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Please review my startup | blakeweb: It took several minutes of playing with a chart and exploring the contents of the page before I had that 'aha' moment when I realized what your site is trying to do. (example: whomovedmystock.com/goog)From the questions in the comments here on HN, it seems clear that everyone else is in the same boat, not really getting why this is any different from google finance.You need to experiment with better visual ways of communicating that the blue 'market index' curve in the graph is something you invented, defined by the pie chart to the right.It also wouldn't hurt if there was some unobtrusive way for you to emphasize why that's important. You're trying to isolate market movements out of stock movements, so that you can correlate news with times when the stock diverges from what would be expected based on the market and the industry/sector it's in. To me, that's great, but neither your intention to do that nor the effect of everything you've done to try to illustrate that is quite coming across. |
What's the fraction of lurkers vs active users? | nostrademons: FictionAlley (Harry Potter fanfiction) was a 100:10:1 ratio - we usually had about 10-20 simultaneous users actually posting on the forums or fanfic sites, 100-200 registered users browsing, and 1000 simultaneous unregistered guests (out of a total registered userbase of about 100k). This seems fairly typical of most community-oriented sites.Diffle (Flash games hosting) maxed out at about 1200 uniques/month, a dozen or two registered users, and about 6 that actually contributed content or games. Similar ratios, but fewer registered visitors because people go to flash games sites to play and you didn't need to be registered to play. |
Please review my startup | Prrometheus: The world doesn't need another stock market charlatan, even one with flash graphics. |
Please review my startup | browser411: You may want to check out wikinvest.com. They also annotate stock charts but are taking a crowd-sourcing approach to it (they are a wiki after all). |
What's the fraction of lurkers vs active users? | unalone: I think Hacker News might have a significantly lower rate of lurkers, because of the fact that it keeps itself out of the public eye. OmegasEye, an old site of mine, had very little lurking, because the people who knew about it were usually its members. Hacker News isn't that obscure, but it isn't a site that attempt to make itself high-profile. |
Please review my startup | comatose_kid: Can you explain how/why this would help my returns? I trade options from time to time, and don't really understand the value this service would bring, since it focuses on things the market has already priced in. |
The Four Hour Work Week model of Startup Financing? | dawie: I recently finished reading the 4 Hour Work and I have been thinking about how it would work for a web startup. The problem with a web based product is that it's hard to outsource.You talk about working many hours to keep money coming in. It depends on what you do. If you are a consultant, you are selling your time and that is hard to outsource too.Doing the 4 Hour Work Week thing and using the money for your startup is a great idea. I hope it works out for you. |
The Four Hour Work Week model of Startup Financing? | trickjarrett: FHWW is a very fun and interesting read. I'm beginning to make better use of virtual assistants myself.The problems I foresee are as follows:
1) Your time won't be immediately and drastically dropped. If you're spending 70 hours a week developing, you're going to go down to 50 supervising the outsourced developers, and for that you're going to probably spend more than the 20 hours of free time is available to you.2) Outsourced code is not perfect. The outsourcing companies work largely on quantity not quality. So you're be spending a lot of time doing code review and fixing issues.3) Unless you're already profitable, you're now spending money rather than sweat to earn the money. If you have the money then this is not a problem, but for many bootstrappers this is a problem. |
The Four Hour Work Week model of Startup Financing? | ram1024: sounds to me like success of a four hour work week relies on writing a book called "four hour work week" and getting people to buy it...but seriously, anything truly profitable that can be handled in 4 hours a week is already being done by people.unless you find something truly paradigm shifting innovative that only you could do, it's pretty much a guarantee that you won't be able to sustain this.you simply can't compete in 4 hours against people putting in 40 if you're selling the same product. you have to have huge amounts of leverage to do so, in the form of irreproducible technologies, processes, personnel, design... |
Please review my startup | thomasmallen: Looks good, although I'm no investor (put a bonus in for two weeks way back: The stress wasn't worth it). Obviously, the site will only be as good as how current the news is: People need this information practically in real time. And you'll have to find those angles that people can't get by viewing the "News" tab on Google Finance.On another note, I'd like to see a site called whomovedmysocks.com |
Please review my startup | sutro: Great work. I really like everything you've done here. Though it will be difficult to improve upon what you already have, I do have three very minor suggestions for you:1. Change your domain name from whomovedmystock.com to whomovedmycheese.com.2. Change your product from a website to a childishly simple business book.3. Stop coding and start lecturing and conducting business seminars.Other than those few small tweaks, I'd say you're on the right track. Keep up the good work! |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | nostrademons: It's actually quite possible to just ignore those tasks, work on your goal, and then retroactively take care of them once your goal's on it way.There's a big task that has to be done beforehand, though, and is a huge pain: figuring out what people want (and will pay for). It's much harder than it seems. |
Please review my startup | paraschopra: Clearly your news index lags the market price of the stock.. I wonder what use can that be? |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | tom_rath: The only tasks which I find stop me from working on my product are various administration and customer support chores. The one-time items like incorporation are trivial in terms of time-cost.Being forced to step away from development has actually saved me more trouble that it's taken away. Being forced to take a breather to tally up expenses or polish up some documentation takes my mind away from the development task at hand and helps give me a better perspective on things when I return. On far more occasions than I'd care to admit, I'll find myself thinking about the 'absolutely essential' work I was intently doing to improve my product and realize it was either completely unnecessary or else could be done in a better manner.Those insights would not likely be gained if I had been focused entirely on development. Mix it up. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | unalone: The only thing stopping me is that I'm not entirely confident with PHP yet. I'm working on small sample projects until I'm certain I can go out and build everything optimally. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | FiReaNG3L: Fulltime PhD :( |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | kwamenum86: Deliberation....you can discuss and plan things all you want but at some point you have to just dive in |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | picnichouse: My other projects. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | litewulf: Not starving in the street: AKA full time job. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | paul9290: Reading Hacker Newsthough i use it for taking breaks... |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | nailer: Finding good documentation on PyXPCOM. |
Please review my startup | danteembermage: I think what you've got here has a lot of potential; let me echo some things and maybe make some other suggestions.First, I think it is a great idea decomposing stock variance. Really, I do want to know what moved my stock. However, it's not really clear what your chart is telling me. I see market and I see the stock price and I see that they are different but I don't know why they are different. What I'd imagined was suppose you start with the return on the value weighted Wilshire 5000 possibly adjusted by empirical beta. Presumably there will be some residual price movement, some of that is coming from sector changes. It would make sense to see the sector effect as a different color tacked on to the market effect. Then you add news effects and then the leftover would be unknown or some such. Perhaps on news days you assume all the residual movement is due to news and then carry forward that price difference through the non-news periods.As you've got it I assumed your chart was just comparing the stock return with the return on the S&P until I read the comments here. You're news history and the associated price change is awesome, in academic finance there is a long tradition of doing event studies (e.g. what is the effect on a stock price to an announcement of a seasoned equity offering?). If I understand what you're doing you've essentially done an event study of every possible event for all stocks throughout time. That's pretty cool. In fact, if you used academic standard methods calculating your expected returns you might even have a dataset that research universities would be interested in buying from you.One possible thing traders might like that you might be able to pull off. Suppose I'm worried a stock is going to get hit with an "identify theft" leak. If you put a little text processing on your news titles you could determine the average effect that kind of announcement will have on the average and maybe for a stock in particular. So lets imagine "identity theft" has an average negative return of six percent. Then I check identity theft with American Standard and I get 0.1 percent because the negative identity theft returns are linked with banking and retail sector returns and not really with the market.I'm a little worried that your design is too cutesy. I would expect websites that do lots of statistics to have more hard corners. I understand you want the site to look accessible but you want it to appear intelligent and accessible. There's got to be a compromise in between somewhere. |
Please review my startup | owkaye: The first thing I noticed is the bad grammar. It never impresses me to see a website that fails to get the spelling and grammar correct. As you're using it here, the word "identify" should be "identifies":>>> For every stock we create an index that measures market and sector influence and identify the news that make the difference. <<<But I think you're trying to say too much in that sentence anyways. A simpler and better statement that's easier to understand and probably has greater impact might be this:>>> We measure market influences for every stock in America, and we identify the news that makes a difference. <<<If you use this new wording you can pay me $1000 ... :)Aside from this change, I like the grab-and-pull interface that works like google maps, but I'm not into investing so I don't know if real investors will find any value here. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | aschobel: Just work on the product!It's way too easy to spend time on things that aren't core to your business.Don't worry about where to open a bank account, where to incorporate, etc. This can all be fixed later on, and won't prevent you from making something people want. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | pg: The two biggest time-sucks for YC alumni seem to be talking to investors and dealing with visa problems. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | rksprst: School. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | curiousgeorge: payment systems. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | babyshake: I'm at a stage where I'm hacking most of the time (yay!), but I've learned that I can get really stubborn about solving problems, and don't know when to just take the loss, and do something in a way that is less robust but at least works.In fact, I'd say I waste several hours a week being stubborn about problems, and I'm not a particularly stubborn person.I would pay good money for a solution that always gave me insight into when I've been spending too much time on a task...but I'd be surprised if that could be pulled off. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | pclark: can't get my head around ruby on rails.. |
What tasks stop you from working on your product? | tlrobinson: I believe what you're referring to is yak shaving:http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html |
How would you deploy a Rails app onsite for a customer? | aranganath: http://express.engineyard.com/Use VMWare Player with that image as the base, install your Rails app to it, and go from there. Then you can give your client the pre configured image and they can deploy it however they please.That image is Engine Yard in a box, and Engine Yard is awesome. You |
How would you deploy a Rails app onsite for a customer? | davidw: Sounds like the desktop app problem in a certain sense, although without quite so many potential installations. |
What are your experiences with remote support software? | otoburb: I use WebEx in my work environment primarily for sharing deployment sessions that involve a GUI or for remote low-framerate group presentations. It's relatively easy to use and does the job.For remote support, I personally use LogMeIn (they bought Hamachi out I believe) for my parents' desktop. That is a great tool for remote control software, provided you don't mind installing the LogMeIn client on the target system. |
What are your experiences with remote support software? | alaskamiller: I like FogCreek copilot https://www.copilot.com/ |
What are your experiences with remote support software? | aneesh: I used GoToMeeting as the customer (the other party was demoing to me), and it was pretty seamless. Worked out of the box, and was pretty easy to use. |
What are your experiences with remote support software? | tihomir: I recommended http://www.uvnc.com/pchelpware/index.html
You can customize it with your company needs and it's really fast. |
How do you write a book? | silencio: I'm going through this right now for nanowrimo. ;)At first I used word (very lame, I know), but a friend recommended Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html) to me a while ago, and I've been using that instead, but it's an OS X only tool. I love it. I'm not a writer, but I really needed some tools to help me finish nanowrimo, and scrivener is it.I've occasionally used mindmapping tools for occasional papers I've written, if it's extremely chaotic you may want to look into that, although I don't know how much help it might be. |
What are your experiences with remote support software? | mmelin: WebEx is the dinosaur, but I like TeamViewer http://www.teamviewer.com/ - it is inexpensive and works _very_ well. |
How do you write a book? | wigglywonk: Just start writing, using whatever works best for you. I've been using TextEdit on the mac a lot lately for my writing, but anything's good.If you're writing for a publisher, then they're going to give you a template that's probably for Word, and you don't have to worry about complicated document struturing stuff -- they'll help with the referencing, etc.If you're doing it all yourself, then a document description system such as LaTeX might be the way to go. If I was writing a technical book that i knew had little chance of being published, I'd probably use that. |
How do you write a book? | ScottWhigham: I always like to start with a mindmap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map) of the key points. Once I have those, I flesh out the individual nodes underneath. I then organize into Chapters/sections and start writing.I've read where some people create a PowerPoint presentation and work backwards from that as well. The key thing for me is that I don't want to get tied down to Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc too early - I want the flexibility to move things around without hindering my thinking process. That's the sort of thing that is perfect for mind mapping tools like FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page). |
How do you write a book? | robg: The advice I've gotten: Write a book proposal. In it, lay out chapters with one or two paragraph summaries. The process forces you to think a lot about organization. It also provides a blueprint/outline for you going forward. You'll see how the ideas fit together to recognize missing gaps in your thesis. Keep in mind that it's an evolving document and as you write more you'll be better able to incorporate new material and scrap old forks. Starting with the summary provides clear signposts along the way.Good luck!Edit: Of course, I forgot the reason why many folks also write a proposal: To shop it around, get an agent, and an advance. Problem is, that usually requires some connections in the industry, special expertise, compelling story, and/or all of the above. You don't need to shop it around to get the benefits, though it's nice to have if you happen to run into someone who could help. |
How do you write a book? | mnemonicsloth: "Just start writing" is a fiction thing.The nonfiction equivalent is "just start writing index cards." |
How do you write a book? | unalone: I wrote a novel last year. For fiction, it helps to just start writing. It's much easier to revise what you've got than it is to start writing anew, so when you have time, just write. Get your ideas out. Once you have a lot, then you can begin to revise: get rid of what isn't absolutely necessary, make sure all of your sentences gleam. Revision isn't always fun, but it's much easier to get in a revising mood than it is to get in a writing moodIf you're writing nonfiction, I'd guess that you'd start by researching whatever you're writing about. George Carlin once said that as an older man, he could make logical connections in topics he could never talk about before, because his knowledge was more comprehensive. Same with nonfiction: the more you know, the more ambitious your writing can be. (Same for fiction, of course, but with nonfiction you're more often writing about a specific topic.)In both cases, outlines help a lot, but it's possible to work without them. It depends on what you want to write, and how you go about writing it. |
Are XFN links and FOAF popular enough to base a startup idea on them? | tonystubblebine: There's real momentum behind data portability and that's likely to help all standards. However, I was very disappointed, when we were implementing FOAF, to find that the FOAF validator is broken. I took that as a sign that people had moved on to other standards (XFN+hcard). |
How would you deploy a Rails app onsite for a customer? | jcapote: I've done this exact thing with jruby + derby, runs anywhere that java is supported. |
How do you write a book? | LPTS: The best way to write a book is to work on it every day. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | brk: Looks like a neat idea. Reminds me of http://www.gimado.com/, just more targeted. I think these investment sites could be a very lucrative way to raise money for small startup operations. |
Virtual gifts vs real-world prizes? | kleneway: For #2, you might want to check out Zuckerbucks, which is a virtual currency for Facebook that paid out real prizes. Careful if you go that route, I know the guy who built it and it can be difficult to constantly be mailing out physical items to people. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | tptacek: Why is this going to work where every other open source bounty site has failed? |
Review our startup (bitloot) | cool-RR: This looks cool! |
Review our startup (bitloot) | clay: I recommend adding as many ideas as you can and even fund stuff out of your pocket. I click browse and all I see is "test" and "wordobe test"... |
Review our startup (bitloot) | alexkay: I like the idea, even though I'm a bit pessimistic about it kicking off...A few glitches I noticed:* The video takes awhile to load, while loading there's a black rectangle. May be use an image while the flash is loading, or bootstrap your flash with a preloader a la youTube.* The "Help" form is behind the flash video.* Consider dimming the background when the help form is open. Also, close it when the user clicks anywhere not on the form or presses Esc. ThickBox, GreyBox, LightBox, Uservoice, etc all do that, it's something the users expect.* As clay suggested add some real content, no one is going to contribute to a test site. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | rw: Cool.UI crits:
1) Try browsing without javascript enabled (cough).
2) Try using the back button in any project-specific page. You have to hit it multiple times, quickly, to go back. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | rokhayakebe: Great idea, what is your marketing plan?I would suggest finding a few businesses that spend a substantial amount of money every month on proprietary software. Then ask them to support the development of a free and better version by pledging a small amount each.The supporters can see it as a form of advertising for one. Every company would love to have its name behind a piece of software that has the ability to change the game. They also get to fix a problem and reduce future expenses.Not only that, this new software will be constantly updated by talented people who are passionated about the problem they are solving and they will not have to pay a penny more for new versions. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | catone: I would be careful using PayPal. Another bounty site - microPledge - recently shut down because using PayPal to hold money in Escrow is against their TOS.I wrote about it here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/10/09/open-source-fundin...I'm sure there are a lot of project owners from microPledge looking for a new home, but using PayPal might just lead your down the same path. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | newt0311: Nice. Very similar to http://schneier.com/paper-street-performer.htmlNice to see some implementation of it. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | sanswork: I couldn't find the info on the site but how do you decide when to release the funds to the developer?I've developed a similar site in the past but never publicly released it as there was a few flaws in the system that I couldn't work around. I've since moved on but I'm wondering how you managed to get around them.For my system you got votes based on the amount you contributed. This opened the site up to people pledging just enough to get 51% of the vote then accepting any solution even bad ones.The other way where the creator of the bounty gets the final say also opens up to people creating popular bounties then claiming them for themselves with no acceptable solution posed.Outside of automated solutions I suppose you could have staff review each claim manually but I decided against this idea as it just couldn't scale.Anyhow, curious to read your solutions to these problems. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | epall: I don't like the behavior of the tabs. When I wanted to back to browsing all projects, I clicked on "Browse." That didn't work, so I tried my back button. That didn't work either. Then, several minutes later, I noticed the "Back" link. This was definitely not intuitive.Also, once I click "Next" when browsing for projects, I see absolutely no way to go back! |
Review our startup (bitloot) | JesseAldridge: This could be ridiculously awesome... if it actually works. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | dexter: Tone down the reverb on your demo video! |
Review our startup (bitloot) | jhickner: As a developer, wouldn't it seem odd to do the work up front, and then have a group of people you don't know vote on whether or not you should be paid? I can't imagine that would be very attractive. |
How do you write a book? | skmurphy: Gerald Weinberg has written a wonderful book "Weinberg on Writing" http://www.amazon.com/Weinberg-Writing-Fieldstone-Gerald-M/d... where he outlines his "Field Stone" method. It's an approach that likens writing a book to constructing what the Irish call "dry stone fence." You write capsules and modules that you have energy around and then gradually re-work them into a narrative once you have a good understanding of the topic and how you want to proceed. He also ha a blog at http://weinbergonwriting.blogspot.com/ devoted to his thoughts on writing. If you are unfamiliar with him, he is a bestselling technical author (and now fiction) who has written more than 40 books. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | marketer: It's been tried before, check out http://www.micropledge.com . That site doesn't seem to be active any more. |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | cperciva: I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop.Desktop environment: KDE3.Text editor: kwrite.Office suite: OpenOffice.Web browser: Konqueror for most sites, Firefox for a few sites which don't work in Konqueror.Email: Thunderbird.Other communications: Kopete (for ICQ), aMSN (for MSN), ksirc (for IRC).System administration tools: FreeBSD Update for base system security updates; Portsnap for updating the ports tree; portupgrade for updating installed ports; tarsnap (of course!) for backups. |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | takumish: I use FreeBSD at work and home.
Its nice to have an identical setup on the laptop and colo.
When I want to deploy something, I make a package file on the dev box and simply install it on the server.
Desktop:
window manager: ratpoison
browser: firefox
editor: emacs
email: mew (runs in emacs) |
How do you write a book? | jrockway: Some advice that hasn't been mentioned yet: make sure your publisher supports you. Writing a book is difficult and you want to spend your time on the content -- not making sure that there are no typos, teaching the publishers how to run the code, doing the layout, maintaining different versions of the book, etc.I recently wrote a book, and I got very little support from the publisher. It was a disaster, although I didn't realize that until after publication. I was the first person to write a Perl book for them, and they had nobody on staff that could even install Perl. The editors didn't do any significant editing, and in fact weren't even native speakers of English. They didn't even manage to publish the right version of some chapters. When they made the code from the book available, they did so as a word document containing code snippets from the book (instead of the runnable tarballs from each example and chapter that I provided for them).Basically, your name goes on the book, so any fuck-up will be attributed to you. If something goes wrong, like things did with my book, you will get hate mail every day, criticizing you for things that you had no control over.Oh yeah, and when the code you wrote the book about goes out of date, people will send you hate mail for that too. It is also apparently a hobby of people to nit-pick things like your variable names ("OMG you used $c instead of $ctx, YOU ARE SO DUMB!"). I'm not sure what motivates people to send me e-mail about things like this. Do they I think I care what they think? Do they want me to magically change every copy of the book? I don't get it.In case you haven't noticed, the experience has changed my life. Before writing the book, I was really excited about open source projects and talking to people. I genuinely wanted to help people learn to program better. Now I am bitter and misanthropic because of the constant influx of hate mail. (I could go on and on about this, how people don't want to learn, how teaching is a waste of time, etc., etc... but I will save that for another day.)I'm not trying to talk you out of writing a book, of course, but just make sure that your publisher cares about your book. If they don't, you may regret writing it. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | jackowayed: 1st note: before I allowed scripts all I saw was:Blog | Contact
© 2008 Experiment House LLCBlog and Contact were links, but that was all that was on the screen.
Your site isn't that shiny and fancy, so it has no reason to be so dependent on JS.It's a cool idea though. I could see developing on it. |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | sabat: I don't. FreeBSD is dying. Haven't you heard? |
Review our startup (bitloot) | 13ren: This strikes me as a market research tool - trying to find out what people want, the needs, the problem to be solved, the pain to address. It's tricky for users to make the connection between problem and solution (hell, it's tricky for anyone - so why not users?)Here's my suggestion: target developing knock-offs (copies of existing products). There's a long and glorious tradition of this in open source (linux, gimp, open office, samba, mySQL, etc). It works because users already know they need it, and how to use it, it's already integrated into their behaviour and their other processes and other software - and programmers have a clear specification to work from. This narrowing the kind of project you seek to fund (i.e. a niche) will help you in many ways, as any business book will recommend (even though narrowing your options seems like a limiting thing...)But please don't use this to undermine good-guy programmers, who took the risk of working to understand a problem, design a solution and get it accepted - use your bounty powers for good, not evil. That is, use it to break monopolies that are hurting customers in small industries. If they have any sense, the monopolist will back down, and some good will be done (whether the open source product is actually used or not). Sounds like good, heroic fun! |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | pogos: Xorg + fluxboxemacs22FirefoxAnd WIN4BSD when I need to test my work in IE or other Windows browsers. |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | jd: Not a guru, but I've used it for a while. Both as desktop and server. My main gripe is that FreeBSD doesn't have a reliable filesystem. FreeBSD still dies pretty horribly after a few hard crashes (power loss, whatever).fsck? In 2008? No thanks. Messages about possibly corrupted inodes? How should that be my problem? I can't stress this enough, one day you will wake up and FreeBSD will refuse to boot. And that day will, by Murphy's Law, be one of those days where you have to get an incredible amount of real work done.I'm a big fan of FreeBSD, ports, and the whole "do it right" and "proper documentation" philosophy. But until they get journalling right you should probably stay away.(also: upgrading from FreeBSD 6.x to 6.(x+1) is incredibly painful. I don't think upgrading a 7.x system is going to be much easier. Reinstalling FreeBSD gets old fast, so you'll probably just shrug and stick with whatever version you already have) |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | joubert: I would postulate that some details of the potential competitor's execution is different from what you envisioned for your app. This difference may be what makes one app more successful than the other.Try to figure our what the core perspective of the other app is; perhaps it is subtly different from your vision - assess whether you believe your core concept is "better" than theirs. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | mixmax: If someone else has already executed it and made a pretty decent job of it be happy. Now you know there's a market, and that there's someone you can learn from.It is very rarely the unique idea that wins. It's the implementation and execution. |
How do you write a book? | Eliezer: Writing one blog post per day on Overcoming Bias, having to do that every day and publish immediately and put it behind me, and then getting feedback, has sped up my writing by over an order of magnitude. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | aneesh: The general idea doesn't need to be original at all. There was search before Google, social networks before facebook, video before YouTube, etc.Sometimes the specifics of the idea can be important though. For example, take Google: lets use hyperlink data to rank websitesWhat's your idea? |
How do you write a book? | mattmaroon: I pretty much just sat down and started writing. I skipped the planning and just let it flow. That meant a good amount of cutting and pasting things around later to get everything in the proper order, but the free form inspired me to write more, better, and faster. Your mileage may vary.Do you have a contract and an agent yet? I learned the hard way the value of a good agent. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | jd: As you're coding you'll definitely do things differently. You can even learn from your competitors mistakes, because you can regard their product as your "prototype". And because you have a competitor you can be pretty sure there is a market and (potential) customers. This is a good thing.There are always a million reasons to not go through with something. If you're excited about the idea, and if you're pretty sure you can turn it into something profitable there's no reason not to go ahead. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | siong1987: Idea is nothing without execution. So, it's glad that you are determined to continue working on your idea. And, you should be happy that at least you are now working on an idea that already has its market.If you are working on a totally new idea, it means you are trying to explore a totally new market. And, thing tends to become even worse if your web app are trying to shape new habits among people.And, if I were you, instead of spending time working on the research, I would rather spend the time start working on the idea. You may already a prototype right now if you started working on it the last couple weeks.But, I do not mean that research is bad. But, I will try to keep the research time as short as possible. And, I agree with aneesh, try to keep your idea as specific as possible.Besides, I assume that you are working on your idea alone, so, it is always good to target a niche market. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | rgrieselhuber: Sorry for the self-link but I provided a list a while back of about 20 successful products that were not based on original ideas: http://firewatching.com/ambient/2008/06/06/products-that-wou... |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | hs: i used to use FreeBSD until the pain kills me (had to rebuild kernel to activate nat)openbsd generic kernel covers almost everything i need (no bluetooth support) - for complete hw support, i use ubuntuoverall, openbsd is simpler. Last week i just upgraded from 4.0 to 4.4 on remote machine in about 2-3 hours). I never bothered to upgrade before :D 400+ days uptime is normalfor desktop, i use dwm, firefox3, mrxvt, qiv, axyftp, vifm, vim (non-gui), mpg123, mplayer, ImageMagick, gimp, lighttpd, mercurial, newlisp, tightvncviewer (to control my Mac Mini GUI remotely) |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | herdrick: If they're doing a good job of it more or less the way you'd be doing it, bail. You want to be crusading for your future users, saving them from the crap they would have to put up with if you weren't helping them. If you don't think you are making a big difference for your users, you won't have the necessarily inner fire to win.Ideally you do a startup where other companies are doing something badly, their users hate them, and they still make money. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | noonespecial: Truly original ideas are terrible things to base products on. It takes people a vary long time to accept things that are actually revolutionary.Instead, its often better to just take something familiar and make it better or adapt it for a certain niche. Make an ipod, not a segway. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | ii: We like to believe in creation, but what's actually happening is evolution, not creation. Original ideas are like genetic mutations of old ideas and are not strong enough to survive and win.I think that the strongest ideas are never really original, they are just better implementations of the existing ones. |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | bayareaguy: About 10 years ago I started using a colocated FreeBSD system as the central location for all my email so the "desktop" that matters to me is whatever ssh window happens to have the screen session where my mh-emacs process is running. |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | gaius: I'm not sure it makes sense to use FreeBSD on the desktop. Not that it isn't perfectly capable mind, but if you want a BSD desktop or laptop there's OSX. I've FreeBSD running in a VirtualBox VM; best of all possible worlds. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | alaskamiller: Go down a street and you'll see McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, In-N-Out, Jack In the Box... |
Review our startup (bitloot) | jcromartie: You broke the back button. You should also add a feature to banish the really stupid ideas, like the one where someone wants to configure DosBOX to launch Lemmings automatically. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | yummyfajitas: Palish has some useful advice:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365962Also, consider that if that German hadn't invented the automobile, Ford still would have. i.e. Ford wasn't inspired by that German, because he was already working on an automobile. His autobiography is very good: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10.txt* |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | SingAlong: I agree with everyone here who says its possible if done with variations and served better.But I am stuck in a similar situation. The worse part is to get the users of the competitor's service switch to mine. Coz the competitor has a huge chunk of data that's of value to the user. How do i urge the users to switch when the competitor doesn't have an API to access the user's data? If he had it then i could've built an app to import user data from the competitor's service. |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | drhowarddrfine: I use FreeBSD for desktop and laptop. Never crashes in the four years I've been doing that. Anything I used to do on Windows I can do on fbsd. The only issue is Flash on web sites. Most of that is just ads so I don't miss it but the few videos I'd like to watch I can download and view them offline.It's no different than running a Linux desktop and you are running the same software. The question is a little strange to me. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | charlesju: If you don't have competition, your idea has no industry. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | swombat: How important do you consider the originality of an idea to be?Incredibly, emphatically, overwhelmingly unimportant. In fact, I would say that if your idea was truly original, that would be extremely worrying from a business standpoint.In fact, I wrote an article on that topic:http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great... |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | known: One advantage is you need not validate your idea because it being implemented successfully by another company. |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | silentbicycle: Using it "on the desktop" is quite vague. What would you use your computer for? Somebody who wants a computer for checking email, shopping on ebay, and playing flash games is going to have different requirements than somebody who wants to make electronic music or do heavy video editing.Have you looked at the FreeBSD Handbook? (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/) That will probably answer many of your questions. Also, the OpenBSD FAQ: http://openbsd.org/faq/I've used OpenBSD on the desktop and servers for over five years. I mostly use it for programming (Emacs), playing music (mpd: http://mpd.wikia.com/), and nethack. I use Firefox and w3m for web stuff, dwm as a window manager, mercurial for vc, etc.OpenBSD's focus on security keeps the core system simple, well documented, and straightforward to configure, so as to minimize the amount of obscure things that could lead to vulnerabilities. FreeBSD is also an excellent OS, but OpenBSD's clean and minimalistic design is more my style. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | swdesignguy: We had the same problem. We had a 50% original idea, and our competitor was the rest of the idea that we knew could be better.We used it as a basis for solving disagreements. Whenever we couldn't agree or decide what to do, we just say "what is our competitor doing?" It isn't about copying per se, it's about keeping momentum and getting past decision problems. |
Please review my startup | thorax: Might also be good to track the value of the USD against other currencies in the world in relation to stock moves, too. |
How do you write a book? | bryarcanium: Understand it. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | natch: So instead of a model built on trust, this is a model based on distrust.It doesn't feel right to me, for various reasons, starting with the above.Also it vaguely says that code must be "open source" but this is not a well-defined term. The GPL (just one example of many possible licenses for open source software) requires that GPL-licensed projects have the source code available in the preferred format, an important distinction that is not necessarily present in all open source licenses. A developer could provide an assembler dump of their code, and claim that was open source, and walk away with the payment.Worse, of course, they could just do a slideware demo, or they could do a demo using Microsoft Word, but claiming that it was software they had written.Also you claim to be more centered on normal users, but normal users don't know or care about open source. To them, they just want the program. Yes, open source gives them benefits too, but they don't know that, nor do they really want to know.As a developer, I would feel hesitant about committing much time to a project - it would be huge gamble. On a normal open source project, I could get things started, get the code base maybe 80% done, and then when that last 20% needs to be done (which in reality is actually 80% of the work ;-)) others typically would be pitching in, to the point where I could even walk away and development would continue without me, ensuring my initial work was not wasted, and ensuring the project got done. But with your site, the developer risks that the "normal users" will see any rough edges and deliver a total rejection - binary thumbs down - and I won't get paid. So it forces me to do way more work, and even then, the users can still say no based on some arbitrary whim - "I like the OK button on the left, not the right, this sucks!" - that's just an example; please don't bother trying to debunk it unless you can address the more general point.All that being said, I could be wrong! It's happened before! I'll be curious to see how it turns out. |
How do you use your FreeBSD desktop box? | samuel: I don't use it as desktop OS anymore, but I used to during the 4.x branch. Most of those days annoyances are now gone like having to recompile java from source or using linux binaries of Mozilla/Firefox for flash (this may still apply).I don't think it's very different from using a non ultrapolished Linux distro(like Debian). Choose your WM, install bash or (pd)ksh(tcsh sucks) and your prefered tools(Eclipse, LaTeX, Emacs, OOffice... whatever) and you're ready to work. I don't like GNU userland so for me that was a plus, but some people can't live without colored ls and a several megs vi, so your mileage may vary. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | natch: 1. Have you (the founders) ever contributed to open source projects? It seems to me you are taking the time resources of open source developers for granted.
2. Is your project (bitloot) open source?
3. Repository URL? |
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