madrobby

Hey, I'm Thomas, the author of the article. I do agree with your observations pretty much entirely.

I'm mostly talking about the "throw a component, library or jQuery plugin at everything" sort of mentality. That just yields and unmaintainable buggy mess—unfortunately I've encountered this all too often in the wild. (While I was a consultant, I could make a good living from cleaning up these messes, so I won't complain too much!)

It all boils down to, however, a willingness to actually think about the things you're doing, and trying to do good solid work. IMO not enough people do that, or even aspire to do that, which makes me a bit sad about "my" profession.

Ohai, I've been hell-banned and don't know why. I guess as someone successfully running a software business _and_ being a well-known open source person I have to place in a forum for people who want to run successful internet businesses and are into tech.

I've made $60k in a year with a highly topical 60-page ebook (PDF only) that I wrote in about a week, mainly by promoting to a mailing list with only a few thousand people on it.

As Nathan says, you need to set a price. Plus, tell people why it's worth more for them to buy and read your book than to either not have the information in it, or spend the time researching themselves.

My book is on supporting Retina screens on web browsers[1]. Yes, you can spend a week reading all you can ok the web about it. Or you spend $49 and know all about it in half an hour and spend the other 39 1/2 hours of the week making money with client work.

[1] http://retinafy.me

The related posts section has some posts with stories and examples.

(I'm the author of the article)

I replace my main computer (MacBook Pro) every 1-2 years with a maxed out top of the line model. I keep the one I had before around as a backup in case my laptop breaks or gets stolen.

Yes, it doesn't make too much sense tax-wise. However, it would cost me much more in productivity to wait 2-3 years longer to replace it. This thing needs to run bunches of stuff for development, like various DB servers, multiple VMs (yay 4 different versions of Internet Explorer) and should be as light as possible so I can take it everywhere easily (usually servers go down when you're mid-vacation).

So it might save a few hundred dollars by taking advantage of tax laws, or I might earn thousands more because I can develop faster and things are just more enjoyable. I know what to pick.

This is why `request.xhr?` exists. It will be false when the action is called with JSONP.

I'm the co-founder of a successful SaaS (http://letsfreckle.com/) and would easily have paid $300 for the spreadsheet alone.

I wish I had had the spreadsheet back when we started. Garrett seriously got your back on the finances of a bootstrapped SaaS.

I can see how my comment could be taken this way. It's not want I wanted to express. I wanted to state, as a disclaimer, that I'm the author of the post.

As for answering the comment, it's really more of an ad hominem so that's why I wrote the snarky "That's interesting".

I am interested in what he developed though, especially as he's so sure of his one true way.

It's marketed as a silver bullet.

Here are some snippets from the ember.js Homepage: "Write dramatically less code", "Don't waste time", "Ember.js is built for productivity".

I'm Thomas Fuchs. That's interesting. How many apps have you developed?

But maybe there IS a Silver Bullet[1], veemjeem!

[1] Fred Brooks, "There Is No Silver Bullet" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

I, for one, think it's delightful that more people are getting to understand the vagaries of product development from an investment standpoint. The more people experience the pain, hopefully the less broken things will become.

This is advice for non-fiction ebooks. :) The most important thing really is to learn how to do marketing right. It's not that hard at all and will yield great results.

I don't have a general download link, when you buy it I'll send out an email with a personal download link that will expire in a week or so, and can only be used 5 times.

Of course you can just write to my support email box and I'll send you a new link if you loose the file. I also send out free updates whenever I update the book.

It's very relevant because you pull stuff out of your ass while I'm actually doing this (successfully).

With "anecdotes" you mean repeatable strategies that work every time for me and for other book authors we know?

No—I've had the experience that it doesn't work for the types of technical books we (my wife and I) write. Or we're just really better at email/twitter/blog marketing. :)

But it's definitely a good option for many types of books.

Are you an author who is successfully publishing books?

You can't get around this. People will pirate it and they do. However, those who pirate it wouldn't pay money anyway so there's no loss.

And because it's literally two clicks to buy it with PayPal, it's easier to buy it on my site than to try and find a pirated copy, so for those who want to buy it legally it's really easy.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the book and blog post.

I've been asked on Twitter about student discounts, short answer is don't do it. Long answer: if you have a book specifically targeting students, price it so they can afford it, otherwise don't bother as it's more work for you and they probably won't buy it anyway.

Larger image dimensions don't mean larger file sizes, see http://mir.aculo.us/2012/08/06/high-resolution-images-and-fi... for an explanation.

Of course, exceptions prove the rule. Sometimes CSS and HTML are not good enough and you'll have to resort to use JavaScript.

But you shouldn't make it the default go-to.

I'm slightly disappointed that it's implemented in more than 140 bytes.

Keep on being awesome. :)

@NathanBowers on twitter suggested looking into http://convertico.org/Multi_Image_to_one_icon/

Media resolution is relative, as people zoom in on mobile phones all the time.

For stuff like photos, just supply a larger resolution JPEG that has lower quality. This will look great when smaller and when zoomed in, while keeping the file size in a range that is ok for mobile.

Good to know that depending on the author of an article, some stories don't get flagged and disappear from the front page of hacker news.

In addition I'd say that the interpreter is broken and should be fixed to be faster. "with" is not deprecated.

I wouldn't use "with" in most situations, but I like it in the testing code and for some DSLs, as it makes things more readable (again, personal style).

I think that once you start optimizing performance problems you need to 1) measure things anyway, and 2) fix on a case-by-case basis. (Don't optimize prematurely, etc.)

#1 has nothing to do with size optimization, it's purely stylistic and about having to write less code. See also http://blog.izs.me/post/3393190720/how-this-works