skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN:How to price/evaluate the value of an iOS app source code
Hi HN community,

I need some advice from the community on how to evaluate the price for the source of my iOS app. I have received an inquiry by a potential buye: he would like to buy the source code of one of my iOS app since my app fit really well the business niche he has already started a few years back.
My iOS app is free in the AppStore but generate through different manner around $300 monthly. I know it's not a huge amount but I am doing iOS app development on my free time to be up to date with the SDK, and get some passive income. I have created an LLC structure for my iOS development.

Personally I don't mind selling the source code -including the associate domain name- but this is the first time that I have been approached for selling the full app.

The app has been in the store for a few months and revenue is increasing slowly but surely. Numbers of download is following the same pattern and there is no particular reason for the pattern to change. The app is on small nice market that most likely not going away anytime soon. Sorry I can't be more specific about it.

The main advantage of selling the source code/domain is that most likely I will re-invest it by hiring some contractors / UI designer to get some other iOS app ideas off the ground. Thus a good bump in the revenue will be nice.

But what will be the best selling price: should I set the price based on the potential loss of revenue for 1 year ? 2 years ? more ? Obviously I have to keep in mind that the buyer could invest his money to duplicate the features of my app but he did mention that he'd rather buy the existing one since it's already in the Store and thus 'validated' by Apple review team.
Thank for any advices/suggestions and things to watch out for such transaction.
What arguments do they make about patents that do not apply well to copyright? Do they take any position on trade secret protections?
This is a great example of design-first open development. A great design was published and developers arrived to create it.

This is exactly what I was talking about here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270870
This is what terrifies me so much about being a [mostly] sole-founder.

If I saw something like this in my mail, I would immediately throw it away and probably have a few thoughts about how out of touch the person who commissioned it was.

But if it really does "convert like crazy", it means that any wisdom I have about marketing (and most of the wisdom given out by fellow geeks, designers, and most marketers) is almost entirely wrong.
This is probably more usability than a bug, but when I clicked from HN to the site, I clicked on login without checking the rest of the screen, as usually the login screen contains some link to register. These days i'm used to, when I see a 'sign in with xxx' (oAuth) that login / register do the same thing, even if you don't have an account.

To me it felt a bit unstable because of this. Although it's a matter of reading everything on the screen, I would be surprised if anyone actually does that, so probably better to change the flow in that case.

Anyway, after that I entered a Github url (naive as I am) which is private, but in my Github account with which I'm signed up to Cloud9IDE. I got a not so user friendly popup saying an error occured, with a key and some JSON included.

So I concluded I cannot use private repositories (?) and clicked on the + to add a new project, typed in Test and clicked create. I clicked open source in the follow up dialog and no extra users. After clicking next it suddenly said 'Forking, this could take a few seconds'. I thought; what is it forking? This is an empty project. Then another popup with about the same error as before. It appeared that even though I created a fresh, empty project, it took my GIThub URL and tried to use that! So instead of my 'Test' empty project, it now showed the name of my private project from Github, with no files in it.

Any comments on the pricing btw? EDIT: nevermind, answered while I was typing this.
How to find a business co-founder
Anonymous Operations Clears Stuxnet Rumors
The tests are asking little enough.

The solution is fully at hand: Local K-12 education is run by the local school boards, and they are fully free to evaluate and respect all forms of education including creativity, social skills, 'engaged' students, etc.
A drawback of English not being my native language, most probably. :) Thanks for your clarification.
The blog post title on the site took up my entire screen. That's the first time I've ever seen that happen.
Hi, some UI/Design feedback. Homepage:

* How can you not have a robot-eating-pizza logo! :)

* WAY too many different fonts and text styles. I count 12.

* Get some better/more appetising food photos

* The text boxes change size when selected, causing the layout to jump.

* Edit and cancel button icons jump 1px on hover.

* The cancel button has a text-selection cursor instead of a pointer

* The flat grey header doesn't really go with the wood panel effect.

* Wood panel bg repeats too soon with a visible join.

Results page:

* Overall very good, nice and clear

* The login pop-up needs proper styling

* I'd consider making the phone numbers always visible, rather than with the address expander. The first action if you're in a rush it to call a bunch of places to check reservations.

* The dollar signs to indicate price are a kinda ambiguous. How must is a $$$ meal compared to a $$$$ meal?
How much traffic is needed to make this supportable by an ad-based model?

Other than that, who are your major competitors? I know I've seen a ton of people use travel apps on facebook, but I don't think any aggregate all of their social feeds.

Have you considered a demo for someone who wants to tour the service before joining?
Last time, I check real estate is about location, location, location. Every place has its own demographics and its own legislations. I dun know any books/sites can teach you all that.

I am familiar with how the real estate operating in Singapore, but across Malaysia & Indonesia, it's a very different case. The same is with you. You have to be there to know how people does business there.

Across the board, one thing I find some similar is that money move when investing in property quite a lot. Investors tends to seek out undervalued properties, buy in.... rent it out.... hold for a few years and sell.

Example... A few years ago, properties are hot in China, Hong Kong, etc.. Government come in... and it is no more.. Now it's going back Europe and USA again.

Take time to understand the location, why does the property make sense. Who does it make sense to? Financially how will it make sense for you in the next 3-5 years timeframe.
Maybe you neant I should have read the article. But I did as my posts here fully confirm.
I like GEB, but I find it hard to pretend that it's really an essential programming title.
The last question is beyond my understanding. Most of time, I hack on FOSS because I need some features, which aren't there. Or I need to fix some bugs developers had no time to take care of, but which prevent me from using the software. Sometimes I give patches to upstream, sometimes I decide that I'm too lazy for communication, or that patches aren't worth publishing.

I do that for my job (I'm being paid for making things work, and we use lots of FOSS software) and I do that on my own leisure-time too (be it some project, or just toying around). But I really don't see any answer to describe something to describe my "I hack to get this working in a way I want" utilitarian needs.

Add: And if I dig deeper, to the reasons why I want it to work, there are too many reasons. Sometimes it's just a part of my job, sometimes I just want to fullfill my interests, sometimes I want to help someone or do something that would matter.
most desktop mail apps will open a new message window at the touch of a hotkey. what's the point of this?
That sliced in half font thing going on the header is doing my head in, and my sense of aesthetics isn't even particularly honed.

But yeah, looking good other than that.
I'd like to point out this blog post is from mid-2009.

I initially thought the screenshot was a LockInfo theme. In any case, such an app already exists, and has for quite a while. There are also plugins for RSS, Things & Appigo tasks,iOS notifications etc.It's very themeable, as well.

The only hitch? Your iOS device needs to be jailbroken, due to Apple's limitations.

The author's LockInfo home page is pretty lacking but he spends a lot of time hacking on LI and you can follow his progress via his Twitter account, @stimpy5050

Edit: Oops, the LockInfo page is: http://david.ashman.com/lockinfo/
I've been a software developer since 1995. Take a wild guess as to whether I've read Code Complete.

I don't think it's a bad book.
Why “Smart” Phones Suck, Part I
Didn't know anything about R until seeing this post, downloaded the Windows binary and within the hour I was producing graphs. Much easier to get into than MatLab (used it at uni, which is probably why I have an aversion to it!).

Really nice bit of kit (as is the R language), and it's free!
I don't mind this sort of marketing most of the time. I do mind that you're abusing "Show HN." People generally use this "tag" to ask for advice which is so generously offered here. By using it as a part of your marketing ploy you're reducing the usefulness of the said tag and stealing from the trust the community has built for eachother over time.

How sad it is to see HN get big enough to be gamed liked this...
The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own privilege is refutation-proof; but when you start creating negative categories like "not-abused" to privilege, it's hard to claim with a straight face that anybody except the people actually in power are all that privileged.

Unless, of course, you're privileging gender privilege far above other types of privilege.

...and I just hit semantic satiation.
My guess is that they've hired a good designer who happened to work on the notifications feature, rather than hiring some sort of "notifications" specialist.

You hire someone with a view to them working with you for years and I don't think notifications is that big a deal that you'd bring in someone specific to do it.

At least fingers crossed that's it because it would be great to see something in iOS5.
Awww man, wish I had this coupon when I bought the e-book the other day! So far I'm really impressed.
No word for sex
Apps should be easy to use - my 6-year-old sister can use mine
i will do a post on it soon.
Likewise. When I first read this, I honestly felt a shiver go down my spine--it was eerie. I was basically the physics major equivalent in college, and now love playing around with Lisp/Haskell/etc.
Um, yeah. Reason why Zen Gardens exist and in minimalism art/architecture/design/etc common for many aesthetic/meditative disciplines such as Zen Buddhism.
I think the long form marketing works on the lower half of the intelligence bell curve. This probably excludes much of a programmer's social circle.
Android, actual app sales
Completely agree. I'm using it for Qt dev on the Mac, and it looks and works great,but I'm also using it to develop some generic C++ libraries.
I guess you just have more faith in the data the weather app on the iPhone throws up.

I find the single day temperature / image to be too much of an average (so 12 degrees and sunny means that it's between 6 degrees and 18 degrees which basically doesn't help me for that sort of decision making).

Maybe that's just where I live and that for others it does provide useful information.
For linux users this is the equivalent: https://github.com/duncs/clusterssh
Does HackNY take data people? I'd imagine so, since bit.ly and Foursquare are both participating.
If you don't want to pay, you don't have to pay. Ever snuck into an extra movie in the theatre when you were a kid, or had a friend who worked at the theatre get you in to a free show?

In your Avator example, had their been a group of motivated people willing to pursue the creative goal of James Cameron's vision in spite of monetary compensation, $237 million would not be required. Some sort of 501c3 action movie production company.
Honestly, your story sounds like a typical corporate power struggle which happened to affect a department which was (by some fluke) full of women.

If you read about HP under Fiorina, you hear a similar story. Techies were pushed aside and replaced by Fiorina's cronies (mostly marketers), and the company suffered horribly. Such stories don't always end in disaster - a certain investment bank recently brought on a new IT chief who is well known for destroying a broken department and rebuilding a highly efficient one in it's place.

The process also involves firing many managers and replacing them with people loyal to him, pushing out lots of insiders, huge numbers of formerly comfortable people quitting in disgust, etc.

The only unusual element in your story ("her staff placed under new male supervisors") sounds like reversion to the mean - as you noted, "in another technical department there were none [women]". Perhaps there are other elements to the story that you haven't mentioned, but your description just sounds like normal corporate politics.
Android, two ad-based apps.
How do you determine the intent of the poster, whether it was a marketing ploy or a genuine plea for advice?
Yep, if your target customer base includes people who religiously consider such letters as scammy (and I agree most programmers would do so) then it is probably a bad idea to use long sales copy.
Terminator (http://www.tenshu.net/terminator/ - not to be confused with http://software.jessies.org/terminator/) can group terms similarly on systems with gtk.
At the beginning of the football [American] season: about $5k. Around now: $2.5k.
€49/m, 8GB, 2x750GB hdd, i7-920 quad-core: http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq4

So, about 10x cheaper, in this case...
"Skip the subject field and just start typing your message. QuickSend will turn the first paragraph of your message into the subject, saving you time."

Meanwhile, the body of the text has to do with meeting for dinner and the subject has to do with the baseball game tomorrow.

So, that was my first question. How are we skipping the subject line? Oh, it builds it off of your text! Wait, it doesn't seem like it did? Maybe he is only sh
owing the 2nd paragraph? No idea.... That was my stream of consciousness.

Other than that, I don't have a mac, but don't really find writing emails on my windows box cumbersome. Is the mac email app that problematic?
Notice the small footnote:

Sadly, this app doesn't exist. If you think it should and write cool Mac apps, email me, or message me on Twitter. I'm Moeed, by the way.
Google Invests in Latin America as Region’s Sales Jump 80%
I tried very hard to pay Oscars.com this year to get a stream of the Academy Awards event. They would not take my money. I tried three different browsers and two different credit cards. No go.

Then later I read that people who did pay the money were duped. They ended up getting not the broadcast stream, but a bunch of bullshit side-angle camera streams, not one of which was the broadcast. This after a build-up that strongly suggested (pretty much promised, the way I read it) that this was the ticket to watching the Oscars online.

This isn't the first time crap like this has happened. People get burned, and they learn.
I think its probably more effective on the "lower half", but I think the reason why most programmer's are less affected is familiarity. We've seen them a million times and know that the pattern of long form is usually spam.

But think back to the first time you saw something like the four page ad in Byte magazine as a kid. There's a decent chance that you went to your dad and said, "Dad, this is cool. Can we get this computer kit? I can learn how to build and program computers for only $899!"
Same advice excepting location--- I'd suggest Ireland instead, hide out until the world stabilizes (if it ever does).
Hi Josh,

Thanks for the kind words! You also had some great advice and now there is a email opt-in form on the website.

A few people have showed interest already, so QuickSend just might see light of day!

Cheers everyone!
> a fraction of your nest egg in ammunition. Really. This stuff lasts forever and only goes up in value.

It lasts a long time if kept air conditioned in a climate controlled area. It doesn't last as long in humid regions or warm/highly temperature variant regions. This goes double for types of ammo that are not as tightly formed in their casing.

Also, is there a good secondary market? Seems like something that would be hard/liable to cause criminal prosecution for selling, if you accidentally sold to the wrong dude.
> The best thing a person can do is turn skimmers, into jumpers… and jumpers… into book worms. That’s why it’s important to have fun, exciting, engaging copy.

As a book worm, I can't stand long sales letters. Bold, flashy highlights and random formatting all over the place interrupts the flow of the text and is hard to read. The copy would have to be pretty darn engaging to make me put up with that.
Apple Geniuses Get Down To Business
How a 19-Year-Old Raised $5 Million to Revolutionize Search
I've held off stuffing fugitive into my vim setup as I'm happy using git from the command line, but this looks like it might be the thing that pushes me in to it.

That said, extradite only looks to get me part way towards answering the question I often find myself trying to answer with git, which is: 'which commits affected this range of lines in this file?' When looking at other people's code I often want to know _why_ the code looks like it does, and the commits made in a region over time give you the commentary (or at least should do if the commit messages are well written). Something like 'git blame', but instead of showing all lines for a single commit I was all commits for a range of lines.
Thanks for your help, I have considered buying a franchise but as you may know:
1. Good locations are taken
2. Priority generally given to current owners
3. It is a business I would have to overlook on a consistent basis (However a hotel investment I think would be okay in this sense, but again, good Hotel franchises are way more expensive plus again good locations are taken, and I do not want to work in the Boonies)
The article seems to generalize quite a bit. The effectiveness of a letter like this I imagine would depend quite a bit on who the target is.
Long-form copy is really slanted towards selling high-cost products, especially intangibles to less-informed markets. You start with a vision, expect skepticism, bring the viewer round to your idea and then hit them with a pricepoint that by this time is hopefully lower than they've been led to expect. They can then buy with confidence that their money is being well spent.

With impulse buys, which is what many apps are, you really don't need the middle level of countering skepticism. You are looking to encapsulate the vision of the app in a short and compelling pitch. Most apps lack the depth to provide the material for long-form copy and you may well lose target market by giving too much and losing attention of the skimmers. Furthermore, consider the negative associations many have with such type of copy, and the correlation of those people with the tech-enabled app-market.

Regardless of your opinion of Moeed's use of ShowHN for a non-product here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2275703, his landing page shows about the level of detail I would expect to see in ad-copy for an app. Just try to picture how you would extend that in order to sell the concept further - if you've run out of ideas, you've hit the level you should be at.
Are GPAs in the US based on averaging all of the marks from all of the classes in a course?

Generally, yes. There are some ostensibly harder courses you can take that are weighted slightly higher (the highest grade in an honors course may be a 5, while the highest in a normal course is a 4, so it contributes more to your overall GPA).

That said, I haven't ever really heard too many complaints about this system. In my experience the level of effort required from year to year is similar, it's the type of effort that changes. For example, in a first-year math course, you might struggle because you just don't know what you're doing. By a fourth-year math course, you may know what you're doing, you just have to do a lot more, and do it better.
"best bet is probably to focus on lowering the incentives for people to pirate"

No. It's very hard to not get people to do something and esp to stop doing something they currently are and tripple esp to do either without some replacement. As this "study" demonstrated and should be common sense.

Instead they need to incentivize legal downloads / legal media consumption.

Of course, that's extremely hard cause they literally add no value. They actually have a huge anti-value hill to climb just to reach parity with downloading. Their middle-man business model is broke and requires ever more bizarre/ridiculous laws to keep it shored up.
You know... I often do not give encouragement and/or express gratitude because I am afraid of being corny.

But I am beginning to see that even if you already know the value you bring to HN, or even if it seems sycophantic to say I appreciate you, it never matters so much that it should suppress a sincere, neighborly, human, "thank you, keep it up"!

So even if this is the wrong place (or even the wrong way) to do this -- an upvote seems insufficient -- I want to say thank you, RiderOfGiraffes, for all that you bring to the experience that is HN; may your tribe increase.
There's a huge difference about being "into" composting... and enjoying talking about composting, teaching composting, selling people on composting equipment/techniques, writing about composting, etc.

This is an important distinction. If you're "into" composting but those other things above disinterest you, it's easy to try to get yourself stuck in a situation that you hate. Where you eventually even stop enjoying composting.

I wrote about this exact scenario: http://unicornfree.com/2011/dont-follow-your-passion/
Uber Cab: Tech Smackdown
AppEngine vs. EC2 (an attempt to compare apples to oranges)
Clump: A replacement for "make" for C projects.
Completely tangential:

What is the reason for posting this reply? I think I understand the sentiment -- it gets tiring to see something repeatedly. The reason I ask tho is it comes off as a bit dismissive, but I consider re-discussing a post every 1.5 years to not be too terrible, as: a) some people may have missed the first posting b) lots of new people can now get exposure and c) we have all changed a bit in that time and have new perspectives perhaps.

I know that discussion of stuff like this really helps people understand the material better, so I would personally prefer a bit of repeat on the good reads, to keep people up to speed than a keeping repeats to minimum.

I can also see another side -- this is to point people to previous discussions for the reason of them benefitting from what has already been said. I agree with this motive. I just think it would be better if there was a way to present it which has a bit less dismissive of a feel to it.

Anyway, I don't have a great solution in mind, more just exploring the idea. Cheers.