dirtae

You seem to be implying that if you make a mistake while booking a flight, and as a result the airline refunds all of your money, then if you have to pay more for the flight you actually wanted than you would have paid when booking the original (mistaken) flight, the airline has harmed you. Do I have that right? If so, could you explain your theory of how the airline has wronged you?

In the U.S. all airlines allow you to cancel your reservation at no charge within 24 hours of booking, so if you make a mistake, then you can cancel your reservation and make a new one.

True. But keep in mind that we're talking about net revenue here, not net profit. That $70K is after Apple's cut, then you need to deduct all of your expenses, like marketing and hosting, on top of that.

Is it possible to take advantage of the affiliate program for sales on in-app purchases? Our app (like many) is free with in-app purchases, so I don't think we can generate affiliate revenue from our sales, but I'd love it if I were wrong.

Ah, you're right. I saw that the enclosure was the same (or at least nearly the same) as the old Mac mini and assumed you could replace the RAM yourself, but I was wrong. That's a shame.

You don't tax the CPU, but you want to pay an extra $200 for a build-to-order option to bump the CPU by 0.2 GHz?

How about getting the mid-tier 2.6 GHz Mac mini, with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB Fusion Drive, keyboard, and trackpad for $1,237? Then you'll be saving an additional $300, for a total of $563 in savings.

If you want to save a little more, don't buy additional memory from Apple, buy it from Crucial or another vendor instead. You'll pay less than $200 for 16 GB of RAM (which is what Apple charges to bump from 8 GB to 16 GB), plus you'll have the 8 GB of RAM that is pre-installed in the machine, which you can sell, if you want.

The original post and your comment both make it sounds like the various premailer libraries all share a common core, but I don't think that is true. Does the python premailer have anything to do with premailer.dialect.ca? I don't think it does.

Several months ago, when I was using Zurb Ink to design some emails, the python premailer would choke on some of the responsive CSS. I had to switch to the ruby premailer gem to get things to work. It looks like the python premailer has since been updated, so perhaps it works now.

Maybe, but I'm not sure that a test could change my mind, unless it resulted in a massive boost in revenue.

Let's say that the vast majority of my customers do not want to use "Remember me", and that most of them examine the option and leave it unchecked, as is their desire. I've still introduced friction into my payment process, and possibly left a bad taste in the mouths of many of my customers. Maybe not enough that they stop doing business with me, but it could still taint my reputation in their eyes, as a company that is trying to push them down a path that they almost certainly don't want to take.

Testing may indicate an increase in revenue, but it can't account for reputational damage, unless we're going to ask every customer how they felt about the checkout process after they're done.

So, testing based on revenue alone isn't enough. There is probably plenty of testing that shows that adding an array of annoying up-sells during checkout increases revenue, but that doesn't mean it's something I want to do.

We do not have many returning customers, and our customers are not as tech savvy as Humble Bundle customers, by a long shot.

We are using Stripe.js with our own form instead. It's not as nice as Checkout, and I really wish I could use Checkout instead, but as a developer I need to be in control of my user experience, and "Remember me" is not appropriate for my application.

Stripe Checkout is nice, but unfortunately it's not suitable for us, since the "Remember me" checkbox cannot be hidden.

"Remember me" is confusing for users. What is being remembered? By whom? When you're dealing with users who may already be concerned about whether it's secure to enter their credit card number into your website, I feel like the "Remember me" box is just adding another layer of confusion and concern.

I'm surprised that the "Remember me" checkbox can't be hidden, given how focused on their customers Stripe normally is. The "Remember me" checkbox feels like something Stripe is pushing on me to help them with their business objectives, which isn't the vibe I usually get when dealing with Stripe.

For a basic todo list, you might like our app, AnyList (available for iOS):

http://www.anylistapp.com

We are primarily focused on grocery shopping lists, but it'll work fine for other simple lists, and makes it really easy to share lists and collaborate with other people.

I was seeing that too, but it looks like Amazon has now updated the availability zone status. When I run ec2-describe-availability-zones from the command line, it's telling me that us-east-1b is impaired. (Availability zone mapping is different for each account, so my 1b may be some other availability zone for you.)

I was a big fan of The Original Mattress Factory when I lived in Pennsylvania. They manufacture their own mattresses and sell them direct to consumers.

http://www.originalmattress.com/eliminating-the-middle-man

Unfortunately they don't have a presence on the West Coast.

The path to creating AnyList was long and winding, so it's hard to say exactly. It wasn't always going to be a standalone app, and we built some stuff that we ended up not using as a result. We've been working on the app since last fall, but we weren't always working on it 100% of the time.

See: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/19-months-and-1-pivot-later...

The company is just me and my co-founder right now, but we also hired some outside graphic design help.

We aren't ready to discuss monetization plans, stay tuned.

I was referring to some decisions we made in our server implementation. A big part of our app is the ability to share your lists with other people and see changes in real-time, which is mediated by our servers.

AnyList co-founder here. We find that the ability to share a list is very popular with spouses, families, significant others, and roommates. When we thought about creating a great grocery shopping list, we took inspiration from the classic sheet of paper stuck to the family refrigerator with a magnet, where everyone writes down what needs to be purchased.

Please do not encourage developers to send push notifications that contain marketing messages, like a notification about a new version of the app. Rampant abuse of push notifications in this way is ruining the push notification mechanism for developers that use them appropriately, because users are growing tired of being blasted with unwanted push notifications, so they reflexively reject push notifications when any app asks for permission.

Push notifications compete for user attention at the same level as incoming text messages and phone calls. Using them to announce a new version of your app is inappropriate, unless you think it'd be appropriate to call or text every user of your app to let them know about a new version.

Also, using push notifications in this way is arguably a violation of the App Store review guidelines, in particular:

"5.6 Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind"

This is cool, but when I get a link for a folder, I don't see any way for the person that receives the link to easily download all of the files in the folder. The Dropbox page about this feature says "no more zip files"[1], but without the ability to download an entire folder at once, I'll still need zip files.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/links/features

We are currently using UnittWebSocketClient in our iOS app to communicate with a Tornado server:

http://code.google.com/p/unitt/wiki/UnittWebSocketClient

It has worked well so far, but I'm glad to see more activity in this area.

> I've never heard a serious, mainstream economist propose it.

Jim Grant has been calling for a return to the gold standard. He is the publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, which is a very serious publication widely followed by professional investors.

http://online.barrons.com/article/SB500014240527023033924045...

I have been using SECWatch for awhile, and noticed that the email notifications I've been getting have been pointing to MarketBrief for the last few weeks. Didn't realize it was a YC company until now.

This is a product I have a personal need for, but I have to say that I'm disappointed with MarketBrief so far. The auto-generated "human readable" articles don't seem to provide much value. In fact, when I started to see them, I assumed it was some kind of SEO strategy, not something that was actually intended to be useful to me. I mean, why would I want to see a bunch of numbers embedded in long-form prose template instead of a more easily digestible table?

Even more seriously, a lot of the SEC filings on MarketBrief don't seem complete. For example, I received an email notification today about this SEC filing:

http://marketbrief.com/pmic/8k/events-or-changes-between-qua...

The filing basically says that the company issued a press release, which is supposed to be attached. But the attached press release is nowhere to be found. If I go to the main SEC EDGAR website, the press release is easily accessible:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1453820/0000950123110...

I'm excited about the problem being tackled here, so I'll look forward to future improvements.

Excellent PR work by Match.com. Anyone who has actually used Match.com knows that it is, from an engineering and design standpoint, utter crap. The algorithm being pumped here is probably nothing special, but hey, getting PR by hyping your "proprietary algorithm" is a time-tested tactic.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Similar article from 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/science/29tier.html

Similar article from 2003: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

Absolutely agree. We (AnyLeaf) send a weekly email newsletter to our users, with one-click unsubscribe. Companies that make unsubscribing difficult are ruining it for everyone. Even though we are very clear about the fact that we'll be sending email and make it simple to unsubscribe, we still get users flagging our messages as spam. This seems to be largely because unsubscribing from email newsletters has become so annoying that a significant fraction of users will just mark a message as spam rather than figure it out, even if the message is not truly spam.

It's hard to blame them, especially when huge senders like Target make it so difficult to unsubscribe that the author of this blog post couldn't figure it out:

http://bigfatmarketingblog.com/2011/01/17/adventures-in-emai...

It's a shame that RFC 2369, which provides a standard for unsubscribing from mailing lists, has never been widely adopted.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt

You're wrong. The long term capital gains tax rate in the U.S. is 15% for most people. The tax rate for "qualified" dividends (essentially, dividends on stock that you've held for awhile) is 15%. Starting in 2013, dividends will be taxed at your ordinary income tax rate (which is the way they used to be taxed), while long term capital gains will be taxed at 20%, which means that for most people, dividends will be more highly taxed than long term capital gains.

Broccoli crowns are on sale this week at Lucky (in the Bay Area) for $0.57 / lb. This should allow the OP to shave at least $0.50 per day from his food budget. :-)

http://www.anyleaf.com/product/broccoli-crowns

As the co-founder of AnyLeaf, I talk to lots of people about saving on food and groceries. Some people "trade down" to save money, e.g., by replacing meat with beans. My personal strategy is to determine the diet I'd like to eat and that I consider healthy (the Paleo Diet, in my case) and then plan my shopping around the weekly sales offered by grocery stores. The variation in the price of a given item at a given store throughout the year is huge. Almost everything goes on sale for at least 50% off at one time or another. Also, every week there's almost always a good sale being offered on some product in every category (meat, seafood, fruit, vegetables, etc). A typical meal for me is meat or seafood with some vegetable and some fruit for dessert. If there's a great sale on chicken breast, I'll have chicken breast. If the sale is on ground turkey, I'll have ground turkey. Likewise with fruit and vegetable choices. Shopping this way is a low-effort (if you use AnyLeaf) way to save substantially without trading down and compromising your nutritional goals.

Safari is my browser of choice, so the fact that I need to launch some other browser just to use InboxQ is annoying. But, since I'm already launching a different browser, I guess I might as well launch Firefox instead of Chrome. The Firefox extension says that it is not compatible with the current version of Firefox (4.0), though...

InboxQ's core functionality is very nice, and I've been using it lately to help promote one of my products.

I haven't been able to figure out why it is delivered as a browser extension, though. It doesn't seem to add any value, and in fact makes it more difficult to use than if it were just a standard web app. For example, if I have InboxQ popped open in Chrome and then I switch to another application to do some research or copy a link, then when I switch back to Chrome, InboxQ is closed.

Glad you like it!

Figuring out where to stock up on soda is one of our most popular use cases. Diapers too.

If you look at the page for an individual item on our website then we show you some historical pricing information. For example, if you visit:

http://www.anyleaf.com/product/navel-oranges

Then you'll see that 25 cents / lb is the low price we've seen, 97 cents / lb is the most common sale price, and so on.

This data is only available on our website and isn't in the iPhone app yet, but we'll be adding it to the app in an update.

We experimented with a multi-step sign up process where we first prompted for a zipcode, then prompted for an email address (letting you know at that step whether we had data for your zipcode), but a multi-step sign up process felt too heavyweight given that we really only need two pieces of information to create an account.

If we don't have data for your zipcode, then we don't send you email. We just keep your address on file so we can notify you when we launch in your area.

Suggesting recipes that use deeply discounted items is a good idea.