Yeah, in the US Charles Schwab provides most of this stuff (they refund all ATM fees so you effectively can use whatever ATM you want, they have an app w/ check depositing, etc) and has for a long time. Don't really get it.
I'm also with Schwab. The only thing I can think of is that they're trying to cash in on the anti-bank sentiment of the Reddit crowd the way Ally has. Their difference is branding, not substance.
Most applicants will be approved instantly. There are some circumstances, such as the specifics of your business model, that may require a brief manual review. At most this will take 1 business day, but many reviews will be much quicker.
The good thing about doing this upfront is that you don't have to worry about running into any issues (like unexpected shutdowns) as your processing ramps up.
i like your style. might i suggest finding out how the wifi scanners work, and then creating a bunch of dummy wifi connections with well hidden embedded systems (of course, set them up with a hidden ssid so it doesn't interfere with people actually using wifi)? also, fake ads for fake companies that blatantly use the banned words.
Yes, adding noise will be unavoidable, but not broadcasting an ssid means unsuspecting people won't try and connect to these pseudo AP's.
To cut down on the interference caused by the added radio noise one could either hardwire all the pseudo ap's to use the same channel, effectively blocking anyone from using it, or have each ap actively scan and switch to the least used channel at a set interval.
"I don't much care about the successes of the developers if they come at the cost of the tools I've invested time switching into"
It's a bit silly to say that you don't care about their interests, if they come at the expense of your interests, but you think that them having what is arguably a milder version of that same attitude (i.e. that they value their own financial interests over your time invested in their product) is a "dick move".
How is that silly? It goes both ways. As a developer you might not care about the happiness of users if they are using your software without a license. In this case they valued their own interests in spite of the users' commitment. A dick move in my book.
A dick move is thinking the developers should be indebted to you for life for giving them them a one time payment of money which is less than a couple of rounds of beers.
People aren't throwing their arms up because they lost ten dollars; they're doing so because a piece of software that was important in their daily work, and that they enjoyed using and cared about, and probably would have happily continued to pay for, isn't going to be around in a short while.
Too bad for them; perhaps they should have evaluated the consequences of tying up a piece of their workflow as critical as email to a ten-dollar proprietary app made by people without a track record of building sustainable software better.
The real dick move is to tease people with cool technologies, good design, so-called new marketing models like fenced-garden app stores where "the little guy can make a buck too", lure them in with a cheap and tasty bait, and then use it to make a fortune for a few people at the expense of tens of thousands. That's what a good portion of the software industry is doing, and in the long run, it isn't going to pay out. After a period of bitter lessons, people will stop buying your shiny apps that go away after a few months for critical tasks, stop giving you all their data for cool free services that may ruin their professional lives, and stick to solutions that respect their intelligence. The app store industry will be left selling games and fart apps.
Exactly this. The financial investment is not the issue here, it's the investment of time and mental energy into integrating the tool into my workflow and becoming dependent on it. I do not expect them to develop new features indefinitely for free, but I would like it to continue to be supported and developed, even if that means a new paid release every year or so. I'd gladly continue paying for new major releases.
As it is, we'll probably get a compatibility release for anything that may break with the next OS update and not much beyond that. Come several years from now and it may simply not work anymore because of an OS change. That's my primary concern. Being abandonware with an unspecified, vague promise of critical fixes makes it seem questionable whether there's any value in continuing to use it vs. investing time in switching to another tool (of which there are few to none which work perfectly for my particular workflow) up front before it does inevitably stop working down the road.
The developers haven't specified a support and maintenance period, and unmaintained software being "around" isn't a good thing. See my other comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4276988
Nobody is arguing this is a legal problem, they're arguing that this is a moral problem.
Users did buy into the Sparrow thing because they expected updates/maintenance etc etc. Their purchase was contingent on the ongoing support of the service, they would not have bought a product they thought would be discontinued.
Now, you can argue that they should have known that the service might disappear without warning, that they should never have used it if there was the possibility of them being bought, but where does that leave us? Should people just stop buying popular apps created by small companies? Should people insist on a legally binding "community promise" to open-source a product if active development stops?
This also neglects the fact that users are statistically credulous - as a group they're simply not rational enough to seriously consider the possibility of the developer being acquired. The Sparrow guys had to have known this, so they either did something unethical when they sold the app or they did something unethical when they sold the company. The blog post says that it is fine to take advantage of them for their credulity, but that's not an ethical position, that's just Ayn Rand.
>Nobody is arguing this is a legal problem, they're arguing that this is a moral problem.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. The comment above the one to which you are replying states:
"Maintenance" means that they will fix major issues that the paying customers are legally entitled to (such as bugs that make the app unusable).
It's almost like you completely ignored this to make some point about Ayn Rand.
>Now, you can argue that they should have known that the service might disappear without warning
What service? We are talking about a downloadable application that is locally stored on the user's device until they delete it. It will not stop working. I've been using an old version of Thunderbird for a while now simply because I haven't felt like upgrading and setting up all my GPG stuff again.
These things may seem like nitpicks, but I think the nuance here is important and is being skipped over in favor of complaining about something. The reaction is way overblown in my opinion.
> The comment above the one to which you are replying states:
>> ...fix major issues that the paying customers are legally entitled to...
Ah craps. You're right, I skipped over that comment and assumed the one I was replying to was making a different point. I look like an ass, and it serves me right. I'd delete or edit the post to make a retraction, but HN has decided that it's important to keep my mistakes around for posterity.
From what you said above it sounds like Microsoft should also still be releasing and providing you patches for Windows 95. You paid a one time fee for an application, if you wanted support and updates for it forever you should have expected to be paying a monthly / yearly fee. If at the time the updates stop coming, then the company should just stop charging you the ongoing support fee.
Expecting lifetime support for a one time flat payment of almost nothing is pretty silly.
The "lifetime support" argument doesn't follow from anything I said. Users may not have been savvy to the possibility of the software being discontinued in this fashion, but they certainly understand that an end-of-life is inevitable. They're used to free updates over the natural lifespan of the product, and they feel that there's been a breach of courtesy when the natural lifespan of a product is willfully cut short.
I don't know. I know that Windows 95 has long since reached the end of its natural lifespan, and that users feel that Sparrow's life was "cut short". I'm sure there isn't a sharp dividing line, but we don't really need one in this case - it's clear which side this falls on.
MyGengo has built a fantastically useful tool which has saved me a ton of time and money. I don't know anything about the addressable market size, but they have <i>nailed</i> the product.
Strongly disagree with this. Minecraft's graphics are a direct consequence of what the game IS (i.e. a world made out of large-ish blocks). More realistic (that is, less stylized) textures look strange on top of huge blocks, and anything that obscured the block structure of the world would have made Minecraft a worse game.
Minecraft needed to be made of blocks, it's true. But Minecraft could be more beautiful than it is. Which isn't to diss it - what it does well, it does really well. And it can often be beautiful -- the terrain generator can produce some wonderful things.
While it isn't aiming for all the same points, and is obviously inspired in some parts by Minecraft, I think for example Cube World is a much better looking game. http://wollay.blogspot.co.uk/
We now finally have search for HN, thanks to Octopart, who've been working on it for a while as a test of their new search database, ThriftDB. You'll see a search box at the bottom of most pages.
Sorry this took so long. For a while we hoped to implement our own search, but it became apparent that would take a lot of work to do right. So we were delighted when Octopart decided to get into the search as a service business.
As a little-l libertarian, I'd accept that there's a bit of market failure here as the friction of making payments has exceeded the relative ease of "just slap some ads on it". However I suspect this problem is fixing itself over time. Ad inventory is only going to increase, which drops what you can change on average, which is slowly but surely going to take "just slap ads on it" out of the reach of more and more people, and alternate payment methods, while not quite as easy as just shouting "Micropayments!" and walking away with a smug expression, are in fact developing. Kickstarter is one example, and other models like that will develop and return the concept of "patronage" to the field of culture by mixing in a heavy dose of "crowdsourcing". And once we're comfortable with that, who knows what else we might come up with?
And hey, maybe somebody will figure out that whole micropayment thing too. But at least now there are increasingly concrete demonstrations that they were never the only solution, which is fortunate since they don't seem to work.
I'm actually more optimistic now that we can escape from ads as the only choice than I've ever been before. I'm hoping that this is the last year or two that cstross could make this post and have it still seem a reasonable concern.
I don't know, it seems like it is going the other way. At least for the buyer, internet ads have become more expensive over time. I imagine mobile ads will become more expensive as well.
There's the Wikipedia non-profit model, for one. Probably can't create all kinds of content, but it has created some of the highest-quality online content.
Why do you think that a non-profit model is outside of the market? People donate money to sustain something they get utility from, and all of the donations are freely given. It would only be outside a "market model" if Wikipedia were funded solely by the government. As it were, it is a free enterprise with a goal other than profit.
Charities and non-profit foundations can hardly be considered outside of the market model. Wikipedia is, in fact, an anecdote you'd point to if your goal was to debate that market forces result in collective good.
That's true. I suppose more specifically Wikipedia is an example of web content being produced without a profit motive on the part of the producing entity, but not wholly outside a market model.
How that relates to market models producing collective good depends on which one you subscribe to. Many proponents (dating back to Adam Smith) argue that it's the profit motive in particular that makes the market model produce good outcomes. There's also a lot of skepticism of even voluntary collective production in much of the libertarian literature; e.g. the Israeli kibbutzim or the 19th-century "utopian socialist" communes aren't viewed favorably. Wikipedia has a sort of voluntary-collectivism feeling to it as well, from that perspective, though it's more limited in that you don't have to actually move to Wikipedia and live there; you can just contribute some content now and then.
