Hacker News Reader

sheriffon 2011: The Year the Check-in Died

Usage being total checkins per month?

I'd be more interested in a comparison of engagement (checkins per account per month) over time. The first metric can hide declining engagement if there are sufficiently many latecomers who haven't burnt out yet.

sheriffon Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

Currently you're in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, where new visitors probably need to see more fresh content to get interested, but your content only comes from having lots of visitors. If you can bootstrap the content, you may find that user acquisition gets easier.

It seems a little bit like you're trying to create a more structured version of what people are already doing on Twitter with many of the trending hashtags. (e.g. today's #failedmcdonaldsproducts[1] or #100factsaboutme[2]) Rather than fight the momentum Twitter already has there, perhaps you could take advantage of the Twitter API to automatically pull these trending topics in as Thingist Lists. When a new list is auto-created from a trending topic, you can automatically tweet out a link to the Thingist list with the same hashtag, which will get you exposure among people following that term.

The hard part then is making sure Thingist provides a more compelling experience than Twitter for browsing these sets of things. I'm not sure if you're there yet, but there is definitely an opportunity to do something better than search-by-hashtag. If you do pull this off, you'll have plenty of fresh content to keep new users engaged until they start creating lists right on Thingist.

[1] http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23failedmcdonaldsproducts

[2] http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23100factsaboutme

sheriffon Show HN: Sparkmuse, story and beta of my side project

A lot of your copy focuses on how this is just the beginning, how important this site is to you, and how you want feedback, etc. That's great for someone who already cares, but most visitors to any site are going to be ambivalent until they know what they're getting out of it.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't care about you at all. Explain the unique benefits that that person can access right now. Appeal to their selfishness. Focus specifically on things that Sparkmuse enables (right now) that cannot also be said about alternative sites, such as Hacker News. Trim everything else away.

sheriffon An open letter to mint.com: Stop storing my credentials

I think the argument is that Mint would not need to store the users' raw bank credentials. Yodlee does need to hang on to the raw credentials, but Mint (when they were using Yodlee) only needed to pass them through to Yodlee in exchange for a token.

sheriffon Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (October 2010 Edition)

Providence, RI. Swipely (http://swipely.com/jobs)

Now hiring back-end (mostly Ruby on Rails) and front-end (jQuery/HTML/CSS) developers.

Swipely is part social network, part financial application, and part gaming platform, and we have plenty of interesting problems to work on in all those areas and more. This is hands-down the strongest engineering team I've worked with. We work in weekly iterations and push new code to production at least once per iteration. Though not a strict requirement, we have a strong preference for full-time employees who can work out of our office in Providence.

Our perks blurb: "Swipely offers competitive salaries and full benefits, similar to "big" companies. We also offer everyone equity in the company, to share in Swipely's long-term success. Our kitchen is stocked at all times with free drinks and snacks. Lunch is catered every day from a nearby sandwich shop, and we even keep a dedicated fridge stocked with craft beers from around the globe. We want you to have the best tools for the job, so the Macbook Pros are fast, the Internet pipes are fat and the screen pixels are unlimited. Go for it!"

sheriffon ASK HN: How do you motivate a lazy co-founder?

Good point. It's totally plausible that he's coming in late so he doesn't have to deal with the intern.

sheriffon [dead]

http://vimperator.org/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4891

sheriffon Ask HN: Do all the iPad articles really add something valuable?

I'd appreciate a comment with the downvote. I was answering the question. Do you simply disagree that the most interesting stories are buried more deeply than usual?

sheriffon Ask HN: Do all the iPad articles really add something valuable?

This is the first time I've ever pulled up Hacker News and found nothing interesting on the homepage.

sheriffon [dead]

If you don't like how someone answers your questions, you don't have to ask them.

Also, the answers in example 2 suggest something false about linear functions. Take f(x) = x + 1. f(a) + f(b) = a + b + 2 != f(a+b) = a + b + 1

sheriffon The "Black Box" Disease

exactly. it's nice that AR makes it easy to go down a layer, but then you're no longer abstracting away the database.

edit: to be fair, I was less than precise in my earlier post when I said that ActiveRecord wasn't totally transparent. I was specifically referring to AR as an abstraction that can be used identically across various different databases.

sheriffon The "Black Box" Disease

I think the form helpers in Rails are handy shortcuts, but I don't know if I'd call them abstractions. Abstractions are tools for generalizing, but Rails helpers only produce HTML output. Only if you could re-use the same helpers to produce a variety of different types of markup would I call them an abstraction (and that would probably make it necessary to make the abstraction less transparent).

A better example of a true abstraction in Rails is ActiveRecord, which I think you'll agree is bit less transparent.

sheriffon I hired 50 people today. This is what they look like

funny, I've been running a HIT recently which asks turkers to wish my friend a happy birthday. http://happyturkday.tumblr.com/

sheriffon Eric Schmidt: "If you have something [to hide], maybe you shouldn't be doing it"

cool, so my friends that work at Google don't need to keep the details of their projects secret anymore?

sheriffon The Mint.com Story by the 3rd person at Mint

agreed. I didn't even try reading it in it's original formatting before clicking reaching for the Readability bookmarklet. http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

sheriffon Why do event sites suck?

I totally agree that a lot of sites fail to get the most important info front-and-center.

I recently started building http://minivite.com to address that problem.

sheriffon Ask HN: Review http://browserpop.com

My first instinct is that I can get 80% of the way there with a tag in my Delicious account. The other 20% would be in a UI that was really geared towards being a home page. As a result, it'd be great if folks could try out the interface without having to sign up first. No reason you can't let people add a couple URLs to see if they like it, and only require sign up if they want to save their bookmarks beyond that browser session or access from another computer

sheriffon YCRFS 2: New Paths Through Product Space

So, basically FriendFeed for the consumer-facing part of online retail?

Having a good understanding of co-op advertising could matter a great deal here. Retailers get paid by manufacturers for product placements... Someone going after this model could try to reach similar deals with both the manufacturers and the retail-fulfillment entities.

sheriffon Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions

I've been happy with pairNIC.

sheriffon Why There Are No Girls In San Francisco

tech conferences != SF

sheriffon Open Source, compliant Google Wave Server

please add mattgillooly

sheriffon Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will?

"I go back and forth with humans having it fairly often even"

I'm curious what kind of things tip you back and forth. I've been a staunch "undecided" for quite a while on this one.

sheriffon Friedman: Invent, Invent, Invent

Then I have to ask: what do you mean by "advanced math students"?

sheriffon Ask HN: What should I do with this project (HandyFind)?

I found the green bubbles incredibly distracting in the demo video. My eye was drawn to a bright green bubble that contained what you were typing, and less drawn to the part of the text which matched your search. It was really hard for me to tell if this would be useful to me... perhaps just going a little slower could help that.

sheriffon Scientists Teleport Data on Tiny Scale

Is that meaningfully different from what happens to you now, instant-to-instant? How many of your atoms need to be swapped out for the copy to stop being "you"?

sheriffon Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed

As a video on it's own merits, I liked it.

But I watched it after reading the post, which was already an abbreviated form of the interview. I only watched the video because the post had already interested me, but watching the video after reading the post didn't really add anything. Given this presentation, I think it would have made sense to embed the full video instead.

sheriffon Bill Gates unleashes mosquitoes on TED conference

Fortunately all the mosquitoes BSOD'ed before they could bite anyone.

sheriffon Twitter API: Call for OAuth beta participants

Our users (http://twalala.com) have been asking for a better login mechanism since we launched. It'll be really nice to finally be able to deliver something better. Looking forward to it!

sheriffon Ask HN: How do you deal with alienation?

Just stop alienating yourself.

Stop coming up with reasons to dislike your friends. Stop waiting for something to magically change in your life (college won't be that different.

And definitely stop framing the problem as _other people_ alienating _you_. Even if it were true, that's not a problem you can do much about.

Spend time with people you like, and try to let people surprise you.

sheriffon Ask HN: How do you explain what you do to your relatives?

don't talk about whats. talk about why's.

it's good practice for your marketing. you need to talk to your market in terms of how you're going to help them kick more ass. if you talk to your relatives in terms of whom you help kick more ass, they are more likely to give a shit.