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Whoa - why did Google bork us? | mbrubeck: I see you already did the obvious thing and put up a redirect. You might also put up a robots.txt on the "admin" site with "Disallow: /" (and no redirect).I see pages from my personal site disappear from Google results unpredictably and be replaced by other copies of the same content (e.g. on Planet Debian). I don't know if it's some duplicate-detection gone wrong, or some unrelated hiccup in their indexes. It's generally gone back to normal within a couple days, with no explanation. |
How to enter and stay current with the security industry? | hga: I've talked with a friend of mine who's a name in this field and my strong advice before the Internet got big and dangerous was "stay away", e.g. far too many security jobs simply existed to provide someone to blame.Nowadays, there's got to be a lot more legitimate ones, I would think, but you should investigate this thoroughly before deciding to specialize in this field. |
Whoa - why did Google bork us? | cpg: We had never seen this before. I understand their crawler has to be very aggressive, but it seems to me like the indexing is broken, at least in this case.Imagine if someone gets all our pages and puts them somewhere else. Even without links to them, they could take over us.Thanks for the idea of the robots.txt. Since the admin site is really for testing and eventually released, it's some work to make the robots.txt dynamic. May do it soon just to make sure. |
Check out my YC app demo - rip away | TrevorBurnham: Hi freebsd_dude,As a heads-up, let me tell you that I'm applying to YC with a similar concept under the name Theoryville. We envision a very different interface, but we haven't built a demo yet. I'd be happy to exchange ideas with you privately; I'm not difficult to track down.Here are some specific criticisms: I don't like the interface's reliance on double-clicking. I don't like that datasets open in a new tab. I expect words that are bright colors to be clickable (for instance, the word "data" under each dataset's name). When I "open" a dataset, I don't expect to be taken directly to the analysis screen; I expect to learn more about the dataset. For the output to be useful, I really need to be able to save the table in some way. The linear fit line should be shown by default. Also, there seems to be no way to remove the fit line once you've added it.All in all, I agree with Tomas's view that it should be more "webby." And that's a non-trivial problem to solve for something as complex as statistical analysis. Best of luck!(Also, have you seen Swivel? They don't do much in the way of data analysis, but they have a great interface for doing data visualizations. Definitely check them out.) |
Whoa - why did Google bork us? | gboudreau: > How can this happen?Good question. I don't think Google published a list of the multiple sources they use to find new websites.
I think it's not too far fetched to say that all URLs they can see though any of their service would be added to the Googlebot queue.
Sending an email to a Gmail user with a link to admin amahi org might be a trigger...
But nothing is sure.> Does PageRank and their famous incoming link equations not matter?? How can this be so off?It's not off really. To Google's eyes, www amahi org == admin amahi org. They became interchangeable. Here's more details on this...Since the end of 2007, subdomains of a specific domain are all linked together somehow.
Ref: Matt Cutts [http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/about-me/] in a blog post here [http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/]What this means is that Google knows that www amahi org and admin amahi org are related.
In your case, they were more than just related; they were pratically identical (in content).
When Google finds duplicate content on your site, it might decide to use one version or the other in search results. In Google's eyes, both URL are interchangeable, and so they will be used interchangeably.
And this is particularly apparent in your case, where searching for "linux home server" on Google will sometimes show admin amahi org, sometimes www amahi org, as the first result.
Or when searching for "link:admin amahi org" will return pages that link to www amahi org.Ref: Duplicate content [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...]> How long will this last?Nobody can say. They never give any estimate on how long re-crawling a site will take.> We have gone to WMT to dramatically accelerate the crawl rate of www amahi orgYou should do the same with admin amahi org, after you've changed a couple of things (more about that below).> More importantly, how can we prevent this from happening again?Multiple ways: robots.txt, Canonicalization, Sitemaps...robots.txt: it's pretty easy to make robots.txt dynamic:
.htaccess:
<Files robots.txt>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>robots.txt:
<?php if ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == 'admin amahi org') { echo "Disallow: /"; } ?>Canonicalization: See details here [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...]
Basically, you should add a <link rel="canonical" href="http://www amahi org/...> in the <head> section of your pages.
This will indicate to Googlebot your preferred URL.
Again, it's pretty easy with any scripting language... Just hardcode the "http://www amahi org part of the @href, and put the rest dynamically.Sitemaps: You should submit sitemaps for both admin amahi org and www amahi org on Google Webmaster Tools.
In fact, you should create only one sitemap, containing only www amahi org URLs you want Google to see, and use that same sitemap for both www and admin sites.
Submitting this sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools could help Googlebot pick up your 301 Redirect, and your new robots.txt, a little faster.Good luck with this! |
got to 33 in the App Store. Now what? | joeld42: I think the "words with friends" model works very well. There's a free version, it's identical except that it shows a small banner add on the main menu, and shows you a full-screen ad after every move. It's not very intrusive but you can't really ignore it either.It was enough to make me upgrade to the full ($2.99) version after playing for a week. And if users don't upgrade, you still get the ad revenue.Take a look if you haven't tried it yet. |
Whoa - why did Google bork us? | eklitzke: Having an admin or test site publicly accessible is a really bad idea, for exactly this reason. If any search engine comes across a link to this site, it will crawl the site. Even if it doesn't promote the test site above you main site, it can cause a lot of problems:
* googlebot finds a ton of new content, and starts crawling this new content rather quickly, increasing load on your machines
* since multiple domains are detected serving the same content, it could make your site look spammy and decrease your PR
* there's no guarantee that your main site content will show up first in google search results, which is obviously badI worked at a site that encountered this problem in a similar manner. The way it worked was the main site was www.example.com, and we had a CDN + squid in front of static.example.com. Only static assets like images were served from the CDN version of the site. However, the code didn't actually enforce this (i.e. it was purely enforced by only linking to static assets). Somehow Google found a link to the cached copy of the site and started crawling everything. Badness ensued.It sounds like your situation is pretty easy to fix -- enforce that only internal IPs can access the test site (or require a special cookie, etc.). In the previous example that I gave, we had to explicitly whitelist certain servlets as acceptable to be served from the static site (and enforce that in the code). |
A watch that doesn't suck when typing? | shrughes: I've never had to take off this when typing: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002HI5N5A/ |
How do I go about shopping for someone to build me a website/flash app? | rms: This is a place where flash game developers can list games that they have for sale. I'm sure that if you contact many of them you will find they are willing to do custom jobs. http://www.flashgamelicense.com/ |
How do I go about shopping for someone to build me a website/flash app? | mediarosh: Hi. Sorry about the self-promotion, but if you want a website or webapp designed and coded (in Flash or any other language), please email me. My email address is mediarosh(at)gmail(dot)comI hope I can be of some help to you. |
How do I go about shopping for someone to build me a website/flash app? | chaosprophet: Your best bet would be to ask people around you if they would recommend anyone. You could also try hiring freelancers. This thread should be helpful if you're deciding to go the freelance route: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028327Now for some shameless self-promotion: I am a freelance web developer (and I also do software, but that's only for personal projects) based out of Chennai, India, and if you would like to discuss a project, please e-mail me (e-mail in profile). |
A watch that doesn't suck when typing? | ledger123: Is there a still need for a watch when we have one in cellphones? I always wonder this. (Except perhaps as a piece of jewelery for men) |
A watch that doesn't suck when typing? | hga: I use one with a cloth band that's snug enough to keep it from sliding down; the cloth makes it sufficiently comfortable when a bit snug.It's also small and very modest in scope, just an analog hours and minutes hands display (yes, I'm old fashioned). |
founders wants me to join for just equity, how much should I ask for? | yogibear: Everyone -- thanks a lot for all the answers and insights.
That helped.
To give you more details, since some are curious, they are just beginning, about a month or two. There is some code but its not more then 5-10% of what is needed for public beta.One other advice I got is to strive to stay with ~3-4% after all dilutions, which should be estimated as being diluted 1/3 for three times. so to stay with 3% i should start with 10.5% (->6.9% => 4.6% => 3%).One other detail I didn't mention is that they want me to keep my day job (me salary paying job i currently have), until the first round (seed money).
Currently the three of them also keep their day job, so we are all kind of equal on that aspect.Regarding the founders abilities, they have design/biz dev/ceo experience. |
Productivity at work | cpr: You likely have Emacs on your system. Learn to use it.In the most trivial sense, as soon as you start editing C or C++ code (or any language), the syntax-aware highlighting/bracket matching is turned on, and you're off and running! All at no cost, other than some learning.Emacs has a good built-in help/info system. Learn to use that first, and then use it at every step.Emacs is really an operating system that happens to edit text. ;-) |
Productivity at work | there: I do not have the prowess of the pointy haired linux geek and I need the help of a good ide to spot those missing curly braces / syntax etc ( trivial mistakes).why can't you just enable syntax highlighting in vim? it has syntax files for most languages and will highlight/color words differently if they are recognized as valid commands in the particular language, and can do things like highlight the closing parenthesis or brace when you have the cursor over the opening one (or use % to jump to it). |
Productivity at work | aheilbut: I've been impressed with Codelite (http://codelite.org/) - it's the closest thing I've seen to Visual Studio for linux, and does very nice syntax highlighting and auto-completion. |
A Business Guy Getting Hired at a Startup, Help Please | espadagroup: Update: Just in case anyone is wondering or will wonder in the future/be in my position, I ended up asking for $49,000. |
A watch that doesn't suck when typing? | anactofgod: The Rado Ceramica and Movado Valor watches are the least obtrusive watches I own. Both have the added benefit of being extremely durable (I'm tough on watches). They still get in the way a bit, though.Maybe you need a ring watch. This one is interesting...
http://www.nova68.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&...But I'd prefer the Pooh watch...
http://www.whattimeizit.com/servlet/the-1/winnie-the-pooh-ri... |
Should Gridspy avoid Flash? | gridspy: Hot :Dashboard: http://your.gridspy.co.nz/powertech/Jquery sparklines: http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/Google visualisation: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gall...Annotated timeline (the flash one): http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gall... <-- Should I use this?DyGraphs: http://danvk.org/dygraphs |
What are all the good launch platforms for an Internet startup ? | coryl: Why do you need a "platform" to launch on? It really won't have any effect on whether or not your startup is successful. |
Should Gridspy avoid Flash? | colonelxc: I don't think flash is "evil", but as I often am browsing around on my iphone, a nicely degrading site is a godsend. This seems like the type of site someone might add to their home screen and check periodically. |
Should Gridspy avoid Flash? | gills: I recently opted to swap jqplot for google vis for some reporting functionality. Losing the annotated timeline was painful, but I think, in the end, workable (jqplot can link the zoom together on two charts so that one of them is the thumbnail).Flash was part of the reason I switched; I was not wholly comfortable with [what I perceive as] the fragile and convoluted page load dependency between google vis and jquery (perhaps you have a better way). |
What are the best ad services for low traffic sites? | briancary: I think you're looking for something like OpenX Community Hosted. http://www.openx.org/ad-server |
Would you pay for a 1Password-like service for email? | there: interesting idea. a few issues come to mind:- people concerned enough about privacy to use such a service might have concerns about their emails being passed through your service as well.- the domains of that service might get blocked on certain sites due to abuse and people using multiple email addresses to create multiple accounts.- spam filters might block the inbound emails because the 'to' address doesn't match up to the user's. though i can't imagine many would place a high probability on this metric since mailing lists and such would act the same way. |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | icey: Transifex is probably a competitor in this space (http://www.transifex.net/).One of the problems that I've had with lowest bidder translations is that the cost of a poor translation can be quite high. Working on a large real estate management application a few years ago, we hired a firm based on cost alone for a bunch of translations; and they did some weird things like using the word for "zipper" when we wanted "zip code". The translations were generally correct, but little things like that really made us look pretty bad in the eyes of our international customers.So, my point is that I would go out and look for a company that had a good translation track record before trusting the public face of my company to someone on the basis of cost. |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | csytan: Hey andrew,I've been working on launching a site like this for the last 5 months. Feel free to check it out:
http://www.caterpi.com/Also some competitors in the same space:
http://onehourtranslation.com and
http://mygengo.com |
Whoa - why did Google bork us? | cpg: Yeah .. not such a great idea ... looks like Googlebot is really aggresive (duh). It's still showing admin as the "main" site. Pain in the arse .. |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | friism: I actually submitted this exact idea to YC last year. Here are some competitors:
http://translationcreation.com/ (site down at time of writing)
http://www.proz.com/The YC-segment could probably be convinced to use something like this (I'd use it if the editing/checking worked well). I know of several tech-startups that use mturk in a way similar to what you describe.A big hurdle for wider uptake would be confidentiality of texts to be translated. |
Should Gridspy avoid Flash? | icey: If it's significantly faster to do what you want in Flash, do it that way first. Your users are almost certain to have it.Most of the conversations of the evilness of flash are limited to the HN sort of audience. I don't think that the internet audience at large really cares about it all that much.If the features end up being really useful and you decide you hate Flash, you can revisit it and write it in something else later.If the features end up not getting used, then you saved yourself a bunch of time on a feature that didn't end up being a big deal. |
What are all the good launch platforms for an Internet startup ? | keefe: lol here I was contemplating EC2 vs AppEngine vs dedicated servers... |
Is my web app idea worth the effort? | pedalpete: Does Joe Data analyst exist? and if so, is he able to gather enough data, and conceptualize what he is actually looking for?
I put this in the realm of wolframalpha, where most people (even hackers & programmers) can't word a query well enough to get the data they want back.From my experience non-programmers aren't able to manage large enough volumes of data to require data analysis. At the company I used to work for, there were people in IT who's job was specifically to build and run reports at the request of retail managers. The problem would not be resolved if you could just give the retail managers a data analysis tool, as they didn't know how to get the data out of the databases.
In some ways, is this the market that pipes or dapper.net are trying to do? |
What are the best ad services for low traffic sites? | volomike: Consider also posting this on WickedFire forums.But off the top of my head, consider VideoEgg.com because the owner of Twitpic.com (on the Mixergy.com website's interview with that owner) said that he didn't start earning serious ad revenue until he switched to VideoEgg.And then there's also CPM banners with ValueClick Media.You'll want to Google the terms CPM, PPC, and CPA in regards to affiliate marketing.But in general, you should probably try the shotgun approach. Sign up with several highly recommended ones, use a PHP script to do split-testing with them, and see which ones give you the highest returns for your particular niche. There might also be an open source split tester you can download and try out, or just build one yourself. |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | jasonlbaptiste: yes we would use this. we used mturk for translations and had it setup for multiple entries. This would help us significantly and we would pay. hth |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | natch: When you talk about "competing sites" that seems a bit off, since your site doesn't exist yet. It took me a while to figure this out.One way to find rough use data would be to find the existing sites, then plug them into http://quantcast.com and look at the traffic numbers. |
Would you pay for a 1Password-like service for email? | petercooper: Gmail lets you do something like that already with the +anything suffixes on the end of the e-mail username.Also, in a slightly similarly vein but if you want to have stuff on a separate domain with a message limit: http://www.spamgourmet.com/ |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | DenisM: I would use it to localize my iPhone apps. I currently use OneHourTranslation and they are pricey at $0.07/word. Make it half that and I will switch.Extra points: * have the translators know about iPhone and the app,
so that they have context
* support for incremental translation (so that terms
stay consistent as you add features)
* automatically validate .strings file format on submission. |
Is my web app idea worth the effort? | dustinchilson: I Like this idea. If you were looking for a target audience you should also include students learning statistics. In college you get to use some of the software but this would be more ideal, hopefully working cross platform. When I took statistics it was a pain running windows on my Mac just for statistics software. |
How can I find out ecommerce conversion rates for various verticals? | answerly: Nielsen publishes a fair amount of ecommerce conversion data. For example:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/nov-e-commerce-...I'd suggest digging around in the archives there to see if you can find some newer stats.Your verticals are pretty specific, so it may be tough to get exact numbers for those categories. Perhaps you can find data for verticals with similar average order sizes as the product categories you are targeting. That wouldn't be perfect but would probably be directionally correct.Good luck! |
How can I find out ecommerce conversion rates for various verticals? | dangrossman: Verticals don't have conversion rates. Specific funnels on specific sites do.According to Nielsen, Proflowers has a 42.8% conversion rate and 1800flowers.com 20.8%. That's two sites selling identical products.MarysAwesomeHandBuiltFlowerShop.com probably converts around 0%. |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | nano81: While not for iPhone Apps, Facebook's translations for Connect sites works similarly: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Internationali... |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | radu_floricica: It's just a feeling, so please take it with a grain of salt, but I think people see mechanical turk a bit like a game on which they can win small amounts of money. Turning it into work and making people translate for cash (as opposed to entertainment) is likely to lead to higher rates. |
List of all YC startups? | faramarz: Crunchbase seems like a good start, but I'm not sure how up-to-date the list is
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator |
List of all YC startups? | erikstarck: This was discussed a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=958899 |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | bemmu: Yup, we were talking about localizing a bunch of strings for our app just yesterday. Specifically need Malay, Spanish and French. |
Is my web app idea worth the effort? | jdietrich: I believe that you will need to make a quantum leap in usability. As pedalpete mentioned, very few people have the skills to process meaningful datasets, even those working in industries where we might expect such skills to be commonplace. The people who do have the mathematical knowledge know how to use the existing software tools.If this were my idea, I would be looking at smaller niches where I could offer a boneheadedly simple way of doing tasks that are commonplace in a particular industry. I'd focus on accepting the dirtiest, nastiest inputs - excel spreadsheets, tables copied from word documents, tabulated lists - and giving the user a big set of simple preset operations, organised by industry and job role. I'd look further down the food chain to people who might deal with data as part of their job, but have no mathematical background whatsoever.This might be an odd analogy, but I'm reminded of software synthesisers. Nowadays it's relatively rare that musicians have the technical understanding of synthesis to create their own sounds, even with the most basic tools. Those that do understand synthesis have usually invested a lot of time in learning the interfaces of particular synthesisers and are loathe to discard that investment. Developers are focussing on the unskilled mass market with products that make it easy to access, tweak and combine a big library of preset sounds. |
Is my web app idea worth the effort? | TrevorBurnham: Have you seen this?
http://yeroon.net/It's a bunch of web-based graphical wrappers around R created by a UCLA stats prof, Jeroen Ooms. Slick stuff, for a hobby project.I agree with jdietrich: In order to be more than a hobby project, you need a "quantum leap in usability." But I'm optimistic. I think someone will definitely figure out how to do this in the next 5 years.Justin also has a good point that a tool aimed specifically at students would be great. Most intro stats courses are taught using SPSS or Stata, and most of the kids in the course have never done programming before; as if stats weren't a perplexing enough subject in itself! |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | innovate: Very interesting. What were your challenges with respect to the machine translations specifically? Also, can you post or share the MTurk ads you use/d? |
You're a Internet millionaire. Why aren't you supporting life extension? | chaosprophet: First off I am not a millionaire (yet). However, the concept of living on and on is something I view as scary, for reasons I do not wish to elaborate. I also believe that eighty years is more than sufficient time to live a life and accomplish all that I want to.Also, rather than donate to a research which could possibly extend my lifetime, I would donate to organisations which are already enabling people to live better lives than they could otherwise. Personally, when I rise to a position where I can afford it, I would start sponsoring a kid's education every year. That gives me the satisfaction of knowing I am improving someone's life in some way. |
Productivity at work | macros: Also look at kdevelop. Should be a bit closer to what you have in mind and available for most any linux distro you are using. |
You're a Internet millionaire. Why aren't you supporting life extension? | janj: +1 for research improving quality of our current lifetime, especially in areas of great need.Also, aren't you the least bit curious what happens after your expiration? Not that I think I'll be joining past friends up in the clouds playing a harp but absolute nothing is about impossible for me to imagine. In that sense it seems silly to pursue the goal of extending life when you could use that time/energy enjoying it and anticipating what comes next. |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | Patonj: Another strong competitor - http://www.tomedes.com |
how to learn functional programming in Python | jacquesm: Functional programming is a technique, and that technique is best expressed using languages designed for the purpose.Python has enough elements of functional programming languages that it should be relatively easily done, but it won't be 'the real deal'.The interesting thing is that this exercise will probably make you a better python programmer, mutable state, side effects and parameter modification are 'bad' traits anyway, and getting functions to always return the same result dependent solely on the input parameters is 'good'.This may be of some help:http://norvig.com/python-lisp.htmlIt's intended for lisp programmers to make it to python, but I think plenty of the stuff in there should apply to your situation. |
how to learn functional programming in Python | spooneybarger: You can program in a functional style using python to an extent BUT... python in many ways puts up roadblocks that make it a less than fulfilling thing to do.I would say you could become familiar with functional programming in python but you can't experience the full depth of functional programming, for that given your general goals... I would suggest looking at clojure ( runs on jvm and gae ) |
how to learn functional programming in Python | gruseom: If you want functional programming on the GAE, aren't Clojure and Scala more obvious choices? Both were designed with the functional style in mind. |
how to learn functional programming in Python | mnemonik: As others have pointed out, the best course for your goals (learning functional programming and using GAE) is probably going to be Clojure (or Scala).Python has taken some idioms from functional languages, but if you try to really code in the functional paradigm you will but heads with the language. Statements and expressions are very sharply divided. Lexical scoping is broken. Lambdas are one line only.Guido even suggested removing filter, reduce, lambda, and map from Python 3k[1]. If that isn't a signal that the functional paradigm won't be nurtured, I don't know what is.[1] http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196 |
How does Ookla Net Metrics (speedtest.net) works? | fragmede: Why do you believe they do anything more complex than a file transfer? |
how to learn functional programming in Python | probably: I was introduced to and learned functional programming through Python, beginning with these series of docs:http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-prog.htmlhttp://docs.python.org/dev/howto/functional.htmlI would say I program primarily, though not strictly, in a functional style in Python, Lisp, and R. For my applications it's more for the purpose of a modularity rather than concurrency-critical issues, so Python's functional programming limitations aren't noticeable (don't know in your case). There is a 'functional' module available for Python which extends on map, filter, and reduce, and lambda's single-epxression limitation does not necessarily make it functional-hostile. |
how to learn functional programming in Python | python123: "The part of the answer on why I want to learn functional programming should be clear to almost everyone here"It isn't clear to me. Why don't you explain why you want to learn functional programming? |
FOSS for Profit? | gojomo: Read the license. If it's one of the usual "open source" licenses, for-profit use of the software is allowed. (It's not considered 'open source' if it discriminates against for-profit uses.)Perhaps you also mean whether the software can be included in your for-profit, for-sale, possibly closed-source product. The answer is still 'read the license'. Some licenses are OK with that reuse, others aren't.If you're wrestling with subtle GPL interpretations or 'copyleft' clauses you'll want to read more of the way these things have been interpreted in the past. But there's no shortcut beyond reading and understanding for yourself, and it's not so complicated it needs paid-professional interpretation unless (1) you're with a giant risk-averse bureaucratic organization; and/or (2) you're trying to pull something fishy, far from the usual interpretations. (eg: "Is there some loophole way we can structure our code to include GPL code without making our entire product GPL'd?") |
how to learn functional programming in Python | cydork: You should read following http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1892324/why-program-funct...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1017621/why-isnt-python-v...I still think if you are interested in learning functional programming choose another language. |
Would you use/participate in a translation site like this? | daves9400: whats the idea with getting into a segment that is crowded already? do you have something better? |
Productivity at work | KeepTalking: Thanks to all of you for your replies !Real neat ! |
Boston / Cambridge Colocation recommendation? | epi0Bauqu: http://www.iland.com/products/colocation |
Where best to sell an established website? | davidw: I'm testing out an auction on Flippa.com:http://flippa.com/auctions/83341/Innsbruck-Austria-rental-li...So far so good. It was a pretty smooth process, and even though it's a niche site, I've gotten a few bids. I'm hoping the price goes up a bit, but I just want to unload it at this point, so from that point of view it looks like I'll succeed. |
Has Hacker News killed the stealth mode start up? | ismarc: I see stealth-mode startups differently. They aren't to prevent "theft" of an idea. Instead, they're designed around using that first big opening to secure a position to grow from. Where general feedback may help, it would lessen this impact when the time did come. |
Where best to sell an established website? | medianama: Why don't you post it here. I am sure lot of HNers would be interested |
Where best to sell an established website? | bgraves: This thread is extremely relevant to my interests.I've thought about this for a long time and I'm completely shocked when I see dog-allergies.com (which has only been online for 5 months) selling for $600! I know SOME of this is modern day snake oil salesmen, just working the system to eek out some small profits, but people are obviously making some money at this, right? |
Has Hacker News killed the stealth mode start up? | mbrubeck: I'm working at http://kiha.com/ and we've been in stealth mode for well over a year. For us it's partly about working together with partners who want a big, coordinated launch. Personally I agree that stealth mode is overrated, but our investors and leaders feel it's worth it for us. |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | pmjoyce: I submitted the same site in November last year - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902172. Since then I've gone through several point releases, a refactor and a design overhaul (I'm hopeful it won't be compared to a domain parking page this time).I'd be interested in your thought and opinions. I'd also like to hear any thoughts on a marketing strategy. Looking at my stats, visitors seem to hang around on the site (as measured by avg time on site and pages/visit) for a relatively long time compared to any other properties I run and I get a fair amount of repeat visitsors. My biggest challenge at the moment is getting people to visit it in the first instance. I experimented with PPC (Adwords) in December - I'm no whizz so I ended up down, but only by a margin.The revenue model at the moment is amazon affiliate sales. |
Could you suggest how to market a proxy server? | jm4: Who would use the proxy server and why? |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | ryanelkins: I would make the "How Bookhu works" box stand out a little more. One thing I've noticed with all of the "review my startups" is that we have no idea what we are going to initially generally, and when we get there the first thing we want to know is - what does this site do. You explain it well enough, I would just make the box pop a little more visually so I don't spend as much time hunting around for it.I found the site interesting enough to poke around a bit. Visually I thought it looked pretty good. I would probably make the call to action more obvious as well. Don't be afraid to tell people what you want them to do. The buy links are pretty small and not even very clear that I am buying them by clicking on them. Make them very obvious.The "Leave a Reply" at the bottom doesn't make sense to me. What am I replying to? Is it just a spot for people to leave their thoughts on the book? Again, tell me what you want. Perhaps you could form it as a question. Try some different things and see what gets people to start submitting comments or reviews or whatever it is you're looking for there (or just take it out).Overall thought I thought it looked pretty nice and it will be interesting to see how you do. |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | fhirzall: I think you should have a longer delay on each book preview in the scrolling list of books at the top. I made it through half of one and then it switched over. 5 more seconds would be perfect.The "How it works" box isn't very obvious to a first time visitor - maybe you can hang this somewhere off the top next to the logo?I like the arrows on the left and right but I suspect that they would be too far to the sides on a widescreen monitor - I suppose you would know better what resolutions your visitors are using.Otherwise I think the concept is cool, you might benefit from putting this out in the various book forums online. |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | Vindexus: First thing I noticed: "What Does It Do?" I wasn't really sure right away what it did. I found the "How Bookhu Works" box, but at first glance I thought it was an ad so I didn't even look at it.My recommendation would be to put a small tagline below your banner. Maybe "Book reviews broken down by gender" or something.That said I think the design is really good. I'd add some title attributes to the scores in the listings. It would be nice when I hovered over the 5 stars I could get a tooltip saying "3.4 out of 5 stars (from men)" or similar. Also the colored box with the percentage or men or women readers could use the same tooltip. At first glance I thought that was a rating out of 100. I know most people don't bother with tooltips, but do it for me?I was on this page: http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-book-4... and when I clicked the "Select Bestseller List" it scrolled me down for some reason. I searched the source for an '<a name="menu">' but didn't find one.One the home page with the slider, the arrows are stretching to the edge of the screen, but the slider container isn't. Here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/8JVjNWhen I use the dropdown to change the bestseller type, it disappears on the listing page and moves to the right side, instead of the top left. I'd keep it in the top left and put the list title right beside it.For advertising I'd have to say that you should definitely start a blog. You've got some pretty cool data and you could run some interesting blog posts. Maybe do some queries and find the words that are likely to appear in men's favorite book titles, but not women's.You could also do some sort of contest. I'd make it a "Men vs Women" thing to try to get people into it, and spreading it. Maybe a giveaway of a couple of books, or maybe Amazon gift cards. Maybe pit a predominantly male book against a female book and based on which one gets more votes, give the gift card to a man or a woman. I know if you put Twilight against something you'd have a chance of going viral on Digg, Reddit or 4chan. Those people hate Twilight.Anyway, good luck with the site. It's well done. |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | bgriggs1: Why not move the "How Bookhu works" box to the top left? It doesn't seem like you need full width for the book scroller.For the book scroller, shouldn't you add some functionality there inherent to Bookhu, like the ratings? It just has descriptions right now, which makes it look simply like a catalog. |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | Vindexus: Here's a quick mockup of a possible redesign for the home page. I'd make the book thumbnail bigger than I put it at, but you get the idea: http://i.imgur.com/Xqy7r.png |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | andrew1: A few questions (I don't mean to sound overly brief or critical - it's a nice site - but I'm at work so can't spend ages writing):* Where do you get the data from about gender? Is it from users of your site? Is it from Amazon or something like that? I like to know where data's from so that I can make some judgement as to whether I want to disregard it. Data with no source definitely gets disregarded :)* What am I supposed to do on your site? Just look for books and then follow links to buy them? Or can I rate books?* Why are you basing the whole experience off of gender? I don't see why it's particularly useful to know what other men like, or what women like. I'd rather know what people like me like. i.e. like the whole Netflix recommendations thing. This just seems like a one-dimensional version of that? |
post your productivity tips/hacks in 160 characters or less | Gimpson: Do the hardest thing on your TODO list first thing in the morning. Later in the day you might not have enough energy to take it on. |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | ddemchuk: What's going on on the SEO side of things? You need to get your meta info cleaned up, running a site:bookhu.com shows that you aren't even including your meta descriptions, and you have a bunch of duplicate titles.Additionally, why are only 46 pages indexed? Are there more indexed and I'm just not seeing them?You stand to get a lot of really good long tail traffic because of the nature of your content, but if Google can't see it, no one else will. Get all that stuff cleaned up and that way you won't have to spend as much on PPC.Shoot me an email if you want to discuss some of these SEO things, I can probably help you out: darrindemchuk AT gmail DOT com |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | jfarmer: Doesn't add value to my life. Can't really think who this'd be for.Or is this just a tech demo? |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | billturner: I'll probably dig into it a little more later, but initially, on one of the book's detail pages, the text (and everything else) is pushed all the way to the sides of the browser window (in Chrome on OS X), so your "Feedback" side button obscures the content. See this screencap: http://i46.tinypic.com/oixe77.jpg |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | MicahWedemeyer: Are you married to the "bookhu" domain name? I think you might have troubles with the phonetic aspect of it. How does someone pronounce that? book-hoo? boo-koo?If you're totally set on that one, you might want to grab any phonetically similar ones like bookwho, bookhoo, etc.I'm not sure how important the phonetic aspect is, but if it's too difficult to guess the domain from the sound of the name, you'll lose any possible traffic from "Hey, you should check out bookhu, I think you'd like it..." |
Where can I find some great resources on investing in tech companies? | jakarta: It depends on what kind of tech company you are talking about.A Microsoft will have a fairly understandable business model with predictable cashflows. Conversely, most young, public tech companies are more of a gamble on management teams/product being able to execute their plan and grow. That to me is something you wont learn in books and pick up on with experience. And always remember that just because a product sounds good, or is good, it might not necessarily be a good investment. You are buying a stake in a business and if you pay too much for that stake, you decrease your margin of safety. |
Review my startup: Next Sprocket - Developer's Marketplace | pedalpete: Nice looking site, though I'm not sure I completely understand how it works.
Your video demo is more of a 'how it works' than a 'why would I use it' type of thing.
As a developer, I'm stuck wondering how do I get picked to complete the task? or is it more like CrowdSpring where the buyer picks a winner in the end?Also, the shadow behind your navigation items is pretty horrible. otherwise, a simple and good looking site. |
Review My Startup: Bookhu | Goladus: Where's the data coming from? This is interesting as a sort of bookstore web-storefront, but the numbers look funny to me. Catcher in the Rye readers are 75% male? Poor Little Bitch Girl (by Jackie Collins) readers are 100% male? |
Where can I find some great resources on investing in tech companies? | tjr: I graduated from high school in 1998. My grandfather, wanting me to learn something about business, gave me $500 to invest in the stock market. Java programming was hip at the time, and I decided to put the money into Sun Microsystems, resulting in ten shares.A few months later, my grandfather passed away, so suddenly the stock wasn't just stock, but was also his final gift to me. I watched the stock double in value, go through several stock splits, and eventually my $500 investment was worth around $6000. But, due to emotional attachment, I didn't want to sell.The dotCom boom turned into the dotCom bust, and my Sun stock gradually sank back down. At their request, in 2008 I mailed back my stock certificates as part of their "reverse stock split", and in 2010 (just a couple of weeks ago) I received in the mail a check for $190 from Oracle Corporation, as Sun is now no more.Had my grandfather been here, he surely would have advised me to sell the stock when it was valued in the thousands of dollars, and had I known that in the end the stock would be reduced to a check for $190 from a different company, I reckon I would have decided to sell it myself.So what did I learn? Don't get emotionally attached to a stock, or to a company, or to anything of that nature. Companies come and go. If you can make the world (or even your little piece of it) better by selling a stock, then consider selling it. The memories I have of my grandfather are far more precious to me than the stock, or the $190, or the potential for $6000, but I let emotions (and maybe a bit of stubbornness) persuade me otherwise for a decade.Deal with facts. Find out what the company is doing and planning to do. Find out how well the company is managed, and if you do buy stock, keep up on how well the company is managed. If it looks like some new CEO is going to drive the company into the ground, that might be a good time to get out, even if the company is still making some cool product that you like.For me, I tend to shy away from buying individual stocks now. There is great potential for great success, but there is also great potential for great failure. I like to think I have better odds at becoming wealthy by creatively working hard rather than by picking stocks, so most of my stock investments are spread across a variety of funds. Even those can turn sour quick, but in most cases, not as sour as quickly as an individual stock can. |
What books on running a software/web dev shop are worth reading? | rmk: Hmm... are you talking about the business side of things / the technical side?The question will be clearer if you are more specific on this point... |
Could you suggest how to market a proxy server? | gexla: I don't think it would be worth the effort to try monetizing. These things are a dime a dozen and they get blacklisted quickly. They can also be expensive to run because of the bandwidth usage. Also, some hosting providers don't allow proxies. My biggest problem with them is that I wouldn't want my server IP address showing up as accessing pedo sites or other types of illegal sites because of the users. Even worse is that some proxy server software caches sites by default (and can even get spidered.)Good luck, but I think your efforts would best be spent elsewhere. |
Alternative to Exchange for Email Server System? | there: it depends on your needs. do you need a mapi-compliant server that works with outlook clients and does calendaring, delegation, etc.? or do you just need an smtp server with imap/pop3 access that works with everything? |
YC alumni to email? | lsc: I have no idea if it will help you, but if you want to meet YC guys, show up at the hacker dojo in mountain view. see http://hackerdojo.pbworks.com/ - plenty of them around. |
YC alumni to email? | thomaspun: You checked their twitter accounts? |
Alternative to Exchange for Email Server System? | profquail: One hosting provider I've used for a few sites offers SmarterMail for their webmail. They've got an enterprise version as well, which is supposed to have all the features of Exchange (like Blackberry support)...and they offer it for free if you have <= 10 users on your domain. |
How to avoid sore wrists | Kliment: The way I solve this on my Eee is to actually move the hand when going for the arrow keys instead of twisting it. Bending the fingers is also much less evil than twisting them. Beyond that, regular joint massage helps, try and find someone around you who knows how to do it, and get them to teach you. The biggest amount of stress on my wrist comes from sports/martial arts rather than computer use, so I need to massage my wrists regularly anyway, but it definitely does help with the issues caused by computer use as well. |
How to avoid sore wrists | cperciva: Two things seemed to help me: 1. Wearing a wrist brace (a cheap one from the local supermarket) made me notice when I was bending my wrist too much, and allowed me to train myself to not do that (i.e., to move my entire arm when I needed to reach other keys); 2. using an external USB keyboard allowed me to keep my wrists straighter while typing.I haven't used the USB keyboard for many months, but I still bring out the wrist brace whenever my wrists start to twinge, and they rarely get beyond that point. |
How to avoid sore wrists | yungchin: In my own experience, wrist pains didn't actually come from wrist action, but from wrist action with my arm in an unnaturally high position: on a high desk, with your shoulder kind of "locked", you bend your wrist to reach for the arrows. At the right height, you'd instead move your elbow backwards and not bend your wrist.Also, people often point out that vim-controls are wrist-friendlier than emacs-controls. I use vim more often than emacs, but when in emacs, I user viper-mode to have vim key-bindings. |
How to avoid sore wrists | awwx: Are you using your laptop in your lap or on a desk?I've found for myself that it's essential not to have the keyboard too high... my elbows should be comfortably at 90 degrees and my wrists comfortably straight. This means for me with a keyboard using a keyboard tray to bring the keyboard below desk height, and when using a laptop having it in my lap. |
How to avoid sore wrists | blackdog: a typematrix keyboard and dvorak helped me. |
How to avoid sore wrists | nomoresecrets: The solution is to get a decent external keyboard. A laptop keyboard is never going to be good. Stop dancing around the issue - get a decent keyboard.I started to get wrist pain about 10 years ago, which worried me. This was right around the time MS first released their ergonomic keyboard. It was 100ukp, but I figured that was a small price to pay if it fixed my problem. It did - the pains went away in about 2 weeks. They've never come back (I've used various models of the MS ergo keyboard since then).Get a decent keyboard. |
How to avoid sore wrists | JayM: I'm working through some wrist/hand issues now, and I've found that the biggest key in prevention/healing is taking breaks.Find some free software that will time your computer usage (I use Time Out for Mac) and force you take 10-minute breaks every 30-45 minutes or so. I also take 15-second breaks every 10 minutes, which may sound pointless, but more than anything it's just a safety net to keep me from tensing up for too long a period of time.As for external keyboards, if you can afford it, I suggest investing in a Kinesis Advantage (~$300). |
How to avoid sore wrists | jimfl: Our office has a foosball table. Playing a game of foos every couple of hours is a great way to avoid wrist pain. Of course you end up with calloused hands instead.Other remedies: learn to juggle and take juggle breaks every so often. Get some silly putty and play knead it while you're thinking.The basic thing to do is get your hands away from the keyboard and use them in a graspy way. |
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