skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Getting ready to sell my first piece of software, what should I know?
One of my goals for 2011 was to sell my first piece of commodity software for consumers. As years of hard work would have it, I'm 99% of the way there and that last 1% is what's going to be the hardest.

This is a piece of software that people buy once and then can install on their servers (no SaaS option, yet). It's a web app, but they host it. It's DRM free, written in PHP and customizable.

What should I know about selling it? I have a nice website to accompany it. To help increase sells, I'm going to:

* have a nice tour of the software
* full demo
* small file they can download to ensure it'll run on their servers
* a way to contact me for support
* two hours of free support with their purchase
* Google Checkout and PayPal payment options

What else do you think I should be thinking about when this launches? Getting tracking, reviews, and sales are my primary goals, so what is the best way to accomplish them? What tidbits of information do you have that increase conversions or really help sell your software?

Thank you in advance!
1) I made Pokemon cards out of cardboard in 2nd grade, selling them in conjunction with a Lunchables promotion (cards on the back of food boxes). My biggest sale was a 5ft tall Charmander. ;) Unfortunately, the teacher got wind of my business and made me give all the money back. I'm still a little bitter about that one.

2) Selling PSP game ISOS to friends in high school, and repairing/jailbreaking PSPs to resell.

3) I waited in line 3 days for the PS3 launch -- went home and sold it on eBay the next day for a $500 profit.
Text Secret - gushing your demons via text.
Maybe you wish to elaborate on what else is wrong with the article, other than a nitpick on what the author admitted was a spur of the moment?
It's very true. And if you decide to fork it than that's what you hear:

"OMG, YOU CAN'T FORK RUBY. ARE YOU CRAZY? THAT WOULD BE TERRIBLE."
So I am going to suggest you're a developer. I am, amongst other things, a packager. Lots of platforme mandate that certain types of binaries go in certain places. This isntpossible with gems. I find this very frustrating for the gems I maintain - including Puppet for example.
FriendFeed Traffic Is Actually Up Since The Facebook Deal
I really hope so. Mostly concurrency.
You can freely incorporate public domain code into a code base licensed under any license whatsoever. For example, as the FSF states in http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html, "Public domain material is compatible with the GNU GPL."

For the other direction, that is, incorporating some copyrighted code into an otherwise copyright-free code base, just be careful to keep the copyrighted files isolated and clearly marked as encumbered, so that nobody accidentally copies anything from them into the unencumbered portions of the code base. See http://groups.google.com/group/unlicense/browse_thread/threa... for more information.
paragraphs are overrated
> The youngest countries in the world currently are Curacao and the Republic of Kosovo.

It's actually Southern Ossetia and Abkhasia. The recognition is spotty of course, but Kosovo ain't perfect either.
It seems to be a lot more common to buy and sell cell phones and electronics on craigslist now, but there are still arbitrage opportunities I'm sure. The key is being able to move quickly and snatch up a good deal as soon as it's posted. I don't have that flexible of a job now, or maybe I'd still do it, just to use and play with the different phones and junk before I sold them.
Have you never seen an Apple iPhone commercial. Between that and the iPad, they seem to be about 1 out of every three commercials that were on leading up to the launch of those products.
In fact, the article is on a site without any visible RSS feed available itself. You have to read the HTML source and manually parse out the rss feed.

And then the author complains that it's hard to use and people aren't taking advantage of it. Jerk.
Is TiVo still big in the US? (It doesn't exist in the UK). We have various hard disk based recorders, and sky plus etc
Not so much, I’m talking about pure poundage of production: code, pots, designs, sculpture. Iteration is the only way to make something better.

Anecdote:

One semester, a professor decided to split his ceramics class up into two sections and see which would create better pots. One half would be graded on their final pot, which would be judged in terms of creativity and technical skill. The other half would be judged in terms of poundage of “acceptable” pots. 50 lbs would be a “C” 65 would be an “B” and 90 would be an “A.”

At the end of the semester, the best pots out of the entire class were picked from the huge number of iterations that the poundage group created.

--Source unknown.
I wouldn't say that the electorate is so much impotent as it is apathetic to issues that affects it.

If the "nerds" came out in the same numbers and loudness of the Tea Party, I'm sure you'd see more attention paid by politicians to the issues we love to debate here on HN.

Many politicians are just as interested in keeping their job as they are in taking lobbyist money.
"The writers and main contributors to most of the pieces named are dead."

Your argument presumes that a copyrighted work is not a transferable asset. Let's say your grandfather, at age 75, pens what some publishing house deems the next Great American Novel. He wishes to live in a nice retirement community and is willing to sell the copyright to this work as a means of paying for this lifestyle. The value of his copyright is function of its longevity, so he would garner a larger payment today if copyright laws allow his work to provide a better NPV to the purchaser. Certainly, exclusive rights for 2N years are worth no less than rights for N years, so extensions of copyright can not provider a lower NPV.

I am not arguing for or against any particular provision of copyright law -- I am simply objecting to the "author is dead anyway" argument against longer copyright periods.
Ironically, I think linking to the comment I thought deserved less karma may have resulted in just the opposite to happen.
Isn't the difference between FriendFeed and Facebook is that FriendFeed is actually innovative?
I am not overly fond of the commute (i prefer to work from my home office) but I live close to the Metra station, it is a healthy walk to and from Monadnock, and I have internet access on the train, so that reduces the commute discomfort.
Thanks so much. This looks very, very promising.
The poster of that video is Duckworks, who published Dylan Winters's story. Mr. Winter's videos are at http://www.youtube.com/user/dylanwinter1 No sailing there at all: purely trucking and a bit of New Zealand sheep.
The surprised crab is not amused, but kisses the winking bull. Obviously.
The OSX part of the application crashes after resuming from suspend. Correction: switching wireless networks.

1/2/11 15:39:24	com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[152]	([0x0-0x253253].com.m3me.Conductor-Server[4603]) Exited abnormally: Broken pipe
This continuous lowering of the "delete or not" bar should be pretty obvious to anybody who has followed Wikipedia for some time.

I used to be of the opinion that it was justified, but has realised lately that it has become a tool for political censorship. Some of the editing cliques have become very adept at suppressing unwanted views with dubious, but to many persuasive, application of the verifiability and notability policies.
I used to scour local thrift stores for collectable electronic children's toys and portable electronics from the 70's and 80's. I used a Treo 300 to do my research "on site" almost a decade ago(!) with Eudora's browser on Palm 3.5 to logon to ebay's desktop site to get the completed auction prices. I could make around a thousand a month with about 20 hours effort per week in college. I was always amazed what could be accomplished with a new pair of batteries, light but thorough cleaning, and a soldering gun.

OK, counting the years since I got a "real job" and stopped, makes me feel old. :(
Actually there is this very fresh website. http://www.thinksharebuild.com which may solve your problem.
Basically, you drop your ideas off, and other people can work on them with/without you depending on your preference.

I hope it can help. Although its still in its infancy.
That's awesome man! Keep up with the good work. It's definitely people like you that keep the Internet fun. :-)
Prepare for sacrifices and it will hurt. You need to re-acquire your time back. That is your capital. We all have 24hrs/day, right?

My story: I'm 31, I left comfortable game-engine programmer seat at AAA gaming company because I wanted to build my own products (have been already hacking on browser extensions during evenings for past 8 months). Had savings just for 3-4months. Reduced my burn rate by moving to a very cheap rent. Started doing web-dev freelancing to save money, my goal was to have at least 1 year of runway. After 8 months of cheap life, I finally stated working on my own startup idea (it was basically http://about.me, but with more technical page builder). My GF left me after 2 months and after next 8 moths I started to have some disputes with my co-founder and few weeks later I gave up. I started to work remotely for SF-based startup. The goal was to learn how to "do it right" and to earn money for my next trial. It took it to me next 6 months to recover financially (and socially a bit). After then I started hacking on TotalFinder during the evenings and one year later finally I made it.

You may read about my last year here:
http://blog.binaryage.com/the-second-year-of-binaryage

Unfortunately I have to add, that with non-entrepreneurial spouse it would be probably much harder to take it off the ground. It makes sense. Most women expect your time/money investment into partnership/family. Also most of them is averse to risk taking. Why she should stay with you when she would do better with fine salaried non-stressed guy who works 8to5? Better he hates his job, because he will be rushing home for recovery.

You need to make your wife co-investor/partner in building your product, she must invest at least your time she acquired by marriage or she has to help out other way to make similar contribution. So we reduced this problem to the problem of looking for the right co-founder, which is very hard problem to solve anyway :-)
Some of the problems that Debian has had have been simply due to lack of manpower. AFAICT, they could have made `gem update --system` work, but that would have taken a lot of time they didn't have, so they disabled it.

And it's a thankless task. There's no way that Debian would ever compromise on anything, the Ruby community is not interested in removing features from RubyGems to accomodate Debian, and the developers are caught in the middle, being blamed for problems caused by policies they have no control over.

So of course, nobody wants to volunteer to help.

That's why when they get attacked (like I saw you doing), I jump in to defend them.

There is hope for the future -- Bundler and RVM make many of the "features" of RubyGems obsolete, IMO.

But I still disagree with your statement that Ruby's real users are developers. End users are the whole point of developers. Without end users, developers are just masturbating. It's fun, but it doesn't get anywhere.
This. From what I've seen of the entire Debian-Ruby fiasco, your post accurately describes how Debian people talk past all the people who are complaining about Ruby on Debian.

Optimize for the largest audience!
Designing Tab Navigation the Right Way
Convert .dlc to .txt
I agree wholeheartedly. I develop in ruby and ocaml on ubuntu, which both suffer this problem (I assume all languages do).
As a user, I have no tolerance for dealing with dependency hell for things like a desktop pdf viewer or rss reader, and a decent gui frontend to APT literally provides a one-click solution to installing an application and all it's required dependencies.
As a developer, I gave up on using APT as part of my development process long ago - I manage my own library of sources and binaries. It's just too painful to synchronize a development environment with the debian/ubuntu repositories that are being updated on their own schedule.
From personal experience, I can say the worst case is having your development environment break b/c you updated your email client, which is easy to do if you use APT to manage your binaries, regardless of the languages involved.
The ability to install multiple versions of the same gem are pretty much key to the migration path of any ruby app. Just because it doesn't fit in the package manager world of some (read: all) distributions is not the fault of Ruby.

I can't count the number of times that we rolled out (while I was at the AJC) a new version of one of our apps on a different version of rails while keeping the other apps collocated on the same box running the previous version.
Rather than doing this, I opted for a resource-based trial for historious. Free users get 300 bookmarks, if that's enough for them, that's great, if not, they can pay to get more. This way they don't put very much strain on the service but can still use it.

Another good idea, if your app can work with it, is to not let free users create any data. For example, for a website screenshot service, you could let free users access screenshots that paid users have created, but not create any of their own. This makes free users almost free to host but doesn't work for many apps.
I resonate with the article. As I've grown in the practice of tranquil and contemplative solitude, my creativity has grown. "Creation comes from within, inspiration comes from without."
Such things are effected by a variety of factors, including how many people happen to read it. More active threads, posts made earlier in the comment cycle for a thread, etc, tend to foster higher votes.

<shrug> (In some ways, I don't much care. There is no perfect system for managing online social stuff. I try hard to focus on the conversation here, not on counting coup, though it can be very hard to ignore it.)
Not part of the OS per se. Part of the platform, yes, but there were plenty of apps that never used handwriting recognition.

[Near as I can tell, the only association with Newton is the use of an ARM. I sure wouldn't use NewtOS on anything modern, even as cool as NewtOS was in its day.]
For the most part, I don't mind bundler, but I think it's too early to say it's overwhelmingly and only an improvement.

I can think of two cases where it concerns me:

1) I'm now supposed to type, for example, `bundle exec spork` instead of simply `spork`. This is extra typing, an extra thing for me to remember and it causes binaries to load/launch/start more slowly. (Yes, I've timed it.)

2) Bundler seems to break things in odd, hard to debug ways. I hang out a reasonable amount in #rvm on Freenode, and not an hour goes by that someone doesn't come in with a complex, hard-to-solve issue involving rvm, bundler, $LOAD_PATH and I don't know what else.

I admit that (1) is maybe somewhat petty, and (2) is probably not all bundler's fault. Still, I continue to have very mixed feelings about bundler. (My current compromise is that I only use it for Rails apps.)
I'm in a completely different country (New Zealand) and I do the same as you. I like to get off the computer, leave my cell-phone inside, and go cut lawns or do landscaping outside. To me, that feels like the best kind of brain-food you can get.
If not, all the ideas I get come to me when I'm off the computer. They're always jotted down in a wee notebook.

Technology is great... in moderation
Well, I don't think it should be exclusively about the life of the author, as I explain later in the comment. I think a relatively short general term from date of publication is good regardless of life of author.

I am merely indicating that in cases where the author died many years ago, all the extension of copyright does is allow non-creative people that were once attached to people that were attached to the original author (great-great grandchildren, the men who now control the publishers (very unlikely to be the same men that controlled the publisher back when these works were published in the 50s)) to profit exclusively off of the author's work, which is the very antithesis of a motivation to produce your own creative work. The creative originator long since got all imaginable value out of the work and now the copyright is merely a memorial to society's worship of money over all else.
"The best estimate I can give, from having semi-actively tracked the growth of adoption for the last year, is that there must at the very least now be many hundreds of projects using the Unlicense. I doubt we have yet crossed the 1,000-project mark, but I'm quite certain that in another year's time we will have."

Someone should make a list of them (that goes beyond 50 projects). Without some sort of substantiation, there's no real reason to believe this claim.
Thanks for making it free.

I played around with it a bit and it's a pretty decent app. Some minor nitpicks like the +/- thing someone else mentioned.

I'd say good effort and a good gesture but I think I'm going to be loyal and stick with Daytum ..
To save lives, focus on impairment, not alcohol consumption
In my naive, idealistic understanding of the spirit of copyright, it's a social contract between the artist and society.

Society will grant you a reasonable amount of time to make money off your work with legal protection. After that time's up, your work belongs to society.

Seems like a fair economic exchange to me.

As far as I know, it's been good for everyone that Shakespeare's works are in the public domain.
And look where Python is on the various distributions. Behind. Constantly behind. The day a distro decides to use Ruby for system level stuff like they used python is the day that Ruby on that distro is DoA.
Hehe. We'll be able to drive our cars... remotely! Not that it serves a point!
New cave found in Vietnam: "A skyscraper could fit"
What would be nice is if RVM allowed a package option for an installed Ruby + gemset. RVM doesn't work for me on my servers because it break idemopotence but I'd love to install RVM on a testbed, type 'rvm package' and get a tarball that I can dump in /opt/ on my production systems.
Why having Lord of the Rings in public domain is so important?
It seems that your argument is generalizable to the inherit-ability of wealth.
> There is hope for the future -- Bundler and RVM make many of the "features" of RubyGems obsolete, IMO.

What? Bundler uses RubyGems! Why do you think Gemfile is called Gemfile?

I think we're talking about two different aspects of RubyGems here:

1. The "gem install" command.

2. The RubyGems database and gem activation code.

Bundler merely replaces the first part. It uses the second part at its core. Still, it makes no sense to me that you see Bundler as "hope". It installs the same gems, just to different places now, usually project-dependent spaces. This latter results in duplication and I thought that was one of the things that Debian people despise.

> But I still disagree with your statement that Ruby's real users are developers. End users are the whole point of developers. Without end users, developers are just masturbating. It's fun, but it doesn't get anywhere.

The end users are the people using the web apps. And they don't install anything.

Even if we define "end users" as "people using Ruby apps", or to take a concrete example, "Redmine users", Debian's current packaging is still next to useless. It forces users to install their own Ruby from source just to make any modern Ruby app working.
Ruby targets developers. I think that's wrong, but let's say you're right. It still doesn't matter. Debian targets end users. If you want a distribution that doesn't target end users, use a different distribution, like Gentoo.

But Debian is one of the best distributions because of the way it targets end users and because it never compromises.

You can't eat your cake and have it too.
The deal between copyright holders and society was changed retroactively in favor of the former. Why then should the latter uphold their end of the deal, i.e. not pirate?
I just want to point out our confusingly similar user-names. Looking through your comments, it seems we are both interested in psychology and are non-technical.

This may or may not be problematic, but I figured I'd let you know as I just noticed.

(sorry for the threadjack, no other way to contact you)
I won't miss the RSS browser button: I hardly ever use it! While I read many RSS feeds I almost never subscribe to them (which is what I've used the button for). The average number of times I've subscribed to a feed I read is extremely close to 1, and the average number of times I've subscribed to each existing feed in the world is extremely close to 0.
About copyright in general: Micky Mouse is still in active use. Can anyone tell me some reason that Warner Brothers should be allowed to make a Mickey Mouse movie just because it's old now?

One other example: sales of Ayn Rand's books currently help fund the spreading of the ideas from the books, after her death. That seems fair enough to me. Why shouldn't books sales be able to fund promotion of the book's ideas as long as people keep buying the book?
Like ‘Twitter For iPad’? Check Out Its Facebook Counterpart, Facepad
Wow, there are even some bargain hunters today who don't have on site research tools (if I remember from you used book reseller post). That's impressive.
Hardware startups.
what are the main challenges facing hardware startups? Why are there not many hardware startups as compared to software startups?
Oh wow at the Jungle inside it... that's pretty amazing. I don't think I've ever seen such a beautiful cave.
I wouldn't bet on an ARM based MAC allowing side loaded applications without an apple issued developer key.
Remembrance Day has become something of a misnomer, since almost no one alive actually remembers WW1. Also, there are more people alive today with a Nov. 11 birthday than died in that war. So I think it's OK to celebrate again.
Is there any reason why you care so much about bin-vs-sbin that would make it such a dealbreaker, other than FHS ideology? Most people I know just care whether the command works, i.e. whether it's in $PATH.
Exactly. Every search for truth must have some aim. In the case of the apple, saying "everything falls down" doesn't get at what newton was really interested in, which was the laws of motion in general. In this case, it is silly to stop at the second law of thermodynamics when you're really interested in homeostasis in the human body.
At RubyKaigi, we talked about closing the Japanese list. It's a bad idea because closing the list will not stop conversations from happening in Japanese, it will just move the conversations to IRC. At least, if we have the conversations recorded, there is an opportunity to translate them.
Advice for apartment hunting in SF or South Bay
I m looking in SF right now but it doesnt look too good (nice places r too pricey.cheap places r too unsafe or old). I dont intend to buy furniture and the thought of living in an empty apartment is not that encouraging. What was your experience? Were you able to find anything through contacts here? I just need a clean place(and preferably with like minded hackers) Is that too much to ask for??? Ps: if you have a spare room, pm me:)
I would be bitter too. My cookie selling was against school rules, but only one of my "employees" ever got caught. I can't for the life of me figure out what schools have against capitalism, it can give great lessons.
I think the point is more that continued copyright protections don't serve any purpose, and thus are unconstitutional.
Maybe for the same reason that having Romeo & Juliet and King Lear in the public domain is so important.

Would West Side Story or Ran have been made if they weren't?