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Ask HN:Review our startup | dzlobin: Your help link comes up empty for me on Linux/Chrome |
Ask HN:Review our startup | jolie: Get a graphic designer for the cards. That's your biggest weakness: The product doesn't look good enough in many cases.It's a good enough idea, not too original, but I like that you've focused on a niche. |
feedback on rescuetime plugin | diN0bot: Today I made a small app to test if time management folks, eg users of RescueTime, are interested in a feel good financial incentive: donate to charity for every hour procrastinated.Feedback greatly appreciated!(We're also looking to expand our summer intern team. Shoot me an email if you interested :-) |
How much increase from negotiation? | pg: Depends how good the offer is. If the offer is low, you should obviously ask for more. If not, you don't need to. But you should have an idea what you think you're worth. Otherwise how do you know when to say yes? If you always ask for 2x, how do you know that the other guys didn't start by offering you a quarter of what you're worth? |
Startups while working and Assignment of Invention | pg: In practice the interpretation of "related" that matters is the one done by a nervous VC or acquirer doing due diligence before a deal. Their definition tends to be broad.On the other hand, what people worry about is source code, not ideas. If you can claim all your code was written after quitting, you're usually safe. Which means in the worst case you can just rewrite any app that seems promising enough that you'd be willing to quit your job to work on it.Another option is to ask your employer for an explicit, written waiver of any IP rights in a specific side project. But many employers will only do this if you're prepared to quit otherwise. |
Startups while working and Assignment of Invention | grellas: In California, Labor Code 2870 allows you to keep inventions conceived or reduced to practice entirely on your own time and without use of an employer's resources unless such inventions "relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice . . . to the employer's business" or to "actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer.""Relate," in this sense, can be read pretty broadly and so there is always theoretical concern over this issue if you as an employee developed something on the side.In practice, though, there is quite a broad scope for employees to do side projects without having them swept in by such clauses. The exception is where you use expertise that is directly related to your job duties to come up with a better way of doing things in the very area in which your employer competes. Common sense suggests why that should be an exception: if the rule were otherwise, any employee could basically claim job-related inventions as his own.If you have already left employment, and have not yet developed anything, then you should normally have little risk of having your ideas being deemed to belong to your employer. It is normally virtually impossible for an employer, for example, to prove that you were still employed "at the time of conception or reduction to practice" of your idea, as opposed to afterward. Two important exceptions to watch out for on this point: (1) if you file a patent application shortly after leaving employment relating to your employer's field, this is like waving a red flag in your employer's face that you had conceived the invention while employed; and (2) some assignment-of-invention agreements set forth a rebuttable presumption that any invention you develop within x period of leaving employment is presumed to have been conceived while still employed, and the legal effect of this sort of clause is to treat such an invention as belonging to your employer unless you can affirmatively prove otherwise (an often impossible task). |
Should I buy "The Art of Computer Programming"? | marshallp: No, it's more like a decoration piece then anything. Read research papers online of the areas you're interested in. |
Would you be interested in this web app help product? | patio11: You're pitching a product to technical users which can be duplicated with your OSS lightbox script of choice (I like iBox) and about 45 seconds of effort. I would think long and hard about what benefits you provide over including the OSS lightbox script in return for asking for money and/or breaking my site when you go down.Incidentally, in terms of UI design, I think using a modal iBox here is probably a step backwards in many circumstances. Make it a tooltip instead. (You appear to be using this on another site. Instrument it, so that you know how many people click on the help, then actually succeed in asking a question. I predict that number will be vanishingly small.) |
Would you be interested in this web app help product? | pedalpete: I think you need to still sort out what you are offering/selling.
Rarely does 'I want to make a...' turn into a business.
Come at it from the other direction.
'People need ..., I can serve this need with...'.If websites need help sections, is the best product a 'help dialog box plugin'?
How would you answer the help questions?
Are you just providing a UI element? If so, what is that truly worth, when full suites like jQuery UI exist? |
Should I buy "The Art of Computer Programming"? | chipsy: Only if you are in the market for comprehensive reference. Reading through TAOCP is a good project for the eager-to-learn beginner, but you probably already know the essentials of the material from your coursework. It's a compendium of the "proven useful" stuff, which tends to be older material. Research papers will have more/newer information. TAOCP will have more examples. |
Would you be interested in this web app help product? | csomar: Don't forget that you are building this for programmers, so they already know the open source alternative and may also prefer to code it from scratch.Try to build something that bring value to the user. Check out codecanyon.com, they have lot of scripts. Some are successful and brings $1,000++ and some get a sale or two. But those are small scripts, and even when they are small, they are 600 or 700 line of PHP or JavaScript code. |
Should I buy "The Art of Computer Programming"? | varaon: If you're still a student, check it out from the library and see if it suits you. |
Startups while working and Assignment of Invention | anamax: This is why you want to disclose broadly when you're hired and update before you start doing anything. |
Should I buy "The Art of Computer Programming"? | anamax: Yes.Not because it's a research resource, although it is, but because knowing that stuff is likely to be relevant to your success in said research. |
Would you be interested in this service? | rewind: I'm curious about your business model. By explaining that, you'd also be giving a better idea of how you expect potential customers to use your service, which would give us more information with which to form an opinion. Would you be able to elaborate on that a bit? |
Indie Markets other than iPhone App store | SwellJoe: It's called "the web". It's pretty awesome. There are no fees to be a developer on "the web". There is no application process. You don't have to get approval before selling your application on "the web", and no one can remove your application from "the web" if it competes with existing functionality. You can develop for any platform you like, and sell your app on "the web".OK, so this is my somewhat smartass way of saying, "Why not stake out your own plot of land, instead of sharecropping?" The bad old days when small software developers had to go through distributors in order to reach the market are gone; don't wish for those bad old days to come back. When you build your own website, and your own community, those customers are yours. When you build on top of an "app store", those customers belong to Apple, or Google, or Facebook, whoever. If I'm putting in all the effort to build a loyal customer base, I want that customer base to be mine. |
Inspiring visualization sites? | skennedy: Did some google searching and these sites had great examples of some cool stuff that can be done if you invest the time.For Data Visualization: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of...For Photography Galleries: http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/galleries/best-photographer-w... |
Indie Markets other than iPhone App store | _delirium: Well as far as phone apps go, there is also the Google Android app store. Smaller market, but fairly large and growing rapidly, and less crowded as far as app-selling competitors go (so far). Also, developing for it is free and doesn't require Apple approving your app.For games in particular, there are a number of other indie-distribution channels, like XBox Live Arcade. For other kinds of software, there's the traditional "sell shareware over the internet" approach, which is declining for the most part but still relatively robust on OS X. There are also web apps, which can be supported either by ads or by selling premium add-ons, among other possibilities. |
Inspiring visualization sites? | ehsanul: Here's a wonderful data visualization site: http://www.gapminder.org/I know it through a few TED talks: http://www.ted.com/search?q=rosling&x=0&y=0 |
Inspiring visualization sites? | j053003: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/http://infosthetics.com/ |
Inspiring visualization sites? | geuis: Cool sites. Thanks guys. |
Ever hired an artist? | _delirium: Most of the artists I know who do small-to-medium contract jobs browse the "gigs" section on Craigslist for their local area (you'd think location wouldn't matter, but a lot of people who contract out for art assets want to meet in person, so many artists don't bother searching outside their local area). It's mainly big in the U.S., so may not work well in other countries. If you're near a major U.S. city, though, a post with an outline of your requirements will almost certainly get multiple responses with portfolios/bids/etc. |
how to build trust on the Android Marketplace? | _delirium: Android apps are sandboxed; the security model, assuming there are no holes in it, shouldn't let apps do crazy things like delete your files or install a keylogger. See: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/security/security.... |
Ever hired an artist? | patio11: My brother, who is trying to break into comics with a book where all the art was outsourced (2010: we're living in the freaking future), apparently got most of his artists by looking for ones he liked on DeviantArt and PMing them asking whether they were available for hire.(Having seen the output and heard what he paid for it I think either he is the most talented hiring manager in the entire world or the price on original artwork has cratered so comprehensively that the industry is doomed, doomed, doooooomed.) |
Ever hired an artist? | wlievens: I know a pretty good pixel artist, if that's what you're looking for.He made the tiles used in this game of mine:
http://skirmishzone.com//data/maps/previews/office_126298036... |
Ever hired an artist? | robfitz: We shopped around for outsourced artists to make animated characters, backgrounds, etc when we were working on fuzzwich.com. The lowest prices we were finding for animations was ~$50 per second (for a simple, single character animation) and I think ~$100 for a static character. The quality often had issues (flickering, jumpy movement, etc) that would require in-house touch up. Those were from offshore agencies (China & India), so US is probably more expensive.So for us, it wasn't worth it. We have an in-house artist, but wanted contractors on-hand so we could develop multiple campaigns in parallel. But at that price point, it was impossible to pass the cost off to a client and still make any money.I mentioned we have an artist. Of the 4 founders, 1 is pure art (classically trained) and another is a designer/programmer. They've been invaluable, even now that we're doing no-art-required data/advertising stuff.Extra art cycles are great for sales because you can go in with pitches that do all the creative work for prospective clients -- they just have to say yes. And if there's art downtime, they can also pick up a lot of the office management, PR, support, QA, etc work that typically cuts into development time.Lots of people talk about getting art done via contractors, and it's probably affordable if your product isn't 90% art. The best process is to ask for samples. You can tell them what you are looking for (always send aesthetic examples) so the sample is relevant, but don't expect them to complete your task as a demo.One warning: I'd recommend you pay extra for an artist who knows how to build art that works with your production environment, whether that's making webpage-friendly images, properly sized swfs, or whatever else. The last thing you want to be doing is having to format/adjust/whatever every file revision that arrives. |
Ever hired an artist? | themetalface: I would love the opportunity to work on a project of this nature. I'm a graphic designer, illustrator, artist currently working at an apparel company designing t-shirts. My hours give me a lot of free time to work on personal or profit projects, but I haven't really had much luck landing solid side gigs, just random little stuff for friends and family. Craigslist is often saturated with out of work artists trying to scrape a few bucks together, and often people will give require a sample'project' to see what you can do, but I don't care to work for free when one could just as easily check out my online portfolio { http://lucasalbrecht.com } and see what I'm capable of. Anyway, just chiming in, check out my work and let me know if you're interested. Cheers |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | davidw: I don't think Tim O'Reilly really made it big until he was a bit older: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_O%27Reilly |
Review my Google Buzz jQuery plugin and web service | simonw: You appear to be using the cross-domain XHR stuff that's only really supported by very recent browsers. Since you're hosting your own proxy for the script anyway you'd be better off having the proxy convert the XML in to JSON and serving it up using JSON-P so it works reliably cross-domain.Your plugin hard-codes the HTML that's used to display the buzzes. While that's convenient, it's also inflexible. I would suggest splitting the logic up in to two parts - one that gets the recent buzzes and turns them in to JavaScript data structures, and one that takes those data structures and formats them as HTML. That way people who want to do their own processing / formatting of the Buzz data can still use the first half of your plugin. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | FreeRadical: Duncan Bannantyne (a well known entrepeneuer in the UK) was 30 when he started his first business. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | jasonlbaptiste: i think pg might fall into this category. i checked wikipedia and he was around 33 when viaweb sold to Yahoo:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | fiaz: Larry Ellison started Oracle in his 30shttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | xiaoma: Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com at 30. It wasn't that big until 3 years later. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | ojbyrne: Many studies have shown that older entrepreneurs are more successful. The canonical example is Ray Kroc, who started McDonalds in his fifties.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | m_eiman: And here I thought that entrepreneurs were the ones who did something nobody else has done before - what's the deal with needing role models that are just like yourself? (And I don't mean the poster specifically)It really should have no impact on either your performance or your willingness to do something if someone else was this age or that when they did something impressive. IMHO.If the timing is right and the idea and execution are excellent, it'll be big. If not, it won't. Just go ahead and find out which one it is! |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | russgray: Andrew Black was in his 30s when he founded Betfair.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betfair |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | sandis: Ray Kroc, Jeff Bezos and others are, of course, extremely successful, but these are more than a decade old examples. Anyone aware of more recent cases? I'm not doubting quantity/quality of the "modern" cases, I just can't recall any at the moment.. |
Does anyone want this? Central Badge/Achievement service for the Web | FreeRadical: I'm not sure where the customer pain is? Are there really users out there frustrated because they can't see all their badges in one place?If you're approaching the problem from the other POV, as in social sites don't want to manage their own badge process, and hence you're offering a 'white label' badge service, then there is potential. |
Try out my new spec list app, Speckle | DanielStraight: How many services do you sign up for without knowing anything about them? |
Would you use this service? | FreeRadical: I think there are bigger worries than emails that start as above. For example, are passwords encrypted, are contact details being passed to marketing agencies etc |
Would you use this service? | alilja: Only if it can be used to add a layer to spam filters that cut this sort of message. |
Does anyone want this? Central Badge/Achievement service for the Web | limist: Am curious what the main websites/services are that issue user badges on some semblance of meritocracy?StackOverflow.com is one obvious one where the awards have some weight (at least with some developers), but where else? |
Would you use this service? | swgw: How about a tool that's broader than just emails: something that puts the BBB out of business. |
Ever hired an artist? | pbhjpbhj: Perhaps local students in their final year of an animation qualification that are looking for portfolio fillers - you can often check out their work on the college website. Perhaps not a quick way to get what you're after though. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | newsio: Marc Benioff was in his mid 30s when he founded Salesforce, after a pretty successful career at Oracle.The guy who founded Android (can't recall his name) was as well, but he already had founded some companies. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | apollo: Reed Hastings founded Netflix at age 37, Peter Thiel co-founded Paypal at age 31, Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn at age 35. |
Try out my new spec list app, Speckle | FreeRadical: The drag a drop doesnt work in IE7, also more description of the purpose of this would be good. For example why use this instead of a google docs spreadsheet that I can share with a group? |
Dumbing down the Web with frameworks and abstractions | RiderOfGiraffes: Isn't this the same as saying that you shouldn't program in Haskell, Erlang, Lisp or Prolog without also being able to program in assembler? And isn't that then the same as saying that you should be able to design circuits with NAND gates? And doesn't it go on to say that you should understand how diffusion processes are used to make integrated circuits?Actually, I'm with you, but the question is: where do you stop, and why? Personally I've build a CPU from an FPGA, and before that I designed a CPU from NAND gates. Even so, I wouldn't insist that my applications programmers know how to do that. C is useful, assembler also, but I wouldn't insist on it, and even those who only know C++ or Python are still productive programmers. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | francoisdevlin: Being older cuts both ways.Deliberately unlearn stuff about tech. Don't let your additional preconceptions slow you down. What was impossible yesterday is commonplace today.On the other hand, take advantage of the fact that you know more about business, people & life than you did 10 years ago. Those lessons are timeless for a reason (e.g. How to Win Friends & Influence People). |
Are you sure your password is not stolen? | spooneybarger: 1. reasonably
2. no
3. yes, 1 password
4. guarantee? as in if it is stolen or compromised, you pay X amount? if yes, how much i would pay would be based on how much you pay out as really, you are just selling insurance. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | akshat: Sam Walton. While he started Walmart when he was 44, he had made headway by the time he was 36. His book "Made in America" is a must read. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | staunch: Evan Williams was in his 20's for Blogger (~31 when it sold), and 30's for Twitter. |
Are you sure your password is not stolen? | chaosprophet: And how do you intend to find out if it is stolen or not? Besides, if you want me to give you my banking passwords, telling me 'hey there, I'm pretty sure your passwords won't be stolen, but if they are we'll let you know' aint really comforting.Rather than giving you my passwords and waiting anxiously for that fateful email saying 'Your passwords have been compromised', wouldn't I be better off just not giving them to you?Also, how do you guarantee that they won't be compromised? If you have really cracked this, then I think you're sitting on a fairly big pot of money. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | pedalpete: If you look at many of the comments on this thread, they point to the very interesting fact that many of the entrepreneurs became 'over night success[es]', in their 30s, though they may have started the company in their 20s.Don't let that discourage you BigTuna. Remember that the media needs an angle, and 'middle-aged' or 'mid-thirties' succeess doesn't have the ring of teens and 20s, or 80s for that matter.It isn't the age that brought the success (though it may have brought some noteriety). It is more likely the ability to do a few things.
1) look at the world with fresh eyes to discover new opportunities
2) accept the risk of actually doing something with your discoveries. I suspect what is being risked is different for each person.I'm sure there are more reasons, but those two jumped to mind. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | mattm: Just remember that stories of entrepreneurs making it big in their 20s is news because it is uncommon. If it was normal, you wouldn't hear about it. No one writes a news story about the sun rising everyday.People starting successful businesses later on in their career doesn't make the news because it is probably more common.Also, there is no such thing as overnight success despite what these stories may have you believe. When I have read or listened to interviews from entrepreneurs, it is quite common that the "overnight success" was 10 years in the making.This is from Mixergy's latest interview with Seth Godin:"I started more than 100 businesses before I had one that really worked. I was three weeks away from bankruptcy for six years in a row. I went window shopping in restaurants. I launched a video tape with fish swimming back and forth for people who couldn’t have an aquarium. I had a business selling light bulbs door-to-door to raise money for marching bands. There’s a really long list of failures." |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | waivej: My entrepreneur energy has definitely changed (also in mid 30s). Ten years ago it was all about the "great idea" and working really hard. Now it's about strategy and observing the way the world works and choosing where/when to work hard. I keep feeling like I should be able to "see" the big picture better.I think Ben Franklin said it well: "At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement."It makes me think of a friend that's been an entrepreneur for 40 years. He carefully planned a new business where he could work 15 hours per week and make very good money. It's like he doesn't waste time doing anything unnecessary. |
An HN idea exchange? | icey: I'll get started with a couple of ideas of my own:1. A site where a developer can do some basic domain modeling, select a database type, programming language and framework, and the site will generate a compressed file (zip or tar) that contains the wired up site with all the basic CRUD forms. Premium options could include authentication being built in to the apps, or reporting suites, or all sorts of extra features.2. A better way to find breaking news that actually has significance. The big news sites have decided that celebrity divorces are equally as important as earthquakes that cause massive casualties, so following breaking news through them has become an enormous waste of time. Find a way to determine if breaking news is actually news by way of real-time search through things like twitter. Make it configurable so that users can specify what sort of news categories they're interested in (finance, world news, US news, politics, etc). |
Review Our Startup - Gemvara | dmarques1: We just launched our new site a few minutes ago, would love any/all feedback |
Are you sure your password is not stolen? | Saavedro: Say I compromised a website that was storing passwords in the clear. There should be no way whatsoever for you to know I've done this, or even that I've -used- this password. What, if any advantage would you have over a password manager storing single-use passwords? A very good web implementation of this, with client-side encryption so that the service has no access to your actual passwords, is clipperz.com. Do you believe you can offer me something better? As someone who spends a lot of time studying security, I think you've made some extraordinary claims.. |
An HN idea exchange? | RiderOfGiraffes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=798009http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848186http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120629 |
Does anyone want this? Central Badge/Achievement service for the Web | vyrotek: Its great to see someone else is thinking about this.
We actually started building a Badge repository service last year. - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795952 (KaBadge.com)We have since also built a rule engine to allow sites to create badges and award them based on specific combinations of events. (You won't find it on KaBadge, we have been playing a new domain, expect a post Monday asking for a review!)The biggest reason we created the rule engine was because people felt that the best area to create value. People commented about why would a site want to share their badges when they did all the hard to work figure out how to award them.I'm excited to see others noticing the growing trend and benefit of achievement engines. There are problems to solve, but the trick is finding the ones that will make money :) |
An HN idea exchange? | RiderOfGiraffes: You're asking for a Hacker News version of this:http://www.halfbakery.com/http://www.halfbakery.com/category/Computer |
Ever hired an artist? | racy_rick: Inexpensive, professional, cartoony style, but he is incredibly versatile.http://brianbarber.com |
Review Our Startup - Gemvara | icey: How do you establish yourself from other established players in the market like Blue Nile? The site looks nice, but it also looks like most of the other jewelry sites out there so it makes it tough for me to think I'd use this over someone I've used before and is a known quantity. |
Review Our Startup - Gemvara | vaksel: I dunno if I'd call an ecommerce store a startup. |
Does anyone want this? Central Badge/Achievement service for the Web | ryanelkins: The utility to having a central location for badges will be if you can find a way to establish virality. That would lead to new people wanting to earn these badges, which leads to directing traffic towards the company's site/application. A user being able to see all their badges in one place doesn't really provide much benefit for the company. If however, you can find a way to promote those companies through those badges (posting "User X just earned Badge Y on Site Z!" on Facebook, for example, then you might have something that someone would be willing to pay for.It sounds like you don't plan on providing a service to actually determine when to award badges and are instead leaving that up to the companies themselves, so the above would be the only advantage to using the service that I can see. You have to think of "how does this benefit my customer ?"(in this case a site). |
Review Our Startup - Gemvara | marilyn: I like how the customization works. The interface looks clean, and easy to use. I imagine most women would enjoy a piece that is uniquely theirs. I expect I'll be heading to your store the next time I'm in the market for something shiny.As a side note, your availability of non-diamond alternatives may be a good selling point for the growing number of people who dislike the diamond industry (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109318). You might want to think about highlighting these alternative, more ethical choices. |
Ever hired an artist? | joeminkie: Assuming you're a freelance programmer, how do people find you? You have a site, you market, word of mouth, you look on CL, job boards, etc. It's the same for designers and illustrators. Google around for "illustration portfolio" and similar. A lot of professional illustrators use agents too. |
Gmail alternatives? | alaithea: I pay a small amount yearly for an account at FastMail (http://www.fastmail.fm) They have a very solid IMAP service, and a robust (though not Gmail-fancy) web interface. In the five years or so that I have had an account with them, I think I could total up about a half hour of downtime that I can recall, so they are very stable. I recommend them highly. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a satisfied customer.) |
Gmail alternatives? | falsestprophet: Zoho Mail offers most of the Gmail feature set (including support for custom domains) with an adequate user interface. |
Gmail alternatives? | vaksel: You can just get Google Apps...since they release features for that 6-7 months after regular gmail gets them, you'll have plenty of warning if they release something like Buzz.+ I doubt they'd be stupid enough to bring buzz to their business users. |
Gmail alternatives? | superjared: The two features I want are conversations and easy archival. |
Gmail alternatives? | mcantor: It might be instructive if you included why you are trying to avoid Gmail in your OP, so we can avoid suggesting other apps that might have the same issues. For example, do you dislike it because of privacy concerns? Or because it's a web app? Etc. |
Gmail alternatives? | sucuri2: If you are looking for open source and to host yourself, roundcube is pretty good and has a powerful interface |
Gmail alternatives? | sahaj: i've looked but haven't found anything nearly as good as gmail. the most useful feature to me, that other services do not offer, is push (sync) email, contacts, and calendar. |
Gmail alternatives? | dan_the_welder: My tiny hosting company Varialhosting offers POP and Imap. I did a quick search and there are tons of providers that offer Imap. |
Gmail alternatives? | Mark_B: I have an account on GMX.com as a backup account.So far so good - minimal spam (well none so far) has reached my inbox and they are always adding in features like Facebook integration. |
Gmail alternatives? | jonathanmarcus: Zimbra may be a good option, particularly now that its not controlled by Yahoo anymore. |
Gmail alternatives? | blender: Rackspace email hosting is $1/10 GB mailbox/mo for IMAP/POPCheers |
What are some concrete ways in which VCs help startups? | pg: Some of what VCs and earlier stage investors do is the same, but some is very different. For example, two of the biggest things we do are help people come up with and modify their ideas, and teach them how to raise money from VCs. Whereas VCs expect you already to have decided what you're working on, and by definition don't need to teach you how to convince VCs. But VCs can do stuff like help you hire senior executives or (should you be so lucky) arrange IPOs, which we know nothing about.We spend our time mostly on early problems like the initial idea, the relationship between the cofounders, how to launch, who to get as your initial users, how to convince later stage investors to give you more money, and (for startups that want to) early stage acquisitions. VCs focus on how to take a promising little company and turn it into a big company, including growing revenues, growing the organization, and big acquisitions or IPOs.Roughly speaking, the earliest stage of investors focus on helping the aircraft get off the runway, and VCs focus on helping it get to 35,000 feet.It's harder to generalize about angels. Some invest $10k and some invest almost as much as VCs. Some are very active and others are completely hands off. |
Gmail alternatives? | scorciapino: I'm currently using sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org/), which has labels and threads like Gmail, but is Free as in Freedom, runs on ncurses and, ironically, has a much better search mechanism, which was the main reason I switched from Gmail. There is also notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/), which is still alpha, but aims to be faster and more scriptable than Sup. |
Ever hired an artist? | joeld42: There's a lot of good illustrators featured on http://www.drawn.ca |
Gmail alternatives? | jdietrich: Run your own mailserver. If you don't trust Google with your data, there's nobody else I would trust. There are plenty of open-source webmail apps if that matters to you. |
Gmail alternatives? | dotBen: Assuming you are ultimately comparing 'shared/managed' email hosting vs self-managed/self-hosted then Spam (well, filtering spam) is the biggest issue you have to resolve.Try turning off spam checking on any email address that's been around the net a few years.The upside of GMail (and other shared-services) is that you are benefiting from their collective wisdom of incoming spam landscape - they see the bigger picture from everyone's accounts in aggregate... which is why their spam filters are so much more effective than bayesian filtering -- which is the only tool you have if you 'go it alone' on emailWith an email address that dates back to 1994 and listed all over Usenet before we knew it would be indexed by DejaNews/Google, I need the spam protection and so I'll always go shared-hosted (Gmail for now). |
Gmail alternatives? | vaporstun: Related question, does anyone know of a mail webapp that allows you to have a unified inbox with multiple IMAP accounts? In other words, something like Thunderbird or Outlook Express but web-ified.I started doing a custom fork of RoundCube to do just this a few months back but never finished it...does anyone know of anything off-the-shelf that will do this? |
Gmail alternatives? | intranation: Just wanted to give a shoutout to Tuffmail: http://www.tuffmail.com/ . Their spam protection is excellent, and very configurable. They also have the fastest IMAP servers I've had the pleasure of using.Their web interface isn't anything special, but at least it's proper IMAP so you can use whichever desktop client you like. |
An HN idea exchange? | og1: OK here's one that I was thinking of. A hardware compatibility website that lists replacement products, specifically outdated ones that were replaced by newer versions. Some context, about a month ago I was trying to replace a broken garage door opener for a sear's garage door. Well, the Sears line is no longer available and now it is Craftsman. I asked an employee if the new craftsman opener it would be functional, but it was ultimately left up to a crapshoot on if it would work or not. Something like this would be useful for me. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | simonreed: The average and median age of a company founder at the time when he/she started the business is 40:http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/ResearchAndPolicy/TheS... |
Gmail alternatives? | lmkg: http://www.lavabit.com/They (claim to) use some sort of encryption scheme such that they do not have access to the data on their own servers. I don't know enough about crypto to verify, but if your concern for moving away from Google is privacy and/or security, it's probably worth at least a cursory glance. |
Gmail alternatives? | datums: I've been using http://www.zenbe.com/mail for the past 3 months. Shareflow looks interesting. |
Gmail alternatives? | rapind: Interesting that the motivation seems to be privacy concerns. I could care less about privacy but I'm getting tired of gmail's underperformance (your results may vary). Gmail speed has become Intolerably slow over the past 6 months. I love everything else about it though and wish there was a paid alternative with the same Interface. And no it isn't premium. I had that and it was no better. I think I'm on a bad cluster or something and google support has been horrendous.I love 90% of googles products so don't assume this is flame / bashing. |
What do you use to track non-dev tasks/stories? | megamark16: I've been using Thymer, it's pretty good for me, and it should scale pretty well to a team environment. With that being said, the free trail should give you enough time to see how it works for your team, plus as I recall the pricing is pretty reasonable. |
An HN idea exchange? | pjharrin: I think online job sites suck and there has to be a better way. Linkedin is doing a better job, but it doesn't seem to have cracked the puzzle just yet. The job postings on HN are a great example, need to figure a way to transfer the networking/community aspect along with the up/down review aspect for jobs and job seekers. Anyone else interested in discussing the idea further, msg me at pjharrin [at] gmail . c0m |
Gmail alternatives? | ubulgaria: http://fastmail.fm is my poison of choice. |
Ever hired an artist? | BearOfNH: I once hired a professional to draw a caricature of a friend of mine, based on internet photos and some biographical info. He did an outstanding job in a short time: http://www.rickscartoons.com/I am not affiliated with Rick, but would use his services again. |
Gmail alternatives? | AdamN: Just use the PGP plugin for Gmail on Firefox. Then it doesn't matter who has access to your email so long as they don't have the private key. |
Gmail alternatives? | andrewcooke: no-one has mentioned runbox - http://www.runbox.com/that's who i was thinking of switching to (i want to be able to use google "anonymously", and it's tricky when also logged in to gmail). i scanned through the mail providers listed on wikipedia and that seemed the best. hosted in norway, iirc. surprised no-one else has mentioned it here, though. |
Gmail alternatives? | haasted: Anyone have experience with atMail? (http://atmail.org/) |
Gmail alternatives? | vimalg2: I've run this argument through my head several times.
Here's what you should like about Gmail:1) Google infrastructure is probably more secure than any server you could set up quickly.
2) Google handles all those pesky issue with IP blacklists, Spam, etc that you'll be forced to deal with on a DIY server. Granted, there are solutions for each of these; Its your valuable time, in the end.On the other hand,
for a DIY mail-server: you truly don't gain much besides having an accessible dump of your mailbox(in the event that all the gmail-specific datacenters get nuked in a single day?)ISPs can and probably wil sniff your plain text email traffic now/in near future due to external police state pressures.I live in India, and sadly I envision this place turning into a police state by sheer incompetence on the part of the administration who pass half-baked net-nanny laws.The only solution to email privacy: Hard-to-reverse Encryption of the text (typically GPG).
Most of the crowd here know this well. But making email encryption transparent and easy-to-use would be a killer product for those customers that value privacy. FireGPG is trying , but Gmail code changes keep breaking stuff sometimes.(http://blog.getfiregpg.org/2009/11/05/gmail-issues-fixed/)Redundancy/Backup is another issue altogether.
You should probably keep backup IMAP dumps in a geographically distant location if you fear Gmail will just cease to exist one day(without any warning). |
Anyone developing for Roku or similar platforms? | sublemonic: Feel free to comment even if you aren't developing for Roku or similar |
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