kaffeinecoma

devcomments.com. osdir.com, and mail-archive.com

Thank god. Goodbye to: devcomments.com. osdir.com, and mail-archive.com!

Very nice. Please fix: "repository by it's sum of watchers" => "repository by its sum of watchers".

No one wants to have a typo in their resumé. :-)

I totally disagree with this blog posting, but here's a situation that I feel SO could do better.

I wish there were a feature whereby as a question-asker, you could say "I've dutifully read all the provided responses, and none of them answers my question. Marking this as 'unsolved'".

And then the "unsolved" questions would not count against your percentage in "accept rate". When new answers come in, you'd need to go back and re-evaluate whether or not the new responses answer your question or not.

The original idea of publishing askers' accept ratio is to encourage people to "give credit where credit is due". But it also has the unfortunate side effect of encouraging people to accept sub-par answers at times.

Apart from that I love the site, and hope Jeff makes a bundle (or at least a happy existence) from it.

This is a real treasure to come across. I hope we'll keep seeing jacquesm's blog postings here.

Anyone know of any publicly available song lyric databases?

Um, slight bit of NSFW failure here: http://i.imgur.com/dN2rw.png

Huh? Maybe I just need some more coffee, but I'm failing to parse whatever it is he's trying to say.

This is amusingly relevant for me. I had a number of bug reports for my November app Quick Brown Frog (http://quickbrownfrog.com) from people complaining of low speed scores, due to their two-space habit (all my source texts are formatted to use a single space, and they're displayed in fixed-width).

I considered reformatting all the text to use double-spaces, but then figured that I'd get an equal number of complaints from the single-spacers (little-endians?)

In the end I changed the code to ignore the double space if received as input. No complaints after that. :-)

I think it's an anachronism. I've interviewed well over a hundred candidates for various engineering positions, and it's extremely rare to get a follow-up. The few that I have received came across as kind of stalkerly. But maybe that's just me.

The only situation I can imagine sending one is if a couple of weeks go by and you still haven't had any response after the interview (which usually isn't a good sign anyway.)

There's a lot of paid content on those two sites. Is that what you're referring to? If it is that's fine; just want to know whether it's worth paying for or not.

That always struck me as odd too, since the Earth itself is ~4.5 billion years old. It just seems odd that our little planet has been around (in some fashion) for a significant portion of the lifetime of the universe.

You could try the "new" link up at the top, and up-vote things you find interesting. There are a LOT of worthy submissions that never make it to the front page.

> What is the purpose of showing your site to other entrepreneurs?

Mostly to get feedback. Sometimes to get a little pat on the back, especially if motivation is dragging. But I suspect mostly it's to get sanity-checks and feedback for improvement.

Sometimes you've been so working hard on something that you're too close to it to evaluate it properly. Taking a few steps back from your project and getting feedback from HN is really handy for finding out whether you're in the weeds or not.

I've gotten incredibly useful feedback from my "Show HN" posts, without which I'd probably not have even continued my projects.

As for driving traffic, there's certainly an aspect of that, but mostly in the sense of establishing a toe-hold in the Google index and getting links from people who like what you produce and then later blog about you. I don't think (most) people are trolling for clients/customers here.

A major pain point for me is not being able to use https with my App Engine apps that have their own domain names: http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/general.html#httpsapps

Honestly it's pushing me to look for other hosting options (Rackspace, AWS), though I'm really really hoping I won't have to do that. I've invested a lot of effort in various App Engine APIs, and it would be a pity to have to re-do all that work.

Live demo: http://dance-dance-robot.appspot.com/

The WPM gauge is set to go from 0..120. I didn't expect to have many customers that can type > 100WPM, but perhaps I was mistaken. If anything, I thought that I might end up dialing that down to 0..75, so that most users at the lower-end of the range feel like they're getting a positive result. Maybe I could make that a configurable option in a future release.

As for measuring typing accuracy, that's surprisingly complicated. I wrote up a blog posting on this:

http://quickbrownfrog.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/measuring-typ...

Thanks for the feedback!

I just turned on the "always on" feature for http://www.quickbrownfrog.com. Worth spending $9/month on. I imagine this will lead to lots of instant cash for Google from frustrated developers.

Now, if only we could have SSL...

More informative link: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/12/happy-holidays-f...

Thank god. Now maybe my TaskQueue jobs for pre-caching Ajax content (for serving to Googlebot) will actually run to completion.

Hit any key at the end of a lesson, and it will bring you to the next one. I should add tab navigation for "fast forwarding" though...

98 WPM @ 100% accuracy is probably not my main demographic. :-) It is a known bug though, and on my list to fix, but thanks for taking the time to screen cap it.

What tool have you used previously to measure your rate at 130-140 wpm? QBF counts every 5 characters as a "word"; other apps might measure differently. Did the tool not keep pace with your typing?

Thanks for the feedback!

Hey, no worries; to each his own. I happily spent $30 (twice!) to buy shrink-wrap typing software.

I think my app outshines the top Google result for "learn to type online". But as you mentioned, not everyone will be willing to pay for that difference.

My intended market was the kind of person who googles "learn to type", finds Mavis Beacon, and then orders a CDROM from Amazon. That's what I did a couple of years ago, and it was a painful experience.

First I bought a downloadable version, which then sent me on a wild goose chase for Stuffit Expander, which was required to uncompress the image. Then when I finally got that, it wouldn't run on my OSX Mac.

Finally I learned that there was in fact an up-to-date version available for Mac, but only on CDROM. So then I purchased THAT (yeah, I paid twice!) Ultimately, the software was great, but getting it installed was a major PITA.

I imagine that there are a lot of traditional desktop apps like this that you can only get on CD (or dodgy software downloads). That's the "niche" I'd like to target.

Just signed up for your contact list. I'm itching to move off of Google App Engine, but not looking forward to jumping back into the sysadmin game, which is what I'd need to do in order to move to AWS or Rackspace or whatever.

I have no idea what your pricing will be like (and I'm guessing that you don't either, at this stage), but it would be great if you had something for micro-ISV type shops (read as: cheap).

As a solo dev, I'd love it if there were a service that would set me up with a linux image on AWS, nicely configured for MySQL/Postgres, JBoss/Tomcat, SSL cert, firewall rules, etc. If I could pay you a one-time fee for that, and then be off and running it would be very attractive.

I was thinking the same thing, that 500 clicks was an awfully small sample size, and that I needed to collect more data. But I could go broke trying to get to a meaningful N. :-)

Thanks! I'll be in touch.

For everyone who has launched, have a look at this site:

   http://www.44tips.com/b/Eric/Where_to_submit_your_Startup/

Spend a few hours submitting your site to whatever review sites from that list are appropriate for your app.

Inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I launched Quick Brown Frog:

   http://www.quickbrownfrog.com 
   http://quickbrownfrog.wordpress.com

It's at the MVP stage, and while a technical success (I think it's an awesome in-browser app), no one seems to be interested in paying for it. I reduced the price to $10 prior to launch, and I still haven't had a nibble. I burned through about $200 in Adwords/Bing/Facebook ads so far. I guess it's hard to compete with the many free typing tutors out there.

Still, I plan to keep plugging at it. I have no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever, so next on my list is to get some badly-needed design help.

Many thanks to everyone who provided invaluable feedback during the past month. I really learned a lot and had great fun developing it.

What are you planning to work on?

Huppie, tried to contact you but I can't find your email.

Can you tell me what OS/Browser you were using? One of the major goals of the app is for it to be blazing fast, and not have any lag issues. I mainly use OSX+Safari, but I test on Firefox, Chrome and IE8, and it works quite well for me in testing.

I also agree with what you have to say about the random wikipedia links; I tried really hard to filter out as much boilerplate stuff as I can, but sadly Wikipedia isn't as structured as you might expect it to be.

Thanks very much for the feedback.