aiurtourist

I'm no expert, but I'm very sure that the difficulty in finding items in a retail store is by design.

If every customer walked in, grabbed exactly what they needed without looking at anything else, paid and left, the stores would probably make half as much money. It's common knowledge that "big brand" items in a grocery store go on the eye-level shelves because the distributors have paid more, and I remember reading that the ends of the aisles ("caps" maybe?) are super-primo real estate - that's why the ends always have Pepsi and Tostitos and big-name items. It's probably the same reason there are "impulse items" in the aisle when you check out. Oh, hey, yeah, I do need some gum, why not buy a pack.

If you're thinking of making this an app, consider two processes:

Mine:

1. I realize I need something and don't know where to find it. 2. I look around for a person who looks like they work here. 3. I ask said person.

Yours:

1. I realize I need something and don't know where to find it. 2. I magically and suddenly remember, "Oooh, there's an app for this that I downloaded last night when I was looking for apps that would improve my shopping experience." 2. I pull out my phone from my pocket. 3. I unlock my phone. 4. I navigate around my phone looking for the app which takes a while because I can't remember the name of the app or the icon. 5. I open it and wait for it to load. 6. I wait for geolocation to warm up while it tries to figure out what store I'm in. 7. I finally get a button that says "Ask now." 8. I click the button and wait. 9. A squawky voice attempts to help me, but by now I've forgotten what I'm looking for.

I'm really not trying to shoot you down, but I think you could find a bigger problem to work on. :)

> What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this?

Yes. Go do that. Like, right now. Find people you don't know who you think are your target demographic and ask them. They're probably in the grocery store right now.

You'll come back thinking (A) that nobody really this problem, (B) that everybody has this problem, or that (C) nobody thinks they have this problem and you need to show them that it is a problem and that, once you do, you'll change their life forever. B is probably a little delusional. C sounds really time-consuming and expensive.

Nice job! Is this on PyPi?

It took me a few minutes to realize that this is about iOS data synchronization.

Good name, and good choice of frameworks. It would be nice to see a complete example including the iOS integration bit.

What makes you different from Parse?

You should lead with a feature matrix comparing SNEBU to rsync because you really need to differentiate yourself from rsync, which has been the standard for 15 years.

Everyone writes some kind of recursive backup tool, just like everybody writes their own templating system and TODO list manager. Set yourself apart.

Cute. You might be on to something.

At Google there's an internal badge system that lets anyone award any badge they create to anyone else. Once it went self-service it became really successful. The badges appear on corporate profiles. Someone even figured out that you can post funning badges on Larry and Sergey's page.

I don't mean to sound cynical, but are you sure this is a problem worth solving?

Yes, it's a problem, but it's along the lines of my microwave getting dirty over time, or needing to fill a car tire occasionally. I don't need or care about a service that only cleans microwaves or only fills tires.

If you want to improve on brick-and-morter, feet-in-the-store retail problems, why not, say, show me a big pinterest-style list of everything in every grocery store around me? That would save me some time instead of perusing up and down aisles and not being sure whether I should visit that farmer's market that sometimes has interesting stuff.

If you want "least amount of cruft," which is strictly perceptual, then Debian is the way to go.

If you want Linux and you simply to get work done regardless of ideology, Ubuntu is the way to go.

MailChimp does something similar, too. We found that a surprising number of recipients display images by default in email.

If I use this, will my app be rejected from the App Store?

There's lots of information on how to do backups. For starters, back up your data and back up your code. If you're using a VPS, see if you can take a snapshot as a backup.

Above all - I learned this the hard way - make sure you can restore from your backups. Try a full rebuild from your backups. You'll learn a lot.

The first step is admitting that you can't optimize for every direction. Facebook has a motto, "Done is better than perfect," which I used to think was cheesy, but realized is quite brilliant. "Perfect" leads to satisfaction, but "done" leads to revenue.

Say you want to try alternative payment processing methods on your site. Your site it tightly integrated with PayPal, and you want to add Stripe. You could (A) spend 1 day to bolt on Stripe with a hack in the HTML, (B) spend 4 days and add enough views to the frontend to make Strip work in a non-disgusting manner, or (C) spend two weeks and refactor the entire backend with a generic interface that will handle an infinite number of payment solutions.

All three lead to success, but you can't optimize for both time and perfection. Set a time budget. Leave breadcrumbs for the next programmer. Instill a culture that says, "Our code isn't perfect, we know this, but we do what we can with what we have." Done is better than perfect.

Cute. This looks like the code from an existing Chrome Experiment.

They have special deals with some sources, such as Associated Press. For example, search Google News for "site:google.com" and you'll see addresses like "http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...

Ideas are cheap. Execution is hard.

If you want advice, ask people you don't know. Friends will always tell you that the thing you're building is cool because they're your friends and that's their job. Strangers will give you cold, honest feedback, and that's what you need.

You'll need to outline a bit more of your technology stack before anyone will be able to help you.

You're driving along a road and you notice a pothole. You pull over to the shoulder, put your hazards on, open up the trunk, take out a reflective vest and tape measure, then you begin to analyze the pothole. You spend an hour analyzing the depth and formation of the pothole and determine that the cause is due mostly to poor mixing of asphalt. You call the town hall and learn that the road construction crew uses a Caterpillar BG500E wheeled asphalt paver. After some extensive research you determine that poor mixing occurs from the inferior design of the BG500E's auger and that upgrading to the BG600D with its improved auger would cause better asphalt mixing and produce paved road conditions less conducive to potholes.

By now it's 9:30pm. It's dark and cold. You realize what your original purpose was: Dinner with friends. That was two hours ago. You missed dinner, but hey, you got some satisfaction.

The above was more of an analogy about Yak Shaving than Rabbit Hole Syndrome, but there are parallels. Like you, I used to be obsessive about details and solving subproblems. I used to come home from work and work on my own side projects for similar reasons as your own.

But then an advisor said something like, "You need to focus. If you want this thing of yours to succeed, you have to focus on making it succeed. Nothing else should matter." So I stopped my side projects and I became so effective at building our product that my employees wondered if I ever slept.

Stay on target. Make it to dinner.

What's the problem that you're trying to solve?

This is wrong for a variety of reasons.

First, you should never accept angel investment from non-accredited investors (i.e., individuals with a net worth of at least one million cents).

Second, the real value of the investors is their network. In this case, Maciej Cegłowski's network is a collection of links featured in an indexed, polished, simple-to-use product. Why accept money from him when his network is already available for free?

Third, seeking outside investment prior to building a prototype has been heralded as a path to madness. You should at least have some sort of Bootstrap-based splash page on a .io domain before you accept his sizable investment.

The payment UI looks unfamiliar and slightly confusing.

   https://gethelium.com/static/images/sales/overlay.png

* Why are the labels _inside_ the input field? It's surprising when you can edit _some_ text in a well but not all of it.

* Why is my email address under billing?

* Why is the CVC field on a different row?

* Email, name, and street address fields will contain long data. Neither my street address or email address will probably fit in there.

* Why is the year only two digits? Y2K led me to believe two-digit years means accidental ICBM lanches.

Also, I spent fifteen seconds wondering why I couldn't flip the switches underneath "Effortless for everyone" on https://gethelium.com/. I even tried dragging the switch nub left and right.

I hope this helps. This looks like a really useful service. I'd love to look at the integration documentation (if there is any).

ImpactJS is awesome. Can you shed some light on how successful it's been?

If financial independence is your only goal, you've stared a startup for the wrong reason.

Most undoubtedly. Given my non-expert outsider cursory knowledge of North Korea, the hotel will likely never be finished and will remain for show. They'll probably finish the main lobby and a handful of rooms — just enough to give the impression of how grandiose it is. Keeping up appearances.

Also, consider what happens to concrete being exposed like that for two decades. The concrete isn't meant for decades of weather, it's meant to be enclosed. The concrete degrades and becomes unsafe. Same thing has happened with a lot of the Dubai skyscrapers whose construction was halted, and they were only exposed for a few years (so says a Dubai contractor friend).

Agreed. Does anyone know the backstory?

As much as I love to see people iterate on the boring old command line, this will never catch on.

1) It's too difficult to remember all the tricks to make it useful, and the cost of memorizing tricks that I saw in the first screencast isn't worth the efficiency it provides.

2) It's too difficult for new users to remember the tricks that are supposedly "better." It's a lot like Python vs. Perl -- Perl is a really smart and clever language, but you can type just a few characters more to write Python and it'll be a lot clearer as to what's going on.

The one exception to all of this is the MySQL stuff I saw. The MySQL prompt has sucked for a long, long time, and building SQL queries is something you do iteratively anyway.

All of the above said, I still think this is pretty neat. But I won't use it.

This is my secret to interviewing and speaking as well. On the inside I repeat, "Fuck this guy" or "I could beat the shit out of everyone in this audience" even though I don't truthfully want to cause harm to anybody. It helps surpress the deer-in-highlights fear resulting from being in the spotlight.

I think realizing that .xxx domains are now available was one of the more useful results of me reading this article.

Whoops! Guess I'll read more carefully, then.