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Having stayed at he Marriott, for business, around the country I can tell you that their internet is crap. I end up using my own hotspot at many of their locations. If they want to prevent me from doing so, they can take their mid-tier, over priced hotels and sell it to someone else.

I've spent over 70 nights at the Marriott and this will make me stop immediately. There are a lot of other options around with similar reward benefits when booked through hotels.com

Downloaded right away! Great for submitting expense report emails and I don't have to push all that data to the IFTTT now.

About 1.5 years ago, we were going through possible itches we could scratch with a bunch of friends and how to turn them into a fun startup. The very first thing that came to mind was a travel planning app.

After going through different rounds of evaluating the idea, we came up with the same conclusion that a service/app with 2-3 uses in a year is not a viable app to make money off of.

We followed the first anti-pattern of startup ideas and immediately started thinking about making it a platform (when in doubt abstract away). When we realized that we were pushing too hard to make a fun project a financially viable startup idea, we gave up and eventually moved onto different ideas.

It's a pity that such a commonplace problem is such an unattractive business model at least with the current approaches that come to mind..

3. Self cleaning coffee-machine is on my list. I don't quite enjoy drinking coffee that comes out of a capsule.

I hoover the moldings but use a dry Swiffer for the walls. Much faster and less scratching. Highly recommended.

Would love to have something comparable in NY area! Too bad I cannot be in Cali for 6 weeks :/

Based on this conversation, what are some of the Big Data/Data Science programs with hands on experience that you guys think are worth the price tag?

I was contemplating this master's degree as well. In the past couple of months we had a bunch of emails go back and forth. However, the $60K tag on an online program makes no sense.

I would rather pay that kind of money for a brand name if I will actually make connections with people in real life.

Just having a piece of paper from a reputable institution with no real human connection is just not worth the price in my opinion.

This is based on my assumption that I do make better connections with people in real life compared to virtual setups.

Build with what you know while understanding the operating costs.

I am currently working on a start-up where we started with .NET running on Azure and SQL server with Android and iOS clients.

After going through some realistic usage patterns and the cost of licensing, we ended up deciding to switch over to MongoDB/Python and Linux VMs.

It was painful to do the switch and the time we lost was not insignificant. However, in our case the time lost was a fraction of the future operating costs so we bit the bullet.

The stack you know is the best stack to use. After that, the stack that costs you the least is the best one to use :)

Good luck.

Having recruited 3 dozen interns/jr.programmers from schools in the tri-state area and overseas in the past 5-6 years, you would be amazed how many students don't get these basics.

Those schools actually DO try to teach students about these concepts. How do I know? I personally have spoken to the deans of CS departments. Now imagine these same students, who no longer even hear of concepts such as garbage collection, pointers, etc. because it just works in their chosen language.

I believe the era of a single language for your career is long gone. Most people in their 20s and even 30s today will go through at least 4-5 different languages throughout their career.

Personally, I learned and enjoyed C++ 15 years ago but I do not find it practical for anything I do today. However, the same "impractical" knowledge allows me to get familiarized with a new language in a few weeks and start producing working software.

I don't quite care what language students learn as long as the concepts are understood. However, if the language they first start with hides most of these fundamental concepts, they no longer have any incentive to even learn how anything works.

If these Python classes were given to an industrial engineer or a chemistry major who just needs enough programming knowledge to crunch numbers/create scripts I would definitely get the approach and agree with it.

However, if you want your Computer Science majors to be able to create the next runtime like the JVMs, .NETs etc. or be able to do some device programming they need to learn C/C++.

A decade after going through a top-tier CS undergraduate program what saddens me is that a lot of university students today, think that Computer Science is cobbling github sourced code with their choice of scripting language. Yes, the startup market is hot and sometimes that's all you need but CS is much more than that. CS is about understanding the underlying models and concepts rather than a language. If you are totally missing how memory management is done, how data structures are laid out in memory, how typing works you are missing a big chunk of code-base out there in the world today.

I think the new wave of CS students, who are expected to solve larger problems, need to understand how billions of devices/apps are running in today's technology so they can create something better in the future.

I feel like my definition of a lifestyle business is not a multi-million dollar business that has been around for 7 years. At this stage, it looks like you have a healthy, established business you are the sole owner of.

I envy you and one day hope to get there myself. Good luck and I hope you get to grow your business to tens of millions.

And kudos for calling it football :)

You, my friend, are the best. As a huge soccer fan and a developer, getting this sort of data is really hard unless you shell out hundreds of dollars a month.

Already thinking about the apps that will use this! Thank you.

Thanks for the link. I have used an RSS based feed by a gent in the UK and he was charging about 20euros/month for the feed. It has been two years and I cannot get the link. Will keep looking for it.

As a soccer fan, this makes me happy! When do you expect to finish? I would love to use this as a back-end API for a couple of app ideas I have. By the way the data side of the business is pretty tough to break into. What are your thoughts on that?

If you want to fix this with me drop me a note. I have an idea, a design and a viable business model.

I agree with reading Kurzweil. The point I would argue is that if the "AI" is smart enough to handle all this on its own, it will probably realize it doesn't need to work for you :)

There was a recent science-fiction book I read called "Avogadro Corp" that I enjoyed a lot. It depicts the situation I just described. Good read, I recommend it.

Saw the movie this past weekend and thought it was really good. I didn't like it just because it has awesome voice driven OSes or endless battery life devices, but because it portrays a current trend we are experiencing; hyper connected loneliness.

The more people are "digitized" and tethered to their devices, the more they seek some human connection.

Don't want to ruin the movie for those who haven't seen it so I won't comment on the ending. However, I urge the HN crowd to check it out. It's one of the best movies I've seen in a while.

Having had a similar business to appointment reminder in the past and not getting the traction I was looking for, folded too quickly (after 6 months of operations) and I still regret the decision.

I applaud Patrick for keeping that business around for long enough to get paying customers and even trying to penetrate the enterprise world.

Patrick, besides the SEO ninja skills you applied to appointment reminder for inbound traffic, did you reach out to others via any outbound marketing?

I love this analogy. This makes me want to bring back to life the product that we killed after our 12 person private launch didn't get traction!

One of the most constructive replies. If you don't mind me asking, how did you get into SEO? Did you get professional help or try to tackle it yourself?

PS: Kudos on the product, you just got yourself a future customer with the Atlassian integration :)

Thanks Spencer. It is encouraging to see success stories, especially considering you are around the block from the day job.

My current project is around providing value to LinkedIn users via an app. I believe LinkedIn itself and the app store are two obvious platforms that make sense for me to focus on.

Thanks for the candid reply! What I am working now at the moment is using LinkedIn as the authentication mechanism and adds a lot of value to LinkedIn users.

I am thinking that getting the word on LinkedIn via posts and "likes" from my own extended network may be the way to go with this app.

Please email me (in profile) I could not find your contact info.

Sent you a tweet, please check.

I did not want to create a very wordy post with all details.

I have launched 3 products (an appointment scheduling SaaS, a Twitter based sweepstakes management service, a private beta of a social product review/recommendation site) and about a dozen apps. Only the appointment scheduling venture was sold to a third party for the code base which had about a dozen free-tier users at the time of the sale.

The social product recommendation venture did not go further because the co-founder did not want to continue going forward. I still believe it's a great idea but I put it on the back-burner for a while until I can find another co-founder.

At the moment I am working solo on an app first service (subscription based) and would like to have a more successful launch this time around.

PS: If anyone is interested about the social product review and recommendation site let me know.

Yes I did get about 10-12 users on the day of the launch. I suppose I am a bit biased reading the wildly successful launches that get thousands of users on the first day. One can only hope, right? Thanks for your response.

Thanks for the detailed reply! I will certainly implement this.