Hacker News Reader

dpapathanasiouon Want to build and launch an app in a month?

dpapathanasiouon Using Stripe to accept credit cards

a simple credit card invoicing system which lets you use your stripe token to collect payment from others, without being a developer

I created https://widgetpay.me/ with the same concept in mind.

dpapathanasiouon Nodejs and MongoDB, A Beginner's Approach

I've written about how to use callbacks in this context: http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=704

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: anti-procrastination community for startup founders

I'm your target market (single founder), and I'm interested in the idea, but not sure about signing up based on the (sparse) information provided.

Can you give us more of a hint about how it works?

dpapathanasiouon Lifestyle Startups Stigma

A small business, which has other connotations (i.e., unlikely to turn into the next big thing).

dpapathanasiouon Groupon Sets Nov. 4 IPO - $11.4B

It would be interesting to log the institutional buyers of it (hopefully none of the funds I own) and track how long they hold it.

dpapathanasiouon Slipping out of the Honeymoon Phase. Waking up Scared.

"Take comfort in the fact that the poor start-up founder and the rich corporate CEO both go home at the end of the day, eat dinner, watch TV, and go to bed."

Dinner, maybe.

The other two are not guaranteed.

dpapathanasiouon For Stanford grads, Jobs's commencement speech in 2005 was life-changing

Transcript and video here: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

dpapathanasiouon Ask HN: How to 100% turn off Google personalization for search?

Use http://scroogle.org/ instead

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: My table of tools for startups [Google Docs]

Here's a suggestion for the publishing category:

eBookBurn (https://ebookburn.com/)

which is run by my startup.

dpapathanasiouon Zero to Profitable - LiberWriter Lessons Learned

if you make something that's hugely profitable, expect lots of others to jump in too.

Yes, I know the feeling ;)

dpapathanasiouon Groupon IPO on hold

Can they go back and raise another private round? Who would buy in, with IPO off?

dpapathanasiouon Groupon IPO on hold

That won't work because they'll just attract the worst kind of cheapskate investor demographic, who'll move on to the next penny stock once the discount is expired.

dpapathanasiouon Groupon IPO on hold

And leave the G round investors, who put in $950 million in January (http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110110006746/en/CORR...), holding the bag?

It doesn't seem like something they'd do deliberately.

dpapathanasiouon The conversation that led to Ruby being called Ruby

Was that a happy coincidence after the fact?

I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

At least that's according to the man pages on my linux machine.

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: authors, here's a new idea for promoting your book

Here are some clickable links.

The site: http://bookhunch.com/

My blog post about its history: http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=620

The Digital Reader preview article: http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2011/08/30/new-crowd-sourc...

dpapathanasiouon If I were a single founder...

I'm curious about how investors viewed you: do you think they were generally more hesitant when you were alone, versus when you had a co-founder?

dpapathanasiouon DoubleRecall (YC S11) Turns Paywalls Into Advertising Dollars

This reminds me of the "Free Day Pass" salon.com used to have before it scrapped the idea entirely:

"So we put up an ad over the front door of the site. Subscribers wouldn't see it at all; other readers had to watch a 30-second video ad, then they got a 'day pass.'

"The day pass approach was beloved by the advertisers and hated by many, though not all, readers. More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/03/memories-paywall...

dpapathanasiouon $99 TouchPad a hit, as Ubuntu and Android ports emerge

It doesn't seem like it.

Best Buy, which touched off the deep discount, is out of them: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/HP+-+TouchPad+Tablet+with+16GB+M... and the next cheapest results (for $200) are all ebay listings: http://www.google.com/search?q=hp+touchpad&tbm=shop&...

dpapathanasiouon On Porous Paywalls

They seem to be using a simple cookie based scheme.

Everytime I've hit the paywall, all I had to do was delete my cookies and history. I could then reload the same URL (from the same ip address) and get back in for free.

dpapathanasiouon Awesome but commonly unknown Linux Commands

lsof is also great for monitoring network activity: you can have it tell you about all the tcp/udp connections, as well as who's attached to which port.

dpapathanasiouon 5000% Increase in the sale of baseball bats on Amazon.co.uk

I admit I laughed, but this comment belongs more on reddit than here.

dpapathanasiouon 5000% Increase in the sale of baseball bats on Amazon.co.uk

Awful; neither funny nor relevant, and disrespectful to boot.

dpapathanasiouon Public market newcomers getting crushed in sell-off

In that context, GroupOn's first-day IPO performance (assuming the IPO still happens) is going to be interesting.

dpapathanasiouon How I decided the price for my Japanese candy subscription service

Are there candies sold only in Japan that I can't find here?

Last time I visited Tokyo I couldn't really see a difference (then again, I'm not exactly a candy coinesseur).

dpapathanasiouon How I decided the price for my Japanese candy subscription service

Well, the candy sold at Japanese groceries in the US is no different from what's available in Japan (it's all imported from there, after all).

His service would only make sense for you if you're not within driving distance of such a store yourself.

dpapathanasiouon How I decided the price for my Japanese candy subscription service

In the case of the US, you can improve this further:

Find a friend who lives near a Mitsuwa, JAS Mart, or similar Japanese grocery (there are several here in NYC).

Have him buy the candy there in bulk (enough to fill all the US-bound orders anyway), and use the relatively cheap USPS flat-rate shipping to send it to US subscribers.

i.e., avoid buying in Japan (which is more expensive b/c of VAT) and avoid shipping from Japan; the chain groceries have done the hard work for you, so you can reap the benefits.

dpapathanasiouon Korea’s Tesco reinvents grocery shopping with QR-code “stores”

"You don't have to rely on people remembering 'Oh yes, I need to do some shopping' and going to your website."

In that sense, the wall scanning is a bit of a gimmick; the critical thing is to remember you want/need to buy something.

FreshDirect, for example, does have an iphone app, but without the visual reminder, you may forget to order.

"If you can be the middleman who standardizes the protocol which lets anyone buy anything and get it delivered to their home, just by scanning a QR code, you'll make a lot of money."

That's an interesting idea: tie a QR reader app to someone's credit card or banks account on one end, and to an automated shopping cart on the other (assuming the QR links back to a specific product, of course).

dpapathanasiouon The Facebook Phone

This reminds me of the ESPN phone: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/07/21/bodenheimer-jobs

dpapathanasiouon Sqlite and couchdb creators announce unQL. SQL for NoSQL

what's easier learn? The "proprietary" API of the dababase (like Redis, or MongoDB) or the limitations of unSQL?

That's what bothers me about this, too.

While I can understand the goal of making noSQL databases more accessible to people who already know SQL, as well as the need to unify the commands across all the different flavor of noSQL databases, there's something fundamentally flawed about accessing unstructured data via logic intended for structured data.