ashray

It took a little while but I'm thinking the main point here is that you store your content in the Osmek system.

Then the content can be published to multiple sources such as an iOS app, website, tablet app, mobile website.

I just don't understand how this is different from having your own database with the content. What's the difference between this and say Django's auto generated admin interface (setup with proper permissions) ?

Why can't my apps just pull stuff out of the database or through my own API ?

I'm sure I'm missing something because this seems expensive so it must be worth a lot to somebody. But why ?

Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream. 5 years ago if you wanted to hire a Django developer it was pretty hard. It's still way harder to find Django developers compared to PHP devs.

As a company, if you push yourself into a corner with newer tech like Node, Meteor, etc. you may come up against hiring issues. Not only that, but Rails and Django are also evolving with time so they too get better with time.

The "age" of a technology isn't the only reason why it gets selected, it gets selected because of a number of factors including features, programmer availability, programmer expenses (in terms of both time and skill), proven track record, etc. Usually age is a plus point in many ways.

Rails and Django will certainly be around and competitive. However, if you're asking from a programmer salary perspective then yes, there will be many more Rails and Django programmers by 2016, so moving into more edgy tech might give you a USP, but you may also end up without a place to work in. Maybe knowing Rails/Django + "shiny new tech" is a better combo ?

Thanks for the detailed responses. The above comments really cleared some stuff up for me. I'd like to add that the US IRS is known to be one of the most (if not THE most) aggressive departments in the world. They have banks around the world bowing to them and it's pretty hard for US citizens to do any of the kind of tax structuring that folks in other countries can.

Of course, you are right that this is all still a grey area but I'm sure the laws or precedences are clear in some countries.

Why didn't you continue running your website while in college ? I did that and it worked out okay for me.

This isn't specific to Indian culture. There are several cultures that will emphasize college degrees over entrepreneurship. I know this is hard to understand from a fairly successful entrepreneur's perspective but the cold hard truth is that most entrepreneurs fail. This is what causes the whole 'it's safer to get a college degree' mentality.

I've been an entrepreneur (fairly successful) since I was 13. Yet my folks said I should get a college degree. I did get an engineering degree while 'entrepreneuring' at the same time. Does my degree help me in any direct way ? Nope. But there are several indirect benefits that a degree can get you first amongst which are that in general people think you are capable and well educated. I don't personally subscribe to this thought process but hey, we have to live in this world with everyone else, right ? My degree has opened doors for me and made some people take me more seriously. It has had zero practical contribution towards my endeavors but sometimes opening a door is all it takes. Not only people but even governments sometimes want certain degrees for certain categories of work permits (even if it's totally irrelevant to your work but a degree helps you). Then of course you have the benefits of an alumni network, etc etc. but those are really what you make of them because you can network otherwise as well. But a degree is a formal qualification - treated as such by society and the government. Does it mean you know more ? Probably not. Do people in general think you do ? Probably yes.

I'd still say that in the world today, a college degree matters a lot depending on who you are talking to. It won't matter if you're talking to me but there are a lot of people out there who care about whether you have one or not.

This I found a bit condescending:

This extra-long workday has given us some fun Spanish cultural quirks, like the 9 p.m. dinner hour and the two-hour lunch break.

I know that folks in the US, Germany and some other countries eat at or around 6pm but I also know that folks in most of Latin America, India, Thailand, etc. eat at 8-9pm or so. So why is this considered a 'cultural quirk' ? A little culturally insensitive I must say.

How does that work out after tax ? I imagine 200k USD would attract a ton of tax. Is there a more tax efficient way to structure it ?

Thanks for the detailed information. That certainly clears things up a bit.

I've been using Paypal micropayments for the past year or so and it's been the best bet for $2 transactions (I pay 6%+$0.05 for cross border payments). Ends up being $0.17 per transaction. I haven't come across anything that beats that by a large enough margin so as to replace Paypal yet.

The only downside is that Paypal is applying the standard 6% fee to $20 transactions as well (as opposed to the lower 2.9% fee), so I either need to route these transactions to a non-micropayments Paypal account or do something else with them... this is what I am currently working on solving. The difference doesn't come out to be much for a $20 transaction but with higher transaction volume it will certainly stick out as a sore point.

This looks really awesome. Funny enough I was just considering moving to Berlin for some startup work when my wife said "Why don't you go to Hacker School for a few months ?" (I had mentioned it earlier this year to her but the timing wasn't right)

So now this gets added to our list of "Why we should consider moving to Berlin". The only thing that has kept us off so far are the rather harsh winters. Was in Berlin about 60 days ago and of course, the summer is amazing and I totally loved the city for being so cheap and alternative... For New Yorkers, it's like Williamsburg, but all over the place ;)

I'll be following this closely. Thanks for taking the initiative to create this!

EDIT: Just told the wife, she says it's a sign - lol :P

I'm more interested in micropayments but this interchange stuff seems a bit complicated. How would a $2 payment work out with interchange included ? I mean, what fees would apply for a $2 credit card payment ?

This is a real problem. I was traveling last year in South America and suddenly found that I was looking at my phone while on a wonderful trek or while climbing a pretty amazing mountain. I started doing 'no phone days' or 'no phone outings'.

I still do them because when I have my phone, I feel the need to check my email or reddit or hackernews. Logically, there's no reason to do it while I'm out - it feels almost like a disorder! I do regret no phone days sometimes because I don't end up having a camera on me.

After doing no phone days for a while I managed to get better at not looking at my phone when out. Nowadays I manage to not look at it while out for dinner with friends and stuff like that. But I certainly wish my friends wouldn't look at their phones either.

Unfortunately, not everyone realizes what this habit is doing to us. Certainly not the programmer nerds I usually work with, or the business types who are always looking at their blackberries. I also took down a lot of notification services on my phone (twitter, facebook, etc.) because I DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS STUFF ALL THE TIME. I need notifications for the really important stuff (someone died, server went down, my best friend got engaged etc.), when did a picture of a cat on facebook become that ?

As someone who uses technology a lot I think I'm getting better and better at filtering this stuff out and focusing on stuff that matters. I feel like most people aren't even aware though of how distracted they've truly become.

I'm happy there's a video about it. This one's pretty good.

Yes, you're right. But the idea is to take everything away + impose fines/penalties (but not like those $1 million per download kinds of fines). I just think that jail time seems overboard for this kind of thing. Even a fine that may take a few years to pay off is a pretty harsh punishment. But maybe it'll push our already talented pirates to do something more worthwhile and work to pay them back ?

Well, if you really didn't commit the financial crime for monetary gain then what was it for ? Just trolling the copyright industry ? There needs to be a deeper look at the situation in this case because the law being discussed right now is really about pirates making money off being pirates.

How is losing all your booty not a big enough deterrent ?

Edit: Also, I'd like to make a distinction here between copyright infringement and financial fraud. I don't think it's been proven yet that people are losing jobs and companies are becoming bankrupt because of large scale copyright infringement. That isn't the same as financial fraud. Personally, I'd like my tax dollars to go first to a jail that houses someone that poses immediate physical danger to me or someone else. Then a list of other things. And finally to those 'dangerous' young'uns from the pirate bay. They're pretty far down the list of evil doers.

6 years is way too much for a non violent crime. There are rapists and murders and drug dealers who get by with less at times. It's amazing what the right kind of lobbying can do in this world.

On the other hand, I personally see this as part of a policy of appeasement and am now waiting for some huge 'donations/low interest loans' to come out to Spain from the USA/MPAA/RIAA/etc.

I'm not Spanish but I have seen the culture of copying and sharing and using pirated software that exists in Spain. A penalty like this may shut down a file locker or two, or may even take down a few torrent sites, but it will do nothing to deter file sharing in general - what's more ridiculous is that the proposal clearly states that it's in line with the people's culture to generally share software/music/movies/games/etc.

Given that it's such a half assed effort it could only be a response to pressure from the US, a response tuned to not raise too many eyebrows in Spain but at the same time unlock some bonuses/favors from the US govt.

Ultimately I think this has come as subsequent pressure and a fallout from the whole Rojadirecta debacle a few years ago.[1] (those guys basically sued the US government for seizing their domain... AND WON[2]!)

1 - http://torrentfreak.com/tag/rojadirecta/

2 - http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-returns-seized-domains-to-stream...

I'll tell you what will happen. I would pay for it! tunes.io is great!

Grooveshark is amazing. They have the best library out there hands down. Yes, they got it through piracy yadda yadda but they have more music than any of the legit services out there (I pay $9.99 for rdio per month..).

The thing is that I can find label music on Grooveshark (iTunes top 500 sort of stuff) but I can also easily find the most obscure stuff you can think of. So fan remixes, and regional music (Indian music, Pakistani music, Lebanese music, etc. etc.). The other services out there have a LONG way to go to make that happen.

Maybe the rich are more comfortable with taking more. Or the notion of 'I deserve more'. Maybe that's why they got rich ? Maybe pushing the boundaries is what it's all about - whether that means not stopping for pedestrians - or taking more candy ?

MtGox has put a lot of bitcoin users at huge risk. I've had a huge USD withdrawal from Mtgox pending for over 7+ weeks now (8 weeks on 21st September).

Every single time I email them asking how much longer it's going to take they just get back to me saying "We don't know, a few more weeks." It's incredibly frustrating! They always offer to cancel my withdrawal and credit the funds back to my Gox account (so I can buy BTC at their inflated rates ? Nu-uh!).

Another offer they made me after a lot of back and forth was a 5% fee on my withdrawal (for a 7 day turn around time). That is ABSOLUTELY insane. Imagine a $100k withdrawal - you'd be paying $5,000 as fees on that. OUCH!

So here I am (along with possibly tons of other bitcoin users) with my money stuck in Gox. I already started using other trading platforms but I have to somehow retrieve this cash... Maybe I'll just take a hit and convert back to bitcoin and move my BTC out ? I don't know.. there's about a 10% price difference between Gox and other exchanges. So I'd lose 10% if I were to convert back to Bitcoin now, sell them on another exchange and cash out there.

Gox has lost a LOT of customers because of their behavior so far.. it's only a matter of time before they lose all of them.

I just wrote a script to do the follow/unfollow thing myself. When tweetadder removed their auto follow/unfollow system due to pressure from twitter - there weren't any other options left in the market.

So, I ended up doing exactly what I should've done long ago myself. Wrote a python script to connect to the twitter api and do the exact same thing. Sure, it's not as interactive as tweetadder [no excel style tables of who was followed, etc.] but it works fine for me. Most importantly, it'll continue running on my Linode even while my own computer is off, so it runs 24x7x365. Works pretty well :] The other advantage is that I don't really pump through an unrealistic number of followers per day so I fly much lower than twitter's API limits. This doesn't attract any attention and works better in the long run.

Also, at least for the niches I use it in this is an extremely effective method of getting very high quality followers.

EDIT: For those who are unfamiliar with this kind of software - this is a pretty simple method to gain a lot of followers. Run twitter searches on things relevant to your niche, follow people who tweet about those things, some of those people will follow you back, unfollow the ones who do not follow you back - gain net followers. (some niches turn out very high quality followers with this method..) There was software that automated this for you (say, you could run auto searches and follow 200 people a day) but twitter barred these companies from allowing automatic functionality sometime earlier this year..

Not only that but facebook may block your account at a whim. Happened to me once for posting 'explicit pictures'. The picture was not even explicit, apparently something tripped their automatic 'skin detection system'. But the result ? I couldn't log into any 'facebook connected' sites.

Better to create separate accounts on each site and minimize dependencies. Also, if you lose your facebook password, it's just your facebook account that'll potentially get affected.

I have to say here that I've been impressed with both the price and performance of Cloudfiles.

I was using S3+Cloudfront for a long time and with cloudfiles my bills pretty much HALVED.

What made the difference ? GET request pricing. Amazon S3 charges for each get request on an object, so with millions of requests on small objects, you get hit pretty hard.

Also, Akamai seems to be really fast :)

Not only that. Imagine Super Mario with just touchscreen controls. It would be a disaster. That would hurt them too!

Nintendo makes gaming hardware and software. Apple makes multipurpose hardware and software. These two worlds are meeting right now with some intersections that are great i.e. Cut the Rope, Tiny Wings, Ridiculous Fishing, etc. - but the really great titles have all been very 'casual'. Eventually these worlds will probably collide but Nintendo's firmly decided that now's not the time for that, for them.

I don't have any trouble with that as long as they keep producing great hardware. And has anyone seen the handheld console business lately ? They are ruling those numbers these days, so why the criticism ?

The problem with this whole premise is that iOS i.e. the iPhone/iPad are assumed to be great platforms for gaming. Maybe this will change with the new gamepad options in iOS 7 but iOS devices so far have not been really good for gaming. Personally, I found several interesting games on iOS but all of the ones I enjoyed playing were strictly in the 'Casual and fun' category. There's something about the pure touchscreen interface that doesn't work for me. (maybe I'm old fashioned and the new generation of gamers are okay with just touchscreens)

This isn't to say that iDevices aren't viable gaming platforms - the hardware does have the punch. Could Nintendo make more money by releasing games on iOS ? Yes. Should they ? Well, I don't know if Mario for iOS will get the same kind of reviews it gets on their platforms. Do they want to take that kind of risk with their flagship icon/mascot ?

I know that Square Enix did pretty badly with the Final Fantasy re-releases on iOS. I couldn't take the controls.

Also, Nintendo makes money on hardware. Why forget that ?

I find the following questions interesting:

Why don't other major game publishers, who are ONLY in the business of making software, make kick ass games for iOS ? Why are we begging/criticizing Nintendo for not making games on a platform that most AAA publishers are rejecting anyway ?

I feel like I should share a story here. The fight against spam is becoming a serious problem for legitimate businesses.

I've suffered from the same malware issue earlier. Since we use ad networks for advertising it works as follows. 1 ad network has about 3000 different ads running in different locations. If any of those domains get compromised and blacklisted and Google notices that you served something from that domain - BOOM! You're on stopbadware.org and need to get your website reviewed. You block the ad, and apply for a review. To their credit, it takes about 24 hours for the whole process (review happens, they delist you, Google caches update, etc.). However, for 24 hours anyone who comes to your site or clicks on a google result for you, or clicks anywhere to come to you - Gets a massive warning. The cost in terms of lost revenue and reputation damage are almost incalculable. This has happened to me in the past, several times. I have severed relationships with several ad networks and yet this keeps happening - even with the most reputable networks and you try to stay ahead of the curve but if you fall behind even a bit, you may get blacklisted again. All this for a site that makes maybe $200/month.

Another problem I faced was with SURBL. It's a spam blacklist that works on a bizarre system. Basically if they find your domain name beind spammed around the internet (it could be anyone else doing it) they will blacklist you. What's worse is that providers like bitly, facebook, etc. use the SURBL blacklist. So what happens ? Well, one day someone goes and spams your domain on internet forums, etc. SURBL picks up on it. Then, suddenly all your facebook links, bitly links shared on twitter, etc. start showing warning pages. Basically someone clicks on your link on facebook and gets a page saying "This site may harm your computer". Ditto for Bitly as well.

I tried to get delisted but no one at SURBL would respond. I kept trying to get in touch through their online form but no one responded for 2-3 weeks. Finally, I did a whois on the domain, found the admin contact and emailed him. I also sent him a text on his phone. At last after about 4 weeks of being on SURBL I managed to get delisted.

That. Was. An. Ordeal.

This in my opinion is absolutely unacceptable. Spam blacklists do have a responsibility to be correct in their assessments. And if they do have a false positive for any reason, they should have a streamlined resolution process. Unfortunately, the internet is the wild west and shooting before asking questions appears to be quite acceptable in these parts. I recognize that a lot of this is an attempt to protect users but when I open my mom's PC, I still see a bunch of browser toolbars, bookmarking widgets, etc. etc. (malware, right ?) Folks are still getting phished. This fight needs to be rethought.

There's an infinite performance gain for browsers that have javascript turned off or use noscript.

Other than that, I'd say that doing this kind of stuff in CSS would by default be much faster in a web page context.

I have to agree. I spent two days in Berlin this week and went to the Holocaust memorial, etc. I was impressed with the way these things are talked about with such openness - to make sure that this stuff never happens again. Also, I've traveled to several european countries and found Germans to be quite open minded regarding race, religion, etc. since I think the past has a lot to do with that. Happy that the german education system and culture appears to have a strong culture of 'learning from mistakes'. Clearly that isn't the case for the US with Vietnam, Afghanistan and now Iraq.

That's a good point but don't assume that the CIA/US-govt is above bribing or even threatening/blackmailing agencies in foreign countries. They do this all the time!

Are you czech by any chance ? I think it's a great place and completely understand why your people would be against government surveillance. The days of asking random people for IDs just to make sure they aren't spies still aren't forgotten there.

This is a really interesting problem that needs to be solved. We need some sort of P2P secure protocol to exchange keys between people. Bypassing all sorts of stuff and connecting directly and sharing over an encrypted channel. This sounds really tough the way the internet works right now but I think solutions will come up now that there is a real need for them.

I find the idea really interesting. And the portuguese startup called crowdprocess seems to be down with this stuff.

I just think that charity would be a great angle to it. How about you donate your CPU cycles for charity ? Companies that need to use large scale parallel processing use the service, your browser does the client side processing and the money that the gets paid by companies goes to charity minus running costs.

Now that would be beautiful. CPU cycles for charity!