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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 rea... |
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 ty... |
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 ... |
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 t... |
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 d... |
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 tha... |
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 "N... |
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 busines... |
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 t... |
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... |
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 th... |
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 prob... |
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... |
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 so... |
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 struturin... |
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 tha... |
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 ... |
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 al... |
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 fla... |
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 adverti... |
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... |
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 aroun... |
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... |
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 ... |
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 ... |
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, ... |
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... |
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... |
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 visi... |
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 contra... |
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... |
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, ... |
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 ... |
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 necessar... |
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.... |
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 ... |
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.I... |
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... |
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... |
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 abo... |
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)... |
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 distr... |
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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