Wow. That reminds me of last year.

My ex made up phony charges to the police so she could keep more of my money (which the crown had to drop).

After work found out they threatened to fire me to negotiate themselves a better position.

Lost most of what I had to lawyers fees, lost the rest of it to the market.

What I did in response:

Lost 60 pounds

Met a great, funny, vibrant, intelligent, much thinner and younger woman

Told them I quit and ended up negotiating a better position

Blew what little I had left on a trip to Burning Man, met some great friends and gained a lot of perspective.

Grew my side biz into the point where it might survive the next 6 month, and lined up financing.

The future:

Quit my job last month

Taking the side biz full time

Life is indeed better on the other side. The funny thing about life is that to have the freedom to do anything you need to first lose everything. Courts, jails, and lawyers may be able to take your money, but they can't take your friends. Likewise they can confine your body, but they can't confine your mind. Going through all that gave me incredible perspective. I've always been a very caring and charitable person and it paid off in spades going through that whole ordeal. I never realized what an incredible social network I had developed through my character until I had to call on it. I left the ex with literally the shirt on my back and within a week had a fully furnished, albiet modestly, apartment and more importantly friends to fill it with cheer and laughter (to be honest a few tears as well, but mostly laughter and cheer).

Go tell your mom about the new features that Froyo has. Watch her eyes glaze over as you talk about "cloud-to-phone messaging APIs" and "APIs to make app data searchable".

Now show her the iphone 4 retina display.

As a developer I think you're obsessed with features. Whereas users don't necessarily want those features. Apple's bet is that users will reject the platform with more features in favor of the platform that works better.

Let's take your examples. When most people search their phone they're looking for information in either mail, contacts, or SMS messages. They don't want the data from the other hundred programs on their phone cluttering up the important results from those areas. So in this case Apple's stance is actually an advantage for the users.

On the cloud to device API it is nice but it's not like you can't accomplish the same goal simply by polling. So while this is an area where android is superior I don't think it's a feature that makes that much of a difference.

All that said the greatest argument against android winning because of features is the fact that they've always had more features than iOS. I mean if multitasking wasn't a big enough feature to woo users to android than I don't think something like cloud to device messaging is going to do it.

Want to do a startup? I'm available

My dream of having Zed come to an interview where the interviewers all have their feet up on the conference table is this much closer to coming true!

The HN take-away:

Behind what looks like a success could actually be a failure. (And probably vice-versa.)

It's awesome on the other side, with a caveat. You will get rejected. Again, and again, and again. Things will go wrong. Your dreams will get shattered. The moment you demonstrate signs of success, suddenly people will start knocking on your door. And when things change, you'll get rejected again. People will leave, mutiny, and flip out. The worst and the best of human nature will come out in plain sight.

If you're unprepared for this, a sliver of ice will form in your heart and will grow larger and larger, until there is nothing left. At the end, you will end up where you were before, with all your dreams shattered and endless cynicism about life and your fellow man in your heart. If you choose to say yes where you said no, and no where you said yes, you must learn to love people for their best and worst qualities, always and unconditionally, lest your adventure ends in a disaster.

So you are billing out 110k a year which is 733 or less hours per work a year.

Somewhere between 110k and 733 hours of labor is an asset you are just looking to throw away.

If you look at subbing it out to someone else(though they get full source, i mean they have to) and if you pay this/these guys 60/hr, you are looking at paying out around 44k-ish a year plus lazy bloat so probably 60k a year.

You should hopefully realize you have built something pretty awesome, you are just missing the steps covered by: http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...

which basically means that you need to put processes into your system where you can sub yourself out as needed and someone else can handle this. Support requests and RFQs going to your personal email aren't conducive to this. Using things like zendesk, some other support app etc would be really beneficial.

So really you have 25k a year + a hose of consulting money you can divvy up/spray around as you see fit.

You really have something cool here, you should value it correctly. People buy jobs all the time, isn't that what college is all about?