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Comment by burnout1540 | Hacker News Reader

Okay, I'll start. I'm 24 and living in San Francisco. I'm a programmer but would like to find another technical person to work with. I have three ideas for a startup:

1. An easy software solution for multivariate testing web pages. 2. A bid management tool for PPC. I'm thinking something like www.efrontier.com, but for small and medium sized businesses. 3. Totally different from the top two, but I'm interested in a personalized (or well-balanced) news site. Findory would be the best comparison. Of course, it failed, so I am a little bit hesitant and I think relying on advertising as your only revenue source is very risky. If you're interested in the latest technology that could be used in this area, check out http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hinton/absps/sh.pdf

My email address is in my profile.

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My email address is in my profile.

The email address in your profile is only visible to you and the YC management.

Then, when editing one's HN profile, it could indicate it better (whether the info is shown publicly or not).

What kind of site calls a feature "noprocrast" without giving any detailed information about what it does?

A site for the kind of people who'd try it to find out.

Actually, it is explained in News News (http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html), but maybe most people don't bother looking at that.

I honestly like it better without any explanation. It reminds us that HN is not for everyone, but only those who will actually dig to find stuff out. I googled those features after I joined to learn about them, and I like it better that way.

But News.YC prides itself on having both a terrible user interface and a terrible user experience.

What kind of site calls a feature "noprocrast" without giving any detailed information about what it does? Only news.yc!

--edit

I wonder why I am being modded down. Maybe I said it too sarcastically. News.YC really does have a terrible interface. Look at the account settings page-- imagine yourself as a user who has never been there before. It's confusing and poorly documented. I love this site for the content and the simplicity, but Paul Graham is a programmer and spent very little time on the user experience, which makes sense. I don't blame him.

But it is still a bad interface. I'm pretty sure 99% of people who fill out the "email" field expect their email to somehow be visible to other users. It's right next to another field that IS visible.

Think of it as a filter for non-technical types.

Shiny graphics do not a user experience make.

Of course not. Craigslist has an amazing masterpiece of an interface and uses no icons/pictures at all.

There seems to be some disagreement over what we mean by 'user interface' and 'user experience'. Those who downmodded you probably thought 'I like using YC news just fine thanks.'

When I hit the little ycn button on my dash, i'm immediately greeted with a list of interesting articles, flanked by comments that are worth reading. That's the most important part of the user experience for us, so here we stay.

Ah. The content here is great. I'm not denying that YC is awesome.

It just has a sub-par interface. Compared to other sites, it has a terrible UI. It's not very user friendly, and it could be much more so.

Don't sweat the small stuff.

Yeah, I'll add a note about that.

By the way, while we are on this topic--can you confirm that passwords are not stored in plain-text?

Sure. You can see for yourself in the source: http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc1.tar

On disk at least. They're temporarily logged to memory in the clear:

  (def good-login (user pw ip)
    (let record (list (seconds) ip user pw)
      (if (and user pw (aand (shash pw) (is it (hpasswords* user))))
          (do (unless (user->cookie* user) (cook-user user))
              (enq-limit record good-logins*)
              user)
          (do (enq-limit record bad-logins*)
              nil))))

It might be good to pull the pw out of the record list:

  ...
   (let record (list (seconds) ip user)
     ...

Ok, I took it out. Turns out nothing later ever needs the pw anyway.

I hope you are not reusing an important password for this site.. Even if they are hashed on the disk, they are sent insecurely to the server when you log in.

Ahhh well now I feel stupid. My email address is npomara at gmail

I'm 30 in San Francisco. For your first idea, if you are talking about website "performance survey" / "A/B" type testing then you have some wicked competition based out of SF.

I agree that advertising is not the way to go. However end users have demonstrated that they are not very willing to pay for services unless its to meet girls ;)

Corporate, on the other hand, doesn't seem to want anything for free...

Yes, there's definitely a lot of competition for the website testing idea and it would've been nice to start on it a few years ago. But I think that a fragmented market is an entrepreneur's best friend. There is no industry giant that you will always be compared to and will be crushed by. More importantly, a fragmented market also indicates that there is money to be made.

I don't know what you have been considering doing with testing, but off the top of my head I don't know of anyone doing content A/B testing (ie: which version of content is more effective). I would expect to see a more granular, dynamic approach in website verbiage as NLP matures. For example, at my day job they argue semantics endlessly. Tailoring a websites' grammar to the user could increase effectiveness. This is an area I consider fascinating and wouldn't mind chatting more about it off line if you like.

i just spent past 7 years working with companies doing your #1 & #2 ideas. i'm a product mgr, not a programmer person so I am happy to share with you my perspective. send me an email:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mgmcmahon mgmcmahon at gmail

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