rosenjon

I was thinking about this same thing recently when I had to do a change of address. It seems like there is a lot of room for innovation around postal mail. I think 80% of the mail I get should be send electronically. If there was a pointer, like you're talking about, you could opt-in to electronic only delivery of mail, and the sender of the mail could then electronically deliver the message straight to the recipient. This would be convenient for both sides of the transaction.

You could try this out. http://www.random.org/clients/http/

Of course, there is a trust issue with this service potentially. However, supposedly, they use a random noise technique that is "true random".

The biggest problem with NDAs that I've come across is that often people want to slip non-compete type clauses into them. If it is a straight up non-disclosure agreement, it's going to cost the company more to sue you than it would ever be worth to enforce the NDA, so practically it doesn't have much effect. Of course, if the company in question has huge resources, you might want to be more circumspect.

This looks awesome. I want one.

How far can it fly on the battery it ships with?

It's a simple coding test that asks you to write s program that prints Fizz, Buzz or FizzBuzz, usually depending on the multiple of some number. I.e. multiple of 3 print fizz, multiple of 5 print buzz, multiples of both 5 and 3 print fizzbuzz. Usually it will ask you to do this for numbers from 1 to 100, or something like that.

It's basically a way to weed out people who don't know how to write any code.

Grubhub did raise $50M a couple years ago: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/20/food-delivery-search-engine...

While not a direct indicator of success, I assume this means they are posting some encouraging numbers.

I think a lot of restaurants don't join these services, because it costs them money on each order, and they have to find a way to deliver the food, which is a distraction. For this reason, these services sometimes have the least common denominator in terms of the restaurants that are willing to deliver (i.e. restaurants that don't get enough real world traffic).

What evidence do you have that these services aren't popular, and how do you define popular?

Was that actually Linus Torvalds? I just assumed it was someone trolling as him. For web scraping, PhantomJS is much better than Beautiful Soup or any xml parsing library. Lots of stuff happens in JS these days, so you need programmatic access to the DOM to really grab data efficiently. In fact, lots of sites hide important values inside JS in order to thwart libraries that post-process html/xml like Beautiful Soup.

What might those be? The check cashing and bill pay mentioned are already offered for free by banks. Diversion of junk mail marketing $ into "effective methods" of marketing is pretty cryptic. I think creating some online equivalent of postal mail would be interesting (there are things like notarized letters, etc that still seem to require snail mail), but I don't see how this service as currently implemented really does anything novel. Scanning your postal mail is tedious and cost ineffective...whether it's done by a startup or not.

I know some people who did it. If you want, I can connect you.

I really like the part where he talks about how companies have forgotten that employees are human beings. So true in so many cases.

Any business is about balancing cost structure with revenue potential. For an e-fax service, once you invest in the initial infrastructure (and these days, there might not even be much fixed cost investment.... link together Twilio and a website for example), you are probably making money at $10 a month per customer. So it doesn't really matter that fax usage may be decreasing...there are still lots of people using fax machines and you make more money than it costs you to run the service.

My point with the mail pickup thing was that they could never make it scale. Their costs will kill them in the short and long term...even if they get a lot of customers. That is why the e-fax service works and the mail service doesn't.

Got it. Makes sense now. I like that idea. I struggle with some of the same issues. Just get it out there and iterate...

"It’s been one month since I decided to try launching a product with the goal of generating $5 in profit."

I'm confused. Why is this a challenge?

That's just to pay the pickup guy. You have to pay for gas. And the costs of operating a batch scanning facility for mail. And most mail is not of uniform size and does not have uniform contents, so you end up having to manually open and scan the items.

It's totally unreasonable. The only place it makes even a hint of sense to do this is at the Post Office, before it goes to the actual customer. The customer could then choose scan, shred or deliver.

Maybe I'm just not clever enough to get it. But this just seems ludicrous to me.

This idea just doesn't seem to want to die.

I saw an investor presentation for Earth Class Mail back in the day. They would scan the front of your mail, and then you could choose which items to have them open. They would then have to manually open and scan the items you instructed them to open at additional cost.

Earth Class Mail blew threw most of their funding (http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2011/01/earth_class...) and rebooted with a different focus.

I don't see how this company plans to run a courier service to collect your mail from random places, then scan it, for $5 a month. The economics make 0 sense.

More importantly, snail mail is dying off. This is like building a business to make your horse and buggy move faster just as the automobile is being developed.

I would find an open source project you find interesting and hack on that for a while. It will allow you to learn from code that others have written, while also creating your own.

I ran a website a while back that ran on TikiWiki, and I learned a lot by hacking on its internals. I think it's hard to start from scratch, so seeing other people's working code can be useful. However, partly it's personal preference also. There is a downside to open source, which is that you might start off learning bad habits or learning from poorly written code.

Chase has solid online tools, and lots of branches in the U.S. If you keep at least $7500 in your account (check this figure...it has been changing, but I think this is right), there is no monthly fee. They also offer solid business credit cards and other services that will scale with your business.

I don't know about offshore. One of the advantages of using them in the U.S. is that there are lots of branches to cash checks and meet with your banker if you so desire. If I was offshore, I might go for something that has a local branch, but also is a big name (i.e. HSBC, etc).

There is a real danger that other people see what Aaron did, and the resulting response, and conclude that the most effective activism is martyrdom/suicide. I think Jeff was trying to push back against this idea with his post, while also taking responsibility for not doing more to help Aaron while he was alive. He also points out that activism frequently coincides with jail time, and that the most effective activists (ie MLK), frequently end up there.

The point of your article seems to be that Jeff Atwood should stick to coding, because he isn't an activist and can't comprehend how bad being on the wrong end of our flawed criminal justice system can be. "Jeff Atwood is apparently saying that Aaron Swartz was taking an underhand route to escape the consequences of his activism, and that he was being a bad activist in so doing."

Let's be frank. Jeff Atwood is saying you shouldn't commit suicide. At no point does he characterize this as an "underhand route"... that is your language. But furthermore, I agree with Jeff Atwood. You shouldn't commit suicide. Even if the corrupt and incompetent federal government charges you with 50 years in prison for downloading journal articles. Don't commit suicide.

So I don't really understand why you're piling on Jeff Atwood. In the past Jeff Atwood has deserved some piling on for his writings... this is not one of those times.

The discussion of the TOS kind of obscured the real question I was trying to ask, which is "What are users of this API allowed to do with the image data?"

The API provides a link to the image, which is probably perfectly legal, but the site that displays that image in, say, an ad for a product on a non-Amazon website may be infringing. I'd like more clarity on this particular aspect of this api.

I think the problem is that this is really hard to do. All-in-one devices more often than not don't do anything well, because they are trying to do everything.

This is one of the reasons Windows 8 is so confusing. It's your good old windows experience. No wait, it's a brand new tablet interface. You can install Metro apps... but you can also install existing apps...as long as they never interact. It's meant to be used with a touchscreen....but also with your keyboard and mouse. It does everything, but nothing well.

I'm not saying you couldn't have a phone that doubles as a laptop, that doubles as a desktop, that doubles as a video game device. But I think it's really hard to make it coherent.

So the terms of service answer this question in a vague way. Basically, they say you aren't allowed to use this data for any commercial purpose. But who is going to want to use this data for anything other than commercial purposes?

How You Can Use the Service Semantics3 grants you only a limited license to access and make use of the Service for your own personal, non-commercial purposes. This license is the only license to the Service granted by Semantics3 unless you have a separate written agreement with Semantics3 or there are Additional Terms applicable to your use of a particular feature, resource or other portion of the Service. This license does not include any resale or commercial use of the Service, its contents or any derivatives. You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes any portion of, or access to, the Service without the express prior written consent of Semantics3.

You may not download any data or other resource made available as part of the Service, except for temporary system caching necessary for your own personal, non-commercial use of the Service in accordance with the TOS and applicable Additional Terms, if any, and not for further distribution or transfer to others, without the express prior written consent of Semantics3. You may not--and you agree not to--modify, reformat, copy, display, distribute, transmit, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer or sell any information, products or services obtained from the Service, except in accordance with the TOS and as set forth in applicable Additional Terms, if any, or otherwise agreed in writing with Semantics3. Additionally, except as set forth in applicable Additional Terms, if any, or otherwise agreed in writing with Semantics3, you may not: frame or mirror any part of the Service without the express prior written consent of Semantics3; forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any content transmitted through the Service; create a database or dataset by systematically downloading and storing content from the Service; intentionally or unintentionally violate any applicable local, state, national or international law and any regulations having the force of law; use any robot, spider, site search/retrieval application or other manual or automatic device to retrieve, download, extract, copy, index, "scrape," "data mine" or in any way gather information, content or other materials from the Service or reproduce or circumvent the navigational structure or presentation of the Service. Any unauthorized actions taken by you or by any third party on your behalf automatically terminates any and all permissions or licenses granted to you by Semantics3.

Very cool! This could be really useful for something I'm working on.

I noticed in the example queries on your site, the data that is returned looks like it is being piped pretty much exclusively from Amazon. For example, every image url is an Amazon url. Have you licensed this data from Amazon? Otherwise, any customers who use this info on their website are effectively ripping off Amazon's product data, and could be exposed to legal issues. For example, would it be kosher to download an image and use it on your own site?

I'm trying to understand the terms under which this data is being provided and whether it is worth it for me to buy a subscription to your service.

True, and I commend you for putting it out there and iterating.

If there was one suggestion I might have on where to go next, it would be improving fine grained control of item placement (as alluded to in my original comment). No one has done this well, and it is one of the things that makes coders say "screw it, I'll just do it with CSS", and non coders say "screw it, I'll hire a designer/programmer.

My girlfriend was working late at her office one night, and I stopped by to hang out. I got bored and decided to write a little app that cycled through pictures and printed things she frequently said when you hit a button. I uploaded it onto her iPod. It was corny and built in 30 minutes, but she loved it and still talks about it. For non-techie people, having their own app is pretty cool, no matter how primitive.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but wouldn't this be the ultimate tool of the "security state". It can literally record everything you see, and most likely track wherever you are. I realize our phones have some of these capabilities, but this seems to take it to the next level in a big way.

I appreciate the effort. I think there have been many attempts to do this (wordpress, wetpaint, wikia, etc). I have yet to see one that really impressed me.

I think it's hard to balance the ability to create what you want, with the ability to have enough structure so the site isn't just a random collection of stuff. It's also hard to build a gui that allows non-coders to have fine grained control over the display.

Right now, I feel like this leans too far to the unstructured side, where it's hard to figure out what to use it for. I also find the controls to be kind of cryptic and difficult to use.

Another way to look at this is that PHP enabled you to build a website with 100,000 users with little to no programming knowledge. I doubt it would have been possible to hack on the same forum if it was built in C and needed to be compiled to run.

These debates come up all the time here. PHP is a really good introduction to programming, and for people who aren't programming just for programming's sake (i.e. want to build something), it provides the easiest entry point to do that without a formal CS background. It provides a shallow end for self-taught programmers.

As for it spoiling your future programming efforts, I don't see why that should be the case. It doesn't prevent you from learning strong typing, strict OO, pointers, etc. That just takes the intellectual curiosity to go beyond your comfort zone.

If name dropping high profile people is an important part of your businesses marketing strategy, then it seems reasonable to pursue that <i>if it leads to more revenue/profit</i>

I think OP's issue relates to the weird, self-referential culture of Silicon Valley, where success is measured in buzz and money raised. It goes something like:

Build free software product -> ? -> profit

where ? = Get lots of buzz/hype, grow userbase quickly, raise VC money

Or course, this is similar to another business plan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts

Nice post. I'll take revenue and profitability over media hype and "it" status any day of the week. It's kind of shocking how many early stage companies have absolutely no plan for revenue/profit, and point to outliers like Facebook and Twitter as their playbook for success. There are meaningless debates about 10 millions users being the new 1 million (http://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-users-is-not-the-n...). To me, it is just indicative of a pervasive sickness in early stage tech. Remember, it doesn't matter how many users you have unless you can monetize them.

I never would have thought that Opera had $155 million to spend on an acquisition. Does their browser make any money?