jsiarto

Marketing, marketing, marketing--best advice in this thread. Why do people care about what you're doing? Why do you care about what you're doing? You need to have story to tell and you need to connect with people at an emotional level.

Another great resource for this is Chris Anderson's http://diydrones.com/

Great resource for UAVs, FPV flying and aerial photography.

Yeah, I feel like this questions answers itself. Why would you change a hugely profitable and popular piece of software? 37signals set the bar for web-based project management, period.

In the words of Barney Stinson:

"To score a ten would be just fine, but I’d rather be dressed to the nines. It’s a truth you can’t refute, nothing suits me like a suit."

Suit up, Men!

These are strictly quantitative numbers as we haven't done deep research into the overall sentiment of the announcement. But it does give you an idea of just how much reach Netflix has and how their announcements drive conversation.

Couldn't agree more. I had a non-malignant "tumor"--essentially a jaw cyst that got me denied individual coverage. Once that happens, you are blacklisted in the MIB (insurance database) and will never be able to obtain individual coverage.

I was lucky that I had an opportunity to start a cash flow positive company with 3 people so we could qualify for group coverage. Only problem is, I always have to be aware that that's my only option.

The best advice in this article is having a cash runway. So many people (people who live in 500K houses and drive fancy cars) are literally 1 paycheck from bankruptcy.

If you need a constant influx of 6K paychecks every month and you don't have a dime in saving to show for it--you're in trouble.

My wife and I run a small tech company--we have, at the very least, 6 months of income saved in the event we have to go without a paycheck or shit just falls apart. We pay cash for things like cars and vacations and we stay out of debt.

We're not worried about losing our jobs--we plan as if that's inevitable.

EDIT: Actually, the only thing I do worry about is healthcare. This country has its head up its ass as far as that goes. Group insurance is great (although we pay about $950/mo to insure 3 partners)--if you have to get individual coverage, good luck...

We pay proportional taxes on the % of income that comes from other states. For example, if 80% of our revenue comes from Illinois and 20% from Michigan--we only pay taxes on the 20% from Michigan.

"Doing business" (as far as our accountant is concerned) is having billable clients in those states--generating revenue. We've had employees in 3 states (MI, IL and FL) and the only concern is making sure you are meeting that states payroll tax and withholding policies.

On a related note: Some states have different workers comp laws. We we're not required to carry workers comp in Illinois, but did need it in Michigan (and we also had to insure our Illinois employee, because she was now working for a company that was based in Michigan).

It's a confusing mess sometimes--seek help from accounts and lawyers and don't be afraid to call the state and just ask.

The Personal MBA is a great program and his book is just as good (http://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-Master-Art-Business/dp/15...). My wife and I are part-way through both and he covers just about everything you could care to know about running a successful business.

I have a BA and MA from a large state school and found the most rewarding things from my tenure in college were the relationships I built--not the classes. I would NEVER go into debt for a Master's or MBA--it's just not worth it. Find someone else to pay (scholarship, assistantship, teaching) or get to work, it's better experience anyway.

Rapleaf doesn't scare me -- their data is only what's publicly available on the web. If you don't want RapLeaf to have it, don't post it on the web.

I actually know their Chicago account manager and have meet one of the co-founders. They are a stand-up group and take privacy and data integrity quite seriously. My company uses their data to pull additional information on "influencers" we identify doing online research.

The one thing I really appreciated about the movie was the accuracy of the computer monitor shots and dialogue about servers/hacking. While pretty basic Apache config stuff, It's nice to see a respect for the technology.

I've had the same issues--it's not perfect yet but they've done some great things in terms of software and service UI. Card reader is a little janky though...

Agreed--these guys have been around for quite some time. I do think they are really just starting to take off though. I just got my reader about 3 weeks ago (It had been on order for almost 3 months).

I agree, I didn't even think you could open that many tabs. I don't know how anyone expects a browser to run optimally with that many resources open.

Ok... Not really the same argument--but I still hold that this is an edge case. I can't even wrap my head around the UI FUBAR of what a window with 100 tabs open looks like. Someone please explain to me how you work within that system?

50 - 100 tabs open at one time!? Why would anyone need that many windows open? I'm not saying that these issues aren't prevalent--but I have to imagine that this is an edge case. Just thinking about ever having more than 5 or 6 tabs open at any given time just makes my head hurt...

Sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but I'm just about done with Head First Wordpress (http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-WordPress-Brain-Friendly-Cr...). It covers Wordpress 3.0 (although not the MU integration) and I've tried to make it more about using Wordpress as a content management system. This is exciting news from the WP team and there are a ton of cool new features in this release--my favorite being the menu admin and custom header images.

By most corporations, I think you mean most large, public corporations incorporate in Deleware. I just didn't want to hassle with being a foreign entity in my own state and the taxes and fees in Illinois are reasonable.

The handling of sprites is really cool. Allowing Rails to generate the sprite from a directory and then calling the sprite image with sprite_tag(folder/sprite) makes sprites much less painful. As a designer, I appreciate the attention to that stuff from the core team.

This is slightly off-topic, but It's nice to see that Phusion updated their branding and website. It's been a while since I've visited that site, but that stupid graffiti tag logo they had before was awful. The new look helps me take them more seriously.

All good points--I don't completely agree on the LegalZoom issue. Our company incorporated in Illinois through LegalZoom and it worked out great. I've done LLC/partnerships on my own and the paperwork is easy. It's good to think of LegalZoom as a paralegal service and not as a lawyer. We had an actual corporate lawyer draft contracts and other important documents but I'm not paying someone $300/hour to fill out forms.

I'm waiting for Google to open up an API or dashboard on top of Caffeine to compete with some of the monitoring tools like Radian6 and Jive. They could own that space and it's growing like crazy right now. Plus, we don't need any more companies coming out with "social web" search engines.

Not to nitpik this, but I don't consider eating off the dollar menu at McDonalds anyway to save money. In the long haul--that's probably what will end up killing you or at least racking up some medical bills. I'd rather spend 10x the dollar menu at a local lunch spot with real food that won't send me to an early grave.

All around, good advice--but don't use fast food as a way to slim down the budget.

Yeah, I agree. Anytime you start saying that your software can "do-it-all" you're bound to run into problems. I still can't see how this has mass public appeal--anyone outside the HN/tech scene isn't even going to understand 1% of what any of that shit means.

I also don't think Diaspora gets that money tax-free. How do they report that at the end of the year? Were people donating to a company? Do they even have a legal structure?

Mac OS X has the best "community norm" for installing software: 1. Download compressed .dmg from Awesome Software Inc. 2. OS X unpacks it automatically and mounts the drive on your desktop (with a new Finder window open) 3. Drag your app to the Applications folders 4. No step 4.

Apple Killer, iPhone Killer, iPad Killer. Enough talk, let's see it. Until someone else comes along and delivers the user experience and hardware quality Apple is putting out-I don't want to hear it. No doubt the Android-based tablet will be great, but it's not killing the iPad.

I live in Chicago and have been using Groupon for a while. The last one I bought was 50% off a 1-hour massage and they were booked for 2 months before I could get in to see anyone. Groupon is hugely popular here (obviously)

My understanding is that they use it to verify your identity and it's also used to set your daily and per-transaction limits. My guess is that this is just fraud prevention and a way Square can keep scammers off their service.

If someone's got your credit card--Square isn't going to make it any easier to make unauthorized purchases. It's probably more work given how easy it is to use someone else's card in retail and restaurant POS.