skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you process $260mm and charge 0% it's not really fair to view $26mm as a 10% revenue multiplier.

(Even for the small part of their business funded by credit cards, there's a $500 per customer lifetime exemption, and 3% minus higher fraud rate and 2-2.5+% CNP processor and interchange still puts their revenue at less than a small team's salary with 100% credit cards, and probably less than $100k/yr revenue on credit cards overall.

They're obviously being bought for team, technology, and growth potential; current customers are just traction, not revenue.
Fact: starting every paragraph with "Fact:" will make you sound condescending to readers.
That's not the point of the site. It's an annual meetup where people push the limits of the latest and greatest web technologies. The people visiting it will be web designers/developers, not Jane Doe who only visits facebook.
When I go to raise money, I really want you there as my negotiator. :)
Thanks for the clarification, I see what you're getting at.

I wouldn't interpret his writings as anti-space-travel in any way, but you have to understand Weston's character arc across books 1 & 2. Lewis was arguing against the ideal that motivated many peoples' interests in space travel at the time, and the philosophical underpinnings of their views on morality and humanity.

I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that someone of Lewis' intellect would so readily throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater on one of the greatest frontiers of human exploration.

Here, this guy puts it much better than I did: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1754/1#IDComment332377...

Edit: Adding expository link.
As sickening as comments like his are, there's some comfort that it identifies the people you shouldn't waste time with. The only thing worse than a loud bigot is a silent bigot.

I only wish that I could get this information as well so that I could avoid investors with such poor decision making skills. But naming and shaming isn't in your or your company's best interest, so I can't argue with your decision to keep the person's name to yourself.

Perhaps an anonymous post to TheFunded?
Sorry for going off topic, but...

>In short, I know what I’m getting for $4 and I’m getting that same experience every time I hit the drive thru.

Drive-through Starbucks? America, you are way ahead.

Also, is $4 the norm for a cup of coffee? Is that standard filter coffee, latte, or one of their elaborate coffee-based concoctions? In the UK Starbucks will sell you a standard no-frills coffee for £1.50-ish.
Note: if your first reaction to this is to say: “Starbucks sucks”, please substitute your favorite coffee shop. Magically, the article probably still works.
Just sent you an email with some info on how to get in touch with me so we can help sort out your account. Sorry for the trouble!
Hope your bandwidth is cheap - how compressible are these files?

Also there's a few suggestions to just send the diffs after the initial model which is a really good idea.
Can't help pointing out that, symmetrically, confidence fraud such as Nigerian 419 scams screen their targets, for naivety, by making certain signs of fraud obvious to those not part of their intended audience.
This is just silly. Can you imagine them saying they couldn't prosecute a cocaine kingpin because the evidence took up too much room in storage? "We couldn't prosecute them. Their lab was too big. They were too successful."

This has to either be an excuse for an otherwise weak case, or a severe misunderstanding how rampant prescription drug abuse is.
Not a gamble, really, just the certainty that that $4 coffee will suck, no matter which street, city, state or country you find yourself. But this is not about Starbucks.
So, he's comparing importing photos from Flickr to drag and dropping pictures onto Picplum? Wouldn't a more fair comparison be to go directly to Snapfish and upload the photos to it?
Hi Josh, interesting read. I noticed the following typos:

"Great software masks it’s complexity"

"Package it such that it shows off it’s craftsmanship"

"I don’t expect it to even last beyond it’s last drop"

"Its like an infant child in that regard"
But it's not a gamble because it's the same every time. It's high quality every time. It has the weight of a quality brand behind it. Maybe it's a small gamble the first time you buy it, but after that it's not a gamble. The argument isn't about the price of your app or their first cup of Starbucks coffee, it's about the price of your app or another Starbucks coffee.

People know Starbucks; people know Starbucks coffee.
It's a very stable and well known experience to regular customers.

People don't know you; people don't know your software.
I don't know if buying your software will actually cause me more inconvenience than convenience. (Buggy, bad UX, hard to uninstall, installs additional crap like browser plugins)

That's why buying an app is a gamble, and buying coffee isn't. That's why you cant make a good argument by comparing the price of your app to the price of a coffee.

EDIT: Actually I guess the $4 drinks are a gamble afterall. My only Starbucks experience is "normal" coffee. Which I guess is more in the $2 - $3 range.
I'm not so sure about the argument that most people would forgo the $4 cup of Starbucks, given a free alternative. Every office that I've ever worked in provided free coffee, and half of the office would still regularly pick up coffee from the nearest Starbucks daily. I think there's something to be said for

1) Crafting the "image" of superiority that people get from purchasing Starbucks (having that nice branded Starbucks cup, rather than the crappy styrofoam one your office provides, allowing people to order ridiculously tailored drinks -- soy half caff with a dollop of creme...etc) and

2) Providing an ecosystem to encourage the purchase over free alternatives (I've noticed that I'll stop at Starbucks for a snack because I'm hungry in the morning, and pick up coffee/tea as well, just because I'm there)
Soyer Uluslararası Evden Eve Nakliyat
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I agree with the idea that purchasing 99 cent app is a total gamble, even if I don't have much to lose.

If I were writing a mobile app, I'd have a free version and a paid version. The only difference between the two would be with the free version, you'd have to look at a screen trying to get you to upgrade to the paid version, and you would be forced to look at this screen for at least X seconds, where X is proportional to how many times you have used the application.

I like this approach because it users could try out my app risk free, but those who want to freeload off of my hard work would be inconvenienced enough where I think I could manage to convert a decent percentage of free users into paid members. Plus, the user can still use the app, but each time they use it you get a chance to upsell them, which you don't get if you just lock them out.
Boolean operators for on-page text finding. E.g., being able to search for "goose|geese", since the pluralization doesn't involve a common root.
The difficulty in finding a co-founder
Barracuda Networks releases cloud storage platform, Copy
How Brains Keep Clean
> So your point is that this article is way too entrepreneurial and HackerNewsy and you don't like that?

I think his point is that the article is hiding a narrow-minded view of the world as general advice.

>I don't understand the need to participate in a community based upon a set of ideas and then rail against them as though everyone else here made a mistake in the URL line of their browsers.

I don't get the point of discussing things only with people who will exactly agree with you.
I think there's a deeper cause behind many of these arguments. People hate to feel ripped off, to a degree that is highly irrational if you assess the impact in purely utilitarian terms. Even a billionaire will feel a bit shitty after paying $0.99 for a lemon.

There are various reasons why this happens. Partly it's the fact they wasted time researching and purchasing the app, and people's time is usually more important than $0.99 or coffee. Partly it's an innate sense of justice. But the main factor is that we don't like to feel that we screwed up. Even worse if you just paid for an app before learning there's a better one that's free.

A good book that covers this is The Paradox of Choice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...; credit Build and Analyze podcast for raising the topic a while back.)
It actually is about Starbucks, not the coffee or the price.

It's about you knowing that Starbucks is Starbucks no matter which street, city, state or country you find yourself in. Whether you love or hate it, it's at least consistent.

That's why it's not a gamble.
Coding is Dead. Long Live the Coders
I get the point, but I think the analogies are a bit artificial.

"Starbucks is a trustable experience."
The assumption is that all people all the time buy known brand coffee. From my own, I know I walk into coffee shops I have never been to before. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Even at Starbucks there are times I ask for decaf and get caffed coffee, or other times, the green tea latte is just not mixed right, or the milk was a bit on the old side, etc.

"Starbucks (or any known brand coffee) has no free alternative."
Yes there is, it's water. Or, if you're looking for the substance of coffee, then there certainly are cheaper alternatives --Jolt, or no-doze, etc. Or there is also just plain regular non-espresso coffee for a quarter of the price, or office coffee.

"Apps can be a gamble."
Trying a new flavor of coffee drink can be a gamble, but given that Starbucks and other introduce new drinks, someone is taking the chance on unknowns. Well, it's trusted! Sure, but as you know, people will try stuff and will go back to what they always bought. Still, they're willing to forgo $4 to try something new which may or may not suit their palate.

PS. For example, I really doubt people research new flavors before buying a new espresso drink combo but apparently they are willing to devote massive amounts of time and opportunity cost to research a dollar app. It's very lopsided and strange.
To be fair the author is condescending to the people who read the article, which the author labels as "the internet".

From the bottom of the article:

> Comments are not currently enabled because the internet has not yet learned how to deal with the ability to post comments. Its like an infant child in that regard. - Josh
For a lot of people, a cup of Starbucks also feels like a "must-have". We all feel groggy in the morning, and spending $4 for coffee isn't a lot if it helps us survive the day.

An app on the other hand, most of the time doesn't give us that same feeling. It's more of a nice-to-have, or nice to play with once and then forget. If it's an utility you use everyday like Evernote, it's different of course.
Meh, it is nothing new and even governments do it. For example, my mother had a "lifetime visa" from the USA, which lasted maybe for 10 years. Some years ago she had to change her "lifetime" visa for a 10 year visa (standard Laser visa).

I guess "dishonoring" contracts might be a cultural thing.
Time to put email in its place
Setting up node.js on Amazon EC2
Also, by the time the user is willing to spend money on your app, they're hopefully willing to pay more than 99 cents.
That sounds less like an argument against coffee analogies and more like an argument for making apps that are actually useful.
$4 drinks are usually the sugary/milk filled drinks like a mocha. I think drip coffee is like 2 bucks or so at SB.
I've found in offices that a lot of the times the $4 coffee is just a nice reason to get out of the building and go for a walk.
This seems like a poor argument for being cheap.

"Starbucks Coffee is a Trustable Experience"
Not true - I've had mixed results depending on time of day and what barista is making my drink.

"Your $1 App is a Total Gamble"
Nope. You have every opportunity to read the reviews, look at screenshots, use Google, etc.

"Starbucks Has No Free Alternative" and "Free Apps Are Often A Great Alternative"
I'm not sure how this matters - if you're cheap, it doesn't matter how good the app is. Do you tip waiters? After all, the alternative to tipping is great - you get to keep your money!

"Starbucks Craftsmanship Is On Full Display"
Not really. I don't think anyone would agree that "craftsmanship" goes into making a Starbucks drink.

"App Craftsmanship Is Hidden Away"
Like I said before, you have ample opportunity to read the app description, check out app store rankings, read user reviews, and look at screenshots.
~$2 for a cup of standard joe in California Starbucks and most other places.

$4 refers to the venti lattes and other sundry sugary crap. (ie, they're stretching the truth)
Yeah, it is very obvious in hindsight.
Does anyone know what theme those gists are using? It's quite nice.
Anyone who argues that because it costs $0.99 it should just be free isn't worth debating with.

On the other hand there are documented cases where charging more like $9.99 instead of $0.99 increase sales because the higher costs increases it's perceived value. People are familiar with the saying: "you get what you pay for."
There is a great deal of philosophy here, but I'd prefer to see some data that backs up his point. Can you show me a project in which investing in an estimate harmed it?
I used to develop apps for Dan Ariely and we would often chat about this topic. By the latest in psychological research it's less rational than that [1]. Additional factors:

Mental Binning—when we think about buying a $1 app, it doesn’t occur to us to ask ourselves what the pleasure that we are likely to get from this $1 app — or even what is the relative pleasure that we are likely to get from this app compared with a $4 latte. In our minds, those two decisions are separate.

Price Anchoring—we have been trained with the expectation that apps should be free.

1) http://danariely.com/2011/12/25/the-oatmeal-this-is-how-i-fe...
What's a good F# tutorial/reference you've used?
Which I would appear to be in compliance with :D
First, continuous deployment works fine for web projects, but it's not an option if you've got a packaged product that you have to ship at some point. Agile is not a panacea for these environments.

It's important to differentiate between the two kinds of software that you can write. This is post is dead-on for developing truly new software (new features, stuff that fundamentally hasn't existed before, etc). However, estimation (even the kind of project-manager-driven estimation that most engineers, myself included, generally hate) can work really well for software where you're doing basically the same thing you've already done in the past such that the risk of unknown unknowns is extremely low. I've seen it in practice, and when you have a checklist of stuff to do that you've already done with very minor changes in the past that can't be automated for whatever reason (e.g., support a new piece of hardware, except that the new piece of hardware is basically the same as the old piece of hardware with very minor well-documented changes), you can estimate with surprisingly good accuracy.
LinkShUI: a CLI-driven environment for in-browser servers and proxies
Damn xkcd! I feel bad about the poor robot now D:
As a user of the service since it was in its MVP stage, I really like the service and I'm excited to see them grow.

To hear that they have a big vision is great. Partnerships with retailers is one thing, but the potential for them to make key innovations on the logistical side of things is huge. I think they can make some big moves in this space (outside of boxes).

I'm curious how they'll address the "only ship to billing addresses" problem?
Lets take it that people are worried about being ripped off. If it was easy to return an app for a refund from Apple, would you expect the baseline $0.99 price to go up?
The Case Against Anything Buckets
I think you are misrepresenting this.

I clicked on a news announcement for a product that I currently know very little about and this will be my first engagement with ANYTHING they have published. Would their impression on me be better if I get a giant white screen, or if I get a note saying that their page requires javascript?

Regardless of my engagement with the product, it is certainly a bad assumption to say that everyone blocking javascript is not a potential customer.
Yours is a good point (and I can't fully refute it), but I'd like to point out that the article's argument is that Starbucks doesn't offer a free alternative. Surely if Starbucks offered a free alternative, people would choose it instead, as long as it provided a reasonable number of the benefits the paid version does.

To bring the analogy back around to apps, let's say there was an Instagram app that costs $9 and a notJimstagram app that does something similar for free. Instagram = Starbucks, notJimstagram = your office coffee. Most people would buy Instagram, because Instagram is well known, has a strong brand, etc.

On the other hand, suppose there was the $9 Instagram and the free Instagram. In that case, most people would probably choose, or at least start with the free Instagram.
Precedence in CSS: Specificity, Inheritance, and the Cascade
I can tell the author is an Apple user - if I used an app for 15 seconds and didn't like it, I'd get a refund.
The French post office (la Poste) have been offering that service for a few years, it's very convenient. very surprised it didn't exist before in the US.

http://www.cityssimo.fr/
> part of that investigation is interviewing Julian Assange to let him give his side.

If this is politically motivated, Sweden wants Assange in their jurisdiction to extradite him -- which seems plausible given that Sweden refuses to interview Assange over phone or in the UK. Does that seem normal to you? To have a suspect extradited for "interviewing"?
He's sometimes right. There are lots of good reasons why you might need software schedule estimation. When you do, there is no point in throwing up your hands and saying, "You can't do that, everybody knows it." Instead get http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Pract... and teach yourself how to do it.

Why would software estimation matter? For many companies it matters a lot if you can announce something in time for Christmas. Or you might have to hit a deadline for compliance with a legal contract. Or you may be trying to prioritize two different possible products - without a sense of the effort involved you're lacking one of the parameters you need for such an estimation.

That doesn't mean that you always estimate. If the value proposition is clear enough, you're going to work on it until you're done and then you will be very happy. But the real world does not usually work like that.
Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API
Google Turns On Smart Updates For Android Apps
Yes, it reminds me of a story about a guy named Joe who spent hours on the phone with the phone company and had the erroneous billing charges removed saving him $11.

Joe tells his neighbour Bob of his ordeal and how he got his $11 back, Bob has the same problem and asks whether the Joe could take care of his billing problems with the phone company for $11, but Joe refuses insisting he isn't being paid enough to deal with the phone company for hours.
What browser/OS are you using? For me in Chrome/OSX, the pages turn flawlessly.
Umm... as if that animation even worked on iOS or Android browsers...
Really enjoyed reading the article (though the criticism by kineticflow about using "Fact", seems valid to me), thanks.

For me, the two stellar points were: "The Starbucks Craftsmanship Is On Full Display" + "App Craftsmanship Is Hidden Away".

I'd also like to add that the "Craftsman is hidden away". Apps do not connect at a human level the same way a person selling you a cup of coffee does. Even for mega corporations like Starbucks, at the end of the day, you interact with a Barista or someone at the cash register. We being creatures of habit, tend to go back to the same Starbucks (mostly), and in the process bolster this connection.
That doesn't happen with an app. You might go back to the app every day, but there is no tangible connection with the craftsman. So what exactly can be done? For starters, one can associate the developer's name and face with the app. I think this is particularly important for Free apps. If you've ever used Adblock on Safari, at the end of the setup, there's a note that "humanizes" the app as being the creation of a person. You get to see the name and a photo.

One of my favourite mobile apps, Instapaper, has the developer leaving tiny personal messages during app updates. I know his name, the fact that he recently had a baby and at some basic level it helps me connect to the person.

Does this make any sense?
Thank you for sharing this. I'm new to HTML/CSS/Javascript entirely and I'm getting into it to make games.
Lenovo Thinkpads have (optionally) Authentec sensors. The way it works is that the fingerprints are stored in the sensor itself. Also stored is a password (or equivalent). Swiping the appropriate finger then makes the password available. Consequently you can either provide the password or the fingerprint. It really is just a shortcut to providing the password. (Note that all other sensor manufacturers are effectively just a cheap scanner - the image processing and "authentication" are all done in the host software.)

On the most recent Thinkpads you can swipe your finger to power on the device, get past the password protected BIOS, unlock ATA password locked drives, boot and login to Windows. (Or you can enter your password 3 times.)

The sensor requires a swipe unlike large form sensors where you effectively leave your fingerprint behind. This is definitely an improvement.

Fingerprint data can also be loaded for use outside of the boot process, such as an "Enterprise" where you want to manage multiple systems and allow centrally managed logins. Authentec also makes client software that keeps your passwords (think ones stored by the browser) in a vault with access controlled by fingerprint or master password.

In this whole scenario fingerprints can be revoked by deleting them from the sensor or management software. However you only have ten prints before you run out. You can be observed unknowingly so passwords can also be compromised just like with latent fingerprints. It is up to someone to decide if the security tradeoffs of the Authentec scanner are acceptable. For the record I do use it on my laptop.

But I'm actually a Linux user so I can only it for BIOS power on and ATA drive unlock, but not Linux authentication. Authentec do not document their protocols or provide evidence of their security. Small subsets have been reverse engineered (see libfprint).
Yes, but a decent amount of software is doing things that are relatively unique to the time, place, and organization creating it.

For those sorts of projects, you might as well use this equation for time to completion: sum of(number of lines in the spec/request * d4)*3 = days to complete.
Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister, pg 27-29, alluded to in the post.

Namely:
"The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others..."

Study refers to Jeffery and Lawrence, 1985 study, to which I cannot find the raw data, unfortunately.