If true my educated guess for the disease would be a form of leukemia, although in its acute form is unlikely that the affected are left well enough to travel.
It's an interesting scenario and very likely, but I suppose FB engineers and shareholders are not too concerned about Facebook becoming a digital graveyard in 50 years because they will be dead themselves.
It looks to me the idea may not be the best one and his success will not be easy to replicate (for those that are thinking to do the same in their cities), but the discussion the story generated is very interesting in two ways:
1)there are bits of localcasestudy's experience that can be used by other businesses irregardless of what sector they are
2)the moral of the story is that if you want to run your own business you can do it.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be a tech startup looking to raise funds.
In average the response you'll receive on free lance marketplaces will always be disappointing, but if the project is not too complicate, you can always find someone good enough to do it.
One option is to invite coders to bid on your project by looking at their past experiences and find some that may relate to the type of project you have.
Other than that, and I know I've said this before, the best coders on free lance sites are those that ask questions relevant to your project description.
While you can safely discard all those that submit generic bids with links to their portfolios without any type of comment about the project they are bidding on, those that ask questions are the ones you want to work with.
If you have a discount club membership with Godaddy, and I imagine with 800+ your friend has one, a .com is less than $8, so that's not $9k in fees, but more like $6.2-6.3k.
It would be close to $9k at any other registrar though, so I suspect your friend will end up like many before, including me, learning his lesson but leaving the domains there.
Domains are worth whatever a buyer is willing to pay, not what people in this thread or automatic tools on the internet believe/suggest.
I've had domains that I hand-registered in the last two years sell for 4-5 figures and other that according to experts/tools are very valuable, but that simply do not attract any buyer.
And I'm not even a regular domain investor (or domain squatter as people on YC seem to believe all domain investors = squatters).
Anyway, I think the blog poster has a pretty good idea of what his domains are worth, but he's just trying to raise attention and possibly start a bidding war on the 2-3 interesting ones. Some choose to do their auctions through auction houses, other uses more creative forms.
I honestly couldn't care less what happened to Mahalo and I pretty much agreed with all your points when you first revealed their ways of creating tens of thousands of useless pages, but nevertheless I also have simpathy for Jason.
I think not many people on HN realize (or probably are willing to admit) that This Week In Startups is the most interesting resource to learn from real experiences of fellow entrepreneurs, developers, etc.
Mixergy is another interesting one, but the format of TWIST provides its viewers lots of insights and info that you simply can't get anywhere else on the web.
I suspect it's not that easy or the previous owner could have restructured the business and its debt instead of declaring bankruptcy. Truth is there is no money left in sex/pornography.