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Pricing Models for Subscription Services... Your Experience?	tekwld: I have found that pricing should be determined according to your audience but should various payment-options should be discussed and developed. Having a broad audience, it would be wise to open with a shorter bill term having a slightly higher rate than that of a longer-term (i.e. monthly vs. annual or annual vs. life-time). With the unsteady economy, each client will have their own perspective as to what may benefit their financial needs/flexibility. As it pertains to a customer preference, remain receptive of your audience.
Glad the override feature is gone?	paulgb: I started using noprocrast again now that it is gone. I'm glad it's gone.
Pricing Models for Subscription Services... Your Experience?	bradgessler: First of all, you need to figure out whether or not you're building a consumer or business product."Would I give this to somebody as a gift?"If Yes, you have a consumer product. If No, you probably have a business product.For business products you want to think in terms of expense accounts. You can bet that ~$20-$30 is super easy on up to ~$300-$500. The problem with subscriptions is that it can scare some people off who only need to use the product once.For consumer products, I have no idea. I just know that consumers are generally more discretionary with how they throw their money around.Education customers will just give you a lot of buzz but not much money (from my experience).
Are you from Japan?	lionhearted: Japan is a lot safer than almost anywhere else in the world, so you get preteen kids from Yokohama going to hang out in Tokyo. That'd be a bit like some 12 year old American kids going to "hang out in Manhattan" - with no detailed plan, supervision, etc.But largely socially emancipated at six years old? I don't think so. Maybe somewhere between 8 and 12, which is a few years younger than a lot of places, but nothing crazy.
Pricing Models for Subscription Services... Your Experience?	merrick33: You should read both of these items that make a case for going with a monthly charge instead of annual.http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/annual-credit-...http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/753-ask-37signals-how-do-...
Pricing Models for Subscription Services... Your Experience?	jakewolf: When I was landscaping, I offered a yearly rate which was a 10% discount. 15% of my customers took me up on it which gave me the money I needed my first year to buy equipment plus a little extra capital.Just be sure to have a cancellation policy in place and cash on hand to not piss off already unhappy users.
How to write financial projections?	bbgm: As Alex mentions, unit sales is usually the best way to do this.Have you benchmarked sales figures for similar products as a possible baseline?
Are you from Japan?	kqr2: When I visited Japan, I remember these very young school kids getting on the subway by themselves. They were all wearing school uniforms with bright yellow hats and were holding hands when they went on the subway together. One of them also had this "emergency" alarm she could pull if something went wrong.
Are you from Japan?	gojomo: Age 24?!?Urban teens in the US often take public transit on their own to school or other destinations. Suburban teens (~16+) often drive themselves wherever they want to go, sometimes in a car they effectively own themselves.Even younger children sometimes also take unaccompanied public transit trips, especially in smaller, more family-oriented cities and towns, or in groups. Children under 10 in many places walk or ride bicycles on their own to school, stores, and events.
Are you from Japan?	pavel_lishin: I grew up in Moscow, Russia, and was taking the bus and subway by myself from quite an early age; I left there at 10, so it must have been several years before then.(I know it's not Japan, but wanted to point out that this was done even in what some might consider to be a western-yet-scary part of the world.)
Pricing Models for Subscription Services... Your Experience?	russell: I tend to buy software and services in that price range by the year for both myself and clients. Expensing or invoicing a small monthly charge is too much hassle. Note, however, I am more hassle sensitive than price sensitive. I am also somewhat resistant to automatic charges, but that is probably just me. OTOH Neflix goes quite well with a small monthly charge. Maybe the yearly charge for them is a barrier.Your charge is so small that I suspect the recurring charge will generate a lot more money than a one-time charge or the lifetime charge.
Are you from Japan?	netcan: I think this issue is a great example of something. We defend what we are used to. Desperately.When we see a 2-4 yr difference in either direction over what we allow our kids to do, we are generally appalled. "He's 15 & can't take a bus!?" "She let an 11 yr old take the train herself!?"An interesting trend I've seen between myself & my brother (12 yrs Junior) is that he & his friends seem to have slightly less desire for freedom. Sure they are annoyed when they're limited, but it comes up less frequently. I think a lot of it comes down to video games, internet & such. What they do with friends, it's mostly at home. We were never home at 10-15 yrs. Nothing to do at home. So most days we went out with friends. We naturally hit more resistance from parents who had a harder time tracking where we were. It also highlighted who had more or less freedom. Our parents got used to us being 'gone' as 11 year olds. Now it feels like kids are at one house or another, easier to track. Cell Phones help. In my particular world, I think many things have moved 2-3 years older.When I was a child, I lived in the US. We had no freedom at all. One reason was crime rates, particularly random crime rates which are the thing that really contributes to your feeling of safety. Another major factor was geography. Couldn't walk anywhere in those sprawling US cities. Kids had to be driven to school. Friends lived far away, etc.
Are you from Japan?	patio11: Yes, it is considered normal for a Japanese child in elementary school to get themselves to and from school.For the first few years they typically travel in gigantic groups with an adult chaperone -- think of it like meeting your schoolbus at the corner, except the bus is a bunch of people walking together. After that, they'll mostly be biking to school alone or in small groups.Factors which make this more common than the U.S: hyper-secure streets, availability of public transportation (it isn't unusual in my neck of the woods for home and school to be separated by a 30 minute train ride), hyper-secure public transportation, and a good lump of inertia. (How many institutions like that really change, when you think about it. The U.S. still has a summer vacation so that kids can help Mom and Dad on the farm, for Pete's sake.)
How do you determine which project you should work on?	mjfern: Consider your passions and your skills and try to focus on projects at the intersection of the two.
Are you from Japan?	RK: Yes, but at what age do they move out of their parents' homes?
How do you determine which project you should work on?	ktharavaad: When I'm presented with a project (by myself or someone else), my thought flow is usually like this:1, Is this project interesting to me? I usually trust my gut on this one and what I'm interested on is temporally-variant. I can only apply my self 100% to things I find an interest in.2, What is the market viability of this project? I do a bit googling around to see if there are any existing implementations of this product. I try to think of usage scenarios and I will google for communities who might need this product, read about what they have to say and find out more about their needs so that the implementation of the product can be geared towards them.Even if a product has 0 market-demand, I might still work on it because of step (1) and I simply treat it as a learning experience ( such is the case of kpicturebooth.com ).3, I work out the logistics - can I work on this on my own ? - if the project was presented to me by someone else, what is the team like? - how long will it take, can I fit it into my school schedule?If I deem the project infeasible, I might try to work on one part at a time or get people to help me.
How do you determine which project you should work on?	pskomoroch: I have a really tough time with this, and often bounce back and forth between side projects.Erdos was supposedly really good at helping people pick research problems to work on which would have just the right difficulty given their capabilities. I can't find the exact quote, but it was in the book "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers"pg had some advice in an essay on high school: http://paulgraham.com/hs.htmlExcerpt:"Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)"
Glad the override feature is gone?	kwamenum86: What happens when you turn it on an you spend too much time on the site? Doesn't load? And isn't the other loophole simple logging out?
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base?	timf: Here's the only example of where I like it: http://playericious.com/
Pricing Models for Subscription Services... Your Experience?	ajkirwin: As for 1, it depends solely on price.If it's say, like that? I'll probably buy a year. If it's more like $9.99 or more a month, then, I'll probably do it monthly to avoid that single large expenditure.
How do you determine which project you should work on?	tjic: Here at SmartFlix we're pretty analytical about it.When we're batting the idea around, we create a page in the wiki, and the first section is "rationale / analysis". In there we put the number of customers it will attract, or the plausible increase in revenue per customer (with some error bars), then calculate a value for this (a 5% chance of an extra $1 from each of X thousand customers = $Y). We also calculate the cost (we have a nominal price of $75 per engineering hour, and half of that for a design or marketing hour). If a project doesn't pay back its investment in a year, we don't do it. If a project does look to pay back its investment, we then rank order it against other projects to figure out which to do first.
How do you determine which project you should work on?	walesmd: 1. Do I find it interesting? If it woke me up from my sleep or prevents me from sleeping, because I am so interested in working on it - it's time to work on that idea.2. If not that extreme - is it worth losing X months of work on my current project. When I set code aside, I can rarely every just jump back into it. I tend to rm -r and start all over. So, is this new idea worth those 6 months I spent on my current project?3. If not - it goes into Backpack in order of "excitability" and I'll get to it eventually.
How do you determine which project you should work on?	catone: I start it, and then see how it's going a few days in. If it's a struggle then it either probably isn't something I want to be working on, or there's something wrong with my premise that's keeping me from really "feeling it." So back to the drawing board -- or I put it aside for something else. Sometimes, I'll revisit something I've previously set aside because I'll have thought of a new way to do it or new spin on it that makes more sense and makes me more excited to work on it.
Do You Hate the New Github URLs too?	walesmd: It would be nice if they implemented the naming of commits as well, into their URL scheme. Of course, master would always work, but for instance - if you named a commit 'user-profile-complete' then you could use that within your URL as well.I'm still learning Git, so sorry if "naming" isn't the appropriate term for this feature. I've only used it when following tutorials and screencasts introducing Git.
Why don't you use email encryption?	mickt: Very few friends use encryption, so full e-mail encryption is out. For a while I tried just signing my e-mails with a PGP cert, but I gave up when friends & colleagues kept asking why they couldn't open the attachment or what that attachment is ...
How do you determine which project you should work on?	voidfiles: I try to start by capturing all my good thoughts into a notebook. The second part is I try to review all the things I have captured on a daily, and weekly basis. If I am not currently working on a project, then I try to be open to inspiration, total cheese I know, but I find that if I "force" it, like for the next hour I am going to work on having a good idea, I fail. My best idea/projects have all come in a bit and pieces and then they all of a sudden form into a solid idea. When I have an idea, I then try and build a prototype as fast as possible. At that point I am usually in a position to decided if I should continue, shelve, or give up. In the end whatever you decided to do, make sure you try and work with the intention of getting better at something. If you do that, in the long run it doesn't matter if you fail at a project because you still learned something along the way.
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base?	kbrower: For me it boils down to whether or not the frame is adding any value to the page, unobtrusive, and easy to close.
How do you determine which project you should work on?	access_denied: I look at every project that is a candidate. The I ask: why would I want to do it? Concrete things, not generals like "I am passionate about it" (that's a prerequesite). I make this list for every candidate. Than I cross-check each reason with each candidate. The same for contra. The project with the most votes wins.
Pricing Models for Subscription Services... Your Experience?	alt219: Do you have enough volume to consider A/B testing?Given a large enough sample size, you should be able to determine an optimum pricing scheme.I'm no expert on A/B testing, just my $0.02.
How do you determine which project you should work on?	bprater: The one that keeps floating to the top.
How do you determine which project you should work on?	tigerthink: I came up with this, but I never use it:Through the day, I have a fluctuating "importance threshold". During free time the threshold is very low; during work time it's high. At any given time I do the most fun thing that's above the threshold.
How to write financial projections?	aliasaria: My experience is that good investors know that profit+loss projections for certain kinds of products at certain stages are pretty much useless. In these cases, your goal is to make something that isn't laughable (when forced to make projections).It's easier to forecast expenses -- you know how many engineers you want, and can guess at legal, rent, etc.But it's also good, if you can't have a market ready piece of hardware within two years, to have an alternate source of revenue in the beginning. For example, you could sell a suped-up (expensive) early-adopter version for a year which will serve as a prototype for the real (cheaper) consumer version.Plan to sell very little in the beginning, as that's what always happens in hardware. And consider planning to sell through someone else. For example, if your device has to do with telephony, assume you will sell through one of the major telephone networks in your area. Then guess at what percent of their users in your target market area you can convert in the first year and calculate your cut of the sale. It's easier to estimate sales if you're thinking about taking a bigger and bigger slice out of a large, defined pie (rather than growing from nothing).
How to write financial projections?	rms: It's better to make them too big than too small. There's no real reason to be conservative, within reason. If you make them too small you force the investor to think of ways that you could be bigger to generate the return that he or she wants.
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	adityakothadiya: Hello HN,I launched http://tweeght.com a few days ago. It's a Twitter based application to share your thoughtful and insightful tweets with #tweeght tag. Other users can Vote up, Retweet or Reply to your tweets.The idea was born out of simple necessity - to share my thoughts, and follow thoughts from other interesting people on the Twitter. But due to other noise available on the Twitter, these thoughtful tweets were getting buried, and were hard to discover. So I created Tweeght in one week. Instead of following such tweets from interesting people in real time, I can just read interesting Tweets voted up by others.So please review the application and let me know your all kinds of inputs.- Do you find it useful?- How was the usability, design and performance?- Do you have suggestions, ideas to take it to next level?Also, if you like this app, then I'll really appreciate if you could promote it amongst your Twitter followers.Thanks a ton in advance for your inputs,- Aditya
How do you determine which project you should work on?	hotpockets: First make sure your enthusiasm for an idea is not resulting from hidden assumptions you have made and not realized. Examine all your assumptions.Also try to avoid falling prey to any cognitive biases. There is a list of them at wikipedia that is probably worth acquainting yourself with. Perhaps you might favor one idea over an other just because you have been thinking about it more recently. This would be related to the Recency Effect - increased saliance and recall of recent stimuli. Thus you will weight the benefits (and drawbacks) of recent ideas more than the benefits (or drawbacks) of past ideas.One way around this might be to rate your ideas at multiple times after rethinking various past ideas fully.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_effect
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	Anon84: Pretty neat idea.I'm amazed at the variety of different apps that have been popping out around such a simple concept. Kind of reinforces the concept of Twitter as more of a protocol than an actual tool.What kind of mining are you doing on twitter? Public timeline? Firehose? Can you make the original data available? There were news of some data being made available some time ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406664 but it quickly got taken off line.Any body else has any data they can provide privately (or otherwise)?
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	jacobscott: Couple of points:1) I understand the use case, but asking people to trust you with their twitter credentials is bad news bears. Isn't some combination of OpenID/OAuth supposed to fix this (once twitter gets around to it, or whatever)?2) I think the intersection of digg with twitter is interesting (don't know if it is novel), and using a tweet tag is a clean way to do it.3) Your design is pretty clean, don't know if I like the color scheme or name though.4) Is "thoughtful tweet" an oxymoron? Is there a good use case for high SnR microblogging?
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	tolmasky: I would make the last point number 1 on your site. Before I care about how to sign up, I want to know what on earth its for. Once I waded through all the different ways of interacting with tweeght (which I'd never do in a real site, but I did here), and found out what the idea was, I thought it was really cool. The voting is whats important in my mind, since you can already retweet and quote people with vanilla twitter.
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	andrewljohnson: Why do people use mispellings for their domain names? It's not a good idea.
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	jaxn: 1) I might find it more useful if it was limited to tweets from the people I follow or where the votes were from people I follow. I know that is much more difficult data and that it requires much greater adoption to be viable. But I think that would make it useful for me. (you could also use favorites as votes if you can get the data).2) The design and performance seemed fine. The icons seem less harsh on twitter.com because the row height is closer to the icon size. Also, maybe only display the instructions the first time I visit the page. Go from Popular to Recent and back to Popular. The instructions get in your way.3) I guess I rolled this one into the first answer.Now, it sounds like I may want different things from twitter than your target market since for me it is more about ambient relationships than insightful commentary.Congrats on your launch!
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	albertsun: I don't understand the point of the app, is it just a place to vote on insightful tweets? Your app needs to tell me somewhere prominent why I should use it and what benefit I will get from using it.
How do you know when to give up?	Shamiq: Tangential: There's no link in your profile or in your text. Do you mind showing us your product?Also, if you live in the U.S. and follow typical diurnal sleeping patterns, I recommend waiting until a more sane time in the morning to think your thoughts through rationally.Caveat Emptor: I do not speak from experience.
How do you know when to give up?	pclark: Post a review post here asking for a review.You haven't even included a link to your app! :)
What kind of support do you offer for your web app?	pclark: I use zendesk for direct support and get satisfaction for everything else. My email, telephone and skype are on all emails sent from me and I openly encourage users to contact me however for help.I think the key to support is to be lightening quick. If its taken over 4 hours you're failing
What kind of support do you offer for your web app?	mmohan: We are looking at Zendesk. Heard good things about it and think it might just be the ticket. I have used the "Free" version, but the $19/month one agent might work for us instead. You get the flexibility of your own email address (your domain).
What kind of support do you offer for your web app?	patio11: I mostly sell downloadable software but as of a week ago it is a web application if you squint at it.Support is via email, and my general promise about it is "I do my level best to get back to you within 24 hours", which I achieve with approximately 98% regularity. (My price point just doesn't support phone calls. Happily I'm overseas from most of my customers, which is a great way to convince them to play ball on that issue.)I love talking to customers but I hate doing support, because that means someone is having a less than optimal experience. Well, two someones, since writing email is no more optimal use of my time than waiting for my email is optimal use of theirs.Accordingly, I spend a lot of time stopping support incidents before they start. This means writing and rewriting and re-re-rewriting copy in the web and application to be more comprehensible, illustrating things with pictures, and providing people with self-help options.Example: a fairly key issue with downloadable software is getting people their registration key. It gets emailed when they purchase. But some people don't get it (spam filters, customer error, etc). So I displayed it after checkout, with instructions on what to do. But some people won't get it (failure to click through to last page, customer error, Internet failures, etc). So I provided instructions before the event (to check the spam folder) and provided a registration key lookup feature. I also made the app sniff registration keys off of the clipboard, which squashes many copy/paste issues before they start. (There are NUMEROUS ways for an unsophisticated user to fail at copy/paste.)I keep categorized records of what causes issues and how many I get. (I worked in Customer Support a long time ago, and old habits die hard.) Relative to the number of sales, its down about 90% compared to my first year in business. I still have lots of room for improvement -- I'm thinking of a way to totally eliminate registration key entry for most users in the next version, for example. (It is fairly easy after you have web connectivity baked in.)
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	willdayble: Yo dawg, I heard you liked Twitter....=\
How do you know when to give up?	patio11: There is an article by Steve Pavlina which, if you file off the words "shareware author" and replace with "web app author", I think you could benefit from.http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/shareprof...I'll warn you in advance: some of it is trite. But there is some value in the other stuff: marketing success, for example, is not something that just happens to a product. It is something which is the predictable result of a strategy designed to produce it. Your submission indicates that you tried a few things to get users, which is good, but I wonder if you thought about that issue in a systemic manner. (Was there a plan in place? With boring things like predicting the chicken-egg issue before it happened, and multiple avenues for solving it? Which you then checked against reality as you encountered reality? These are opportunities for improvement in your current project and in how you approach future projects.)As for when to give up: you'd be really, really surprised how far you can take projects with persistence. That said, if my little brother said "Hey, I've got an idea, first you take gamers and then you..." my first question would be "Why will they pay for this when they hate paying for just about anything, including the games which define their identity?" and I would not have a second question until I got a satisfactory answer to the first question.
How do you know when to give up?	robfitz: if you haven't already, i'd first make a budget (of time, money, or whatever other resource you're consuming) and see what it might take to reach a win scenario you'd be happy with (ie $3k/mo passive income). laying it out in rows and columns with required user #s and growth is surprisingly helpful.i haven't seen the site and have no idea of the specifics, but based on what i'm imagining, i would jump ship. the chicken-egg issue is hard for anything social (especially when bootstrapped w/ no marketing $), and gaming is a saturated space, so it'll be hard to get the user base to critical mass.that said, if you're still excited about what you're building, that carries a lot of weight.
How do you know when to give up?	ktharavaad: Googling his HN username turned up this site:http://www.noobindex.com/Clean design and layout and I dare say it looks a little inspired from the HN design.However the site really doesn't tell me what it does, issit like twitter?
Could no procrastination feature only operate in specified hours?	jacquesm: For no fee at all I will make you stop procrastinating during the hours you desire, what's your ip ;) ?
Could no procrastination feature only operate in specified hours?	andyn: If you're on Firefox, you might find that Leechblock ( http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html ) gives you more control over what and when you can visit sites. It can lock you out of disabling, changing the settings or removing it too.
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base?	The_Sponge: It's perhaps only tolerable in situations where a site has to deal with phishing on a large scale basis, perhaps on a forum targeted towards a younger audience. And even then, only if it is only a banner which says "WARNING: Don't give out your password to sites you clicked on from us!" as well as a swift way to see the page in full.
How do you know when to give up?	tontoa4: You need to believe in your own product, otherwise trying to sell it will just make you feel guilty. So post a link i'd like to help review it.
Could no procrastination feature only operate in specified hours?	tomsaffell: I'd been wondering this myself. But then I thought: if one needs a no-procrast filter during 'working hours' then one is probably spending so much of one's day infront of PC that one should be wary of ODing on HN at any time of day.Perhaps we should interpret the no-procrast filter outside of 'working hours' as a message to go exercise / drink / eat / sleep / hang?
Glad the override feature is gone?	RossM: Could I suggest an alternative to the maxtime/minaway method?I was thinking have a set time when you know you are at work, (e.g. 9-5, Monday to Friday (or Saturday you poor soul)) and just have it disabled between that time. Perhaps even have an 'allowance period' that gives you X minutes per day for your break usage.
How do you know when to give up?	sharkbrainguy: When the reasons you originally believe the project could (not necessarily would or even probably would) succeed become invalid, you should stop investing in it.To answer your question someone would have to know what those original reasons were. As some say, what's your "secret sauce".It looks to me like a twitter for geeks. The problem is that being twitter is already for geeks, and I don't see any benefit in being in a more exclusive communication channel.When you say "fair chance" to me it sounds as though you think there's a community of intelligent people who give websites scrutiny proportional to the effort the authors have put in. This kind of attitude is almost always going to lead to disappointment.The internet is more like a herd of lazy, selfish people looking for ways to do less boring stuff and more fun stuff.You might do better optimizing for that scenario.edit: I originally had a critique of your site here but it wasn't strictly relevant and this post is too long.
what sources should I read ?	bayareaguy: I'm assuming you have a FreeBSD box handy. If not then you should :-)If you're just getting started with unix and C I'd say start with /usr/src/bin and /usr/src/usr.bin since there are plenty of easy things there like cat, date, etc.Next I'd head over to /usr/src/lib/libc, do a grep for "Chris Torek". Everything he writes is good. Learning low level details about how libc works on whatever platform you're on is always a good thing if you're doing any real C programming.After that it's a matter of taste. Find something that interests you and read that (e.g. if you like kernel stuff head over to /usr/src/sys).
How do you know when to give up?	leftnode: You've already done what so many others fail: complete a site and launch it. There's no reason to call it a failure. You spend what, probably $10 a month in hosting? I wouldn't close it down because it hasn't received a lot of traffic yet.However, as the other posters say, it sounds like you'll attract a bunch of 13 year olds. May want to steer the site in a more professional direction.
how can Obama use a BlackBerry without going to Canada?	pclark: IMAP & SMTP
How does the White House prevent Obama's emails from being forwarded?	rrival: Sounds like something these guys might have dev'd: http://www.vaporstream.com/
Do you use online accounting software?	jcapote: I've been using freshbooks.com and I'm loving it
How do you know when to give up?	matt1: A little background, as I can relate: I built a poker calculator called ALL IN Expert, which I thought would be a big hit but wasn't. When it launched, it received very little coverage or attention and I quickly despaired and took the site down, though I did keep a copy on my blog where people could go and download it.A few months later I do a Google search to see if anyone had said anything about it and lo and behold, one of the notable poker training sites had done a full hour long video on how to use ALL IN Expert to improve your game. They had found out about the software, either because of my initial marketing or just randomly through Google, and wouldn't you know it: they found it useful. Now its downloaded a dozen or more times/day. Not much, but who knows what would have happened if I had kept promoting it.It can be hard to tell when to give up and when you should push just a little bit harder. When I stopped working on it, I started working on a new project, Domain Pigeon, which will likely prove to have been a good decision.My 2c: Leave your site up, make a few changes every now and then, keep promoting it even if only an email or forum post every few days, and re-evaluate in a few months. There's not really a good reason to take it down, even if you do choose to devote your time to something else.
Do you use online accounting software?	jacquesm: No, I would never put critical financial information online, I just about trust my bank not to mess up with my account information but that's as far as it goes.But that really is my only reason 'against', on the other side of the ledger (pun intended) there are plenty of 'pros', such as the ability to stay current with the tax rules without upgrading your software.If you use an online accounting service make sure they allow you to export your data in some common format so that you can back it up yourself. Most of these companies will of course do their very best to make sure that you don't lose your data (one should assume) but if anything should happen then you, not they, are responsible as far as the IRS is concerned.
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	hotshothenry: i like the layout and design, esp the color scheme, you managed to pull off the brown.
How do you know when to give up?	vaksel: if that noobindex is your site, then you should spend a few weeks and do a complete redesign. Right now(no offense) it looks like crap. You have to play to your audience. Simplicity works on HN, because the site is only text and you get the full experience anyways.But for a gaming site to be simple is just wrong...look at your competition, all of them have extremely visually appealing designs. So why would a person register for something that looks like crap(pink background..really?) when they can register for a site that looks good.If you suck at visual design hire a designer to build you something that is visually appealing. Probably will run you something like 500 bucks on one of those freelancer sites.
what sources should I read ?	wallflower: "Code reading requires its own set of skills, and the ability to determine which technique to use when is crucial. In this indispensable book, Diomidis Spinellis uses more than 600 real-world examples to show you how to identify good (and bad) code: how to read it, what to look for, and how to use this knowledge to improve your own code.Fact: If you make a habit of reading good code, you will write better code yourself."Check out this next time you are in the bookstore:http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/
How do you know when to give up?	nostrademons: Here's the criteria I used, courtesy of a Sam Altman post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95883):"If no new or current users/advertisers/customers/etc care about what you're doing, and no one in the company has a plan (or, more commonly I think, a desire) to fix it, you are probably in bad shape."
how can Obama use a BlackBerry without going to Canada?	pedalpete: The actual device that Obama is using is from Certified Digital, and I've been looking but haven't been able to find anywhere that it says it is using the blackberry network (aside from all the reports that say 'Obama's Blackberry).I'm wondering if this is just a poor naming convention by the press. Like saying 'he grabbed a kleenex' when grabbing a tissue.
How do you know when to give up?	alex_c: I find it useful to think in terms of rates and percentages. Sounds dull, but hear me out.What % of blogs respond to your product? If you've only emailed 5 or 10 blogs, you don't really know yet - that's a pretty small number, and you might've just had bad luck. The rate of success really depends on a lot of factors unrelated to your site itself (subject matter, the blogs themselves, how you approach them, etc.), but I wouldn't be surprised to get a 10% response rate for an average product. I haven't really done this enough to go into more detail, or to have a winning formula, but I would expect the success rate to be relatively low, which can get discouraging.What percentage of your visitors are sticking around? Again, if you've only received a few hundred visits, it's hard to tell. The best way to iterate is to have a steady stream of traffic, make changes, and see how they affect stickiness.. but getting the traffic is the tricky part to start with, right? I'm not really counting Digg/Reddit/Stumbleupon traffic here, since those visitors typically have the attention span of a fruitfly.How much search engine traffic are you getting? How feasible is it to get on the first page of Google or Yahoo for some combinations of relevant keywords? (use the Adwords Keyword Tool to research keywords, see how much traffic they could potentially get you, and how competitive they are). Search engines can bring you thousands of visitors a month who are actively looking for something like your site. Don't ignore them.Can you think of any other domain-specific promotions? You mentioned game forums and guilds, I don't know how far you took that. Is there any angle under which game developers or publishers might see an advantage to promoting your site or collaborating with you? What about game magazines or review sites?These are all the cost of giving your site a chance to succeed. Weigh that against the reward of success - how badly do you want your site to grow, and how much effort are you willing to put in to "give it a fair chance"? (you're the only one who can give it a fair chance, by the way - no one else cares enough).
How do you know when to give up?	edw519: How do you know when to give up?When do you know when to move on to a new project?Ah, 2 completely different questions.Moving on to a new project is not giving up. Especially when you use everything you learned from the previous project in the next one (which, of course, all of us hackers always do). Just think of it as Me 2.0 and move on. Never give up.
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base?	NoBSWebDesign: As long as it's relatively unobtrusive and has a prominent "remove frame" button, I don't see what the big deal is. If it weren't for their link to you (framed or not), that user would not have found your content in the first place. I would be grateful for them driving traffic to your site and move on to more important issues.
How do you know when to give up?	azharcs: Read a book by Seth Godin called "The Dip - The Extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit ( and when to stick)". It might be useful.
Do you use online accounting software?	RobGR: You might look into various bank's online software. Some banks have a "business account" that has a really simple accounting system built in, that is a double-entry system with 4 accounts. I think Wells Fargo is one such bank.Another thing you might look into is installing and configuring SQL-Ledger or LedgerSMB. Setting that up turned out to be too much of a time sink for me, given what I expected to get out of it. That was several years ago however, and since then I have picked up more common sense bookkeeping and the code has progressed a lot.
To porn or not to porn?	TrevorJ: "I frankly dont want to be associated with porn and explained to me how to make start this with out using my name."Then don't. In my experience your respect for yourself is a hundred times more valuable than money.
Best format for video download	wmf: WMV can be played by all Windows PCs, about 20% of Macs, and many Linux systems. MP4 will play on all Macs but only some Windows and Linux machines. Anything else is worse.
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup?	madlid: About PR firms - just take care when selecting one if you decide to go that route - simply because a lot of them still send out e-mail blasts which are annoying and tend to be dismissed quickly. So I'd hate to see you throw away good money and not get great results. Ask them what how they work and what they can do for you before they do it; you don't want your startup associated with the ratfinks.Overall I agree with what Mystalic wrote but wanted to add a couple of things - note my disclaimer, I write for ReadWriteWeb.Make sure your product is relevant to to the sites audience - this is soooo important. Take a look at this post Richard wrote some time ago - it's worth a read - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_not_to_pitch_a_blog...Also, if you do want to target bloggers - make it easy for them to write about you. For instance - make sure the site covers all the things we'll want to know - the basics - who, what, where, when, why and how - you'd be surprised how many people forget that blogs have made it super important to write stuff up quickly; if we have to spend an hour just working out what your product is about, chances are we won't bother.Sorry that sounds harsh, but it is the reality.Hope this helps a bit and good luck!
How do you know when to give up?	markessien: If there is a path to making money that does not involve gaining a huge number of users, the continue pushing it. If your only path involves becoming very popular, then it may be the right time to give up.
Please review my webapp: Tweeght.com	AndrewWarner: I like the idea, but I don't think you need the big explanation box at the top. You built a very intuitive site.The only thing that needs an explanation is how to post. So I suggest having a button that says "post" and when it's pressed, show the different methods.
Existing startup directly competes with mine, now what?	NonEUCitizen: If the market is big enough, there should be room for them to be Coke and for you to be Pepsi. Or preferably, vice versa.If the market isn't big enough, there should be room for one of you to be Microsoft. Preferably you and not them.Why do you think they'll beat you?
Existing startup directly competes with mine, now what?	LukeG: Focus on your users.Listen, iterate, and build something that at least a few of them LOVE. I'd say that startups don't have the luxury of focusing on their competition.
Existing startup directly competes with mine, now what?	ph0rque: You can contact them, talk about what you're doing, and see if there's a possibility of partnership. If you're both startups in a true sense of the word, you might benefit more from such collaboration rather than competition.
How do I write a software license?	markup: I suggest you to go for the lawyer, a good and skilled lawyer who understands software licensing issues.
I need feedback for my feedback site	Angostura: The one thing, I don't understand. You say "Think of us as Getsatisfaction/UserVoice for small businesses."But small businesses are all over Getsatisfaction.So what's different about FeedbackJar?
Whats the most popular web scripting language?	davidw: These show Java as being more popular than PHP, but it's not limited to the web:http://langpop.com/In any case, though, it's very likely one of those two. If you're just looking at the number of sites rather than how big each one is, I'd put my money on PHP too. Then I'd go buy a Rails book with my earnings:-)
How do I write a software license?	cperciva: Talk to a lawyer, but I recommend looking at existing licenses (especially free software licenses) first and putting together a draft based on those. Lawyers almost never write anything from scratch; instead, they re-use boilerplate. If you turn up at your lawyer's office with a collection of boilerplate and say "here's what I've put together, here's what I think it means, can you see anything wrong with this" you'll end up paying far less than if you ask him to write everything for you.
Existing startup directly competes with mine, now what?	gojomo: Being the only or being the first of a type is a minor factor in ultimate success. If the idea/market is good, it will support multiple offerings.So whenever discovering a real or potential competitor, learn from what they do well if you can, but don't be discouraged.
How do I write a software license?	dpifke: I would recommend "The IT/Digital Legal Companion", which discusses the things to think about and provides some sample licenses:http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Legal-Companion-Comprehensive-......followed by a review by a real lawyer. :)
Existing startup directly competes with mine, now what?	andrewljohnson: That's good news. Anyone who doesn't have competitors isn't in a very good market.My start-up has a dozen competitors, ranging from start-ups to billion dollar conglomerates.
I need feedback for my feedback site	nathanburke: The one question I have deals with how much data you'll have at launch. Right now, when I search for anything in MA, there's nothing there. Are you planning on either: a) just focusing on CA for launch b) preloading some data so there's at least something there c) connecting to an API or other service like Yelp, etc. to display some local listings, allowing users to select those businesses to add to the feedbackjar listingMy other question: Are you purposely staying vague with your categories? When I go to add a business, there are no category selectors, though it feels like there should be (could just be me).Hope this helps.
Getting information about a URL or domain from other web services	JayNeely: Here are the results for this page using the Site Information Tool extension I have in Firefox: http://www.wmtips.com/tools/info/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycom...
I need feedback for my feedback site	FlorinAndrei: Yo dawg, I herd you like feedback...
Review my side project: Sqrt(2)	sam_in_nyc: Your first puzzle sucks: I hate registering to see things. Let us try it right now!You really need a not-logged-in version.
Review my side project: Sqrt(2)	dfens: I registered just to see what the puzzles were. Some thoughts:I found that you can answer the same puzzle multiple times, which you probably want to change.For three of the puzzles, if you submit a blank form the website breaks.You should make it more obvious how many sickles a user has. And why are they sickles anyway?I don't know if this breaks your idea, but maybe add trivia questions as well as puzzles. That might be helpful when you're struggling to find new puzzles, and if a theme built up it might help build a community.
Review our startup - Taxi Mogul, a persistent browser game	villiros: Thanks a lot for all your feedback, guys. It far outstripped my expectations. HN once again proved to be a fantastic place :)We've addressed some of the most pressing issues, and based on what we're observing from new users, it did help a lot.One thing I definitely learned, is that providing context in the original post would have been tremendously useful for everyone. Writing a few lines in the original post would have helped everyone involved.
what would your ideal language for web-pages look like?	sam_in_nyc: I type in English what I want the page to look like, and it makes it look that way.
what would your ideal language for web-pages look like?	makecheck: I like "markup that doesn't look like markup", e.g. reStructuredText or Textile.
Getting information about a URL or domain from other web services	jwesley: Reverse IP look up can be helpful, as well as info from the Who Is database. Check out abouthisite.com, they have some functionality along those lines.I would also recommend using Yahoo Site Explore and the Google link: operator to look at back links.
what would your ideal language for web-pages look like?	cx01: I'm not sure why your title says "markup language" but then you include CSS, so I assume that you're talking about the combination markup+style. In this case I would say: HTML is quite OK, but CSS is broken. I would add functions and variables to CSS, so it allows you to write stuff like this: .someDiv { width = $someOtherDiv.width - 150px; } .someOtherDiv { width = 450px; height = min(300px, $someDiv.height); }
Where should I buy an SSL certificate for my site?	run4yourlives: Verisign and move on, or use your hosting firm if they provide the service. This isn't a question worth your time, really.

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