ankhmoop

Other than money, how do you prevent an expert-exodus as expert users are deluged with simpleton questions? Amidst a deluge of bad questions, there's little value to remain active, as your own questions can rarely be answered, and users aren't providing interesting questions.

Something else is needed to provide a substitute for that value.

Alternatively, you must prevent the exodus by filtering the kinds of interactions/questions that occur. Mailing lists, for instance, have a barrier to entry to serve as a first-pass filter (the subscription), and then a community to enforce community norms.

Either way, money is what would entice me to answer questions on the web. Currently I do it for free on IRC, but only because standing community helps ensure that the quality of questions is reasonable on the channels I frequent.

$5-$15 per answer would be reasonable given the limited time involvement.

It's doubtful to me that you could appeal to expert users to exchange time for money when it is better leveraged by consulting and entrepreneurship.

I seem to have enough free time to blow a fair portion of it commenting on Hacker News.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

As it is, I don't bother to use StackOverflow. My questions would be too esoteric for the audience/format, and nearly all of the questions I see are boring, easily answerable with a search of the documentation. The questions would be less boring if I were paid to answer them, and then I'd be more likely to find a few gems to answer, too.

That convincing management regardless of your productive output is what matters at the end of the day? Perhaps at some organizations, but it's not a particularly accurate, nuanced world view.

I doubt this story would be conveyed in reverse -- the stereotypical "rockstar hacker" produces vast reams of code that will fail catastrophically, but comes out ahead by, upon 'completion', immediately pushing responsibility for the disastrously buggy code to the "stodgy" enterprise engineers who get called in to maintain the project. The "rockstar" moves on to the next project, where he'll repeat this performance, and the stodgy developers get poor performance reviews.

"Enterprise teams" are not, inherently, profoundly stupid in their practice of software engineering, and not all "hackers" inherently produce worthwhile, quality code.

This completely fabricated fable of software engineering is a simple straw man argument, and I've flagged it accordingly.

As a software developer, Objective-C is just another imperative C-derived language (a pure superset of C, actually), with Smalltalk-decedent OO features. It's not (or shouldn't be) an alien experience.

My comment assumed a baseline software developer proficiency. If simple high-level webapp development is all you've ever done, then of course -- writing an Objective-C application will be more difficult. Perhaps that's a good reason to write one.

As for the rest of your argument,AT&T's Edge connection downloads at around 25KB. So a 1K page (which you claim causes an "unpleasant wait") would download in 1/25th of a second even on a slow connection.

In addition to failing to account for additional resources (the page won't be 1K in total), you forgot to account for latency (there's quite a bit).

As for the rest, my point still stands. Everything you spoke of requires a cracked iPhone which the great majority of people don't have anyway.

Nothing I've mentioned requires a jailbroken phone for any purpose.

I'm truly, genuinely surprised, as most indie game developers I know have been lucky to recoup their costs, and fewer have seen any sustained revenue to speak of. Some got lucky, most have not.

What games do you develop, if you don't mind shedding the mask of anonymity? (I understand if not, I'm anonymous here because it allows me to actually speak freely).

At this date in time, I am the model for an iPhone business. A single guy making indie games. It might morph into something different in the future. I imagine there will be a separate path for business applications. Perhaps $30 CRM apps will be sellable in a bundle with enterprise software to large companies. But I don't think end users will ever pay $30 for iPhone apps except for very niche cases. Most people view their phone as an entertainment device, apps are on the same level as ringtones. The market may correct itself by flushing out all the players who can't make a profit on a $1.99 game, but it's not going to correct itself by suddenly having mostly $30 apps on the app store.

Maybe you're right, but I hope not. I'd be curious how you can afford rent on $1.99 game sales, what sort of revenue "more money than I ever have in my life" means, and whether you've seen more than one of your released applications succeed.