Hacker News Reader

STHaydenon I'm curious, Hackers, what do you think of the reddit redesign?

love the new spacing... I was feeling claustrophobic before.

I still think it could use more space between the header and the first links.. and you could do more with the arrows with out over doing it too...

over all though it's a solid upgrade!

STHaydenon Blogging Horror

A little decent is always good. The comments are good too.

STHaydenon PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter

I also feel like asp was also super popular before php came around.

STHaydenon Teach yourself you to Hack in 6-9 months

think the people who are not hackers view the term "hackers" as more of a person who makes something from nothing. hacking in my mind has a lot of allusions to trying to get through a jungle with a machete. It's a rough quick way to get something done.

I don't think many on this site see their hacker status having anything to do with quick and dirty but I think perhaps the general populous views it that way.

STHaydenon Reasons Why Video Comments Will Work

they seem to work fine on youtube

STHaydenon 25 Beautifully Colorful Websites - Part 2

I think the problem is that people use 'design' as too broad a term.

In my mind 'Good Design' is more of a technical comment that talks about whether or not the piece follows the rules of design. If it follows the rules then it's good design.

Good Design is not necessarily beautiful or striking. A lot of designers (myself included) can get caught up in the mind set of 'beautiful' = 'Good Design' which is not the case. Most sites should avoid looking ugly but do not need to look beautiful. Also beautiful is often also associated with intricate. Making an intricate design is a different skill set then creating a sparse design. This keep a lot of beautiful sparse sites off these 'beautiful' lists.

Good Design is not necessarily usable. I think usability is most important for a website. A usable website focuses on grouping information in intuitive ways so that users can find the information when they need it. Information is not just text but buttons and actions as well. A usable website does not need to be beautiful or have good design.

STHaydenon Using jQuery to Produce Rich User Interfaces

for us non programmers jquery really is super easy to use.

STHaydenon Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?

http://www.flugpo.com

We have this Social Classifieds Network that is trying to inject more trust in to online classifieds but it's hard to get above the noise of craigslist and kijiji. Not a failure yet but not a success either.

STHaydenon Craigslist, Kijiji & Oodle: The Geographic Distribution of Classifieds 2.0

I love how these graphs erase the huge lead that craigslist has. it almost seems like a fair fight.

STHaydenon What is the minimum budget to promote a site?

I know of a couple places you can get listed for free and get decent traffic for early startups.

The Museum of Modern Betas always good for a couple hundred visitors. http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/

Killer Startups is an ass ugly site but can send some traffic. http://www.killerstartups.com/

Simple Spark has not sent me a ton of traffic but they have a nice looking site and will hopefully gain more of an audience. http://simplespark.com

I'm also looking for more ways to get the word out so the more advice the better.

STHaydenon Ask YC: Feedback on my webapp (semantic social bookmarking tool)

I think the idea is not to explain what the sites does but the problem it solves. the details of how it solves the problem are less interesting.

STHaydenon Live results from tonight's primaries on twitter

very cool

STHaydenon Ask YC: Good mySQL tutorial on linking tables

great resource. thanks!

STHaydenon Why doesn't Microsoft out-innovate Apple?

they just need a steve jobs like person. I don't even like apple but you need to have a guy who can make large decisions and also have a vision of the ways things need to work. If the people in charge are not already like that they will not jump at the chance to give up their power to some one else.

STHaydenon NYTimes hand codes their HTML

yeah. Khoi Vinh is a pro and so is his staff. NYTimes is a whole department unto itself. any all web company/department is going to do everything all hand coded.

STHaydenon Are all the good domains taken?

I often wonder ho this will scare over the next 10, 20, 30 years. It's hard enough now... by 2037 will there be any domain left?

STHaydenon Rackspace files an IPO, setting price by auction

I know back when I worked at sconex.com we hosted are application at rackspace with our images at serverbeach. I'm not sure about prices but I know our CEO would not have let them rip us off. And for the most part we seem to have fairly good customer service.

Though I'm just the user interface designer so take that as you will.

STHaydenon Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

http://wwww.booksiamreading.com

Books I Am Reading: A Book Reader's Tool

STHaydenon Apple to the Core: Why Steve Jobs is buying PA Semiconductor

I can't wait till multi cores actually makes a difference. I have way too many of them already.

STHaydenon Ask YC: How to avoid front-end clutter?

As a designer at <a href="http://www.flugpo.com">Flugpo</a> I deal with this problem all the time.

With CSS I really think the best answer is one monolithic CSS file. Add a index at the top and keep it organized by global, section and page: http://www.flugpo.com/FlugPo/styles/style.css

With JS I find breaking it down by section files alone with one global file to be the best way to approach it.

STHaydenon Poll: Are Slide and RockYou overvalued?

as far as I know they are all about getting ads in to all of those flash embeds. So largely I think this is a question of ad click through rates on the embeds. these days they seem to be poor but who knows if anyone will figure out how to fix that.

STHaydenon Post your Friendfeed ID here

http://friendfeed.com/sthayden

STHaydenon Ask YC: Anyone working on applications for Craigslist?

it's a hard problem in general because craigslist has such market share... when myspace was that dominant back in the day every one knew they would fall eventually because myspace was such a pain to use.

craigslist's problems are not so glaringly functional. They have safety problems with anonymous posters and scamers. They have issues with locking out people in the development community. I've heard a lot of complains about their forums.

It's hard to figure out the best way to attack though problems in a way that draws people from craigslist to a new service.

STHaydenon Ask YC: Anyone working on applications for Craigslist?

nope.. not a free ebay either... I like to think of Flugpo.com as a middle ground between ebay and craigslist. There is a large spectrum of security between ebay and craigslist and we are trying to fill that middle gap.

STHaydenon Ask YC: Anyone working on applications for Craigslist?

craigslist has an problem with anonymous posters. People often get ripped off because there is no good way to check on a persons reputation. Flugpo.com is trying to create a space where you can find out more about who the people are that you are trying to deal with.

Not a solution for all people but some people are more concerned with online safety then others.

STHaydenon Open Deals angel funding application (Is this legitimate?)

I went on an interview at their company a while back and they seemed legitimate. They are NY based with like 10 employees as of 4 or 5 months ago.

STHaydenon Ask YC: Anyone working on applications for Craigslist?

I'm in a startup working on a competitor to craigslist. We have a long way to go but so far I think we have good bones. We are hoping to work toward being more open for people to build on top of us.

http://www.flugpo.com

STHaydenon Ask YC: Feedback on startup: wirenode.com

as a designer I would say the front page is a nice start but there are some details I would clean up.

the "Build your own mobile web in 5 minutes." does not look great and probably needs to be an image.

I would make the text box to "Mobilize your blog" bigger and more of a focus of the top of the page as it feels a little hidden.

The fade to white around the images in the yellow box do not look great. I would take off the shading and perhaps just use a darker yellow border or something. Images that look crisp are always the best.

Other wise it looks great and was super easy to signup for. On the first occasion the "phone emulator" got stuck on my mouse and I could not close it with out refreshing the page. I have not been able to reproduce it though.

STHaydenon Y Combinator's 2005 Summer Founders Program: A Complete Dud

I think it's pretty clear that Reddit started development before digg was well known. So it's hardly a rip off though perhaps not the winner in that battle.