evdawg

This is an extremely complicated question. I run a UI/UX studio here in Toronto and we go all up and down the spectrum, with some clients being shocked at our prices for web design/development but we've also lost jobs from other prospective clients because our prices were too low (no joke).

It depends on two things:

  1. Where you get your business

  2. Who your competition is

For many, #2 depends on #1. We see three main sources of business: Google (we rank highly for 'Toronto web design'), Dribbble (we have the 2nd most followers in Toronto, and 8th in Canada), and of course, referrals.

Dribbble leaves us with clients with the biggest budgets, who aren't afraid of 5-figure prices for web design. This is where we're competing with other high-end designers and thus our prices are more in-line with theirs.

Referrals are the strongest leads, with clients who when they don't have larger budgets are more comfortable stretching a bit because of our strong work for a friend or mutual acquaintance (and we're often happy to mark down a bit for a referral).

Leads from Google are where the clients who get really shocked come in; they don't really understand or appreciate the work that needs to go into good, iterative, considered UI/UX (and the custom development that goes along with it). The competition here includes a swath of companies who game SEO and outsource work offshore, and they can charge considerably less. Thus, our prices look unreasonably higher to the untrained eye.

There's also a phenomenon where cheaper clients expect more. If you move up in terms of positioning yourself as premium, better clients will consider you and your services-- the types of clients who aren't shocked by "high prices" for design and/or development.

So, if you find all of your clients are shocked at your prices, you're not marketing towards the right clients.

I would also highly recommend listening to patio11's podcast #3 about making more as a consultant: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/10/10/kalzumeus-podcast-3-grow..., and charging more http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...

I didn't know about this. Still, I was expecting a little longer of a communication with support-- 'escalation' or at least 'the ask' should have been done before the public shaming, in my mind. All I see now is a cordial and polite explanation from Instacart.

Lets get real: outside of two $8 charges that he's not even asked to be reversed, this is exactly the same service that he describes as "great" in the same post.

The author didn't even ask for what he wants: his year of free delivery under $35.

I'm sure Instacart would have no problem at the very least waiving two $8 fees.

My advice to people calling into customer service departments? Just ask. The person on the other line can't read your mind. If you ask for what you want, you'd be surprised at how often you'll get it.

This appears to be an abuse of process from LayerVault.

They have a design in a style that's not quite originally theirs-- they've seemingly abused the DMCA to have github remove a completely unrelated UI kit in the same style.

The two items in question are as follows: https://layervault.com/ http://designmodo.github.com/Flat-UI/

Flat UI has (seemingly) been designed and developed completely independently, having nothing to do with LayerVault. No artwork is derived, based-upon, designed by the same artist, etc.

You should care about this because the process is biased towards the accuser. Given no chance to rebut, Flat UI is removed, and disabled. Despite providing his side of the story in the commit comments https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/735e17614cca63102b8414..., the author now has to write a formal counter-takedown notification, and the repository will still be offline for up to 10 days (https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown)

Furthermore, 'designers' and HN users should care because LayerVault runs a 'Hacker News' for designers at https://news.layervault.com/. LayerVault is not the right entity to run this site after these DMCA shenanigans (if in fact no infringement has taken place).

I think this is another case of "Failures were justified and assigned an appropriate cause". In reality, the author didn't have the discipline to balance work and entertainment. This sounds like tantamount lazyness to me; who doesn't want to be having "fun" all the time instead of work or school?

I have difficulty putting it into words but this sounds like one big excuse blaming society/parents/school for his failures rather than himself, which is where they lie.

I think the big difference is that thumb tacks are not a toy. These are a toy. They're marketed as a toy. They're given to children as a toy.

I think this was the lowest-hanging fruit in Rails. Glad they've finally addressed it in core. Years of people using job queues just to send mail is finally over!

But, why doesn't this let me pass objects to Mailer methods? I can't help but think passing ids and finding the object again on the other side is bad design.

Myself, over the past few years, instead of a job queue, I have been using a simple gem called spawn (https://github.com/tra/spawn) to fork processes to asynchronously send mail from Rails. It lets me pass objects around... I hope that this asynchronous ActionMailer gets this functionality as well!

This is a spectacular move by Microsoft because it takes the main feature from Nintendo's upcoming WiiU: a touch-screen for games.

Nintendo has released an entirely new system, while Microsoft has kept up with Nintendo's innovation by using devices you already own.

We contacted 37signals when they originally announced their intention to sell Sortfolio. Having bought and sold sites before we asked for some pretty standard information about traffic, revenue, etc. These questions weren't answered and we did not pursue the matter further.

I'm not surprised the site wasn't sold; the "business" of buying and selling sites isn't exactly very "37signal"-y.

With a price now available it's much more transparent for everyone involved; I hope though that this time they are able to accommodate due diligence.

Rails needs to do a release solely focused on speed. Dropping 1.8.7 is a good step for a lot of people, but I feel Rails itself has gotten slower since 2.x and I know a lot of people would agree with me.

I do a lot of work in CodeIgniter as well as Rails (w/ Ruby 1.9.2 in production), and there's no doubt that my CodeIgniter apps on slower servers with little-to-no deliberate optimization are faster than my Rails apps.

For just one particular example, I have found rendering partials in Rails are such a point of poor performance that I have often found myself avoiding it.

There's this red herring (and a pet peeve) that making the framework 'less bloated' by dropping components or making them optional equals performance. You'll even see a comment on this blog post asking which components to remove to improve performance! It doesn't work that way when the core components of Rails remain slow.

While the speed of Rails had Ruby 1.8.7 to blame for a long time, now that it's being dropped I think 4.0 has a unique opportunity to optimize for 1.9 and make a big difference to the overall speed of the framework.

Be careful-- kaminari is much, much slower than will_paginate: https://github.com/amatsuda/kaminari/issues/37

will_paginate may pollute Array, but it's been a great solution, that has worked for a long time. Be wary of upgrading for the sake of upgrading, especially with that kind of performance degradation.

A little research shows the photo is not recent. It's being hotlinked from a wordpress.com blog, and a Tineye search shows it's from Time's 2008 TIME 100 (http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,17337...)

Who knows when it was taken, but it's at least 3 years old.

EDIT: Further Googling confirms the image was taken in 2006: http://stuartisett.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/PORTFOLIO-...

In question 5) regarding Canvas vs. SVG, Remy Sharp lists Canvas as a "non-interactive" technology.

Could someone clarify this for me? Why does he consider it to be "non-interactive"? It was my understanding that Canvas is picking up steam as a medium for web-based games (highly interactive).

At the risk of leaving a 'negative' comment:

This is dangerously close (for lack of a better word) to spec work. You might get paid, based on a vague specification (I want something like x.com! Features? Just look at x.com!)

The author wants it all but offers very little. It HAS to be completed FAST (first team gets the cash!), and it has to be polished ("This is not to be a 'botch' job, I want something that's production grade"). ANY HN'r should know that FAST and POLISH do not go together.

To add insult to injury, you have to hand over all your copyright. Yeah right!

For the reasons above (low budget, no formal specifications, handing over all copyright, and risk of not being paid whatsoever), I really think that if you participate you ARE being taken advantage of.

I believe they do owe the community a few things.

They owe the community a transparent and open development process. They are doing this with Lighthouse and GitHub. Anybody can submit a bug, patch, watch other tickets, see commits being made every single day.

They also owe the community responsible release management by releasing stable code. They are doing this by delaying the RC.

So in my books, the complainers really have NO angle here.

If you have excellent Django, PHP, HTML, CSS, etc skills don't just give them away. It's great if you want to help out with the Ubuntu project, but make sure it's on your terms. Someone riding you 9 to 5 for no pay is called being taken advantage of.

Absolute junk journalism from a jealous and insecure author.

The same thing happened with .GIFs, royalties weren't actively pursued for a very long time, but when they were it became a problem.

Let's not make the same mistake again.

The problem with this suggestion is that the floor that Starbucks occupies costs a fortune. The author says it himself: he'd be willing to pay "a small" fee to hang out in a Starbucks for 3 to 5 hours. If you were to actually look what this space costs Starbucks to rent, I'm sure it would amaze you.

Starbucks isn't your office. Hanging around and having a chat is one thing, but staying for upwards of 5 hours is just excessive.

I find it completely and utterly mind boggling that anyone would find this useful. Spending habits are private: tracking your OWN is useful. But sharing everything publicly? It's insane. Guaranteed you are going to be embarrassed after you reveal your $200 purchase at the Love Shack or once your friends realize you eat at McDonalds 3 times a week. What happens people start tracking down gifts or you blow the surprise on your engagement ring?

People want to share some of the things they buy to show off, but no one wants to share everything they buy. From the mundane to the inane to the embarrassing, it's a wide window into your private life that very few would feel comfortable opening.

"The Mouse team have worked closely with experts from the OpenOffice.org User Experience project."

Ah. Well that explains it.

I'm a little confused by this... so the Unreal Engine 3 (included in the UDK)... isn't the same as what's being distributed to the big-time game development studios?

please leave that in for the 'rel="followtothemax"'. lol.

That page is faked; I just see the same entries come up again and again after I refresh.

Brilliant marketing technique, indeed.

Blogspam: the original article is here http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=Direc...

The title 'MySQL 6.0 Nixed' sounds so negative; it should probably be something more along the lines of 'MySQL starts cleaning up their act' ;)

I, for one, welcome the promise of more regular releases with open arms.

Ha, this might sound silly but I'm on Linux so I can't see your app through that link. What is it, what does it do? Curious.

I'm disappointed to see that each of these TypePad Motion deployments will be closed on it's own, instead of hooking into some kind of distributed TypePad Motion network.

At any rate it's open source... looking forward to what comes out of the community's development on this.

As far as I know: these REE releases/patches are for 1.8.7, a release of Ruby that isn't quite being actively developed, only maintained. Stuff similar to this is being folded into the official Ruby interpreter, which is now at 1.9.1 (1.9.2 soon!).

The uptake of Ruby 1.9.1 has been slow, and people are staying on 1.8.7 for compatibility reasons. Thus, these patches are trying to bring better memory performance to the old but widely used 1.8.7.

The Well-Grounded Rubyist is an introduction that will take you through to a Ruby pro in no time. http://www.manning.com/black2/

The official Rails guides are rough but a good resource. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

I wouldn't bother with the official Rails book.