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Gmail alternatives? | cnouri: I work at Rackspace and we see choosing our email solutions as alternatives... http://twitter.com/solevangelist/statuses/9028774642 |
Anyone developing for Roku or similar platforms? | pstinnett: Not Roku but I'm going to be porting a webapp to a boxee app soon enough. I'll share once I do! |
Should we give incentives ? | marilyn: This may be more theoretical than you are hoping for, nonetheless, I'd like to suggest Dan Pink's TED talk on The Surprising Science of Motivation http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.htmlPink explains how financial incentives often have the opposite effect on motivation than we would want or expect. He suggests that the causes of true motivation boil down to autonomy, mastery and purpose. The video is worth the 20 minute investment. |
Google Reader Alternative? | gr366: I use Feverº by Shaun Inman. It requires that you have a hosting account somewhere, but has an interesting twist to it:You set up your subscriptions as either "Kindling" or "Sparks". Kindling are your essential feeds and Sparks are your supplementary feeds. So Sparks just kind of sit in the background (though you can read them too), but when enough of them start pointing at an interesting story, that story becomes "Hot" and is prioritized by "temperature", kind of like Techmeme does, but for your personal feeds. It has completely wiped out my "Unread Items" issue, because that number isn't really surfaced in the UI. And with the Hot items, you're unlikely to miss something important.http://feedafever.com/ |
Google Reader Alternative? | nfnaaron: I really like Brief, a Firefox addon. I like minimalism.It has folders. |
Gmail alternatives? | tybris: If find Google Apps for your Domain to be a good Gmail alternative ;-). |
Gmail alternatives? | Kilimanjaro: This is the right time for Mozilla to offer mymail@firefox.comMillions will flock to them. Instant win. |
Should we give incentives ? | JacobAldridge: Incentives to employees work best when they meet two criteria:1) They are directly linked to performance. Giving our random amounts of money (eg, Christmas Bonus because the business had a good year) can backfire because it sets the expectation that such incentives will be standard, not a bonus. Rewarding those employees who meet or exceed their targets - financial or otherwise - encourages them to keep working hard.2) They should be personal. Most people would rather you spend $x on a personal gift (eg, movie tickets) than give them some multiple of x in cash. It shows you care.Regarding the angels, I would again ensure you understand their personal motivation and expectations. If they want an equity stake because they think you could be huge, chances are they would rather you reinvested in strategic growth than return a dividend. |
Anyone develop MS solutions on a Mac? | cpr: Run Win7 under VMware Fusion. Excellent product. You'll have the best of both worlds. |
Gmail alternatives? | nfnaaron: Here's a comparison of web mail providers:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providersFrom that list I use fastmail.fm for outgoing (smtp). (Reasons of historical accident.) $5/year, no ads, satisfied so far.Another alternative is to go the shared host route. Plus: you'll get a shell account without having to/being able to administer a virtual box (and mail server), it's just an account.I've used pair.com for about 10 years to host my domain. Imap/pop access, or webmail. (Their webmail actually isn't that great, but it works.) Enthusiastic recommendation for pair.Go register somewhere reputable (pairnic.com is good), then go host your domain somewhere (I like pair.com). Pairnic and pair are the same company, and conveniently integrated, but you can use either separately or not at all if you like. I get so many allowed email accounts with a minimal plan on pair.com that I don't bother remembering it anymore. |
Anyone develop MS solutions on a Mac? | justrudd: I develop on a MacBook Pro with a Apple Cinema Display hooked up to it. I've tried both VMWare Fusion and Bootcamp. When in Fusion, the only thing running is Visual Studio. I turn off everything - Aero, sound, etc. It runs fine for the most part. I use a dark color scheme and sometimes scrolling through code shows some lag. It isn't as pronounced now since I turned off Aero and what not, but does still show up every once and awhile.I also use CodeRush and Refactor! Pro. It does a lot redrawing of the core Visual Studio environment (highlights, animated arrows, etc.). Most of them work. But I have noticed cases where they don't redraw properly when running under Fusion.Now depending on the types of solutions you develop, you might not like Fusion. I do a mixture of desktop apps and web apps. The desktop apps work the same on the VM as they do in a non-VM install. The difficulty is that to get the performance I wanted, I turned off Aero, sound, etc. So your app isn't really what your clients are seeing. For web apps, it doesn't really matter.The other thing I've notice is that sometimes WPF doesn't do an initial rendering under a VM. I have to resize the window just a smidge to get it to draw. Now this is only showing up in WinForm apps that display a WPF dialog. So maybe it is the WPF being hosted in a Winform under a VM that is causing it :)Each thing taken alone is negligible to me. But add them all up, I just started using the Bootcamp partition exclusively. I get all the "prettiness" of Win7, my apps look like what my users will see, etc.The biggest problem I have with Win7 is the apps just aren't as nice. I think Trillium is bloated compared to Adium. Pidgin works on Win7, but you can tell it's a GTK app. On Mac OS X, I used Gabble for Yammer. Windows doesn't have a native Yammer app except that stupid AIR app. And on principle I won't install Adobe AIR.1Password is nicer than KeePass, Password Manager, or whatever Win password you use (if you use one).iBank is nice (but not great) on the Mac considering I won't use Quicken and Microsoft Money has been discontinued. |
Review our startup: Unbig.me | theweirdzone: I've been using it and I love it. It's so easy to use and the stats are terrific.
The ads are clean too. i was frustrated with other shorteners displaying mainly soft porn and gambling ads!!
Only one sore point - no support. I have sent a few support requests and have not received any replies. and how do we receive our paymnets?
All the best! |
What happened to Winamp? | sburgess: Was that an app that came with Windows 95? |
What happened to Winamp? | YuriNiyazov: Same here. I think the reason why we used Winamp was because it was the fucking cool edgy underdog. After it was sold to AOL (which is as uncool as can possibly get) and got loaded up on corporate features, we moved on. |
What happened to Winamp? | ctingom: I think Napster happened, and frankly had a great music player interface (for it's day). Then iTunes came later and (at least back then) it was light and fast. |
What happened to Winamp? | chaosmachine: AOL bought Nullsoft. After that, it was pretty much all downhill. It went from an mp3 player to a mp3 player / video player / web browser / digital media library / online radio / toolbar / etc... |
What happened to Winamp? | noonespecial: I still used winamp classic/lite right up until I accidentally switched over to vlc. I installed vlc to play videos and noticed that it was playing mp3's and rtsp's as well, and it was good enough that I didn't bother to switch it back. |
What happened to Winamp? | stan_rogers: Bloated, yeah, but I still use it. Straightforward, categorized, text-based music library management and the ability to play cut/continuous tracks without a hiccup even with other disk IO going on(which is why I rejected the other simple players I've tried) keep it on my machine. (I should mention that I use FLAC almost exclusively, so the seamless prefetch makes more of a difference to me than it would to somebody playing MP3s.) |
What happened to Winamp? | sidmitra: Switched to Foobar2000. Easier to manage your library if it has more than 10K songs, and really light on memory. |
wind powered, power generating ships | jws: I doubt it. Compared to a fixed tower wind turbine you have hull drag losses, water turbine losses, and the problem of where to put the power since you won't have cables to shore.Some cruising sailors do use systems like this to generate their own power when under way. |
What happened to Winamp? | mrphoebs: Still use winamp with the enhancer DSP plugin. |
Gmail alternatives? | agravier: GMX is not too bad |
What happened to Winamp? | po: I heard that llamas everywhere joined into a class action lawsuit and filed suit for being whipped repeatedly. AOL, having newly acquired the company, decided to remove the llama whipping features, instead opting for non-llama-whipping ones. |
What happened to Winamp? | jrockway: Its interface did not really scale with peoples' music collections. Software with better library management eventually replaced it. |
wind powered, power generating ships | Someone: 'useful' is subjective. That mast would not have to be 'very large' to power one's GPS system, and having that certainly could be useful. At even lower power, a tiny impeller that measures boat speed could be very useful.If you are aiming for large amounts of power, I would expect it to be more efficient to replace part of the sailing by a wind turbine, and to get rid of that water turbine. |
What happened to Winamp? | nokya: Most colleagues at work listen to music from their iPod, not their workstation. |
wind powered, power generating ships | david927: Take a look at this; I submitted it a couple days ago and found it very interesting:http://thepowergeneration.blogspot.com/2009/09/hydrogen-chal...If you had other ships carrying away the generated hydrogen, it seems like a brilliant idea. |
Anyone develop MS solutions on a Mac? | macms: thanks for your responses. looks like i'm getting a Mac. |
wind powered, power generating ships | mbrubeck: My friend Craig, an engineer for an oceanography company, has been working on very similar ideas for a while. Here are two of his proposals:http://longshotcity.com/2008/11/17/flymill/http://www.paratow.com/ |
From desktop to webapp - where to begin? | kls: JavaScript, CSS, HTML and REST is what you should learn everything else is transferable to any back end language and servers you choose.Once you start building applications in this manner you can write you REST services in the language of the day and implement it on the server of the day. |
Review my app: Wappr | unignorant: Interesting! Perhaps I missed it, but I feel that you need some way to break down the suggestions into categories.Also, of course I don't know your long term intentions, but something like this would seem difficult to monetize. |
Review my app: Wappr | bearwithclaws: Wappr is my lil weekend side project (and also my first app!) that provides a votable list of app requests powered by Twitter.It's a simple app with the purpose of providing entrepreneurs/hackers/developers ideas & inspirations on what app to create, based on feedback from the public.I would love to hear your feedback. |
Review my app: Wappr | vinhboy: clicking "what is wappr" should toggle slideup slidedown, not just slideDown. |
Review my app: Wappr | dangrossman: I like the idea. I actively look for "I wish there was a [website, app, plugin, extension...]" threads in forums sometimes just to get some inspiration.In Chrome 4.0, there seems to be white "vote now" text running down the left side of the page, barely visible against the gray background, after I maximize the page. It might be a bug that only shows up upon resizing the browser? |
Review my app: Wappr | DeusExMachina: Great app!Some time ago I was thinking about creating something similar. I am one of those developers that finds figuring out what people want extremely difficult. But I did not think about it in terms of twitter, so it appears you implemented it better than I would have done.A possible way to expand it could be the possibility to tell people when something already exists or if you are developing it. It could become a good promotion channel. |
OS / Hardware choice for a software startup in Africa | yannis: >I'll be training them on Python/Django/etc and it just doesn't ...If you are going to provide the training the hardware does not matter. You can just extend the training to cover the OS. My preference - having worked in the Continent - would have been for Windows, since it can accelerate the training and introduce Ubuntu at a later stage. At the end of the day it depends on what the software start up is involved with. |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | spooneybarger: Our primary means of monitoring is to do fullpage requests to different parts of the application every 5 minutes and check the results. We have a historical record from multiple locations around the world that we can use to see if changes were made that had a negative impact as well as automated alerts when the full page load takes longer than expected.We then have secondary monitoring that can allow use to isolate issues within different areas if primary monitoring indicates a problem. |
Review my app: Wappr | epall: I'm seriously depressed by the number of requests for social networking aggregators (Twitter+FB+Wave+Buzz or whatever). |
Review my app: Wappr | mscantland: Your app should have a "how much would you pay?" field. The answer is probably zero for most of these. |
Review my app: Wappr | dconti: I think it's great. Having organization (so you can minimize dupes and easily sort through items) would be a great next project and would keep the utility high. Per the other post, i think you could do a little bit to make it an interesting source of leads for anyone who tries to solve one of the posted problems.Nice work! |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | dpritchett: I have trouble imagining something more useful than Munin for a *nix server. Check out this screenshot - it only shows four of the tens of graphs available at any given time: http://dpritchett.posterous.com/test-driving-munin-service-s...Edit: Munin profiles services and responsiveness. You'll probably want to complement it with Nagios to monitor service/hardware failures. |
Review my app: Wappr | sahueso: I'm very impressed that that's your first app. I started programming my first serious web site recently, before this I just made small sites to learn how to use CSS,PHP, Javascript and MySql, however I doubt that whatever I make will come looking as good as that. What did you use? From what or where did you learn? Another thing, could you please recommend me a book that covers everything in general about making a site? From programming it to handling issues like balancing the load between servers, etc. Thanks a lot. |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | dangrossman: A Windows 7/Vista desktop gadget. Actually, the gadget is just a tiny (400x300ish) iframe showing a webpage with some small text. It sits in the corner of one of my monitors where I can always see it.This webpage is a list of servers (front and back end) and their load averages.At least for all the webapps I run, which serve hundreds of requests per second to tens of thousands of users, load average is a good enough proxy for all the metrics that matter.When CPU usage on the front end servers is getting high enough that it impacts response times and throughput, that shows up in the increasing load averages. When disk IO on the database servers is getting high enough that it impacts response times and thoughput, that shows up in the increasing load averages.The web servers each have a webpage on them that has the load average as its only output. I wrote up a little script for the database servers to query the load remotely on the DB servers. The webpage I use as the desktop gadget polls those webpages/scripts and prints out the server names and their current load as its output.As for uptime monitoring when I'm not around, I used to use AreMySitesUp.com. Nice, simple service that does what it's supposed to. Even with a free plan it seems to check every 15 minutes or more often, and if a site goes down, it checks again much more often until it comes back up. It'll also tell you the exact status code if it's not in the 200-300 range, so you can tell a server is 500'ing out but online, and will notify you of timeouts.I built my own uptime monitoring service, though, so I don't need that anymore. I run it using VPS accounts at different providers so I don't get stuck with the sites and the service monitoring them going down at the same time. Twilio just added SMS to their API, so adding SMS alerts to any custom monitoring scripts is dead easy now. |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | fseek: I would say all of them. Generally top + atop + the log files should be enough. |
Review my app: Wappr | lawn: The site looks good but I'd like it a lot more if it was unobtrusive (works without javascript). Not a biggie but still. |
Review my app: Wappr | tom_ilsinszki: A single sentence should be enough to describe what Wappr does. It probably could fit next to you logo too. |
Review my app: Wappr | lisper: I love it! I think you may be seriously underestimating the potential of what you've done here. |
Review my app: Wappr | adrianwaj: This is also a great app to find new users for any particular site that already fulfils a request. Thus, there could be a field where people can write the name of an applicable pre-existing app with a note, with that also being tweeted out to the requesting user. Then, bunch all the notes and source tweets that apply to the same pre-existing app together.Ideally, you could also group similar requests together for developers to approach jointly to raise funds using a note they place below, that also sends a tweet out once inserted, or, these people can be informed of a suitable app once launched.So, you'd be building a directory (eg http://twittown.com/) of existing and proposed apps, tied to the tweets you've recovered, each with user responses as submitted on the site. |
Review my app: Wappr | stuntgoat: Don't stop at ideas for webapps. What about ideas for creating jobs or reducing environmental problems? I guess you could crank out other sites that used collective decision making fairly quickly, now that you have the template. Build a network of these sites and sell it to someone.If you had groups for people to join it might make sorting easier; we still have to sort through people with ideas that cannot type URLs in a browser:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1119184Also, allow me to unvote. I accidentally clicked on voting for some top app to see how test how voting worked.Please don't have me default post to Twitter when I vote for an idea after logging in with Twitter; that is sort of annoying.Consider how search engines are going to index the ideas from your users. Create a URL object for each post and have the relevant content there. ( such as other users' comments about how to improve the app idea )How do I submit ideas from the Wappr site? |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | rajuvegesna: If you are looking for some commercial solutions, there are ton of them like AppManager (appmanager.com). But then, some of these solutions monitor what you expose from your application.I don't know if there are any hosted solutions though. |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | dmytton: These are all important metrics but they're available from different things.You will have application specific metrics - errors, user counts, message queue sizes. These will help you understand what is happening in the app itself, let you fix problems and ensure that things are running smoothly. For this we use FogBugz to report errors and have various user metrics store in a database.The next level is the daemons and services used by the application. Apache will report the number of req/s and MySQL can tell you about the number of connections, or the status of replication. These are important for planning growth and ensuring your server capacity is sufficient.Then there's the servers themselves. This is CPU load, memory usage, disk usage, etc. This ties closely to the services above.There are a lot of tools for doing these things, but in the end you have to tie everything together yourself. You might start with simple website response monitoring with something like http://www.pingdom.com then move on to having it triggering your own check scripts to alert you when custom stuff goes wrong (e.g. queue sizes).And of course I'd recommend my company's server monitoring product http://www.serverdensity.com ;) but you could spend some time setting up a bigger, more flexible (and thus more complex) tool such as Nagios to pull all the metrics in. |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | dryicerx: If you're addicted to every statistic possible, check out collectd http://collectd.org/ . It's a tiny daemon that polls every couple of seconds pretty much every server and services stat imaginable (cpu, mem, disk, snmp from routers, get vals over http from your app, apache, *sql, etc) without really any noticeable performance hit. You can output it all RRD files and view it in a variety of ways. You can also use use cacti, munin (by them selves to collect and graph, or use collectd to collect and use either of these to graph as well) |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | imagetic: http://newrelic.com has been pretty critical, but we're a Rails only shop. |
What happened to Winamp? | keefe: Zinf ne Freeamp http://www.zinf.org/ also showed up as an open source player after all the degradation others already discuss, I'm using Rhythmbox right now just out of laziness basically. I dunno what is going on in the lands of windows these days. |
Review my app: Wappr | vais: Please add the ability to search. |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | sunkencity: Nagios - measuring that the application and database is up, and that disk and load are ok. (also ping but that is redundant).I use exception notifier for rails. Simple, but it works. Might switch to newrelic.From time to time I also use pingdom.com to see that the site is available from different networks around the globe. |
Great tech entrepreneurs who saw success in their mid 30s? | keefe: Don't forget the venerable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders from my home-state who started franchising KFC at 65. How long does a successful startup take to build once you hit the proper idea, 5-10 years? You regularly see professional athletes working into their 40s, I find it hard to believe physical degradation is more significant for programming than it is for athletics. I think one thing that happens is that people get older, have families and at this point the risk becomes much higher and the drive drops quite a bit lower - if you've got your wife selected already and a few kids and a good salary, it's a lot easier to just accept that life. |
Review my app: Wappr | iaskwhy: I'm a faviconist claiming that every site needs a favicon.Very nice and simple idea, I've been working with some similar stuff and believe there's a bunch of work to do with what people say. Given that it's free what people say on Twitter, etc, I'd say thinkers should start finding interesting stuff there, even on the most simple 140 characters.Also, since it's your first app: good work! |
Review my app: Wappr | maxklein: Do you do this with the twitter API? |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | ianmcgowan: It's early development (pre-alpha), but http://www.leemba.com/ looks promising. |
Review my app: Wappr | abraham: I still don't know what it does... |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | doriang: ScriptCanary - monitors Javascript errors |
Review my app: Wappr | thenduks: So how do the people wanting something (poster and voters) find out about it when it gets made (or told about it if it already exists)? Am I missing a feature? |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | wooster: For stats, I use Ganglia. The newest versions, which sadly have to be installed from source on most Linux variants, have support for Python modules. So, in addition to the out of the box stuff, I monitor a whole bunch of other stuff related to how my applications are doing (signups, item counts, etc).For daemon monitoring and watchdog-ing, I use monit. It emails me if there are problems with the server, and can automatically restart processes if they fail or get out of control. |
What's your Google profile URL, vis-a-vis Buzz? | markerdmann: http://www.google.com/profiles/103110545840570448381 |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | chuhnk: 1. I dont actively use Apache extended status or req/sec monitoring because it slows down serving requests. Instead I look in the logs every minute and feed the count into ganglia.2. Again apache logs into ganglia. New Relic for rails. Firebug and yslow when testing.3. Exception notifier in rails, ErrorDocument in apache that triggers a php script which notifies by email. Log4j in java.4. Redis, OpenMQ for queueing, Resque for background jobs5. MySQL only because at the time postgres did not support replication.6. AlertSite7. Monit8. MonitI am always on the look out for better ways to monitor the servers at work. I never really liked nagios. Monit is extremely easy to use and is very good at what it does. MMonit is a management console that can centralize the monitoring of all servers. Ganglia is great for metrics, flickr can vouch for that one. |
Review my app: Wappr | techiferous: Some design feedback:* "What is Wappr?" -- the font size and style should be the same for the whole phrase.* The slidedown should be much smaller. Wrap it in a differently colored box with rounded corners (perhaps a background darker than the page background).* Add another color besides the light blue.* Increase the contrast on your Wappr logo (either black letters or darker blue background).* You have too many font sizes. I would pick three font sizes and stick with them (and make sure the font sizes aren't too close to each other).* The "sign in with twitter" animation when you click "vote this" is really cool.* Make the previous/next/page links more prominent (or change them into image links).* The twitter icon at the bottom of the page needs to breathe (it touches the fat footer).* I really like the light, simple, zen-like feel of the design.* Your fat footer spans the whole width of the screen. If your header did the same it wouldn't feel like the page is completely squished into the middle of the screen with unused space on the edges.* I like the subtlety of the divider separating the list from the header. |
Review my app: Wappr | resdirector: Awesome. Should get more and more useful as we approach the singularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity :) |
Review my app: Wappr | fname: More importantly, is anyone working on an app they see suggested here already? |
Review my app: Wappr | diN0bot: how do i post an idea? would be nice to have an input box on the website. |
Review my app: Wappr | ddemchuk: Oh man I was loving the css work on the site until I hovered over What is Wappr?...please please tone down that blue drop shadow when you hover, it looks like a bad mistake because of the amount of blur.Otherwise, great design! |
Review my app: Wappr | stralep: It's a nice site!My JavaScript was turned off... When I clicked "what is wappr" nothing happened. Could it be a nonJavaScript friendlier (just a little :)Nice work!EDIT: JavaScript in my browser... |
What do you use to monitor your web application? | JangoSteve: For all of my Rails apps, I use a combination of Munin (for trending and profiling over time), NewRelic (for daily and weekly profiling and optimization) and AreMySitesUp (for 15-min pinging). |
What's your Google profile URL, vis-a-vis Buzz? | SlyShy: http://www.google.com/profiles/mkbunday |
Review my app: Wappr | nandemo: This is interesting and hope HNers will use it. Frankly I'm puzzled by attempts to do startups that are basically targeted at other geeks.However, there's potential for a lot of "abuse". The top suggestion now is:I wish there was an app where you could report a car whose alarm has been going on for hours, and car thieves will read it and steal the carI hope you don't try to ban that sort of thing, though. |
Review my app: Wappr | rendezvouscp: It’s a nice little app. Its purpose was fairly obvious to me once I read two tweets and the design is nice.Do things automatically get voted up on Wappr if someone retweets a tweet on Twitter?It’d be cool if you could subscribe to a particular want or desire; for example, I’d want to subscribe to anything related to personal finance because that’s the business I’m in. You could probably even monetize it by offering more advanced features like that. |
Review my app: Wappr | nathanh: This is a great concept, but it might be more useful if it aggregated problems people have instead of apps people wish for. From a technical perspective it would be harder to pull off, but we all know that end users rarely know what they're looking for. |
OS / Hardware choice for a software startup in Africa | mahmud: I shipped laptops to Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.) Forget starting an Apple shop, or a Linux shop. Most IT people there get trained in MS stack technologies, and most techies you will be able to hire will be familiar with them.If the purpose of your startup is profit and not some other altruistic or fun reason, I suggest you don't try to introduce you them too many new things at the same time. You wont be able to service Apple hardware there, at least not cheaply.You can source newish IBM Thinkpads for $350 a piece, if you're buying 10 units+ (feel free to contact me for that) same with HP and Toshiba ones.They should be able to pickup Python and Django on their own, and fairly quickly. They're already competent in ASP.NET and other more complex technologies.Nairobi has some decent IT scene as well.Good luck! |
I want to cancel my Gmail. Alternatives? | nicko: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121269 |
You're not allowed to comment/ reply on your own submissions? | jacquesm: That's because it's (rightly) dead. |
Where do you find leads? | jeffmould: Can you be more specific as to what you are looking to buy/sell? There are a lot of resources out there, but it really depends on what you are looking for specifically.The best leads though come from your own marketing efforts. Just avoid spamming to obtain leads. Creating a blog, social media marketing (Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn), and your website are going to be your biggest drivers. Consider reaching out on LinkedIn for quality business leads. Join groups, respond to questions/answers, explore your contacts.Paying for leads can be a recipe for disaster in my mind and is really just a waste of money. On the other hand, if you are looking to create a direct mail campaign to a specific group (i.e. realtors, doctors, etc...) in a specific region, you may explore sites like InfoUSA. |
what do you think are ebay's weaknesses? | jmount: I think most of the features are irrelevant- you need to find some way to break the "network effect" (large number of buyers attract sellers, large number of sellers attract buyers) like Craigslist did.A cautionary point is your idea also has to something that is not true for Amazon (else Amazon would have already crushed eBay). From what I have seen a big blocker is the rigidity of Amazon's catalogue versus eBays. For example an eBay seller selling obscure components to repair fishing reels doesn't need variable pricing and would be happier using Amazon for the payments (versus PayPall)- but has no idea how you would enter these unique items into Amazon. |
Relationship between HN and Scribd? | jmount: I think Scribd is a Y-combinator funded startup (hence the Hacker News connection) and some of the Hacker News admins by-hand edit other people's posts. I am very against copying PDFs into a walled-garden like Scribd, but this isn't my website. |
Relationship between HN and Scribd? | tptacek: I don't like Scribd, but I also don't like it when I click on a link and a file appears on my filesystem, which is what happens when I click PDF links in NetNewsWire. |
Review my app: Wappr | necrecious: Have you heard of appswell? It is a voting system for iPhone app development. |
How to know if hard disk failure is imminent on a Mac? | minsight: Install SmartReporter. It will give SMART diagnostics which can indicate if (and how quickly) your disk is trending towards mechanical failure. |
What websites do you visit daily? | russell: HN! /. <blush/>, Charlie Stross, Lambda the Ultimate, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Fantastic Fiction (well weekly). |
What happened to Winamp? | vkdelta: Thanks for input guys! |
Relationship between HN and Scribd? | akkartik: If anything, HN scribd posts seem to turn into straight pdfs. I think the admins search for posts with [scribd] in the title and link to a pdf version instead. |
How to know if hard disk failure is imminent on a Mac? | minsight: You can also try running hardware diagnostics from the disk that came with your mac. That will do a test to see if something is currently broken. |
Relationship between HN and Scribd? | sundarurfriend: The consensus here seems to be that it's an effort to promote Scribd, but I had always assumed that it was an attempt at trying to be helpful to those who prefer to remain within a browser, and to those who hate opening PDFs. At least, it serves that use case to me. |
Gmail alternatives? | voltolibro: Dear Fastmail,I hate Gmail and desperately want to find another email/webmail service. I want to switch to something that feels more secure, something that does email well without any of the extra junk they have been adding to my Gmail account. I don't seem to be alone.I consulted several friends with more "tech cred" than me, and they pointed me to a few Gmail alternatives, with Fastmail at the top of the list.I went to your website and after browsing for about a minute, I wanted to scratch Fastmail off my list. Your website came across as clunky, cold, and BLAH. It seemed like the website was designed about five years ago, and it didn't really instill confidence that your service would be a user-friendly experience or something that I could transition to without a huge amount of effort.I decided to check out another Gmail alternative on my list called "Roundcube". The Roundcube site was simple but elegantly designed. More importantly, it didn't feel like it was trying to put me to sleep. The site laid out its features via simple navigation structure, basic colors, a nice screenshot, and a non-cluttered layout. I wanted to hug it. It gave the vibe that they offered an email service that would make the transition away from Gmail extremely painless and straightforward.I relayed my thoughts to a techie friend, and he reiterated that your service is far superior to Roundcube. I trust my friend, and I will probably sign up for an account with you.But seriously... There are so many people out there right now who desperately want to break free of their Gmail shackles. The moment is ridiculously ripe for another service to step into that vacuum and offer a refuge to all of these people.Your email service might be truly awesome, but your website is total cryptonite for people who are ready to make the switch.Welcome us with open arms, and we will come in droves!!Sincerely yours,Volto Libro |
Review my Startup | fnid2: To be frank, I can't imagine signing up to use this service. It is too easy to build into almost any shopping cart system.Why go through the process of integrating with a 3rd party and all the logistical and viability nightmares that come with such a decision when it's a trivial problem to solve in the real world? |
Review my Startup | coryl: It looks interesting, but I'm REALLY confused as to what I'm looking at with the graph, countdown timer, lowest price, etc.What is all that junk? Why does the graph show a price in $000 but the price per unit is $2.00 |
Review my Startup | forcer: I don't know if its just because its late here and I am bit tired but I didn't get the concept yet.I understand what group buy is but not sure what problem your website solves? |
Review my Startup | zackattack: you have way too much text on your site and not nearly enough pictures |
What's up with performance? | romland: Maybe we take unrestrained pleasure in news for hackers on Valentine's Day. :)Hmm. But no, it's not just you. |
Review my Startup | gridspy: Okay, so from my vantage as an electrical manufacturer the point of syncfu is to help me achieve economies of scale. The more people that purchase, the more I can lower my price.You don't currently obligate buyers to make an actual purchase, so the price that the other buyers pay might be too heavily discounted. For example, 100 people reserve, but only 20 actually buy - in this case I might not make a profit since the per unit costs for 20 are much higher than for 100.I'd rather see a similar grouping mechanism that requires full commitment from both buyers and sellers, like ebay does. You'd probably have to do this with accounts, points and validation.As for the actual purchase you could do this:The seller creates a graph of price vs size of the production run, as now. They specify how often they would like to do production runs (sales).Each buyer specifies the maximum amount they would be willing to pay, by clicking on the purchase graph. They specify how long they are willing to wait until it reaches that price. They enter all their credit card and billing details into the system, and have made a promise to purchase at that price or below.When the sale ends, the system attempts to solve the graph for price. Everyone who "bid" above this price pays the solved price, everyone below is moved to the next run, unless their stated "latest date" would be passed by waiting that long.You then bill everyone who said that they would pay. You make the lump sum available to the retailer who then satisfies the orders. This way there is no risk to a buyer that they will pay more than they want, and no risk to a seller that you will set the wrong price.When I say solve for price, what I mean is that- 1 person chooses the 1 user price (A)- 2 people chose the 5 user price (B)you solve, 1 user (A) gets the 1 user price, they get billed, B moves into next round (unless their time limit has expired)now more people come along- 5 users choose the 10 user price (C)- 6 users chose the 12 user price (D)+ 2 people chose the 5 user price (B)So now you can manufacture at the 13 user price because that will satisfy everyone. |
Review my Startup | akamaka: This is very cool idea, but the whole thing gives me the impression that it was developed without customer feedback.Is anyone using it? Group buying is something that can be done without any special tools. If people are already doing it, then there are probably group buying forums out there that could use your support in making them more efficient.If people aren't already doing group buying, then the real work is in convincing people to do it! If you don't already have connections to merchants who are doing this, then you need to find them, or start doing it yourself.I hope this works out for you, because it seems like an awesome idea. The app looks good, but comes across as being a technical tool, rather than something that generates sales. |
Relationship between HN and Scribd? | diN0bot: how about we submit pdf's inside google's pdf viewer?https://docs.google.com/viewerjust mention the real domain in the post title |
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