kalendae

as a beginner, things like scaffolds and other generated code pretty much completely eliminate these typo driven mistakes, they also make great starting points for understanding the framework. so that mitigates the problems mentioned for beginners, and by the time you are not a beginner hopefully those error messages make more sense. Personally, i found most of those error messages pretty good. im currently using spring/hibernate as well as RoR very heavily, and trust me i pull my hair out way more on the spring/hibernate side than the RoR side, come to think of it, i pull my hair out exclusively on the java side =)

this is also a case of correlation does not imply causation. People who fall out of touch may have done so because things are not going well as opposed to being the cause of things not going so well.

is there data backing up this n+1 claim? without A/B testing it, it is hard to be convinced that it is definitely the cheaper strategy. in fact, it makes a lot of assumptions about how people will behave, whats to prevent a culture developing where someone always grab the last roll but is responsible for flagging down the next batch? thus severely increasing your costs. regardless tho it is definitely non-intuitive and clever and worth testing for the sake of academic curiosity.

this is a little old but could be used for very approximate approximations: http://www.joelcomm.com/app_store_ranktosales_revealed.html

from the data in the past HN post, single founder companies are slightly better in absolute numbers than duo founded. but i would think there could be an order of magnitude more bootstrapped single founder attempts than duo founded, and if true that would mean duo founding is way more likely to succeed than single founding.

but with that said, no matter how the data looks, these stories are very encouraging.

you need to work your headline/story here into your site somehow.

you might want to rephrase the question then, cuz i thought the same thing other posters did.

i think its interesting enough that it could boost the pr on your product or help create an early rush to put you in the top lists, but if i bought an app using that model i wouldn't really be motivated by that fact alone to recommend it to anyone. for me the usefulness and how much i like the app would still way out-trump any need to get my money back.

if you are going with the idea tho, it might be better if there was a 'reward' aspect not just a refund. like 4x = u get paid 1x or something. refunds are frankly not too exciting especially for an iphone app.

would be more correct to have (even Joel Spolsky)

well done, tho adding :P kind of makes anything ok.

Your article makes you sound evil :P

Chrome currently does not support @font-face by default so this does not work on chrome for me unless i run it with a command line option to enable it.

I vote for #3

mostly due to feeling that if you are asking these questions instead of just jumping in and learning it, it is probably not for you. And from the limited information you have provided, I would be wary of going forward with your 'other developer' with the platform he is comfortable with. I would think a great developer would not even put you in this kind of position. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but is there anything preventing him from making the case for a different platform or learning rails? and plus it's rails, not like he needs to crack open some COBOL.

first of all the idea is great, and when my son is older I will definitely use this. What would be really nice is some sort of guidance system by age. For instance, which worksheets are appropriate for which age, maybe as a wide range. and the parameters within the worksheets could use a recommendation as well. This is because as a first time parent it is hard to tell as i've already gotten the feeling that presenting toys of wrong difficulty sometimes really results in reduced intended effect.

how about using something like http://www.slifeweb.com/ I am quite curious to hear about whether these tools help or not and maybe ways of using it that I haven't thought of.

right, sucker is a bit harsh. Using it emanated more from him loving the secret more than the story that was told. But the point I pretty much failed to make was that if he felt the enterprise to be worthy, but the people not to be, it is something within his control to find new partners or continue, nothing that happened prevented that. But the story dramatizes events to the level of someone having stolen his business dream or some such. Basically, yes it is a crushing experience to lose your innocence and find out someone you highly respect is just out to exploit you, but there's no reason to get it so mixed up with everything.

Ha I actually had a similar take. The story started very nicely like a good startup story should and in my mind i thought here is possibly another good story about the pitfalls of doing startups that one can learn from. Then got to the secret part and it kind of just completely vaporized that notion and the story became how a sucker got suckered. but the real downside was that he didn't even get suckered out of that much. he did some prototyping, almost partnered up and then decided they were not a good fit. it's not like the couple and his friend made it so no other yoga apps can be made.

R http://www.r-project.org/ i would consider it to have a high learning curve tho.

I honestly never truly understood the value of services like engineyard and heroku (more accurately i guess i think i understand the value but am surprised by why so many would need it). It is quite a price premium you pay to save yourself from doing something that is pretty simple -- deploying rails, at the cost of losing full control. When I had to use engineyard for a client, I was really shocked by the prices and while they were really fast on support I just found it tedious to have to get someone else to try something that doesn't fit entirely into their 'optimized' stack of things.

"I don’t know why people go looking for idiots so they can jerk themselves off over them. That’s a fetish I’ve never had."

but the fetish of looking for the people who go looking for idiots, now that's apparently very appropriate to jerk yourself over?

the return value of foo == foo.deserialize(foo.serialize()) is true unless foo has a soul.

that is assuming we can't genetically engineer ever and for people who are already born not able to alter our DNA through some kind of viral infection mechanism.

would be great to know at least the order of magnitude of the amount of traffic considered big enough to warrant an AM and possibly be able to get this kind of partnership?

thanks, this is brilliant, gonna try it and see if it has an effect. (for me it would be google tasks)

What makes you think there should be any reason we would give a crap about your little publicity stunt you call a blog post?

My rather incoherent take on this is that wealth is really not generated by people as much anymore. The things we use/want are really produced by machines plus a few workers. It is not really that worker producing the products, it is a combination of historical capital leading up to that machine and then some time the worker is putting in. Basically, we are moving towards a system where wealth is generated by machines but distributed by a weird combination of factors that is heavily historical (who spent the capital on this production to have it happen?). If you work in the stock market you get a certain share of that distribution, if your dad owns a hotel chain you get a certain share, if you collect aluminum cans on the streets of SF you get a certain share. It is all a heavily artificial system of distribution that is very historically based (more so than incentive based i think). Yes, being a successful entrepreneur will get you are larger share percent, but for the same effort/luck 1000 years ago (even if the political system was same as now and favorable to startups) the same share percent would be tiny compared to today. (kinda like bill gates added a lot of value but he got way more cuz its amplified by all the machines in the world) But my point is it is no longer about how much you produce directly but how much of that distribution goes to you.

Traditionally, a humongous proportion came here to the US and its workers, again due to historical reasons (and personally i feel deservedly so or atleast close enough). But it basically went like the US increase the whole pie so much that it got more of it. But as globalization happens it is apparent that unless you are a capitalist, your share of the distribution simply has no reason to grow but a lot of pressure to shrink so that it equalizes more globally.

so i think short of the US coming up with more things that just dramatically increases the whole pie again, theres only two choices to maintain your standard of living, have capital so you have the power to get your share, or support some form of socialism that hopefully doesn't reduce incentive to the point of reducing the whole pie.

Sliders? There are features in Photoshop that only make sense if you have done darkroom development. They are already so heavily invested into being complex and it has been OK so far. For more reasonable UI, you can use Adobe Lightroom.

if you would like to play it beyond just swinging back and forth to get out there is a walk through at http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/amiga/file/575157/16381 the javascript version would be Scene #2 in that walkthrough.

I think part of the stigma of buying online goods stem from the 'fantasy' games where people think they originated from. That had more to do with generalizations about fantasy gamers more than any real concrete reasons. A trade is fair as long as both parties feel they gained from it and has nothing to do with whether there is anything physical or tangible involved or the marginal cost.

If you are a black man between 15-24 with no high school diploma, changing the color of your skin (to white) has more positive impact than getting that high school diploma.

there is a webapp called namethis.com that does exactly what you are trying to do (here on HN not your app itself).

What about the opposite question. Do startups need to be in the US to be successful? And if so why? I'm sure there are non-US originated webapps that are popular in the US, but it seems the opposite tends to happen more often (Google, Facebook, etc etc...). Given that you can host your web app on EC2 from anywhere in the world with an internet connection as easily as from the US, what then are the barriers? My guess is that it is actually mostly cultural. If I write a webapp I am more comfortable knowing the target audience well. If it is a cultural barrier, then maybe the foreign founders don't really gain much from being in the US unless they are here to absorb the culture?