bap

This made me think of a thing I've done in the past so here's a brain vomit about 'base page caching' - most of which is probably irrelevant here but perhaps someone will find it useful:

I don't know how dynamic or unique your pages are to each user or if they're largely ubiquitous across all users.

Assuming the latter I know that you can cache a base page in some CDN's through a different header. Akamai's DSA product in particular allows you to cache HTML using the Edge-Control header that has matching syntax to Cache-Control. Edge-Control is stripped out in transit, the client never sees it. This allows you to control cache TTL in Akamai's edge servers independently of the client side cache.

A quick look through Amazon Cloudfront docs seems to indicate that Cloudfront cache's will respect the Cache-Control header but this can get complicated if you don't want the same TTL within client side browser cache. Perhaps I missed something, though?

Even if your page is dynamic but you're willing to go a route like Angular or ReactJS polymorphic client side apps you can still offload a bunch of those basepage requests assuming your app is suitable for this kind of design pattern. The assumption is that you will be relying on API's so additional complicated caching calculations may apply ;)

Depending on how you construct your cache key you can do a certain amount of multi-variate caching and still achieve pleasant cache hit rates. This applies to both base pages and fronting API's with a CDN.

Regardless it looks like for only U.S. traffic (as a yardstick) Cloudfront charges 0.085 per GB so futzing with the AWS calculator I split a page I'm very familiar with (49KB) across your 3TB for US only traffic and the price comes to $304.68. No savings.

Looking around I see that Fastly (a lower priced than Akamai - Varnish based CDN) charges a $0.12 rate, the price there in the same scenario would be something like $400 (the number of http requests made factor into some of these pricing models.) Akamai comes in at $500.

OTOH a CDN I've never used (Stackpath) might cost only $140 which would get you close to half your current spend. Remember that depending on your cache hit/miss ration and how many cache flushes (cache object invalidation) that price could be anywhere from slightly to extremely optimistic as you still have to pay for the requests between your CDN edge servers and your AWS origin.

To be fair, when considering pricing Akamai is the big fish here and has something on the order of 170,000 edge servers sprinkled all over the world whereas some of these smaller CDN's have far far fewer.

Once you're into some CDN's there's all sorts of wonky things you can do with parent-child tiering models that can be leveraged to further limit the number of times a call is made back to your origin (aws) server.

Here's a pretty good CDN pricing calculator: http://www.cdncalc.com/

Because BTC and blockchain utility do not need to correlate to the exchange rate against USD for the system to have massive inherent value.

[Edit: removed redundant 'correlate']

Classic.

At that level of 'paranoia' / privacy concern you might as assume this is an elaborate honey-pot. An unlikely scenario but certainly the safest assumption from a privacy perspective.

I think this deserves a conversation as opposed to a comment. The comment would have to be very long just qualifying assumptions about your situation given how oblique you have to be to protect your anonymity. Unfortunately I don't have time to write out that response at the moment.

Feel free to hit me up via email (or whatever.) Check my bio for contact information. I understand your reticence to broadcast any specific information due to your situation. Maybe we can take it to email or a phone call to allow you more latitude to talk specifics.

I"m not in any way involved with the OP but:

Thanks for being awesome Patrick. :)

Hi, I got your email and I promise I am working my way through the queue toward it!

I just wanted to note here for anyone else who feels like they are 'late to the party' that I'm trying to make this an ongoing thing.

People should feel free to get in touch!

Glad I could help!

My instinct (knowing nothing about your business or it's potential) is to launch but maybe you have legal or financial or personal reasons for not doing so.

There's a potential problem of perception from a buyers perspective:

The buyer is getting an unlaunched, friends & family market tested batch of code. Further, it is apparently something the founders don't believe in enough to take a chance on. (big red flag.) I'm not saying it doesn't have value, I know all about life choices and timing (spouses, kids, mortgages, car payments.) You just have to be aware of what you may be communicating to a potential buyer.

If they were planning on building it they might buy it but if they can build it for less, they might just do that.

I would be very tempted to launch it and see if I could get some traction. It's going to be worth much more if you can get some adoption. Yes this is riskier, if it flops out of the gate it might be worth less, realized than it was when it was all potential energy.

When it comes to the $40k: was the seed offer about the product or the team? Very commonly in seed people are betting on the team as much as the product.

Can you find someone to take over and execute on the product but leave you and your partners in the equity mix? This is risky too, you might get washed out but it's an alternative if you can't sell it. Some return may be better than none.

Can you sell your codebase to a potential acquirer? What large company would benefit most from having this product in their offering? Could you sell it to a potential incumbent who hasn't innovated in a long time and is suffering from stagnation? It might be cheaper to buy it than for them to pay to have it built. Essentially a contracting gig on spec?

I'm going to talk about geography because other people are giving good advice in other regards:

Can you move to a startup friendlier environment? Even by taking another job and working nights/weekends/lunch hours on your startup?

Tony Hsieh is doing awesome things in Vegas and it's not nearly as expensive to live there as Silicon Valley, San Francisco, LA, NYC, etc.

Create a really good plan, come up with a simple proof of concept and reach out to the incubators? Hell, Reach out to Tony to see if it's worth the move.

You'll want to have something concrete to reach out with before you do so. Execution is everything, ideas are just vaporware. Once you've shown commitment by building/executing, your inquiries will get a lot more respect and attention.

Being in a place where people value and are enthusiastic about startups will make a huge difference to you.

If you can't move DO NOT GIVE UP. I totally understand having a family or a mortgage or a spouse who isn't into moving, etc.

Building your product is more instructive and can be more entertaining than watching TV or going to a movie or whatever else you do to pass free time. You're making yourself better at what you do by expanding your horizons in this way.

I have been very successful working with distributed teams. Take a look at Automattic (wordpress.com) a company that has zero requirement on where you are geographically, provided you can do your job well.

Start building, launch a minimum viable product. If you feel the need for more help use what you've built to inspire collaborators. Don't be afraid to bootstrap if that is your only recourse:

http://37signals.com/bootstrapped

Email me (check my profile) if there's anything I can do to help. ;)

I've stuck it out to the very end a couple times. Once I was the last guy to lock the doors and walk away, after the CEO, after all the management senior to me. After the cleaning crew.

It really comes down to what you can afford. You've stated (obliquely) that your pay is being reduced. Can you afford to stick it out at the reduced pay? What is your opportunity cost for staying, do you think you can get a job at Square or some other too good to pass up opportunity?

Can you go a month without pay when shop closes up? Can you go three?

Some things to keep in mind: Sometimes when companies are in trouble they get bought by other companies. This doesn't mean your options will be worth anything but you will have gone through an acquisition which can be a valuable experience.

Sometimes they get shut down or liquidated: Still valuable experience (just once though, please.)

Sometimes lightning strikes and your startup comes roaring back to life. This one really depends on the team and your leadership, not to mention whether there was anything to begin with. If the team is broken and has lost hope then it's less likely anyone will find that inspiration that can change everything. If people still have fighting spirit you might have a chance.

I'm sure your CEO is wracking his brain trying to figure it out. His job is the worst job you can have right now. While you see a company failing, he sees himself failing. The simple fact is that most startups fail. They are experiments to begin with. Learn what you can.

The thing is, everyone who sticks around will have gone through something very difficult together, regardless of the outcome. Doing so makes those relationships valuable and long-lasting. A lot of "success" comes from solid relationships with people you can trust.

Tech startups are hiring like crazy right now. Definitely find out how much time is left. Time is the only thing in life you can't get more of but that doesn't mean you shouldn't choose to do something really hard once in a while. If the remaining runway is pretty short then it's unlikely you'll miss out on the rest of the current tech boom.

So, figure out how much time is left before the company ends then weigh the opportunity cost of staying versus where you might land if you go.

Oh and if someone offers you a job at something like Square that has the potential to change the course of your life through the amazing people you'll get to work with, the network you'll build and/or massive potential financial opportunity: TAKE THE JOB.

I had a great telephone conversation with Emil last night re: my Offer HN post. He's very smart, down to earth and knowledgable.

This is a great opportunity if you're looking to found. He's already eliminated some risk and validated part of his market.

You're on! See my profile or contact info. ;)

I just tried to do a headstand like that. Now I have a headache. Thanks, HoboCEO!

In all seriousness.. the Silicon Valley startup crowd is going to say some ugly things about 'Lifestyle Businesses' when they see things like this.

On the other hand, many entrepreneur's I know start companies because their goal is to be able to travel freely and chart their course wherever whim and wind takes them..

Also, in the program section.. if I decide I need a loop after I have added a couple instructions to my program I can't seem to drag them into the loop. I have to pull them from the top and delete the ones I had already brought down.

(still having fun)

This is fun!

Minor: The click and drag interface is nice but once you become a little more proficient at the game mechanics it would be nice to just be able to single or double click a command entity to append it to your command set.. ;)

Not to sound trite but:

Start a project.

You will learn all sorts of things about project management in a software development setting. Source code organization, etc. You will gain domain knowledge of whatever technology stack you decide to deploy against, be that desktop software or some kind of web based server stack. You will find challenges where you least expect them (typically where you've made a poor assumption) and at the end you'll have something to show for your effort that will be much more effect than a few lines on a resume.

As I am not deeply involved in bio-related software dev I'm afraid I can't offer you any kind of concrete project ideas. The last time I did anything biology related was when played around with visualizing genome datasets.

One thing I don't commonly see mentioned in these types of articles/posts/etc is something I've been doing for quite some time as an avid reader.

Often I will run across a phrase, or a sentence or sometimes a paragraph, that just feels awkward to me. I can't help but read it two or three times trying to find the not-awkward way of 'hearing' it.

When I encounter these I tend to type out the text that doesn't jive with me and then rewrite it twice:

1.) in a way that comfortably flows with the context I found it in (I call this exploring another writers voice.)

2.) and re-interpreting it in my own 'style.'

Never do I publish the results of this exercise. Aside from the obvious benefits of the two points above, doing this just helps me get the damned chunk of prose out of my head so I can move on with my life.

Does anyone else have any quick and dirty, improving your writing in the wild techniques?

This is pretty spiff. Revenue just from that little 123Systems Ad or are you planning some greater service rollout?

It seems like you could ad maybe 3 Square Button ads in various places and still be unobtrusive about it..

Don't get me wrong I don't sell online advertising or anything but your site design would make it really easy to add more inventory and have them still not be distracting.

PayPal is _ok_ but I don't feel like they're really pushing the innovation envelope (and haven't for a long time.)

You might consider Recurly http://recurly.com/ as an alternative.

Additionally, I think it can also be said that a market of some kind will spring up around anything people value and can possess. "Success" will bring competition and/or copy-cats which will help alleviate shortage of supply, etc.

I too have a hard time lasting it out through an essay that seems very self-promotional. Many essayists whose work I used to look forward to reading (J. Spolsky, P. Graham, etc) seem to have become stuck in a rut of beating a particular set of drums. These drums seem to promote in some way, the business interests of the person writing.

To me this diminishes their credibility and puts me off their writing.

Strangely when I see Lessig doing this for his various causes it does not inspire the same reaction in me. Possibly this is because I don't think that Lessig is deliberately writing in a way that can lead directly to personal monetary profit, although he certainly could profit from his growing cachet due to his political activity.

Possibly I am just being cynical.

I think that even a team of rock stars in a cubicle-free paradise are still beholden to whatever set of development priorities they are handed.

The most successful startups are disruptive. How can someone be disruptive when they're worried about keeping up appearances? To my mind, worrying about what others think of you starting a company might just mean you shouldn't do it at all.

Obviously there's a big difference between whether you are perceived as responsible and whether you really are.

Readability is awesome and I would love to see some version of it for my iphone. I concur that if apps like this become ubiquitous then the 'industry' (whatever that is) will shift toward inline text inclusion of things like credentials as well as advertisement.

Apple seems to have drifted away from it's carefully trod line of empowering and protecting users into the realm of protecting users from themselves.

I tend to think that Apple signed some of it's soul away when making media deals and situations like this may be a part of those legal agreements.

Not to troll but I think Microsoft started focusing on it's business to business dealings more than on it's users at one point and eventually became what it did.

Unfortunately this is a common pattern for successful corporations. I wonder if it is driven purely by fear (of lawsuit?) or by the types of executives you get when you reach a certain size.

I would characterize that as 'acceding to authority out of respect.' Respect, or course, must be earned and can so easily be lost when those in authority start to demand it.

I really like this and I agree, it's one of those forehead slapper idea's, obvious when you see it. Is it just me or is the pricing structure a little aggressive?

In my wanderings I see CentOS more than anything else. A lot of people here mention Debian which I haven't run across at all and of course Ubuntu is pretty frequent as well.

Michael and Xochi Birch are part of the founding team behind Bebo.com, which seems to have worked out rather well for them financially. I'm sure founding a company adds some extra stress to any relationship but you can certainly take proactive steps to assuage that.

One blogger (relatively well known) but I can't remember which (sorry!) blogged about how he and his wife set aside a monthly date to re-connect. They go out to dinner, and exchange gifts (big or small.) There was quite a bit more detail than that and I think it's a good ready for any of today's super-busy couples. After 30 minutes of searching around I just haven't found the link. Maybe someone else here remembers the piece (or wrote it?)