bradleyjoyce

you overestimate the brain power of the average internet user.

I'm sure it's well worth the price!

This is the risk you run when building on top of other companies. Generally speaking, it's always more favorable to BE that platform, rather than be building on top of it. We've seen this over and over in the Twitter development community. Zynga is the rare case on Facebook where they are generating so much money for Facebook they have enough leverage against Facebook to level the playing field somewhat. 99% of other platform developers/startups do not have this luxury and can be wiped out at the whim of the platform.

if whatever you're building on the primary domain is successful, you'll end up purchasing the variations down the road anyway and usually at a huge premium because someone else will have bought them up to hitch a ride on the gravy train. Might as well buy them early and save money.

looks interesting! thanks for the tip.

ugly is in the eye of the beholder :-) A logo well suited to the brand is better than something not well suited to the brand. I would argue, however, that a great designer could come up with a unique and closely matched logo, and you wouldn't have to settle for one or the other.

Personally I think part of my problem is that I particularly like working at night.. I find I'm more focused and productive. However, this backfires quite a bit when I would prefer to be sleeping but can't because my brain is used to being active and doesn't want to slow down.

I think that depends on what your goal is and what you expect the MBA to give you. Generally, I would say no, an MBA is not worth the time/cost if you think it's (1) going to get you a job (2) prepare you to start/operate/sell a real life business (3) get you girls... in some cases you might develop connections that at some point in the future make the mba worthwhile, or perhaps you get a nice base of book knowledge that supplements real-world business experience that you feel worth the time/cost.

writing is a good suggestion... hopefully it will either be a healthy brain dump or make me super tired... or both!

Would love feedback from fellow HNers on what keeps you going on your bootstrapped startup!

If you're serious about being in business I would recommend you get a referral to an actual lawyer, from a friend or business acquaintance you trust. The "cheapest and the quickest" doesn't usually match up with "won't cause problems later." If you're still in the information gathering phase, I recommend checking out http://startuplawyer.com as it has a lot of great info.

I would definitely prefer it if they did... I often visit the linked article and end up clicking around a bit on the site, which prevents a 1-click back button to return to HN to comment on the link here.

The title of the article is "Why Many Americans Will Never Retire" which the article does a really poor job of answering. The first paragraph points out lower home values and a drop in people's retirement accounts. That is it?!?! The article then goes on to throw out these percentages based on survey responses but it doesn't appear the survey asked anyone WHY they won't retire. Personally, I will never retire! Why would I want to?? I love my job, it's NOT work at all and I could do it 24/7/365. I never feel like I'm working... I have no reason to stop doing what I'm doing unless, like many survey respondents said, am no longer able to work for health reasons. Nothing to do with the economy, housing market, etc etc has a factor for me. If I saw a survey of American small business owners that said they don't plan to retire, my first assumption would be they're like me.. they love what they're doing and they see no reason to stop.

Since last May I've been spending increasing amounts of time in Perú doing just that. Recently I've finally made the move more "permanent" as I've rented a house here in Lima and plan on staying a least a year.

The easiest way to go about it is to maintain your permanent residence in your home country and enter new countries as a tourist/visitor.

This officially means that you can't "work" in the country you are visiting. However, as long as your clients are not local and you get paid to your bank account in your home country, you should be ok.

I would highly recommend you review your tax situation for your country, and especially the country you will be visiting if you want to stay longer than their tourist/visitor visa allows.

I'm going through all this myself and have started blogging about it at http://expatentrepreneur.tv ... A lot of other people blog about the expat digital lifestyle. One I enjoy reading is http://exilelifestyle.com and he has links to quite a few others.

I highly recommend South America to you... it has a fast-growing tech/startup community (Chile, Brasil, Argentina, Peru) and there are tons of expats as well.

If you make it to Peru feel free to look me up!

Twitter says 78% of users use Twitter.com

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/09/evolving-ecosystem.html

to be honest, it was mostly based on "what would I pay for this service" ... operating costs at this point are pretty low

you don't have to authorize your account to find out it's behind a paywall... but I agree, the flow needs to be improved.

we tried yearly pricing and it turned out to be a big pain.. people forgot about their subscriptions and we're confused/angry when it renewed, people's credit card numbers changed or expired after a year and caused subscriptions to expire, etc etc... $10/yr pricing on a monthly subscription doesn't work because there are just too many fees. Appreciate the feedback though... still trying to figure out the right price.

This is precisely why I built http://tweetsaver.com ... I wanted a nice way to search through ALL my old tweets AND keep them around. I'm always retweeting awesome content, favoriting interesting things, and sometimes I just want to remember what I said without having to click MORE MORE MORE MORE for 100 pages to find it on twitter.com. Maybe someday Twitter will turn on a feature that kills my app, but for now I think it's the best way to archive, organize and search the great content that flows on twitter.

why are you posting this again? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1698433

cross-posting my comment on the blog: Great post, thanks for sharing... I really like this idea! At the previous company I worked for context switching was a huge issue that killed productivity and developer happiness. I've noticed I'm keenly aware of trying to mitigate this issue now that I've started my own Rails consulting company. If we ever get to 20 people, this is an approach I'll definitely want to implement.

It really depends on how serious you will be about it... if it's just sort of a hobby and you're making a few hundred bucks then there isn't much to worry about... but if you're out there raking in bank and marketing your services "as a business" then that is a different story... most states/cities would require you to register your "business" as a sole proprietorship. You will also need to make sure you keep good records of all the freelance income and make sure you're paying the right amount of taxes. Depending on how much money you expect to make freelancing, you'll probably want to talk to a good CPA to make sure you cover all your bases.

I highly dislike comparing academia to the real world... how things are done in the two are incredibly different and often do not apply to the other at all... the author is comparing two extreme cases, a typical maneuver for an academic, when in the real world, the REAL situation would very much be a mix of what he's speaking out against, and what he is suggesting you should do. (lean startup anyone?)

this is pretty much similar to how I fell in love with Rails... I came from a strictly front-end html/css background.. not too much real programming experience. Ruby just felt so natural and Rails made the hard parts easier and the community was so helpful.

I think it's pretty hard to generalize the future of the web... it's just way to broad, and there are simply way too many different things on the web that one stack is going to a solution for everything.

If you're a chef, the saying goes - "There's a knife for every job and a job for every knife" ... if you're a golfer the saying goes - "There's a club for every shot and a shot for every club" ... if you're building stuff for the web it can be said - "there's a stack for every app and an app for every stack"

Advice

My advice would be YES! Look for someone who has experience is the industry you need help with, who's done things you would like to do (ie, raise money from investors) and is a person you find easy to talk to. You find this person by meeting and having intelligent conversations with A LOT OF PEOPLE... it will take time to find the right mentor, so don't give up too quickly. Go to as many startup "networking" type events that you can, meet as many people as you can, and follow up with people that you find interesting. People inherently like getting asked for advice / their opinion, so don't be afraid to ask that of the interesting people you meet.

No... that's the short answer.

Taking people's money on the internet is a HUGE pain. The only other potentially "easy to use" alternative would be Amazon I believe https://payments.amazon.com

Most everything else is going to require a merchant account.

nice!

it's sort of hard to classify swingly as a typical startup... it's more like a company incubated within a larger corporation.. they are licensing TONS of data from their parent company, which has been collecting this type of data for 10+ years or something like that