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Review my startup, reportminers.com | Angostura: Now, I'm sure you are a splendid, law-abiding 100% legit operation.However from a potential customer point of view and without additional information this could look like a brilliant scam designed to phish for various types of high-value, possibly company-confidential information.In your FAQ you have:Q: Are my files and data secure?A: Yes, your files are uploaded using a secure SSL encrypted transfer service.To be honest, if I were using such a service, transmission to your servers would be the least of my worries.This may be something that you could address, perhaps by beefing up the how does it work section. Do you have a little sweatshop somewhere with people retypring data? |
What's a good book to learn electronics? | trapper: Doing > Reading if you are that way inclined. I learned by buying an arduino starter pack + a couple of shields from ladyada, putting them together. |
Review my startup, reportminers.com | Dilpil: Pretty cool business idea, your solving a real problem in a way that generates actual revenue.Also, since your already writing software to process pdf data, you might want to leverage that to start a side business providing spreadsheet info on SEC filings. Alot of traders and businesses pay good money for that kind of data. |
Review my startup, reportminers.com | puns: I've worked for a market consulting firm and so have experience working with many reports and large spreadsheets and I think this is definitely something that can be valuable to many firms.My two biggest barriers for using the service would be your price and time. I understand this isn't a fully automated service, which is why it's expensive and time consuming -- but this is exactly the problem. If this was an automatic conversion app that took a few seconds to do the work and cost $20 a month it would look very appealing. As it is, $200 or $100 per report is too expensive in my opinion.But these are just my thoughts -- I'm not part of your target market anymore so cannot honestly comment whether I would use this or not. |
How to aggregate product info from other websites | DenisM: I use python to write scripts of this nature (one script so far:)).Python has SGML SAX parser and since HTML is SGML it can be used. Better than regexps any day.Python's http client library also supports cookies so that you can pretend to have a "session" with your target website.EDIT: the libraries are urllib2, sgmllib, cookielib |
What's a good book to learn electronics? | aaronsw: For the hardcore Feynman fans, there's the Feynman Lectures on Computation: http://books.theinfo.org/go/0738202967 |
What's a good book to learn electronics? | pkeane: The Boys' First Book of Radio and Electronics. Author: Morgan, Alfred Powell, Publisher: New York, Scribner Date: [1954]
The Boys' Second Book of Radio and Electronics. Author: Morgan, Alfred Powell, Publisher: New York, Scribner Date: [1957]
The Boy's Third Book of Radio and Electronics. Author: Morgan, Alfred Powell, Publisher: New York, Scribner Date: [1962]
The Boys' Fourth Book of Radio and Electronics; an introduction to solid state physics, semiconductors, and transistors, Author: Morgan, Alfred Powell. Publisher: New York, Scribner Date: [1969]For me, nothing else comes close :-) |
How to aggregate product info from other websites | tocomment: What are you trying to do exactly? It depends a lot on the type of data you're trying to gather. |
Downvoting? | ram1024: think you can only downvote comments |
Downvoting? | kwamenum86: I second that-I am pretty sure it is only for comments. It says that somewhere on the site as well. |
How to aggregate product info from other websites | astrec: Python & Beautiful Soup (http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/) are your friends here. |
What's a good book to learn electronics? | jsyedidia: I would recommend considering being more ambitious and learning how to design and prototype digital circuits on an FPGA development board. Pong Chu's book "FPGA Prototyping by VHDL Examples--Xilinx Spartan-3 Version" is really excellent, with lots of well-explained projects.You can get really nice Xilinx starter kits compatible with this book for cheap. To be absolutely compatible, you can get the old Spartan-3 starter board from digilentinc.com for $99, but be aware that you need a PC with a parallel port. If you prefer like me to connect your FPGA board to your computer using USB, I recommend either the Nexys-2 board for $99 or the Spartan-3E starter board for $149, available at digilentinc.com, or the more up-to-date Spartan-3A starter board for $189, which you can buy at nuhorizons.com or avnet.com. These boards are mostly compatible with the book, and you can get lots of peripheral modules like seven-segment LED's for them from Digilent.The software necessary to program these starter boards is available for free from Xilinx. The only slight problem is that you need to use Windows or Linux--no Mac OS X. |
How to aggregate product info from other websites | thwarted: See if the sites in question are part of an affiliate network, like Commission Junction or Link Share. They often provide plain-text feeds to affiliates through these programs, and many of their terms of service enable you to set up these kinds of services (although some have restrictions on mixing their data with data from their competitors). However, I've found that even this data isn't all that great, cleanliness wise (sometimes you can't trust the name of the product, the price, the link, or the SKU to even match the website) and isn't updated very often (like product availability). But it's a hell of a lot easier than writing a custom parser for each site's HTML (although when I was working on project like this, I had to write a custom parser for each feed in order to put them in a more consistent format). |
what's a good resource or book to learn domain management | callmeed: Out of curiosity, who is your registrar?I would recommend checking out Slicehost's articles and ebook on DNS topics:
http://articles.slicehost.com/tags/dnsThey have helped me quite a bit. From my experience, I would say the following are the most useful concepts to grasp:* Knowing the difference between an A record and a CNAME record* Understanding MX records (especially with the prevalence of Google Apps for email)* Understanding SPF records (helps if you have a web app or form that sends mail) |
How to aggregate product info from other websites | aneesh: Perl's WWW::Mechanize module is a good choice for scraping & automating website interactions. |
How to aggregate product info from other websites | shabda: You might also want to
1. Worry about the Copyright laws.
2. Make sure you do not hit the site so often that you show up in their logs as bandwdth hog and are blocked. |
what's a good resource or book to learn domain management | Kaizyn: O'Reilly's DNS and Bind is the book for you. O'Reilly has several books on Apache as well, for information about web server security. |
How to aggregate product info from other websites | petercooper: For Ruby, consider Scrubyt: http://scrubyt.org/If you're wondering why, well, consider this script that "learns" how to scrape Google results (from one supplied example of output data): google_data = Scrubyt::Extractor.define do
fetch 'http://www.google.com/ncr'
fill_textfield 'q', 'ruby'
submit
link "Ruby Programming Language" do
url "href", :type => :attribute
end
next_page "Next", :limit => 2
end
puts google_data.to_xml
Reads almost like English in the scraping part! |
What should happen to your gmail account if you die? | Angostura: I think you should make explicit provision in your will, including instructions on how to access passwords.Thinking about it, I would be quite tempted to leave my wife a 'to be opened in the event of my death' envelope containing (among other things) the master password to my Mac's Keychain. |
What should happen to your gmail account if you die? | jwilliams: I can't find the exact case... But I recall reading that a family was able to get the courts to compel Yahoo to hand over their son's account (he'd died in Iraq) -- So there seems to be some precedent. I'm sure there is a lot of other case law around on this already.Edit: Found the reference: http://news.cnet.com/Yahoo-releases-e-mail-of-deceased-Marin... ... According to that article policies vary. e.g. AOL release accounts to next of kin. |
Are email providers getting more strict with mail from your web app? | mmelin: One thing I have noticed is that more and more providers are requring valid reverse lookups for your mailserver's IP. About a month ago Sweden's largest ISP activated that feature late on a Friday night without any prior notice, causing mass panic and consulting opportunities. |
What should happen to your gmail account if you die? | babyboy808: This came up before regarding Adsense and death. In the event of a death, the next of kin has to send off a copy of the Death Certificate of the account holder to Google, and that account can be transferred. I assume this can be done for most online services. |
How to keep your milestones and co-founders in check. Incentive/Punishment? | owkaye: Why don't you just accept the fact that he's no good at estimating how long it will take him to accomplish something, then just add a number of extra days to his estimates so you're not disappointed any more? |
Why no 2-factor authentication for web apps? | cperciva: Some banks -- mostly in Europe -- have started using two-factor authentication. But so far the biggest problem with "something you know and something you have" is an unavoidable one: "something you have" costs money. |
What should happen to your gmail account if you die? | peakok: What is the adsense of life ? |
What should happen to your gmail account if you die? | hendler: Interesting question.There is opportunity for some one who can do data banking/insurance correctly for the masses. Since a good startup is solving a pain, and death is one of the biggest, this is a relatedly great problem to solve.The technology obviously exists, but it's another example where legal systems and business models need to catch up. |
review my site, afterthepinkslip.com | pclark: this is a fantastic name. |
What should happen to your gmail account if you die? | josefresco: I sometimes think about my family going through my personal belongings after I die, and learning a lot about who I am that they probably never knew.I plan on leaving all my information to them (good and bad) so they can not only 'clean up' after I'm gone but also learn more about who I truly was./Maybe I should do that 'before' I pass. |
What should happen to your gmail account if you die? | trickjarrett: This is something I've thought about a lot.My mom had a disease that involved a great deal of treatment and it wasn't a very common disease so she had found a wonderful support group online. I helped her start a blog (http://www.jarrett.ws/dale) and after she lost the battle with the disease I was the one who updated her blog to share the bad news. That is still the latest post on the blog, having left it untouched since then. I make sure to renew the domain and take care of it for her.The fact is that death and the Internet is still quite nebulous. Companies don't really address it, the law hasn't covered it, etc.We knew mom's passwords so I didn't have wrangle control or anything, I went into her email accounts and collected any emails or mementos I wanted to keep. I unsubscribed her from mailing lists and discussion groups, generally got her digital life in order.The idea of handling online property is something I'd even considered bringing to YC as a business concept, but I couldn't find a solid base for it. Even aside from emails, blogs, and such, I had considered the idea of virtual wealth in MMOs and such.I actually expect Facebook to be the first social network to really begin addressing this issue, as they seem more intent on generating a map of relationships rather than building new ones.As to answer your question, then it needs to be in your will, as a first step. You can avoid the legal wrangling by putting the info in your will as to your wishes and login/pass.Once companies begin to accept that they're holding information and property of individuals, then they'll reach an understanding and process for handling deaths and the transfer of this information.I hope. |
What should happen to your gmail account if you die? | nebula: I thought about death and information in the cloud a few times earlier.
There were two problems with handing over the information to the next of kin:
1. How will the family members prove that the claimed account indeed belongs to the deceased?
2. Was the account holder OK with passing the information to his kin? When it comes to physical diaries and mail, we know that someone will have access to it after we die. I don't think same applies to digital content.
Does the ruling in Yahoo's case mean that the laws in the US dictate handing over information to family members?
If so, why has Yahoo not amended its privacy policy to reflect this.
I think it's pretty easy for all these service providers to add an option where the account holder can nominate a heir for his information. Options should be:
1. Details of the chosen heir
2. Default legal heir
3. No one should get access to my information. |
What's a good book to learn electronics? | comatose_kid: One other piece of advice: Get access to an oscilloscope - they can be expensive, so you may want to enroll in a course at a community college. |
What should happen to your gmail account if you die? | scottw: If you do decide to give it to someone, you can use a dead man switch (http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ is a good example, or write your own) that would email all your account information to someone you trust completely. You could give them instructions (destroy the account, give certain information to next of kin, etc.). |
Why no 2-factor authentication for web apps? | wmf: Yep, with OpenID you can choose to use stronger auth. Somebody from Vidoop said they want to give away tokens; I wonder how that's going. |
Offline log analysis/analytics | aristus: visitors is well thought of. I'd give you a link to the hom epage, but it's fing impossible to find. http://packages.ubuntu.com/hu/hardy/visitorsIf you want to sort-of roll your own, I maintain a command-line program called logrep that lets you "query" your webserver logs:http://code.google.com/p/wtop |
What are you practicing? | alaskamiller: Never stop closing. |
What are you practicing? | noodle: well, i'll be the contrary one and just throw out there that i've been doing some form of martial arts for about 15 years now and don't consider myself particularly exceptional.i'm quite good, but having seen exceptional, i know i'm not there. |
What are you practicing? | redorb: I make it a point to pick up an incoming sales call and make sure I know the product as well as I think I do, of course I'm usually developing ways and methods of selling that product. |
How Much Can I Scrape? | redorb: 1 request per a minute I don't think yahoo would even notice. |
What are you practicing? | jaytee_clone: 1. Go out and talk to a stranger. Write down your interaction later. Take notes of your body language. You goal is to have them ask for your number or email before the conversation ends.2. Learn something you have never learned before and device a way to practice it every day. (You don't have to do it of course.) This is practicing your meta-practice skills.3. Teach/explain something you know very well to someone who doesn't know anything about it.4. Pick something randomly (daily utilities or routines), and make it better, or at least think about how you would do it. (You want to focus on a specific quality for at least a week. e.g. this week is user-friendly week, next week is durability.)5. Find something (or concept, habit) you don't need and get rid of it.6. Grab a friend/stranger, ask about something he want to change about his life. Analyze it and find the root cause. (of course, solution will be even better)7. Grab a friend, tell them about something your want to change. Analyze it and find the root cause.8. Meditation (the sitting kind, but also try to be aware of your thoughts at all time of the day.)9. Make 10 people laugh.10. Pick a newspaper/blog article and rewrite it.11. Smile at everyone you see, and find something about them that you like.I can keep going with the list.The principle here is what you already know, which is putting in 10,000 hours.However, I think it's far important to focus on the specific and push yourself just a little bit every day.You don't get better at playing chess by playing in the same rank for 10,000 hours. You get better by playing with someone who's better than you until you can beat him consistently, then play with someone who's even better until you can beat him.This works because your brain is design to adapt to harder and harder tasks. Hence the old saying, "if it's not hard, you're not learning." |
How Much Can I Scrape? | qhoxie: I got blocked during RailsRumble for pulling too much from Y! Finance. We did not have the time to throttle it.You should at least try to email them and see if your restrictions can be loosened. |
How Much Can I Scrape? | xefyr: If you're really concerned about it you can go through an anonymizing proxy service. But, as has been said, if you have the time, spacing out your requests should work fine too. |
How Much Can I Scrape? | enomar: Hate to be obvious, but reading their API terms of service might be a good place to start... |
How Much Can I Scrape? | spc476: How far back? EOData (http://eoddata.com/) has 15 years of pricing information for $20 for a number of exchanges, which would certainly save time and isn't horribly expensive for what you get. |
How Much Can I Scrape? | kaens: If I had a site that was scrape-worthy, I wouldn't care about it if the people were respectful about it (wait a second or to in between requests, don't hammer my server).From the business side, I could see them getting a bit grumpy about it, but if it's publicly available information, and there's nothing in their TOS about it, I don't see how they could do anything about it - again, unless you're being a dick with your scraper.Does anyone know off the top of their head if there are any relevant court cases dealing with scraping? |
How Much Can I Scrape? | hotpockets: I don't think you have anything to worry about. I've scraped Yahoo finance before at about a 1 second request rate, using perl's YahooFinance module. |
How Much Can I Scrape? | oakmac: I did this exact same thing a few years ago only stripping the data from nasdaq.com using Perl. I used to hit their site once every 2 seconds times roughly 2500 stocks every day for about 6 months. I would only grab as much data as I needed. They never contacted me or blocked my IP address. I also had a friend who was doing the same thing for a longer period of time.From experience, I would not recommend getting your data from Yahoo. I looked at them first, but their data is just not as good as the source.If you would like more information or my notes on how I reverse-engineered the nasdaq.com URL scheme please send me an email. |
Offline log analysis/analytics | known: You may try http://www.webalizer.org/ |
How Much Can I Scrape? | lacker: If you contact someone at Yahoo, the response will be, do not scrape us in any way.The problem with financial data is that Yahoo (like most other sites where you might find this data) doesn't generate this data themselves. They license it from other companies, and the licensing agreement typically prohibits or greatly restricts Yahoo's ability to provide the data to third parties.That said, if Yahoo is not aware that you are scraping them, they cannot stop you. They certainly do have anti-scraper algorithms (you will start getting http 999 errors) but they will not kick in until you cross some invisible threshold. You can probably use Tor with no problem.Although, if you get large enough that someone notices, you will probably get some sort of cease & desist letter. Depending on your goals that might not be a problem for you. |
What are you practicing? | unalone: "Startup founder skills?" Are there such things? If you look at it one way, pretty much any skill can be a "founder skill" if you use it right.I've been working out, if that counts as practicing. I like being able to look at my body and feel a measure of pride in it. And absolutely, if you look good, it influences how other people think of you. I've also been trying to write music: mostly classical-inspired pop. I'm not very good at it, but it gives me something to fiddle with.If I could say some things that aren't current, though, my two big ones are acting and Dungeon Mastering.Acting, because it teaches you to become comfortable with your body, your voice, and with other people: you learn much more about your relationship with other things. It teaches you both about how you interact with yourself and about how you can change yourself to get a reaction in other people. Also, because the cliché is true: there's no people like show people. They've vivid and fast and alive, and there's no sort of person I'd rather be with on a boring do-nothing day.Dungeon Mastering, because it forces you to think. You're dealing with an extremely complex system, you're dealing with four-ish other people who each often know all the rules pertaining to them, and you're dealing with a world that you have to create yourself. Being a good DM means you learn how to handle complex systems and how to innovate within said systems. You need to balance four people at once and keep them all constantly entertained. It requires years of reading and - most likely - years of practice afterwards, but it's profoundly satisfying once you can do it. And D&D players are unique in that any group of players is playing because they love the game. You don't do it as a social move, or as a career move. You very rarely do it to pick up girls. It means you're with people who genuinely love what they do.(I'd also recommend working out, if you haven't tried it before, because it's an excellent way of calming your mind, and because you really have to focus to get it to work.) |
How Much Can I Scrape? | yawl: Do not crawl too fast with yahoo, otherwise you will get 999 error -- which mean you will be banned temporarily.Search 'yahoo 999' for details. |
How Much Can I Scrape? | mikkom: I've downloaded all the data they have for s&p 500 many times (I did it with processes, spawned one donwload about every 0.1 seconds). They block your connections if you download too fast.If they give out csv exports as they do there is no reason why someone wouldn't download them and use them for personal use.I guess you already know about the CSV download but if you don't, here is a link about it: http://www.diytraders.com/content/view/25/43/I would however never ever use them in commercial product if that's what you are asking. |
How Much Can I Scrape? | m0nty: Disguise your scrapes as a browser, so include an Explorer or Firefox browser ID string. Randomize the times between scrapes, so it looks more like a human being doing it. Make sure the scraper takes "coffee breaks" every now and then. Run the service from several servers at once, if you have them. I would guess your program is fairly low overhead (mine always have been) so contact friends and ask to use their server or home PCs. Extra credit for designing a cloud-like infrastructure where PCs could come-and-go without missing any data :) |
News website tips | SingAlong: 1.) CMS - Joomla is OKAround a week ago Bengtan posted his startup on the following thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352987http://www.prosepoint.orgHe describes it as "Online Newspaper Software". It's opensource too. This might help you. Also there are a lot of new site plugins for Joomla.But If you want a better CMS (in general), I would suggest Drupal. Joomla (and Mambo) lacks documentation. There's even sufficient tutorials to create some cool plugins.Drupal on the other hand has a lot of plugins and clear docs. If you wanna create plugins for Drupal you won't need any tutorials. Just start off with the docs. It teaches you from the scratch and is good for beginners.Apart, the best would be to try everything possible and then choose according to your and your users needs.2.) where do you get to recruit good people?If you wanna recruit people, but don't have a solid revenue base, try and get some freelancers working for you on a per post basis. Amazon Mechanical Turk has proved useful to a lot of guys who need small stuff done. Just toss a few cents and your job is done.3.) If you have run a news site, any other tips you may haveCREATIVITY!!! CREATIVITY!!! CREATIVITY!!!There are some data that you cannot have access to. A lot of large corporations have access to this data and offer APIs. So consider using external data too(mashup).A lot of guys run new sites. Creative ideas are what would work if you wanna penetrate into a crowded market.(shameless self promotion:) I developed a news site for a contest by Daylife. A part of the site was news search but there is another page where users can read news by their Delicious tags. Its at http://jaxly.com/deliciouslyYou'll find more of the content entries at http://challenge08.daylife.comAlso checkout the news mashups at ProgrammableWeb.And there's another news site run by another HN member, http://jaanix.com which allows you to read news by assigning strength to keywords.As I said before, it's just about how you can enthrall your users with your creativity (and the usefulness of the site). |
How Much Can I Scrape? | dpmorel: We scraped Yahoo Mail for about 6 months quite heavily. We had to keep it at a >5 minute timer otherwise we got captchas during the auth process, or we got locked out for 24 hours with error 999.We now have a formal agreement with Yahoo, but during the process Yahoo indicated they had an informal open policy on scraping. Note that they have an initiative to open up all services within the next year or so (google Yahoo Open Strategy to read more about timelines). |
How Much Can I Scrape? | bgtony: biddersedge v. ebay is particularly interesting, as is verticalone.com, now yodlee.com.Trespass to chattels is an old roman law which dictates what should be done if you tresspass on my land and hurt one of my cattle, and it is used as the core of most cases involving scraping in unauthenticated environments (like Y! finance). They can come get you, not for taking data, but for costing them money to support the response volumes you demand. The magic number is $5,000, at which time it becomes a felony (or at least that was the threatening rhetoric, which is a different story altogether). You scrape, hurt their cow for 5k, and it is not a question of restitution, but of punishment. And in each case the scraper is typically viewed as a "thief"... not a label that inspires lighter punishments. see:www.biddersedge.com, yeah, exactly. nuked from orbit... and there, in a nutshell, is the risk inherent in scraping. All a scrapee has to do is wait for you to pass $5k... while they consider the pr ramifications of the whole thing... how much bandwidth and resources need to be used before the public will sympathize? 10k? 20k? 30k before they are lauded as a hero for removing the thieving vermin?Insidious really, scraping and scrapers are being "set up the bomb" here... to not be viewed as enabling the liberation of data, but rather as thieves of the resources necessary to deliver that data to the general public. Using trespass to chattels as a precedent is therefore a brilliant stroke... apparently, they can be taught. Or, to put it another way, scrapers aren't napster users in dorm rooms, they are felony thieves of public resources.Yeah, we all know that cease and desist and all other legal remedies are jurisdictionally challenged - the net doesn’t stop at international borders. And, historically, it seems that other countries turn a deaf ear to most cyber crime excepting, of course, for credit card fraud.Also, limit scraping via tor. Tor has a legitimate use which scraper volumes would impact. Of course, there are tor nets set up for "illegitimate" use... and they let anybody in, including folks like me, who then map all tor exit nodes used by scrapers and interdict em all...And, don't forget steganography... you take data (even through tor or rotating proxies) and redisplay it, google can find it and I can ask google to tell me where it is. Scrapers, even as very clever data middlemen, will get the squeeze from both sides as scrapees discover where their data is being displayed and utilize legal means to go after those storefronts, who will of course first provide name, rank and serial number of the scraper that provided them the data...And what about copyrights? Lots of legal precedent here, be careful with image redisplay. Mine field here... |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | jfno67: I think people will stop storing their data locally. This will not mean bigger transfer than video, but the number of transfer could be huge. It is doable with the bandwidth we already have, but it will become ubiquitous only when locally or remotely stored will almost feel the same. |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | ObieJazz: I don't know if this is in the cards or not, but what I hope will be the next big thing in bandwidth is cheap mobile data plans, on par with cable/dsl plans, which (together with cheaper, more powerful phones) would help push mobile computing towards ubiquity. |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | alaskamiller: Looks like it might not be wimax. |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | azharcs: I would say Games would be huge, where we play without actually installing 8 or 10GB worth of data. Maybe just playing level by level, where it downloads files needed for that level.Also HD video would lot more bandwidth, so i am thinking that will be huge too. |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | Pelagic: Symmetric internet links will be a big deal, if they ever happen - right now most places seem to be 8Mbit downstream and 1Mbit upstream - once symmetric high-bandwidth applications become popular p2p technologies can really start taking off. |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | unalone: I'll probably edit this post as I start using this more.The Facebook application looks VERY gaudy. It stands out. For me, that's a turn-off. The more native it looks, the more likely I am to keep using it. |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | inerte: Stuff for 3D printers?Live streaming? Yeah, we have it now, but let's say a night club give its visitors glasses which broadcast what they're seeing through a website so people can check if it's worth going... live streaming on stereoids. Or on sports matches... televisions would love to have more cameras on stadiums. Just imagine if you can figure out that an spectator, from glasses #44403, looked from seat 34 to ZXY axis, which is where something that you wanted to see happened, but your camera couldn't catch.Mesh networks? 10 years ago we didn't have mobile internet, so it came and was expensive, now it's everywhere, and getting cheaper. But I think it's inevitable, someday someone will release a cellphone that can mesh and has mile range, and connect to free wifi networks on Starbucks, and managing all these small hubs of bandwidth inteligentlly will be hard.Video will keep getting bigger, because tvs are getting bigger, encoders are getting better, and all that stuff. Sure more bandwidth helps, it always does, but imagine a movie studio instead of releasing to cinemas, they will, at the same day, release for download "directly" to your TV. So this video will have to be mirrored around the world, on cities, etc... because bandwidth pipe will keep getting larger, but there's always room to save costs.If you want to go even further into the future, think space tourism, news from the/for a ISS-like hotel... er.. better get back to work. |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | alaskamiller: So in order for them to give you cash, you must help them churn out lots of pageviews? |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | stanley: I think you need to make a stronger pitch as to why this would be useful to people. Turn your index page into a sales page, it's worth putting more time and effort into it. |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | vaksel: why are "friends, family and associates" represented with calendars? |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | aston: Would you mind going into more details about this quid pro quo going on between you guys and Facebook? |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | ram1024: the next stage is mobile computing. your smartphone will become a seamless integration with your home desktop and cloud SaaS products (your desktop will be part of the cloud as well, hell maybe even your mobile will have shared storage and be serving data). Live video telecommunications will become the norm. everyone will be a videoblogger. everyone will live with the internet at their fingertips 24/7.it's scary isn't it? |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | swivelmaster: I think it looks okay, but I do agree that it should be reformatted to look more like a facebook app.There were a lot of steps to sign up! Don't use ugly form buttons and do condense a lot of the instructions and steps together. Make those buttons big and bold and label the buttons more descriptively.For instance, a big blue Facebook-style button that said "Allow LuckyCal to Access My Account Information When I am Not Logged In" (long button label, I know) would have been fine IMO and I would have clicked it without needing a paragraph of explanation.Also, the page with the add to profile prompt was completely unnecessary to me. Your metrics will probably disagree with me, but I'd prefer you just leave that button at the top of the main calendar page. The screenshot of somebody else's calendar just confused me.Also, why are you intercepting my scrollwheel to scroll left and right in the calendar? That's just weird.All that said, you guys are working towards making a product I wish I had. I just don't like the execution, mostly in terms of the interface. Stop thinking like engineers when you're designing your UI! :)I would love for the calendar itself to be bigger and pre-filled with events you're suggesting for me. Then I'd click yes/no/maybe to each one... once the event is closer (maybe a week), you could prompt me again to see if I'm interested in solidifying the plans. That would be awesome.Where are you located? |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | peter123: if you're a fbfund recipient, don't you get advice and promotional help from fb? Is that right or am I mistaken? |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | jfarmer: Hey sanj,I have a lot of experience in this area. Drop me a line at jesse@20bits.com if you want to talk. |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | DenisM: telecommute |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | iigs: Other than the obvious P2P file sharing that grows to fill the available space, better responsiveness (less buffering time) for high bit rate streaming video will probably dominate bandwidth needs for the near future.Remote computing applications will probably also get richer as latency drops and throughput increases.If we ever get in front of the common user's bandwidth needs, I'd say you might see applications that download speculatively, such as pre-buffering the videos advertised in the youtube player at the end of the selected video, or pre-downloading (pieces of) movies or TV shows that you watch online.Beyond that there's room to innovate in being clever (video codecs that don't under-run but degrade the bitrate of the video trying to keep things flowing), and there's probably a lot of untapped innovation there that could take advantage of more bits. |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | hooande: It took a lot of work to try that out. You should try to focus on value proposition to the user. SHOW them what luckycal can do, don't try to just tell them with text on the home page. You can probably make some assumptions and suggest calendar events to the users. Or just show local events. I'd like to understand what luckycal is and exactly why I should use it within ~5 seconds of seeing it.My advice about the product itself: I think you should focus on making luckycal very useful for an individual with no friends using it. The idea of finding local events while filtering out noise is something that a lot of people have tried but no one has quite gotten right. If you can make that work for one person alone, then people will naturally tell their friends without being constantly prompted to "invite".I think this is a good idea, I hope you keep working at it. |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | lowkey: First impressions:New User Experience: Requires me to give up a lot of personal info without providing me with a compelling reason to do so. Maybe this is typical of Facebook apps but it is still likely to be a significant resistance point for signing up. I wouldn't have if I hadn't heard about it on HNMarketing Strategy: I think for this to be successful you will need to focus on groups with a vested interest in promoting themselves and their events. Think MySpace and bands or local community event organizers. You are likely to get easier traction if you focus on specific geographies - say New York, San Francisco, or your home town. These people need to get their message out so could become active super-users and draw in users of their own. Think about a local band with an existing fan base and how you could target your app to help them reach and connect with their audience.The look and feel should be more like a Facebook app. As it stands it looks out of place. Still, nice start. Keep it up and good luck escaping cube-land. |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | arjungmenon: Higher resolution streaming movies will be the most important thing in the next few years to come.Projecting further into the future, 3D image/hologram transmission could be a probable candidate. |
What's next big thing in bandwidth? | vzn: All your home usual staff on the mobile gadged.
I think 700Mhz Wimax connection across USA from "google" might be huge. |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | MikeW: I've been using Luckycal for about a month - it frequently reminds me it can't find any events for me.I remember seeing very complicated sentences to describe simple things within the app.It seems like for it to become useful, all my friends need to install the app. Is that correct? I'm still waiting for luckycal to recommend something to me. |
How Much Can I Scrape? | toddcw: This might help: http://blog.screen-scraper.com/2007/03/01/how-to-surf-and-sc... |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | njoubert: One piece of advice - your tagline "LuckyCal predicts where you'll be to help you decide what to do." seems slightly creepy - you guys are going to tell me where i'll be and what i'll do there? Once I read your description it became much clearer, but I would change the tagline. Just my 2 cents |
Impact on sales of using external site for payment processing? | JeffL: I offer both options for setting up monthly subscriptions and people go almost exactly 50/50 between the two. Some people prefer Pay Pal because they feel more secure while others refuse to use Pay Pal for whatever reasons.Setting up a payment system isn't really that difficult. It seems like if you get even 1% more sign ups because you offer both choices, you should hopefully make out on the extra implementation cost. |
Impact on sales of using external site for payment processing? | nreece: We use PayPal for our service (Feedity.com). It works well. But once in a while we have users who simply do not want to pay through PayPal (due to security/privacy issues, or they don't have a credit card). In such cases we generally recommend them to pay with an eCheck. We have perfectly good potential customers waiting for us to provide an alternate payment method. It doesn't happen too often, but at the end of the day, every new customer counts.Another thing we have learned is that you should always offer monthly as well as annual subscriptions. We'll be introducing monthly subscriptions (through PayPal) pretty soon. |
Impact on sales of using external site for payment processing? | subpixel: PayPal is a good alternative checkout method, but less desirable as a billing method. Recurring billing via PayPal, for example, requires your customer to enter a hairy "User Agreement" giving you permission to charge them up to several hundred dollars/mo. Try using PayPal at GoDaddy to see what I'm referring to. |
Impact on sales of using external site for payment processing? | vaksel: I think for your audience using paypal will kinda label you amateurish. |
Impact on sales of using external site for payment processing? | daveambrose: Have you looked into PayPal Pro? https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-pro-overvie... and https://cms.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-cont...There are a few options you can take, ranging from creating a Google Checkout account, PayPal account or even going as far as a merchant account (where your site is processing a very large amount of transactions a month). Some say PayPal is more buyer-centric and others say Google Checkout is more seller-centric.One thing to consider with PayPal (either Pro or Express Checkout), you need to build into your design and flow the way the customer will purchase the product, enter the product into the shopping cart and then do one of two things:1. If using PayPal pro, continue the transaction all on your site and then return to the product summary/confirmation page.
2. If using Express Checkout, leave your site to PayPal and then return to the product summary/confirmation page.Here's some more information on PayPal Pro, API and integration design: https://www.paypalobjects.com/WEBSCR-550-20081103-1/en_US/pd...What are you building? |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | rw: Could you explain how you spent your $25,000? |
Impact on sales of using external site for payment processing? | babul: Just a word of caution on PayPal, being as unbiased as I can.I have had first-hand experience, on behalf of numerous clients, with problems that can arise with PayPal and some of the crazy things PayPal do out of the blue and without reason (see sites like http://www.paypalsucks.com etc. for examples) and always suggest using other methods for anything but low cost products where a chargeback/dispute won't bother you (if you get 2-3 disputes in quick succession, PayPal typically freeze your account and all monies in it for 180 days and even if you jump through all the hoops they set thereafter, will in most cases not unfreeze your account for as long as they possibly can - which is very bad for cash-flow if you are a business).Although low-cost products and small payments for web-services (which being intangible goods are not covered by PayPal seller protections anyway) may be less likely to incur problems with PayPal (especially chargebacks), mainly due to the buyers/users being less likely to complain over what are trivial or easy to resolve matters (e.g. shipping delays or miscommunication) and being more honest in general when compared to those in higher value transactions, I would always suggest using a merchant account or service such as protx for online payment processing and repeated billing.These generally provide a better quality of service anyway, and when things go wrong respond faster, follow legal guidelines and regulations, and are more likely to fight for you than PayPal which will just cave-in and return any monies to the buyer/user on even the smallest issues and with almost no recourse to you or consideration of whether it is the right thing to do in the situation. To PayPal, it is about numbers and money and basically it is cheaper and in their interest for them to hand back money (your money, remember, not theirs) to buyers almost without any seller considerations than fight issues, whereas a merchant account has more legislation and obligation to protect you and will infact dispute chargebacks and other complaints if you so request. Also, unlike PayPal, they will not freeze your account or make other major demands that could affect your business, when customer related issues do occur (and eventually one will occur!). |
Downmodding protocol | qhoxie: My policy is different than yours. I upmod for intelligent discussion and downmod for your same reasons. I do not always agree with what I upmod.I think that publishing a protocol is an interesting idea, but the entropy afforded by the current system seems to work well for HN. If anything, I could potentially see mentioning that people should probably not downmod just based on personal opinions. |
Review my startup -- LuckyCal | ahupp: On the first page after adding the app I was confused because there was a page that looks partly cut off, and I couldn't click on it. I finally realized that this was a screenshot and not an actual page I could interact with. It would be far better to just start me on the next page rather than showing the image. Better yet, step me through adding interests right away. |
Review our startup - BeatMyPrice.com | apsurd: I really like the idea. The interface is very nice and friendly. Your presentation is excellent, which motivated me to test out the functionality ...It doesn't work?
If I understand the idea correctly, I am supposed to use the site to find a product I want at a lower price. But when I click on the tags, I am led to a mix of various loosely related products. I clicked "wii" expecting to find the best price on a wii, but instead i get a billion wii video games and wii accessories.I understand the drawbacks to folksonomy, but ...it undermines your entire concept.I feel like I'm just browsing a bunch of items, which is pretty boring.There also needs to be refinement on the product lists. It might help the vagueness problem if you had links that filtered by brand or model. Also there are lot of products that are the same price, so you might need to batch them together.Overall a useful concept, but tons of work left to actually execute. |
Techmeme clone | noodle: you would not be the first.drupal has a memetracker plugin. http://drupal.org/project/memetrackerits a little wonky |
Review our startup - BeatMyPrice.com | vaksel: seems to me that you are just grabbing the amazon and ebay feeds. The whole "submit a link with price" thing doesn't seem to work...and if it did that'd be ripe for abuse. PS3 for $1.99 linking to lemonparty |
Impact on sales of using external site for payment processing? | m_eiman: You should look at PCI DSS, the new requirements for processing credit card purchases. I haven't looked into it very deeply, but according to the reporting about it you'll no longer be able to use a simple form on your own site to handle credit cards - you'll have to go through an external payment processing site (or implement it yourself and have it audited - expensive!).Compliance with these new rules will be mandatory beginning next year.More info at https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/ |
Review our startup - BeatMyPrice.com | mstefff: Awesome design - no doubt about it.But seems broken and useless in terms of functionality..Searched for the Dell Inspiron Mini...
The first result is for a wireless PCI card.
And the next 15 results are links to Dell's site with prices at or above what I asked.Searched for Logitech Z-5500 Speakers...
Results were relevant and did find cheaper products..But some questions and problems:1) How is this different than the tons and tons of other (much more comprehensive) comparison shopping and deal aggregation web sites?2) Why is the page needed for the searching? The same results came without entering a web address.3) Having to first go out and find information to bring back to your site is extremely annoying and seems pointless. You could just go to another shopping site once and do it all there. This seems like it would only (maybe) work as a browser plugin.4) What API(s) are you using?I think that is it.. |
Downmodding protocol | alecco: It is quite a dilemma. It depends on the number already voted. For example, if a post I don't agree with is quite rational and has low votes I up-vote. But if it already has some votes I leave it there... Unless it has a double digit number and the other side is much lower, then sometimes I down-vote (and feel almost guilty about it.)Many times I agree with someone but their post is incomplete or has a part that isn't good, then the replies tend to say the whole side is invalid because of that... It's very hard for me to pick what to vote specially when groupthink or fanboys back either side (yes, including my side.)There isn't a perfect way without granularity on votes. |
Review our startup - BeatMyPrice.com | aneesh: Interface is very nice. Well done.The main challenge when doing this is the quality of the data, and that's where you still seem to have some issues. It's a hard problem though. |
Review our startup - BeatMyPrice.com | alaskamiller: I like bugmenot and retailmenot. Not so much CushyCMS though. |
Hey hackers how many hours do you sleep? | astrec: About 6 - bed around 2am-ish, up at 8am-ish. I often have a 30 minute nap around 9pm.Any more and I have a sore back and a foggy head, any less and I have a foggy head! |
Any good publications that deal with the Internet? | tuukkah: ''First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet.'' http://www.firstmonday.org/People such as ESR and Eben Moglen publish there. |
Hey hackers how many hours do you sleep? | brk: As many as I need to... |
Hey hackers how many hours do you sleep? | sherl0ck: 8 |
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