sycr

How does one go about finding developer resources for closed applications like Oracle ATG (or really any of the above list)?

I'm employed by an eCommerce vendor myself, so I'm sure I'd have an intuitive understanding of general architecture, but actually understanding the internals of a system as an outsider seems like a difficult proposition.

Oh man, this is just awesome. Thanks so much for making this open source - it's great to be able to pick apart the internals of something like this.

Not bad - definitely a solid start. This happens to be on my own idea list:

11. Full-page screenshot service that doesn't suck

I'm happy to be able to tick it off as completed by someone else. :)

Edit: I tried sending it a url with Typekit fonts on the page. No dice. I'm assuming that Javascript is turned off?

Alex, I enjoyed reading this tremendously. As a young guy, somewhat skeptical of anyone who claims authority on these matters, I grok you here:

I am not a business person. I don’t know what makes a good business. It seems like it helps to have a good idea, great people, the willingness to work hard, and an absolute shit-ton of luck. Being certain about much beyond that seems, well, a bit crazy to me.

This has been discussed before. Here is the conversation:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098756

And pg's explanation:

It's not so much that it's ahead of its time relative to hardware as it is something you do in the early versions of a program.

Using closures to store state on the server is a rapid prototyping technique, like using lists as data structures. It's elegant but inefficient. In the initial version of HN I used closures for practically all links. As traffic has increased over the years, I've gradually replaced them with hard-coded urls.

Lately traffic has grown rapidly (it usually does in the fall) and I've been working on other things (mostly banning crawlers that don't respect robots.txt), so the rate of expired links has become more conspicuous. I'll add a few more hard-coded urls and that will get it down again.

I knew nothing about your product just by reading your title, so these are my complete first impressions:

1) In the second sentence, I'm expecting to hear the first pitch for the product.

Generally speaking: with Spaceship, we ultimately aim to lift your creative process to a new level of productivity and fun.

Why "generally" speaking? You don't want to speak generally, you want to speak specifically about what you're offering. Secondly, you introduce your product with its benefits. That's great for most sales situations (think of all of the TV commercials that start with "Imagine if..."), but can be confusing for technical products like software. I want to know what your product does.

2) This is a really strong insight:

We found and tried a lot of products that try to simulate analog tools like note-taking apps or virtual whiteboards. Web afficionados work together in Google Docs. A forward-thinking filmmaker might manually copy character mugshots into a Dropbox folder. We heard of people who like the experience of Evernote.

3) The video is great. You're using the application to demo the application. Fantastic. But where's the audio? Why aren't you speaking with me directly? If you aren't comfortable with speaking, hire a friend for cheap.

Great job. Stripe is one of the few valuations that doesn't seem out-of-this-world insane.

Get yourselves into Canada!

Do you have any contacts in particular? I'm in Toronto myself, and currently looking.

18. A BankSimple for the payroll industry

I've thought about this one myself. Seems like an industry ripe for disruption too: with complex, expensive systems from a monopoly player (ADP). Can anyone offer some insight as to why we haven't seen startups in this space?

Why is this on the front page? It's link-bait and list-spam. Flag it!

Ditto. I would include a clearer legend somewhere near the graph.

Hopefully specialforces.com will do a full disclosure to their customers immediately. Every second counts at this point...

Please do not create throwaway accounts to make one-off, potentially controversial comments. It dilutes the quality of the discussion.

Yeah, really though.

The indextank repo proper is interesting (and useful) enough, but indextank-service (https://github.com/linkedin/indextank-service) made my jaw drop a little. It's a full administrative stack for deploying indextank as a service.

Joined.

I've got at least one +1, maybe two potentially.

There are a lot of feeder groups for this type of thing: the Toronto Ruby Brigade in particular probably has a lot of HN types.

While this briefly has some attention: who's up for a generic Hacker News meetup?

He also seems to misunderstand the Windows pricing model as some kind of subscription service (which may be true for products like MSDN, but not in general):

"As soon as you stop paying the licensing fee, you cease to own the software. This is especially impactful with their corporate clients. Imagine if Ford and GM had decided at the onset of the automotive industry that when you buy your car, you need to bring it in yearly for a checkup, with payment — and any year you miss that, the ownership of the car reverts back to them."

I agree, but for different reasons. It's simply not a newsworthy item. Gossip worthy? Looks like it.

Why is this being up voted when the link is broken?

The reason you are being down voted, just so you know, is because you're being flippant and dismissive.

Clickable link: http://mixcastr.com/

Yes.

I'm sure there's a solid handful of us.

Worth and cost are not the same.

Thanks for these po. Sublime Text is kicking major ass these days.

That time line might be a bit aggressive.

But what's undoubtedly true is that Facebook is laying the infrastructure for predictive analysis of pretty much everything.

Thanks for this - a video was the first idea that came to my mind.

With a monthly burn of only $150 though, why kill it? The all or nothing approach seems stubborn to an outsider. Maybe it doesn't generate a full time income, but you only need 30 users to break even every month. That seems like an achievable goal.

Instead of looking for fashionable languages, why not look for a history of creativity and a passion for learning? And you can never, ever underestimate the value of good communication skills.