apdinin

A company or individual putting “Facebook” or “Instagram” in their domain name without Facebook’s authorization would constitute trademark infringement.

Pretty sure this lawsuit is just Facebook doing what they’re supposed to do to “protect” their trademarks.

When you have a trademark, you’re obligated — by law — to attempt to protect it in cases of seeming infringement. If you don’t, you lose the power of the trademark.

Devil's advocate here... and I'm adding the caveat that I still use my iPad 1 daily (with the grandfathered, unlimited data plan).

A lot of this is about generating revenues. At the end of the day, Apple is a public corporation. It's not a charity. Apple's primary reason for existence is to generate shareholder value. It's hard for a device company to do that if they aren't... you know... selling devices.

Apple doesn't believe everyone should buy a new Apple product every 5 years. Sure, they'd love it, but that's not the market they're targeting. Apple has branded itself as a luxury technology brand. Would someone make this same argument about Lexus or Rolex or Coach?

If you can't afford that shiny new Macbook, there are plenty of alternate options. No one is forcing people to buy Apple products.

Beyond pricing, older technology can limit software innovation. What if every App developer out there -- including the folks at apple developing the latest versions of iOS -- still had to support my "ancient" iPad 1?

Legacy support would put a lot of young companies out of business. As a developer, one of things that costs me the most time is cross-device support. It's a huge drain on resources, and not every company can afford it.

I can make it work on SMTP/IMAP, but, right now, it requires a custom setup. I've got a couple accounts that pay to do this... but they also have lots of team members using it.

Thanks! Fixed... and an extra upvote to you for the trouble.

That's actually my next big update. I've got a Gmail plugin about 80% complete that will auto-stop the messages, too.

I still kind of count it as "passive" work because I had to learn to develop Gmail plugins for my startup. I was able to transfer that experience to Autopest.

FYI to anyone reading this... InboxSDK is amazing for Gmail plugins.

Dang... maybe I'll get that fixed in a couple months :)

During my day job I run a full-time startup, but, as a weekend hack a couple years ago, I built an automated email sales tool called Autopest (https://autopest.com). I've never done any promotion for it, but it keeps growing on its own organically via word-of-mouth.

About a year and a half ago I mentioned Autopest in an HN thread titled "Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?" Since then, it keeps getting featured in Reddit and Quora lists for "best growth hacking tools" and "best sales hacks," and I've also seen it popup on sites like Inc.com and LifeHacker.

I guess Autopest isn't technically passive in the sense that every few months I code a new feature or two based on user feedback, but I also go months without touching it, and more people just keep signing up.

P.S. Here's the original HN thread... some good links to other passive income projects as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255

@jklein - just seeing this... sorry. Happy to chat. What's the best way to get in touch?

I'm an adjunct. No... adjuncting does not pay well. But anyone getting a degree with the expectation of being a professional academic should know this going in. I certainly did so I approached the job marketing accordingly.

I've never tried to be a tenure track professor. Instead, my approach -- for what it's worth -- is to make adjuncting my passion.

Instead of "being a professor," my profession is software engineer. As a result, being an English professor gets to be my hobby. I teach one course a semester and I love it. It allows me to be a member of an academic community, I can participate in talks/lectures/conferences, I can publish, and I can do all the other "academic" things I want to do and no one has ever told me I'm not qualified or made me feel unwelcome. Usually, the opposite is true. I get at least half-a-dozen invites every semester from my university and neighboring schools asking me to come lecture about my work. In addition, I can bring real-world experience and expertise into my classes every day, which my students appreciate.

TLDR: Submit a post titled "How you can rank on the first page of HackerNews and GrowthHackers."

I can obviously only speak for my students in terms of willingness to do legwork, but I don't find this to be the case at all. And just because they ask me something in an email that they could figure out themselves, I don't necessarily have to give them the answer.

The opposite is usually the case. I prefer to use their hastily sent digital questions as teaching opportunities -- opportunities I wouldn't have had if not for the ease with which they can engage with me. For example, I often respond to questions that need to be researched elsewhere by reminding students they have Google, as well as world class libraries.

Like any profession, different professors approach their work in different ways. How a professor chooses to engages with his or her students isn't the fault of students. I don't see much value in metaphorically shaking my fist and lamenting "What's the matter with kids these days? They're overly entitled! How dare they expect success!"

I, like most professors, am in control of the education I provide. That's my favorite part about being a professor. (It's definitely not the salary...)

This article seems more reflective of a generational technology gap than an actual loss of student interest in building relationships with professors. The author doesn't seem to want to bother leveraging all the wonderful tools currently available to interact digitally with students beyond the walls of a classroom or office.

I give my students my phone number and encourage texting. I find that sending Facebook messages usually gets a quicker response than emails. And, in lieu of office hours, I prefer Google Hangouts so we can be more flexible with meeting times. (Yes... I've had many "office hour" sessions at 11:00 at night!)

Contrary to what this article asserts, I've found that digital technologies bring me closer to my students. Using tools like Facebook Groups, Google Docs, and whatever course forum software the school is operating on at the time, I get to expand the classroom well beyond our 2.5 hours per week and create a sort of 24/7 learning environment.

I wish I could have had those kinds of opportunities as an undergrad.

I'm not convinced the accelerated growth in administrative positions is entirely a result of corporatization. FWIW - I'm commenting as someone who has served on a few committees at a top 50 public, Research I institution. Not a single meeting ever included anything remotely resembling the phrase "we need to decrease costs in order to increase revenues and line our pockets!"

In the US (which is all I can speak to), the growth in administrative staff seems more like a response to increased layers of political bureaucracy. For example, schools are scrambling to add Title XI administrators because the federal government requires them in order to get federal funding (including student loans). Faculty don't want to be responsible for the associated administration and paperwork, so someone has to do it.

Regarding increases in tuition prices, most if not all states are slashing higher education funding. That shortfall has to be made up for somehow.

I have trouble accepting the general premise of the question. Not the $100m part... even a $100k job or a $10k job... doesn't matter. It implies that the program being developed has a definitive "done" moment. But software (at least software in constant use) doesn't really get finished. So you build, and you expand, and you rebuild, and new things happen that change your approach and new tech gets developed and your software changes. I can (technically) start coding in Language X and ultimately port the entire codebase to Language Y (or take bits of Language A, B, and C). It's not so much about choosing the right language as reacting to the ever-changing world in which your software is being deployed.

Since you're a developer, you already have the most important asset, which is the ability to basically create anything (web services related, obviously). From there, it's "just" a matter of finding something to build that other people will value and then telling as many people as possible about it.

The best way to figure out what to build is by thinking about what YOU would find useful, and then build that. Don't get too big with the idea, though. Just analyze your day-to-day routine and ask yourself what kind of little piece of software would make your day 1%-5% less annoying.

For example, I'm a developer but also a startup founder. I've wasted entire days doing repetitive email follow-ups to investors, partners, customers, etc., which means I wasn't committing code. So I put aside a weekend and built a system to automate my email follow-ups. After it worked well for me, I showed it to some colleagues, they started using it, too, and before I knew it, I had a nice little SaaS app going. With another weekend of work, I added a frontend and billing system, and I launched it as https://autopest.com.

(I'm including the link at the suggestion of some of the other folks in this thread, and also to show how it matches well with their advice -- target B2B, build a SaaS app, keep it simple, rely on quick solutions like Bootstrap and Stripe, etc.)

Step two is getting people to it. Best way I found for that is social media -- especially Twitter. It only takes me 15 minutes a day to be "active" on Twitter, I can easily target BizDev people and GrowthHackers (my target audience), and slowly but surely, they start signing up. It's been a few months and I'm on pace to hit your $500/mo target in the next 30 days.

Best of all, because I built something that I REALLY WANTED, even if no one ever pays me another penny, I'll still come out ahead because the thing I built works really well for me.

This article wrongly implies that people getting English PhDs are only doing so in order to become tenure-track English professors. But I just completed my PhD in English two weeks ago, and I'm also the TECH co-founder of a VC-backed startup. Many of my peers are not just tech savvy, they're also developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. They just also happen to be interested in studying slightly older forms of technology -- literary technologies.

Yes... books and poems and epics and dramas are all technologies, too.

I should hope the HN community isn't fooled by the _New Yorker_ article's professional typecasting. After all, Paul Graham has an entire book called _Hackers and Painters_, and he argues: "Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things." (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html).

"Hacking" -- as both Paul Graham and much of my dissertation argues -- isn't a purely scientific discipline. It's also a humanist and aesthetic pursuit.

If you don't believe me, go pick up a collection of Emily Dickinson poems (you know... the things you probably haven't looked at since you were in 9th grade). You might be surprised to discover all of the conditional logic, the programatic loops, and the object oriented structures.

I can agree with the seeming intention of the OP, but the analogy of adding labels to wires in an electrical box is problematic. How does having blank labels on wires equate to poor commenting?

Good or bad, a comment says something about the code it's commenting (even if the code is self explanatory). A blank label says nothing about the wire.

The better analogy might be having labels on wires that state the color of the wires -- red, blue, green, etc.

As the author, I should probably take my own advice and do what I always tell my students. If the structure of the sentence causes so much controversy that it distracts from the meaning, change the sentence. Allow me to offer an alternative that solves everything:

"Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day by sending you a $20.00 USD Starbucks Card eGift to spend on your favorite beverage."

Legal Disclaimer: Don't forget about the possibility of a child falling off the rope bridge because of poor construction and the builder getting charged with involuntary manslaughter as a result of product negligence.

We actually ended up rolling our own, but that's because the specifics of our model required us to be able to track things that a) no other analytics platform was going to be able to handle; and b) we wanted to retain our own data. So I'd just add that the proper solution is highly dependent on the company's model and what the company plans on doing with the info.

As a side note, I would highly suggest NOT building a custom analytics platform as a startup unless your model simply won't work without it.

Good point. I'll pass that along.

And what about all those poor folks with 1024 x 768 monitors?

Thanks for the feedback, Paul.

We kind of figured we'd need to add custom options, so it's good to hear people would like to see that sooner rather than later.

We'll get it implemented as soon as possible!

Yeah, guess I should have scaled the servers before posting. Good lesson for next time.

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I'll be lucky to get a cubicle in the same building as him (though to be fair... I never called myself a server admin).

Thanks for the feedback, Fuzzwah. Yeah... we're still in a closed beta. Probably should have mentioned that in the post. Err... and on the site.

Umm... clearly it's a very early beta.