Show HN: Silly weekend project sends physical postcards using Sincerely & Stripe | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Silly weekend project sends physical postcards using Sincerely & Stripe

mailmeme.com

2 pointsDanI-S6 comments

Author here! I had fun building this, and Sincerely and Stripe are both nice to work with. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions.

It's written in node.js using expressjs, backed by mongodb, styled with bootstrap and reverse-proxied behind nginx on EC2. My aim was to prove whether this is a nice stack to work with for rapid prototyping - and it worked very well.

>Meme

I dont think that word means what you think it means, and I think you should google it.

Meme: An image, video, etc. that is passed electronically from one Internet user to another.

Seems pretty appropriate in this case.

It looks like a fun idea. How do the postcards look in printed form? I imagine quality is not great?

A meme is a cultural unit. It can be an image or video, but also a belief or idea. It's like a gene, but in culture. So a "funny image with captions" might be a meme, but that neither means that every "funny image with captions" is a meme, nor that you can send all kinds of memes with that page. Thus the description is wrong.

Thanks! It's pretty silly, really, but it has been fun to play with. I only got switched to 'production mode' by Sincerely on Sunday, so I have yet to receive any of my test postcards - but their main business is printing people's photographs, so I think they should be fairly acceptable quality.

http://sincerely.com/

http://dev.sincerely.com/

'Meme' has become accepted terminology within various internet communities for a particular format of captioned image:

http://www.quickmeme.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme

Whilst the majority of them aren't particularly funny, this application of the word 'meme' makes perfect sense within both the dictionary definition and Dawkins' original usage:

"an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture"

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

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