dkuchar

no, it's pretty awful. but $200 isn't likely to solve it.

Arrington has had his own share of business drama as well:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/15/status-of-crunchpad-litigat...

didn't even know this one: "7. Aero Shake: Aero Shake allows a person to grab an application with their mouse, and “shake” it to minimize any open application window except the one they are holding with their mouse. Sometimes I have so many applications open at the same time; I just “shake” them all away (minimize them all at once) to keep my focus on what I’m doing in one application."

Out of curiosity, how would they know this? "Aero Snap has been used 150,957,478 times in the last month."

Doesn't seem like an estimate...

the santa claus/god realization could have been like 12 or 13, I don't remember exactly when I was told there was no santa, I'm estimating. I know I was three with the death thing, my parents remember me crying myself to sleep repeatedly moaning about it. of course they could be mistaken.

anyway, the ages were only there because I hadn't seen anyone referencing anything other than facts they heard recently. in reality nothing you've heard recently could be as earth shattering as the facts you learn when you're a kid that pull the veneer off your rosy fantasy world.

besides "you and everyone you know are going to die" at age 3, or "there is no santa claus" which logically led to "God is an imaginary friend for grown ups" at age 10.

The fact that we're all akin to lumbering flesh robots designed to help our genetic material persist. That was kind of humbling.

http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----Introducti...

I hate getting caught by link bait. "oh no SEO is irrelevant", I should read this to see why! No, I shouldn't.

We use vimeo, mainly because I like it's interface better than youtube's. But yes there's a small delay.

Massive. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492098

agreed about the documentation.

PayPal Adaptive Payments is pretty solid.

They chalk up more than $250 million in annual fraud losses as a cost of doing business - there's a network of fraud artists that have cut their teeth on the PayPal network.

Being the innovator, PayPal grew up with these fraudsters, building an in-house database of knowledge about how to handle them as they cropped up one by one.

If you're talking about building a PayPal competitor at this point, you're launching at a point when there isn't going to be as much investor interest in your startup combined with a mature fraud ecosystem prepared to shut it down.

And those are only the problems we know of.

couldn't remember the specifics. German - thanks for that and the rest of the details!

as my friend Mitch Lillie says, geographic isolation leads to linguistic conservatism. Iceland is another great example of this - I believe Icelandic is derived from middle-ages era Viking languages?

while that's a great idea in principle, in practice, no one's going to lend you $120k to invest in startups. If you've got the cash and you're looking to pay out of pocket, it's a nice idea. but to my knowledge the gov't doesn't over low interest loans for education-via-angel-investing.

My first business was incredibly similar to yours in terms of success. A partner and I share about $75K/year in profit, and at this point we only answer occasional technical support (no custom development or contracting).

Neither of us were looking for the additional contracting work that you take on, we instead regarded this as passive income, and took the liberty to travel and relax.

I've now moved onto a new (bigger/riskier) project full time (with another partner), with my month-to-month financial burden still being taken care of by this first business.

From my experience, what I'd suggest is that, if you haven't already, build out incredible demonstrations, tutorials, how-tos, videos, etc for your customers, in an attempt to render yourself as useless as possible (on the contracting side). Then I suspect (based on the particulars of your business), that you could just maintain the project for some amount of time, only fixing problems, enhancing support materials and answering technical support, while earning significantly more than the $25k you suggest.

I say some amount of time because these things don't last forever, especially if you aren't growing it. But to me this doesn't sound like a killer business - it sounds like some passive income that you can use as a stepping stone to the next big thing in your career.

So don't sell it. Round it out with a last big push, turn it into a solid source of passive income, and let it fuel your future endeavors.

If you want to talk about this more in private shoot me an email, it's in my account info.

yeah, that would be a good way to prove/disprove his worth for sure. he should put himself up against someone who charges even $50/hour with the same budget, then have the work judged by an impartial panel of experts.

2 hours of work from this guy: http://le.mu.rs/motherfucker/Index/Entries/2010/6/24_What_mo...

I meant the original article. Chatroulette hasn't been dead-pooled. The title was inaccurate and sensationalist.

link bait!

did anyone else notice the comments on the bottom where the author had never heard of stackoverflow? I think he wrote this article based on his preconceptions rather than reality.

A lot of what he says is true (developers who use Microsoft products are generally more willing to pay for software). but there are plenty of open source projects and a TON of online references - and there were even before the latest and greatest stack overflow came into existance.

Viacom won't take this lying down (it will set a hell of a precedent), but great win for YouTube and the future.

seen this before. it's funny. I always guess serial killer.

the more I read about evolution, emergence, etc, the more I start to feel that life is almost as common as rock, and not all that much more interesting. all it needs is a highly interactive environment of molecules. water and carbon works in our environment, and I'm sure there's other ways it can be brewed. carbon based life is likely to be the most common only because of the multitude of ways that it can be transfigured.

anyway, given the right set of conditions, which shouldn't be all that uncommon in the universe, life is a matter of time, not a stroke of luck. so, in my completely amateurish opinion, I think any planet that would be immediately inhabitable (by us) would already be inhabited. however, I'm sure there are plenty of planets, Mars even, initially barren (at this moment) that we could terraform to our purposes. as I alluded to in my first comment, we're natural born terraformers, and we've done that already (in this case for the worse) on this planet.

hawkings:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7...

Life on this planet is predicated on material transformation/consumption. that's what we do - we eat and excrete our environment. no reason to believe it would be fundamentally different on other planets.

I think he was being sarcastic.

Good analysis, and I agree with your conclusions.

wow i expected up-votes for this. jobs is one of the greatest innovators of our time. but he got completely destroyed by microsoft last time, and he's going to get similarly beaten by android and google.

yes

too expensive. square and the like make sense from the point that you already have a phone, and it's more peer-to-peer payments than a commercial solution.