peterarmstrong

If you think this is bad, just wait until July 1 and CASL gets introduced. As a Canadian I'd like to apologize for this:

http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2014/25293/how-canadas-a...

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/casl-lcap.htm

It's a meme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base

We've been debating whether to differentiate between "online" and "mobile". The obvious answer is to do so, but it might be that with phones being better etc some people prefer to just use the mobile app for much of the day, especially if they only have one monitor...

Thanks!

In terms of convincing your team, we need to build importers to import popular tools (e.g. Trello, Pivotal, Slack, Asana). What do you use?

In terms of security and IP: the security model is at the cube level. Anyone you add to a cube can see the tasks and conversation inside it. Private conversations are between you and the other person, and are not attached to cubes.

In terms of hosting, we're on AWS. Eventually we may offer a hosted option for companies that this is a deal-breaker for, but that would be priced at Enterprise levels. If you're interested, please let me know...

By the way, I buried the lede: our point is that Trello (tasks, kanban) and Slack (chat) need to be first class citizens in the same app. Having two separate apps for this is the mistake of the industry -- e.g. Basecamp and Campfire being separate, etc.

Right now chats are either private messages or else they are on a task. We probably need to generalize this though, since not everything is a task.

Our mobile apps are interesting. We are experimenting with both the iOS and Android apps and still working out some of the UX kinks. (Right now, for example, we have hamburger menus, etc.)

This is fine; thanks. Sorry about that...

The UI is intended to be something that is pleasant to look at for hours, since ideally we want it to be left open all day on a second monitor. So we didn't make it bright and shiny...

They're more active than typical investors, but it does sound weird. Fixing.

I was actually quoting a journalist (David Coleman, CMSWire) whose article was quoted at the top of the Dashcube homepage. I have no idea why a voting ring detection got triggered, but it's probably because everyone who has been working on Dashcube was excited and sharing with their friends. I've been on HN for years and am not a bad actor...

Thanks for your feedback!

Specific notes:

- We have native mobile apps on iOS and Android. The links to both app stores are on the homepage. The apps are a bit rough around the edges, but we're working really hard on them.

- Integrations will come, as will importing.

- We do have fast search, in a drawer from the left.

- Every single task and project ("cube") functions like a group chat room. And there's rollup, meaning that if you are talking in a task, the discussion is visible on tasks above it in the hierarchy, all the way up to cube level.

The project replay feature is designed for things like project retrospectives, getting up to speed when joining a new project (aka "onboarding" which is usually painful), getting caught up when coming back from a vacation, etc.

And yet... Bose QC15 are simple, light, comfortable and sound fine. The real point, however, is that they are amazing at tuning out the outside world, and thus are fantastic for coding. Their lack of audiophile cred means absolutely nothing compared to all the above, and if you are in an environment with noisy children or coworkers you won't want open headphones anyway. So for the actual use cases of many of us here, QC15 are actually a good choice. Regarding Beats, I actually have no opinion since I've never tried them, but people who like them enjoy them...

Cool. Let me know how it goes!

If you're planning at least 3 parts, have you considered turning this tutorial into a Leanpub book? It's the perfect start to one... (Disclosure: I'm a Leanpub cofounder)

"New publishing model"? You could have just used a photocopier.

What I meant was that we can do a compensating transaction (say a PayPal payment etc), but that it would not be a "refund" in terms of being a refund onto their credit card.

I talk about this at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA#t=935 ... The serial publishing bit starts at 14:03

Authors categorize their books themselves. Using the wrong category is presumably a mistake in autocomplete...

Authors do this themselves on Leanpub. But the thing is, readers of the in-progress book actually end up providing a lot of that in many cases, by providing feedback to the author via email, Disqus or Twitter. (Development and technical editors function as proxies for readers. We've found that readers also do a good job of that!)

[Leanpub cofounder here]

[Leanpub cofounder here.]

We have an unconditional 45-day refund policy. This is so readers of the in-progress book can judge whether they think it has stalled. If so, they can decide whether they've gotten their money's worth, and if not, get a refund in 2 clicks.

In situations where books are abandoned after being dormant for a long time, we can't issue refunds since we literally can't. (We take PayPal and we take credit cards via PayPal Website Payments Pro, and we can only do refunds for 2 months with credit cards.) So, in these cases, it is up to the author to make things right.

This happens very, very rarely though: having actual readers of your in-progress book that you will disappoint if you stop is a great incentive for you to finish.

Just make it the Control key. Yeah, Emacs user. I assume if you use vi you'll remap it to Esc. Either way, you'll be happy.

I agree! I think it's possible to teach kids programming from a very young age, provided they have the right tools. I'm teaching my grade 3 son how to program, and I'm doing it by writing a book which he is following along with:

https://leanpub.com/programmingforkids

I want more beta readers though!

I've made a free coupon "hackernews" which has a 10 use limit (for individual use or any of the school packages). If you want to use it with your classes, go ahead. I'd love feedback!

For kids (not just American kids) between 9 and 12 I'm working on a book that hopefully can help with that:

https://leanpub.com/programmingforkids

If anyone here wants a review copy, either reply here or I'm @peterarmstrong on Twitter...

Beware: you can only do that if you want to open source your entire site. It used to be the AGPL, now it's the CPAL, which has the same effect.

I got laid off when my son was 2 months old and my wife was on maternity leave. That was about 9 years ago. You can pull through this.

(My solution was to relocate countries, from Victoria, Canada to Silicon Valley. We did this in 2 weeks. Now, ironically, I'm doing a startup, but living back in Victoria.)

If you're a programmer and a US citizen, you have won the talent + nationality lottery. (I'm the former, but not the latter.) If you're both, realize how fortunate you truly are.

One course of action is to...

1. Move to Silicon Valley if you're not there right now. It's a boom, and it sounds like you don't have much to lose at the moment.

2. Go be an early employee at some startup that is funded. Maybe you'll get lucky and it's the next Dropbox or Snapchat. Or maybe you'll just earn good money in a great climate.

3. Consider doing another startup once you have savings or can bootstrap doing consulting. However, bootstrapping takes a LONG time and requires serious commitment.

Good luck! Peter

On Leanpub, the author gets 90% royalties minus 50 cents per copy. So, on a $10 book, the author gets $8.50 (85%) royalty, and on a $20 book, the author gets $17.50 (87.5%).

Just because publishers have historically paid 10% royalties does not mean it has to be that way in the future.

So, questions of copyright should be a debate about what is fair based on a range of arrangements. Personally, I'm in favour of 14 year copyright, not the "author's death + 70 years" madness that exists now...

[Leanpub cofounder here.]

One great thing about this is that with Leanpub, the money you earn while your book is in-progress and selling is not an advance (i.e. a loan), it's earnings. You own your work, and you can sell it with a traditional publisher at any time.

We've had traditional publishers pick up a few Leanpub books, and attempt to get more. If you look at our bestsellers list (https://leanpub.com/bestsellers_lifetime) you can see why.

Leanpub raises the BATNA to doing a deal with a traditional publisher. Since we pay 90% minus 50 cents per copy in royalties, you earn $17.50 from a $20 ebook. The types of books that HN readers would write would do well to be priced at this price point. Authors choose the minimum and suggested price. So, if you sell 1000 copies at that price, that's $17,500; if you sell 5000 copies at that price, that's $87,500.

Because of this, lots of "niche" books that would sell fewer than 5000 copies (and not be worth it for a traditional publisher) are totally worth it to be done on Leanpub, just for the direct revenue. Plus if you consult, a book is a great business card...

Congrats Reg!

At Leanpub we bet the whole startup on Markdown, so we certainly agree! We love Markdown since it means that writers focus on writing, not on formatting...

I have come to find out what it's like to humblebrag.