angilly

At 3:30a France local? Alrighty. I still wait a lil bit ;)

The lack of a corresponding announcement on their blog makes me worry about a Twitter account compromise and a malicious model. Any way to verify it’s really from them?

As a REST enthusiast I was excited to read this and learn a new perspective but this section

> The “benefits” REST is supposed to introduce

Is one of the more egregious straw men I’ve seen in a while. Never once in my twenty years have I heard anyone say it’s nice because “you don’t have to read the docs” or “it works in a browser”

REST helps with lots from thinking through clean data models to helping ensure consistency within an API.

`Error establishing a database connection`

So is the joke that is this wouldn't happen if their blog was hosted on a dapp?

I let out an audible "wow" when I read the about page. So freaking cool. The implications and uses for this are incredible.

Yes!!! I've been waiting for this to be ready for a while. Psyched to integrated it into https://ChartURL.com !

Disclaimer up front; party in back: I'm about to discuss a freemium service that I built & operate related to this :)

I looked around for a solution like this for a while last year while building a new weekly email for Ramen[1]. I tried a bunch of services but ran up against a bunch of issues mentioned in this thread:

- GET query string character limit

- Stress around unreliability of free alternatives

- Need to be able to handle large spikes of image generation when sending emails

So I ended up building a service and turning it into a freemium product: ChartURL.com[2]

It is:

- Free for low usage w/ branding

- Based on C3.js[3] (for major flexibility)

- Supports datamaps.github.io[4]

- Has an API whereby you can POST huge datasets and get back a short URL that can be used in an img tag

- Supports retina & `srcset` via a `retina=1` option

You need to sign the URLs which means it's not a simple "just drop the data in the URL" but it's close.

I'll hang out in the comments here for a while if any of you want to ask questions about it.

[1] https://ramen.is

[2] https://charturl.com

[3] http://c3js.org/reference.html

[4] http://datamaps.github.io

I didn't think someone so young could die of "natural causes", but apparently even dying from the flu or sudden heart failure qualifies as a natural cause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_natural_causes

Ooof. Terrifying.

Thanks!

Ironically, we did not use Amplify for Amplify :)

We had a last-minute standoff with Facebook over some permissions issues. That delay meant that we weren't able to start asking our customers far enough in advance, and we could not delay our launch of Amplify because it was tied to announcing our Segment.com integration.

However, towards the bottom of the landing page, you can see how we were able to use the technique to trend on LinkedIn back when we launched our core product a couple months ago. Unfortunately, in that campaign, we were not tracking clicks correctly, so we can't share any hard data. Anecdotally, several companies told us they came across Ramen through that campaign, which is why we were confident that building and launching Amplify was the right move.

I look forward to a day when we can provide a great case study backed by data :)

EDIT: Forgot "announcing" before "our Segment.com..."

Hi HN,

One of the guys who built Amplify here. We posted on Product Hunt yesterday, so some of you might have seen us there, but for those that haven't, some background:

Amplify is something that we've had in the back of our heads for a while. We built a hack version of it for our own launches, and when we told other founders, marketers, and product people about it, we got lots of "huh... yeah that's awesome... can I use it?" type responses.

While there are other services out there like that allow "group social scheduling" like Thunderclap & GaggleAmp, Amplify differentiates itself in that it focuses on the product/customer relationship.

We've had success internally with a previous version of Amplify, and now we're happy to offer it to the world.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Looks like there's a pre-order campaign. Probably will ship early 2016 once they wash out all the... bugs.... :-D

Yeah interesting. They really fly through the product. The use of angles and animations makes it so that you don't even try to spend time trying to read what's on the screen. You just flow through everything really quick and get a holistic sense for what's possible.

I should clarify that I'm talking about web product demos here: screencasts of an application being used.

This happens a lot.

Mentor whiplash gets the founders all frothy that they need to do X, Y, and Z _immediately_ or their company will fall apart. Unfortunately, it changes to A, B, and C a week later after meetings with another 30 people. These founders aren't bad people. They just have no idea what they're doing. They got shoved into this crazy new accelerator experience, and they're being told by their heroes that they need to XYZ and ABC immediately, and they freak out and they make decisions too quickly.

Founders joining accelerators, do yourself a favor: the minute you think you NEED to hire one of those first employees, wait a week. Wait 2. Chat with some people informally. Don't setup a coffee meeting and ambush them with your whole team. Just breathe and take your time. Building your team is the most important thing you are ever going to do. This is not cliche. The process of building one, especially that initial core team, should be respected. Talk to some people. Do some contracts with them. Take it slow.

guybrushT, this sucks for you more than most given that you (and your wife!) were moving from another country. The founders should have been more careful. If you still wanna move to the states, I'd more than happy to introduce you to a bunch of startups in Boulder. We're always looking for developers here. Shoot me an email: ryan at ramen dot is.

It lets you log into websites using Yo.

<3 so much creativity out there.

Much easier to berate than create.

Haven't wrapped my brain completely around this yet, but I wonder if it's going to allow for some cool (and/or dangerous?) crossover write-once-run-in-browser-or-locally apps.

Not if you want to use the Obj-C bridge, though :)

"The primary access points for the Objective-C bridge are the global properties ObjC and $."

It's totally up to you. Some hackathons are themed, so a lot of times you'll want to hear presentations from various API sponsors first and then decide how to integrate. Conversely, in the case of http://ramen.is, we had planned out the idea for quite a while before going into the LAUNCH hackathon last November.

That's a very poor answer, Matt. The audience here is a hell of a lot smarter than that (and right now, very skeptical of your business). Showing up here was a nice gesture, but if you're not going to answer questions thoughtfully, it's not going to help you.

I appreciate that you're here to answer questions, Matt. Two questions if you're still around:

1. Are you saying that Dustin lied about submitting a drivers license? His blog post clearly states that he submitted a drivers license. So are you saying he is lying?

2. Why do you allow clients to pay you before you've properly identified the freelancer? That process seems completely backwards and asking for trouble. I would expect that a freelancer would need to verify their identify before they are allowed to even be listed in the marketplace, way before you would accept funds on their behalf.

Regarding the last line: Ramen just launched a few weeks ago, so the projects you see are all we have right now. Good feedback on the scarcity giving you the impression that they are dummy pages. They aren't. Ramen, Benefit & Velocity Kick are very real projects. Great feedback though. We need to get more projects into the system asap. Thank you!

PS. If you wanna submit a project: https://ramen.is/project_submissions/new :-D

FWIW, I thought for a while about whether or not to approve that comment due to it's flamewar-factor, but I approved it so I could write this response:

"Ehhh I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a “prick”. Yeah he certainly could have gone through our blog and read up on Ramen. He could have clicked on our project page and watched our video. I think the point of Peek, though, is that you can’t tell a visitor that their first impression (and/or their first confusion) is _wrong_. I think he brings up a lot of completely valid points about our homepage. We haven’t put enough energy into making our homepage something that succinctly describes what we do. He called us out on it. I give him kudos."

Yeah I hear you. We put ton of long form philosophical waxing onto our blog in the early days. We're working now on taking all that and boiling it down to homepage-speak. Homepages are hard ;)

Thanks! We <3 TL;DR's too :)

One of the Ramen founders here. We just launched a few weeks ago, so that's actually all we got right now. Feel free to submit a project if you'd like :)

It's going to take a lot of work :) However, contrary to popular belief, Kickstarter doesn't drive much traffic to projects with their own discovery features. From their own stats page [1], 72% of backers only back once. What I take from that stat is that most people are only going to Kickstarter for a single project that their friend asked them to back.

It may take a year, but we hope to establish a culture where people browse the Ramen Marketplace. We look at it like being a zeitgeist of what is currently being built.

In the mean time, what is "better" off the bat is The Kitchen -- the area where project owners can collaborate with the customers: vote on features, get comments on mocks, poll on pricing, etc.... This area gets opened up once a project hits it's goal.

Thanks for the kind words. We're really excited to get this off the ground :)

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

Haha :)

I know what you're saying, but what I've seen is that people are unjustly called this word simply for being inexperienced. They have all the drive and are willing to do the work, but get derided for being inexperienced. Those people, who are incorrectly being called a wantrepreneur, are the people we are talking to in this post.