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Using alternative keyboard layouts?
Eliezer: Dvorak. It's not faster but your fingers get a lot less tired. Cured my carpal tunnel syndrome.
How to write a business plan for an Internet startup?
Stalemelon9: Business Plan Pro is AMAZING :-)
Have you seen any open source HN clones?
yan: HN is open source itself. Are you looking for a clone specifically?
Have you seen any open source HN clones?
mixmax: Reddit is open source.http://code.reddit.com/
How to write a business plan for an Internet startup?
hamgav: To clarify, I work for a software consulting company. The potential investors would be the directors of this company. They themselves, have sold a startup for millions... What would u do?
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
ctingom: Wow, this looks great. Just signed up.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
alex_c: I know the guys who made this, they've been working hard on it for over a year. I'm curious what news.yc thinks.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
imp: Looks really cool. I don't travel much, but next time I do I'll give it a try.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
siong1987: You definitely need a tagline on what the site is doing straight below the TOP LEFT corner. No many people will click into the "what is zipalong" link.If I didn't get to the site from YC news, I will think that it is just another photo site rather than a travel site.It's clever that you put the logo at the t...
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
tc7: Looks cool. I signed up. Going to have an API?I like the icons/graphics.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
soundsop: Allow people to use your site before signing up. This is a recording.
Using alternative keyboard layouts?
sctb: I could possibly be inclined to be interested in an alternate keyboard layout, but the prospect of adapting my Emacs keybindings makes me curl into the fetal position.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
akronim: Those photos on the home page map get all the attention, buy aren't clickable? (not that I didn't try...)
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
timcederman: I have no idea what this does better than TripIt/TripAdvisor/<insert travel site here> or why I would want to use it.
How do you read? (And Yellowstone is a supervolcano)
raamdev: I find remembering the images that the text created helps me recall the smaller details. For example, using the size of Rhode Island and the height of cirrus clouds easily painted a vivid image in my head. I'll remember that image in the future and the context it was used, but not necessarily the smaller detai...
Creative TLD Use?
brk: I'm not a big fan of "trite" urls making use of .us, .me, .foo extensions unless it's for a trivial application (ie: non commercial). Trying to tell someone "Have you used delicious?... No, DEL dot icio dot US. No, it's in the .us tld, with del. instead of www. Here, I'll write it down for you. Fuck it..."For ...
Creative TLD Use?
jm4: I think it's kind of lame to have a site about education with some made up variation of the word 'education' as the name. It's fine to use a made up word with no meaning. It's fine to use a play on words. It's also ok to use some completely unrelated word (like delicious or Amazon). This is a variation of a real w...
Creative TLD Use?
yan: If you got the .com, I don't see a reason for having the .us. It might have been cool a few years ago, but there's no substitute for you.com. I mean, keep it around as an alias just in case, but I would definitely use the .com as the primary page.
Creative TLD Use?
aaroneous: It has always been confusing, but now is considered gimmicky and tired.
Incorporate before launch?
aaroneous: You don't need to, but you've already stated that you want to - so go for it. It'll cost you though (time//money), and that might be prohibitive for a hobby company.
Creative TLD Use?
makecheck: Considering most people think in terms of .com, and browsers let you type "xyz" to guess "xyz.com", you're really better off choosing a word that users can type without remembering where the dots go.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
paul7986: Loaded the page saw a pretty cool photo continent collage, but was unable to interact with such and there was no text to tell me briefly what zipalong does.As stated above, it's best to allow use of your site without requiring sign up or have facebook/open social sign in if it requires sign up.good luck!
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
bemmu: I feel like the site isn't really selling its benefits to me. I do organize some trips, but I wouldn't use this now because I don't want to bother everyone by telling them to sign up to this service, when I don't really know what the benefit would be.Travel is such an interesting area, mostly because it is seein...
Creative TLD Use?
arockwell: Creative tlds are really confusing, don't do it. For the longest time I didn't use del.icio.us because I couldn't remember how the domain name was broken up.I'm on the fence for the name educatious itself. Can you provide any details on what type of service is the website? I tend to prefer names that are tw...
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
snprbob86: Seems like a cool site so far :-)The itinerary "Summary" on this sample trip <http://zipalong.com/zip/Trip.page?tripId=42626548> was quite long. The map neatly fits the browser window, but I have to scroll down past it to see all of the summary. Also, the content of the summary seems quite verbose. Many of t...
Would you solve programming puzzles to apply for jobs?
jleyank: Strikes me as pretty easy to game, as Google's MY friend... Might have some use for hiring fresh-from-school, but anything more senior's best done by reputation rather than brain teasers. True rockstars would not stoop to proving it - imagine asking Linus to play such a game.
How do you read? (And Yellowstone is a supervolcano)
MaysonL: Yellowstone has seen a lot of quake activity lately, btw.: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2009/01/05/yell...
Would you solve programming puzzles to apply for jobs?
cardmagic: But assuming I figured out a way to make it hard to game
Is this a DMCA takedown?
answerly: I have dealt with these type of folks before and DMCA threats mean very little to them. What hurts them is getting de-listed/penalized in search engines, particularly Google. I would suggest reporting to Google's web spam team. You can access the Google web spam form through Google webmaster tools.
Is this a DMCA takedown?
calbers: IANAL, this is simply a case of copy write infringement, not a violation of the DMCA - which prevents the dissemination of information with circumvents an owner's copyright. They stole your content, plain and simple.
Do you criticize?
11ren: > it's like a drugI think criticizing is enticing because it gives a feeling of superiority, without the hard work and risk of mistakes... and risk of criticism. Even more insidiously drug-like is that habitual criticizing makes one more reluctant to take those risks oneself, because one is more self-critical, a...
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
kirpekar: Very nice UI. Unfortunately very commonplace idea.
Would you solve programming puzzles to apply for jobs?
Jebdm: It'd be cool, but there are a few things to worry about:- Bugs in the system are dangerous; for instance, if I did my quiz in an hour but it got submitted as two, my job opportunity could be lost- People will get around your anti-cheating methods- People will practice or memorize solutions to your quiz (while t...
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
pmjordan: I'm getting this after a long wait: The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /proxy/FrontPage.page. Reason: Error reading from remote server
Would you solve programming puzzles to apply for jobs?
babyshake: It sounds like a good idea, but it probably would only work well for junior programmers. I'm working on something similar in a couple ways, but not related to programming.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
jwilliams: I signed up:+ve: very slick and liked the design a lot.-ve: whilst the UI was slick I found it a bit clunky. It took too many clicks to achieve things, particularly adding an Itinerary - I think being able to blast a bunch of cities into a text box would be the way I'd like to start.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
scott_s: As others have mentioned, you desperately need to explain what you do on the front page. Once I understood what your site is, my first thought was "Facebook for traveling."Now the hard part. What do you provide that people can't already do on Facebook? This is what you need to stress.
Creative TLD Use?
pclark: Educatious isn't easily spelt, I'm not really keen..
Would you solve programming puzzles to apply for jobs?
barbie17: Something like this already exists: TopCoder. They are pretty well known and have a good reputation, so they will be hard to compete against. With that said, however, there are a lot of things that can be improved: (like what you hinted at) you can have each company submit their own problem and make it more o...
Is this a DMCA takedown?
wmf: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/05/15/takedown-faq/I've seen a DMCA takedown template somewhere, but I can't find it right now.
Is this a DMCA takedown?
jreposa: It seems that it's a scraper site with all content stolen from around the web. If you go to the vevz site, there are a ton of blog posts copied verbatim (links intact on most of them).Also, I just realized... Who uses a four letter domain name for this type of stuff?
Creative TLD Use?
babyshake: Are you in the bay area? There's a few education startups around here you may want to know about.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
sam_in_nyc: I took the tour and from what I saw it seems like an amazing service with loads of features. I also love the design (from what I saw in the thumbnails). Agreed that you should switch the logo and courtesy nav... logo on top left, nav on top right.This is a no brainer: Make the whole continental thing, as...
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
gommm: Wow, looks slick and nice Just curious, how many people have been working on this?One small thing is that you should maybe allow people to view a sample trip from your main page (maybe also a link to something like http://zipalong.com/zip/TripAnimation.page?tripId=42887183) When I arrived on the main page, I tr...
Using alternative keyboard layouts?
awfabian: I switched to Dvorak about 10 years ago. I never regained my full QWERTY speed (which was 100+ WPM--from what I hear, the faster you type, the harder it is to regain your full speed. I type fast enough that I don't care that much, but it's still annoying), and always find it annoying when I have to use a QW...
How to write a business plan for an Internet startup?
anamax: > I've been approached by some investors who want to invest in my startup. They've asked me to put together a business plan - listing costs/revenue etc.Are said investors paying enough for what they want? Or, would you be better off doing something else?I'm assuming that you have enough of a plan to run your b...
What would you want (or Not want) on a dead-simple free niche jobs site
medianama: "Things I see on the pay sites that should be left out: - letting job seekers post their resumes"Not sure about this one. Recruiters will pay a lot of money for access to resume bank, for a niche that isn't available anywhere else... and you don't need to do much to implement this feature - just a form with ...
Freelancing
nazgulnarsil: don't rely on the internet for finding clients. the good jobs are either never advertised through the regular channels or don't stay up for long if they are.
Review my holiday side-project (clipclipsave.com)
pclark: I love the logoI got an SSL error when I signed up, looks extra scary in Firefox.It wasn't obvious how to make a coupon in the admin area, maybe it should be a tab as well as a link?The themes are awesome, but make the preview open in a new windowIf you simply made the currency logo user selectable you'd instan...
Freelancing
danw: Best place to find clients is through friends, referrals and people you meet in the real world. Time to get networking.
feedback on my trip and travel planner site
AlexeyMK: Show, don't tell. Show me a diary that somebody wrote recently so that I can imagine myself using this.I do like the integrated-ness of the diaries + photos functionality. Deep Facebook integration would be great (either add to my Facebook photos + notes or at least post as shared items to my profile).What ...
An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
anthony_barker: wxWidgets or QT either in python or c++ are fine. SWT with jython Flash?
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
opticksversi: We need to research VC's before we talk to them. Try researching your VC's by talking to the people who have been funded by them..There is no NDA at this point.You are thinking of asking a VC to sign an NDA?.http://robertplattbell.blogspot.com/2007/10/to-nda-or-not-to...Simply put, when you sign an NDA, y...
Once you open source, can you take it back?
makecheck: I am not a lawyer.But my understanding is that the copyright holders have the right to change the license.Once people contribute to the project, they, too, are copyright holders. If a contributor does not approve of the change to the license, he or she should have the ability to remove his contributions fro...
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
jwesley: Don't reveal that you wouldn't mind the investment. Act like you have no want/need for it.
Once you open source, can you take it back?
bayes: If you own the copyright to the whole project (because all the other contributors assigned copyright in their contributions to you) you can presumably distribute it under any licence you want. But you can't prevent other people continuing to distribute it under the GPL.If (as seems more likely) the other contri...
Once you open source, can you take it back?
noodle: you would have to fork it, or build something on top of it the OS version.there are a lot of companies that have an OS version of something, and then a premium version, which consists basically of proprietary scripts and upgrades that hook into the OS version and improve it. they're not touching the actual OS ...
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
rishi: enough to get investment
Once you open source, can you take it back?
cperciva: At first I thought that it's his project, if he wants to un-open-source it, I guess he can. But then I considered the contributions that others have made to the project. Can he un-open-source those?No, but many companies (and the FSF) demand that contributors assign copyright to any open source contributions ...
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
cperciva: Be very careful. It sounds to me like the VC is considering investing in one of your competitors and they want to use you as 'due diligence' to verify whether there's enough of a market for them to invest in.If I were you, I'd go into the conversation with the working assumption that everything you say is go...
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
walesmd: Don't reveal the fact that they are calling today and you have no idea what you are going to tell them.
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
pumper: 1. go to the funded.com and do some research on them. 2. find out if you are talking to an associate or a partner. I wouldnt reveal much to an associate as they are almost definetly doing research. Either way, ask them up front what their intentions are 3. Decide ahead of time what you want to tell them. I wou...
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
invisible: I would only tell them your business model plans and that you're planning to make X amount this year (or that you made X last year). Don't go too far into your plans for 2009 unless they're public knowledge. New customers can be explained by $ amounts, not names. Only discuss your technology if it's commo...
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
sachinag: Seriously, if you don't think they want to fund you, then cancel the call.
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
jfarmer: I was going to type a long list of things to do, but it really boiled down to this: what can this call get you?Who is calling? Is it someone who can put a term sheet in your hand next week? Or is it an associate out to impress the higher-ups at the firm? How good is the firm itself? World-class? Mid-level...
Once you open source, can you take it back?
mdasen: Yes and no.Let's say I put something under the GPL and you download the source. Later, I regret that and don't allow more people to download the source. You (as someone who has downloaded it) can still forever use, transmit, etc. it under the GPL. So, people that want a copy of the source can get it from you...
SEO for web apps
qhoxie: http://www.seomoz.org/ is the best resource I know of. Lot's of good articles and discussion.
Who do you follow on Twitter?
yan: I follow a few people from the security industry (ahem tptacek), a few people from #hn and some cocoa devs out of interest (gemmell and others)I really should follow more, but don't have much time to seek out yet.
SEO for web apps
akronim: I'll take a quick stab at it: 1) hopefully that's landing pages. You don't have to worry about SEO on the internal pages that google can't see. 2) no, since I assume they just all redirect to the login page, and you want people to be able to find that i guess 3) pick one and 301 redirect to the other 4) Not i...
Once you open source, can you take it back?
tstegart: I don't believe un-open source is a concept that can exist under past versions of the GPL. If you read the GPL, it has no time limit on the license. And the contract also has no termination conditions except for one (which the people downloading/modifying the program control).Therefore, it appears an old vers...
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
swombat: "So, what can I help you with?""We're wondering how you've sized the market.""I'm afraid that's confidential information. I can't really tell you that until we get to know you better.""Umm, ok. How about your biggest name clients?""I obviously can't reveal that kind of information at this stage."(etc)Option 1)...
How-to Implement Machine Learning?
RiderOfGiraffes: Learn Python.
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
run4yourlives: Not Bad.I wasn't sure what it was all about until I actually completed the quiz and started looking at "rooms". You may want to fix that somehow.Also, I found some issues with the way the room objects were displayed (after you have a style)... seemed a little mish-mashed.Looks like a good thing to presen...
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
daveambrose: Why did you choose a lightbox for sign-up/login?
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
pedalpete: I too wasn't sure what it was all about, but (and most sites should take a hint here) you made it very easy to figure it out. I clicked the button and off it went.I'm curios as to why you went with two different styles though. When I start I have radio buttons and a submit on the right of the picture, then y...
VC are calling later today, how much should I reveal?
mooneater: Many thanks for the comments. The conversation was short and sweet, I heard them out, we didnt say too much, and they said to call them back if we want to pursue it further.
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
rmason: Now I know it wouldn't occur to most of the people on here but when I tried to take the quiz with IE7 the site hung as soon as I answered the first question. So 80% of your visitors will never know what it's all about.
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
biohacker42: I liked it a lot.But I did stop at entering my email address.Sites like HN have spoiled me with their fast and easy signup. I'd make giving one's email optional.Remember signup is one of the biggest hurdles any website has. The easier you make it the more people will do it.Especially if someone is just pl...
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
alex_c: Good implementation!I ran it past my gf (who watches a lot more home decoration shows than me), she didn't like the quiz results. She felt that they were all over the place and a bit contradictory.I felt that the quiz was too long :p I was also a bit confused about how many more questions there were - I didn'...
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
jollyjerry: I liked how I could immediately start using the StyleEngine. The navigation was great and I had no trouble using it. I thought the 'ruled out' could be a little more prominent so I could see my progress. Definitely a slick site though. Best of luck!
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
okeumeni: Nice implementation, good concept. My only suggestion you should not force people to take the quiz to get to the point of what is that the app does.One thing surprising is not the fact that the team met on HN, it is the fact that only David is a hacker. I didn’t know that HN was also a meeting spot for interi...
How-to Implement Machine Learning?
anuraggoel: http://pyml.sourceforge.net/
Review our startup: Mugasha - A better way to listen to electronic dance music
mixmax: Looks nice. I'm into this sort of music, so I'll use it for a few days and tell you if I have any problems/changes/ideas:-)
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
sidsavara: I liked it - fun! Tweeted itIs there a way to tell my friends my results? Not via email, I want a direct link to tweet/IM etc
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
mixmax: In the style engine I would move the options (love it, like it, etc.) over to the right of the picture, or underneath it. And make it look more like clickable buttons.The placement and design makes it look like a menu.
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
midnightmonster: This is clever, and I think it gets a pretty good read on me, but my real style (as judged by actual purchases) is cheap and/or used--so I'm probably not a target consumer here.In the room display (which is odd, but the problem is hard), my apache area rug showed up somewhat smaller than my great plain...
Review our startup: Mugasha - A better way to listen to electronic dance music
omarish: I love this.A couple of things.1.1 The invite a friend form is broken. 1.2 Could I invite multiple friends using the same form?2.1 Why are you searching for music like this at Amazon.com? I think you would have much better luck using beatport.com.I just started using this right now; I'll keep you posted when I...
How-to Implement Machine Learning?
aneesh: Machine Learning is not a language-specific thing. Maybe Python makes it easy out-of-the box (I haven't used Python -- I don't know), but you do it in whatever language you want.Many languages have modules you can just use. And of course you could just write your native implementation of an algorithm in you l...
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
mikexstudios: Very nice. Excellent design. The quiz was fun and easy to complete.I would like to see a list of specific styles and their representative pictures though. That way, I can see the names of other styles that I might like or dislike.Like biohacker42, I stopped at the signup.
Review our startup: Mugasha - A better way to listen to electronic dance music
alex_c: Looks great, but... I can't seem to get any sound out of it? I click the Play button, and absolutely nothing happens.It's disappointing, since I actually want to use it :pTried it in Chrome and Firefox 3 so far.Small side note: log me in right after I register! Especially if you don't require email confirmati...
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
Jasber: I thought it was confusing how the quiz controls changed after I answered the first question.You should make that consistent.Otherwise nice work.
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
NoBSWebDesign: Wow, I really like this site. Some of the graphics leave a little to be desired (the logo and the greater than sign on the "see your results" page). But, I really liked the flow and interaction. It did take me a second though to figure out what was going on when I started the quiz, because the buttons ju...
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
andrewljohnson: Pretty great, it was spot on with me.
Review our startup: Mugasha - A better way to listen to electronic dance music
Tangurena: The blog page gave me a 406 error in internet explorer (ver number 7.0.6001.1800. vista).
How-to Implement Machine Learning?
aschobel: Mahout looks like a really interesting project which has a bunch of Java machine learning algorithm implementations build on top of Hadoop.http://lucene.apache.org/mahout/You can glean some good idea from there. Hadoop has a bunch of python libraries if you want to go that route and write it yourself." In cla...
Review our startup: Mugasha - A better way to listen to electronic dance music
slig: Somehow, after I click to listen a track, it breaks the "back button". ff3.05 osx
Does this idea exist and who wants it?
rjprins: Ideas are not worthless! Good ideas can have potential, but as long as they're untested they're not worth money; they are worthy of pursuit.
Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
DJN: Lovely site.. well done
Review our startup: Mugasha - A better way to listen to electronic dance music
rjprins: The title of the 'forogt password' page is misspelled :)I love this by the way. I always listen to long trance mixes while progging..
Does this idea exist and who wants it?
gsiener: Sounds good until Yahoo! integrates it into their site...