That being said, the arrogance displayed in many of the comments on this thread and others like it is one of the things I dislike most here. There's this pervasive attitude that hackers > businesspeople, and while it's ridiculous for a business guy to think he can hire a programmer (or be of much value to one), you never see articles about how hackers are helpless without business people or how a hacker would have no idea how to hire a marketing or sales guy (and shouldn't even try).

Maybe I'm overreacting because I'm one of those who straddle the line, but this kind of arrogance serves no one.

One thing I've learned the hard way is that self-deprecation only works in British comedy. In the USA most people don't get it and it not only damages your career but your dating and social life, too.

New: 3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1.

But if we intend to continue to increase our agricultural output and continue to feed the earth's population then there's no going back, and you can't feed everyone on earth with organic methods. Its hard enough using every trick in the book. Borlaug ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug ) is an amazing guy and anyone who enjoyed this article will enjoy reading about the bio-hacker that fed a billion people and ended mass starvation in India and China by breeding kick-ass wheat and rice that raised agricultural output by seven times since the 1940s!

The solution for Americans: grow your own vegetables! Use plenty of compost, use organic heirloom seeds suitable for your area and spray weekly with dilute dish soap and you'll have minerals a plenty in your veggies and no pesticides. And they'll taste better than anything you've ever had! It doesn't take much land to grow a significant amount of food.

Yes, many businesspeople hire bad hackers resulting in a bad product. But equally many hackers hire bad bussinesspeople and never get their product out the door. None of these scenarios are good.

The keypoint here is that to start a successful business you need many components, and if you fail at just one of them you're finished - A startup is never stronger than its weakest link.

The startups that achieve success acknowledge what their strengths are, are keenly aware of their weaknesses and try diligently to hire people that can fill these out. So the great hacker should not frown at businesspeople if he wants to do a succesful startup, he should acknowledge the fact that he has shortcomings, as everybody does, and try to hire people to fill out these shortcomings. The weakest point with many hackers (in my personal experience) is that they don't like political games, don't like cold-calling people, and don't think marketing should drive your sales. Exactly the things a good businessperson excels at.

So please, get along and you will make more succesful companies.

    http://www.parrotsecrets.com/

I'm curious though, and I'd love it if you'd share - did you get this awesome press through PR, contacts or serendipity?

Unwanted: Excess red tape. Non-deterministic bugs. Win32. IE. Reality TV. Murphy's law.

When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.

I got great feedback and found a programmer from hacker news a few weeks ago

Got a new website up, keep it coming

ramen profitable!

1. Build a social news site for local stuff. Gather an audience of local news junkies who like sharing, rating and discussing the best links from across the city. This is a somewhat efficient way to generate pageviews and gather like-minded folks together. Exhibit A: http://www.windycitizen.com the first local, social news site.

2. When you find crazy power-users of your social news site who have specific passions for topics, create blogs for them and nurture their interest in writing about these niche subjects. Exhibit B: http://dailydaley.windycitizen.com a group blog written by a handful of our power users that posts a daily briefing on the mayor of Chicago's appearances, schedule, comments and coverage. We have 40 more blogs where that came from, of varying quality but with some really good ones here and there http://www.windycitizen.com/blogs

3. Team up with local hackers for the occasional special project that scorches the local sites. Exhibit C: http://election.windycitizen.com, a rails app built by HN member collint

4. When you feel the social news site is growing consistently and having an influence in the community, hire a part-time ad sales person to develop relationships with local businesses who want to reach your audience. Exhibit B: The Craigslist ad I posted last week: http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/sls/1071989015.html I've had 5 great resumes sent my way so far and am excited to put this piece of the plan into motion.

5. Once you get $300-400 dollars a week in profit coming in, you can afford to hire an honest-to-goodness pro journalist to cover whatever it is your community is interested in that week, scooping the dying local papers at least once a week. If the story has national implications, you pitch it to Gawker, Politico and the HuffPo and rack up the backlinks and google mojo, making your social news aggregator even more powerful.

6. Add more writers to your blogs, which are essentially open source journalism projects. Some may grow to be powerful/influential in their own right, letting you sell more niche advertising or get direct donations.

7. Get to the point where your front page links are driving 1,500-2,000 readers to the stories that make them (which would make you the most powerful traffic-supplier for local sites), your blogs are breaking news every now and then and doing a great job of covering ongoing stories a la TPM. And your special reports, directed in part by the votes and story submissions of your users are setting the agenda in your community.

8. Repeat elsewhere.

Am curious to hear what folks think. The limiting agent for us is always technical development. We're using Drupal and I've learned that 9 out of 10 contributed modules either don't work or are so poorly-designed you'd never want to use them on a production site. This has meant paying and begging friends for custom dev work and me having to learn a lot more Drupal than I want. But that's the thing that I'm trying out here in Chicago. I think of it as a kind of open source newspaper.