msencenb

Personally I'm sad to see this lowered as I think it set up good incentives.

High taxation in general, plus high car taxation, means that taxes will be allocated towards alternative transportation options. In Denmark this has meant bicycle infrastructure and culture which has been shown to make humans both happier and healthier. Not to mention that older cars means a lighter touch on the earth (heavy metals, fuel, etc).

Taxation is a good way to apply pressure, and I think we often overlook the power that high taxation has for good policy. Instead we get lower taxation and 'let the market decide' which often results in a more wealth inequality and worse pollution among other things.

The easiest way to make more money, without devoting more time into working, is to ask for a raise. If that doesn't work, find a job that pays more.

All of these other ideas are good, but are not easy and require time commitments.

I spent a year traveling from September 2013 to September 2014. It was the best year of my life. The trip itself was fun, but more importantly I gave myself permission to simply sit, think, and have idle time. Traveling gives you a sense of perspective you can't get from sitting at home.

If you are a decent software engineer I wouldn't worry about employment. Mid way through my year of travel I received a job offer, and negotiated that my start date would not be for another six months.

Also, this does not have to be an all or nothing decision. Why not sublease your place for two to three months, spend that time traveling, and then re evaluate at that point?

My two cents from a sustainability perspective.

My girlfriend and I would never consider something like this due to the high volume of plastic involved. Can you make the containers compostable?

If your investors have liquidation preferences, that's not true and can leave founders with nothing depending on the exit.

If there are no liquidation preferences, then you are correct.

I (respectfully) disagree entirely with this conclusion.

If you want to do analysis like this, you need to weight these numbers against the possibility of it happening to get the expected value of each column. You have also simplified the smaller exit values to not include investor preferences (which means investors are first in line to get money, founders second, employees dead last).

Additionally, most contracts do not allow for early exercise so lots of these ideas are moot. If you do not have early exercise in your contract and you leave the company it's usually a leading indicator of failure. Either the company laid you off to reduce burn (do not under any circumstances buy stock if you have been laid off), or you left the company for a moral/business/whatever reason. In the latter case, it seems unwise to put your money where your heart isn't.

If you are optimizing your life for the best chance of striking it rich do not be a startup employee. Be a founder. Better yet, be an investor.

There are lots of reasons to be a startup employee, but being in it for the options is not one of them. Treat them as worth $0 and negotiate for more cash or things you care about like vacation or part time hours.

Does the CLI work on ubuntu, or just mac?

I run my current CI/CD pipeline through jenkins for Rails, and I would like to keep everything running through jenkins. Is there a way to do this currently with bitrise?

First of all, talk to a lawyer if you have legal concerns. HN is not the right place to take advice about legal issues.

Second, I would explore the idea of working part-time. Last April I switched jobs and now work part-time at one company while having two days a week to work on my own software. I make enough money at my part-time job to give myself infinite runway (my personal expenses are low, I have health insurance through that job, and I'm still contributing to retirement/savings which is important to not overlook). In my opinion, this is a much better option than going freelance, as you only have to context switch between two projects and you always know you have a paycheck coming in the door.

For webapps with vps backends the recommendation is to use environment variables. In order to get said environment variables onto the remote machines I tend to use Ansible in conjunction with ansible-vault for encryption.

This is accurate. Returns of VC portfolios follow a power law distribution. One or two companies generally return the entire value of the fund, and these tiny acquisitions are considered 'gravy'.

I've been happy with 1Password for teams. They have a white paper, which outlines their encryption strategy clearly, and their family of apps have worked great.

Of course, when sharing 'vaults' with team members you have to remember that each vault is only as strong as the weakest master password of everyone on the team.

If you define 'profitable' as $100 a month, that's where one of my iOS apps (http://postcardpanda.com) is at after 2+ years. I've only recently started putting actual time into it though.

If you want the full income report, here is May's: http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-re...

You still have to comply with apple pay guidelines.

If you are selling physical goods then you can use apple pay. If you were already in the app store, you would have already been using credit cards (and probably apple pay) to process payments instead of in-app purchases.

If your hybrid app is currently using in-app purchases, then you should still be using in-app purchases.

Have you considered working on projects specifically for vision impaired people? I've become increasingly interested in iOS accessibility support, and last I heard their accessibility team was hiring.

My MX Records were boinked last night when I switched to a new DNS provider, so I've been unable to receive any emails in the last 24 hours. If you sent me an email please try again (sorry about that)!

Thank you for the extremely detailed feedback, much appreciated. I'll admit that I haven't really thought about the 'enterprise' portion of the offering, instead featuring on the small time developer. This is a great breakdown of what might happen in an enterprise developer's head, I'll need to mull this over as well.

Good point!

At the moment it's iOS only (https://github.com/msencenb/AppFaqsiOS) with Android support in the works.

I tend to agree for most questions, but feature requests and longer explanations are still useful IMO.

For example, I have an app that allows you to send postcards from your iPhone in which I get several emails a month asking if things can be shipped internationally. It's fairly explicit in the UI since it's for US style addresses, but I also plan on adding international shipping soon.

I have another app that lets you lookup the name associated with a phone number. I get 5ish emails a month asking what 'No results' means. The FAQ is helpful in explaining why this might be the case (skype numbers, burners, etc) that is hard to do in a constrained UI.

Just some examples of how I use the side project myself. Easier to try to answer the questions up front, while I keep refining the UX, than put in an hour a month on support.

Thanks for the tough feedback, I'll definitely mull it over. One of the reasons I made this was because I have multiple iOS apps in the App Store that are really just fun apps that I don't have time to support. Since they don't have websites or server side components, something dead simple like this makes a lot of sense.

Side project I've been working on for a while. Would love feedback from a design stand point (landing page) and a 'do you see enough benefit to use this' perspective.

I've got a small bit of Android code I'm going to need developed soon (1 JSON API to get info from, 2 screens). Do you have an email you can be reached at?

Do you guys have templates for privacy policies and terms of service? I'm launching a small saas app soon and have been looking for a decent starting point.

Googling a number doesn't really do personal numbers, VOIP, etc.

Still figuring out gumroad a bit. Since HN has been an source of continued pleasure for me over the years here is a link for early adopters:

https://gum.co/leanprototyping/earlyadopters

Would love everyone's feedback and impressions.

There is a time and a place for both, with option number 2 coming first.

When you are first interviewing your target customers you really want to gain a deep understanding for their pains and a sense of empathy for how their pains rank on the totem pole of "I will pay you money now to solve this problem" to "It sucks.. but the system we have now works".

Once you've had those first round of interviews go back to them with a prototype (this can be paper, or just marketing material) and have another conversation. It's a great way to start building a solution people will actually care for, and build a small customer base at the same time.

I would be careful using most cloud providers for storing PHI because most cloud providers will not sign a Business Associates Agreement (BAA). Keep in mind that the HHS has recently made a 'final ruling' that makes BAA contracts more stringent for companies that deal with health data as well so you may want to take a peek and ask a lawyer if you are worried.

As patrick notes most the Security Rule is mainly just a lot of documentation that has to be written. If you have even a little security background you probably have a good technical handle on it already (encrypted in transit, encrypted at rest, have good access controls, etc). Specifically it feels like a way for non technical people to track whether an organization is doing anything in regards to security. Keep in mind though since these policies and procedures are what you hand an HHS auditor when they come knocking you better have them in some fashion. Even a little documentation turns the conversation from "willfully neglected x,y, and z" into "You need to improve on x, y, and z". If you are interested in a fairly comprehensive checklist tool check out this little program from NIST http://scap.nist.gov/hipaa/

I am not a lawyer, not legal advice, etc etc

--------- Personal opinions and speculation

Keep in mind that in order to fall under HIPAA you have to use/store personally identifiable health information.

If you are looking for an easy way out of HIPAA you might want to look up 'de-identified health information'. Essentially what this means is that if you strip out all identifiable data from your records you no longer fall under HIPAA regulation, which may be useful if your company is doing statistical analysis of flu trends but probably less helpful if you need to be able to piece the data back together. I believe there are officially 18 or 19 pieces of information that make information personally identifiable.

As another note, once PHI is encrypted it is no longer considered PHI. It's my own opinion that you could probably leverage cloud services for a lot of operational work such as automated backup storage as long as you carefully encrypt everything before it hits any disk. Food for thought

This is a pretty poor attack on a startup that managed to get itself acquired for more than most of us will ever sell a company for.

As Peter Thiel says there are two kinds of companies: companies who go from 0 to 1 (SpaceX, Tesla, maybe Google) and companies who go from 1 to n (globalization of technology).

Summly clearly fits into the 1 to n bucket, but so do a lot of other companies. Would people be pissed if Github got acquired? I see no outcry for a $100 million dollar round of funding for a company that is built upon open source software.

How is github any different than Summly from a 'renting' of technology perspective?

Remember that A/B testing is a tool for refining the local maximum of a specific design. It works wonders when you are at scale (with some sense of product market fit) but is not a cure all at a small startup.

Going out and talking to 15 of your target customers in person will get you more learning at an early stage than a month long A/B test

Thanks! I think this problem is in a lot of junior devs as well (not just elite college grads). You get good at one thing and feel comfortable within that bubble, but the real growth comes from pushing yourself out of that comfort zone.

If its possible have him read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Multipliers-Best-Leaders-Everyone-Smar...

It's a book on how some leaders push people at their job while other leaders simply make everyone shut down and only get about 50% productivity. He's micro-managing style is actually covered in depth.