$50/mth and 3% + 50c per transaction
1,413 karma · joined July 21, 2010
When our service is down for some reason, the ONLY question we get (like this one we got today) is - "Has the service been down recently? If so, no worries - it happens, just wanted to report and see if this is temporary or if it is just me."
Having a "holy shit our entire service is down" message means your users dont' have to ask "is it just me?".
That's a big difference. It has nothing to do with shifting blame, it's about keeping your users informed. Information makes people happy.
Personally, if my app were making 12 MILLION DOLLARS a year I'd either a) not care about that $200k a year or b) I'd then have the resources to do something about it
If I were these guys I'd support Spanish and French long before I'd bother chasing that 1.6%, but no one is being critical of them not doing that.
As the saying goes, a fool and their money are soon parted!
If this was an "occasional" problem, there wouldn't have been a dozen blog posts on HN about it in the last week (least of all this one). If humans are doing anything sub-optimally that's something technology can help improve. The more common the problem, the more likely there is a common solution.
If everyone wants to use email as a todo list, you have two options: 1. tell everyone not to 2. build it
Option 1 will not work.
It's not that it's offensive, it just says you are unable to convey the strength of your argument without the vulgarities. You lose critical (logical) thinkers when you resort to crass language; primarily because it says your argument relies on emotion, not logic.
The user is not broken. Wanting email to be MORE than it is does not mean users are wrong. The fact is that email does not do what the average user wants it to do. Telling people to change their habits is...well...stupid.
Before anyone chimes in with "email isn't broken, but the clients may be". Whether this is a client issue or protocol issue is irrelevant. 99.9% of users do not know what SMTP is let alone why it is not broken. The email experience is broken. End of story. No blog post required.
Using try/catch to resolve this also doesn't help unless you literally try/catch every function
There are plenty of services out there that tackle this problem properly. Shell out the money and use one.
One expects a learning curve starting any new language, but I prefer that to start AFTER I've got it installed.
I've been a .NET developer for over 10 years. I'm a Rails "beginner". I'd say I'm comfortable with web technology, and yet Rails was an absolute nightmare for me to get started with.
If the Rails community wants people like me to stop doing what they were doing and use Rails instead, it MUST be easier to get started with.
I'd love to see a bit of a roadmap from them actually. We built custom tagging to hook up our users with intercom; then they rolled out that feature. We wrote a timed/usage dependant notification system; then they rolled out that as well!
The upside of that of course is that they're solving a real problem in sensible ways. I'm not a huge fan of the "in app" notifications, but even just as a research and email tool it's pretty amazing.
Who says OSS has to be all about altruism and self-sacrifice?
Btw.. http://railsinstaller.org/ was funded by EngineYard... I'm not sure I see the difference?
So really, you're not saying the cloud isn't right for anybody's startup at all. You're stating the obvious, which is "if you have someone with sysadmin skills, use those skills". Well, duh.
As a technical co-founder, I can either spend my time learning all there is to know about being a sysadmin, or I can outsource it for DIRT CHEAP. Even at $1500 a month for something like Heroku, it's still cheaper than spending as little as 10-15 hours of my own time managing a server.
Besides, for the first 6mths of your startup, the actual costs for Heroku are likely to be less than $100 a month for a couple of dynos. It's not even worth the time to read the manual at those rates. A couple of git commands, and you're done...even for a complete novice. By the time you're needing those 24 dynos, you likely have the revenue to support the cost.
You can always make more money, but you can't make more time. As a technical founder of a business, your job isn't to be doing something that you can pay someone else to do. You should be making magic happen in your product.
Price assurance guarantee.
We now understand that it’s impossible to grow your business if you can’t be sure how much Chargify will cost you. Going forward with our new plans, you won’t have to worry anymore because all plans will come with a 100% grandfathering guarantee for 12 months from the time of a price change. This means that any plan you’re on will be priced the same for you for 12 months from the implementation of a price increase. Conversely, if there is a decrease in the price of a plan, you can take advantage of it anytime.
If you never "turn off" Photoshop or Office, they too will appear the instant you click on them. Amazing!
A good example is the current top topic "co-working space opens in Marrickville"...certainly wouldn't be of interested to anyone outside of NSW.
In my mind, anything that raises the profile of local events/news is a good thing. I think I'd have preferred to see an actual localised version of HN which rates "local" content higher than US content (perhaps).
Sometimes standing up for what you believe to be right is a costly stance to take, or at the very least difficult.
If the worst case is that you get fired...well you were leaving anyway. What's to be lost? Even if for some bizarre reason they did withhold your salary, I'd personally rather than that be an accomplice to their wrong doing.