1] or Matthias Wandel's Pantorouter[2], John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, or Tom Stanton's flywheel trebuchet[3], Paul Lutus' works, or even things like early SpaceX. It's an engineering inventiveness, building something new or modifying something for an unexpected use, a techno-engineering-playfulness for its own sake, nothing to do with money. The "hacker spirit" of today seems more like growth hacking your Wordpress blog with SEO while you arrange some poor people on an outsourcing site to drop-ship nutritional supplements in your name so you can spend your free time writing a TEDx talk about how you attended a weekend hackathon and got a sneakerbot running on a Raspberry Pi so it can scalp limited edition sneakers and sell them on eBay at a huge markup. It's a greasy, used-car salesman, self-aggrandizing world, it's focused on self-gain, riches, exploiting systems in ways like lootboxes and dark patterns to increase customer retention with borderline-addiction mechanisms. Hacking is at best orthogonal to making money, and at worst corrupted by the influence of money. And to me it's not about disrupting the incumbents; SpaceX wanted to go to Mars, they didn't set out to "do whatever spacey thing made the most money" or "put ULA out of business", if those happen it's a side effect of inventing ways to build cheap reusable rockets on their way past that to a loftier goal.
A world with BitCoin and a world without BitCoin ... really what difference will it make?
> "After the 50x happens in about 30x years, you may not remember this conversation but I will remember how yet again I was unable to make someone take a clear beneficial action."
and what? Are you sad for me that I didn't buy Apple or Amazon stock in 1999? Are you upset that I didn't invest in Segway (assuiming that was an option)? That I didn't buy BeOS? I don't remember the VA Linux IPO, but would you have encouraged me to invest in that? Facebook's IPO?
Isn't there supposed to be more to life and more to people than how much money they have or how much they want to participate in various markets?
I think Dr Burns TEAMS Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is probably a world changing thing, I've spent many hours listening to his podcasts and think it has the potential to upturn mental health treatment; but there's nothing to invest in and it's a 1:1 therapist/client thing, it won't be web scale or built with AI, and it will likely be sidelined and ignored by mainstream therapists who want repeat custom, can't deal with facing their failings, or get kickbacks from drug companies.
I think giving up sugar would be clearly beneficial, I can't make myself do it.
Life goes on.
[1] https://bellard.org/jslinux/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wZ1v4PIsYI
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVT5i4nhIGs","created_at":"2020-12-09T02:53:09Z","created_at_i":1607482389,"objectID":"25354765","parent_id":25350224,"story_id":25314106,"story_title":"Exotic Programming Ideas","story_url":"https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/exotic04.html","updated_at":"2024-09-20T07:29:19Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"ddemchuk"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Matt, thanks for responding. I guess I'm not exactly sure where to end this back and forth, but your latest response does open up a few questions of mine.
I've never argued that running Adsense helps a site rank higher, I know that it doesn't. But I do believe that sites like eHow, who presumably make Google millions of dollars a year, are given a free pass to pursue content spam like I posted in my previous comment without any sort of repercussions that we can see. They're leveraging their domain authority and producing very low quality articles to target obscure long tail variations of keywords to keep getting that traffic.
What concerns me is \"If you can\u2019t algorithmically identify a content farm, is it still ok to take action and remove a site\"...is the issue that the algorithms aren't sophisticated enough to catch these content mills from spitting out article after article of low quality, long-tail targeted traffic, or that you guys have thrown in the towel and believe that if the algos aren't throwing flags, then the sites are fine?
I posted up an example of a content mill type situation in my last response. To most people, a manual review should throw up a warning flag if the goal was to identify people targeting keywords rather than trying to help people. The top 5 rankings for each of those pages shows that neither algorithmic nor manual measures are in place to deal with such a situation.
I have 10+ content sites targeting random niches. I know how the SEO game works. I know dozens of internet marketers who have dozens of their own sites each who know how to game the algo to rank high with low quality content sites like these. It's obvious people are taking advantage of the algorithm, but it doesn't appear to be drastically improving anytime soon.
I do appreciate the time and effort you have put into your responses. If you'd like to talk privately, I would love to. I'll try and watch the video you suggested tonight."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-better-google-2/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_ddemchuk","story_2057772"],"author":"ddemchuk","children":[2062152],"comment_text":"Matt, thanks for responding. I guess I'm not exactly sure where to end this back and forth, but your latest response does open up a few questions of mine.
I've never argued that running Adsense helps a site rank higher, I know that it doesn't. But I do believe that sites like eHow, who presumably make Google millions of dollars a year, are given a free pass to pursue content spam like I posted in my previous comment without any sort of repercussions that we can see. They're leveraging their domain authority and producing very low quality articles to target obscure long tail variations of keywords to keep getting that traffic.
What concerns me is \"If you can\u2019t algorithmically identify a content farm, is it still ok to take action and remove a site\"...is the issue that the algorithms aren't sophisticated enough to catch these content mills from spitting out article after article of low quality, long-tail targeted traffic, or that you guys have thrown in the towel and believe that if the algos aren't throwing flags, then the sites are fine?
I posted up an example of a content mill type situation in my last response. To most people, a manual review should throw up a warning flag if the goal was to identify people targeting keywords rather than trying to help people. The top 5 rankings for each of those pages shows that neither algorithmic nor manual measures are in place to deal with such a situation.
I have 10+ content sites targeting random niches. I know how the SEO game works. I know dozens of internet marketers who have dozens of their own sites each who know how to game the algo to rank high with low quality content sites like these. It's obvious people are taking advantage of the algorithm, but it doesn't appear to be drastically improving anytime soon.
I do appreciate the time and effort you have put into your responses. If you'd like to talk privately, I would love to. I'll try and watch the video you suggested tonight.","created_at":"2011-01-03T03:32:01Z","created_at_i":1294025521,"objectID":"2061977","parent_id":2061061,"story_id":2057772,"story_title":"Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google","story_url":"http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-better-google-2/","updated_at":"2024-09-19T17:25:14Z"}],"hitsPerPage":20,"nbHits":67,"nbPages":4,"page":0,"params":"query=how+long+does+SEO+take+to+work&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":147,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"roundTrip":15},"afterFetch":{"format":{"highlighting":5,"total":6},"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":6,"total":7},"total":7},"total":7},"fetch":{"query":20,"scanning":118,"total":139},"total":147},"query":"how long does SEO take to work","serverTimeMS":154}