symbiotic

People throw out the word feminist without actually thinking about what it means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism - What does this have to do with feminism? The site doesn't claim that women don't have equal rights when it comes to start-ups.

I think in any potential business venture the team is so critical that I'd go out to people I know to help, even for early prototyping. Admittedly I might not be your target demographic because I can code myself.

Interesting idea but I would have a huge aversion to giving anyone equity who I haven't had some experience working with in the past or I don't see as having a long term role in my company.

Do you think rails or backbone was a mistake, or both? I'm a huge fan of backbone and would urge you to stick with it. It pays off!

Interesting, I'll look into it!

Here is my thought process...

Regardless of how you feel about PHP, I've spent enough time with it that I can make it work and write good code, quickly.

I do want to switch to another language at some point (I'll leave the reasoning for that out of this discussion).

Why switch to Python 2.7 if it's going to be old in a year or two? Even if there isn't a huge difference between 2.7 and 3.x it sounds like it would be a nightmare trying to upgrade any of the old work that I would have done in 2.7. So either I've got some projects that will be on 2.7 forever, or I go through the hassle of trying to upgrade. I'd rather just wait and avoid the whole debacle.

As a PHP developer I've been waiting for the web-dev group to jump on board with Python 3 before I make the switch. I'm hoping it will be sooner rather than later.

It looks like there's a built-in css editor (look in the lower right) so you can do something like this pretty easily:

.btn {color: red;}

This is kind of disheartening. I found it on the front page and saved it so that I could read the discussion later. I've gone through the same thought process while evaluating job offers at start up companies and would have been interested to hear the other side of the story from the employers.

I might be wrong but hasn't the Kindle been offering a free internet access to browse its store and even some online content for a while now?

That's a reasonable complaint, but maybe it means we need better lightweight libraries with well thought out interfaces or better library management like deweller suggested in the comments on the original thread.

I don't think there's any disagreement about using the right tool for the job. What I took from the original MicroPHP Manifesto is that the solution is not to have a ton of hammers to choose from. Instead, make sure you have a couple different types of hammer heads and a couple different types of handles that you can mix and match so that the right hammer is always available.

This way your toolbox is much lighter and easier to carry around (easier to keep up to date with improvements to the code and easier to maintain). I think it's about breaking things into smaller pieces.

link to our launchrock page: http://launch.foodwithafriend.com/

My sister is a designer, but interested in learning how to code. I'll be seeing her over the holidays and I thought the best way to teach her the more technical side of the web would be through a quick hackathon style project.

Here's our pitch for foodwithafriend.com:

It can be hard to keep up with friends from all of your different social circles.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to catch up with a different friend each week over some delicious food? Food with a Friend will automatically match you up with one of your friends each week for a tasty meal at a local establishment.

You tell us what days you're generally free and we'll match you up. Then all you have to do is pick a restaurant!

If we can get 100 people to sign up, we'll build it. Otherwise we might choose a different idea.

What do you think?

It's great to see that there are other Wesleyan tech entrepreneurs out there. I moved to Madison, Wisconsin after graduating from Wes, so I didn't realize there was such a big Wesleyan tech scene in NY.

That being said, there are a number of great start-ups coming out of University of Wisconsin, supported by a really exciting entrepreneurship community here. There was a TechCrunch article a while back about Wisconsin start-ups and Capital Entrepreneurs, a group that really supports the start-up community here in Madison (http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/wisconsin-land-of-beer-chee...).

Start ups from public institutions are out there! 94 labs, a Wisconsin incubator program that I went through just graduated 14 companies, many of which had founders from UW schools.

Two weeks ago one of my co-workers (HN name: coreyloose) participated in build madison (http://http://www.buildmadison.org/) a hackathon in Madison, WI. For our project we built Brainsy (http://brainsy.net), a visual suggestion engine for etsy.com products. We won the cash prize and a years free hosting. This past weekend we pushed out version 2.

We wanted to share our work with HN. The algorithm is pretty simple now. It looks at the list of tags for the products that you like, and searches for products with similar tags. It's not perfect but works pretty well givent its simplicity.

We would love to get HN's feedback on the design, possible improvements for the algorithm (or any good reading I could do on the subject), and thoughts for monitization. We never really intended for the project to make any money, so we're pretty happy just making something that's useful. Corey is trying to get a job at etsy, so he figured this would be a good project to help out with that. But if you have any good ideas for how to monitize that would be an added bonus!

Building a good user experience (in my opinion) involves: 1. A research period to determine which features your users need and 2. A brainstorming period to determine how to implement those features in a way that makes them easy to learn over the short term, and easy/quick to use over the long term.

So to answer your question, user experience is more about the process of how to build good features.

This looks promising. Unfortunately I can't use any GUI tools because the server doesn't have a GUI installed.

Very cool! I can see myself using this. How are you able to parse out the ingredients so well?

One suggestion: After submitting a url for one recipe I get a list of ingredients, great! It would be cool if the text box at the top of that page would allow me to add another url to append the ingredients from another recipe to the list.

Yeah FB Connect is a great idea! I think many of my potential users are probably already on facebook already.

As far as the TOS go, I'm a little too poor right now to hire a lawyer but the university near me has a great program where law students (supervised by a lawyer) offer free services to entrepreneurs. I'm signed up for that program but it doesn't start until June.

Any suggestions for how to fill that privacy policy and tos in the mean time?

That was hand coded. It took me forever to get it working in IE6 :)

We do need birthday because you have to be at least 13 to register but you're right about the rest, especially the TOS... going to fix that now :)

Clickable link: http://trophysight.com

You might want to check out: http://builditwith.me/

I posted an idea on there a while back and got several responses from interested developers and designers.

In the end I decided that I wanted to work with someone who I could meet face to face and who I had a previous relationship with. I think it's hard to set this type of thing up through a website.

I found this post very insightful as I'm having many of the problems that were described (and will definitely be tying some of the suggested solutions). I'll also give it 10/10.

I think this is absolutely on point. I'm working on developing electronic medical record software and lowering the initial learning curve is my primary concern. After that comes additional features, but in the beginning you need to be able to demonstrate that your product will actually make you customers' lives easier in the short run.

This website: http://dostuffright.com/ does something similar with the drop shadow. Kinda neat.

The company I work for uses IE 7 standards for rendering within our application. A lot of things would break if the people using our software upgraded to IE 8.

Our HTML markup is so ugly :(

In the best class I took in all of high school we read this book cover to cover. It can be a little bit repetitive but as soon as I read the title of this post I immediately thought of this book.

Thanks, I'll check it out!