mahipal

It's a nice thought, but I think it's important to have a separate community. The goal is to create a place with serious discussion where professionals can gather, and I think it sends the wrong message if it's one click away from r/lolcats. (This is not to mention all the NSFW content, or the meme-accounts, which could very easily scare away a fledgling community.)

Backstory: I'm starting a company to produce educational games (you can probably guess the URL) and I went looking for the "HN for Education" post from a while back. I think it's important to have such a site for the education community.

It turns out (for whatever reason) that news site was taken down, so I've spent the last week or so getting the reddit codebase running and customized on a VPS. (Many thanks to spladug and alienth of the reddit dev team for humoring all my dumb questions and helping me get the code running.)

The goal is to provide a central place where everyone in education/technology can come together to discuss news, startups, and ideas. This is all about the community, and I wouldn't have gotten this far without everyone who's helped me along the way. The education-startup community is very young, so I hope to see you guys voting/contributing there. If you're working in this space, I'd be happy to help you out however I can -- feel free to drop me an email.

clickable: http://joinbox.com

It shouldn't be... it's hosted on Tumblr.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mahipal.org seems to be fine.

My startup http://brainracer.com is very early-stage, but we're tackling the difficult problem of keeping young kids interested in math.

The math education system (especially in the US) tends to be soul-crushing, and it focuses more on repetition rather than intuition. Our first app is guilty of being a little bit repetitive also, but it uses social game mechanics and spaced repetition to make learning arithmetic as painless as possible. Hopefully, it will validate the idea of social math games and create some cashflow. I'm already looking forwarding to the next game we'll build on the iPad -- because of the touch UI, I think it's a perfect medium for exploratory learning.

Yes. I'm in Old Town Pasadena but it's hard to justify that rate. There's enough coffeeshops around here, and it's unclear whether the space has a "community" or if it's just freelancers.

What's your email? I'm interested in setting up some sort of part-time thing, especially if there's a few others around.

Duly noted. Check back in a few days. =)

Do you mean, specifically, the "lesson plan book" market?

Are there other similar things that teachers have to deal with, that he could expand into?

Here's another one of my favorites:

http://glyphish.com/ Glyphish - 200 icons for mobile apps, CCA

So you use Mighty Meeting as your sales tool... what do you think the Medtronic guys used in that example from the article?

As an iPad developer, I'm wondering if there would be value in having some sort of "Product Gallery" type of SaaS -- an app that you load on your iPad, combined with a website that lets you manage the products and info that you'd like to show with it.

This is also the most exciting feature to me. But, looking through the reviews, it sounds like the buggiest feature. Worst of all, they process your UIs server-side and then send the code to you. Unacceptable.

I just picked up Dapp (http://dapp.kerofrog.com.au/) and put together the first screen of an app that's been bouncing around in my head for a couple weeks. It was pretty intuitive and quick to put it together. I also confirmed that Dapp generates all its code client-side, by using the app only in Airplane mode. Looking over the code, I'm not thrilled about the coding style, but it's not bad for auto-generated code.

So I can't speak for Interfaces (I wasn't going to drop $10 on an app that had terrible reviews about the one killer feature I need) but it seems like Dapp is a winner. YMMV.

Another good way to monetize would be to analyze for common typos around the domain names being traded, and then offer those domains for sale via affiliate links to registrars.

Does anyone have any good articles/thoughts on creating APIs?

Last year, there was some sort of food-based reception right afterwards on campus. For the evening, a few YC companies threw after-parties at their offices in SF.

The choice of Java is one of the most mind-boggling things to me. There must be so many developers turned off of the platform because of it.

Luckily, you can now distribute Python scripts as APKs (http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/SharingScrip...).

I really want to know... what else is on this reading list?

Email me. I might be interested in buying some or all of them.

But apparently she had been swimming for decades -- a lot of it in (progressively colder?) ocean water -- and she was studied "over the years." So it seems pretty possible that her physiological adaptations were a result of, not a cause of, all that cold-water swimming.

What kinds of things could a VA do for a startup?

EDIT: After Googling around to answer my own question, I'm still not sure about start-up specific tasks. But you might find the results of this survey useful:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/06/the-personal...

Congrats on the awesome product and launch! I've been waiting for something like this for a while. I just signed up, and it looks really promising.

Thoughts/bugs:

- I tried to add a category under "Bills," and it goes through. But the sub-menu doesn't show up on mouse-over, possibly because there's no built in categories under Bills.

- I added just one account and clicked through to the dashboard, but it shows no accounts in the bottom left sidebar and so calculates a total of $0. The graph on the right is drawn based on my actual numbers, but then the figures displayed below it are all $0.

- How about built-in categories for things web entrepreneurs commonly deal with, like legal bills or server costs?

Email me if you want screenshots/details on these.

This article reminded me of this old gem from PG's "Great Hackers":

"I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent."

I have my "Bertha" on a textured wall. It works fine, although you can still feel a bit of the texture through it. (The texture is "damped," if you will.)

I don't think it would be a problem for anyone except the most OCD of users.

Nice post. I think you nailed it: Fried's advice is for a very specific type of company. Scott's example of a giant SAS company is a bit cherry-picked in this sense, since it's the complete opposite of Fried's "type" of company.

And this may be a bit OT, but... how about an Amazon link to that playbook? ;)

An API? That's a sad joke. (I say that bitterly as someone who's been knee-deep in the HTML structure of HN for the past few days, trying to parse out data for my own app.)

I talked to someone in #startups a little while ago who was developing a server-side API for HN, but last I heard it wasn't done.

There's a few sites that are sort of "HN aggregators." Unfortunately I've lost the links, but there was one that used a simple algorithm to accumulate the top stories of HN. It would scan the front page every N minutes and give each story X points based on its ranking at the time. Does anyone remember that one?

At any rate, the best you could get from those sites would be a friendlier HTML structure that doesn't feel like 1994. You'll probably have to parse some HTML yourself.

Note that my answer will be hugely biased, but then again so will everyone else's. ;)

Nonetheless, I'd say to go for the MSCS (or similar). You're looking for the networking potential of going back to school, and you want to start a start-up. In a technical master's program, you'll be around exactly the sort of people you need to meet for this to happen. In an MBA program, you'd network with a bunch of other business guys, many of whom wouldn't be interested in start-ups at all.

You'll obviously also gain a lot of truly valuable technical skills. You might not be able to single-handedly carry the technical side of a start-up by the end, but you'll definitely be able to make meaningful contributions and decisions about the technology. This helps your future partners as well, since they know you can contribute to the tech while working the business side.

If you're worried about missing out on the education side of the MBA, don't be. I think you could get a better version of an MBA education by just buying a pile of books [1] and starting a company. You'll learn everything you need about business along the way. And, as for the networking part of an MBA, you'll get way more interesting conversations out of "I'm running a start-up" vs. "I'm working on my business degree."

[1] Possibly a topic for another thread, but here's an example of such a reading list: http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/

For iPhone apps, it's more than appropriate--it's practically necessary. For other apps, it seems like the right thing to do if you want them to be able to review the entirety of your app.

But your problem comes from the same thing that OP is getting at. You don't necessarily know that it's what users want. It's just that single-purpose apps are much easier to find, because of the under-developed infrastructure of the app marketplace. Search is a particularly bad part of it--for perspective, keyword search is a recent innovation!

And that's the heart of the problem: So much infrastructure has to be re-built around this app ecosystem. Especially with HTML5, apps and the App Store are fast approaching a lame, more unwieldy version of the Internet and web apps. Their only saving grace is the easy payment system.

They were mobile software start-ups, and certainly there were plenty of other reasons that I left them behind.

But the pattern he describes maps pretty well to my companies. As a Technician, I started a company focused around building what I loved to build (good software). To a certain point, it's easy for N co-founders to keep juggling all the balls that comprise running a business (rather than just writing code). This is the "Infancy Phase," and all was well, just as he describes.

It was the "Adolescent Phase" of the business where everything fell apart. All the various things we were juggling became too much, and they started to fall by the wayside. In my specific companies, I think a big cause of this was trying to do too much in terms of product.

And so I followed one of the paths he predicts--I threw my hands up, and started small again with a new company. The revelation that did it was pretty much exactly what he writes:

    You realize something you've avoided all these years...
    You don't own a business--you own a job... the worst job in the world!
    You can't close it when you want to... You can't leave it when you want to...
    You can't sell it when you want to, because who wants to buy a job?

I think the Basecamp site you're talking about is Sortfolio (http://sortfolio.com/).

I'm pretty cheap when it comes to hiring (since I'm bootstrapped), but I found a pretty good selection of designers even in the lowest price bracket.

I've started reading The E-Myth Revisited (http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...). Someone recommended it pretty highly on one of the previous HN book threads.

I wish I'd read it two start-ups ago. It's downright scary how well he describes the exact path my companies took.