Forget about exercise, just eat broccoli. Your body will co-operate with you the moment you start co-operating with it, by giving it food which is actually nutritious. I lost 75 pounds in 6 months without eating less or exercising. I mean I exercised a little, but not enough to have any contribution to my weight loss at all. Google "dr joel fuhrman". I also saw my cholesterol go down 100 points in three months, along with similar huge improvements in blood pressure and triglycerides.
I've got a list on a blog post of all the different HN mashups people have made. There's more than 10. I think it'd be cool if we had some HN wiki to put them on.
it's only a matter of time before this stops entertaining me so I'm just going to answer this question as completely and totally as I can (before guys like KirinDave start calling me names, etc.).
there is in fact RESEARCH about this. being somebody who really really really wanted to make music for a living, and utterly failed, I went and read as much research as I possibly could. the two most relevant things you should read to fully understand this question are an article in the New York Times on cumulative advantage - google "NYT Timberlake cumulative advantage" - and "The Winner-Take-All Society", an economics book which is a few years old now.
the short answer is: create lots of stuff, at high standards of quality, because how specific assets become popular is very near random. you absolutely cannot predict which assets become popular - not even if you have a track record of huge hits. the economics and social networking elements are the same whether you're talking companies, code, movies, or music. you cannot predict hits. Tom Cruise can't say for sure, DHH can't say for sure, no matter who you are or how at the top of your game you are, it is functionally random. however, having lots of fans makes it much, much more probable, and the best way to get fans is by giving them stuff which is good. so create a lot of assets, get them to as many people as possible, and target a nice high standard of quality. and NEVER be too attached to the success or failure of any particular asset - there's just too much randomness involved for it to be even remotely logical to be taking it personally.
very close (in my opinion). it's the opposite of the ad problem. while lots and lots of people were arguing about how to make ads suck less, I was writing an ad entertaining enough, and with enough of an actual point, that people would tell each other to read it. that's the solution: ads that don't suck, and not only don't suck, but are so far from sucking that ten or twenty years ago, they would have been books, magazines, or articles unto themselves, and would have sold as products in their own right.
I mean seriously, if you decided not to buy my video, but you still went and took this philosophy of "create stuff and get it to people" as a guiding principle for your career, it would improve.
the ad debate was hilarious to me because it was all going on while I was writing this thing. this isn't the solution to the ad problem, it's the antithesis. at one end you have people who make premium content, and host ads nobody wants to see, complaining that nobody wants to see their ads. on the other, you have one blogger, on his own, in his boxers, giggling at home and writing an epic ad which people are going to post on Hacker News for free without any action on his part.
the answer to the ad problem is don't even have an ad problem. just skip the whole thing. if you do business a different way, where all your marketing is about giving away stuff worth getting, you'll never have to care about an ad problem in your life.
Like anything SEO, there's some inaccuracy here. For instance, I rocketed a microsite to number one for its keywords with a someblog.blogspot.com link. It was at #1 in like a day and a half.
The reason there's so much mystery around SEO is because you've got a black box called Google which may or may not do what you want when you want. You can't run any real scientific method on it because, just like how you can't cross the same river twice, you can't evaluate the same Google twice (since they're constantly running experiments on you, the surfer, in real time), and obviously you're competing with a gigantic graph of web sites, which you also can't evaluate twice, since it changes every time a new page goes online, goes offline, or gets republished with some tiny edit.
Most SEO people don't think this way, but because I'm a programmer, I think you should start learning SEO by understanding how Google works. For instance (blatant self-promotion), you could check out this video where I give you Google PageRank in five lines of Ruby:
I think you're really onto something. The whole "ads suck" conversation is kind of unnecessary because there are so many ways to make money on advertizing without annoying anybody. Dan Kennedy's books are essentially just giant, 200-page ads, and I buy them and read them cover-to-cover (and overnight in most cases).
Cluetrain Manifesto explained it more than a decade ago: markets are conversations. The flipside to that: conversations are markets. So if you're filling the whole world with conversational media, you're turning everything into a market.
However:
Make dropping in an affiliate marketplace easy for content providers. And make revenue sharing, management, and tracking easy for product providers.
This already exists. :-) Both through the reputable world of Amazon (et al) and the disreputable (or less-reputable) world of Clickbank (et al), this is all a done deal and already was a done deal several years ago. The tech is simple: cookies and HTTP redirects.
I think he wasn't calling the phrase itself deceptive. I think he's saying that you use it in an undisciplined way. From the final paragraph:
[the phrase is] useful in circumstances where you don’t have any substantive path from X to Y.
Nothing personal, but I think he's onto something. Especially if you take a more generous outlook and expand it to "circumstances where you don't demonstrate any substantive path from X to Y." (Even if somebody fails to demonstrate a substantive path, the path might still exist.)
Re: patterns, there was a blogger who did some kind of screen-scraping, machine learning, NLP analysis of my blog and claimed their analysis proved I was really a bot. I would take that kind of thing with a grain of salt.
I'm in the same boat. I'd be happy to give books away to people locally (I'm in Los Angeles) but I'm kinda too busy to deal with the post office. There's a cool web site or two that address this problem (a friend of mine is a big fan of one which I believe is called PaperbookBookSwap.com or something like that), but it's not worth it to me to wait at the post office. (Waiting in lines drives me nuts.)
In the past I've given books away to the local library. Where I live now, they only take donations on Saturday mornings, so I've just been giving them to Goodwill instead. There's something about donating a Haskell intro to Goodwill that fills very stupid, though. I hope they have some system where they put them all on eBay or sell them upstream somewhere to some kind of distributor, but I think they just throw them on the shelves.
If we were to build or find some kind of "free programmer books" site where we could just co-ordinate giveaways, I'd be very happy to kick in a ton of books, and probably to keep doing so for years.
I used to have your problem. In 2009 I said I would make a new miniapp every month. I failed most months. I also said I would make a new mp3 (of electronic dance music) every day. I failed something like 1 out of every 3 days. However, the pressure from both projects, especially the daily mp3 project, changed my life.
In order to stay on point with the daily mp3 project, I bought an iPhone app called Streaks and marked an X on my calendar every day I made an mp3. Soon I was posting mp3s every day like clockwork. Since it worked so well, I started adding new calendars. I quickly had more calendars than Streaks could handle and the app slowed to a crawl, so I switched to a paper calendar on my wall and some thin Crayola markers. I now have, and have had for months, a daily real-time paper dashboard of how all my habit-generating projects are proceeding.
The key is to focus on generating habits rather than accomplishing goals. To understand why, consider the phenomenon of passive income. Passive income is money which comes from projects that make you money. A person who works at a job trades time for money. A person who builds passive income projects decouples time from money, and puts their time into building something which will, once built, generate money for them autonomously.
Every programmer should know that tight coupling leads to bad OO design. It also leads to bad business structure. Passive income wins over working for a living because you get a much more enjoyable lifestyle. Instead of working to make money, you create things, and those things make money for you.
In the same way that passive income gets you money on autopilot, when you focus on habits instead of goals, you accomplish your goals on autopilot. You decouple time from money with passive income; when you generate the right habits, you decouple effort from results. You put a little time in to create a passive income project, and thereafter it generates money for you; you put a little effort in to create habits, and thereafter your habit gets results for you.
When I got in the habit of creating mp3s every day and marking each daily mp3 on a calendar, I didn't just establish the habit of making music every day. I also established the habit of completing a tiny project every day. This is the part that changed my life. Over the past year, I have morphed from a completely disorganized person into an unusually organized one. I used to never even make a to-do list; now I have an original planning and organizing system with three separate layers. All this happened because I started by establishing the habit of completing projects.
When the mp3 thing started working well and I started tracking many other desired daily habits, I created a pattern of working to complete small tasks every day. The brain is a fantastic pattern-matching machine, and if you focus on creating habits, your brain will generalize out to broader things. Since I was in the habit of tracking my music and my workouts, I soon fell into the habit of tracking how often I ate the way I wanted to eat and even how often I put gas in my car. Once I had established these habits, of tracking nearly everything on paper, it became absolutely trivial to make and complete to-do lists every day, and to track my finances, my weight, and my sleep schedule on a daily basis.
Remember, this took me a year. But all you have to do to get started is pick one thing you really care about, more than anything else, and make a deal with yourself that you will do at least one tiny bit of work on that one thing every single day. Put that on your calendar, mark an X on the day every time, and don't break the chain. That's the Seinfeld method (google "Seinfeld Lifehacker"). If you want to expand that method to something more sophisticated like me, it will be easy to do, AFTER you have taken the time to establish this habit of completing one tiny project every single day.
If you do what I just told you, your problem will be solved for the rest of your life.