bakhlawa

I think the Grandfather was making a different point. That because rewards cards = higher interchange fee for the merchant, this results in the merchant increasing fees on everyone (the payment networks prohibit charging a higher fee to only those paying with a credit card).

>>The money extracted by the credit card companies and Visa causes merchants to raise prices for everyone regardless of whether they have a rewards card or use a credit card at all.

>>This creates in effect a massive money transfer from the poor, who do not use rewards cards, to the rich consumers who do.

I did consider this but part of the appeal was learning a new skill…and proving to myself I could do it after 15 years! But outsourcing is an option.

What should I expect to spend and time to develop for a “straightforward” app? Any particular criteria to filter for if I was to go the outsource route?

Could be a web app, I see the use to be on a mobile device va desktop (think mindfulness/wellness app).

What is the current set of options to develop a web app (JavaScript, PHP, Python) that can be deployed as an iOS and Android app?

Very compelling and would be fun to learn something new. Need to research if the 3 month launch constraint can be accommodated or better to outsource. However the act of coding and learning again is very attractive. Thanks.

Pair up with a friend and learn/do together. It will help push through moments of frustration and a partner will serve as a check on giving up prematurely. Good luck!

You’ve already got a lot of great advice. I’ve been in the same position and would submit I’m still in the same spot. What has helped is “scratching an itch”, trying to do basic things. The feeling of accomplishing something, even small, is powerful and motivating.

One idea I didn’t see suggested is pairing up with a friend and working on learning/doing together. It will help push through when the learning gets overwhelming/frustrating and bring some joy back into the process. Good luck!

I’m sure there’s a case you can get for the Apple Card to prevent the scratches and premature wearing out

/s

But, I still 100% recommend Salesforce to companies when they ask about it. Why? Data liability. Yes Salesforce is expensive - but you are outsourcing the responsibility of dealing with sensitive data to Salesforce.

This is precisely the reason why my organization, a large Canadian FI on the commercial banking side, decided NOT to go with Salesforce. They couldn’t rationalize giving up the data and went instead with a MS Dynamics implantation. This was 10 years ago.

+1 StackOverflow remains a valuable resource but there has been a very clear shift in the responses from nurturing, supporting to snarky and mean. Perhaps it was the intention but I now think twice before posting a question and half expect the first few comments to be along the lines of "Duplicate", "What's with the lame use of <fill in blank>", etc.

It really sucks the fun out of coding but alas it has far more positives than negatives.

I couldn't help but wonder how much traffic is lost by online-calculator.com, the first search result...

Are there other use cases you can think of aside from tracking spammers that would incent your bank to invest in the overhead to maintain special/bogus card #s? (And what about bogus card #s used against legitimate vendors that get cheated out of money owed to them?)

really, like what?

I've always wondered if ddg's stated mission to respect privacy, etc. is in fact causing it to show worse results than Google...i.e., because Google tracks clicks, knows who from what region clicks on a link more often and ostensibly moves those results further up, don't they have better "signals" about what results to prioritize? It strikes me that ddg is handicapped in this regard as it ignores these signals that its competitors openly use.

Note: I frequent both ddg and google (more the latter as it's the default in my browser) but I've always wondered if ddg's results would be even better if the "ignored signals" were, well, not ignored.

This may just be a case of giving credit where none was necessarily due. The absence of sort may just be a victim of 37signal's own design philosophy of only including features that users want and repeatedly request thus causing them to float to the top of the queue. In the grand scheme of things, High Rise and Base Camp users probably have other more pressing feature requests / complaints that they would rather get implemented pronto.

Have the memory issues been resolved? Under Windows 7, it isn't uncommon to find an idle Firefox browser with a few low-activity tabs using up more than 1.5GB of memory. It's gotten to a stage where I have to restart the browser every couple of days...reminds me of when I had to this with my Windows PC! I've recently moved over the Chrome and while I miss Firefox, the browser is far less of a memory hog.

How novel! Many thanks Pete, I will read up and certainly consider it as a source for feedback.

Thks thorie, I've been thinking about adding a Tour and I agree it's required. The most challenging part is explaining the concept, and a tour would do the trick.

I'll think about making it free to get some critical mass. Not desparate for the $ but I figured one free credit at signup would give users enough to try it out for one event. But perhaps that's keeping people from trying it out.

I would love for you to try it some more. Your profile didn't have an email address but I'd love to set you up with a free unlimited account so you can try the full feature set. Can you contact me through the website with your email address so I can follow up with you?

Thanks for the feedback. The target audience comprises of people that actively create gift registries or wish lists today. E,g. it's common in US/Canada for the bride and groom to create a gift registry for their wedding ASKING for gifts they want. GiftBait solves this by letting friends decide what they want to get...so in effect it's quite a bit better than being told what to get. If the friend's gift gets selected, they know what to buy, or they can submit more gift ideas for the host to consider. And as a bonus: it lets the friend suggest gifts they can afford/would like to get vs. the host saying what they want.

<TL;DR> This is targeted at people that use gift registries today. If you don't, you admittedly won't see much use for it.

No one? I'll even take critical feedback...!

I like the A/B testing idea to narrow down to an industry where this concept would make sense. Weddings are just one industry to whom this would appeal (albeit a large one), however the concept could apply to other events as well, e.g. birthdays, house warmings, christmas gifts, etc.

Don't these online services all have the eggs in one basket problem? The likelihood of them getting hacked might be low, but the impact of such an occurrence would be very high (all passwords exposed).

Maybe I'm not getting it, but how is this different from putting a button/link on my site that just points to a "Coming Soon" page and using Google Analytics to track clickthroughs? And wait, all this for $9.99/month? I like the pricing table categories: starter, side dish, etc. cute.

That's great, congratulations. I took a look at your pricing page and you may want to consider putting the annual price in like terms, i.e. say $12/year instead of $0.99/month. When I read annual, I expect the price to be stated in that unit. Maybe you can tack on a "Pay for 6 months, get a year's worth of service if you get the annual plan" line somewhere.

Really like the page design, simple, uncluttered (at least the homepage). Are you using a template (link?) or did you write the css from scratch?

If you enjoyed this, highly recommend the following This American Life podcasts on the same topic.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/375/b...

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/t...

I understand the minimalist theme at HN, but would a simple toggle switch to show/hide comment scores be a terribly bad idea? These could be set by logged in users (wouldn't apply to drive-by or anon users).

I hope this is a joke. Instant Search is a UX nightmare with the screen changing / morphing with every keystroke. Now if you meant Google Suggest, I'd have no argument, but on any new browser install, one of the first items is to switch Instant Search off.

meh.

Might just be me, but in IE I get an auth login that never goes away...had to go through Task Manager to kill the browser.

I'm assuming dropping a couple thousand dollars for a Mac and a "dev account" is obligatory to get any serious iOS training, development, testing?

Still fail to understand why Java was chosen for Android, but oh well, the learning curve ought to be flatter.