jacksoncarter

The potential with this app isn't in charging people to email them recipes, it's in selling the email addresses to companies who want to advertise to people who want recipes emailed to them. Make it free and get more email addresses.

It's not a ponzi scheme, because additional wealth is created by the investment of the capital. That capital buys factories, jobs, and marketing.

In a ponzi scheme, the investment goes solely to pay off previous investors -- that's it.

Wall Street is not a ponzi scheme.

They're also havens for disease like fish lice, viruses, and bacteria that infect themselves and the surrounding communities of fish.

Or try this

  var i = a.length;
  while (i--){
    console.log(a[i]);
  }

The next versions will be dog fight enabled. This one looks slow and clunky, but there will be some designed to seek and destroy the recon drones.

Nice work. Doesn't work well with AJAX though.

Imagine a dataset where the inputs are to be in a range from 1-100, but for some reason unknown to the programmers when the program was written, there is a value of 4,000.

In the real world, a human must decide what to do with that 4,000. A computer would crash or throw an error or something like that even though the data may actually be valid.

The argument that computers can't think derives from the idea that there are noncomputational processes at work in the brain. Essentially, we don't know how certain thoughts arrive in our mind. We can't create an algorithm to mimic our chain-of-thought generator.

But that doesn't mean we can't create a computer that can have similar noncomputational "thoughts".

People must choose, when a computer need not choose. What I mean is, a computer can shut down. A human mind cannot -- and continue to live. When a computer "observes" -- so to speak -- stimuli it cannot handle or are beyond its capacity, it does not make random choices about what to do now. We do not trust randomness. Sometimes, however, humans have no option but randomness. This is why in a crowd of 100 each one will react differently to the same stimulus. If it suddenly gets very cold, some will shiver, some will leave, some will get up and jump around.

In most cases, Computer systems aren't even allowed to accept input that isn't known to be valid. Minds have to all the time.

When you begin to predict the future and that's largely what the human mind is -- a future prediction machine, then it becomes even more complex. It requires memory. Concoctions from memory or assumptions. We don't let computers assume.

In many ways, we are holding computers back. Because we are afraid. We are afraid of what they will decide for us. We are afraid of random. We need control. We haven't subjected computers to survival of the fittest.

If we did, then by the law of large numbers, eventually, like I suppose is true with many humans, one will survive that we can't explain how. We won't know how that computer made all the right decisions the whole time.

We don't know how to program computers to accept any input. White is the maximum color. Black is the darkest. But computers could see much darker than black and much brighter than white. How can we control something like that? We can't. We won't be able to. It will see and know thinks we can't imagine.

It's silly to think computers can't.

That's pretty much what I'm doing now. Building apps on top of it and selling those as customizable CRM's, intranets, etc. I have lots of ideas: catering businesses who want to put menus online, online stores, warehouses with lots of inventory, things like that.

I think at this point, it may be easier to sell a product for a specific niche than to sell the platform itself, which is why I wonder about funding at all.

People don't want to build a custom system. They either want a system that is up and running or to pay someone to build a system for them.

And then there is the market who has very specific needs for which there are no niche apps for them. They are left stranded, because the cost to build from scratch is too high. The goal of the platform is to reduce development costs and help more people who need information management systems get them.

Great questions. Customers are individuals and small businesses who want a web application or to web enable their business. Most of the revenue is from building custom apps on top of it, then charging a monthly rate for hosting, essentially. I don't want to get too specific about the details. I feel uncomfortable enough as it is just talking about it publicly. That's part of the problem I suppose.

The pricing/business model very well could be flawed. I'm constantly refining pricing. Some customers think $8/mo is too expensive, others tell me I'm not charging enough, so I experiment with pricing. I'm not really sure what the best price is. If I lower the price, I do get more signups, but I read all the time about charge more and people will think it is worth more, so you'll get more customers, so I wonder if I should just make it $5/mo and get lots of customers, or $5,000 and sell harder. The issue at that price point is that customers want to be sure the platform will never die and the bus factor is low. The largest sale was to a Fortune 1000 for an enterprise license.

I have got plans asking for as much as $2M.

But you're right. It's not clear what it does. My family does understand it, to some extent. I do need a lot of help on the marketing side. Explaining it. Helping customers understand how to use it. That's what I mean when I say customers who can understand it. The market is split between developers and business users. I'm a developer and have tended to focus on that route, but developers want 100% control like they get with PHP or RoR. Business users need more assistance and quite frankly, building information systems is hard, so it takes a lot of time to help them figure out how to create a system -- with any tool. I spend a lot of time helping customers define a model for their systems. There is a large learning curve and I continue to shrink it. That's what I spend a lot of time on.

I added a link to the above, but here it is for you: http://design.qrimp.com

It is a cloud platform that enables application development using only a browser. No IDE's to download, databases to configure, servers to manage. Upload your data and Qrimp builds a relational model to support it and let's you customize reports, forms, build pages. Use AJAX to customize the interface of your app. etc.

Imagine MS Access for the web.

It seems more and more customers are looking to move their databases to the web and this platform helps make that happen easier than coding them from scratch with .net, ruby, even django and frameworks like that to some extent, because it's all on the web.

Of course there are lots of competitors: Salesforce, Caspio, Quickbase, even excel really -- the status quo. But the market is growing and will continue to grow.

What exactly would be a decent offer considering the valuation of FB?

On the insert tab, all I see is Table, but I can't seem to find inserting images, editing hyperlinks, bullet points.

Also, Firefox keeps asking me if I want to kill an unresponsive script, so wondering what that is...

And what is the aGPL? If I include a link to the js file on my webapp, do I have to open source all my code? I really don't get what all these different licenses mean.

Cemeteries have endowment funds to ensure the land where people are buried will remain land where people are buried. Sites like this have nothing of the sort. I don't even see a business model.

Without something to guarantee people's memories will live long in the site, you run the risk of their loved ones being taken from them twice. You didn't even address this point on the first page, instead just start talking about your nifty features.

You really need to think about how your startup is going to avoid death if you are asking people to put their faith in you when they try to preserve memories of their loved ones.

The question is, who makes the living and how? Do you want programmers with brains capable of creating software worth buying to be doing tech support? It's a waste of time for programmers like that to be doing tech support -- they should be programming!

The truth is that creators in our society do not make money. They sometimes make salaries. Sales people make money. Distributors make money. But the creators very often make almost no money.

We need to reward creativity in our nation. We need to reward the people who are clever enough to think of solutions to problems. The consumers are creating problems. We need fewer of those -- both consumers and problems.

So I'm not so sure really if it is possible for creators to make money without intellectual property and I definitely do know that without intellectual property it's easy for consumers to get content without paying anything.

  Reddit is a classic example of this approach. 
  When Reddit first launched, it seemed like 
  there was nothing to it. To the graphically 
  unsophisticated its deliberately minimal design 
  seemed like no design at all. But Reddit solved 
  the real problem, which was to tell people what 
  was new and otherwise stay out of the way. As a 
  result it became massively successful.

So how do you define success? Is Arc successful if you open a web page and then 30 minutes later try to submit a form and get "unknown link" or something to that effect. It seems massively broken to me.

I'm not trying to pick on pg. I'm trying to present the alternative which is this: survivor bias. pg may have been in the right place at the right time with viaweb. As an incubator, pg probably made money on reddit, but conde nast has almost certainly lost money on reddit, so I'm on the fence about that.

Continuing on, I think it isn't unsurprising that putting $15k or so into 118 startups over the past 5 years would lead to one or two successes. pg has the benefit of being the magnet, or is it magnate? All the best ideas come to him, but there have only been a small handful of "massive successes" turned out. With his social network and contacts, quite frankly, I expect more big successes than I've seen.

How successful is pg, really? Do we know?

I suppose, really, my point is this: If there was a science to this, then it should be repeatable. Since it doesn't appear that pg has repeated his viaweb success in over 10 years, I wonder where is the science? Is pg just someone we choose to listen to because it feels good? He makes hackers feel good and important and understood? He can empathize with us, so we lend him our ear?

But are we wasting our time?

I love hn, I love listening to pg on stage talk about startups. It's like chicken soup for the startup soul. But maybe I'm being misled. Maybe it's just feel good, irrational stuff that isn't practical or beneficial -- and perhaps even harmful.

How do we know we won't be listening to him and then 10 years from now, we find out he's lost all his viaweb money. He hasn't been able to keep the startup chuck wagon turning out profitable businesses or something like that and we wasted all this time trying to replicate his success because... well... he writes a lot and it feels good to read it...

Such an esteemed organization should refrain from using false statements to support its stance: Movie makers receive most of their revenues from motion-picture theatres, not DVD sales.

is contradicted by: http://www.allbusiness.com/north-america/united-states-calif... titled: Digital Verite: studios see more money in DVDs than theaters.

And then the article says:

  Spend a few dollars, get a dozen good songs in your possession, or
  Spend the next four hours on the Web trying to find those songs performed by some obscure local artists.

  The answer is obvious.

This is also not exactly correct: For-profit entrepreneurs are able to take a piece of shareware, add useful features, and sell copies with tech support.

And again, a hopeful naivety: Even though you would have the right to call your product Cheerios, grocery stores may refuse to carry your product. Does Mises really think stores care about the consumer? They care about selling stuff. If consumers buy it because it says Cherrios on it, then they'll sell it. Why do grocery stores make their generic brands look so much like the name brands? Because when it has the same color logos and the pills are the same colors and the words look the same, the store makes more profit selling the generics.

Overall, poor showing by Mises on this one.

This article makes sense only if you side with the consumer.

In any society, one must ask, who do we want more of? What do we want more of? Personally, I want more content to consume and I want higher quality content at that.

So, to get more of that, we have to reward the producers of content. If we reward the consumers of content, we'll get more consumers. Do we want more consumers?

More consumers has led to a consumer society in which we are consuming more than we are producing. The American culture is in decline, because we aren't producing anything the world wants. We need to reward producers more and punish consumers so that Americans will produce more and consume less and rebuild our nation to its previous glory.

And this goes for everyone. We have to reward those who produce OSS and proprietary/commercial software. We need to reward the producers of movies and music -- not just the distributors -- the bands. The artists. The actors. The designers. Not just the big studios.

We need to reward the writers. The programmers, the creators. Not just the factories.

And we definitely don't need to be enabling the consumer to consume even more and destroy the planet even more.

It could backfire as marketing, because even with such a fancy lab, they still couldn't produce an iPhone with good reception...

I know pg is constantly tweaking the comments algorithms, so perhaps this is why lately I've noticed very few comments with more than 5 or so karma points. Many months/years ago, you'd come to the comments and there's be a couple really great comments at the top. So much so that it I didn't need to read the article.

Lately however, I've noticed that the top comments all have one or maybe two karma points. Sometimes I can scroll down and find a comment with 30+ points, but the ones above it are one liners and not really interesting. Overall, the comments have become less interesting.

It's like a lot of barking dogs, short quips, lack of insight. The commenters seem like they don't want to add value, but rather, want to get their username on the board or something.

Did you tend to worry a lot before you had the money? You mention the misery is consistent. Is worry part of that.

I think coming into money is pretty much like losing a limb or experiencing a tragedy. After a certain period of time, the person who has experienced the tragedy goes back to where they were, mentally, before the tragedy. Same with lots of money, eventually they return to their norm.

I've subscribed to their forums with an email that I link to them, so I know for a fact that they spam. They also write articles that are really paid for ads, so the shady meter for sitepoint.com is over toward the orange side of the scale... but, you know... you gotta make money I guess.

If the centrifugal force in the upward direction is 2g, that is, twice gravity, then passengers will feel like the plane is flying exactly upright and parallel with the earth.

It could be that as one learns more about a topic, one learns more about what one doesn't know about a topic.

For example, if you know while, for, if/then and case statements you could think that's all you need to know about programming. But once you start getting into encryption and security, you realize there's a universe of knowledge out there and you're really dumb compared to that.

If I change the word "consume" in my comment to "absorb" then the point is the same. I'm not really one to care to argue about particular words used in the discussion, but more the point of the discussion.

If you consume fewer calories, you also absorb fewer calories. Is that not true?

Your comment only reinforces my point, which is that people would rather consume more, that is, pay for a doctor to prescribe a drug, pay for the drug, consume the drug on a regular basis, than simply consume less food or do more work. I'm sure orlistat has a huge list of side effects. It probably does stuff to your body they don't even know about. It would be better to consume less food or burn more calories than to consume a drug to enable the overweight person to consume more food than they need. And think of the moral implications of over-consumption. Doesn't it seem odd that we are selling people pills to enable them to consume more than they need? What about those who need more than they get?

Yet, people choose to consume the drug. The question is, Why? and you didn't even come close to answering that question, but rather focused on a semantic issue that doesn't move us any closer to understanding.

At one point, I too was overweight. I ate 3 big meals a day, I sat behind a computer all day. I never exercised. Then I started eating less and exercising and I lost weight and became healthier.

if they escape variables: danger!

Escaping is not sufficient to prevent SQL Injection Attacks. You must used Parameterized Queries.

http://bobby-tables.com/

The key to obesity is simple:

  Calories In > Calories Burned = Weight Gain

This is a subject of irrationality I have trouble understanding. The answer is there and known, but it isn't believed or accepted or something. Or do we accept it, but we just have a greater desire to avoid manual labor than change our habits.

Facebook is awesome. They have some of the most brilliant minds working there. Pretty soon, they'll be able to tell whose face it is! I can't wait until they partner with restaurants and banks and other places with security cameras, so I don't have to update my location or status. They can just tell all my friends where I am and what food I ate for lunch.

From what you've described, it's not really a thousand tasks, it's one task: close out auctions. What the PHP programmers suggest is a horrible idea. For two reasons, first, the reason you describe: nobody loading the page, and second because it may close out auctions way more often than necessary. Imagine if you get 1,000 people a second calling the close out auctions task.

So if it really is just one close out auctions task, why not build a cron job to find all the closed auctions and do what you gotta do in a loop?

A single network has lots of people who are friends and would use something like this. Family talk plans are popular sales strategies for the networks. "Family talk with FourSquare!" Imagine that commercial. The game features that require everyone to be on the PS3 or xbox are also successful, so there are plenty of examples that support my idea.

It seems like something you've seen before, because it is. There are lots of devices that require batteries to be inserted.

Perhaps there's no prior art, because it's an unobvious advancement to battery technology. Is that so hard to believe? Why do you find it hard to believe the guys at Microsoft were the first to think of it? They create lots of battery operated devices like mice and keyboards and microsoft has a ton of geniuses working for them to boot.

I've never seen anything like this before. I wish all batteries were as easy to insert as this invention makes them.