lmirosevic

Can anyone point out to me where the linker fits into the equation?

Can I ask you why use graphite over SaaS based monitoring like scout, etc.? I'm genuinely curious. Is it just because it's free?

Yes. And because you know the questions to ask means you have too. And so since we both have it makes it OK.

This is great. Thanks!

I use pop a lot and its actually really easy and intuitive. Just my opinion.

My first reaction was that this was a play by yahoo to get in on the newsreader market. There's been a lot of fanfare about google abandoning its RSS reader so obviously this is a big market, one to which Google doesn't think RSS is the answer. So what is the answer? I don't think anyone knows but it seems to me like yahoo is taking a bet on summly. Plus it's a great opportunity to capitalise on the press and general sentiment of the whole Google RSS story. And finally Marissa is new, and a lot of people are probably pointing their eyes at her to see if she can turn around yahoo; and what better way to do that than to win a game of chess against Google?

Edit: and if Marissa does get a lot of faith from investors, which she will if one of her first moves is a victory against google, then her reputation will undoubtedly rise. And how much is the reputation of a CEO worth at a multi billion dollar company? I think a lot more than $30M. Just look at Apple's recent stock movement.

I don't quite agree with your phrasing, but as an indie iOS dev on the app store since 2010, I sadly have to agree 100% with what you said. It is what it is. Some people might find it easier to swallow if instead of "cheating" you simply called it CPI though.

I sympathise with you 100% from first hand experience as an iOS dev[1] on the ad front. As designers we want our products to be beautiful and "pure", and for every single user to love the experience of using our app. You have to remember though that at the end of the day you want your company to do well and provide some sort of return on your investment.

Having said that let me give you some numbers which you can correlate to your download figures to come up with an estimate of how much ad revenue you are leaving on the table. Today you can expect your ad revenue to be about 3-10 USD per 1k bootups. Maybe more if you do some ad mediation between networks to increase fill rates[2] but this is a realistic estimate. This is from personal experience using Chartboost and revmob. To achieve a steady 1k daily bootups, you will need about 150 downloads/day. This is a steady state equilibrium I've found true for my apps, it takes into account new user acquisition rate and churn rate (which is surprisingly high, from my stats only about 80% of users will even open you app, and of those 80% only 30% will open it on the next day, after 30 days you can expect about 5% of users to still be using your app).

There's a lot to be said about App Store monetization but take these numbers into account when considering whether to ad ads to your app. Btw all of the above is for full screen interstitial ads shown once on app launch. And honestly most users are ok with tactful ads that don't interfere with the user experience (predictable and consistent positioning out of the way of gameplay--e.g. at app launch or between levels/after you "die"), I can tell you I've never had a bad review because of ads.

I just wanted to give you some advice re. ads as it's something I emotionally struggled with at the beginning, and I'd hate to see a talented team like yours not get the results you deserve, esp. by leaving money on the table.

Cute game btw!

[1] www.goonbee.com [2] www.github.com/lmirosevic/GBAds

John I just want to say thank you. Unfortunately text cannot quite convey how grateful I am for you making these videos but if I could tell you in person you would know.

I developed a web app in Angular.js and find it a great framework to work with, but unfortunately there wasn't any great way to learn it when I was starting out. The documentation makes sense once you know Angular but it isn't good for someone just starting out with the framework. I actually remember watching your videos on youtube about writing directives last summer and thought they were one of the most concise yet unassuming "tutorial" videos in the tech world I have ever seen.

Thank you!

Sorry typo. 7M hits per day. It was tested with 250 concurrent users, and page load times consistently stayed below 300ms (measured end-to-end).

Andrew is right, we set up three different apps and so each is free.

At Qard.at we used 3 Heroku dynos for: web server, mobile API, and our CMS. We used MongoLab for our MongoDB database. We also used Amazon S3 for static assets like CSS and images. The system was tested with Blitz.io and could scale to 7M hits/month. Our monthly fees were less than $1. The takeaway from this is not that you should run your company on free services, but that you can get started for (as good as) free with a scalable architecture which is then easily transferrable to AWS or similar once the need arises.

The $500 or so you need to buy your first computer is too much of an upfront investment for a lot of people in the world. And the time required to learn how to program, time you could be spending making money at a local job putting food on the table, is an insurmountable investment.

Part of my family is from a small fishing town in Croatia, I go the their every year on holiday. And every year I see so many intelligent and hard working people there who walk around with that lost expression on their face, longing for a way to make a good living. But there's no role models, no people to set an example. The wealthiest guy in town owns a cafe. To them, what is programming? How do you convince someone like that to spend a month's salary and many more months of hard work learning something when they have no sense of the implications or the benefits of it. A lot of this world doesn't even know what programming is or why we need it, no wonder programmers are in short supply.

"Go has garbage collection, only. [...] Day 1 design decision." http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.slide#51

Can someone tell me why GC was the obvious choice as opposed to say automatic reference counting?

Apples and oranges. Hadoop is a framework for parallel batch processing of existing data, like server logs and sales statistics. Storm is a framework for processing streaming data in realtime, like Twitter's live stream of tweets.

Maybe the raw sound input is run through a band pass filter that attenuates all noise outside of the human vocal range. This would make the voice sound "bad" but it would actually make it clearer to understand, especially in noisy environments.

It might be easier for you, and for lots of other HN readers too, but what about all the other people in the world? People who when they hear the word "code" think vertically scrolling green letters on the screen.

This is great, I love the feel of this and the value it creates (which I'd describe as "live structured conversations").

Here's some suggestions, keep in mind these are essentially my personal opinions:

-Try putting some thought into making the functionality a little more intuitive, by this I mean to try and not necessitate having to hover too much to discover functionality. As a designer I know how difficult this is to do without spoiling aesthetics, so good luck (but I think you need to do this).

-Host this as a SaaS and make money, I image businesses would love to use this as a way to gather user feedback and talk to users.

-Categories would be nice. Right now it's just one "board" (in the traditional "online forum" sense where the set hierarchy is forum>board>thread>post). I'd find it cool if I could say visit a "sports" category, or a "Tech" category, and especially a "Hacker news" one. Think subreddits.

-The "navigation" is a little unintuitive, on the left column where it says "Threads", "Lists", "Users". When in threads mode, the other modes are listed underneath it, suggesting that they form a child relationship to Threads, whereas they're really siblings.

-I'd dispense with the little arrows under "Home" on the left column, and move the refresh button onto the same line as the Create and Home links/buttons. It doesn't really add anything. Up and down could be implemented using infinite scrolling and would be more intuitive. Left and right could be replaced by making aggregating all the different views ("My threads", "Users", "Replies", etc.) into a flyout or dropdown list, accessible by hovering the currently active mode title. This would also mean you could dispense with the 3 bottons on the bottom left next to the settings button.

-Speaking of that settings button, it doesn't have much to do with searching, instead I'd move it closer to the "user button", which you don't really have but will definitely need. Opening the user pane on the right, and then clicking the username to reveal "log out", etc. isn't easy to find.

-You probably don't need all the corner hovers, they don't really do anything useful IMHO.

-Fluid layout so it works well on mobile devices

-The reading mode is cool but you probably don't need it everywhere.

Good luck, I love the idea. Hope this goes somewhere.

Nice to know there's some exciting stuff happening in my city for once.

That's awesome! You said it's a free app. What's your business model? Free+ads, In app purchase, freemium? And how do you market, do you use CPI/CPC networks?

Just wanted to say congratulations and keep doing what you're doing. I've found that there's nothing better in life than having a goal to believe in and then achieving that goal, in spite of all it's difficulties. It's one of few things that will give you true happiness. As for the negative comments, you'll get plenty of those in life and you should just ignore them (if you succeed in doing this, let me know how you did it).

Really great talk. Thanks! You hear a lot of people talking about how to succeed more, faster, etc. but very few people seem to mention all the little side effects of being a die hard entrepreneur, or how to deal with them.