steveridout

It was a mix of cash and stock options which vested over a few years. There was a confidentiality clause in the contract so I can't be super specific. But I asked ChatGPT what a typical price per employee is in an acquihire and it gives the following answer. I'll just say that the common range it gives doesn't sound crazy to me.

> In general, the price per employee in an acquihire can range from $100,000 to over $1 million, with a more common range being between $250,000 and $500,000 per employee.

Not a ton of methodology behind it!

I started at $10 per year, then gradually raised prices as the product got better, always keeping existing subscribers happy by grandfathering them. At one point it was $4.99 every 3 months, which is the plan my mum is still on :-) For a brief time I offered a lifetime subscription for $100 and sold a few but felt uncomfortable offering to keep the service running forever with no further payments so killed it.

I ended up at $5 / month or $48 / year. It's possible I might increase it a bit more in future but for now I think it's better to keep these prices and try to grow user numbers instead.

One thing I noticed with some companies was that the yearly plan was very heavily discounted compared to the monthly one. To me that gave the impression of lacking confidence that monthly users will stick around long term, so I didn't want to do that.

Yeah I think it's true that popular mainstream consumer products tend to be cheap and highly polished, and that more niche products tend to be higher priced and less polished.

Sorry to hear that.

I imagine it would have been a lot harder in my case if we'd actually integrated Readlang with Duolingo, sharing user accounts and that kind of thing. Luckily it was quite separate. I was a little stressed dealing with accountants and tax stuff here in Spain, and worrying that the technical transfer would go smoothly. But dealing with Duolingo was super easy.

Hmmm... I'm actually not sure if I can talk about the numbers from the original sale in 2017. But I'll say that the original sale was paid partly in stock options which vested over a few years and ended up being worth a lot. And the price of the buy back was much much less than that.

Funnily enough, in the original sale I negotiated for more cash and fewer options. Luckily for me they only moved a little bit in my direction since the options ended up being worth much more.

Good question! There was a lot to do and I was kept busy just with internal communication, so didn't feel the urge to share externally so much. Also, getting outside attention didn't feel as important given my role at the company compared to when I was alone running my own project.

I actually remember asking them how restrictive they would be when it comes to sharing when I joined and they said they weren't as secretive as Apple, but that they weren't completely open about everything either. If I had had the urge to post anything I would have run it past people before publishing details about what our team was working on, and it would have probably been fine. But in the end, like I said, I was always busy and blogging fell by the wayside. (I was never a naturally prolific blogger anyway)

Yep, I've got nothing but good things to say about Duolingo :-)

It's mainly for intermediate and advanced learners who want to tackle longer texts. I originally made it so that I could read novels in Spanish.

Readlang may not ever be appropriate for complete beginners. But it could do better at providing stories written in simple language appropriate for beginners in specific situations like yours. Right now there is a public library of shared texts: https://readlang.com/fr/library, and a list of popular websites: https://readlang.com/fr/links. But you're largely left to your own devices to find content, which adds friction for new users and isn't ideal.

Tucan actually works in reverse compared to Readlang. Say you're a native English speaker learning Spanish. With Tucan you browse the English websites you're already used to browsing, and it'll automatically translate some of the words to Spanish to sprinkle in a bit of practice that fits within your normal routine. It's a nice idea (actually this is the first one I saw doing the idea: https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/3/2995523/google-language-im...) but for me it didn't stick. I found it weird to be learning isolated Spanish words out of their normal context, and pretty soon it just became annoying to have these Spanish words popping up everywhere. Maybe it works for some people though.

With Readlang the idea is that you read actual websites in the language you're learning. If you're learning Spanish you might read El Pais or BBC Mundo for example. And to aid you, you can click on the odd word or phrase you don't understand to get a translation in English. It's intended for intermediate and advanced learners. Unlike Tucan you need to seek out texts to read in your target language, and Readlang offers a list of popular sites in each language to help you there: https://readlang.com/es/links, but there's obviously more friction than something like Tucan which fits into your normal English language browsing routine.

Yeah, it was pretty easy. Relatively low offer and not much negotiating. From their point of view it wasn't worth maintaining. I'm just very happy they offered it back to me instead of shutting it down.

Hi! Steve here. Happy to hang around here for a while if anyone wants to ask anything! :-)

Good point! I just made the first mention of Readlang into a link to the website: https://readlang.com

It's a web-app and browser extension to help people learn languages by reading texts or websites in the language they are learning, get helpful translation hints and definitions to aid comprehension, and then to practice the new vocab with flashcards.

This blog post of mine hit HN and led to Duolingo's CTO and co-founder offering me a job back in 2016: https://steveridout.com/2016/01/04/readlang-3-years-as-a-one...

I joined them shortly after and a year later I sold Readlang to them. In 2021 Duolingo IPO'd and I'm now financially independent, which may not have happened if not for writing about it on my personal blog.

(Oh, and I really ought to write another blog post about buying Readlang back from Duolingo last month!)

> The price of Shared and Dedicated compute plans will increase by 20%.

Disappointing. My expectation is that compute should get cheaper over time, not more expensive.

As a long time Linode user this makes me nervous. Will give them the benefit of the doubt for now though.

I thought the same thing. Surely it must be a function of the prevalence of these fonts though. In a hypothetical world where 90% of text you read is in sans serif I'd have to imagine that this would tilt the readability study results in sans serif's favor. I wonder if the studies attempt to control for this somehow?

It's because it's not supported out of the box by the mathjs library I'm using: https://mathjs.org/

I agree that this would be nice.

This should now work regardless of your locale. Please let me know if you notice any more bugs!

Sounds cool, I was about to try this but it lost me (for now at least) with the .NET SDK requirement.

This is pretty cool!

There's no completely offline version. But if you don't sign in then none of your notes are sent to the server, they stay in localStorage in your browser.

Right now they are stored as plaintext on a VPS server (or in localStorage in your browser if you aren't signed in).

I was wondering whether encryption might be compelling as a premium feature if this ever got enough users to think about monetizing it in future. What do you think?

That was the inspiration for this site a few years back. I wasn't a Mac user at the time so couldn't even try Soulver myself but thought it was a cool idea.

I'm the creator of this site. It's a very nice surprise to see it appear here!

I created it a few years ago and recently added the ability to create multiple notes and to sync your notes to the server.

Interested to hear your feedback, please keep it coming!

EDIT:

Just adding that there are two secret features that you can enable via the browser's JavaScript console:

1. Change locale to change the number format used in the answer column:

  localStorage['locale'] = 'en-US'

2. Dark mode:

  localStorage['darkMode'] = 'true'

After running either of the above commands, refresh the tab for the change to take effect.

Thanks for reporting this, I'll work on it.

In the meantime, there's a workaround you can use to change the locale by entering the following in the JavaScript console:

  localStorage['locale'] = 'en-US'

> we all know that Musk has never in his life used a regular city Bus or even a train

I’m skeptical, and this CNBC article quotes Elon refuting it:

> According to Musk, he does, in fact, "actually love trains, most subways and London buses." From https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/elon-musk-versus-twitter-on-...

Nice work on the interactive elements in this guide, they're delightful!

I think it's useful as a counter to Postel's law.

Postel's law (or robustness principle) states that you should be liberal in what you accept, conservative in what you output. Hyrum's law shows the danger in being liberal in what you accept.

(Shameless plug: I've just made public an open source CLI flashcard app where the example deck includes a set of Hacker Laws including the aforementioned ones, you can try it here: https://github.com/SteveRidout/flashdown)

I'm working on an open source terminal based flashcard app called Flashdown which uses a simple plain file format both for storing both the card data and your learning progress.

I just made it public: https://github.com/SteveRidout/flashdown

I'm probably too late to this thread for many people to see this, but if you do and feel like trying it out, please let me know how you get on! :-)

I'm currently reading "Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant and was struck by this even earlier reference to a process of evolution by natural selection:

> Empedocles (fl. 445 B.C., in Sicily) developed to a further stage the idea of evolution. Organs arise not by design but by selection. Nature makes many trials and experiments with organisms, combining organs variously; where the combination meets environmental needs the organism survives and perpetuates its like; where the combination fails, the organism is weeded out; as time goes on, organisms are more and more intricately and successfully adapted to their surroundings.

Durant, Will. Story of Philosophy (p. 82). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

As a replacement for reminders I've been emailing myself and then using the snooze feature to hide it until later. It works but adds extra friction to creating the reminder and is very clunky.

I'd love it if someone could create a Gmail add-on which gets us closer to the ease of use of Inbox reminders.