illdave

I think there's something in that - how come you're running into the problem so frequently? Is the main use case that you're looking for something like people that look for flights to X and don't realise that they could save money by going to Y which is a short drive away? (E.g. a flight to Gatwick, when they could save 50% by going to Heathrow).

I think what you've got is pretty cool, but you've got some extremely stiff competition from the likes of Hipmunk, and (as of yesterday) Google: google.com/flights.

I also worry that your unique selling point (the fact that it helps to display hard-to-find airports) is difficult to word in an appealing way - who wants to go to hard-to-find airports? I'm not saying it's impossible though, but I think you'd benefit from finding a good way to word that. Good luck!

I would definitely be interested in that service, if just to try out minimum viable products and see if they're worth developing further - it would let you fail faster.

Thanks very much - I didn't know that banks did that (I'm pretty sure the ones I'm with in the UK don't), but that does sound pretty useful - I'll look into it.

I use Flipboard pretty much every day, I can't recommend it enough.

Yes, every so often, mainly to vote up "Show HN" posts - at peak times I think a lot of very valid Show HN posts never see the light of day, sadly.

Sorry if this is slightly off-topic (as it doesn't really necessarily improve "culture"), but it sounds like your bank could do with something like a password protected version of My Starbucks Idea: http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/apex/idealist?lsi=0&cat... (but for employees, instead - or maybe just your tech team).

I mention it because of the fact that you have people coming up with ideas that then get ignored. Having somewhere were ideas can go, and get voted up could be a small shift towards making those ideas actually happen.

Incidentally, Does anyone know if there's a commercially available version of that that isn't outrageously expensive? Starbucks' seems to be custom-built with Salesforce, I could be wrong.

To answer your question about working for non-corporates - I've spent a lot of time working at marketing agencies, the jobs I enjoyed the most didn't have a dress code and allowed me the time & freedom to actually implement the ideas I came up with.

Doesn't the URL need to blocked in robots.txt too? It'd be interesting to see if it does cause the site to drop out (even temporarily). Hopefully Google can patch this.

I actually think that design looks really good - don't forget, people that read HackerNews may be more inclined to see these sorts of themes around (as they're usually used by people just launching a product to see if there's any interest). Most users might not see the same theme that often, if at all.

Thanks, that's a great idea

Clickable: http://gotypecast.com/

Also, here's an example of a Typecast: http://gotypecast.com/casts/1

I really think this is an excellent, excellent idea - I'm perhaps not your target audience, but I can see instantly how it could be useful. It's definitely an interesting idea.

Not to be too self-promotional, but I built a site called HackerBuddy.com that could help you find a mentor (it's all free).

A lot of the advice here is about learning to code by building something for yourself, I completely agree with that approach. Pick a small web app that you'd like to build and try to build it yourself - when you get stuck, StackOverflow can usually help. I know that I learned much more by building something than I did being shown how to build something. And good luck!

Exactly. I've, perhaps foolishly, designed mock-ups and interfaces before where I've used icons instead of text explaining what it is, and I'd often think to myself "It's ok - people will probably click around to learn what that does". That's probably wishful thinking on my part.

I've only ever been helped by something in the "Help" menu through the search bar on a Mac (which I switched to about 2 years ago) - because it actually highlights with a massive arrow what you need. I don't remember finding anything useful with the Help nav on Windows.

Having said that - the HN audience is most likely a massively different audience to the sort of people that would ordinarily rely on the Help button - people like Joe.

I used Chartbeat on Hackerbuddy.com - it has customisable alerts which can go straight to your iPhone, so when traffic spiked I was able to react. The app hit the front page of Hacker News, and I was able to join in the conversation early on, which was really useful. It also got mentioned by Mashable, and Chartbeat alerted me and let me share the Mashable link around. It also monitors uptime and alerts me if the site is down - which means I get to reboot the server pretty much as soon as it happens. I'm not 100% sure real-time analytics is a requirement for everyone, but for me it's been extremely useful.

I think it takes a bit more getting used to, but I do genuinely like it. Good job, I love the white space.

Clickable: http://dayri.me

I'm not really your target audience, but I just wanted to say that, on an iPad, that tap-to-scroll-down is extremely satisfying. :)

It's also interesting how they admit that the results can be gamed if you know what the changes they've made are. While that's most likely always been the case with Google's algorithm (any search algorithm, really), it's interesting that they're publicly saying it.

http://knowem.com/ ?

While this is really promising - it's important to note that they experimented on this using only journal articles. It'd be interesting to see how it would deal with spam, as it seems like this is the sort of thing that could be gamed.

Also, you can download the priority inbox PDF here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

It's free, yep - I'm planning on open sourcing it once I've improved the code a bit, too.

Wow, thanks Moe! You're right, my typography could definitely be improved - I can't tell you enough how grateful I am for the mockup. I'll get playing with the CSS :)

By the way, I stole the colour palette from Adobe Kuler. For hackers that struggle with design, it's amazing (ColourLovers.com, too)

Ahh sorry - you're absolutely right, there should be some kind of confirmation first. I'll add that to v2 :)

Sounds like an awesome site, I'll have to give that a try :)

Thanks for the comments - I agree, the browse user list is pretty dreadful at the moment. I'll be looking at adding a search function as a better way of finding people in the next update. (And the close account function too)

Letting people search within the profile is a great idea, thanks! I'll try to add that in version 2 - I know the current categories are a bit restrictive, but that would be a good workaround.

Thanks, I like that idea - I'll add it to my list of things to do :)

Hi guys - I'm Dave, the guy that built HackerBuddy. Thanks for all your feedback - it's really useful. I'm planning on improving the site over time, and I'll be going through the comments and adding in any skills that seem to be in demand, I realise some of the options are pretty limited right now.

At the moment it doesn't email people when a match has been made - my thinking behind that was the person who requests the help would most likely already email their new match to ask for help - if you guys think it would make more sense for the app to email to introduce, then I could look at including that too. Thanks again for all your comments! :D