neoveller

In case anyone's curious (as I was) about Javascript's Math.random(), here's an implementation I wrote and executed in Chrome on a 300x300 div: http://i.imgur.com/63M2Adb.png

I think this is the first post I've ever intentionally "kudos"'d. Launches are hard. The title is intentional link-bait for HN, but it rings at least in part true: a grand launch carries a lot of expectations, but means only the start of an effort to find your target market.

I'm surprised nobody in the comments or even in the OP has mentioned the prevalence of "How to get into YC", "How to hack your way into YC", etc. submissions that pop up on HN every cycle. There really have been a lot of those and they usually try to spell out a concise set of rules or patterns for each question/step. Even when PG gets interviewed and asked the question "What kind of companies do you accept?" I wonder if he realizes that this is bait for prospective applicants and blog post fodder instead of a genuine opportunity to endorse the quality of startups accepted into YC (to make these companies look good).

Has there ever been a write-up on "how to get into YC" by someone who followed such a guide and got in?

- Someone who was rejected 4+ times, and doesn't believe in that kind of stuff anymore

Signed up maybe a month back, but still awaiting any "offers" to review. I'm excited to see if this works, only because I hate the archaic process in place. Good luck!

Sendhub took a chance on me when I was just half a year into programming and one hackathon API prize in. I've been set ever since.

Launch Hackathon!

But did they harass you at all? Downtown Palo Alto has one on every street corner too, and they don't bother anyone. But Tenderloin... after walking through Westwood and PA for several years now, I still just plain don't feel safe in the Tenderloin at all.

Has Westwood gotten worse since I graduated UCLA in 2010? By my memory, there were only several decipherably-homeless individuals wandering about. In most cases, they would talk at me, mumbling, and didn't actually talk TO me in a real attempt to get anything. I would even say downtown Palo Alto is worse than Westwood. The rest of LA is pretty bad, but Westwood was a far cry away from any of it.

I just shot you an invite to the PenFM beta, because you hit it on the head. www.pen.fm is taking on that end-to-end publishing challenge, and then some. Having worked in epublishing for a few years now, I think I've finally come up with a way to automate the hell out of epublishing--and the results show up. At any point in writing in PenFM, you can click download and get your work formatted perfectly in epub, mobi, or pdf. Formatting improvements are coming rapidly, and mostly present already for mobi.

The biggest problem I've recognized with epublishing is that you have to get the formatting down perfectly, and usually that requires a lot of work by hand making sure your input HTML file is exactly as it should be. When you control how content is inputted to a platform, it's much easier to automate perfect-formatted rendering of that input HTML file, including TOC by inference.

Glad to see two big dogs from 37Signals calling for this a day apart from each other. www.pen.fm is actually moving straight into this direction as a platform to allow self-publishing of all sorts of mediums. Super-clean and perfect conversion is a hassle, but if we can track/mark each component to begin, everything regarding styles and rendering becomes so much easier to control. Currently we're on stories and going into manuals, but I can see magazines being the next hit. :)

Just until you've clicked close on him enough times... then never again... you'll miss him, you'll see.

Oddly enough, I'm very compelled to believe Clippy may be a very useful on-boarding tool for new users to websites.

You're probably right. Better Home Depot (node w/ express) than IKEA (RoR). In my defense, my full time positions labeled me an engineer. On that note, I don't use any prebuilt front-end libraries.

Browser? Steps to repro?

Thank you!

Thanks for that. I looked it up and it seems they declare it a bit differently, with grids. Worth adapting, though!

It really is good feedback.

I didn't come to HN expecting sunshine and rainbows as a response--but it was nice to see. I'm not going to be shy about taking harsh feedback constructively. It seems people want an option for a reading/layout mode. Not hard to do.

What happened to it?

Good catch. Beta release will accomodate all the things then, including a clean view that may or may not still include social feedback components.

Even more fun, the bigger scheme includes the ability to export these stories directly on-demand to different e-reading formats (epub, mobi, pdf). So, if you want PDF, you'll get it. With enough content in the network, we'll take on content discovery in a big way so we make sure you don't waste your time having to skim so much.

A wall of text is often more a reason to instant close-tab, especially with our short to long form target content lengths.

Yep, IE still doesn't support css columns, so until I focus on compatibility I'm giving you the interfaceless mobile version.

I thought I made it clear how to navigate (why you would want to go to page 2 if you hadn't finished page 1?), but I guess you're right. I'm pushing navigation arrow buttons live right now. Sorry about that--Internet connection at my place is currently dying every minute. Pushing now!

#2 is very fair, but I'll also note that growing up as a kid with two parents who had masters degrees in mathematics (from Warsaw Polytechnic), it was actually near impossible to learn math from them. I think it's also very difficult for me at this point to really help people learn to code. I recall a time when I was in the middle of learning where I could really communicate with people on both sides and bridge that gap of understanding, but I'm afraid that I've now surpassed that point. My dad was a great resource in learning, but mostly in the confidence arena where I knew if I got stuck, I would have someone to turn to. That being said, I school him on JS now.

Indeed I am bootstrapping from basically nothing. I have this horrible tendency to leave a job right when I have just a few months of runway. It really puts my feet to the fire :)

pen.com is going to fet a pretty penny, I imagine in the higher 10,000s if not more. With funding, it becomes feasible. And to correct myself, FM domains cost $79/year not 55, so that's where I am. Got lucky in finding the short name.

I have a few months of runway. My previous engineer was my dad, and didn't have a sense of urgency about it. I have a month or two of runway now, and every time there's a bug to fix, that bug is the most important thing ever--because until it's fixed, I'm not delivering my users the experience they deserve. They could be elsewhere, doing something else.

Neovella withered not for lack of interest--it withered because it was spec'd out by an idea person straight out of school with an economics degree, and engineer who insisted on building everything in C# :)

Because when you're bootstrapped and can't buy a 3 letter dotCom for $55/year, FM doesn't look so bad. So we're working with it, and kind of playing with the slogan "broadcast lit".

What do you mean exactly by "too expensive to build"? I taught myself how to code a year ago, and I managed to build a pretty complete platform in a month.

To put this in some other perspective as well, I started a similar startup Neovella two years ago, before I knew how to code. It was entirely the collaborative writing side of things--no reader feedback or anything. The community grew pretty well, and we published 4 anthologies of short stories from it. The experience was awesome and unexpectedly amusing. My engineering team (1 man with a full-time job, working for free) couldn't keep up with bug fixes and features requests, and so it kind of withered away and died... but Neovella still receives users to this day who hope to find something other than a ghost town so they can continue to write in a community. I sent out an email to my former users telling them about PenFM, and the feedback overwhelmed me. People loved the product and were entirely supportive, and replied as such, even if they didn't have the means to donate anything. That's more of why I'm doing it. Also because I'm finally able to code it up all on my own, and not let down my user-base anymore.

Though I think you may be jumping the gun on how "most people" are going to interpret 1/4th of an image, it's important to note that the full PenFM project is also built to accomodate single-author works that may or may not be the best quality writing.

Every collaborative story needs an amphetamine-driven cynic to cause a little bit of chaos.

You sound like you really understand the pain-points pretty well, and while we have a few ways we're considering solving this one, I would love to pick your brain about it. Would you mind shooting me an email at mike@pen.fm?