If anything google made all types of bullshit more accessible.
Just search for articles about: Non-stick pans, chem-trails, hollow-earth theory, etc. etc.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but looking at hardware prices, might also support the case that "miners are hoarders".
(Please excuse the sketchy math in the following post. these figures are just based on searches on Ebay/Google. Most of all I don't know who's doing the majority of the mining and at what scale.)*
(Low End) ($490 investment in mining)
At the current level of mining difficulty a machine that has a hash rate in the 200/g/. Returns about $6.00 worth of BTC a day.
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.
I searched "200 gh/s" in a site that crawls Ebay, The machines for sale at this hash-rate costs about 490. You would recoup the cost of the machine in 81 days.
If it takes 81 days to break even on your investment, even if bitcoin doubles in that time frame you basically made the price of the machine as profit ($490 in 81 days). (meh)
(High End) (18k investment in mining)
Machines in the single digit tera-hash realm come in at under 20k, they peak at 15-20K per machine. Let's average the price at 18k. They make $90 a day according to the calculator. This would mean you would need 200 days to recuperate the cost of the machine.
In this case it takes 200 days to break even on your investment. If bitcoin doubles in that time frame you made 18k in 200 days. (the online calculator said power costs in this time frame are around $70.)
I'm assuming individuals in both these positions are have long-term holding in mind. My rationale is: getting substantially richer in either case requires the price per coin becomes drastically higher. You're also not hemorrhaging money in either case (power costs seem reasonable). It makes more sense for miners to hold as much of what they mine as possible. Both positions seem to hedged on a BTC being priced a lot more higher, in this sense hard to imagine miners to be selling in great quantities.
I also feel that people DIRECTLY buying and selling bitcoin would dwarf the selling pressure of the majority of miners. The barriers of entry for this also seem much lower than setting up the hardware.
During early elementary school I learned more in camp than I did at school.
I was also first exposed to C++ in a summer program around 1998.
With the right vendors this is more than a marketplace for camps, it could radically change education. Kids can pick up technical skills VERY early (that schools won't give them), and they'll have years to master them.
Great post! I browsed your site some more, and found a video of a presentation you gave. Asking for the close is killer. In retrospect too many of my first couple of calls ended with... "So uh yeah, I'll email you I guess."
Me and my cofounder have been doing test-runs of sales just to test if there was interest in our market. We made a note to take time out of developing to call 20 vendors a day. Some things we found:
1) Doing cold alone is nerve-racking, doing sales with a friend is actually pretty fun. It's almost nostalgic of crank-calling people as a kid. You can joke about the interesting run-ins you have with vendors. My cofounder and I grab snacks and just spend an afternoon calling.
2) We rate each call with "likelihood ratings (1-10 rating of how the call went). These are just qualitative ratings about the disposition of the caller on the other line. Every 50 or so we take note of what language improves the mood, and what turns people off. This way we're consistently improving our pitch.
3) Early on we let the initial tone of the calls dictate their end result. Too many calls ended more abruptly than they should have.(because we perceived that the other end was too disinterested to sway.) But we quickly noted was that many of the vendors had the same objections. It was an easy fix, just come up with a list of simple, logical retorts. There's many calls that we talked out of a ditch. -It's like when you solve yourself out of a cluster-fuck in 2048 :)
4) I'm not a very extroverted person, I don't have a marketing background. But I've actually come to like the calls. The first call of the day is always the hardest. The initial dip into a chilly pool is unpleasant, but you get over it much quicker than you would think. I talked to many interesting people just through cold calls. At first I scoured my network trying to find someone to delegate this task to, now it's part of the daily work schedule.
5) Ask for the close, just let them say "No". Don't dance around it. In the bigger picture who cares that one person said "No".
TL,DR Technical Cofounders can operate telephones; thus they can make sales calls. Make a structure, log objections, find patterns. (It's fun.)
/r/programming doesn't get that specific into programming. I think it's mostly an aggregator of resources for beginners learning how to program. (a large percentage of the posts are questions like 'which language')
I think its possible that your product could have gone over many peoples heads, at least in that particular sub.
Have you looked into subreddits like r/webdevelopment or r/html5( or javascript,CSS)? They have less readers but maybe they're more your target?
I'm actually interested in using your site for a quick landing page (for an app I'm developing). I'm checking out the 'Pro' section, is there any coupon code available now?
Nice article, some ideas reminded me of a passage I read on Chris Dixon's blog a while ago.
"The successful products took big meals and converted them to snacks. The Internet likes snacks – simple, focused products that capture an atomic behavior and become compounded only by linking in and out to other services. This has become even more so with the shift to mobile."-
His entire post wasn't necessarily about 'specificity', but I really liked his 'snack' analogy. Looking at currently successful products, many are incredibly focused and snack-like.
1. A defined use-case (flavor) they users easily distinguish from other products.
2. Efficient interaction (consumption) that addresses the problem: quickly, simply, and mobile(ly).
I'm not sure that understanding this is that predicated on cultural familiarity. I'd argue the majority of its meaning comes from the fact that it "breaks the rules in order to be overly brief." The syntax being intentionally wrong, bad, and clumsy coincides with the fact that it's often used to describe absurd things and situations. Clumsy syntax = slightly belligerent rhetoric? I could be wrong, my main idea of a idiom is a proverb or figurative parallel illustrating a concept.
I don't think it's belligerent or simply compressed. AFAICT, it warns the listener that a lot is being left out. It is, in fact, the independent phrase version, using a single noun as the independent phrase. This tells the listener to deduce the rest of the phrase. The verb and object are generally omitted for reasons other than brevity.
"I added bacon to my ice cream because bacon" [is the most awesome thing ever] (and if you don't already know that or don't agree, I don't want to try defending it).
"The project failed because politics" [generally causes everything to fail] (and if I start talking about that I'll start ranting and no one wants that).
"Root beer in a square glass is beer because math" [uses "square" and "root" as opposites] (but if I said that explicitly it would harm the humor of the joke).
Contrast "I added bacon to my ice cream because of bacon", which would suggest that everything you need to know is there and it is the nature of bacon to be added to ice cream.
Off-topic, but just wanted to add that the four comments above exemplify why I still find hope in HN discussions. Each one adds some new insight, refining what was said previously and does it in a constructive way.
There's also ambiguity. I didn't think math was funny just because of the pun, but also because of the way people use math to justify homeopathy. It's mathematical, so it must be true. From a similar cultural perspective, I can see something totally different but also valid.
Most popular memes have cross-cultural appeal, and we each add to them.
