Terry_B

Agreed. Although I have to admit, I also find the idea of someones creative concept being copied far more offensive than setting out to solve a common problem and adopting the same solution as someone else.

Meh, launching objects at structures to collapse them is a pretty common concept. Catching fish, throwing them in the air and shooting them is a bit different I guess.

I find it very strange that in this crazy age of software patent mutual destruction, cloning games is such an open field.

I guess the first question is, how would this differ to Groupon?

The Nerdist, Hype Machine Radio, StackExchange podcast, Build and Analyze, RadioLab, The Adam Carolla Show, The Moth, TWiT, This Week in Startups, EconTalk and Mixergy have been my go to ones for a long while now.

Thanks very much! So it sounds like from every aspect the cost scales fairly smoothly from zero on up, is that right?

If that's the case then it makes life easy as from day 1 you can pass the entire cost onto the customer in your pricing. Has that been your experience?

Can you please talk about the economics of doing a video based small startup?

I have a couple of ideas that would involve users uploading large video files and me having to store them at least temporarily.

I don't yet know if this is a show stopper for what would be a on the cheap side project.

Can you name an example of a good software patent?

The problem comes about I think when you are constantly opening the iPod app on your iPhone and starting again each time in shuffle mode rather than resume. So the playlist gets regenerated each time. I feel like there are songs I've heard 50 times and plenty of songs I've never heard come up. Would be much better if it aimed for an even distribution.

Thanks! I now have the language to describe the highly annoying fact that the ipod shuffle algorithm seems to be pseudorandom when I wish it was quasirandom!

I can see G+ quickly becoming the best way to share links, videos etc amongst friends.

The part where G+ becomes your social life like Facebook currently is for many people...I just can't see it.

I know, but there's so much junk! A HN collection would be awesome.

Absolutely. And when you start talking about games especially, the long tail matters even more.

Surely, it's a case of each person only having 10 or so apps that matter to them, but it's kinda a different 10 for everyone.

Like the old, 80% of users only use 20% of the features. But it's a different 20%.

If a prototype is trivial to build then absolutely. But I don't think there's ever an excuse for not going out and asking people who might have these problems some good questions. "Would you pay for this?" being one of them.

You can do a fair bit of work up front to get a pretty good idea though I think. At least about which of them don't stand a chance. People just don't like doing it, including me, because it's hard.

Nice idea, but you're not really asking the target audience for each of those products are you. Best ask the people with the chequebooks in question.

They interviewed 6 year olds clearly.

I love these "visions" that constantly get thrown about with no discussion as to how or why the airlines would want this for their business.

Had this one on my ideas list for a long while now :) Good luck!

Perhaps there are some lessons to be learned from what worked and didn't work on rulesofthumb.org?

Absolutely, but it's quite likely that it highlights a systemic problem with this type of business which the article discusses. Shadier business owners can abuse it.

Rhymes with Groupon.

I got stung the other day by a Groupon clone here in Australia. My wife asked me to buy the daily deal, which I did, without checking it properly. The business in question doesn't exist.

Looks like the daily deal company did absolutely no checking that it was legit or the business did as this article suggests and knew they were going bankrupt anyway.

I started asking around and found a few similar stories from friends and colleagues. Hoping to see all of this hit the news soon.

So much less than I used to. I used to average something like 15000 read items a month in google reader.

Now just HN and Techmeme and I try to get on with getting things done.

I've always wanted someone to write a book like this that is basically a catalogue of all the different business models out there from the common ones to the obscure.

Does anyone know if something like this exists?

I find writing out the instructions to be very helpful as a start as well. If I'm really struggling to get started on something I tend to divide myself into Thinking Me and Robot Me.

Thinking Me just starts writing out the dot points on how to do something, because thinking is easy right? Then Robot Me just starts following the instructions, because simply following instructions is also easy. Can even listen to your favourite music while doing it.

Then next thing you know, you're under way...

I thought it was working well without points until this morning.

With this ASK HN post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444709 ) about the best credit card payment method I would typically immediately go and look at the comment scores.

Because a vote for a comment is typically a vote for the thing being recommended.

It's really a "poll-like" question except it can't be a poll because the OP doesn't know the options in advance.

Other than that one problem though,I found I was judging people's comments more thoughtfully without the scores.

I'm guessing that it's the famous kickstart it gave to Twitter that has started this trend.

I'm surprised by the lack of answers talking about market forces.

I know many people who think that doing a job that is complex and hard automatically entitles you to money and complain about people with much easier jobs, who aren't as smart, making more than them.

I agree, I've got the same value out of these things as you. But pretty much all the people I know who have had some amount of success with anything didn't know these things and didn't care.

They just hacked something together and didn't stop...

So I think the value you are describing comes a fair distant second.

If you've gotten used to both full time work and full time study at the same time, then you shouldn't have any trouble finding the time and energy to work on projects outside of work hours when you graduate! Hang in there.

Just so I've got this clear..

If I develop an enterprise ipad application and track down the customers myself, it is possible to sell to them and take 100% of the revenue still?

I can do this by offering the app for free on the app store and requiring activation through my own external signup system. However, I must also offer the option to sign up using Apple's API and Apple taking 30%?

I just need to be on the phone to the customer when they download the app and ask them politely to not use the Apple method?

As can credit card companies, I once heard on a Planet Money podcast I think.