karjaluoto

I don’t think it’s much of an arms race. There are practical limitations to scan frequency that’ll keep most groups operating within the same general constraints.

Added costs/fees are somewhat inevitable. I spent $25 for two small bundles of firewood on my last camping trip. Everyone’s got to make a buck somehow.

I see Campnab as a convenience. Anyone can refresh the booking system manually, but doing so is time consuming. Some folks are happy to pay for that convenience.

Campsite availability is largely a supply and demand problem concentrated around busy centers and amplified during certain times. Drive a little further and go on the weekdays and it isn’t as much of an issue.

Perhaps lotteries would help. Some permits have been switched to this approach. I’m not sure how practical they are to implement across the board, though.

Personally, I don’t think any solution will actually solve this problem. That said, a lot of campsites do sit unused when folks fail to cancel. Reminders a week in advance of a trip could help with this. Some areas also have policies that discourage no-shows.

I love hearing this! (My friend and I built Campnab.)

P.S., I joined each of your suggested subreddits. :-)

Thanks! I follow a few of these sorts of subreddits and do find them useful. It feels like less of a community than HN, though. I also like the text-only approach on HN. It just seems easier for my pea-brain to a linear list of items without the thumbnails and such.

My friend and I did something like what you propose (selling services and working on a product). It was hard and slowed us down a lot.

Consulting work is a business all to itself. Tacking a startup on top of that just complicates matters. Got a family? Well, you won’t see them much.

If I were in the same situation, I’d keep my day job and spend my spare time working on the product. This approach would cover living expenses, compartmentalize my tasks, and allow me to put all of my non-job hours into the product.

Like you, we tried to start our company the “right” way. That too was a mistake. If I had it to do over again, I’d skip the lawyers and accountants and just try to make a product people wanted to buy.

If you can achieve product-market fit, funding and all of the business stuff can get sorted out reasonably easily.

Another approach might be to toss it on blot.im. (I’m in no way affiliated with Blot, but I like how simple the product is.)

I’m happy to see this launch, Andrei! You all have dedicated so many years to working on chat for business. I’m excited to see this out there, and watch this next chapter in your story unfold!

Awesome—thanks for signing up! If you run into any issues, do let us know. :-)

We’re using Wasabi for cloud storage. So far it has worked pretty well for this project.

Nice! If you do try it, please let us know how the experience goes for you. I think the onboarding process is a bit intimidating given the (necessary, yet lengthy) permissions we request.

I’ll mention that you’d be interested in more options around backups to @shelkie. Like I said, I don’t think we can make this happen now, but it’s good to have a sense for what others might find useful.

We’ve thought about it, but I think it’ll be a while before we’re able to get to that. We also run two other products, and we’re just two people. So, we’re already spread a bit thin.

Those are fair points and thoughts I’d probably have myself. I’m not trying to sell you on this, but here are my responses to your two notes.

The first is that we know it’s more expensive than Google Photos storage. That’s in part so that we can actually fund development. As a small operation we can’t run it as a loss-leader or make up revenue from other channels like Google could.

The second is that we’ve been somewhat vetted through Google’s application process. We’ve also been building things for the web for 20+ years. Admittedly, trust is hard to earn from folks you don’t know, but we are decent people.

To be honest, Pixaver probably isn’t right for most folks on HN as most here are pretty technical. (I’m just a daily reader here, and spotted this thread, so I thought I’d share it.)

We’ve geared this more for people like my mom who don’t want to set up a local hard drive or do anything even remotely technical. For someone like her, it’s a couple of clicks to having a second backup without needing to do anything additional. :-)

My friend and I built https://pixaver.com. It doesn’t address all of the points you note here, but it does offer some piece of mind if we get locked out of Google Photos.

I feel like you’re projecting your beliefs/values on me. We’ve never met, nor shared any interaction outside of this comment thread. I think it’s improbable that you have any sense for what’s in my heart or what I believe to be true.

Fair enough. I understand your point. Also, there are plenty of really good type families available for free. From what I’ve seen, though, pricing based on traffic is pretty common among those selling type.

Plus, these are single purchases, not recurring fees. For most organizations that makes these costs trivial. (I.e., License the font indefinitely for about the same cost as an hour of a consultant’s time.)

That’s a nice typeface!

I felt differently. For me, this article echoed the same ideas which I’ve often had about death, but I rarely hear others articulate these ideas in this way.

Many are obsessed with the notion of an afterlife and over-prioritize around that possibility. I kind of like the idea that I continue in some form, even if I’m not conscious.

As for “raging against dying”, fair enough. I’m just not sure that such rage will accomplish anything. At this age, I’d rather accept the inevitable and make the most of the time I have.

Thanks! I appreciate you saying so.

I’m a total hack when it comes to type design, so, I’m still pretty unsure of this one. I go from seeing all of the problems in it, to thinking: “hey—that looks OK.”

One discovery that helped with both this (and the site we built it for) came from reading about wabi-sabi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

That perspective helped me see that imperfections might be part of a thing’s appeal. This is a very different viewpoint for me. I tend to “need” everything pixel perfect—but I’m not sure that’s as important as I once thought.

I needed a type family that felt hand-printed. Lots of these fonts exist, but they have problems. Some are hard to use because their letterforms are overly varied. Others are limited to just the alphabet and a few punctuation marks. Almost none have multiple weights (which I find useful).

With Campy, I wanted to try my hand at creating a type family that addressed these points. So, I drew out a reasonably complete Latin character set (208 glyphs including accents, special marks, symbols, etc.) by hand. I then corrected each of the glyphs to be more consistent and aligned. From there, I added a total of 7 weights and corresponding italics. This project turned out to be pretty time-consuming.

I’m not a type designer, so I’ve probably done some things wrong with Campy. That said, I like how it looks casual without feeling too messy. Throughout the project, I came to look upon Campy a bit like Comic Sans, but (hopefully) more functional.

https://blot.im is a nice alternative. I played with it last spring and loved the immediacy of making an edit locally (in iAwriter) and seeing those changes made on the live blog within seconds.

When I first loaded this page, the post had exactly 404 points. :-)

Thanks for catching that. It’s fixed. :-)

Officehours hasn’t seen a lot of traction. That said, it’s still running, and has some activity.

To our surprise, the biggest problem is in getting requests for advisors’ time. Turns out many will share their experience; fewer feel comfortable asking for it.

I agree, but I also suspect you didn’t read the post. ;-)

We don’t charge a retainer, but do bill in advance. This can solve a lot of cash flow issues, and even out your billings. I’ve written about this approach here: http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/blog/how-we-fixed-our-studios-...

Can’t see an email address in your profile. Can you edit it, or provide it here?

Sorry for the delay. Just spotted this now. I’ll send you a code in a moment. :-)

From what you describe, I think https://www.hipcamp.com or https://www.gamping.com might be closer to what you need.

Campnab solves a very specific problem. There’s limited supply at province/state/national campgrounds. As such, some people hoard sites, only intending to use a few of their reserved days. (This means campgrounds are often sold-out within minutes of being made available.) Then, they cancel the ones they aren’t using, at the last minute.

The problem with this is that many campsites go unused. If you want one of those campsites, the only way to get it is to refresh the availability page repeatedly—in hopes that a spot will open up.

This is what my friend’s wife was effectively doing, when they couldn’t find an available campsite. So, he put Campnab together to automate the process. We later opened it up to others.

We could probably do lots of other things with it. For now, though, we’re just keeping this small and simple—with hopes that it help frustrated campers find a campsite.

Officehours started as a goodwill sort of project. Anyone could offer/request sessions—with the caveat being that those sessions were free, and limited to 10 minutes.

Since then, we’ve received requests for longer sessions (we added an option to extend them), and the ability to sell one’s time through the service.

We added the latter item, last night. It allows anyone to create a profile, set a rate, and get paid through the platform. (The free option still exists for those who just want to lend a hand.)

These are all manual postings. Seems that a bunch of “SEO” companies in the U.S. are outsourcing this work to Bangladesh.

I deactivated as a sort of safeguard. I had transferred all of our company/project pages to my business partner at the time of deactivating. If something went wrong that prevented him from accessing those, I wanted to have a way to get back to them.

Like I said in the post, I’ll sign in one more time in the weeks ahead, and delete the account altogether.

As for the company/project pages, it’s not as though I intend to use them again. (I did delete a few outright.) That said, I also didn’t want to leave those urls/names open for someone else to grab—and spam from.

I understand your frustration with folks posting on Medium—and turning life/work events into a type of promotion. That said, while some do this purely as a marketing ploy, I think some just want to share their experiences.

Personally, I just like writing. I enjoy thinking through an argument/idea and seeing if my thoughts hold up. That’s part of why there were so many links in the post; they served as a way for me to force more research and find the gaps in my thinking—which, typically, there are many.

I try to be honest in my posts, and share the struggles I’ve experienced. To me, this adds a cost to them. For example, in this one: http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/blog/in-pursuit-of-mental-plas... I admit to past beliefs I’m deeply embarrassed by. I know some will probably think less of me for even acknowledging such biases/stupidity, but without such admissions, I’m not sure the writing is worth much.

I’m carrying on, which perhaps also reinforces your point. That said, I read your initial comment and just felt shitty. I didn’t write this post to sell anyone anything, or trick anybody. It was just something I felt I needed to write down somewhere, and I thought others might also find the reasoning useful.