Hacker Monthly Presents: Hacker Bundle
hackerbundle.com
hackerbundle.com
These services have confusing end times (3 month, 6 month, 12 month, transactional?) At a bare minimum I'd have to keep a calendar of what expires when and that's just an extra hassle. Next time, please work out a deal where ALL offered products end on the same date so there's less complexity buyers have to keep in mind.
Another concern: this bundle seems to have a mish-mash of offerings with little rhyme or reason. It's like someone said "let's throw as many vaguely web development related SaaS products together and hope there'll be something for everyone!".
Finally, why SaaS? Sure, it's a great business model for a company, but as a consumer each time I sign up for a SaaS I have to make a calculated risk:
* Does the service have a good data export option?
* How likely this service will be around for a year or longer if I'm to sink my time learning it?
* Does this company have any exposure and does it look like it knows what it's doing?
If you decide to stick with SaaS, I hope you curate better and streamline the deal, but frankly I'm looking forward to a Bundle of installed apps instead.
Great guidelines on choosing SaaS (noted for future deal curation). And you are right about the end times. I'll keep an eye on that for the next bundle.
Thanks for the feedback! It's my first time doing this, and rest assured I'm listening with all ears.
The downside is the incentives for the sellers may not be as clear being they may end up as just a bunch of competitors doing the same thing.
This bundle lists an e-zine, a web-tv channel, SMS/VOIP API, CI, a dashboard, image hosting... The only thing linking these disparate services is the claim that "someone on HN recommended them" and that's it (was there a poll thread that you could link? citation appreciated). Taken together, this bundle makes for an incoherent product picture.
Another observation: the site claims that there are "limited units remaining", however the deal is running for 26 more days. Does this mean the bundle will be shut down when all digital licenses are "sold" or is this a way for getting more conversions? If the latter, you could step it up a notch and display fake dwindling license counters next to each product so users are placed under more pressure to make the purchase before you "run out of stock".
Excuse me, I have to get back to yelling at the teenagers to get off my lawn.
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
https://agilebits.com/onepassword/mac
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription...
I already own 3/4, but I'm sure some people would be interested in a bundle.
I would do it manually, but hey... I'm busy... and I'm just trying ubuntu out to give it another chance. Of course going back to debian+xfce I never have any problems.
/endrant
However, am I the only one who enjoys setting up Graphite and CI and similar software? (No email, though. Did it once, and don't want to give up sleeping time for a week to do it again.)
Good question! I think a lot of devs get therapeutic enjoyment from setting up CI. It starts out as fun for the first few hours, while everything is new and exciting. However, it turns to disdain very quickly when:
- you need to remember how to set up postgres/rvm/lucene again
- you need to add a 2nd server and realize you now need to manage a cluster (and you didn't automate the first one!)
- you're away on vacation with your family, and someone calls you because the company CI server is down
- you realize the tests run too slowly and now need to figure out how to make them faster
- you get a bad performance review because of all the valuable engineer time you're wasting managing the CI server, which you could have outsourced for a fraction of the price
- you wonder how you turned into "the build guy" when you actually signed on to make great products.
These are the sort of problems that hosted CI like https://circleci.com solve for you :)
This is a general problem with any kind of maintenance or setup that you might do. Did you write a diary of how you went about setting it up ? Did you communicate to the rest of your team how it's supposed to work / how you suspect it might break ?
If not, don't be _too_ surprised to be The One Person who gets called about that thing.
Being "the build guy" is an important role in delivering great products. In fact, SaaS CI offerings in my experience cater to a small subset of real world apps, none of which are usually heavily used non-trivial apps. I helped build one SaaS CI product and really hope this changes in the coming years as we abstract more 'things'. But for the time being, 'build guys' or DevOps guys or whatever the latest word is play a vital role.
That's why sysadmins should be encouraged to never configure systems directly, but use write-apply-observe-refine cycle of Puppet/Chef (or alike) declarative configurations.
Sounds like a hassle (and sometimes it is, especially in cases where to-be-configured software has Turing-complete configuration files), but in my own experience actually proved very helpful.
There's quite a bit more than the money involved when setting up SaaS infrastructure; even if the first 3 months were _sponsored_, the precious time invested would be wasted if they aren't signing up for the long haul.
And if they are signing up for the long haul, then 3 months of X discount makes very little difference in the calculation.
If your tiny startup isn't able to afford a couple of hundred dollars a month for various hosted services after 3 months, then you're prioritizing wrong. You need to focus on building a valuable product and getting it to customers, not on building your own internal setup to save a little bit of money. Companies doing the former are much more likely to succeed than those doing the latter.
Thanks for putting up the more relevant comparison price point, though, and I do agree with you that outsourcing non-core functions is essential to getting real work done on the actual product.
I think the 50% discount applies even when you upgrade. Let me shoot an email to Geckoboard to confirm this.
The discount applies even when you upgrade - it's a pretty generous offer and could save you substantially more than $294 depending on the plan you choose.
Actually it's not tough. You could get a lot done using email ALONE. And, living in Malaysia gives me unlimited runway to keep shipping and experimenting. :)
I'm interested in knowing what the "size" of the portion is.
p.s: You can use https://hackerbundle.com if it still concerns you. I just set it up last night.
The actual risk of a MitM attack is low, but it's certainly feasible; your page would look exactly the same if it were tweaked en-route to use a completely different source for the overlay iframe, and tweaking your page en-route is possible because you're sending it unencrypted.
There's also a web-standards rationale -- all payment pages should be over SSL, because it's one of the few security precautions that non-technical users can reliably verify. Any unencrypted-but-legit payment pages undermine the lesson that payment pages should be SSL-only, when we should be encouraging it.
At minimum, redirect the entire site to https. Why bother with anything less? Https is easy.
What if they rely on free CloudFlare support for site content? Going full SSL will mean another $20/month of hosting cost.
What if the site in question comprises a thousand HTML pages written on MS Frontpage over 15 years, and most of those pages (if flipped to https) will start showing "insecure content" warnings until they're edited?
By all means, doing more than the minimum will be trivial for some sites, and a good idea for them, but that's not true for everyone.
And really, those aren't exceptions I would call worthy.
CDN / cheap ass issues: you're selling something and running a business, businesses have costs, 20/month aint nothin to secure you're shit.
15 years worth of legacy frontpage you call content: the "insecure content" warnings are probably right regardless of ssl. Further to the point, nobody cares about 15 years worth of shit nobody reads, move it to a different subdomain if its static junk that can't be secured, or I don't know delete it? We'd all be better off without it clogging up the interwebs anyway.
SSL Isn't new, its been around almost two decades, you're making bad excuses for bad people. Stop it. Site wide HTTPS is a good idea for everyone and it is trivial, if its not (in your case), that is your fault and your problem - not mine, and certainly not your users.
For the rest of it -- at some point you're going to have to get used to the idea that the people putting content on the web are a lot more diverse than you'd prefer, and their motivations are also a lot more diverse than you might imagine or think "worthy".
If you want to tell them all "do it right or go die in a fire" that's your prerogative, but it's not the most effective approach.
Edit: Lim instantly reached out to rectify the issue. Turns out my bank (Chase) flagged it for fraud. Cleared it with them and now I own the hacker bundle :)
Thanks!