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nmeyer

285 karma · joined March 25, 2007

Co-Founder + CCO @ The Rattle Relativity6 Entrepreneur in Residence @ MIT GroupAhead Wim Sup Yahoo MileWise SocialShield Playlist.com Reble.FM (S07) MIT Course 6, Media Lab Booz Allen Hamilton Kings of Chaos

YC Badge: 0xaf5fcaa634c461a5cf0a3eb26d7bef669c1b8d47

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nmeyer··on Launch HN: Noya (YC W21) – Direct air capture of CO2 using cooling towers
You may want to talk to the Infinite Cooling team out of MIT too. They do water reclamation on top of cooling towers to reduce water usage. Could be a nice channel partnership between you all! Happy to make the connect.
nmeyer··on Mmhmm
Anyone know how it works? Does it create a virtual camera source that Zoom can source from?
nmeyer··on Hipmunk Launches Flight Deals
We do something similar for our Explore feature on MileWise, just our deals include prices in reward points. We compare current prices to historical trends to figure out if a price is a "good" option. I like Hipmunk's idea of Subscribing to specific deal feeds.

Would love feedback: http://milewise.com/mw#explore

nmeyer··on Ask HN: Options for modern development with Node.js?
We use node+express for everything at MileWise. I put together a starter project for quickly bootstrapping new projects that's ready to go using our favorite set of tools:

Expres, Jade, Stylus+Bootstrap-Stylus, Passport (for auth), Mongode (MongoDb-native wrapper)

Maybe it'll help you get started! It's ready to be deployed to heroku or node-jitsu etc. And I use mongohq for new projects until they get bigger.

EDIT: link... https://github.com/milewise/sideproject

nmeyer··on Google-ITA powered MileWise brings real-time reward flight search to iPhone
We actually built the app using Appcelerator Titanium. We modified Backbone to work with Titanium's API, and were able to reuse pretty much all the Models we wrote for our web app.

If anyone's interested, I'm thinking about writing a dev post about our experience. Definite Pros and Cons, but the TL;DR is:

There's pretty much no way we would have been able to do what we did in 2 months if we had started from scratch in Obj-C.

nmeyer··on ITA by Google and MileWise let you search flights in cash, miles and points
So while we don't have a way explore flights based on say, earn maximum miles per dollar, we do sort by what ee call WisePrice - which actually does factor in the "kickback" you get from miles earned on the flight. We include any elite status or cabin class bonuses too -- and you can value miles at any rate you'd like in your preferences.
nmeyer··on MileWise Launches Search Engine for Frequent Fliers
Thanks for all the feedback from our dev post on the blog guys. TechCrunch picked us up a couple days later!
nmeyer··on Show HN: My user-friendly outbound firewall for Mac
Very clean site design, and UI looks gorgeous. Awesome job!

May want to think about putting the qualifier inside the call to action:

Buy now for $9 (try risk-free for 30 days)

Then below the CTA put "If you're not absolutely happy..."

Alleviate their worries as in-context as possible.

Congrats on shipping! Baller.

nmeyer··on WebGL Water Simulation
You can get close by turning on gravity by pressing 'G', then dragging the ball into the air and dropping it.

Unfortunately can't get it to splash since it's just a height-field simulation.

nmeyer··on How we used Node.js to build real-time award flight search
Aw shucks you've uncovered our master plan.

We have our own account scrapers augmented with a partner API from AwardWallet for the more esoteric programs (CVS Rewards anyone?)

nmeyer··on How we used Node.js to build real-time award flight search
Sacha Greif did our homepage. (http://www.sachagreif.com/)

He's awesome, super talented and incredibly fun to work with.

nmeyer··on How we used Node.js to build real-time award flight search
Great feedback - we weren't sure whether at this point people would have a clear idea from the homepage of what we were doing w/ the info and they'd just want to get on with things, or if they'd want more contextual explanation.

This is definitely an area for metrics and user testing, but probably better for us to err on the side of caution =)

nmeyer··on How we used Node.js to build real-time award flight search
We actually do both, and then spent a few cycles de-duping etc.

1) Part of our reason for using Node+Socket.IO is to deal with the problem of having a bunch of different sources returning data over a wide spread of time.

2) You'd be surprised about the airline sites. While they don't necessarily have the widest variety of good fares, airline will often reserve their cheapest fares for their own sites (called Last Seat Availability).

nmeyer··on How we used Node.js to build real-time award flight search
Awesome. Emailed!
nmeyer··on Apple iPad. Are you underwhelmed?
Not at all. I'm glad the iPad inherited it's core user-experience philosophy from the iPhone and iTouch - Apple has positioned the iPad as a device suited not just for entertainment but as a tool to G.S.D; a tool that is actually FUN to use.

I'm personally very excited about the potential for applications that really take advantage of touch and gesture to make more mundane tasks not only bearable but enjoyable.

That said...yeah it's a giant iPod Touch.

nmeyer··on The Suicide of the East?
Paul -- as a fun aside, one of the books in that article (The Year That Changed the World) is my father's latest book.

Let me know if you want to borrow my copy ;-)

nmeyer··on Ask HN: What are some good biographies to read?
theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln. Great leaders
nmeyer··on Ask YC: Road trip. Which audio books would you recommend?
Check out http://www.librivox.org. They have a HUGE catalogue of audio recordings of public-domain works. Grab a list of the 100 classic books of all time and download them. Don Quixote, The Prince, Picture of Dorian Grey, Pride and Prejudice...
nmeyer··on PriorSmart, easy patent search for entrepreneurs
Whole site is entirely html+javascript. No server-side scripting and it's hosted on S3 (ONLY S3, no EC2).
nmeyer··on Ask YC: Do you watch TV?
I'm a fan of the working with music
nmeyer··on YC Startup Going into Beta: Reble.FM Music Sharing
Yep. Working on the Mac version. Linux version should be out about the same time. The plan is to work most of the kinks out on the windows version and then get it running on Mac/Linux.
nmeyer··on YC Startup Going into Beta: Reble.FM Music Sharing
Thanks =)

Yup, RL does have a purpose still.

If anyone wants someone to share with, guessing my username would probably work.

nmeyer··on Introducing the XMPP application server: Scalable, Distributed Twitter-esque App
It can also be applied to p2p music sharing =) http://www.reble.fm
nmeyer··on Ask YC: Version control hosting site for private projects?
I love unfuddle. I find their UI to be so much cleaner than Trac, and the customer service is great. I usually get a response to any problems in under an hour.
nmeyer··on New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand
roflmao
nmeyer··on Learning how to stick with it.
Just watch a Nike commercial.
nmeyer··on Hackers' screen shots
Eclipse, vim and Opera. I like my syntax highlighting scheme, but not many people like colors as much as I do.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/59/workspace.PNG

nmeyer··on Who's partying with reddit tonight?
If you're drunk enough, that's walking distance.
nmeyer··on Fonts for hackers
i use 10pt monaco on windows with ClearType turned on
nmeyer··on Quote of the Day. Give us (News.YC) your quote for Motivation. Must be your own.
"Oh shit."
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