jhubert

I drive a 2009 Subaru Impreza Outback. We bought it used recently right before our first kid was born. It's a solid car with plenty of power but nothing all that fancy.

The reasons we went with a Subaru, besides it being well priced, were:

- AWD so we can drive to Tahoe without chains in the winter

- Extremely reliable engine

- Plenty of room and flexible storage for skis, bikes, roof rack, trailer etc.

Basically, it's a great car that we can get dirty and use to go play outside.

I'm not really talking about just handing out the code... although I suppose it could just be open sourced. That being said, I'm not opposed to the company being taken in a different direction.

Of course, I realize that by telling people to contact me on about.me there is very little chance that a discussion will happen on Hacker News and this post will probably end up buried. :|

The intent of the post is to start a conversation and to have people take another look at YUI. After using jQuery for years in both small and large projects, I took another look at YUI when 3.4 was released and I've really been impressed. I don't think it gets the credit it deserves, mostly because YUI 2 was such a beast. I realize I'm missing a lot of concrete reasoning in the post, but that's primarily because I didn't want this to be a conversation about the right and wrong ways, or simply a syntax comparison.

A student from Georgia Tech did a fantastic job with one of these last month as well. He called it CodeBook:

http://danielchasehooper.github.com/CodeBook/

You guys might want to think about working on it together. His version includes the introspection on an item in the canvas as well as some other great things like inline, as you type JSLinting.

Thanks. It was a bit helpful. I'm mostly curious what other people do because it feels like something that has been done over and over again.

Thanks. I definitely will. :)

From an execution standpoint, I fully agree with you. That's what I did when we first found out that the domain had been registered and saw the site he had put up. I collected information and then left it alone to focus on our March 1st launch.

Now that he is being more aggressive, it's rude and a nuisance. He setup a similar facebook group to ours with a hyphen in the name instead of a space; He is tweeting about it and it's showing up in our name searches; etc.

Also, he is offering something similar to what we are offering as a (very inexpensive) service, for free; Which is just annoying and potentially confusing.

Trying not to focus on it. Serenity Now. :)

Yeah, I started filing it this morning before writing this post. Trying to cover all of my bases. :)

Agreed about Lawyers. I am happy to spend money on them as necessary for the right things, but this seems like something that could be very lengthly if not approached the right way... and one thing I know about hiring lawyers is that long problems have big bills. :p

Yeah, I like this route a fair bit. I'd like to think that I'm not the only one who gets frustrated by people who would do this type of thing.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion. :)

My hesitation on something like this (and also the reason I didn't put our company in this post) is because I don't want to give him any unnecessary attention until necessary. Plan of attack being worked out now...

Yeah, just contacting him and asking him what's up was my first reaction. I want to make sure that's not a bad idea or that I don't say something that could complicate things in the future.

We have a company that is registered with the same name, and I'm filing for a trademark right now.

According to the lawyer that I spoke with, I think I'm ok from a legal stance because you're not actually buying a chance to win 10k. You're buying a product (advertising on TweetFolk.com), and I'm simply selecting an idea from the pool of customers and making an investment in them.

From an accredited investor point of view, I don't think that applies. I've spoken with a number of VC friends of mine and they said that I'm in the clear. I can give 10K to anyone I want, from my wife to a random stranger I've never met before. The terms are just based on the agreement.

As for shaking off $10K being a very long time, I disagree. Many startups kick off with 10K and make a profit in their first year, especially in the product space. 10K is enough money for a young person to leave their job for a few months to build an invoice suite or iPhone application. It's just enough freedom to let you move on your idea.

I just wrote a plugin (Gem) for Ruby On Rails that makes system level A/B Split Testing really easy and uses Google Analytics as the dashboard.

I'm coming at it from the software side, but if someone (read: You) was interested in approaching the business / advisor side of it, I would be happy to talk about partnering up.

Personally, I think A/B testing is going to get more and more important in the coming / months, years. So being where you are with the knowledge you have is a pretty sweet place.

The project I put together is here: https://github.com/jhubert/rails-split-tester

I'm currently using it to test this (silly) site: http://www.tweetfolk.com

If you're interested in talking more, just get in touch. :)

Cheers, Jeremy Hubert @jhubert

I replied but clicked the wrong link, so the reply is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2078872

Thanks for the suggestion and support. :)

A friend of mine actually bought some pixels off of the MDHP back in the day. Apparently the guy who started it even sold all of the customer details to outside advertisers for money. My friend received a bunch of spam to the email address he had used. Bad pool.

Personally, I like that simple ideas like this can be the seed funding for future projects. Not just in currency, but also in education.

Thanks for the feedback Rubyred.

Personally, I think the idea is relatively juvenile but I never intended for the headline to sound spammy. I'm just excited.

As for the "Awesome. I love the internet" portion, I'm not sure I can change that one. I do love the internet. I can't think of any industries where something like this is possible... well, no other legal ones.

I ran a large (1+ million member) community website back in 1999 - 2000 and realize that every community has their style and voice. I'm sure given more time on HackerNews I'll learn to speak with the one that's appropriate for the audience.

The 8 large squares along the top row are now $100 each, and I had originally started everything out at $10 and $50 until people told me it was way too cheap.

So, the math worked out something like this:

(15 * 10 + 2 * 50) + (26 * 15 + 3 * 100)

From my point of view, there are a number of things that are "unfinished" about the site and they don't all have to do with technology. Here are a few.

1) Figuring out the right price to charge for the squares is something that probably would benefit from some more thought.

2) There buying process is pretty rough and there is very little text to reassure the customer as they are going through the checkout process.

3) The incentive structure is very rudimentary. People have to get it in order for them to see the value, and that takes a bit of imagination. The initial sweep of squares seem to be purchased from either the "it would be neat if this takes off" or the "i have some extra money in my paypal account" people. I could spend a lot more time working out this part of the site.

4) The design is, heh, rough.

As for the technology, I'm happy to go into it in more details but I'll summarize here for brevity:

  - Ruby on Rails 3, hosted on the free Heroku cloud stack (Ruby, PGSQL)
  - Paypal handles the payment processing and invoicing
  - Basic REST Twitter API for pulling down the twitter account details
  - Twitter OAuth is used to handle the optional account signup
  - Twitter's S3 account serves up the avatars, although I'll probably have to change that
  - Each purchased square is assigned a bit.ly URL that I use for tracking clicks and surfacing statistics to the owner of the square
  - Google Analytics for the tracking
  - Page caching is used for each of the pages to minimize server load

Total Cost: $0

Thanks Veb :)

Thanks for the feedback jayzee.

I didn't post this to drive traffic to the site, although I am aware that it would be a side effect. The only reason I included the URL is so that the first comments wouldn't all be "what was the site?"

Lame and Derivative: As I mentioned in my previous comment, I don't think it's an amazing idea... it's just an idea. As for derivative, isn't innovation the art of taking old things and reworking them into something new?

JohnnyBrown:

You're not missing anything. As jolan said, it's basically the twitter version of "The Million Dollar Homepage"... minus the million dollars. :p

I'm also not saying this is a good idea or that I would like everyone to start putting things like this live.

The whole point of this post (which I suppose I understated) is that I generally have ideas that are much more interesting and complex, but their complexity causes even more doubt and I never launch.

In this case, I stopped over-thinking it and launched a very simple idea with a layout and model that I wasn't very happy with. For this, I was rewarded by getting money in my account right away and now I am watching the trends of actual paying customer and can tweak the site to meet their needs.

I know that we've all heard "Launch Early, Launch Often" and "If you're not embarrassed by your first version you're waiting too long" but it took me pushing out a really simple idea to actually get a feel for it.

The hope is that I learn my lesson and launch my real ideas faster.

Rest of Hacker News:

Do any of you have similar stories or some insight that you'd like to share?

This is pretty fantastic. I travel around to universities with the Yahoo! HackU program and have had a heck of a time teaching students ruby and the rails framework from scratch. This is going to make it SOO much easier. :D

As far as the labs thing goes, this feels like the future of interactive learning.