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Ruby on Rails Hosting | matthall28: A VPS provider(i recommend SuperBytes.net) is probably the cheapest route. You would just have to install RoR yourself. |
Ruby on Rails Hosting | gtani: here are some credible reviews (i think)http://earthcode.com/blog/2008/02/cheap_rails_vps_options.ht...http://groups.google.com/group/rails-business/browse_thread/... |
Managed server ISP recommendations | wmf: Here's a forum dedicated to answering that question: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=103 |
iPhone Development Resources | watmough: I've been very impressed with the Apple documentation in the SDK. The included applications cover a lot of ground in the UI, and thanks to the speed of the development tools, it's easy to code and learn a step at a time.I've had a fun few hours this afternoon building a very simple image processing app that uses custom table view cells as a way to show each step of the process.The foregoing said, there are other materials coming out, but I believe that the NDA surrounding the SDK is holding these up. |
Patents | noonespecial: Patent Pending does not equal patent issued.That said, the patent system is so far gone when it comes to software that you can patent anything. Everyone has. If you write "Hello World", you are infringing. A web form with a button? infringing. The power switch on the computer... ok, you get the idea.Just do your thing. In software there's no such thing as infringing because the answer to "can I make a computer do X?" is always yes if you work hard enough at it. All of the paths to X will be different.If you are successful enough for someone to actually sue you for infringement, take this as a compliment. You will also likely have the resources to mount a defense as well.Worrying about all of that now is just premature optimization. If you succeed, you will be sued. That's just the business climate of today's market. Cross that bridge when you come to it. |
Patents | chaostheory: disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I'm not giving you advice, and you should talk to a lawyer.Just remember one really important thing: letting people know that you have knowingly infringed on a specific patent increases the damages awarded to the patent holder. Never talk specifics unless you're talking to your own lawyer. |
Patents | micks56: The short answer to how close you can be is you don't know till you end up in court. Now, for the longer explanation.The Supreme Court of the US has ruled that patents can be obtained for "anything under the sun." Exceptions carved out by the same court are for laws of nature, maths, and abstract ideas.So you can't patent F=ma, but things in web e-mail clients could be patented.There is no way to tell if you are infringing without actually reading the patent claims. So until the patents are granted, you don't have anything to analyze.Also, their patented claims do not have to be identical to what you are doing. If it is obvious to someone skilled in the art that what you are doing is a modification of what your competitor is doing, then that could also be infringement. This is why you see the language "in one embodiment" in patents. The drafters are not limiting themselves to the claimed implementation, but are trying to do a land grab that people skilled in the art would do after reading this application.In legalese this is called the doctrine of equivalents. The United States section on the wikipedia page for doctrine of equivalents is currently accurate. You will see the standard there. |
Patents | stcredzero: Patents are largely bullshit. The only thing looking at patents can do for a you as a programmer is to give you a nasty case of brain cloud. A few years ago, I spent a lot of time a few years ago looking at "Internet TV" related patents. Any area that might be hot is patent trolled to death, and this was certainly true for video over the internet. Best thing to do is to ignore it until people start becoming interested in you. |
Patents | hooande: Patents cost a LOT of money to enforce. The odds of you being sued are very low. People will be able to issue you a cease and desist order on the cheap, but the odds of it ever going before a judge are equally low. Business methods patents are notoriously hard to enforce as well.Many big companies collect patents to have as assets. They rarely actually enforce them because it costs too much money (even for them). While your product might dance around infringing on this patent or that, the odds of anyone actually doing anything against you are very low. |
iPhone Development Resources | demallien: There are no books available yet for the iPhone SDK, as it is still under NDA (why, I have no idea!)That said, when you download the SDK, you receive a lot of good documentation direct from Apple - tutorials, programming guides, API references etc. It's a bit more work then just picking up a book, but it's not bad.There is probably one book from the Mac world that is worth looking at - I forget the title, but it's written by Aaron Hillegass - everyone just calls it the Hillegass book... The first half of that book just teaches you basic Cocoa patterns, that are every bit as applicable in the iPhone world as they are in the Mac world. Once you have got those basics nailed down, the Apple documentation does become a bit easier to use. |
Patents | sonink: Just make something useful.Forget about patents. Patent pending refers to a provisional application and is not legally enforceable. Essentially, anyone can get a 'patent pending' on anything.Patents are important only if you have enough money to either sue someone or if you have tons of money to interest someone to sue you. Assuming none of the above is true, and as someone commented above, cross this bridge when you come to it. |
Patents | goelp: A thing to note is that patents have a life of 20 years or lesser, so in some cases patents would have become void. Probably it is less likely to apply to internet technologies since lot of the internet development took place in the last 20 years. |
Patents | vaksel: Not a lawyer, but I wouldn't worry about it.a) software patents are pretty useless nowadays, it takes so long to get it, that by the time you have it, your patentable technology is a $39.99 script people can buy.b) Its not your problem to adhere to all issued patents, until someone starts suing you. I mean look at ANY site on the web, they are probably in violation of 200 patents. Chances are the "Add Comment" button has already been patented. So has the hyperlink I used to view your story. So has the term "flag"c) Most of these "patents" are bullshit.d) There is no guarantee that these guys will even get their patent approved.e) You don't even know what they are trying to patent. For all you know, their patent has nothing to do with their technology, it could just be a patent for something stupid like "a way to display a hyperlink in a lime green bold times new roman font".So personally I'd just go ahead and do whatever it is you want to do, because chances are there is prior art that you can cite to make anything they come up with invalid. |
Growing a Company? | alaskamiller: Offtopic, how are your projects working out from 5 months ago? |
Patents | 13ren: I think there's no way to be safe from patents, except to be not worth suing. And since anyone can sue you for anything at any time, so there's no point fearing the uncertainty.BTW: I've seen a strategy for avoiding patent infringement of a standard by using only 20+ year old techniques. If it was published over 20 years ago, any patent would have expired. Unfortunately, someone could have had a "submarine" patent (delaying issue of it) so you need to wit X years longer, where X is unknown...Selden did it to automobiles: http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html |
Patents | michael_dorfman: Don't "Ask HN"-- ask your lawyer.Seriously: you're being offered a lot of free advice, some of which may potentially cause you significant problems down the road.If you're serious about developing a product, you're going to need a lawyer at some point-- and it sounds like you've just reached that point. |
Patents | Create: "A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."
Bill Gates (1991)"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
Bill Gates (1991)"The benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to their general suppression."
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the USA"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the USA"Patents are being used as an offensive measure. [...] If you don't have any patents, you don't have any weapons in your armoury."
John MacPhail, Partner, Baker & McKenzie
(one of the world's largest law firm)"Patents are intelligent bombs."
Harvard Business Review"Reback often tells the story of how a team of IBM patent lawyers went to Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1980s and claimed that the then start-up was infringing on seven of its patents. After Sun engineers explained why they were not infringing, the IBM lawyers responded that with 10,000 patents, they would be sure to find some infringement somewhere."
The Washington PostIntel's [chairman] Grove derides such patent holders for showing little interest in producing goods with their inventions in favor of demanding licensing fees from others. "We call them trolls," he said.
The Washington Post"The nature of software is that it is a writing, an expression of mathematical ideas. The copyright law protects this expression, and it does so without requiring costly and time-consuming proceedings."
Douglas Brotz, Principal Scientist, Adobe Systems (1994)"The government and the money-counters must not lock away from us, our intellectual processes -- not even when we execute them with the aid of symbols on paper, or performances on calculators, or programs in computers.">
Jim Warren, Board of Directors, Autodesk (1994)"It was simply that had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and, at the same time, keep control of it."
Tim Berners-Lee"Software patenting has run amok."
Tim Berners-Lee"Building up a patent portfolio by engaging in defensive patenting cannot always protect against hold-up."
Federal Trade Commission of the USA"More patents in more industries and with greater breadth are not always the best ways to maximize consumer welfare."
Federal Trade Commission of the USAlearn all about it: www.nosoftwarepatents.com |
Patents | globalrev: If I invent something and don't patent it I assume someone else can?
But let's say there is some obvious invention noone ever patented and someone goes to patent it now even though he obv did not invent it, will he get a patent?Since it is very expensive to patent all over the world is there some way you can do something like the GNU license?So I can say I invented this and anyone can use it however they want and noone can prevent anyone from using it.And that would be free and hold up all over the world? |
Growing a Company? | tstegart: Look through back issues of Inc. They do articles on this sort of thing a lot, and it will give your friend a good idea how other people grow their companies. It sounds like he needs a strategy more than a coach. |
Tufte course worth the cost? | mechanical_fish: My wife took this course and adored it.I just bought all the books, so I don't know. The books are very nice, as you may already know. I will say that owning all the books already makes me more hesitant to take the course, though by all accounts Tufte is a great presenter. |
Tufte course worth the cost? | yan: I am taking it in October in DC. My manager took it and loved it.I saw Tufte's books on her desk and started ranting on about how much I love his work and asked if she was a `fan' as well. Turns out she just took the course because other management were too, but she loved it as well. |
Tufte course worth the cost? | bisceglie: The course is definitely worth it. Tufte is a great speaker, and watching how he presents ideas, evidence, etc is a valuable experience. The books are supplemental to the talk, and they end up feeling more like development materials to be explored in greater depth... highly recommended. |
Tufte course worth the cost? | xg: I attended the Tufte course a few years ago and it was fantastic. I enumerate the following reasons:1. The 4 books alone are worth almost $2002. He's one of the most engaging speakers you'll ever see: you're ability to present will improve.3. Book porn. He brings antique copies of Galileo and shows them off.4. Inspiration. |
Tufte course worth the cost? | viggity: I went and saw him in Minneapolis in June and I was incredibly disappointed. His books have good info, but I thought is talk was bad. He talked a lot about presentations which I wasn't really there for, I wanted info on how to make my informational graphics better. It seemed like the majority of the people there where managerial types, not developers/designers so I think he skewed his topic for their needs.He also did a poor job at backing up his points, thats not to say they weren't true, its just that he would make an assertion and count on dogma to validate it. It was too cargo-cult for me. The other three developers/BA's I went with thought the same. (Especially when Tufte started showing pictures of his bizarre metal sculptures that had nothing to do with visualizing information).If you're a developer and you want specific details in how to make your applications better, I'd highly recommend Ben Fry's Dissertation. (http://benfry.com/phd/) Its 150 pages, but the text is pretty light and he is very detailed in how you can use color, space, animation, spatial relations to make your data easier to understand. The dissertation doesn't fail to impress, plus its 100% free. Ben is the guy behind the Processing language, which is essentially a DSL for info graphics, really cool stuff, even if it is a wrapper around Java. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | gaika: I think people are a bit afraid to post things outside of the main themes. The quality and relevance of such posts is a lot more subjective, so you always will see people complaining that it is not hacker news. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | mark-t: I think the bar for a non-programming, non-startup article to count as "interesting to hackers" is a lot higher. Really interesting science articles just aren't written as often as somebody blogs something useless about how great closures are.Your English is fine, by the way. I wouldn't have known you weren't a native speaker if you hadn't said so. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | davi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_driftMaybe in a small population social news site, the 'norm' for content can drift in a similar fashion to allele frequency in a small gene pool. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | brentr: I have to agree with you. While I find tech news interesting, I am also a big fan of science news. I'm not a hacker, but I hang around HN because the community seems to filter out very well all of the garbage found on Digg.I came to the HN because of YCombinator and my ambitions, but I am no longer studying computer science (I have changed my major to mathematics and physics, pursuing what I dropped my first go-around at an undergraduate degree). I stay because this group shares many of the same interests in news. If science posts were to show up, then all the better. If not, then it may be that this group is more inclined towards tech news. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | ojbyrne: I posted an article on my blog about how, at digg, science ended up being the best quality category (largest promotion/submission ratio - http://owenbyrne.com/2008/06/05/yet-another-random-digg-list...). My impression at the time was that there was no money in science - So people post crap constantly in other categories, because that's where the dollars are. There's a lot less money in the promotion of science, hence less sock-puppets, gaming, etc. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | gojomo: Do you have numbers from a comparative analysis over time? (It may be true; I'm not sure and it would be good to quantify beyond anyone's vague impression.) |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | paraschopra: We don't consciously post things here trying to comply with the vision. Historically, communities evolve independently of the vision their founders had when seeding them.So, you can't complain why there are less science related posts. It is just the way because the community does not find science interesting. (By the way, I personally love science). You can try seeding the community with science related posts and see how we respond. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | gojomo: The average upvoter has become less sophisticated.A top story for almost two days was a screenshot of a hapless fellow complaining about mistakenly ordering the 'I Am Rich' iPhone app. (It got 59 story upvotes, and this was in addition to other news coverage of the app.) The thread had multiple highly-rated comments that were no more insightful than "ha, don't click 'buy' if you don't want to buy". (Two of those had over 20 net upvotes.)The idiot hordes have arrived and are breeding like rabbits through mutual upvotes. Death of News.YC predicted; news at 11. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | Alex3917: The reason there aren't more science submissions is probably just that there isn't very much good science writing on the web. Most of the science articles being written today are basically just poorly summarized press releases covering cleantech, medicine, space, and the physical sciences. Most of the announcements are bullshit to begin with, and the fact that the writers don't know what they're talking about makes it even worse. If there were people who went out and read interesting journal articles and wrote up the results in a readable way then I'd be all for that, but the number of people doing that is basically zero. Aaron Schwartz et al. were trying to do that for a while on their blog Science That Matters, but they don't seem to even exist anymore. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | bootload: "... why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? ..."I don't know but every time I post an article detailing the hard science behind say a wired, the economist, newsweek, salon or FT post it will be ignored. The reason behind this might be the fact the real science doesn't make for entertaining reading or more likely journalists explain difficult things in an more entertaining way. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | nickb: I've been posting quite a few of them in the past (science, neuroscience, cogsci etc) but they never got more than few points. People just don't seem to care.Another thing is that many business related links never propagate upward either. I've started my own mini news site that will be all about business/finance/management. I haven't give the link to anyone yet. Anyone interested? |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | lvecsey: Don't forget that hacker news has collected lots of media attention all those numerous time that Y Combinator is mentioned. Paul Graham even pointed out to the community here that the demographic would be changing, and perhaps it has again a few times over.The recent http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html is worth mentioning because if the VC types appear in droves here to observe us, they indirectly create a salting effect where we stop posting or otherwise behaving as ourselves. i.e, we go elsewhere, possibly back to a chat room, or just keep to ourselves until another collaborative opportunity presents itself. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | pierrefar: I think there are two questions here we need tease out:1. Are enough science stories being submitted? If not, why not?2. What happens to the science stories when they are submitted?I can't answer the first question (anyone got data?) but from experience submitting a few science stories is that they get a couple of votes and die. This, I think, is an interesting observation.The hint of an answer also comes from my experience: I get my science news fix elswhere. HN, to me, is about things that make me think harder/better or see the world in a new way. Granted that's not always the case, but the gems here outclass any gem elsewhere I've seen.So what think is happening is that we don't care for mainstream science news. I think for a science story to survive here, it needs to be a slightly off the beaten path subject with a very clever title - hackers are humans after all and headlines can affect them emotionally to get them to up vote. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | wenbert: SCIENCE has failed the world!!!! |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | DanielBMarkham: It's a totally different site than it was a year ago.It used to be five or six votes could keep you on the front page for a while. Now you submit the same kind of article and it dies with only a vote or two, and other people coming in with the same link count as some of those votes.Sadly, I'm left to conclude that it is not the quality of the article, but the personal relationships between the posters that lead to upvoting or downvoting. That is, the same article submitted by two different people would get highly different scores based on the track record of the people involved, not the community's feeling about the content of the article.Speculation only, but it explains the answer to your question. We ARE seeing just as many science stories -- probably more. It's just the wrong people are submitting them. (on average) |
how much of the stuff you own do you really need? | gexla: I am getting ready to move abroad so this issue is even more important for me. Here is what I am doing right now in preparation and likely will be doing while abroad (I will have an apartment to keep my stuff at but I will be traveling a lot.)Books are a big problem for me as well, until I see that I really don't read any of the books that I have. Space is one problem with books, time to read them is quite another. I decided I will give all my books away (tech books are almost all available in E-format anyways.)As for the bed, go Japanese style. No need to kill your back and quality of sleep with a hammock. You could get a latex mattress about 4 - 6 inches thick and throw it on a wooden platform. Latex matresses last forever but they are kind of expensive.Clothes are kind of hard to get around but rather than putting them in a space wasting dresser I keep them all in plastic bins in the closet.This is kind of silly but my work desk is a laptop sitting on a T.V. tray and a folding metal chair. I would love to get a much nicer chair though. The T.V. tray is fine but it wouldn't work with a better chair. I could probably find a similarly small desk though. I think you shouldn't scrimp on possible productivity gains of having multiple monitors.Some things you just can't get around, like the bed, clothes and good working environment.I feel the same as you though. I feel weighed down by my stuff. Even worse is attaching my identity to some of it. |
how much of the stuff you own do you really need? | iamdave: I'm going through this exact thing right now, after moving my things out of the old apartment I'm downsizing to a studio apartment on the barebones. Less stuff = less clutter = less distraction = more productivity. |
how much of the stuff you own do you really need? | whalliburton: I've been nomadic for about three years. Books stored at a friends place. All belonging in my backpack. Never looked back. Working all over the world, wherever and whenever, as long as there is a decent internet connection. I highly recommend this to anyone that feels weighted down with their things. Freedom in a certain sense. |
why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? | aswanson: I still have hope. As long as people aren't posting game screenshots and cheat codes, there is hope. |
how much of the stuff you own do you really need? | eru: My back does not like hammocks. (And you would need a stand - or trees.) |
how much of the stuff you own do you really need? | pxlpshr: I went through this same issue when I moved to and from California. Fortunately, my parents each have large garages so what I did was box up a few 'time capsules' of stuff that I might want later. I'm kind of a packrat.As for your books, try selling them at a place like Half-Priced Books. Or post a few bundles on craigslist of similar titles that you think someone might want.Or for a small tax break and charitable donation, just take them to good will. |
how much of the stuff you own do you really need? | mattyfo: Try closing some doors, if you have stuff that you won't use or don't enjoy, get rid of it. Otherwise be careful of ending up with too little stuff and then realizing: "shoot I really need a can opener".Also, chicks don't dig an apartment that looks like a dorm room and they don't dig sharing a hammock. |
how much of the stuff you own do you really need? | ganley: The best bed compromise (IMO) is a futon mattress on the floor; during the day you can roll/fold it up and store it, as the Japanese do.As for books, I keep very few; I figure book storage is the library's job, not mine. |
how much of the stuff you own do you really need? | keefe: I'd go ahead and keep the bed, since it is what you are accustomed to.When I moved out to CA, I left half my stuff in KY. I'm about to downsize again to lower the bar of "ramen profitable", so some of my stuff has got to go.I think our culture is way too obsessed with things. still, it's a capitalist society.So, here is what I would do :1) Set aside everything you really need : no more than 20 shirts, 10 pants, various accessories, the bed, whatever else you would be up shit creek without. Set all of that aside.2) Look through what's left. Can you sell any of it? You wardrobes at least would certainly be sellable on craigslist. If so, do so. Get rid of the books you haven't read in 5 years, unless you really loved them. Libraries do a pretty good job of storing those things.3) Throw out anything that you can't sell that isn't practically useful, if it's a hassle to move it. |
How To Paint a MacBook Pro? | yan: Did you try looking at companies that'll laser-cut vinyl decals for a reasonable price? Those look pretty shnazzy. I think most companies are a google search away. If anything, I can ask a friend who had a few cut before for more info. |
How did they do this? | swombat: I have very little knowledge of coding and suchAcquire some knowledge, then ask again if it's not clear. |
How did they do this? | alaskamiller: Back in the good ol' days of the internet, that strip on top of the page was done via HTML frames. Nowadays most people utilize javascript writes in conjunction with frames for graceful degradation usage.Not sure what you're asking about passing the bandwith.I'm not seeing the resizing thing you're mentioning. |
How did they do this? | olefoo: They use frames. If they are doing what they say they are doing they are using their bandwidth twice.Wikipedia will explain web proxies to you, without telling you that they are mostly skeezy and untrustworthy. |
How did they do this? | nostrademons: View source is your friend.It's creating a frameset. The top frame is the address bar. The bottom frame is the content. When you enter an address in the top frame, it sets the source of the bottom frame to http://free.megaproxy.com/go/<url>. This goes out to the Internet, retrieves <url>, and rewrites all links to point to the appropriate megaproxy pages, so that you continue surfing through megaproxy.When I was at my first job - way back when it was still a "teen content dot-com run exclusively by teenagers" - I wrote a little script that did exactly this, except that I rewrote the links so that they would float around the page and bounce off the edges of the window. I called it the LinksJynx. Then my boss yelled at me for wasting company time on frivolous coding projects like that. Personally I thought that was a little harsh, since I spent like 3 hours on it and that was far less than the amount of time I spent reading Harry Potter fanfiction on the job (or, for that matter, less than the amount of time the other engineers spent looking at porn and fucking the CTO's niece). But whatever. |
How did they do this? | qhoxie: 1. While they do use js for some of their page loading, it is not really js-specific.2. The bar at the top remains in a 'fixed' position over the rest of the page. Hence the 'position: fixed' CSS property that can achieve this effect. The way they do it is with frames, though.3. Both sites do. It appears that the proxy pulls the markup from the page specified, appends it to their page, and then sends it to you.4. This is done via js. You could use something like firebug to modify this behavior if you really wanted to. |
How To Paint a MacBook Pro? | alaskamiller: Print off some stickers and just stick it on to your mac. Resale value intact. That or try engraveyourtech.com and http://www.etchamac.com/ |
How did they do this? | gunderson: If they let you be anonymous in a site that requires authentication, then it's a bit more sophisticated. If not then it's probably simple like the other explanations below. |
How To Paint a MacBook Pro? | Psyonic: very carefully. |
How To Paint a MacBook Pro? | dualogy: Just remembered this German startup: http://designskins.com/ -- never tried it but apparently, upload your design and they send you the Laptop-sized sticky foil that apparently can be gotten rid of just as easily. |
Web Programming Platforms | davidw: Been there, discussed that. Search for it, then try both, see what you like. |
Web Programming Platforms | qhoxie: Throw merb into the ruby options and then try a simple app in each of the four. All of them are great frameworks, it's just up to you to determine which feels best. |
How did they do this? | zacharye: Awesome guys, thanks so much for the help! |
Best way to show current weather? | apgwoz: I've played with the Yahoo! weather api. It gets data from www.weather.com and gives you some flexibility. For your purposes, I'm sure it'll be more than adequate. link: http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/ |
Web Programming Platforms | noodle: if you feel like learning java or brushing up on some skills, you could hit up grails. rails clone that i like. not quite as productive as grails, but its not bad. still new but is showing promise. |
Profitable startup's small revenue. What next? | imawesty: Marketing, marketing, marketing. Become a 'sponsor' of other companies, and look for a target audience. Just do anything you can to make people aware of your product.Start sending emails, get on the phone. When you find people, give them a reason to use the product you're trying to sell. |
Profitable startup's small revenue. What next? | matt1: Congrats!You made it further than most startups ever do. Can you share with us what you do?I'd echo imawesty's advice: expand and profit by acquiring new users.Best of luck - |
Profitable startup's small revenue. What next? | illume: Automate as much as possible. Reduce the time you need per customer, so if you record how much time you need for current customers -- then multiply that out. If you had 2x the customers would you be able to support them properly? How about 10-50x?Is there anything you can do to make the existing customers happy? If you keep concentrating on them, more will follow.Just take it slowly... don't do massive advertising/marketing spends all at once. Control the rate of new customers you get.Each time you grow you'll probably find issues, so best to do it slowly... otherwise everything could fuck up.It's tempting to go 'oh things are working now, let's throw $20-80k at advertising tomorrow and see what happens!'Nothing worse than having 20,000 angry customers. |
Profitable startup's small revenue. What next? | tstegart: A few things:Marketing to existing customers. Is there a new product your existing customers also wish you made? Is there anything else they would pay good money for you to add on? Look for competitors that do what you do and see what else they offer. See if they've given any clues on their website to what else their customer's like. Heck, find their customers and market to them. Do a bit of competitive intelligence, see what else customers want, and confirm it with your customers. Its never too early to get a whole new product line in the works.Market through existing customers: Call up all your biggest customers and check in and see how they're doing. It works especially good if you have a new feature you've added on to their subscription that you're announcing to them. Encourage them to use it, then say "We're looking to expand and grow our business, do you know any other companies that might be interested in our products?" Don't pressure, just ask, and if you get a name, follow up with them. Don't use the existing customer's name without permission, but ask if you can i.e. "Bob from Wigit-MakersPlus suggested we call you..."I would do basic advertising research. Even if you don't decide to advertise. Think, where would you go to advertise? Who are your potential customers, and where can you find them? Who do you contact at the company to get a sale? I wouldn't discount online advertising, such as feed sponsorships or niche websites. If there's a blog or site many of your customers go to, find it. If it doesn't do advertising, contact them and ask to be a sponsor, you might get a great deal.If every single customer is profitable, expanding your business involves getting more customers, but like someone else mentioned, increasing the profit margin on each sale is important as well. |
Anyone use Windows Server? | prakash: I know some people that run dns services so that they don't have to deal with bind.... |
Anyone use Windows Server? | oldgregg: Yes, you're missing out on a world of pain. I came from a windows server background. Even though I consider myself a *nix novice, I would rather stab myself in the ear with a pencil then go back to windows. |
Anyone use Windows Server? | gaius: If your app involves a database, you might want to give LINQ a go. |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | noodle: there are jobs for jack of all trades. i'm working in one now. but if you're looking to pick up a job at something larger than a dev shop, they're going to look for depth not breadth. |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | brm: Community manager for an early-stage company. You'll be doing a lot of support and interaction but your ability to fill in anywhere needed will be really valuable and allow you to explore and learn |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | stcredzero: A job that needs breadth: CIO.If you want to develop knowledge in depth, this is a good place to start:http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr...Buy the book, download the courseware for free, and learn how computers work from NAND gates up. Implement your own OO language on the hardware you've built and write your own OS in it. Then write games for the resulting system. This will put you ahead of most coders out there. |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | blender: Entrepreneur ;-) |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | truebosko: Isn't being part of a growing start-up a need for a jack of all trades to a point? With little or no capital, many people need to be both designers and engineersSo I guess, find a small company looking for some designers or hackers, and I'm sure you'll be designing and communicating with customers as well. |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | strlen: This may seem paradoxical, but have you considered operations/systems administration? Would give you a chance to pretty much do use every single skill, gives you the flexibility to choose between full time and contracting. |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | KevBurnsJr: Many companies don't even advertise junior or entry-level positions.Find a company you want to work for, find a pain point in their product and make a compelling case in your cover letter for how you feel that you can help their company.Oh, and be prepared to accept honey roasted peanuts as legal tender in exchange for your time :) |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | scumola: Sysadmin for a startup. Bring a hammer and a power screwdriver too! :) |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | blader: BushyMark: Some of the best developers I know started late. DHH didn't start programming until he was in his 20s.If you're willing to learn and can get things done, my company has 1-2 junior Rails development openings. Why don't you send me a resume at siqi@seriousbusiness.com? |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | tss: I suggest you capitalize on your studied profession (music). Music and programming is an uncommon set of interests, and if you can talk about the parallels you see between them, it can really set you apart. Picking up a certification or two wouldn't be a bad idea. Also, your qualifications for any type of technology job are completely experienced based. Assembling your projects into a portfolio as a supplement to your resume would be a wise move.And as a side note, I would definitely avoid jobs with titles like "PHP Wizard". It's a personal opinion, but I wouldn't want to work for an employer who expects me to work magical miracles with PHP. I'd prefer someone who has a good understanding of the realistic capabilities of programmers. I might be totally off base here, but it's my opinion. |
What happened to the TechCrunch Web Tablet | qhoxie: Despite the quick momentum the idea picked up, it never quite left its pie-in-the-sky state. It will probably take even more community push before they do anything tangible with it. |
What happened to the TechCrunch Web Tablet | iamdave: Ostensibly,http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/this happened. |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | SingAlong: Wou wou!!I too sail in the same boat and I find it tough to write down my skill sets in my profile or explaining it to others.I can work on PHP, Python and Mysql (and would start learning ruby becoz i love to learn new stuff like you). But my way of thinking has been like a marketing guy(and love doing this kinda job too). |
What happened to the TechCrunch Web Tablet | tonystubblebine: About two days after I saw that article I saw that Dell had added touch to their tablets. Doesn't meet the $200 goal, but it's a start.
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoff... |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | gscott: > Should I start focusing on one specific development area?I would suggest focusing on being a database developer guy, the person who writes the best sql routines, triggers, stored procedures, indexing, etc. This pays a great deal of money and really is not as stressful as having to program a project to completition. With databases, the programming itself is done now you optimize the sql routines and indexing to make that programming work better, faster, under load and work with programmers on dealing with more complex interations with the database. |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | Jaytee: We are pretty much in the same shoes.I'd suggest entrepreneur too. More specifically, an entrepreneur who can integrate different fields together to create new field. And at some point you will have to become the specialist of that new field. So you gotta throw away the jack-of-all-trade mentality.I'm a musician too. So let's use music analogue. Good musicians often can play in many different musical styles. (a jack-of-all-trade) However, great musicians experiment with various styles and create new ones. (e.g. Duke Ellington for early jazz) Here's the critical part. Plenty of musicians "experiment" but they don't master these new styles or techniques. The work is lost and they will be forgotten. But the one who do master them will move music into a new era.Being a jack-of-all-trade means you can learn very well. So use that ability to learn something very well. |
Looking for tool that adds links to Wordpress from Firefox | alaskamiller: http://www.sizlopedia.com/2008/03/16/fast-and-easy-posting-u... |
What happened to the TechCrunch Web Tablet | alaskamiller: I'm from the future. I bring you this piece of archival footage showing the week prior to Skynet becoming self-aware:http://qik.com/video/156187 |
What is the job for a jack-of-all-trades? | prateekdayal: Did you say 'music'?Would you be willing to work on a music startup we run? http://www.muziboo.com |
What happened to the TechCrunch Web Tablet | gstar: Don't like to put down an Aussie, but it was written up on TechCrunch by Nik Cubrilovic - the same guy who was behind Omnidrive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidrive)Nik's past doesn't feature too many home runs - and with that in mind I decided not to hold my breath for the release of the tablet!I'd dearly like to be proven wrong, though. |
Movable Type or Wordpress for personal blog? | noodle: i like wordpress mostly because the community is larger. MT is also fine, and you can get the job done with either. |
Movable Type or Wordpress for personal blog? | jeebusroxors: Here are some others to look into, as I do not like any of these:
http://cactuswax.net/projects/failhouse/
http://drupal.org
http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/ |
Movable Type or Wordpress for personal blog? | zacharye: My vote is WP as well. There is tons of development around it so it's much easier to cater to your needs. |
Yahoo spam filter, is it possible to get through? | dedwards: Or you can always just outsource the problem to a company like www.icontact.com since they have whitelist agreements with all the major ISPs.Good Luck! |
why do some non-trollish articles get [dead]ed? | alex_c: I know there is some automatic [dead]ing - I occasionally see [dead] spam submissions that are just a minute old, for example. It's possible that one submission triggered some rule in the filter? (maybe the "crm" in the domain name?) |
why do some non-trollish articles get [dead]ed? | Alex3917: I've had a couple of my own links marked dead recently. It doesn't really bother me, I just submit stuff I find interesting and if the admins want to kill it they kill it. |
why do some non-trollish articles get [dead]ed? | emmett: Editors will also kill straight up dupes of other stories, or things with no intellectual content (like funny pictures, etc.) A lot of it is arbitrary though, obviously. |
why do some non-trollish articles get [dead]ed? | robg: I'm going to guess that if enough people flag something, it automatically goes dead, unless perhaps it's received some threshold of upvoting. |
why do some non-trollish articles get [dead]ed? | noonespecial: I hate when I've commented on something, am being modded up because of my ostensibly good commend, and then the story goes dead.... |
why do some non-trollish articles get [dead]ed? | pg: That one got killed automatically because the domain is banned. I think the domain was banned because someone once spammed us with links to it.Another reason non-spam/troll stuff gets killed is because it's a dupe. |
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