Hacker News Reader

rdamicoon Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (May 2012)

Crocodoc.com (YC W10) - San Francisco - {Software Developers, Business Development, Sales/Marketing}

We just launched a major new HTML5 document embedding product today (http://tcrn.ch/JbsoVN) and announced new customers including Dropbox and LinkedIn.

We're growing super fast (haven't had time to finalize formal job descriptions yet!) and are a small, fun, high-intensity team.

Our goal at Crocodoc is to free users from antiquated desktop software and empower the world’s top companies to adopt cloud-based document workflows.

We've developed the world's most advanced web-based document viewing and collaboration technology for Microsoft Office and PDF files, built on open standards such as HTML5 and CSS3.

Drop us a note at jobs@crocodoc.com

rdamicoon Eight years today

Paul, thanks so much for sharing this. It's very touching and really underscores how easy it is to loose sight of the big picture in life. Very appropriate especially for those caught up in all the craziness that comes with a startup.

rdamicoon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

Our startup has been looking at office spaces lately for ~9 people (6 developers and 3 business people), and based on these comments it sounds like the recommended layout would be two separated / noise-insulated areas, one for each group to work. Would love to hear whether people agree with this or not.

rdamicoon Teens Photograph Lego Minifigure at Edge of Space for $400

Out of curiosity, how far downrange did each of your balloons end up coming down after reaching such high altitudes? How far was this distance from what you anticipated?

rdamicoon Ask HN: How do you keep track of your personal achievements?

If you're looking for an iPhone app, I use a tool called Momento to do this. It's nicely designed, is fairly functional, and works well so far. The only major downside is its inability to sync with external services like Dropbox to back up your data (you can do that manually through iTunes, but it's a pain).

rdamicoon Das Keyboard now pre-ordering Mac version of their mechanical keyboard

They're not kidding when they say their keyboards make an audible "click" sound... they also sell:

Reusable Earplugs: "Multi-use, comfortable earplugs for co-workers or significant others of Das Keyboard Professional or Das Keyboard Ultimate users."

rdamicoon Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.

You can sign up and order a kit anyway. Even if you're not a match for Amit, you can take this opportunity to be a potential match for someone else. Who knows, you might save a life.

rdamicoon Notifo (YC W10) Will be Shutting Down

I've been a heavy user of notifo myself, and will be sad to see the service go. Also agree that the notification was very professional and should set an example for other services.

rdamicoon Poll: Google+: Like it/prefer it to FaceBook

Thanks for the offer. I'd like to try out g+ if you have any invites left.

rdamicoon Building UI in Google Apps Script just got a whole lot easier

Yes, it can be VERY slow. But for us it's so valuable (allowing us to build a custom CRM on top of gmail and google spreadsheets) that it's good enough for now.

rdamicoon PDF Reader in JavaScript

At Crocodoc we tested out a similar approach using the Canvas element to render pages, but ultimately opted to go the @font-face route for a number of reasons, including:

- Near-instant client-side rendering (albeit a one-time ~5 second wait during server-side processing)

- Native font rendering (Canvas rasterizes all text and doesn't benefit from technologies like ClearType)

- Native text selection (which is important for overall UX and our annotation tools such as highlighting)

- Better performance on mobile devices (this is an ongoing project)

Here's a comparison of the test file micheljansen links to (thanks!) compared with the same PDF in Crocodoc:

- Canvas rendering: http://bit.ly/kU0mlW

- Crocodoc rendering: http://bit.ly/je2wcv

Edit: By the way, we're really impressed by this canvas implementation :-)

rdamicoon Introducing appointment slots in Google Calendar

I've been using tungle.me to schedule meetings for a while now, and it's a decent service. But the biggest problem is that it requires people who book time with me to click on an email verification link before they can request a meeting.

That makes for a really poor UX for them, so I'll definitely be interested to see how Google's new appointment slots work.

rdamicoon Scrible Launches Rich Web Annotation App To The Public

This looks almost exactly like WebNotes, the product we built before joining YC and pivoting to Crocodoc.

Will be interesting to see where Scrible takes their product, especially with fresh funding from the NSF.

rdamicoon Crocodoc, inDinero and ReadyForZero on NBC's Press:Here

Three brand new CEOs who know all the tricks sit down for a wide ranging conversation about success in Silicon Valley.

I had a lot of fun during this interview but certainly wouldn't claim to know all the tricks to being a CEO (ha!). That topic has already been covered exceptionally well here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2396120

If anything I think the gist of our conversation was about learning from past mistakes and refusing to quit no matter what -- and as a result, learning to make better decisions over time. That and the notion that a good team will always trump a good idea.

rdamicoon Goodbye Outlook - Gmail now lets you paste images directly from clipboard

This is a big step forward for Gmail. Now if they could just add some simple mail merge functionality, that would be another super-useful feature.

rdamicoon YCPages - List of Y Combinator companies, founders and jobs with statistics

I just tried editing our investment details for Crocodoc, and I get a "We are working on this feature and will be available soon" message.

rdamicoon Is the Boston technology scene living in the past?

I raised two angel rounds for Crocodoc -- one in Boston, and one in SV. In Boston I wore business attire to every meeting and was generally asked for a 5-year pro formas. In SV I wore flip flops to coffee shops where I showed off prototypes and talked up our vision to bring down Adobe.

I love Boston, but most of the investors there are so conservative when it comes to web startups that it makes me cringe. There are of course some fantastic investors (e.g. Dharmesh Shah) and exciting new initiatives (e.g. Mass Challenge), but I hope for its own sake that Boston picks up the pace and slows the massive influx of entrepreneurs leaving there for SV.

(For reference I lived in Boston for ~6 years and now SV for ~1 year.)

rdamicoon Yammer introduces HTML5 document collaboration (powered by Crocodoc, YC W10)

It's easy to get very basic Word/PDF documents to look decent in HTML, but to get ALL documents to look virtually identical in HTML is extremely challenging.

Here is the same document displayed in Crocodoc as well as an online "PDF to HTML" converter, for example:

http://crocodoc.com/ElpNgF

http://www.pdfonline.com/convert-pdf-to-html/DocStorage/678a...

rdamicoon Yammer introduces HTML5 document collaboration (powered by Crocodoc, YC W10)

Crocodoc allows IE6 users to download either the original file, or a PDF version containing any comments and markups that have been added to it so far.

All other versions of IE work fine (and IE9 actually looks amazing due to its updated font rendering engine).

rdamicoon Why does Adobe Reader need so many updates?

This is one of the main reasons why we launched crocodoc.com, to do the same thing to Adobe Acrobat that Gmail did to Outlook: Take a bloated offline application, bring it online, make it easy to use, and make it accessible to the masses.

When you think about some of the most common reasons why people use software like Acrobat and Word (e.g. viewing a document, filling out & saving a PDF form, commenting on a presentation with a group), these are all things that should be easy to do online or on your mobile device. That's the vision we're working towards at Crocodoc: view and collaborate on any document on any device.

rdamicoon World's first embeddable HTML5 document viewer, from Crocodoc (YC W10)

Here is one of the most complex PDFs we've come across so far, at least in terms of the typography and number of crazy fonts: http://crocodoc.com/KhoD84?embedded=true

rdamicoon Crocodoc (YC W10) launches online HTML5 document reader

Wow, we're really flattered by these posts on HN (Crocodoc co-founder here).

The HN community has been really supportive of us as we've been working on this. Lim Cheng Soon from Hacker Monthly was even kind enough to give us permission to use some of their PDFs to showcase our viewer.

This PDF (HM issue #1) is one of my favorites: http://crocodoc.com/pUY6tB

rdamicoon World's first embeddable HTML5 document viewer, from Crocodoc (YC W10)

Ryan from Crocodoc here. The Adobe Acrobat product line alone is a $600M+/year business. We believe that we can expand upon and disrupt that industry just like Gmail did to Outlook and Google Docs is doing to Microsoft Word. So if you ask us, we definitely have big plans for Crocodoc.

rdamicoon Crocodoc (YC W10) Launches HTML5-Based Document Viewer With Its Own API

Fair point as far as image-based document viewers are concerned. See response on this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2226889

EDIT: To clarify, I'm a co-founder of Crocodoc and answered the same question on a parallel thread (with a side by side comparison).

rdamicoon World's first embeddable HTML5 document viewer, from Crocodoc (YC W10)

Ryan from Crocodoc here. It is fair to say that we're not the first non-Flash document viewer -- there are some really solid image-based viewers like Vuzit who have been around a lot longer than we have.

What we are the first to do is leverage new HTML5/CSS3 standards like SVG and text transformations to create a fully embeddable document viewer that renders text natively and has built-in commenting, markup, and PDF export functionality.

You can compare the two different approaches used on the same document here:

http://www.vuzit.com/blog/2010/10/vuzit-now-supports-tight-i... (see embedded viewer under bullet #3)

http://crocodoc.com/uzvIYS

rdamicoon The Size of the Human Radio-Broadcast Bubble in the Milky Way Galaxy

It would be interesting to know how much of the Milky Way SETI has scanned so far. In other words, if someone else out there was running their own version of SETI, how long before they would be likely to find our little radio broadcast bubble?

rdamicoon Ask HN: A web-based PDF editor?

Ryan from Crocodoc here. We're open to adjusting our per-document limit -- can you give me an idea of what kind of document this is, and what its size is? I'm sure we can find a way to help you out!

rdamicoon Yuri Milner, SV Angel Offer Every New Y Combinator Startup $150k

Unless there are additional terms at play here (e.g. liquidation preference), this means that unless YC companies raise a series A before exiting, Yuri and SV Angels won't get more than a 1x return (plus interest).

It's hard to believe the math works out here, but obviously a lot of thought and number crunching has gone into this decision. Great news for YC though!

rdamicoon How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail

Great insight into a UI so good nobody will ever notice it (not being sarcastic there). Reminds me of your awesome post on the tab resizing UI for Google Chrome. Well done!

rdamicoon Introducing LunchTree - Lunch networking for the startup community

Overall, great concept!

Minor note: On the "Connect with friends & colleagues" screen, you might want to explain why I should give your site access to my linkedin/facebook/twitter accounts.