skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't sell the app: If it's self-sustaining without taking up much of your time, charge for it!

For support-related tasks, find someone that will do the support for a percentage of the new revenue you realize with some version of the suggestion below.

Tell all your existing, un-paying customers that in 30 days, you're going to start charging $19.99/month for it, but if they sign up before the pricing starts, they're in for $9.99 (or $12.99--whatever floats your boat). Leave all your existing customers happy by not charging them more.

You could also consider an annual subscription model where they pay either $240 a whole year, or $199 if they sign up before the date of the price change.

A lot of your customers will say no and leave, but some will likely say yes and contribute to your top-line. Either way, you'll make more money than you're making now. Be sure to explain why you're charging: E.g.: I think the service is valuable and in order to keep it running, I need to charge something for it.

THEN, once you have more paying customers, you can either sell the app and charge more for it or sit back and have a pssive revenue stream.

UPDATE: @ barmstrong, If you're not interested in the above and decide you DO want to sell it, contact me and we can talk about me buying it from you.
I wonder what the trade off is for 1KB of text or an extra HTTP request.
Why Did VideoEgg Buy Six Apart? To Create A New Modern Media Empire, Says CEO
True, I wouldn't say wasted, but I believe there are sharply diminishing returns for the classes of books I was referring to.
I haven't signed up for Ping yet but does this mean it works for music I imported to iTunes but did not buy through the iTunes store?
"Being curious or "hormonally charged" seems normal, but people seriously looking to have sex in college seem to be in the minority. Otherwise, there would be an orgy every weekend, right?"

If you replace "people" with "men," the answer is probably yes. Men on average tend to seek out far more sexual partners than women do; I remember one study that had attractive, opposite-sex college students approach other students and offer to sleep with them. 75% of males approached said yes; 0 females did. I think the study is discussed in Dan Ariely's _Predictably Irrational_. As Roy Baumeister points out in his book _What Are Men Good For_, famous men often sleep with many, many random young women, and appreciate it when young women offer them sex; famous women seldom do the same.

As for women, they are the sex that has to invest more in offspring; in virtually every species studied, the choosier sex is the one that has to invest more; see, for example, Robert Trivers' famous work, or Geoffrey Miller in _The Mating Mind_:

"As David Buss has emphasized, human sex differences are most apparent in short-term mating. Men are motivated to have short-term sexual flings with multiple partners than women are. Women are much choosier than men in the short term. Short-term mating is exciting and sexy, but it is not necessarily where sexual selection has the greatest effect" (95).

"Human males are generally not as choosy about short-term affairs as females. There is very little opportunity cost to short-term mating for men. It does not exclude other sexual options. But men get much choosier about medium- and long-term relationships, because their opportunity costs increase dramatically. If they are in a sexual relationship with one woman, it is very difficult to sustain a sexual relationship with another woman. They cannot give both their full attention. They must make choices—sexual choices" (95).

Note: this doesn't mean women aren't very sexual. They are. See, for example, Randy Thornhill's _The Evolution of Human Female Sexuality_. But they don't tend to seek out as many random encounters or as many concurrent, unknown partners as men do. Most sexually mature women are "seriously looking to have sex" because they like it as much or more as men do. But they aren't, on average, looking to have it as indiscriminately as men do.

The equilibrium isn't for "an orgy every weekend." There isn't a stable equilibrium if the number of males and females and fluctuating; for more on this and how small numbers of people influence mating/dating markets, see Tim Harford's _The Logic of Life_.

Note too that variations among individuals are greater than variations between groups, so those of you who are about to tell stories about your guy friend who is asexual and your female friend who hooks up with a new guy every weekend are not being inconsistent with the above, which has been established empirically through a variety of means discussed in the books referenced.
Sure, but that doesn't mean those 78% don't also use a client. I log into the site from my laptop but use a client on phone ans iPad.
The only rational reason to use DDG over Google is that for some reason you are on the extreme end of the paranoia towards Google or any other search engine.

That's a pretty bold statement. I have gained concrete benefit from switching to DDG full-time, mostly from the 0-click info but also from generally improved search results.

But no, I guess you're the "rational" one, and my experience is not valid.
What do you mean by "good rate of leverage"? You traded on margin at a low interest rate?
http://www.google.com/search?q=LCD+TV+43..100+inch+%240..%24...
Thanks for taking the time to provide an update.
The pinned menu feature allows you to put images and text on a native system menu. It is conceivable that a malicious person could use this to crash the browser, or have unauthorized code run.
Stuxnet is a worm that targets net-isolated computers running Siemens control systems propagated by USB drives. All things old are new again, this time with sneakernet viruses.
This is poor advice. Powering RSS-to-email is a losing proposition unless it's destined to bring more value than the FREE Feedburner. Also, forcing users to switch from free to paid (or else) with 30 days' notice is a jerk move, especially with an RSS product.

Your product is promising, but isn't easily differentiated from Feedburner and thus it's difficult to charge anything for it. I'm surprised you have any paying customers actually.

However, if the guts of the application are as solid as they seem, then you have a gem on your hands that just needs the right business touch to position the product for the right market.
Techniques and Tools for Taming Tangled Twisted Trains of Thought
Reminds me of a few things I've read about how fancy new houses in the southern US have omitted design features which cleverly deal with heat in the absence of air conditioning, so an energy crisis is going to put those homeowners in hell. It's important architectural technology to preserve.
Well...that's a good question from a performance standpoint, but it's more than that. Readability is important too.
Thanks for the pointer (checking them out), but that's not what I want, right? I still have to set it up and manage it myself.

I just want easy memcached access. No setup/management for me. I'm actually waiting for Amazon to add this themselves.
Sounds more like burn-out at this point. Try a related, but different job if you can get it.

I moved from straight up developer to a technology analyst to sales to product management (with some minor development) roles and this kind of movement has really helped keep things fresh. It also didn't hurt that I cycled between huge mega-corps and small companies -- each have radically different environments with their own pluses and minuses. Stay until you get tired of the minuses of one, then jump to the other.

One nice thing about my particular moves is that I've dragged along entire skillsets from my previous guises that most people in that field don't have while learning new ones from that job that I can then carry forward. It's amazing what kinds of old skills I never thought I'd use anywhere else come up again and again, except nobody else sees the application in their domain because almost nobody who grew their entire career in that particular field has had any exposure to it.

(I remember the first time I taught regular expressions and production rules to a fellow analyst co-worker, once he "got it" his jaw just hit the floor. He now has carried that forward into another analyst job where, just by knowing that one simple thing, has revolutionized operations at his current employer for a large analysis program he works on.)
Your first point is a valid one, but 700 people are using his product and not the free Feedburner for one reason or another.

Re the 30 days, I meant it (and all the prices) as an example--I should have been clearer.
Shigeru Miyamoto's Lifelong Dream: Invent the New Rubik's Cube
I don't see why anybody should bother with Atom anymore. Are there any applications that exclusively support Atom over RSS?
On the other hand, deploying a virus to bring Iran's nuclear enrichment effort to an undignified halt sounds enormously preferable to the alternatives of bombing it or getting into a shooting war.

From a historical perspective I can see why Iran would have a chip on its shoulder, a violent distrust of the west, and the belief that nuclear weapons are the only credible path to long-term security. I see no point in antagonizing them for another generation or two. On the other hand, theocratic dictatorships have a bad track record, and the regime's political autonomy has came at the expense of its citizens'. Impeding their progress at no cost in human life or political capital is a win in my view, both strategically and ethically.

I agree that many situations are far more ambiguous. If you asked me to shut down a hospital on the premise that it would destabilize a rotten corrupt regime, I would be skeptical of whether the hoped-for benefit outweighed the certainty of harm. Geopolitics is not an idealists' pursuit, but we can do better than select optimistic expediency as our guiding strategy.
You can't back that up with anything I ever said or "claimed." I and my company disclaimed ownership of everything, even the copyright on the spec I wrote.
they do hosted memcached on ec2 for heroku. you're right though, there's no mention of a service on their site.
I posted it here because the author wanted to post it on my blog, and I didn't want to host yet another of these angst-fests about who was right or wrong about stuff that mostly never actually happened.

I once called Mark Pilgrim an asshole, that was the extent of my crime against him. He had it coming, he was being an asshole. But if I had known it would lead to the kind of jihad he led, I would have let it go.

Anyway, to answer your question -- yes this is me.
Symbian is dead and so is Nokia..
Revisiting Paul Graham’s “High Resolution” Financing
Also, I'm going to stick with this account.
The really pathetic thing about this is that trademark law requires ebay to protect their rights, so all they need to do, really, ask you to pay them a license fee for infringing on their trademark. This could be just a dollar, and they would have legally protected their rights. Sending a cease and desist is just being assholes.

If they did not. Provide full contact Info, including a mailing address, then this is likely a scam- any law firm is going to give you a way to contact them. If they dont, then what they demand is impossible and thus the notice is not valid.

Around 8 years go i got a c&d from some company that believed they owned the tm on a generic word and claimed my two word domain infringed. Ignored it, still have the domain, no further action, other than some stupid threatening demands from them.
Or, better yet, create a keyword search for it:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:stackoverflow.com+%s
These are not new, they are old filings.
I up voted both these comments because it just goes to show that different people care about different things. It is not a matter of better, just a matter of preference.
Google would use all the information it has to make assumptions about defaults to display. When you click-through to the site to make the booking or to drill in further you can specify the details.

eg. 'flight to LA' can show :

SFO -> LAX Tod Tom Wed Thu Fri
Orbitz $187 $210 $299 $330 $450
Travelocity $200 $350 - $89 -
United.com

etc. etc.
I think the problem is that he is describing the graph as if it is undirected, when for the purposed of STDs, it should be directed.
The reprap guys have demoed a solder extruder so that they could print a circuit board with it.
Please don't use Class::DBI for Perl. The modern replacement, DBIx::Class is better-designed, faster, and more flexible. And it comes with a full Class::DBI compat layer, so you can incrementally migrate your CDBI application!

http://search.cpan.org/~frew/DBIx-Class-0.08123/lib/DBIx/Cla...

If you just want to persist your application objects, then KiokuDB is even better:

http://www.iinteractive.com/kiokudb/
Nothing stopping you from going after something more technical and more challenging. Every time I've been in the job market- back when I still deigned to work for other people- I got a range of offers, some of which were mundane and some of which were challenging. Just pick the challenging ones. Don't let yourself be typecast.... Took me forcing the issue to get off of working on windows software, for instance.

There is no way a masters will teach you near as much as you can learn on your own..... Just doing a startup and working on a hard problem on the side will teach you an amazing amount. You just have to apply yourself and bite off something worth chewing.

Plus, why pay someone to teach you old stuff when you can earn good money blazing new pathways? I hear people say that masters are supposed to teach you how to think, I haven't found that to be true, and that if you haven't learned by then, you won't learn it in school.
Ever tried to include an ampersand in an entry title in an RSS feed? The RSS 2.0 spec still doesn't specify if the title should be HTML encoded or not, and the implementations tend to disagree as a result. This is why my apps always produce Atom, never RSS.

Edit: Here's an article that illustrates the problem: http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2006/06/encoding-rss-titl... - this kind of unresolved ambiguity in the RSS spec is one of the main reasons Atom was needed.
The problem here is that good UX isn't borne of qualitative analysis -- you have to build something worth analyzing to begin with.

Once you do start analyzing, what do you do with the results? You can try to make small tweaks -- it can be worthwhile if what you have is already good. If what you have is bad however, no amount of rigorous analysis is going to solve the artistic problem of coming up with a cohesive vision of something better.
I took it in 3 blocks of around a year each. After 2.5 years of working, after 5 years of working and then after around 7-8 years of working. Completely changed my life.

I am a dropout, so if my own child doesn't want to go to school I would support him/her just as my parents did with me.
There may ideally be only 4 versions of RSS, but Winer was responsible for 6 of them :)

Mark may be an asshole, but he's nearly always correct (save for his recent Apple II fixation), and he follows up instead of trying to edit his mistakes from the record. He has a lot of company in hating Winer, basically everyone Dave's ever worked on anything with.

Here's some examples of classic Dave: http://www.metafilter.com/26701/ http://www.metafilter.com/33699/ http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2881/ (note that rcade, the author of the last link, was Dave's sole defender in the earlier ones). Here's some freshly curated ridiculousness: http://eyeonwiner.org/ http://davewinerscrazytrain.tumblr.com/

RSS is no simpler than Atom, not even when used naïvely — it's just easier to break. It was successful because Winer was at one time successful, but after he managed to attack and alienate everyone else in the field, they moved on and started over with a clean slate.
I feel the same way. There is something strange about what is really going on inside the fortress of FB. Social space is ripe for innovation and for compassion. Depraved ideologies scare sane people away...
You need to figure out what it costs you to support each user, make a ballpark of how many free users will upgrade (it's less than 2% for most sites that share their numbers, including my own W3Counter.com), and do the math to see if freemium will work for you. You might find that you won't be profitable if your cost to support the free user base is more than the paying users can cover at prices they're willing to pay. You can't just make the price arbitrarily high, sometimes freemium really doesn't work for a business.

W3Counter barely gets by as a freemium service. The paying users cover the servers it takes to run the site, but not enough more to pay even a single person's salary. I'm always waiting until service degrades to the point someone starts complaining before I add more hardware, otherwise enough new users wouldn't have started subscriptions to pay for the expansion.

The next service I built, W3ROI, does not offer a free plan. It's harder to build traffic to the site, and there are less people talking about it on blogs and social networks, but each new user it adds pays for themselves. There is never a risk of not being able to afford the hardware to provide a good quality of service.
Of the 2 homosexual relationships, one of them is in a triangle with a heterosexual partner. That may be more of a threesome than a purely homosexual relationship.

One interesting pattern that I saw was that, other than the threesome, there only seem to be four cycles--one is extremely long and the other three all involve the same guy who is of degree 9 and serves as a cut vertex to no less than seven subgraphs.
Our deficits have exploded, and that's because nobody has an interest in reducing spending. Reagan, bush, Clinton and bush all grew their deficits by trillions, and now Obama is adding a trillion a year.

Meanwhile, taxes have not grown like that, nor has the economy, so how is it financed? Via inflation. Via the
Tinting press, via federal reserve auctions of treasuries.

All of which are the same thing, and all of which are the drug Alan greenspan spent years pushing in our economy. Note also that the ability to finance this way is dependent on there being enough people to buy the debt. Lately, the fed has been printing money to buy it under the table to keep the treasury auctions going, not that they will admit it. This means that the ability to find financiers for the debt is decreasing, and without them, crash.

If we raised taxes to produce a balanced budget, it would be a death spiral, because e deficit is astronomical. If we cut taxes we at least stimulate economic growth. It won't be enough to cover the deficit, though.

So the real question is, how much of the country needs to be destroyed before the government will get spending under control?
Exactly. Most of the top ranked liberal arts college have gender parity. For example, my school, Amherst College, has a 50% male to female ratio. Likewise, Williams is 48% to 50%, Swarthmore is 47% to 53%, and Pomona is equal. This is also true for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Since each school is competing for the same 10% of high school students and has an acceptance rate of 10% it’s probable that males have an advantage. However, affirmative action contributes a fair amount to the overall success of these schools and their graduates. I suspect, and I hope, applicants agree.

It’s also worth mentioning that this has become more of a problem because of the Seven Sisters. Harvard’s acquiring of Radcliffe and Vassar becoming coeducational placed greater pressure on similarly ranked schools. Moreover, Amherst and Williams’ becoming coeducational might’ve contributed to this imbalance.
Walmart is the only place to get Walmart's house brands. That's not a monopoly, that's merely inconvenient.
This is a great opportunity for McClure to do some product market research and sell products to the bureau.

It's rare that such a large organization comes to YOU for a PROBLEM that they are having and not just go DIRECTLY to ya MAMA (or the bank):

#1 Take chances. The other guy who didn't got off scotch free with no time serving (web requests, ya twitter stream, nothin!).

#2 Hold ya own. Fast talkin ain't just for the guy on the other side of the table. Let him know you have a dictionary and thesaurus too. Don't pull them out so fast though!

#3 Haters hate, but you gotta love. If you aren't allowed to leave the room to get coffee suggest a friendly game of thumb wars.
If you like the domain, don't get bullied into letting it expire. As many have pointed out, the notice itself is just a meaningless action by ebay to frighten you.
The one caveat is that the song has to be available in the iTunes Store.
Wouldn't the trade-off be between an extra 1KB on every page vs. a single extra HTTP request per user?
If you want to sell it, create an auction on http://www.flippa.com

If you're asking more than $1000 for the site, only accept payment through escrow.com.

Flippa's the best marketplace there is for selling websites in the $50 to $250,000 range. I've sold several sites there in the past, including one for $90,000 which had several serious bidders. There are real buyers there.
Maybe this was intentional? If Apple had opened with a functional last.fm competitor, the discussion would have been about all the privacy concerns and do I really want to share every song I listen to with the world?

This way the focus is on, look Apple fixed their mistake and it actually serves a purpose now.
You always could. It's just that you had to hunt down the album in the iTunes Store in order to "Like" something. And it was not "laughably tedious", as suggested in the article; you just click the little arrow next to the track name in your Library.

Now you can "Like" stuff directly from your Library.

All they've done is replace that little arrow-button with a pop-up menu. It's a pretty small change, overall, it just makes things more obvious.
What are you talking about? Nothing you said has anything to do with anything I'm saying. You and the other commenter are skewing my comments with your responses into something they're not.
Massive deposits could one day make Inuits the Saudis of the north.
"Life is pain! Anyone who says different is trying to sell you something." Wesley to the Princess in "Princess Bride"

"The truth is, start-up-land is littered with mavericks, iconoclasts, drops-outs and misfits."

Matt Maroon had a good post on this topic at http://mattmaroon.com/2008/03/19/why-not-to-do-a-startup/
HN discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140602

I blogged about this at http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/12/04/we-dont-encourage-in... and Matt Maroon also offered advice in http://mattmaroon.com/2008/12/08/a-little-better-advice/
The main advantage of a separate file is that it can be cached by the client.
I mostly agree, with the exception of two things:

1) It's much easier to stick meta tags in HTML than it is to reference an external file in many cases (blog hosting services, hosted storefronts, etc).

2) Sites that make the best use of that menu will have different data depending on what page is pinned. We didn't do much implementation, but assuming enough people used IE9 we'd probably make that set of meta tags page dependent. Separating it into an external link when it's page specific data doesn't make a bunch of sense. Particularly page specific data that changes frequently.

Also, that 1kb of text is more like 260 bytes gzipped (as it is for us). We'll survive. :)
Writing queries is one of my favorite activities. Some of the queries I had to write for w3roi.com are two pages long printed in 10 point font. They're efficient as possible and quite beautiful to me.
XML tells you what to do there.

It says it very plainly in the RSS 2.0 spec.

"RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website."

Pretty sure the W3C tells you how to encode an ampersand in XML. If not, your quarrel is with them, not RSS.