lh7

The idea of having "zones" for people with different interests sounds good. Given the sort of amenities on offer and the unusual founding route, not to mention its Eastern endpoint, it would have been more accurate to refer to this as "zones for hipsters with different interests" though. :-)

Piss-taking aside, I think it's nicely representative of a certain "Germanness" trait which is perhaps not so well-known outside the country, where the stereotype of a population of humourless engineers still prevails.

Hi. I applaud your motivation, but to be honest, when I was learning Arabic, the only trouble I would regularly run into would be with the tashkeel, which I find difficult to memorise. On the other hand, it was much easier for me to associate each letter with their respective sound(s).

Aside from that, Spanish, Catalan, and Occitan have historically been written using both the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, by their respective user communities. Same for Yiddish, linguistically a Germanic language, which was often written using Hebrew script. Turkish seems to flip from Arabic to Latin and vice-versa every few decades.

English written in Arabic script looks surprisingly natural to me.

Receive comments about your choice of font for the powerpoint.

That would be 2.5, they will be unsolicited, and yes, your font really is too small.

2.6 is where you spend another five minutes faffing about with the font size until everyone is happy.

(which is why I rarely use slides and even more rarely put any text in them)

(but if you're demoing anything on a computer screen, the same applies)

Go for it then, and good luck! ;)

Consider having a continuity plan next time. Personal tragedy is not an uncommon occurrence.

He's adamant he wants to continue, and he's seeking help from a counselor.

He's doing the right thing, both in seeking counsel and in wanting to continue. Taking time off is extremely unlikely to help him.

Grieving affects everyone differently.

Whether you are a start-up or an established small business, chances are the bulk of your value is in your management / founding team. That means the three of you, working together as a team.

The 3rd co-founder and I find it demotivating and frustrating when he disappears.

That is your problem, not his.

I feel as if the best thing for the business is to let go of him, but it's a shitty thing to do. Moreover – I feel as if his depression would worsen if he lost his place in the team.

Wrong priorities. If you're not looking after your team you're not looking after your company. Help the guy first and foremost.

Give him honest support, don't complain, take up the slack, man up and swallow the frustration. It may well be you going through a rough patch next time.

These things suck but it's part of life (and business).

Ok, having some actual experience on this, I think you can ignore most of what has been posted here, particularly all those "10K? No way! Ask them for 100K!" posts. It just doesn't work like that.

Two posts that do strike a chord with me are ChrisNorstrom's and LargeCompanies'.

Whoever said they will clone you if you don't sell is also correct. That means that whatever value your project may have now it won't have in the future once the competitors (plural!) start popping in.

It appears that you have already talked to them and figured what their motivations are, that's good.

Depending on how good your negotiation skills are (and I'll assume they're not very good, since you're asking here) and what your feeling about their offer is (whether they're lowballing it and how much) you could:

1. Ask them for a bit more (maybe 50% / 100%) and sell as-is, or

2. Take their offer and sell as-is, then

3. Offer them a limited number of support days at a fair day rate ($600-$1200?). This is where, after you get the money, you show them how your thing (which is now their thing) works, and

4. That should be the entirety of the agreement.

That means no code review, no technical discussion, nothing. They have seen what they have seen and they have named a price that's good enough for them based on the information they already have. They don't need any more than that and you are satisfied that it's a fair valuation.

Just to emphasise, if they are well-resourced enough and have enough of an interest in whatever your product is, and you don't sell it to them, they will copy it.

So you'll be better off selling it blind to them for whatever money they offered and then you just set up a new site competing against your own old code. See my point 4 above and don't sign a no-compete clause. Hopefully you're a good enough actor to play dumb and convince them the deal is not worth enough for you if you need to start lawyering up so you'd rather keep things simple.

All the above is based on actual experience.

10K is an absolute insult.

How can you say that without knowing what the project is? For all you know it's a clever sed expression that took the author fifteen minutes to write.

I did some work (non-IT) for a retired internet billionaire, who doesn't mind one bit using gmail as his private email address even though Google is a direct competitor to the company he got rich with (and they have the upper hand in their market).

Likewise, one of his start-ups' (1 million unique visitors per day) entire closed-source code base is on Github.

From a legal and commercial point of view, it would be devastating to Google et al. if they were found to be stealing IP like that.

Just like spam is dealt with in email and walled gardens, it could have been dealt with in Usenet.

I'm unsure what to do next.

I'm sorry if I've missed something, but isn't the status quo a reasonable option?

Other than that, see what other problems your current customers are having that you could help with. Basically you do not want to leap into a completely new arena and start from zero again (some people can pull this off, most don't). Your Delphi to C# thing appears to be a good example of the sort of transitions you can make.

Alternatively, do personal projects on things related to your hobbies or stuff like that. It's a great of motivating yourself and learning new stuff. Often enough, you will find that there is actually a market for what you built.

Also, find dev meetups in your area (assuming you live close to or in a reasonably-sized city) and go there. You tend to get free pizza and there are always people with interesting / intriguing ideas. Sometimes the people themselves are interesting / intriguing.

I reckon what you suggest is not a bad idea: when someone posts an issue that you do not particularly feel like working on, set a price on it! When/if anyone pays, you work on it.

Or someone else can come in and say "I'll do it for X".

Most successful projects that I know of are those where the developer is actually getting paid for his work. QGIS is a great example.

Sometimes I'm OK with that. Sometimes I wonder if I've been misunderstood and could have written it better.

And if you had an actual reply telling you what "wrong" with your post, wouldn't that be more useful? Sometimes people downvote simply because they misunderstood/misread your post.

Either which way, it's blunt, simple and useful feedback.

I'll give you "simple" out of those three. What is "blunt" about it? And for useful, see above.

Agree. Actually, just posted a related question a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13171928).

And if you're going to have votes, at the very least those should be public, as they are in some forums that I've come across and in some bug trackers.

Upvotes: the only point of those seems to be to serve as a form of "reward", like "badges" and the like, to entice those with an insecurity problem to seek some validation. The only ones benefiting from it are the site admins though, as people tend to generate more content in order to collect "upvotes". Note I said "more", not better quality. See Stackoverflow for example.

Is it possible to get all that information in one round trip ?

If we're talking about the same thing, yes.

One pattern that I use in my APIs is as follows:

Assume a JSON object like:

{ name: "Joe", colour: [ {red: 0, green: 128, blue: 90}, {red: 35, green: 88, blue: 199} ], hair: { length: { value: 9, uom: "cm"} }

I have on occasion provided an API like:

# Assume that {id} returns an object like the above.

GET /api/{id} # Returns the full object

POST /api/{id} # Replaces the object

PUT /api/{id} # Overwrites properties in the object

GET /api/{id}/name # Returns "Joe"

POST /api/{id}/name # Overwrites the name

PUT /api/{id}/name # Overwrites the name (also)

DELETE /api/{id}/name # Removes the "name" property

GET /api/{id}/colour/0/green # Returns "green". Other methods as above.

* /api/{id}/hair/length/value

PUT /api/{id}/hair/colour # Creates a new property

GET /api/{id}/colour/0;2 # Returns the first and third items in the array

GET /api/{id}/colour/1/red;green # Returns those two properties from the object. Note that this imposes some restrictions on property naming (no semicolons)

And this I never implemented, but I would if I had a need:

GET /api/{id}/colour/(0/red;green);(1/blue) # Returns [ { red: 0, green: 128}, {blue: 199} ]

Indeed, it's been a long time and it wasn't common to actually use URLs back then!

I am not sure I follow the conversation. What would a deeply nested result hierarchy be, exactly?

Are we talking about something like:

CREATE TABLE person (id INT, name TEXT, birthdate DATE);

CREATE TABLE car (id INT, brand TEXT, model TEXT, licence TEXT);

CREATE TABLE p_c (pid INT, cid INT, FOREIGN KEY pid REFERENCES person (id), FOREIGN KEY cid REFERENCES car (id));

And for a given person, we want to return their details plus the cars they own?

gopher://example.com/person/{id}

# Get person ID

1, Joe, 1970-01-01

gopher://example.com/car/{id}

# Get car ID

1, Ford, T, 1313

gopher://example.com/person/{id}/cars

# Get all cars owned by person ID

1, Joe, 1970-01-01, 1 Ford, T, 1313

,,, 2 Ford, S, 1717

gopher://example.com/person/{id}/cars/{id}

# Get specific car

gopher://example.com/car/{id}/owners

# Get owner(s) of car ID

gopher://example.com/car/{id}/owners/{id}

# Get specific owner

gopher://example.com/car/{id}/owners/{id}/birthdate

# Get specific owner's birthdate

gopher://example.com/car/{id}/owners/birthdate

# Get birthdate of all owners (assuming no domain overlap between IDs and field names, other solutions possible otherwise)

If this is the sort of thing we're talking about, I've got that t-shirt and assumed everyone had too, so I guess I'm missing the point here. By how much?