Pretty sure this is how most Zendesk responses are generated anytime I email tech support.

This should have an RSS feed so I can be notified when it doesn’t scale.

This is spot on.

I only buy orange juice when people visit. Last time that happened I was at the store looking for Tropicana, but couldn’t find it. After several scans of the shelves I finally saw it under the new label.

I never noticed the cap was an orange either.

I too laud Apple for their efforts, but I view them as a benevolent dictator.

To me it’s obvious how this helps their bottom line: people are very interested in privacy and willing to pay top dollar for it. Every time I turn on an additional privacy service from Apple, I feel their grip tightening on my digital identity as they push themselves even more between me and the direct relationships I have with other websites.

iCloud private relay, email aliases, and “Sign in with Apple” is their final act to completely dominate the relationship between their users and other web applications.

I’m not bitter about it, but I do think it’s helpful and healthier to view Apple in this way and not mistake their efforts as altruistic. They’re simply a company trying to develop a profitable, high retention service… and they’re doing a damn good job at it.

Yes and no. It depends on what bracket you’re at on your income tax. It also depends on whether or not you’re factoring in corporate income tax too, which is paid before dividend distributions are made. For tightly held C-corps, you’d probably factor in the corp income tax since the concern would be about tax efficiency from revenue to dollars in your pocket.

You should add that you cap founder salaries at $250-$300k/year (if I remember your terms correctly)

If you’re a founder looking at TinySeed, what this means is that if your business reaches a level of success you can pay yourself over $250k-$300k through your W-2, you’ll either have to cap it there or pay the rest through dividends.

That said, this isn’t really a terrible setup if you plan to go down this route. The IRS takes issue when tightly held C-corps pay themselves large amounts via W-2’s because they would want to reclassify those as dividends. They won’t say what the “large amount” is, but I’ve been advised that its around $250k-$300k if you don’t have disinterested stockholders or board members voting on your comp.

As always, consulting with your accountant before making tax and/or fundraising decisions.

Same! I think the middle ground is somewhere between paying dividends or distributions from the revenue and most importantly, becoming comfortable with the idea and ignoring the “growth at all costs” mentality that people (and press) are so attracted to.

Where does this community exist?

After setting up over 100 IoT devices in my home, I’m convinced this industry needs to be regulated if it wants any shot at succeeding.

Here’s what needs to be required:

1. An IoT device should be capable of functioning without any sort of “smart” features. For example, a remote controlled lamp should have a physical switch on it that allows it to operate like a dumb lamp.

2. A device should be capable of integrating with the rest of the home network without depending on the public internet or external services. This means said lamp can be turned on and off by a smart switch or phone that’s in the same LAN.

3. Smart devices must be accessible without registering an account with the device manufacturer. This is one of the most egregious parts about IoT today—most vendors require an email and password to login and setup or control the device, which is absurd on so many levels with respect to privacy and when the company goes bust like Insteon.

These 3 things would put an end to most of the IoT shenanigans we see happening today.

I’d position it as “we do exactly what needs to be done: push, build, deploy” and talk to the benefits of deploying static websites without all the complexity of edge functions and the complicated pricing that goes with it.

I’d also speak to the idea that the service is shooting for longevity and stability by not adding a bunch of whiz bang stuff needed to justify PM salaries or impress VCs that will be sunset later.

I’d be interested in building the bootstrapped “git push and we build and publish”, aka “heroku for static site compilers”

Chime in if you’d like to be one of the first few customers. If there’s enough interest here’s how I’d play it:

1. I won’t raise VC money. I know how to build a SaaS business without it—I bootstrapped Poll Everywhere from $0 to $10m+.

2. My motivations these days are to build low complexity products. Ideally they’re “evergreen”, meaning I can ship a core feature set that I know will be the same in 10 years. The feature I’m selling their is stability.

3. I like to price things in a way that makes them accessible to as many people as possible while being sustainable for the business so it can operate for a long time with the support it needs for customers.

I see a lot of folks talking about better warnings, etc.

Something else to consider for situations like this (or maybe for your apps) is to use the element of time to prevent mistakes.

For example, when a user wants to permanently delete an account or do any action that’s destructive, irreversible, or catastrophic… queue up a job for 10 minutes, an hour, or maybe a day, that gives the user time to cancel it if they made a mistake.

Out-of-band could be another way to prevent mistakes. “Want to delete your account? We’ll send you a link for you to continue via email”. This would also be cancelable.

There’s a lot of ways to deal with potentially irreversible actions outside of “better error messages” or checking the equiv of an “are you sure?” Checkbox.

I created https://www.thingybase.com/ to track my home inventory and https://legiblenews.com/ for unsensational news.

Thing is, when I create a program for personal use, I go ahead and make it available for the rest of the world because why not?

I’m going to be building software to manage my kids schools science fair project for next year that I’ll also share with the rest of the world.

When I read articles like this, I can’t help but to think the media has it out for social networks and the internet because it absolutely destroyed their revenue models and they’re still sore about it.

How is there not a company specializing in mortgages for people who don’t have 3 years of W2’s?

Some of the situations I’m seeing in the threads below seem like no-brained, low risk loans that would be free money to a bank.

If it’s a question of modeling risk, is it purely a function of banks not having the tools to model non-W2 earnings?

The whole thing seems absurd, but there has to be a reason for it. Regulation? Past financial crisis? Fat and happy banks loaning to W2’s? Wealthier people not needing mortgages?

If operating system vendors wanted to, they could deliver APIs that resemble Electron, but with better OS integration capabilities without the performance problems.

HN loves blaming companies like Slack for shipping “crappy bloated electron apps”, but what we should be doing is demanding more from Apple, Microsoft, and Google to ship a sane APIs to make this work. Blaming vendors is essentially victim shaming.

Sadly I know that’s a naive optimistic pipe-dream because these corps would lose power over their user base.

> Most people don’t want what you want

This is absolutely true; however there are riches in niches.

The % of internet users who want X probably is lower, but I’d gander the absolute number of people who would want something like this is much bigger than it was a decade ago.

This community forgets that because we’re told by investors, the media we read, etc. to go after the biggest markets possible. “Hunt for elephants, not field mice,” they say.

Don’t forget that a niche market on the web can still be massive and small fortunes can be made building products and services for them. You might not even need to have investors on your cap table to bring products to market to sell to those niches if you know what you’re doing, but shhhh… don’t tell them I told you that.

A library like https://icons8.com/icons where you can just tell it what icon you want and the style (e.g. Material, outline, solid, iOS). It would do it’s thing and spit it out.

Could somebody build this for SVG icons? I’d invest in it.

Oops yeah, meant Max. That’s the only one that can drive 3 - 5K displays.

I’m thinking about a Mac Studio w/ an M1 Pro, 32 GB RAM, & 2 TB disk for a 3 display dev workstation and an M1 Air for when I need to go in the road.

Any thoughts on this approach? It costs about as much as an M1 MacBook Pro.