FYI missing an `h` in Thymine label

looks excellent

Generally not for Masters' programs though, which is the most popular and easiest way to get a temporary study visa. Then they pay out of state tuition rates.

JSON - er JSON-based document storage - documents with unique identifiers. and the ability to define and set schemas for the JSON, and ... we're back to a relational database

I think he was talking about the query language.

Shocking!

No wait, predictable.

This is premeditated nefariousness! Horrible

there's a workaholic / achievement / perfectionist satisfaction aspect at play - hustle to make yourself into an idealized version of self. Since achieving this is difficult, gradual, and ultimately impossible, it becomes a perpetual distraction.

Wow pretty amazing. This seems to point very clearly to a muscle tension issue. The piercing into some area on your head may have helped some chronic tension to release, stopping the migraines.

worse yet some moron sets the search type to "regex"

Wasn't the NY times founded way before the microchip?

zing!

people can find multiple ways to get to the same product. once your way starts charging they will find another way.

Is the implication here that you need to charge and users will leave you once you do? If you can make a product that's significantly better, then you should be able to charge. The thing I'd note for affiliate marketing as a business model is that for it to generate significant revenue, you need to have a lot of traffic while other business models can generate that much faster (subscriptions) or make you money based off of that traffic (ads) instead of how many products are purchased.

Your note on affiliate marketing is what makes your first statement potentially unachievable. How does a consumer "know" that a product is significantly better to the point of "worth paying for"? There's always another free (potentially ad supported) affiliate marketer (or 5) around the corner. (Also considering the "worst" version of this "product" is an unskippable ad").

I don't know the solution

Fair. The best solution we've seen is building the product in some way where it's somewhat defensible, either through data, features that bigger players won't build, etc. and then using a subscription based model if users are willing to pay for that and value the searches high enough or using an ads based model if you're optimizing for traffic rather than pure value on each search.

I suppose two case studies worth exploring are:

Consumer Reports (subscription magazine recurring revenue) NY times Wirecutter (a potential add on service to boost apparent value for subscribers)

We've looked a bit into CR and Wirecutter, not that deeply into CR yet though. I definitely used Wirecutter for a bit of things in the past, and they have a high level of trust that we'll need to seek to replicate.