Show HN: My 1-week project, OpenCombinator.com | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My 1-week project, OpenCombinator.com

opencombinator.com

24 pointsnoduerme21 comments

Anyone can be a mentor or investor in some walk of life. Anyone can be a founder, creator or student in another. Anyone can mod their own, or someone else's news list.

A tool without restrictions, operating on a finite set of rules. You decide whether it evolves to be used for good or evil.

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Interesting idea but to be honest, the color palette is quite distracting - there's too much going on.

* the yellow background for the news items is a show stopper - the text will look just fine on it's own!

* the two-tone peach/cream background for the main content blocks is distracting. instead try a subtle tone for the left section and the page body color for the news section

* the dark grey background + blue headers and footers is not cohesive. make the background a very light grey or creme color (#f8f8f8 for example) and if you want the headers and footers to have a color, I'd make them extend the full width of the page or else make them flat (no-gradient)

Of course, this is all my opinion, and you get what you pay for right? :)

Good luck with this interesting idea!

Thanks. I pro'lly gotta work on that. I get a little carried away once I start CSS'ing.

Sure thing! It's about iterating a piece of work and revising.

Cool project, I played around with the CSS a little bit myself but didn't have as much time a I thought (running late right now) but I'll still show you what I came up with so far just so you can see an alternate perspective.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/U4uO8.png Color Scheme: http://i.imgur.com/6oUyx.png

If you like it and actually want to implement it, shoot me an email (proexploit[at]gmail.com) and I'll clean up the CSS and send it to you, this was all done in firebug and turned out messier than I intended.

That looks quite nice.

Yeah, it looks great. Thank you for taking the time and interest to do something like that. I emailed you, but in case it hit your spam (probably), it's from info@opencombinator.com

I read everything on the page, but have no idea what it means.

I've poked around and even created a SubCombinator. But, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the site offers. In some aspects its feels like Hacker News with Reddit sort of categories.

Then you have this Expert/Student system. Honestly, I'm not completely sure I understand it. I see that I can set myself as the expert for a SubReddit...I mean SubCombinator.

"At the end of every month, the top five Sensei (advisers or investors) in each area will receive the proposals of the top ten Grasshoppers (entrepreneurs or activists), based on points earned for intelligent posts and comments that month."

So, this didn't make sense to me until I registered. If I understand correctly, you 'pre-fill' a sort of pitch/proposal that you want to be sent out. Then based on your activity in the site it will be emailed to the 'Experts' of the SubCombinators where you've earned the most points recently. Does that sound right?

Right. You fill in your proposal, which is kept hidden. If you're in the top 10-rated "grasshoppers" in a subcom, at the end of the month, your proposal gets packaged into a nice email that goes out to just the top 5-rated "sensei" or experts.

Have you shared this with people who would be experts and actually interested in receiving proposals? I guess I don't fully understand how my activity in a news sharing site makes me important to an investor. You're basically trying to reward people who participate and submit links with the idea that their pitch will be seen by an investor who is following a topic you contribute to.

Its definitely an interesting approach. And there's some work to be done on the UI, education and flow within the site. You just need to make sure there's real value for everyone involved.

I have, and there are a few investors who are waiting to see what happens here. Myself included. It's got to be an organic process; hopefully some people with great ideas will start posting and sharing their concepts, and it will snowball. Although I should stress I don't see this as a primarily IT-oriented site, it could become anything, or go in any direction, depending on who gets involved. In a lot of ways it's an experimental, theoretical model. I have no idea if it will really work, but I can imagine a lot of interesting proposals being collected that would be interesting opportunities for investors, who in turn will have to work to get their ratings up, in order to see those proposals.

Don't use terminology like Sensei and Grasshopper as it confused me with what the idea even is. Plus it means you've got a lot more text with all the brackets. Although I do not like the colour scheme, it's really distracting.

Make it pretty. I cannot think when I see that page.

I don't understand what an upvoting news site has to do with advisors or entrepeneurs. How does the right column relate to the left?

I understand that Ycombinator has hacker news, but the two aren't tied to each other very closely.

YC is great, but it's essentially closed to other investors and, while the program is merit-based, it's a closed selection process.

HN is nice because there's a meritocracy at work; the concept is to allow that type of meritocracy to force both investors and entrepreneurs to have to work for one another's attention. The site is just a conduit for BPs or proposals from the most motivated idea-people to get into the hands of the most motivated action-people in any area. And every area can be broken into two parties with a mutual interest in industry news, who need to sift through each other to find the best people on the opposite team to work with. So; this is just an engine based on that concept, with up/down votes serving as an objective determinant every month.

What the fuck was that about?

I'm so sorry to speak so frankly but I thought this time my unvarnished first impression would be useful

The overwhelming screaming in my head was

What the fuck was that about?

Make it clear what you are trying to achieve. fewer distractions. one goal

Good luck

Here's my take on on the design (which should be priority #1 if you think the idea is any good):

Minimize the number of font styles. I'm counting over 10 distinct size/face/color/decoration combinations. Cutting that down to 3 or so will reduce the ugly tremendously.

Also try to figure out what you want users to read first, next, etc and figure out a structure where that feels more natural. At the moment, I'm totally confused when I look at it.

I'd also try to come up with a more concise description of what the site does. After reading the description on the left, I'm still kind of confused.

For the design part, go through this ( http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-web-design-ux-crash-course ) post by Paul if you haven't already. That really is a crash course in design and should help you get started.

After that, http://www.blueprintcss.org/ (or http://960.gs/) and http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes

Advertising that you only spent one week on it hardly makes me want to invest my own time in it. It sounds like a website thats going to rot away in the same timeframe.

Okay. CSS and color scheme need to be improved. Definitely need to think of how to explain the message more clearly. Nicer graphics, easier-to-read fonts. Check.

What does everyone think of the idea of a user-controlled, up-ranking newsgroup where the highest rated investors receive the proposals from the highest rated entrepreneurs? I know the site isn't beautiful. It's a concept. I just wanted to get the bare bones framework in place and launch it... Of course I want it to be pretty, but I'm more concerned about whether the idea can hold water. I spent a week on it because that's how long it took to write the code; the "graphics" took about an hour. I want to test the function before I spend time beautifying. I want to know if this idealistic model actually pans out and rewards the investors who take the time to rank on it.

Specifically, at the end of the month, I want to see the quality of the proposals that go to investors and whether we get any interesting startups funded out of it. Hopefully in green tech, non-profits/NGOs, etc, as that's where I'd really like to see this go.

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