ryanholiday

That's exactly the point no?

It depends. They're calculated hourly. Right place right time...could be just a couple dozen. Books sell less copies than people think.

I had a tour guide in German who told me he was one of the few people he knew who had read any of it because he'd spent time in the US as a exchange student.

"Rivers are easiest to cross at their source." Syrus

Do it now before it gets harder.

Yes they are very readable and his thoughts often feel like they were written last week. It's surprisingly timeless.

Schopenhauer was not a big proponent of empty, pointless philosophizing. His stuff is all practical and to the point.

I would disagree. The general principles for growth hacking always apply--far better than traditional marketing techniques do anyway. Growth hacking is, at its core, the art of building marketing into the product itself and then pulling in the initial customers/clients to kickstart that process.

But to go to your point PG has a funny line about cofounders. If you can't get a cofounder for your startup your idea will never blow up--because you couldn't even get one other person to agree to work on it with you for free

Hi everyone, I wish I was clever enough to have orchestrated all this, but in fact am not. Very nice of Chris to include me in his list.

Though I will say that this list is missing a few good books:

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

48 Laws of Power

Antifragile

The Fish That Ate the Whale

Wikinomics

Contagious

The Pirate's Dilemma

and I think PG's book of essays is worth reading for any founder as well

Who is insanely worked up?

It's not that it's luck behind viral videas, it's that they tend to spread or become popular in their own unique ways and attempts to deduce general rules from examples you had nothing to do with is usually foolhardy.

There is some science behind virality and for that I'd recommend looking at Jonah Berger

This is known as "thumbnail cheating"

Nothing is worse than advice about making things "go viral" from people who have never actually done it.

Real name as user name on pretty much every account I have period. Never saw the point of doing otherwise.

HN is a testament to what happens when you make a thing for a very specific group of people and only them.

It sort of reminds me those companies you hear about every once in a while that say "No" to being sold in Wal-Mart. It seems crazy but there is value in passing on certain kinds of growth.

The only hiccup to this plan in HN's case is that the very specific community it is targeted to is itself growing and growing. So staying "small" might be impossible.

Only when it doesn't make sense :)

Please, I have written pretty extensively about the problems with the ad impressions model--I think it's the root of the YT issue and most the low quality blogging we see.

I don't get paid by the pageview and if I did, it would be an inconsequential part of my annual income at this point. I write columns about ideas I find interesting. If I wanted pageviews I'd probably publish it somewhere other than the Observer