LukeHoersten

https://github.com/ndmitchell/shake Shake is an awesome alternative to Make written in Haskell. It fixes a lot of the weird dependency tracking issues Make has ("my build broke and I don't know why!" "did you make clean?")

They ran this promotion before too. I tried to use it but later was told I couldn't because I'm a 3rd party payment aggregator. The trouble is they never said TPPA couldn't participate anywhere in the promotion. I felt tricked. I continued to try to set up processing with them as a TPPA but it was this long drawn out and manual process. The CEO ended up contacting me to apologies and see what the problem was. He told me they didn't disclose the TPPA restriction on the website to make it "simpler". After many phone calls with them I was never able to get set up. Stripe just came out with Stripe Connect and I was up and running in a matter of minutes. Not to mention support at stripe has never been so bad that the CEO had to contact me. In fact I think stripes real edge is their excellent support. I would never use anyone but stripe after seeing how bad it can be. Note I have no affiliation with either company. I'm a Chicagoan and want to see Chicago companies like Braintree succeed but boy what a poor job they did. Definitely not with $1500 IMO.

I really feel like Snap is a much more pragmatic approach to types. Where Yesod uses tons of metaprogramming and DSLs to make HTML and CSS type safe, Snap focuses on being a great Haskell system and HTML/CSS continue to be whatever they are. In practice this seems to be a good trade off because to get type safety in HTML/CSS the way Yesod does, you take on a lot of complexity and black magic.

The one place I wish I had better type safety in Snap is the SQL level. Yesod has Persistent which you can use with Snap but Persistent follows the same "black magic" design principles. I really wish there was a tool that handled PostgreSQL-specific query type checking and migration and that's it. No JSON/noSQL to SQL abstraction etc (which is cool if you want it but just a lot of if you don't). Once I pick a DB I don't want to constantly be generalizing away from it which is a conceptual overhead.

All the sudden I'm super super happy I've been collecting heap analytics all this time! Huge update guys! Great job!

I've been using mercurial and git for about 8 years and I've never had corruption problems from either. What are you doing to get corruption errors. Also, mercurial hashes just like git and has for a long time. Are you sure that's not enough to detect corruption issues?

Great focus on doing one thing and doing it well. Excellent work!

I'm really sad about this. I love Upstart and think it's an elegant init process implementation. Anyone more informed than myself care to summarize the key points in making the decision?

Nice work!

How did you get the domain abacus.com? Awesome brand name!

#haskell on Freenode is one of the best IRC channels I've ever used. Great people and very helpful.

It'd be cool if you could search a URL and it would analyse whether you need JQuery or not.

Awesome! Thanks for putting this together. The clearer the better.

I love the Mercurial community. We use Mercurial at work and I'm able to get instant support in IRC for any issue we have with an awesome signal/noise ratio. I'm glad Facebook is contributing back so much as well. My suspicion is that open source projects tend towards Git because of GitHub but I think a lot of companies who don't have the option of external code hosting lean towards Mercurial. All anecdotal observations of course ;-)

I'm glad you brought that up. I used to say explicitly free races are free but removed it for the sake of simplicity. Would you mind putting me in contact with your uncle. It'd be great to be in contact with someone who organizes free races. luke@racemetric.com

Thanks for all your great feedback!

What version of chrome? Can you see if there are JS errors in the console? View -> Developer -> Javascript Console?

Sorry about that!

Great question.

1) Snap is super simple. It's not overdone with metaprogramming etc so it's easy to understand and debug, but it's not so simple that you have to reinvent the wheel all the time.

2) Heist, the templating engine, is super simple and powerful. It subscribes to the idea that control flow should be in Haskell and HTML/XML in the template. It's proven to scale EXTREMELY well.

3) Performance. Snap server has really performed well in production for me. Low memory and CPU usage, fast, etc. Right now I'm just running on a micro EC2 and it's not breaking a sweat under the HN load.

4) Digestive functors is a GODSEND for handling forms. It really looks like Haskell's the perfect language for form processing when you use it compared to other frameworks. It also has features like dynamic lists w/ automatic JS which many other frameworks don't support.

5) Snap is the perfect blend of simple + featureful (framework + libraries). It easily competes with microframeworks in simplicity and the heavy weight frameworks when you need the functionality.

There's a great SO post with more detail from the authors of both Snap and Yesod: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5645168/comparing-haskell... Jump on IRC Freenode #snapframework for discussion. The community is great and really open to all frameworks and language discussion.

Nope right now I just store them as an array of tuples of points. I do plan to use more PostGIS though in the future! Any experience there?

Re: Edit: Good feedback. I'll do it. Yeah it's free for free races. I'll throw that in there. Thanks so much for all the great feedback!

Using Snap (http://snapframework.com/) has been great. It's extremely quick to develop because 1) Monads are an extremely natural way to sequence request handling 2) Heist is awesome for templating 3) I used other frameworks like Django in the past and Snap/Heist really just fits my tastes well. I'd suggest jumping on IRC freenode #snapframework to chat about it more.

Re: image: Definitely. Thanks for the feedback.

Currently Racemetric just supports uploading the CSV/Excel file but I plan to integrate w/ the live results APIs shortly (for chip timing etc).

Racemetric is a simple athletic race registration and credit card processing app. It's all written in Haskell (Snap, Heist) and JS on top of PostgreSQL. The idea is for race organizers to accept credit card registration payments within minutes instead of having to talk to sales people, get a merchant account, build a custom web page, etc. As a runner and rower, I'd like to have all my race results in one place and one format.

Of course I'm looking for customers as well as any feedback you have to give! Feel free to contact me directly at luke@racemetric.com.

This Show HN grew out of another comment thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7008532

Great suggestions. I've thought a lot about this area and feel I've struck a good balance for risk vs. low barrier to entry. People don't think about it but third party payment aggregation is extremely risky from a fraud perspective and many times that cost gets passed on to the users.

Unfortunately I don't think I can hold off on payment collection until after the race because organizers need the registration money to actually pay for the race facilities. Any suggestions there?

Thanks!

Snap and Heist. I've used other frameworks and languages before settling on Snap and couldn't be happier. PostgreSQL for the DB.

Agreed. There are many things I plan to do differently.

Active was one of the products that drove me to create Racemetric. Same market.

Thanks for the feedback. That's exactly my goal. I currently have it so you can create a race w/o signing up. Shoot me an email (link on the bottom of the website) if you don't mind chatting a bit more? Thanks!

I have a side project http://racemetric.com for simple athletic race registration and credit card processing (just released). It's all written in Haskell and brand new. Any ideas about how to specifically drive traffic would be extremely helpful. The idea is to accept credit card registration payments within minutes instead of having to talk to sales people, get a merchant account, build a custom web page, etc.

iOS in the plans?

Thank you so much!