girasquid

I've been using http://gdne.ws for this, but it's cool to see another service cropping up. I'll keep an eye on it.

Not quite - I replied to a comment just underneath yours that has been deleted. It was something along the lines of "don't start a content business, investors HATE content businesses".

You don't have to start a content business in order to take on investment - running something that aligns with your interests can be rewarding enough on its own. Optimizing for what investors like seems shortsighted.

I'm not sure if they have something exactly like this, but http://erlibird.com/ has gotten me pretty good feedback on projects before.

I'd be interested in using the data that came out of it as a result. If there was an easy way for me to contribute back I would be interested in doing that.

There are plenty of developers still actively producing and releasing games in Flash - the fact that it can cross compile to iOS, Android, and Mac/Windows desktop applications with a single codebase is pretty compelling.

Haxe and Unity also do this, but I would hesitate to call Flash a dead platform - it's just not the flavor of the month right now.

I've been teaching myself actionscript 3 so that I can build games - right now I'm working on a game where you run a pizza shop, because I used to like playing lemonade stand:

http://d.pr/i/zJh4

Today has mostly been spent working on getting some of my UI in order, although there's still a lot of work to do as I hammer down the design for that page.

No API, but someone has bundled up the scraping into a gem for you: https://github.com/speric/kindle-highlights

Not always though. I didn't get a degree but have had recruiters from both companies reach out to me based on work experience. Based on the conversations we had, it didn't sound like my lack of a degree was a big deal.

If you have the unique skills they're looking for, the top technology companies are willing to budge on the degree requirement.

You already accepted the offer from the second company. It's clear from the speed that the first company has been responding to your emails that they're either disorganized or not very interested in you - neither is a good thing for a potential employer.

In your shoes, I'd tell them that I'm grateful for the opportunity but have taken another position due to the delay and leave it at that.

Who are you pre-selling to? You still need those first five.

I was after people who used iTunes to listen to their music for Beathound (http://beathound.com), so I created a survey asking them about their listening habits and offered a $100 iTunes gift card as a reward in the hopes that folks filling it out would self-select based on how much they cared about the gift card. I posted a link to the survey in a handful of survey-oriented subreddits (/r/SampleSize is good) as well as some specific ones (like /r/music and /r/itunes).

I had them leave their email if they wanted to be notified of the survey results, and then when Beathound was ready to go I sent them a nice email that said "Thanks for filling out my survey! You didn't win the gift card, but [here] are the results, and [here] is what I built using them."

I had a terrible time giving the gift card to the person who won it, because they were in Australia and I'm in Canada - if you're going to give something away for your survey, make sure that you can easily do it internationally.

I built a service that tracks new music releases because I got sick of missing things from the artists I was interested in (http://beathound.com - iTunes only for now) - it only emails you at most once a week, so I use it generally once a week.

As it has grown, it's been interesting to observe the parts of it that I work on a lot (the parts I use - I just today fixed a bug in something that I kept seeing in my weekly emails) vs. the parts that get neglected because I don't see them as often.

Arq

You might try signing up on https://www.odesk.com/ - you'll probably want to stick to small projects to build up your reputation at first, but once you have a few under your belt you should be able to raise your rates and start bidding on larger projects as well.

There isn't really a set number for how many or how long they should take as far as I know.

Keep your job and start selling the product. Don't take investment capital unless you absolutely have to, and don't quit your job until your profits are high enough that you can do so comfortably. If you do it this way, you'll relieve some financial uncertainty as well as put yourself in a better position to negotiate should you raise money in the future (you end up saying "We have a profitable business" instead of "We have this thing we haven't sold to anyone yet").

In a lot of cases, the "performance" people care about when making language choice is "developer performance". People choosing Python feel (perhaps incorrectly) that they will be more productive and able to build things faster with that language than any of the other ones they considered.

Contrived example: If it will take you 8 hours to write something in Language A that takes 30 seconds to run, or 30 hours to write it in Language B and have it run in 15 seconds, which do you choose? If raw performance isn't the thing that's valuable to your company, maybe Language A is a better choice (even if it's slower than Language B).

This seems like it actually detracts from the PDF experience.

1) I can't search anymore

2) I can't click to get to the next page - I have to click the corner of the page and drag it over, which feels gimmicky after the first time.

3) I can't select any of the text in the demo to copy and paste it somewhere else

4) I can't zoom in other than by zooming in my entire browser screen

5) I can't click any of the links in the last page of the demo

Those are the issues I noticed after playing with it for a minute or so - what benefits does this give me as a user that outweigh those negatives?

There was at one point - Clutch (http://clutchio.github.io/) did it and then got acquired by Twitter. They've open sourced everything though (https://github.com/clutchio), maybe you can start researching from there.

Depends what you want. http://99designs.com is good if you need a logo.

How many billable hours would it take to make the $60/year this will cost you?

My first guess would be affiliate commission from the various services where you can buy the music.

I'm curious: if a gaming company were to distribute a game that had an option where you paid for it and an option where the client partitioned 10% of your capacity for mining (only while playing the game) - how many players would go for the free-but-mining-bitcoins option? If the game client was less greedy about the resources and everything was communicated up front, could this be a way to monetize free to play games without charging the player any real money?

They used to enforce that, but then relaxed the requirement a (year?) ago. Since then there's been a lot more marketing shots instead of screenshots showing up in app listings.

Right now it's iTunes only, but I'm doing a lot of research into what to support next.

Some of that research has led to new projects (http://magic-playlist.com puts music recommendations into your Rdio or Last.fm account), but all of them contribute to the overall ecosystem. I'm hoping to eventually support everything.

Beathound (http://beathound.com) is making between $50 and $100 a month in affiliate revenue from the various music stores. I'm working on rolling out some new features that will increase that.

You could try Erlibird - http://erlibird.com. The crowd is typically less technical than HN readers, in my experience.

I highly recommend CoSupport (http://cosupport.us/). They were great to get up and running with, and do an incredible job of fielding the simpler requests and learning from you for the more challenging ones (eventually they can even help with those).

This page seems really light on data - do you know how they decide which artists/albums get listed?

I second this - I built one of the competing services (shameless plug: http://beathound.com), and it seems like every day I find a new one (or a new one gets announced - like yours!).

I gave this a shot, and it's pretty cool - but it seems like some of the javascript is a bit superfluous, and I was confused by the interface. On this page: http://d.pr/i/e0hN - why are there no thumbnails? I was expecting that box to have a picture inside it (and I was expecting clicking it to take me somewhere).

On the New Music! page, I expected clicking on the album boxes (not just the thumbnails) to load up the albums for me to take a look at. It took me a second to figure out I needed to click on the thumbnails - and having to wait for something to load (Ajax, I'm guessing?) was a bit strange. I was expecting that click to be near instantaneous.

I'm sure the slow bits are just because you're getting hammered today - cool service, and good luck!