captainbenises

I've been using raygun for zoomin.co.nz and it's a solid bit of kit.

I've been running the prototype on my phone, and doesn't seem to use a noticeable amount of power at the moment. But you're right, all your friends have to be running the app for the detection to work.

I definitely don't want to be orwellian about it. That's why it's not about sharing your location, it uses your location to work out where you are, but it only shares who you are with, not where. If you want to find out where someone is, you'll have to message them using a seperate app.

Foursquare checkins support tagging who you're with, as do facebook posts, it's definitely a "single-feature" app that is already done by the bigger companies, but I think the ambient location aspect (detecting when you're with someone) and the focus on just 'Withs' might make it a viable app.

It's also a bit different from foursquare, since it's easier to share when you're 'With' someone at a private venue, which might happen more often to teenagers who aren't so often at a foursquare venue (bar, cafe, etc).

I answered below, but basically post your location every 15 minutes to a server, and if you and a friend are near each other, send a notification asking you to 'check-in" with this person.

It detects by sending your location to our server every 15 minutes. If you and a friend both send the same location, we send you a notification asking you to check in with your friends.

As to making money, I don't know - maybe using one of the existing in-app ad networks, with a $1/year upgrade to pro version with no ads?

So basically implemented with no technology? Maybe just an idea in your mind?

Ignore the crazy motherfuckers in this thread, jesus. Like I said on reddit, use phonegap, angular and maybe a simple ruby on rails backend if you need something on the server. That'll be the easiest way to build the app, and you'll develop great marketable skills.

Interesting article.

I think you can monetize it more than the hosting costs. More ads, better positioned.

Ahh, but your traffic is all from reddit, so maybe not. Damn adblockers.

Everyone is gonna give you advise on finishing and tenacity.

Have you thought of the opposite viewpoint - that it seemed like a promising idea, but once you fleshed it out you found out there's reasons why no one else is doing it?

I'd say you're doing it exactly right, keep working on projects, find out if they're dead ends or not, then move onto the next one.

If you want to improve your process, make sure you focus on prototyping and UI, and not worry about stuff like scaling.

Also - opensource your half-done projects on github, so you can have them as resume pieces.

Rails, devise, postgres, heroku, scss, backbone.js or angular.js. Stripe, Google Analytics, Xero, Dashing.

Have you considered doing the same thing as a spotify app - this'd be a great spotify app!

What do you mean "The same could have been said about places" - are you referring to foursquare's dominance of the places market?

Decentralized still means pods that the NSA can get a warrant for and access. The only real answer is a peer-to-peer social network.

http://bennolan.com/2013/08/22/social-network-over-webrtc.ht...

I don't understand how you're the top rated comment, but whatever. The reason the original diaspora team didn't make a success of the diaspora project was that they were new coders. They were way out of their depth, they chose cool technologies and got burnt (mongodb -> mysql).

It is impressive, but far less impressive than going from a suborbital lob to a moon landing in 9 years.

I reckon a good tool (that this psd.rd wouldn't actually help write, but), would be one that rendered an html/css page - and exported a layered PSD, so you could prototype an app, render it to .psd and send it to your designer friend to make it look rad.

To reply to myself, it looks like it's rendered client side - the json just returns a bunch of points and the heatmap must be canvas.

See the json here: http://s3-media3.ak.yelpcdn.com/wordmap/2/words/sf/dim-sum.j...

How does this work - is it rendered server side or client side? Very cool! Reminds me of the 2d historgrams and contour maps you can generate with R.

This is a good idea, surely someone has already made a good mailing list tool?

I think people who earn their fortunes through hard work are less likely to blow it like a lottery winner.

I think it'd be cool to have urls like:

http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/congo/kasai-occidental/ka...

I got this url, I'm not sure if it's correct (I don't read japanese sorry). :(

http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/japan/tokyo/adachi/

In theory there should be only one high street per locality. I didn't try the app with london urls (only berwick street which worked fine [1]). In theory if you can unambiguously write the address of a place without relying on the postcode, then you should be able to construct a unique url for the place.

1. http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-kingdom/greater-lo...

I'm using iconv to convert from utf-8 to ascii, but the transliteration isn't as complete as I'd like. :( Sorry it strips out prague addresses.

I tried using utf-8 urls but I couldn't work out how to handle them in rails.

Actually, looking at the search term you entered, I must have a bug, because the iconv output is correct, it definitely shouldn't be stripping letters out of the url.

Thanks. Just pushed support for that...

https://github.com/bnolan/nice-map-urls/commit/2fee561a61ede...

Source is here...

https://github.com/bnolan/nice-map-urls

Why is this on hacker news, I don't get it - most readers here would earn a decent wage - what's the interest in super cheap eating. Is it because people want to self-fund their projects and live as cheaply as possible while doing so?

Of course we will, just will it be in the next 100 years, the next 1,000 or the next 10,000?