The East Bay is a great option for startups on a budget. Cheap(er) rent, good food, lots to do, and many startup-minded folks. Emeryville is ~10-15 minutes away from downtown SF, so you won't be missing out on any major events in the city.
I second that. I grew up in the East Bay and thought it was a great places to live. Oakland gets a bad rap, but there are certainly some nicer areas where one could rent a house much more inexpensively than in the other areas mentioned. Also, there is lots of culture in the Berkeley/Oakland area, not to mention tons of great eateries.
Not just parking, apartments are a lot more expensive in SF too. Most events seem to be south bay but if you like driving then Berkeley/Oakland wouldn't be too bad I guess. I'd personally go for Palo Alto area but that's because university avenue is fun.
I would say that regardless of where you live, you should shed 2/3 of your cars. Cars are very expensive to own, and if you're a pre-money startup, you need to save money. Everything takes longer than you think.
"we accidentally took that off when we moved to Mahalo 3.0 i think." Jason is the last person who would accidentally make a move like that. Its all planed.
His business would come crashing down if he admits even to an inch of this. I have to respect that he knows how to run his business and respond to these types of concerns that are raised about his ethics. But that still doesn't excuse the facts.
... the truth is having short content pages indexed works against you--that's why i no indexed them to being with.
Again, I'm not as big of an expert on SEO as Aaron, but I think there is something called "page rank sculpting" in which you push your sites page rank to high-quality pages and no-index the ones that are shorter in terms of original content. We did that because one of our people read about it on a blog.
We're probably holding ourselves back having removed this and we are putting it back on because we didn't realize it was off.
That is why I thanked Aaron.
Is the page rank sculpting thing not a good idea? I thought this was a fairly certain thing: only index the best pages.
A mistake is something you do where you try to make it right (at least if you acknowledge something as a mistake AND MEAN THAT YOU WANT TO MAKE IT RIGHT you should fix it).
Scraping 3rd party content (without permission) and then putting nofollow on the links is bogus.
But you keep avoiding that issue because you realize what you are doing, and your goal is to cash in on others content for as long as you possibly can.
Thats fair. Theres no denying Jason is good at what he does and understands the web business better than most. I feel like this is an opportunity for those on HN to learn the way he rolls and manages his business.
Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature, Mahalo accounts for less than .1% .. I think this is more Google's issue than Mahalo's.
"Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature, Mahalo accounts for less than .1%"
Huh? I'm not sure which way I stand on this whole mess, but the fact that he makes up a tiny portion of the "spam" doesn't seem relevant? Is a petty thief less bad because he accounts for less than .00001% of theft in the world?
