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Subscription management/billing software? | NoBSWebDesign: We use BlinkSale (http://www.blinksale.com) for invoicing and like it very much. They have a nice interface for creating templates and recurring invoices as well. Though, as I began digging deeper into this area, I've begun to think that there are a lot of sites that do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. Go with one that's free to begin with, and pay if you like it I suppose. |
What has been your biggest mistake? | time_management: I'm good at rolling with the punches, so I haven't yet been smashed by a big mistake, although I've made plenty. I usually recover from those, and come back bigger and badder.I have, however, lost a lot to the petty time-wasters and energy drains that eventually lead to missing opportunities for growth. |
What has been your biggest mistake? | abstractbill: I used to have regrets. For much of my early 20s, I thought not having tried to make music professionally was a mistake. Then, later, I worked at Macrovision and saw the music business up-close and was very glad not to be part of it! Similarly, for a couple of years after my PhD I regretted not staying in academia. Working for a startup has completely cured me of that regret.I guess I've learned that something you believe to be a mistake today can turn out to have been a smart move given a year or two's hindsight. |
What has been your biggest mistake? | ptn: Not having looked for a scholarship to get me to a real university. Now I'm stuck here. I'm in my 4th year (1 more to go), if I transferred I'd be in 2.5 or something. |
Recommendation services? | tstegart: iTunes Music Store? |
What has been your biggest mistake? | msg: I was a National Merit Finalist, honors student, and such. I didn't go out and get scholarships for college. I stayed in-state instead of going out for my own adventure. When I got to college, I didn't know what I was doing with myself and bombed pretty badly. I wasted a lot of time and effort. I didn't drop out to figure things out though. I took out a lot of student loans, and didn't even finish undergrad first time around.I think a lot of my problem was not biting the bullet and making the hard choices after that first mistake. Instead, I dug myself deeper every time. I'm still paying the loans, but once I figured out what I really wanted, it was not so hard to work to get it. |
What resources have you read for E-Tailing/E-Commerce? | tstegart: They're hard to find, because you have to filter out so much "Make money in 10 seconds!" type spam. If you're looking for background, I think there's a Dummies book on the subject, although parts may be out of date. Finding an objective look at all the offerings out there will be hard though. What exactly are you looking to sell? |
What has been your biggest mistake? | fiaz: Listening too seriously to others. People like to give "advice" from their perspective and because such advice is through their own lens of reality it might be true for them, but not for you. |
Which mobile phone would you buy? | mrjbq7: I love the new iPhone 3G.And the SDK, plus the distribution that the App Store provides, makes a compelling combination.Battery life is a little light, but the screen (oh the screen!) and wifi, gps, bluetooth, 3G, EDGE, etc. |
Review my startup | mstefff: There seems to be tons of these sort of sites out there. It looks like a nice site but I never saw the appeal these prediction sites have. |
Can I use the RDBMS as an application server? | pjackson: I used to be an Enterprise architect for a Fortune 500 company. We did many of the things you are asking about. Here are my answers:1. Yes, you can. However, there will be tradeoffs. One important piece of sharing business logic involves sharing instances of running code, not just the logic itself. It's tough to implement a singleton in a set of stored procs. I'd recommend that you leave stored procs for the kinds of logic that you might code into a web service: transactional concerns that have a complicated set of steps.2. Yes, that's a popular approach, and for good reason: the objects you create against the persistence store are sharable at the instance level.3. It will scale less-well than an architecture with a solid middle tier, but it's impossible to put a user-count on it without knowing much much more. If you pick a commercial RDBS like Oracle or Sybase (and many people don't like to do that), you will find that there are a lot of expensive but effective scaling mechanisms to handle this. It's usually cheaper to invest in a decent middle tier, a caching server, and scale that way.4. That's not necessarily true. Portability is nice, but there are many other reasons to pull the business logic out of the database. For example, it's hard (but not impossible) to implement an event-driven system where transactions will fire off other business events downstream when you're using a stored procedure set as your logic layer. You can do it, but you end up with triggers or batch jobs that reduce the real-time processing capabilities of the whole architecture.5. P/L SQL is pretty powerful, but I still have my logic in objects rather than in Oracle. I can introduce caching and other sscaling strategies easier this way.Though I use and like Oracle, I'd steer you away from it unless you have a really good reason to buy it. It takes a lot more care-and-feeding than MySQL, the licensing model becomes oppressive when you start to need to cluster the DB, and experts in the area are expensive.Hibernate is a good framework. Why are you resisting the use of it? If you want to go heavy on the stored procedures, check out the iBatis framework. It's really good at ORM and stored procs. |
What has been your biggest mistake? | kirpekar: Wow, interesting topic. Some months ago, I started a little (non commercial) website that would do exactly this: ask people what they regret and record it for others.http://www.regrett.com |
Which mobile phone would you buy? | geuis: I have the iPhone 3G after upgrading from my first-gen iPhone. Honestly, it's not any more useful than the old one. 3G sucks the battery in only a couple of hours. I live in San Francisco and the 3G coverage is so sporadic and unreliable it switches back to edge anyway. I mainly just leave 3G off.The gps is next to useless. It doesn't matter if I'm inside or outside, it never really works. I can be side by side with a Garmin that locates me exactly while the iphone only sees a 10 block radius.So basically, buy an iPhone. I absolutely loved my first-gen. Had it jailbroken for the better part of a year. Edge was slow, but was reliable. The jailbroke apps that the hacker community put together were much better than the crap that's coming out of the App Store.It's a great phone, but 3g/gps isn't the reason why. |
Social app without the social part | jlogic77: Can you just use those as a "Contacts" base? Think of those networks just as sources for contacts.Let users, point to a network with their profiles as a source for contacts. Allowing for many of these to be setup, i.e. one for each network/profile so a user can even use multiple accounts on a network (if they have that). Also allow for your own internal contacts base that is NOT hooked up to a social network. |
Recommendation services? | maryrosecook: Working on a music recommendation service for which an API is quite high up the feature list. Email me at maryrosecook [at] gmail [dot] com |
What has been your biggest mistake? | tc7: Graduated with BA in comp.sci at 19 y.o. (not a mistake), then immediately took job doing web support stuff with big (non-tech) company.In retrospect, I would have loved to look at more options (like starting my own company), but a) I honestly wasn't even aware of the y-combinator sorts of opportunities, b) I was engaged to be married, and felt pressure to be 'stable', and c) didn't think there was anything interesting in my area (and didn't want to leave).So now (at 22) I'm working on a solo startup solo, in bits and pieces on the side. I just don't want to be like all the 30-year people surrounding me. Or the 10 year people. Or even the cynical, tired person I see myself becoming, all too rapidly ;). Must... not... give... in... |
Subscription management/billing software? | blurry: I've used Authorize.net's solution. Cheap and reliable.http://authorize.net/solutions/merchantsolutions/merchantser... |
Can I use the RDBMS as an application server? | newt0311: Points 1-4 seem fine. Furthermore, I should point out that if you consider recent benchmarks, the bottleneck was not the DB but the framework on top (ie. Django or ROR). Generally DBs are extremely well designed.Furthermore, it is still possible to cluster DBs as long as there is one write master and multiple read masters (of course, this does not apply when there is a high ratio of writes).I am not an expert on clustering so you should check that last statement.For statement #5: If your are concerned about SPs, I would strongly advise against MySQL. SPs in MySQL are very new and thus their implementation may not be quite up to par. You might want to consider PostgreSQL. The pgplsql SP language is supposed to be nearly equivalent to Oracle SPs. Furthermore, postgres also allows SPs in python, tcl, and perl which should cover pretty much all use cases for SPs though you sacrifice portability with languages other than pgplsql. Postgres also has much better scaling performance. |
What resources have you read for E-Tailing/E-Commerce? | mkull: Hey Dave just adding what I sent to you by email for posterity...http://www.ecommerce-blog.org/
http://www.varien.com/blog/
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/webtogs-diary-of...
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-new-rules-for-successful-ecomm... |
What has been your biggest mistake? | icky: My worst mistakes were in doing what was expected of me, rather than what I wanted to do. |
Subscription management/billing software? | tylercarbone: Thanks for all the suggestions; I'll take a look at them. |
What has been your biggest mistake? | misterbwong: Biggest Regret: Waiting too long.Examples: I wish I learned to program sooner. I wish I started playing basketball sooner. Etc...I still find myself doing this, although less now than before. |
What has been your biggest mistake? | jnovek: Talking about regrets and mistakes s a funny thing. There is an implied hypothetical there -- like, "If I had made a different choice, I would be a in a better place."Take, for example, my (admittedly foolish) decision to drop out of the University after a year and go to community college part-time for a year. It should have been a bust, but I ended up meeting my wife (who was working on her generals) there. I met another great friend on my second run at the University. Now my wife and this friend are my co-founders for my startup... both of whom I possibly would've never known if I hadn't gone to the community college.Now, I'm not saying that there is no such thing as bad choices, or that I have no regrets about things I've done -- I think it's natural for us to regret things that we perceive as mistakes. But I'm pretty happy right now in spite of any problems that I might have, and as far as choices contribute to our happiness, mine have worked out well. It's hard for me to describe choices that have made me happy as "mistakes". |
What has been your biggest mistake? | qhoxie: Not focusing on ideas that interested me, but rather ones that interested others. |
What resources have you read for E-Tailing/E-Commerce? | solost: Woot! does not use drop shippers, they have their own warehouse in Dallas and they send our all of their own sales. |
What has been your biggest mistake? | skinny: 1. too much cocaine. really, it makes you feel like you can conquer anything and anyone, but it is totally not worth it.
2. learning any Windows based programming languages. seriously, what a waste of time. |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | benjamincanfly: Hey guys! I've been building this app in my spare time. It's based on a simple idea I had over a year ago - somehow after all this time there still has not been a great web 2.0 chatting site to come into existence, so I've been steadily working at it whenever I've had the chance.You can read my whole spiel at http://www.circleofconversation.com/#tab=theory, but basically the idea behind the app is that people like talking to strangers online(like we're doing right now) as long as there is a sufficiently precise topical specifier(like we have here). The app attempts to accomplish this by letting users give their chat rooms tags which fade out over time and then disappear if they aren't refreshed/spoken aloud. They're constantly replaced by now-accurate tags, so ideally every conversation has a very precise set of topical specifiers at all times, making them worth joining.I'd love to get some feedback on the general concept as well as execution specifics, though the UI is rough and the feature set is basic. Thanks, HN.P.S. I'm intentionally posting this in the evening to try to avoid any significant traffic, and to give myself time to hot-fox any glaring bugs, since I do client work during the day. I bet this sounds familiar to at least half of HN's readers. |
What has been your biggest mistake? | YuriNiyazov: Not quitting sooner the startup where I had to learn J2EE. |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | mechanical_fish: I rather like it. No idea if it will take off or anything, but it's really nice.Your approach to user signup is superb.There should be an explicit "tag this conversation" link. Otherwise nobody will even know that they can do that.Can I post a link to an ongoing conversation in some other place, like Twitter or, say, here?The "Theory" page is... a bit too theoretical. I mean, everyone here will get it, but not the mass market. I doubt that many AOL Chat users understand what "asynchronous" means. Don't delete the existing page... just make a slightly simpler, shorter Theory page and relegate the existing text to a second-level "Theory of the Theory" page.Other than that... it's hard to know what to critique. Many of the essential design features of such a site will only become obvious when it's flooded with traffic or overwhelmed by griefers. That's hard to test. Maybe you should start a really provocative conversation and then post a Digg link to it. ;) |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | cdr: "Under construction" is a phrase I have an immediate, strongly negative reaction to. I'm probably not alone. How about "Coming soon"? |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | tocomment: Really cool!! I put all my comments in the chat system. We really need to link this with hacker news so we can discuss things. |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | Alex3917: Great concept. I would start by putting everything into the dashboard page. Perhaps borrow from the look and feel of the Wikipedia main page, in terms of fitting everything into four different boxes. The theory page isn't necessary; I know it's only for HN readers, but once the site is good enough the concept will speak for itself (it already does for the most part.) Choose a snappier name. This has the potential to get really big. (The YouTube of conversations?) |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | gruseom: I like it too. I might even use it, if there are enough high quality participants.I read the whole Theory page and it struck me as blah blah blah blah blah, except for these two points:1. Conversations on topics you want, going on right now;
2. Karma keeps the quality high.To me those are the core, and they're a pretty cool core. If I were you I'd strip everything else out. And emphasize those two things on the main page.Personally, I'd drop the recommendation system, or at least drop talking about it. There's so much tripe surrounding that kind of thing that, when I read it, I noticed that your credibility instantly dropped in my mind. I'd rather you put your effort into making it really easy for me to browse/search what's going on so that I can make my own choices. Recommendations won't make me want to use your site if there isn't a lot of value there already. And if you do develop a kick-ass way of recommending related stuff, don't talk to me about it, just show me a few suggestions unobtrusively and I'll eventually catch on.I also like the slogan "chat rooms that really work".Edit: on reflection, I seem to notice a pattern which, if it really is there, I suggest you avoid like the plague. It is the idea of the system being "intelligent". It comes out in details like your choice of the word "Theory" and the title of this post, as well as in the emphasis on the recommendation system and its overtones of AI. To me this is a big turn-off. I don't want a chatting system, and I certainly don't want an "intelligent" chatting system. What I want is intelligent conversation. It seems to me you've got the kernel of something that could actually offer me that, which could be genuinely valuable. Focus on that and try to get the system out of the way.Edit 2: while it's fresh in my memory... I noticed another thought going through my mind which was, "I wonder who is on here that I know from somewhere else", like HN for example. I wonder if people would be willing to link their user names to their names from other communities. I would, if I knew that lots of other people from HN were talking about stuff on your site. |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | Hexstream: Typo on the theory page:"Coupled with an analysis of your actual chatting history, this data lets Circle makes helpful suggestions as to what conversations you're likely to enjoy.""makes" --> "make" |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | curiousgeorge: Not to put a downer on things, but this is not going to be useful for me at all. Why should I want to chat with complete strangers about random topics. And why online? |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | dmnd: I really like the idea. A few things I noticed:Tagging a conversation with a pronoun like "I" will probably means it sticks around forever.Can you join multiple conversations at once? What happens if two conversations share a tag? Are they merged?To stop conversations being tagged incorrectly, you could perhaps ask users that join via that tag if it was accurate or not.It'd be awesome if you could automate tagging of conversations. I'm not sure how many people will be motivated to maintain metadata about their conversations (the only way to find that out is to get more users though). |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | sutro: Good idea and nice start.Suggestion: Add up-down voting for tags/topics, then rank the tags/topics on a redesigned front page that looks more like HN or Reddit. You could make the site behave like a HN for which all link submissions were self-referring (like this one), and all commenting/conversation happened in real-time. |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | shawndrost: The feedback here is valuable, but leaves out one point which you might not be aware of: an "intelligent chat system" will enjoy about as much widespread success as a poetry board. (Which is not to say that you should stop, or that this isn't valuable.) |
New site feedback ('ideas for things to do' - using RoR, EC2, AJAX, CC, API, etc) | thomasswift: I really dig the the design of the site, the logo is pretty rad.The one thing I noticed is how Y looks like a hand and is giving the "two finger salute" to the little guy flying in the parachute, it made me chuckle, but no one will really notice :) see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_signEDIT:(your site has something about a UK business, so you're probably familiar with it, I'll leave the link for others) |
New site feedback ('ideas for things to do' - using RoR, EC2, AJAX, CC, API, etc) | spxdcz: Ta!Yeah, the logo (and most of the design, in fact) was done by an amazing Russian design company: http://www.turbomilk.com - I think they added the 'v sign' to make it more playful! |
New site feedback ('ideas for things to do' - using RoR, EC2, AJAX, CC, API, etc) | tstegart: That design rocks. Curious, how did you get in touch with a Russian company, and how was it working with them? |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | drewcrawford: Are conversations archived somewhere? Here's my reasoning:1. Some conversation and/or the site gets dugg2. Thousands of incoming users waltz in with good karma3. Everything goes to hellWikipedia, Everything2 et al. have some resilience because the audience is more than just who's using the site at the moment. Dunno if you've thought about that in great detail or not. Also,* Friend system. Encourages people to band together against the trolls* Bookmarking |
Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system) | thorax: Really needs a quick way to get your friends in the room. Should actually be very visible and very easy to get them in that room chatting with you.Perhaps an obviously marked URL to copy/paste or something like that? |
How do formalize / capture your ideas? | entelarust: the best way to show non-technical people a new concept is by building a base prototype |
How do formalize / capture your ideas? | nostrademons: Code.I've found it's generally a lost cause to tell people about your ideas and expect them to understand it. They'll try to fit it into their existing conceptual framework, which is probably not what you had in mind.You've got to show them, so that they've got a new conceptual framework to anchor their ideas to... |
News more Deliciously. How's the tweaked idea? | gaika: I really like this idea, thanks, would implement it on my site too. |
How do formalize / capture your ideas? | rw: Build it and they will comprehend. |
How do formalize / capture your ideas? | qhoxie: Simplified use cases. Present it as an animation or the like. When done properly this communicates a purpose quite well. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | tstegart: Well, there's the real world answer, and the legal answer. Not too sure about the legal answer, thats always murky. Some things are copyrighted, some aren't. You can't just take someone's story, or art, and use it on your own site without permission. Usually the creator has all rights until they are given away. Even if they have uploaded it to another site, that doesn't mean they have given you permission though. On the other hand, some information can't be controlled. If Bob says it's 70 degrees in San Francisco right now, you can totally say its 70 degrees. If the Mets won, you're welcome to say the Mets won. The Drudge Report does nothing except report headlines.In the real world, however, people steal information all the time. Its not polite though. Usually people ask for attributes. I don't think a policy of only removing it when someone asks you to would be polite. That's like stealing something when no-one is home and leaving a note saying you'll return it if they ask you to.Also, pure scraping, even of non-copyrighted information can get you into trouble if the other person had paid for that information, like a news site. They pay for their news. Scraping it and making your own news site (with full content, not just headlines) is illegal.So the short answer is that the original creator still owns the content, and no you probably can't have it. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | jonmc12: A few years back I wanted to set up a menu service - putting a bunch of restaurant menus online so that others could search. My lawyer advised that because the restaurant made these materials open in the public domain, we could basically do whatever we wanted with them. As if they were public property.I'm not sure how this relates to other kind of content from a legal standpoint, but I've used it to ask myself 'did this person intend for this information to be public' as sort of an ethical guideline. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | drewcrawford: In the legal world, whenever text is set in fixed form, it is automatically copyrighted by its author, whether they claim it or not, unless they specifically say otherwise. "Specifically say otherwise" probably includes anything they might have agreed to in the TOS for a particular site, although the legal waters there are largely untested. The only exemption to this auto-copyright is statistics, phone numbers, or other non-copyrightable content (see CBC vs. MLB).IANAL, but depending on the nature of your service and specifically how the content is collected, you may qualify for DMCA safe harbor protections. This means that if you remove things in a timely manner upon request nobody can sue you. This is how Google caches the whole internet without getting sued.That's all legal mumbo-jumbo. The real world answer is that some people will get mad regardless of the law, so take their content down and apologize. Follow robots.txt guidelines. Don't post takedown replys a la PirateBay. Generally act sane. If you do all of the above you'll probably be ok. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | nickh: Check to see if the site that you're considering scraping has any sort of "terms and conditions", "terms of use", "legals", etc page. If it does, read that page in detail. If it doesn't, ask the site for permission to scrape.If the site doesn't have one of those pages and you don't ask for permission, you're not only putting yourself in danger of legal action, but you're also depending on a data source that isn't reliable.Remember, it'd only be a matter of time before they notice you scraping, and take measures to stop it. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | okeumeni: I will suggest that you mention clearly the origin of anything you get from anywhere on the internet.The truth is, it’s hard to find a site without the mention of copyright in terms and conditions page.Overall it will depend of the use you make of the copy content. Trouble starts when you use someone’s material in a line of business that competes with the owners. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | gm: Technically, you own whatever you write. So I own the copyright on this message, unless I granted the copyright to YC News when I signed up (I don't remember). Assuming that I did not, then I retain copyright, and you have to get the ok from me, individually.That's the theory anyway. Talk to a lawyer. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | smakz: Relevant recent discussion on slashdot:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/08/1245204 |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | pedalpete: I'm not a lawyer, but had to do a bunch of legal research regarding this topic for some of my sites.I think what most of the responses so far are missing is the importance of accrediting the content to the content owner (likely the site, not the contributing users), and providing a link to the source.Check out this pdf <a href="http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol16/sab...">Sableman's authorized linking</a> and search on Google v. Perfect 10.You haven't really given much to go on with respect to what you are scraping, and what you plan to do with it. But I think a bunch of common sense and ensuring that your site in no way harms the original source's site (defamation, etc), are the most important things to consider.Hope this helps. |
What Other Community Sites Do You Read? | saundby: DZone (http://www.dzone.com/)
The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/) Not exactly a community site, though there are enough good comment threads that it does a good imitation of one. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | micks56: It is most likely not legal.The user owns copyright to the article or story that he wrote. This ownership of copyright gives the user the right to decide how it is distributed. For you to use the material legally, you must get permission of the copyright holder. The user may be the copyright holder, or the site may be if the user transfers the ownership. Either way, someone owns the copyright and it is not you. You need permission.There are two defenses to copyright infringement: 1) fair use, and 2) parody.Parody probably doesn't fit here. So that means you need to make a case for fair use.Fair use has 4 elements:1: The purpose of the use (commercial vs. non-commercial/educational) - if you are going to make money on this, fair use is out.2. Nature of the copyrighted work - This doesn't really apply here, so I won't go into the lengthy explanation.3. Amount of portion used in relation to the whole - Did you extract a quote? That is probably ok. Did you copy the entire article? Probably not ok.4. Effect upon the market - if your site harms the market of the other site, no fair use. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | mattmaroon: One of the most dangerous things you can do is rely on non-lawyers for legal advice. Ask an attorney. |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | icey: If the application was good enough (and the price was right), I'd certainly install it on my phone.There seems like a dearth right now of really good iPhone applications, so the more the merrier, I say. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | bprater: I'm similarly curious about the legality of using screenshots. |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | aaroneous: If you can, I'd do both:Making an iPhone-friendly website isn't very hard, and using the iUI will allow you to easily integrate a psuedo-iPhone interface.Then, your iPhone application would pull in your iPhone website, while also providing the other functionality you want to include (location awareness, contacts). |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | tstegart: Yeah, I agree with the other folk, doing an iPhone site shouldn't be hard. How often will people be coming back to get this information? Native apps have huge advantages in UI design and functionality that can help display information in more useful ways. But if its short, simple stuff, an iPhone friendly website might be the easy way. Then you can go with an iPhone app for power users and provide more functionality. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | webwright: Google does it, as do vertical search companies like Indeed and SimplyHired, so it's certainly legal under some conditions. Taking only a snippet and linking back to the source is generally okay (as the original publisher benefits from traffic and SEO juice). |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | bapbap: Seems like both is the best option, thanks everyone! |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | emmett: The real question is usually not "Is this legal" but rather "Will this get us sued". We do many "illegal" things like jaywalking all the time, but everyone with sense knows which things are truly illegal. |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | wmf: If you have both, maybe you can justify charging for the app (assuming that it has some advantages over the site, such as location awareness). Use the Web version for free, and pay for the app if you want more. |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | nickb: Are you charging for it? If you do, definitely an app. |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | silencio: Yelp has three options: Main site telling you that there is a Yelp app in the app store (I guess it's using the UA string), mobile site, yelp application.Ideally having both is nice, with the same functionality sans the native-only stuff (e.g. like you said location awareness and contacts). Yelp has different limitations for all three options - today I tried to look up a restaurant on yelp's app and found it, but I had to go use the full regular site to write a review (how irritating). |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | ComputerGuru: If you can get away with it, a webapp. Given Apple's restrictions on 3rd party software, a webapp gives you the most freedom and future compatibility though it does mean sacrificing the beauty and elegance of native code. |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | danw: Build a webapp, then build an app which is just a wrapper for the web app. All the app will contain is safari with the webapp loaded. This gives the ease of building and ability to use without installation advantages of webapp with the appstore visibility of an installable app. If the app is popular enough you can then build a proper app that has better features is you need them. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | uvince: News is one case, but how about the millions ratings & reviews floating out there on the web? What about this site? http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/CA/palo-alto/the-counter/A...They scrape, re-present abstracts from and supposedly do calculations based on of the entirety of user-submitted data collected by a number of sites.Does that violate fair use in anyone's opinion? |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | rdj: Based on your questions and your last comment... let's be clear here. You aren't wanting to make an app just to view content right (ala plugin)? The purpose of the native app route is to provide better/easier/more interaction with your site/web application. If it's just another way to view the site, I would just do an iphone optimized site ala m.digg.com, espn, foxnews, cnn, etc. |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | auston: An iPhone web app will also work on Androids Platform and I'm assuming Nokia's S60 Platform(it uses a webkit browser).So there are some benefits to being platform "agnostic" (even though it's not as true in this case). |
iPhone Web App or iPhone App? | tlrobinson: iPhone Apps are good ifa) You want to charge for the appb) iPhone's MobileSafari can't do what you need, performance-wise or feature-wise. Note the gap is narrowing now that MobileSafari has touch events and hardware accelerated 2D and 3D transforms. |
Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content? | sh1mmer: My "not a lawyer" answer to this is:It depends on the terms of service of the site.#1 The TOS of the site may not let you use a robot on their site at all#2 The TOS will define who owns the user generated content (UGC), either the user or the site#3 Depending who owns the UGC you may or may not be able to scrape it, if it's the site it's against their TOS if it's the user you would need permission from the user.#4 As other people have said fair use might come into play. If the site owns the material using a single user contribution might be fair use within the context of the whole site. If the users own the content you are likely to be using all their content, thereby not able to use fair use.Again all of these are my observations. Hopefully it will give you something to think about. If you are starting a business based on this, you do need to consult a lawyer. Also starting a business based on page scraping is a pretty risky thing to do. If the scraped site turn you off you could be pretty screwed. |
ASK HN: How to hire good employees? | tonystubblebine: What about the people you used to outsource to? There's nothing that matters like the ability to produce and having people work for you on contract is the best way to test that.The test-type questions I've seen have been almost entirely useless. When I'm asking questions now I mostly ask what about someone's goals and what I'm judging is whether I have a company and position that can meet those goals. |
Which are the well written open source programs? | haasted: I once added some custom functionality to MediaWiki, and was very pleasantly surprised by the codebase's organization and the readability of the code. |
Work on products, or take a break for (seemingly) lucrative consulting? | noodle: why can't you institute a consulting wing of the business?might not be as fun as writing your personal stuff, but if 1 week of consulting will carry you for the rest of the month on personal stuff, why not? |
Work on products, or take a break for (seemingly) lucrative consulting? | sidsavara: You could try a hybrid approach - develop client software, but negotiate to own the intellectual property to parts of the software that are just "utility" and not specific to their needs. I think Matt Raible once wrote a blog post along those lines, but I don't have a link handy.Edit: Clarification, the reason for this is that you would still make some headway developing tools to aid you in your own software development. If there is no overlap at all though, I think it's up to you to decide which is more important at this point in time. You can always come back to client work later, or always come back to your own product later. It is hard to do both at the same time though, and it may not be feasible when crunch time comes - what do you pick, your product, or theirs? |
Work on products, or take a break for (seemingly) lucrative consulting? | trevelyan: Take your business seriously or drop it. |
Work on products, or take a break for (seemingly) lucrative consulting? | lsemel: Questions for you to think about to help make your decision:- Will the extra money from consulting reduce any worries you have about money, thereby letting you focus on the product more?- Would consulting save you from having to take a full time job, giving you extra time work on the product?- Can you consult on something very similar to your product, own the IP, and use it as a way to learn about your market?- Can you take whatever custom thing you'd be building as a consultant and instead develop a product out of that, and then sell the product to your consulting customer?- Can you outsource part of the consulting, so you're just designing the software, managing the project, and reviewing their work, thereby saving time and drudgery, and letting you mark up the outsourced hours?- Could you meet good people consulting? (i.e. are you consulting for a startup or tech company, as opposed to some company in an unrelated line of business?)- Can you use the consulting gig to learn about tools or technologies you want to use in your own startup? Can you use the consulting to learn about a market that your startup is targeting?- Can you talk to more experienced consultants and get tips on how to charge more and manage clients better? |
When to do an API for my web app? | wlievens: Maybe working out the API will allow you a good second angle into how your app should interface with the world (next to the user interface, obviously)? |
When to do an API for my web app? | th0ma5: hey good question, good comments so far, i keep thinking asap... aren't we all in the platform creation business now? |
When to do an API for my web app? | mixmax: I think it's way too early for an API, and here's why:- API's are generally only interesting if there are already some users, accounts, etc. to interact with.- API's are not a main feature of the site (I could be wrong here of course) and are quite a way down the list. Fix the obvious problems first. I searched for Dire Straits and got no results.- API's aren't used by a lot of people.Basically what I'm saying is that you should get your priorities straight: An API has no value before the rest of your site works well, and has a lot of users. |
When to do an API for my web app? | pierrefar: I'm building an app and found that thinking about the API from the get go made me design the app better. Why? Because the interface I'm building is just one example of how to interact with the API. The API is better and I understand my app better. |
When to do an API for my web app? | maxklein: If your application is something for whom an API is useful, then encapsulate the application behind your API. This will allow you deal with the application at a somewhat abstract level, which will lead to better programming practises. So, write your tentative API first, program for the API, test with rough mock-ups, then write the front end. |
When to do an API for my web app? | steffanwilliams: Interestingly, I was wondering the same thing!I wouldn't call what I'm doing much of a web app (http://scribbleit.net), but I wanted to learn some basic PHP so I decided to create a to-do list app (wow, new idea huh?) because I hate all the alternatives out there.I had just finished hacking a bunch of PHP scripts to get all the functionality and then a friend of mine said, "Hey, I actually want to use this... if I could make an iPhone app for it!"Long story even longer (sorry), I've started implementing an API just because I think it's the right thing to do. It's allowing me to understand my application a bit better and proving to be a great learning point for me.In generality, I can only see an API introduced early as a major advantage. It can give you a direction for your design and future development. Oh, yeah, and the purpose of the API .. it will allow people to interact with your application in ways you possibly didn't imagine; there'll always be someone out there who would be interested in playing about with it!Just my $0.02. Sorry for rambling. |
When to do an API for my web app? | danw: If you're using MVC or similar framework then adding an api is a simple case of adding some alternate views. Adding these is a handy way to check if you're keeping your code all neatly partitioned. |
When to do an API for my web app? | nir: An RSS/Atom feed is usually fairly easy to build and can make for a decent read-only API. You can add your own namespace or use microformats for app-specific data.It might also make sense in your app as the more common "subscribe" use - a user might subscribe to get recommendations for new artists that fit her taste etc. |
When to do an API for my web app? | sh1mmer: I would recommend checking out Tom Coates' "Web of Data" talk. Presentation: http://www.plasticbag.org/files/native/ Audio: http://www.webuser.co.uk/carsonworkshops/TomCoates.mp3It explains that the data is the web site (app), or at least the most important part of it. By building a web app on top of an API you are immediately exposing the unique and interesting part of your service, the data.This leaves you, or anyone else, free to build whatever interface on top of that data. At Yahoo we absolutely use our own APIs internally to build our sites. That means most of the APIs we make publicly available are the ones our own developers have been using. |
When to do an API for my web app? | richtaur: The purpose of an API is to provide a way to build an application. If you build your website on top of your own API, then you've already shown off what you can do with your API, which is great. |
Ruby on Rails Hosting | sant0sk1: Heroku FTW. (http://heroku.com/)Especially since you'd be supporting a YC startup and they are great for beginners because of their pretty powerful in-browser editor. You don't even need your own dev environnment if you don't want.Also the service is free during beta. Not sure if the beta is still closed, but ping me if it is as I'm sure I have some invites available. |
Ruby on Rails Hosting | pius: If you're comfortable administering a Linux slice, consider Slicehost ($20/month). If you're just learning, Heroku might be a great option. |
Ruby on Rails Hosting | alaskamiller: Linode.com is a better choice than Slicehost. Better customer service and more bang for the buck. But you do have to learn a bit about sysadmin. |
Ruby on Rails Hosting | hopeless: I may get flamed for saying so but Dreamhost support RoR apps, lots of bandwidth/disk space and all for $11/month. It's shared hosting but they support mod_rails / Phusion Passenger which is working out great for me so far (I'm running a Redmine bug tracker on Dreamhost, along with lots of other PHP stuff).However, I've also got a virtual server from Slicehost where I deploy my own apps... it's noticeably faster than Dreamhost but you do have to deal with lots of sysadmin stuff which distracts you from the RoR learning/development.My advice would be to start with a shared RoR host (a la Dreamhost) and then migrate to a virtual server host (e.g. Slicehost) once you've got something that's too running slow, getting too popular or is starting to earn revenue. |
Ruby on Rails Hosting | hardbap: I've been happy with hostingrails.com. The support has been very good and accounts start at less than $4 USD per month. |
Ruby on Rails Hosting | vivekamn: We have had good experience with speedyrails(www.speedyrails.com). They are cheap and their service is great. |
Ruby on Rails Hosting | lyime: Moprh |
Ruby on Rails Hosting | gunderson: I like Slicehost. I have tried Joyent and it's good but you have to learn a bunch of Solaris skills and many gems don't work quite right on Solaris, and I've tried Engineyard but nobody will return my emails to set up an account.Slicehost has never done anything but offer consistent, professional service. I could not recommend them more highly. |
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