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danielhon Ask HN: Can you sell small non-scaling startups?

Of course you can sell a small business, the question is at what price. If your potential for growth is limited, you won't get a Twitter-like valuation, but if your business is solid and profitable, someone might be willing to pay a couple times your earnings.

danielhon Show HN: Final Touch

A great idea, both the app and this post!

Unless the unobstrusiveness is the main selling point, I would drop "A small unobtrusive app that allows you to" from the description and just go with "Achieve unrivaled precision with your mouse". You could list the fact that it is unobstrusive further below.

danielhon How to construct a web developer in twelve months

All items on the list sound reasonable, but I think it should be ordered the other way around. Begin with play and build.

If you spend to much time on reading and research on the beginning without actually getting your feet wet you might get overwhelmed.

danielhon The end of the IT department

I'm not a big fan of prohibitive IT departments, but this article is probably as biased as you'd expect an article from a major SaaS provider to be.

I witnessed the shift from a very restrictive environment (central SVN accessible only through VPN, all authenticated through Active Directory, limited access to servers) towards "the cloud" (Google Docs, Github, AWS, etc) at my last employer. While the latter has it's advantages, but it's not all rainbows and unicorns.

One major issue is user management. I quit yesterday (self employed now, yeah), who ensures that my accounts gets deactivated on all these services? With a centralized approach, it's just one click.

danielhon What Toy Apps would you write in order to learn a language?

How do you ensure that you learn the style specific to a certain language and not just literally translate from a language you already know?

E.g. in Java, you would probably solve problem 1 with a for loop, while you could use a generator expression in Python.

danielhon Can you use PHP without frameworks nowadays?

He already did:

easy rollbacks to previous versions if a deploy went awry, separate static media serving (because it's faster), load balancing and the like

Other things that come to mind are database migrations, running tests before deployment, pushing code to multiple servers etc.

It is probably a good idea to automate all these tasks.

Yes, with an application server you might have to reload the code, but it doesn't really matter, because thats just one step of your automated deployment.

And if you use an opcode cache you probably have to restart the server with PHP anyway.

danielhon World's worst hacker

That makes sense, as there was no attempt to run it.

I guess one should be really careful before calling someones actions stupid. Lesson learned.

danielhon World's worst hacker

A script kiddie [1] hacks into a computer and goes out of its way to demonstrate its ignorance by doing stupid things like downloading a file, but being unable to locate it or downloading Windows Service Pack on what seems to be a *nix system.

Luckily, the hacked computer wasn't a real computer but a honey pot [2] and everything the script kiddie does is recorded for our amusement.

It's a bit like watching a bank robber sporting a big gun without knowing which way to point it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_kiddie [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_%28computing%29

danielhon Using external APIs to improve search

Interesting, thanks!

One suggestion: I would move the note You can test regexp using DuckDuckGo further to the top. IMHO that's a killer feature!

danielhon Using external APIs to improve search

Thanks for that post, I didn't know Qwerly, that might come handy.

I wonder how DuckDuckGo decides which API to query. Gabriel, could you shed some light on this?

danielhon Waking up at 5am, my nearly 1 year review

I usually get up around 7:30, so getting up at 6:00 is somewhat special. Maybe the effect wears down once you get used to rising early.

danielhon Waking up at 5am, my nearly 1 year review

From my experience, the big advantage of waking up early to hack on a side project vs. staying up late is that I'm way more focused in the morning. If I manage to drag myself out of bed early, I don't waste the time with mindless surfing.

YMMV, but it is worth giving it a try.

danielhon How hackers ruin everything with computers

You bring up an interesting factor I didn't really take into account. It probably makes no economic sense to run a car for 1M miles considering the high costs of labour. The question is whether it is possible to run a modern car for so long with somewhat reasonable maintenance, or if it will die with a fatal engine failure.

We will see in about 15 years, whether the modern taxis of today still serve as taxi in lesser developed countries.

Fun anecdote: I recently sat in an old BMW taxi (I guess early 80s). The mileage indicator showed about 50,000 km, which is way to little for any taxi. The indicator had 6 digits. My guess is that it reached 999,999 km, overflowed and started again at 0.

danielhon How hackers ruin everything with computers

Does anyone believe a modern Benz will be able to drive for 1,000,000 miles the way old ones regularly would? I don’t.

I think this has to do with the advances in material sciences and engineering. My theory is that parts in old cars were massively overengineered because the variation in quality was so high. If you wanted most of your cars to last 100,000 miles, you had to construct a car to last 1,000,000 miles. Nowadays, you can probably get away with constructing a car to last 200,000 miles.

Can someone with the right background comment on this train of thoughts?

danielhon Smyface.com - the status emoticon is back, updated, and fun

Thanks for verifying, it's working for me as well now. Apparently, I had JavaScript disabled. D'oh!

danielhon Smyface.com - the status emoticon is back, updated, and fun

Funny idea! The magic slider doesn't work in FF 3.6.13 on Mac OS X.

danielhon Piracy Doubled My App Sales

I think the piracy marketing effect works especially well for iOS because not all devices are jailbroken. If Alice jailbreaks her phone, and Bob doesn't, Alice can show Bob her pirated apps, but can't easily share them with him. If Bob sees somethings he likes, he must buy it.

The same might be true for game consoles, but probably not for PCs.

danielhon [dead]

Web-controlled or not, I wonder if it is legal in Georgia (or the US in general) to let firearms lie around unprotected?

And there must be giant hogs in Georgia, if you need a total of 6 shotguns to kill them.

danielhon Projects: hijack (Hijacking the iPhone earphone jack)

There is a guy who has about a dozen of apps in the store that (ab)use the headphone jack to power and control external hardware.

Among them is a laser pointer [1], a controller for RC power outlets [2] and countless others.

    [1] http://hmb-tec.de/iPhoneApps/LaserPointer.html
    [2] http://www.hmb-tec.de/HMB-TEC/Funksteckdose.html
    (Links are in German)

danielhon Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

I wonder why Slate offers their content under two almost identical URL schemes. At least they have a canonical link.

danielhon Chatroulette Founder Andrey Ternovskiy Raises New Funding: "50,000 Naked Men"

Keep in mind that 50k uniques/day doesn't translate into 30x50k uniques/months. There are probably some repeat visitors. Otherwise the world would at some point run of naked men.

Still, it's a non-trivial amount of highly targeted traffic.

danielhon Chatroulette Founder Andrey Ternovskiy Raises New Funding: "50,000 Naked Men"

I didn't mean to imply that they make 100,000$/mo of AFF. My point was that they probably redirect their adult traffic to something adult related and not to mainstream dating sites.

danielhon Chatroulette Founder Andrey Ternovskiy Raises New Funding: "50,000 Naked Men"

I think he sees that himself now: I think I would accept the offers now, because I'm much more educated about it.

Regarding the money: The article mentions redirecting these users to FriendFinder.com, that should probably read AdultFriendFinder.com. I find it highly plausible that this kind of traffic has a very good conversion rate on an adult dating site.

danielhon How to get your startup on Hacker News

Probably through the ads that are shown once you submit the form.

danielhon (Android) Developer Income Report #6

Regarding iOS development, keep in mind that even if you outsource, you still need an iPhone to verify the work. Maybe you can borrow a phone from a friend.

If you want to develop yourself, you don't need the latest hardware. A used Mac Mini is enough and should cost around 300€.

danielhon For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

Norton Disk Doctor to the rescue! Even if it couldn't save the data, you could reuse the floppy. They were expensive at the time.

Out of curiosity, I just googled for prices and it seems prices stayed about the same since I bought the last pack.

danielhon Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?

Same here. For me, the big time sink is not HN itself, but the articles. Thanks to Instapaper, I can postpone reading the long ones until I've time to kill.

danielhon Steve's story - Google employee #13

I have no proof that it is his blog, but I have also no reason to believe it isn't. And yes, it's a nice car!

danielhon Sorry, your “cool” webapp is probably not going to make money

Just because it's free doesn't mean people will use it. If you just want to create apps that people use you might still get disappointed, unless you enjoy the process of building or scratch your own itch.

danielhon Steve's story - Google employee #13

Well, he just wrote an inspiring blog post.

And he started the Warrior Heart Foundation to "inspire and empower people to live their dreams". Unfortunately, I can't find much about it except some videos of their participation in the Gumball rally.