thetrumanshow

Great question. The biggest change comes from the per-CPU-hour to per-instance-hour transition. My most popular gadget consumes minimal CPU (spent lots of time optimizing this) but uses anywhere from 29-50 instances. Why? Well, to give you an idea, my midday peak traffic is around 160 requests per second.

Indeed ads aren't possible at all. Google purges gadgets from its gadget directory that wrap any kind of ads.

I would not have upvoted this, except it wasn't written by some paranoid academic... it was written by a (paranoid) software engineer.

When I tell close friends and family what I do for a living, any more I tell them that the core of my job as a software engineer is to reduce the amount of people required to perform business functions. At the very least, it is valid to consider the repercussions of this at scale.

For me, procrastination often comes from overestimating the pain involved in performing a task (fear). To overcome it, I promise myself I'll just "take a look at the problem", then I convince myself that I'll just do this quick small task (ex: change a label, do a lookup query) and stop, but pretty soon, I see that this isn't scary at all... and I JDI.

Edit: Oh, you said 'intangible' benefit and you mentioned this in the context of negotiation... gee, I can't think of an intangible benefit that can be negotiated. Can you negotiate that the company should have a strong, recognizable brand and hires top-notch people? Those are intangibles that make a difference, because I care strongly about the brand that I stamp on my resume. Titles could be negotiated, I suppose... but there are so many small companies with VPs of XYZ (title inflation), that titles are only meaningful if the company has a strong reputation already.

Stuxnet is so incredibly scary that I would be afraid that the thing would come alive during the dissection... like a scene from Independence Day.

You have taken the high ground sir. Therefore, I surrender. :)

Ahem: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/... :)

Just sayin'. But, to your point, yes I would welcome a world where all the ultra low-fi junk would disappear and where there was less noise in the app marketplace... like 2003, except with today's consumer awareness.

But the exact opposite will happen. Right now, our peers are building tools to allow ever lower-fidelity apps to enter the marketplace, that is, enabling less and less qualified people to try their hand at building products.

I have yet to find the saving grace in this situation. I see two paths: 1) create tools to help people build crap apps, and make money while I can, 2) move up the value chain, and make money while I can.

Yes. So, this is why you should never trashcan your projects. Keep them alive and keep iterating on them (track them with analytics). Also, keep trying new things. If over time the number of people using them is > 0 (and growing, albeit slowly), then they are probably assets.

If you are less aimless and want to get strategic, make sure all of the projects center around some addressable market for which you can eventually take a shot at building a genuine product.

I am so incredibly horrible at estimation that I bid more with emotion.

If I find the project very interesting and I can fall in love with building it, the client is going to get a good deal. Boring or otherwise tedious projects engender some stone-cold, take-it-or-leave-it negotiation. I mean, this is my free time.

Edit: Nevermind that extra bit, however true. :)

Just a trickle of cashflow, and it took ~2 years of generating enough traffic from various sources (other projects) to drive the trickle that I have now. For a ballpark, if the current growth is sustained, the trickle should be enough to buy a car in just over a year.

The concepts for the things I am building now were distilled from several other failed ventures. The choices were based on the projected market sizes.

My last 3 side-projects (while working fulltime at BigCo): $750, $750, $2700

Over time, I have become less and less interested in these kinds of side-projects as I have become more focused on owning the upside of my own products. But, its occasionally nice to get paid for my late-night coding adventures.

Its also possible to quit your job and still only build a half-baked company. At least you can call yourself a startup by this standard.

This smacks strongly of someone who is fostering elitism.

I also did a stint in SecondLife, trying to build web-enabled in-world products and/or build web services that would take Linden dollars for payment. Probably made $600 in revenue.

It was my Artix Phase.

I saw this blip as well. Spreedly was telling me it couldn't talk to my server for around 17 minutes. 8:04pm-8:21pm PST

I hope that Blogger does such a great job of this revamp that they begin to attract users who would otherwise choose Wordpress.

If they do this, they will have an excellent platform that developers may consider returning to.

My dad said this to me at a particular low point in my life, perhaps its relevant: "This hard time you're going through right now is just the way life is for you right now at this moment. For better or for worse, life is always changing, and things WILL NOT be the same tomorrow as they are today." ... I always drew encouragement from that when the chips were down.

Take care.

I went through a phase where I just HAD to have a certain girl in my life to make my life complete. I endured sooo much pain because of it.

Anyway, I only say this because, in retrospect, I think it was all just biology. If, despite your emotional state, you can just manage to wrap your head around that for a second, then maybe it will help you.

Keep going the way you're going as long as you're enjoying the ride. On the other hand, don't wait for forever until you find the time to commit to a relationship. They can be very rewarding, and you should definitely try to have that experience at some point in your life.

I must be in it, because I have rarely seen a downside to using AE. Here's the nature of my apps:

1) Extremely simple or very flattened data-model 2) Few writes, TONs of reads (I peak at 150 requests/second every day) 3) The occasional DeadlineExceededError causes me little or no headache. For some people this would be frustrating.

Also AE is awesome as a CDN. The latency is very tolerable for static assets.

It will aways be harder to attract/keep women on a dating site than it will be to attract/keep men. That is why almost ALL advertising for dating sites on TV is targeted at women, IMO.

Further, if you start with a domain like inlu.st, you are eliminating the % of women that actually care about long term relationships over one night stands. That is a very large %.

Just my opinion. I have no data for you.

I prognosticate that inlu.st will have an easy time attracting at least one of the two sexes as users.

Now, which one will that be? Hmmm..

Also, the upvote is a good way to bookmark something to read later (ie. upvote => saved stories). That has to account for some of it.

To answer your first question, you should simply benchmark against the average Mechanical Turk worker's ability to classify links. Build a set of tests from the workers and every time you update your algorithm, you'll need to run against the dataset to see if you've improved anything.

For the second question, your product would be most valuable as an aid to contextual advertising (what ads should I display?), and its possible that you could charge per 1K requests. I have a need for this myself, so I would be happy to be a beta-tester.

Wait, they're booking you on consulting gigs to get revenue for a startup company (with probably zero valuation) and you're the only technical guy doing the work? Red flag!

Edit: The point is, unless you are trying to earn money to match a monetary investment they've already made in the company, it doesn't make much sense. You could be pocketing the consulting $ yourself.

A BIG fight is brewing, and NetFlix is summoning allies to its cause. If they don't, the ISPs will eventually have their way anyway. So, while I agree, I think NetFlix has almost no choice but to go down this path.

I respectfully disagree. This is a fantastic move by NetFlix.

NetFlix knows that the ISPs are already pissed at them and are moving to throttle them, so they fire back by showing consumers which of the ISPs are a better fit for their NetFlix viewing habits. NetFlix is flexing its muscle a bit here to show it can redirect customers to choose different ISPs and affect their bottom line.

Fire up another poll and link to it here.

I have a similar experience. I work full time for a BigCo, so I have to work at finding spots off campus where I can go and comfortably code for an hour or so during lunch. It has been a non-trivial venture, living in a not-so-tech-friendly area.

After a while, I become apathetic to the place I am working at over lunch and need to move to keep interest... else I will just decide to skip the offsite work and sit at my BigCo desk and vegitate.

Ah, and I too would have been rejected, if nothing else than for poor reading comprehension. :{

ok, added.