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"Done is better than perfect" is brilliant. It is motivational, succinct, and easy to believe. From my particularly context of a side project with no real deadlines, however, I can have perfect if I want to. There's no race against the clock, nobody to report to, nobody relying on my results -- just me and my idea.

At any rate, I'll tweak the "done-perfect" lever more towards done.

It's hard to generalize. I think the amount of perfection I demand in a solution is proportional to some combination of its importance and my interest in it. I have no trouble putting in place simple, hacky solutions with the intent of changing them later, and then actually changing them later.

My side projects, in particular, are where I allow myself to roam freely, and I often end up prioritizing unimportant (but interesting) work that is only tangential to the core idea. When I am only accountable to myself, then it becomes too easy to get unfocused.

Perhaps the original question should be rephrased as "how do I keep myself focused when working on side projects, since I'm only accountable to myself."

Even within the context your product, surely there are cases where you're presented with a problem that can be solved with several different depths of thoroughness. How do you, generally, choose a solution which optimizes for, success, time, and personal gratification?

People like you contribute to the problem.

Your company, Suitey, spams the hell out of craigslist.

Your company, Suitey, spams craigslist.

While looking for an apt a few months ago, I'd come across postings several times a day matching the specific criteria I was looking for. They'd all look like decent opportunities, but upon further inspection they all turned out to be pointless links to your pointless service.

I was looking for 1brs with "union square" in the title. I can only guess at the total number of spammy posts you are responsible for on a daily basis.

It wasted a lot of my time and was very frustrating.

Shame on you.

Yes. So it goes -- that's why they are side businesses. Another thought: sometimes dependency on Google is a good thing.

Curiosity. Just this minute I started working on a "Scroll Wheel Detector" javascript because I wondered what % of people use scrollwheels to scroll.

Let it be known that I thought this post was hilarious, and so I upvoted it.

Regarding your original title of: "Our Business Model Repel's Our Customers... Tips?"

How much of your business model relies on people converting from your website? If it is a substantial number: As part of your audience (a developer) I can divulge my first impression of your site. It is that I have no idea what your website does, and I won't give you my e-mail address to find out.

Some solutions: 1) Explain with both sufficient and few words what it is your website does. Use pictures if you need to. 2) Allow me to explore your website risk-free, or in other terms, without requiring any information of me. 3) Try further to persuade me to try your product through marketing ploys such as free things, empty promises, etc.

On your website there are five subscription services listed. Is there any way to browse for more?

Please make the Chrome address bar awesome.

You are a sample size of 1.

Seems like a good way to calibrate is to have the client cache a file from your targets list (you can cachebust by adding "?some_random_junk" at the end). Then, see how long it takes to get a hit.

Better yet, do this for each target URL. Knowing the time that a miss takes vs. a hit will greatly increase your accuracy.

Why the need for a "sub-ms" timer implementation? Just do a while loop and constantly check for the SOP exception (or for Xms to have elapsed). Set a timeout between checking URLs. The ~10ms blocking of each URL check will not be noticeable to the UI.

Nice PoC though, and thanks for the lack of press release ;)

Edit: I just tried this out and it appears that the looping JS blocks the iframe from loading. I would have figured the iframe would be a separate JS thread. I'm wondering -- do all iframes share the same JS thread? Can one iframe block another? Anyway, it's clear that some sort of asynchronous solution is necessary.

I cannot be consistent with apples to oranges. If I required a specificity of 10 feet in my region selection, what then would be the "consistent" specificity of the rent slider? $1, $10, $100?

Also, inconsistent requirements != inconsistent UI.

I'm interested, but before I continue I'd like to see screenshots or a demo so I can get a feel for the product.

I hate the domain registration system as a whole, but I love the idea of TLDs. It's likely my anger is misplaced since I scarcely understand the business of it, but I find it infuriating that most ".com" domain names are taken by squatters. Perhaps squatting is just too hard to enforce (I think somebody could come up with an anti-squatting policy), but more likely I feel a lot of people decided it better to make an easy buck and have the "market" sort itself out.

However, I really like the new concept of TLDs. There are a few reasons why I think this will benefit the internet as a whole.

First, if it catches on, then TLD's will mean a whole lot less. ".com" will lose it's ubiquity, and I (along with thousands of entrepreneurs) will finally be able to register suitable domain names. No more need to make up names. No more need to negotiate with professional squatters, domain name dealers, etc.

Second, it's not just about the name of the TLD, but a lot about the policy. Imagine if ".startup" was just $1/yr, but you have 1 month to put up a real site or your domain gets put back onto market. Or you could have strict rules of inclusion: Imagine a TLD called ".realperson" that requires a video of you to be sent doing a backflip before registering the domain. Of course, the authentication of doing a backflip would likely be replaced by something meaningful.

Third, as alluded to in my second point, it creates opportunity for businesses built off of the concept of TLDs. There really is a ton of room for innovation.

Finally, I think there is a lot in a name. .tv, .info, etc didn't fail to catch on because nobody cares about names. They failed because all of the .tv and .info domains weren't owned by the same entity. If you add cohesion to a TLD, I think it could become quite powerful, and I think there are actually a lot of cool things people will come up with. For example, if .info were created under the new system, "foo.info" might be able to send you to a wikipedia summary of "foo". Alright, that example is not entirely useful, but you get the picture.

* Disclaimer, I scarcely understand the domain business. Any correction or insight is greatly appreciated.

I agree that Chrome's dev tools are faster and crash less. I also find them more visually appealing. I wouldn't say they are better than Firebug, though... there are a few kinks they need to work out.

One of them is console.log():

  (function(){
	var obj = {};
	console.log(obj);
	obj.new_value = "hello";
	console.log(obj);
  })();

In Chrome, this logs an object {new_value: "hello"} twice, as opposed to the expected: an empty object, and then the aforementioned object.

More details here: http://techblog.appnexus.com/2011/webkit-chrome-safari-conso...

It's not something I encounter often, but when I do, it's really obnoxious to have to work around it. I mean, it's console.log() ffs.

Dealing with breakpoints is a very time consuming process. In my opinion, a better workaround is to have a "log" function which wraps console.log(), and clones any objects if the browser is Chrome or Safari.

How do you do #2?

I too have switched to Chrome about 5 months ago -- only because of its lower memory and CPU footprint (in my experience at least), and have found myself used to the Chrome web dev tools' assortment of annoyances. All things being equal, I'd prefer to use Firebug, but Firefox just eats up too much memory and starts to lock up for a few seconds at a time.

Some issues I've found with Chrome dev tools:

* console.log() is fundamentally broken [1]. There's a bug filed for it and it doesn't seem like it will be fixed.

* When you log an HTML element, there's no way to jump to it in the "Elements" view.

* If XHR response is in JSON, it does not show you it in friendly easy-to-navigate format, but rather a big string.

Aside from that both tools are really awesome and do pretty much everything I need them to.

[1]: http://techblog.appnexus.com/2011/webkit-chrome-safari-conso...

That's exactly what I'm looking for. I tend to shop in the exact same manner -- though for items under $100 I still have a process of determining the "best" one from the price I'm willing to pay and the reviews.

Thanks for your input.

I dislike pretty much everything about Apple except the MacBook Pro.

I think there's a rather large snowball effect in play here, and during the first hours of a post where the snowball should first form, there's massive randomness in what activity will befall a post. The fact that an article is genuinely interesting doesn't guarantee it's spot on the front page, it just greatly increases it's odds.

What is of more concern to me is that all of the front page articles are genuinely interesting. To me HN does pretty well in this regard. There are so many interesting things out there that it doesn't bother me if some of them slip through the cracks and never reach the HN frontpage.

The quality of monitors nowadays is really quite good, and if you get one with a good NewEgg / Amazon rating it's almost impossible to go wrong. More good news is that it's an extremely competitive market, so you'll be getting pretty good bang for your buck. Best value seems to be in the 22-24" 1080p range.

I have a survey and brainstorm request which I feel you'd be able to answer helpfully and in under 15 minutes:

Suppose you're in the market to buy an item of type <x> (eg: blender, TV, energy bar). How do you go about finding the best <x>? Do you google "best <x>"? Do you go straight to Amazon? When/if you find a store, Do you sort by best rated, most reviews, most popular? How do you determine how much you're willing to spend? How do you determine which features exist, and which features are right to you? In fact, what things do you find necessary to determine? What's your process?

Ultimately, I'd like your thoughts on what the pain points of product search are, and how they could be improved.

I usually say: I help build an online advertising platform. Nope, I don't buy and sell ads. I work on the platform which we license out to people in the business of buying and selling ads. It handles more than 8,000,000,000 requests (200,000+/s peak) and several TB of data a day. From there discussion turns to their questions about advertising or scaling.

Alternatively, I'll answer "Internet stuff, and some personal projects in my spare time".

At any rate, a lot of people will always be misinformed about stuff they don't know much about but which they hear a lot about. Technology is definitely one of those things, as is the ".com garage millionaire" thing, as is this new work-from-home-x-hours-a-week. I wouldn't worry about it, but rather think of it as a chance to educate them a little bit.

Why the downvotes? Is it not legitimate to ask how a scarely-known website ended up being acquired in such a short time?

I'd never heard of SparkBuy.com -- how did it get snatched up so quickly by Google? A precursory glance at it's stats shows it as being tagged only a handle of times on Delicious [1] and is ranked 200,000+ on Alexa [2].

[1]: http://www.delicious.com/url/dd6d860947e61d97884bb3719377c7f... [2]: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/sparkbuy.com

It's a great concept, and I think it could fit into Google Shopping quite well. If you haven't checked out Google Shopping, you should -- they do some interesting things by aggregating reviews, doing NLP, and extracting out key terms. An example would be showing you a TV and it's ratings/sentiment analysis for several attributes like "color", "design", and whatever else is relevant for the product. With a more clever UI, they could churn out some amazing product search. I sure wish I had their data.

Tangentially related, I've been working on a similar website in my spare time. If anybody could point me in the right direction in terms of a price comparison API, and/or how to sign up for decent affiliate programs, I'd be quite grateful. Also, Google, if you'd like to hand me the keys to your product database I'd be happy to make a much more useful UI for you.

I think there's also an issue of performance -- it's possible, though unlikely, that the sort could take forever to complete.