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What content do you pay for online? | robw: I paid $5 for a MetaFilter account - good intentions, then never used it. That was about 3 years ago.Other stuff - last.fm, flickr (although its not the content that they charge for), emusic.
I wonder if the BBC iPlayer counts? There's a TV license after all.In terms of news/informational content, I have a subscribtion to New Scientist (dead-tree format), which gives me access to their online archives. But I didn't pay specifically for those archives.
I was also a paid-up member of Daring Fireball when John Gruber first went full-time with it. But again, that was to get a shirt more than the content itself.As moxy says, you can get pretty much anything free if you look hard enough. Seems in my case I'm buying a physical item with 'free' content attached, rather than the content itself. |
How do you vote a submission after you have read the page it linked to? | RiderOfGiraffes: I use this:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=370399 |
How do I handle a million hits a minute? | majelelo: http://majelelo.com |
Where to find used office furniture? | brk: craigslist is usually a dearth of used office furniture. You can also often find used office furniture dealers in your area via a Google search for the same.For whiteboards you can also use a large piece of glass (mounted on a standing frame, or against a wall).FYI, I bought a roll of "whiteboard vinyl" a few years back at another startup with the intention of covering the walls in a conference room with it to make huge whiteboard areas. It sucked, don't waste your money. If the walls are not glass-smooth all the little bumps come through and make it a bitch to write on or erase. |
How do you vote a submission after you have read the page it linked to? | ScottWhigham: Best way I've done it is to use Firefox+Greasemonkey+"HN Splitview" (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/28372). When I click a link for HN now, it opens in a frame - half is the post and half is the comments. |
rules for storing banking info? | Tangurena: The case is mostly #3.PCI-DSS is the most commonly used standard, is aimed at retailers and payment processing systems. And while it is credit card based, much of what is in it covers other stuff that you should be thinking about if you're storing banking information.One book to look at is Cryptography in the Database. There is a section about laws that cover data security such as GLBA (which says nothing that a developer finds useful) and SOX (which, for software development, is more about background checks and version/configuration control).
http://www.amazon.com/Cryptography-Database-Defense-Symantec...Another book that may help with keeping the data away from hackers (and rogue employees) is Translucent Databases. I have the 1st edition, and the 2nd just came out last month:
http://www.amazon.com/Translucent-Databases-2nd-authenticati...In support of #1, check out NIST's 800 series of standards. When we were looking to bid on a government computing contract, they included a long list of them by reference, effectively turning a 3k page RFP into about 6k pages:
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsSPs.html |
What if we open-sourced our medical records, anonymously? | Tangurena: One past employer was looking to do such a thing. They handled electronic prescriptions, lab results and insurance claim filings. The premise was that pharmaceutical companies would be interested in long term longitudinal studies of patients.I identified the highest risk to be the anonymizer system. I called it "sausagizer" because it is easy to turn cows into sausages, but hard/impossible to turn sausages back into cows.One problem is that data entry isn't consistent or repeatable. So what might be entered as "John Doe" one day, might be "J Doe" or "Doe John" some other days. This is called "patient matching" and has been an area of interest for several decades. One paper discussing it is:
http://www.cecs.csulb.edu/~monge/research/thesis.pdfMost researchers in similar areas ended up getting lured into "bioinformatics" for the Human Genome Project. More prestige, more money and gene matching is suprisingly similar to string matching.Sadly, most of the research in the area of patient matching "went dark" after 911. By "going dark" I mean a combination of researchers who used to publish, now no longer do; and companies that used to publish even white papers have disappeared from the market. One such was NORA from SRD. IBM ended up buying the company, and shortly afterwards, all web pages, white papers and even the whole website of SRD vanished (even from archive.org).
http://www.pcworld.com/article/103692/tracking_terrorists_th...
http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/02/what_do_you_... |
Where to find used office furniture? | pedalpete: I've been looking too, but haven't been able to source big whiteboards locally (and shipping costs on the big items limits any savings you'd get).I went to ikea, in the "as is" section and grabbed a huge panel of lamenated something ($6).
Now, i've just got to get some whiteboard paint
http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=17835&utm_source...The whiteboard will end up twice as big as anything I found at office depot, and cost should be less than $40. |
Think Obama would approve a wireless network cloud owned by the people? | shutter: That would be awesome. If only those with the dough felt the same way...Granted, there are hurdles -- concern for theft, infrastructure for loss/repair/upgrades, etc. But it would be incredibly exciting nonetheless. |
Review our app, Lizzer | hotshothenry: umm, i don't see anything on your homepage except a link to digitalscientists... |
Review our app, Lizzer | digisci: hmm, DNS might still be switching over. I can see it here. Sorry, might have jumped the gun posting before it had time to propagate. |
Review our app, Lizzer | arthurk: The first impression of the service and the site in general is good.But I'm not really happy with the registration. Why do I need to sign up? Didn't I just use the service on the website? I don't want to customize it, just give me the bookmarklet with some default services.Anyway, I signed up 10 minutes ago and am still waiting for the e-mail with the activation link. |
Review our app, Lizzer | ucdaz: You should have some bullet point summary or how to |
Finding a contractor to set up our server | davidw: I'd suggest that you also try and learn from this person - it might cost a bit more initially, but basic admin skills are something that everyone technical should have. Sure, know your limits too - you may never be the guy that runs the 100 system data center, but you should be able to manage a few computers competently. |
Finding a contractor to set up our server | icey: Things that would be helpful for us to know: * The language / frameworks you're using
* The amount of traffic you need to handle
* One server or many
* Your budget
* The expected load your application will create on the server |
Please help me price my new app | tstegart: Paying by the month gives you extreme flexibility. You can always lower the price in the future, although raising it is a bit harder.One thing to do would be to compare what your app does with the one that costs 300/month, and what yours does compared to the one that costs 14/month. Where does your app fit in?How much are you looking to make? How much are your costs per customer and costs per month? The basic way to price is to add up your fixed costs (rent, hosting, marketing, etc) and the cost per month for providing the software, and then add in a healthy profit margin. That's how much you should charge.There are a lot of other pricing mechanisms, including how much money your software will save the customer, how much value they perceive it to have, etc. You could always start high and just keep lowering the price until you reach the ratio of customers to price that you want. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | lbrandy: Abject thievery.As I waste-time on the internet (err, do market research) I bookmark attractive sites. My only scruple is that I try to pick a site that is totally off-topic in a completely different industry. One of my projects recently "was inspired by" http://heroku.com/. I hope they take that as a compliment. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | mixmax: I found these by by asking Google:http://colorschemedesigner.com/http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/topbut found them pretty wanting.. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | rdrimmie: I am absolutely not a graphic designer. Usually I start with a dominant colour that I like (for example the default orange header here) and I'll plug it into a colour-match system like http://colorblender.com/Another resource I've used to good success is http://kuler.adobe.com (requires flash) which lets people (some of whom are quite a lot more competent than I at this) create and share colour themes.Finally, a neat tool that I saw make the rounds recently is http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php which lets you search on a word and uses Yahoo!'s image search to come up with some colour suggestions. That is not a theme place, but it's a fun way to perhaps stumble across a colour you like to use with tools like those above. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | thehickmans: I'll second http://kuler.adobe.com as a great tool to find or piece together a color scheme. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | timcederman: I used http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | tptacek: A well-known designer trick I've used is to spend 20 minutes paging through a stock photo site (I like sxc.hu), find a picture you like with some good color contrasts, and pull it into an image editor to eyedrop colors out.Kuler has tools that support this workflow too.What I don't get is the "shopping for color schemes" workflow that sites like Kuler support by default. I have also never liked anything that came out of a "generate split complements" color wheel tool; the real aesthetics of things like triadic schemes depend too much on saturation/value, and not enough on hue. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | psyklic: I ask myself what I want a user to "feel" when they visit my site. Then, I choose basic colors which elicit that feeling. After that, I look at different color schemes to see which complementary colors I like (this part is mostly subjective). |
Any users of SimpleCDN? | davssali: Yes bro, they seem to be legit, but their downside is, you could only use the (live)service as an enduser, u cant practically resale it as with other providers, it sux. I have 50 customers that want me to provide live event streaming, but it costs $75 per account with simpleCDN, too much for me, and they dont offer a re-saler kind of account. If any one know a way around this or know a program cpanle etc that can allow a single account to host other sub accounts or something then LET ME KNOW NOW... |
Hacker News Thread Dynamics | CalmQuiet: To me it looks almost like that. I would say that the first "catchy" post (or maybe first catchy reply) tends (TENDS) to set the tone. No, I doubt that the effect is intended, but it seems inevitable: a snowballing effect can occur only around a sufficiently potent idea that gets injected.Of course, this phenomenon can have the the effect of derailing the central idea (perhaps your initial concern?), but may we conclude, "There are no perfect discussion, only great ones?"Related thought: I've often wondered whether a pop-up summary of the essence of the originally posted article that is linked would help focus discussion + (for new news) help visitors know whether the linked material is worth their visiting. [ For me, often the discussion on YHN is worth 10x what the linked article was. ] |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | omarish: I like to check out wordpress themes. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | jfornear: I mostly pull colors from images, but http://www.colourlovers.com and http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html are sometimes helpful. FireBug is real helpful for experimentation.The best advice I know regarding color schemes: spend time up front finding a good 6-8 colors to cover everything from backgrounds to link hovers, and then, stick with that scheme for your first iteration so that you don't get hung up on choosing colors all the time. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | unalone: I just kind of go into it intuitively. I guess you could call it synesthesia, but that's a bit overwrought a description. I pick colors that feel right and jiggle until it comes together perfectly. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | tricky: I grab a camera and take pictures of things that were obviously put together by someone who knows color.There is a neighborhood full of very well-painted homes that has inspired a few of my designs. One time I pulled a color scheme from macro shots of my backyard. My client said, "Wow, I really like that brown, what is that?"It was dog poop. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | Hoff: Hire somebody that's good at this stuff; same as dealing with icons and images and such.Creating good color schemes and good icons is as much a specific skill as creating good code.If you're serious about a product, it's worth the investment. The first thing folks see with your project is the UI; the colors and the icons and such, after all. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | misterbwong: Work with grayscale first. Design your UI with contrast in mind rather then color. Then when all the main elements are in place, pick a good color scheme. I've always found colourlovers.com to be an invaluable resource. |
Please help me price my new app | RobGR: Start high and drop it over time if you are not satisfied. Also, maintain a "permanent license" option that is not monthly, that is about 6 times the monthly cost, and don't drop that as fast as the monthly cost if you have to drop it. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | ionfish: I just make them up. They don't come "at the drop of a hat"; it takes time and a lot of hard work, usually. Often there are false starts and wrong turnings. One site design I did a while back went through four utterly different designs before I was happy with it. Sometimes that's just how it is; usually things go a little more smoothly.Usually it's art that I draw from, rather than the work of other designers--Rothko, Hokusai. Recently I saw an understated gem of an exhibition: Vilhelm Hammershøi at the Royal Academy. I would love to incorporate some of his subtle tones and textures into something. |
Review my startup, mobify.me | ktom: Wow spin.mobify.me actually loads faster than spin.com on my iphone.easier to read too |
Review our app, Lizzer | crux: It ssems a little mad to use the New Yorker font, or a font that is so strongly reminiscent of the New Yorker. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | showerst: There's a fantastic (physical) product design blog at http://www.thedieline.com/ that I often use as inspiration, especially since many of the product ranges use a palette of 3-7 colors. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | jmtame: on hndir.com, i basically got my inspiration from the textmate editor theme "Blackboard." many of them can be found here: http://wiki.macromates.com/Themes/UserSubmittedThemesi guess after a while, you like black as a background so much that it creeps into your projects ("black's da new white, yall!").our next project, which we should have ready in march, is also themed the same way. dark background, neon'ish colors. i need to get over it. there was a phase i went through where everything was white and blue. i honestly have no idea where i get these fetishes (fetishii?).but yeah, great artists steal. anarchy has no rules, so declare a form of government and go ballistic ("maybe wrong in YOUR country, but in mine, which i happen to login via root, it's perfectly acceptable.") |
Review my startup, mobify.me | eli: Shucks, I had pretty much exactly the same idea a year or two ago, but it stalled when I couldn't find anyone to pay me to develop it.May I ask for details about the platform/architecture?Also, the usage caps seem low to me, across the board. If I ran a site that I expect to get major mobile traffic, it might make me nervous to see that the top tier is only 10k hits/day (even if in reality I'd never come close to that) |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | jwesley: I usually pick a theme I want my site to have, like "education", then do a Google image search for the term to see how others have represented it with color. After getting a basic idea of what color I like I hand it off to the designer with very general suggestions. I have learned this is one area I am better off delegating to someone more talented. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | Zev: I generally pick a main color i want to use and pick colors that are on either side of it in the color wheel (Also that are similar in brightness and so on) if I don't want a monochromatic site.Or if I'm at a loss, i have this widget: http://www.colorschemer.com/galleria_info.php |
Would you pay $5/yr for HN? | jnl: Yes, unquestionably. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | juliend2: Try to define the subject of your branding. It your logo is a monkey, for example, find some photos of monkeys and pick the colors. Make a palette of these colors and see what is matching well.Hint : it's good to mix some cold and warm colors. Try to keep some white space (or at least, light tones). |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | diN0bot: ask a designer (-: |
Review my startup, mobify.me | siong1987: I think you may need a better mobile version of your mobify.me website to convince others that your team are good on "mobify" websites. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | johns: Offer the icombinator.net guy a little something. |
Is this idea outdated? | RobGR: It seems like a good idea to me. Ads for travel related services usually pay a lot, so maybe it can pay for itself. However you should be doing it mainly because you want it to be done, I don't think it will make a lot of money.I will check back to see how the site evolves. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | jeremyw: Heh, you wound me sir. I had pulled down HN and tested the mods.Here are the URLs to test on the phone.http://lookerupper.com/hn/news.html
http://lookerupper.com/hn/comments.htmlObviously not an optimal iPhone interface, but enough for reading/login/voting. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | daltonlp: Oh I would definitely hit up http://www.colr.org :)...unless my project IS www.colr.org.Then I stick with white and gray. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | TrevorJ: For what it is worth, I have browsed HN on my palm Treo, which has a tiny screen and is pretty far behind what I'd consider state-of-the-art mobile browsing and the user experience is functional when on the HN site. |
Review my startup, mobify.me | enej: Amazing work! |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | gojomo: Here's an addition to the prior suggestions that shows scaling up and spacing out the voting arrows in the mobile CSS:http://xavvy.com/news.yc/comments-arrows.htmlIn HTML, the up and down arrow A elements get classes; in the CSS, the IMGs are stretched and the down arrow bumped down a bit.(And the last comment shows a failed experiment in using ⇑ and ⇓ in lieu of IMGs.) |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | pg: When was any? I find these sorts of things crumble in your hands, because as soon as you pick a candidate you find yourself thinking "but that was just a variant of such-and-such earlier idea." |
Review my startup, mobify.me | TrevorJ: Great idea! Think there is a model for user-submitted "mobified" versions of 3rd-party websites in the future? |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | shailesh: The question reminds of the notion of processes and channels in Occam with constructs for parallelizing based on Tony Hoare's CSP theory. |
Review my startup, mobify.me | s3graham: First screencast was good.Seems sluggish loading the mobile versions (on desktop, not mobile). Especially images seemed painful, and they don't seem to cache.Is it common that somewhere like grousemountain.com keeps a web designer on staff? I feel like normally a lot of sites are designed one-off, and updated by a receptionist/nephew/something. Anyway, my wild-ass-guess is that offering to do the mobifying for a few hundred $ (+ future hosting) would be well-received. [edit: oh, duh, didn't see "Expert Design"]Looks pretty nice overall.ps. good to see Vancouver representation (I'm guessing, given the samples on the main page :) |
Review my startup, mobify.me | awk: sleek and well done. like the fact you offer prospective users a chance to try out mobify via the site. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | iamelgringo: I have an Android G1 and the site actually functions rather well for me. The only problem that I have, is that I can't log in. I don't know why. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | icode: Why not just make HN work in any screen size? Then it will work on IPhone and any other device as well. You just have to get rid of things with absolute size and replace them with sizes relative to their container. Maybe the textarea im writing this into is the only thing that has to be changed.And then testing is easy too. Just resize your window. |
Review my Craigslist killer | andrewljohnson: Your name strikes me as somewhat anti-semitic, but I wouldn't swear to it. Did you have gibberish Hebrew in mind for the name? |
Review my Craigslist killer | andrewljohnson: Your site would be more useful to me if you listed any items in California. A search for California on the site shows nothing. |
Are patents worthwhile? | karim: I think that something like this already exists for firefox :
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/Patenting, is, imo, not a good idea. First, suppose that someone breaks your patent ? Are you going to engage a tedious lawsuit. Second, you should always be ahead of your concurrence. Third, you're already copying someone else's idea. |
Are patents worthwhile? | noonespecial: Unless you happen to have a couple hundred thousand laying around to actually prosecute an offender, a patent will do you little good.You should spend your energy doing your thing. Simply having a good idea and doing it well is probably the best defense against those who would copy it. People who rip off ideas in the way that you are worried about usually do it so poorly that it doesn't matter. |
Are patents worthwhile? | rms: It's not particularly useful once your company is going, but investors like to see that your IP is exclusive and protected. It's still probably not worth the money to pay a lawyer to write it, but you can file a patent or provisional patent yourself for next to nothing. Check out the Nolo Press books on the topic. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | markup: Beside the other URLs suggested may I point you to http://developer.apple.com/webapps/ ? |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | swombat: I often browse HN from my iPhone and it works great... not sure what else you need.Oh, actually, just one thing - links in the message body. Since iPhones can't copy/paste, those might as well not be there. Otherwise, it seems pretty functional to me... I've browsed articles and comments, posted comments, checked my threads for responses... all worked absolutely fine. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | wheels: Two things that I'd probably call just features of OO languages, but seem significant:- Type-safe generic programming- Introspection |
Review my startup, mobify.me | mcantelon: Seems like it'll have great prospects. At a reasonable price many folks will likely go this route as it cuts through the pain of dealing with the current mobile state (which should become more management in the future as smartphones gain all the capabilities of the desktop). |
Review my Craigslist killer | asimjalis: One thing I wish Craigslist did but doesn't do is look good on the iPhone. I am not suggesting you do this. But that might be a strategy for you to beat CL: find a niche that CL ignores and target that. |
Review my Craigslist killer | barbie17: How about if you allow them to import their postings from Craigslist and other places? Craigslist wouldn't like it but when you are small they probably wouldn't even notice. Just do it from multiple IP addresses or something. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | nostrademons: Most really fundamental ideas are only recognizable in hindsight, after people have built other ideas on top of them. If I remember the early/mid 80s correctly, the hot language was BASIC because it came with most microcomputers and would supposedly enable a new generation of hobbyist programmers. (Which it did, but they grew up to program in C++, Python, and JavaScript, not Basic.)There're a lot of really interesting ideas going on in the programming language research community right now. Subtext, Epigram, associated types, Goo(ze) (which unfortunately seems to have been abandoned), JoCaml, STM, etc. Unfortunately, it probably won't be possible to judge the worth of these ideas for another 20 years. |
Review my Craigslist killer | barbie17: I would change the look and feel of the site a little. It looks like those spammy domain squatters. I would tweak the font a little, at least. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | jlouis: Operational semantics has transformed language theory quite a lot in my opinion. It has set a new precedent for precision in describing programming languages. I would hope that more new languages began to pick that idea up. And then to use formal machine verified methods for verifying its meta-theory. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | dfranke: The ability to securely dynamically load and execute arbitrary untrusted code within the same address space as trusted code, ala the Java bytecode verifier. I'm not certain whether the creators of Java invented this idea, but they were certainly the first to popularize it. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | notauser: Output all the data as lists and wrap it in IUI:http://code.google.com/p/iui/ |
Review my Craigslist killer | rm999: It's tough to provide a good incentive. I think your idea of initially targeting zip codes not covered by craigslist is good, but then your problem is marketing to thousands of local, semi-rural areas. Very tough...Perhaps a way to break into the market would be to find an esoteric genre of items to trade with a very devoted user group - these people generate buzz for free. Then, when you have a group of users, slowly expand into more mainstream categories that have some relation to the original base. For example, you could start with car stereos and speakers, then slowly expand into other car parts, then into everything. I realize this may require shipping and isn't CL-like, so it may not be what you are looking for.I think the most important thing for me that Craigslist is missing is user profiles of some sort. When I am going to drive 30 miles to some guy's house to pick up a widget, I would feel much more comfortable if other users said he was on the level and dependable.Feature-wise, I'm unclear on what your site offers that Craigslist doesn't, other than a more web 2.0 interface. If anything, I think a simpler, quicker interface would be better for something like this. |
Review my startup, mobify.me | known: How do transcoders affect HTTPS?http://blog.masabi.com/2009/01/how-do-transcoders-affect-htt... |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | known: I prefer Black and White as http://mobify.me/ does. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | bulanga: any chance you could get it working on the Wii?
Sometimes I like to sit back in my sofa and browse HN from the Wii. It renders ok but could do with a few tweaks. I usually use the Column mode for browsing where the width of the page in made to match that of the screeen i.e no horizontal scrolling needed. I don't think I'm the only one accessing HN from this console? |
Review my Craigslist killer | ComputerGuru: You can't kill Craigslist with that UI.What makes Craigslist "just work" is the simple, bloat-free interface. It makes it easy to view large quantities of data on a single page, and doesn't make it a "chore" to browse through the site for stuff.Your UI is really way too bloated. Cut down on all the "web 2.0" look, focus on what your customers need rather than making sure your design screams "I'm a Web 2.0 Startup!"Cut down on the graphics, the crazy whitespace.Just my two cents. |
How do you find a colorscheme for your project? | andhapp: Has anyone ever tried Adobe Kuler. It has a lot of themes put together by I guess designers. I admit some of them are awful but it gives one an opportunity to see how different colours complement each other... |
Are patents worthwhile? | jacquesm: The sooner patents are abolished the better.That said, as long as they exist there are situations where patents make sense. If developing your product takes a couple of millions of dollars and it is truly innovative then it makes sense to take out a patent because the overhead is relatively low compared to the potential benefits.For instance, the Dyson vacuum cleaner was protected by a patent and it helped them in going after Philips who shamelessly cloned it. |
Review my Craigslist killer | rantfoil: If you're going to AJAX, what about just going all the way and never showing a 'loading' page? Just cache all the pages and all the item listings in memory so that its zero cost to browse around fast? |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | euroclydon: This has got to be some kind of test: Who's up at 2:00 AM on Saturday morning and willing to donate modified HTML/CSS to HN?Is the winner going to be a new moderator? Get a HN T-Shirt? Get a 7x7 pixel image of their face hidden on the site somewhere? |
Review my Craigslist killer | katz: It looks nice. Just my 2 cents (I am not a USA citizen so I don't know the exact conditions):Marketing in small towns is going to be difficult. A lot of small towns lags behind more urban places in internet adoption. Their population are also generally older and less tech savvy than cities - so you should plan for this group (simple interfaces, etc...).You also get small towns that are relatively near each other: if a person wants to buy something $200 + he will happily drive through to the next town. So if you implement a type of map and list nearby towns it may be good.A lot of selling over here happens with small regional papers – a regional paper will cover one or two towns and will be filled with regional news (stuff like school performance, local politics, etc...). Those papers also contain classified advertisements. If you can maybe link up with one or two of them to put those advertisements online – or provide a system in which they can put advertisements on your system (e.g. show on their website and redirect to yours when a user clicks on the add) it would be great.Most of those papers are usually a one or two man operation without much of a website – you should check if you can get a system in which you supply a CMS type system with your advertisement system to them. You provide the website framework and advertisement system and they fill it with content & advertisements. |
Review my Craigslist killer | ieatpaste: Instead of zip codes, why not do closed, individual communities? I know there are a lot of forums that have a closed buy/sell market that could use this application. Some guys recently were trying to buy/sell on HN and this would be a good opportunity to expand. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | ig0rskee: Paul,What you actually want is a mobile projection of the HN site! iPhone is the dominant device in the US but I am sure you want to open up to Asia's Nokia, Google's Android and the BlackBerry as well.We launched Mobify.Me in a post earlier today and here's a mobile version of HN done in around 5 minutes (as it's very late here in Vancouver). All you'd have to do is point a DNS entry for m.ycombinator.com to:http://yc.mobify.meHope you like it!Team Mobify.Me |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | davo11: type inferencing as used in haskell et al, that's a fairly recent development - early 90's/late 80's?Category theory is another perhaps - it's from the 40's but it's application to programming is new - 80's perhaps? |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | waleedka: The implementation that Ashwin from Buxfer built for the iPhone was great. Simple, fast, and already tested. Maybe you can use it, or borrow parts of it. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | tome: Monadic models of computation, in Haskell etc? |
Review my Craigslist killer | eli_s: What is the point of all the AJAX? All your content is virtually invisible to google, and given that you're looking for ways to get traffic i would have thought natural search would have been very important.I think you need to think a lot more about your urls - make them friendly for people and search engines, so instead of:http://www.menkle.com/BrowseCategory.aspx?c=3why not:http://www.menkle.com/categories/electronicsand instead of:http://www.menkle.com/ShowClassified.aspx?id=847why not:http://www.menkle.com/items/dvd/american_pie_2 orhttp://www.menkle.com/washington/georgetown/dvd/american_pie...some well thought out url rewriting will go a long way + will give the benefit of obscuring the fact you're using asp, which might help with security. |
Review my Craigslist killer | sonink: I think before you want to make something like a CL killer, you first need to understand what is CL, why is that so popular as it is - essentially what is the primary driver of business for CL.As other would have already commented, it seems that the simple interface is one of hte biggest drivers for CL. You would find the same if you dig through tons of forbes/media articles. I think that is not the case. That is just post-facto insight - something which gets generated a lot in the media.The primary driver of business for CL afaik is data and the people who already use CL. If I want to sell something I go to CL because it offers me the most amount of buyers. If I want to buy something vice-versa. It is a self-fulfilling loop.The only way to beat CL is to figure out how do you overtake CL in its primary driver of business. It will not be easy - I dont know even if it is possible. But what I do know is that anything else (neat UI, AJAX) is just inconsequential. |
Review my Craigslist killer | tlrobinson: Isn't the "[insert huge company or product] killer" phrase incredibly cliche at this point? |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | davo11: What about javascript's dynamic object model, where the objects can be changed at run time? I don't think this was possible earlier on, can't remember if this was possible in smalltalk or self?The idea of the DOM?Both mid 90's |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | gaerfield: Somewhere/Sometimes comes the point where fundamental ideas just evolve or merge's. Democracy is one of these examples, just from a other domain.
Future improvements would be massive parallelism and languages would evolve on this. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | Alex3917: The biggest problem with HN on the iPhone is just that typing the comments takes too long. What we really need is to modify the spelling autocomplete to take account of our most commonly used phrases. So if the user starts typing s-i-r the thing knows they are actually trying to type "sir ken robinson" and just completes the phrase for them. |
Review my Craigslist killer | merklefeedback: What would you change on our site to make it better?Here's a start: don't use javascript for link navigation. Try browsing Craigslist with javascript disabled and you'll see that the site is fully functional. Then try browsing your site the same way and see how far you get.Craigslist quickly presents a lot of useful information in an accessable manner. It's successful in part because everyone and everything can traverse their site.Craigslist on lynx:front page: http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt145/lynxcraigslist/cl.p...sf bay area: http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt145/lynxcraigslist/cl2....software jobs: http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt145/lynxcraigslist/cl3....specific job posting: http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt145/lynxcraigslist/cl4....Although not particularly pleasing to look at, nothing stopped me from getting right to the information. Now consider menkle on lynx:http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt145/lynxcraigslist/menk...Unfortunately this is as far as we (and most search engines) are going to get because your links depend on javascript for navigation. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | palish: Please keep HN as it is (or expose a way to turn off the new CSS). I browse HN daily from my iPhone, and it works fine. Also, pages load extremely quickly because of the minimalist site design, which I love.Basically, you've already met your goal, which is to "make HN work well on the iPhone" -- it currently works great. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | njharman: I'm not a language connoisseur so don't know if this meets your paradigmatic quality test and it's kind of old, early 80's, but significant indentation as popularized but not invented by Python. http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/02/early-language-de...I believe it is a large factor of why Python has/is gaining mindshare in technical but non-programmer fields, education, science. If true and continues seems transformational to me. |
Are patents worthwhile? | pclark: you can't patent ideas. Even if you could, you couldn't afford to actually prosecute an offender. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | david927: I've been working on something for a while that I think could represent a fundamental shift in constructing software. It's essentially an environment that takes collections of nodes and assembles them into self-defined constructs. Since there's nothing more than these simple key-value nodes, anything that is created is a matter of cloning an existing node, removing one, or setting the nodes state. There's no textual syntax besides operators in expressions. I haven't published the results yet, but if you're interested in finding out more, feel free to email me. |
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