systemtrigger

I have never bought a virtual gift as I understand the definition. They're silly. That may change as the interestingness and utility of these social tokens evolves. Today they seem very...Elementary School. Back then if your dream girl gave you a Crackerjax prize you treasured it. I'm not saying they aren't a good business but today I put them in the same stupidity category as gift cards.

I suspected there were a lot of us INTPs here. Namaste, architects.

The first two clips are a prolonged throat-clearing from a guy who makes no effort to disguise that he is reading. Maybe eventually he recites an argument for us, meanwhile the visuals are a yawner.

Great summary. I watched it too and like you was impressed to see how articulate Reznor is. His answers were insightful and nuanced.

I'm bound to make mistakes when talking about this stuff but my wife got her masters in nutrition, is published in journals and for what it's worth she's a big fan of the raw food diet. We both followed it closely for about 6 months but eventually we decided it just wasn't convenient enough. There were certainly some benefits to it that I miss but I phrase these much more conservatively than what most gurus would have you believe. For example, I never felt any sort of natural high or extreme mental clarity - just comforted knowing that I wasn't poisoning my body with HFC etc. YMMV.

Here is my best argument for why a layperson should go raw: it forbids you anything that even resembles junk food. Raw may be flawed but clearly it's way healthier than how most people eat. You can say it's a crutch or psychosomatic or whatever but for me once I got into the mindset of it I just stopped noticing unhealthy food. Almost everything in the modern dining world is cooked.

The major downside - because it's so damn restrictive (plus we're practically vegan) is that raw gets to be time consuming. It's really impractical for people on-the-go. Sure you can always just eat an apple or some carrots but that gets boring and so you end up dehydrating your own bread etc and turning down practically every social dining opportunity. In a way that is a Good Thing because there is a lot of harmful junk in modern food, right? But it takes real dedication and eventually we decided a totally raw intake just wasn't worth all the effort.

A cooked food diet opens up the floodgates to all sorts of unhealthy temptations. But in the end it came down to priorities like convenience. If you're thinking of going raw your best friend is the blender: there are a million nutritious ways to mix a surprisingly delicious smoothie (secret ingredient: jalepeños).

I think the reason your post isn't getting traction is that you don't have anything to show us unless we leave our email addresses for you here in the open. Maybe you should leave your email address and let us privately contact you.

I signed up for an alpha account a few minutes ago. If I hear back from you I'll check out your app.

On the credit card question, these already exist - they're called Corporate Purchasing Cards. The reason credit card companies don't do buckets is, as Steve alluded, the merchant data isn't granular enough and in order to place restrictions on what cardholders can buy you have to know the bucket type of every item that merchants sell. That's a huge problem which even the best Corporate Card companies have trouble solving. American Express is #1 in terms of data but the cardholder often still needs to explain which bucket the purchase goes into. (One reason you need a special POS cardreader for Amex is to inform the Purchasing Card transactions which bucket to use.)

I have one other account here. I started this account one day when I wanted to express a controversial idea I felt I couldn't articulate well enough to warrant associating my real name with it for the rest of my life. Sometimes my positions aren't P.C. enough to associate with my family name and sometimes I just want to explore my opinions in discussion form even though I haven't got the time to express myself with exacting clarity. I'm afraid if I use my real name (a unique name for sure) I will either make a mistake I might later regret or I will be tempted to wordsmith my comment for longer than I should.

Anonymity can sometimes be very liberating. Maybe when I become a better writer or my startup is wildly successful I will reveal my identity. Until then I don't see why I should silence my most authentic voice by closing this account or use my real name on every comment that I write. What's wrong with using a pseudonym once in awhile? Some people only use a pseudonym - is that so wrong?

I treat this account more like a diary. I take more risks under this account. It grants me creative license to be myself but not the self I want shown when someone googles me.

What if my startup doesn't work out? I'm going to need a "real job" and if the economic environment gets much worse I might find myself interviewing with a conservative pointy-haired boss. This is a real life possibility and if it turns out that is what happens I'm better off if my interviewer hasn't read my honest ramblings on corporate life, sex, philosophy, politics - all of which I feel free to discuss under a pseudonym. Look at it another way: in a worst-case-scenario, let's assume one day I am wrongly accused of a terrible crime - do I want the prosecutor to take out of context my most controversial, intimate musings? There are after all some things you can't say. I haven't exposed much under this account - I just started it a few weeks ago - but <edit>my reaction to the negativity in this thread</edit> is What is wrong with someone detaching themselves a bit from their ego? <edit>Downmodders,</edit> how am I hurting the community?

Vivapixel appears functional and very fast but it doesn't arrest me as a visitor with a compelling argument on why I should sign up. If I were you I would work on storytelling then I would add pro subscriptions.

I would paint a better "you're stupid if you don't sign up" story, starting with the home page. Your focal point currently is a random image from one user's photos and after refreshing 10x I think maybe your ego is getting in the way of your argument; we should not see pictures of Dave's baby or his out-of-focus drunk friend, we should be thinking 'wow I need this' within 5 seconds. I would replace that random image div with a thoughtful, visual argument for why vivapixel is a brilliant photo and video product. This is your chance to convince and sell. I like how your artistic design is minimalistic but it appears so bare-bones and unopinionated that as a visitor I'm just not confident you care much about user experience or celebrating my handiwork. Like a gourmet meal, presentation is key and IMO some elements of your design aren't paired well. Think of your customers as artists - they need to believe their gallery's curator has exquisite taste and appreciates the visual zeitgeist. If your marketing even hints that you're cheap or that you cut corners we won't proceed to Page 2, we'll be off to flickr.

I love your logo!

Your visitors subconsciously nitpick, so get into their heads. The dialog boxes are all highlighted red - that makes visitors think they've made 6 errors just by opening the homepage. The buttons should all be beautiful images - not the browser default or a graded blue. Treat your canvas as a masterpiece, something that elevates and makes us want to play with your toys. Visitors secretly resent the fact most of your language is boilerplate - would you rather spend their visual energy covering your own ass or convincing them that you've got something worth using?

Finally I think you could eventually monetize Vivapixel with a subscription model. I might make public libraries free and for users who wanted privacy I'd charge them - like Github does. Another option that might work: charge users for large filesize libraries, or for transcoding services. At any rate, great job so far - you might have a super business if you keep at it.

mirror: http://s3.amazonaws.com/01981/index.html

Aha - that fixed it! Thanks, all of you.

I think a paywall just hides a site's content from nonsubscribers so it's just a euphemism for a subscription site. As for micropayments, yes I think a lot of us are familiar with that technology - paypal and amazon fps developer docs ought to be enough to get you started. What specifically are you trying to accomplish?

Pardon this off-topic comment but would anyone happen to know why on pages like this I see unusual characters in place of punctuation? Screenshots: http://s3.amazonaws.com/2009/safari.png http://s3.amazonaws.com/2009/firefox.png. It doesn't matter which browser I use or what user account I'm logged in as, my Mac chokes on certain web pages - the linked article being an example.

My screen res is 1440x900 and my browser is Safari 4 public beta. If it isn't legal to display the full recipes on your site I wonder if you could around that by doing a split-pane thing - with your content on one side and the source content on the other, that's cheating a bit but not nearly as much as if you scraped everything as your own. I wonder if there are any free-use recipe databases you could use. Smart design on the search - you might want to highlight this on the front page as your sorting algorithm inspires confidence in the search results. Good luck!

I like how it prompted me to add more items to the filter which updated the search results which seem to come from all over the culinary web. I can see how this is already a useful service. Forgive my ignorance, Are you the first mover in this space or are others already doing recipe search by ingredients? I was a little frustrated with the search result display: I had to scroll down a page or two of whitespace but I assume you'll work on that in good time. I'm also feeling unloved by the way each search result appears because the list of external links makes me feel like I'm on a parked site. My frustration was that for every recipe I still needed to visit the grocery store to get more ingredients - that said it may be because my cupboard is too bare. I wonder if for the paid service it might work a bit better if you approached the whole site from an ad-free perspective. What if the search results didn't drive away traffic to the source sites but revealed the full recipes on your site? Only your paying customers would get to see the entire recipe while freeloaders could see just the list of ingredients? Or you could give away some recipes in their entirety for free while making a percentage of the search results opaque to all but your customers. If you're wanting to flip this maybe you could sell or license to a foodie site. I don't know what restrictions the sites you're getting these recipes from place on their APIs (which is I assume how you're getting the data) but these are my initial thoughts based on a cursory visit. Good v1, I think you should keep working on it. And don't listen to me too much, you might well have an ad model that works.

> it would be practically impossible to sell custom collections of printed articles.

Well it might not be the safest undertaking and certainly the product could not be sold in corner bookstores but I can imagine such a business in today's world. To be sure, we're talking about an app that lets customers print "protected" works sans owner permission and compensation. Technologically there is precedent for this sort of racket; a lot of very profitable web businesses sell digital content they don't legally own. These startups are cheap to launch and thanks to the wonders of abstraction and obfuscation the thieving operators cloak themselves in relative obscurity. Add a dash of print-on-demand, update the legal contract to ensure absolution if questioned and what you've got is the world's cheapest print store for copyrighted content. It's just Kinko's in the cloud.

I think your idea of shipping documents to customers for free needs more explanation. The cost to deliver analog archives to physical addresses is huge and if you open up the order floodgates do you really think ad revenue would support the print and delivery costs? How would you deal with, for example, all the pranksters? Maybe if you defined extremely tight parameters on customer requests you could make it solvent but I would challenge you to define a single use case. If you can paint that legal, lucrative story maybe you've got an interesting business idea.

Ditto in Phoenix (5th largest US city by population) where the job market strongly favors Microsoft tech. I search indeed.com every few days and the lamp/open-source/mac jobs here are super rare compared to .net demands.

It is zippy and although the full-screen view breaks Spaces it gets rid of the already minimal "chrome" (to access click the address bar arrows). Some standard options - even a Preferences menu - are grayed out so it feels very bare-bones. I keep getting the aw, Snap! error message (http://s3.amazonaws.com/2009/chrome.png) for no apparent reason and there doesn't appear to be any developer tools for the user yet. So I won't be using Chrome for demos anytime soon but it was fun to explore for a couple minutes what has been strictly a Windows phenomenon.

I loved the Galt speech but it has been a few years since I last read it so I don't recall how much lead-in it requires. Sometimes I listen to the audio version of Anthem Chapter 11, another powerful speech.

Who is being pretentious now?

The HN library is a strong reading list:

http://ycombinator.com/lib.html

Last night on 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl interviewed Vint Cerf and some security experts for a story on identity theft and malware. Cerf was on for maybe 20 seconds and the rest of the segment was your typical the-sky-is-falling doomsday report. What bugged me about Stahl's piece was how rotten she presumed hackers writ large to be. She said the word at least 20 times with no consideration given for honest hackers.

I once used the h-word in a corporate setting in front of my boss. The benign context left no doubt as to my meaning but old pointy hair later assured me I had crossed a line. Memo: the safewords are "code" and "program."

Good to be working on a startup today. Essays like this continue to remind me why I left the establishment.

> Would you not release an update until your UI passed the 10 out of 10 test?

No. You cannot expect 100% of unqualified users to grok any UI.

> Should I worry about the 3 in which our UI failed them?

You should want to know why these 3 didn't pass your test.

To say much beyond this in the way of advice I think we need to know about your UI, the test and the worker incentives. What exactly did your HIT Description say?

I would say that the world's privileged have a digital addiction problem and that many people should unplug themselves and go out for a walk more often than they do. But if I go analog tomorrow it will be a self-directed decision not because I feel some need to imitate a diarist who hopes to coin a holiday.

I think uni labs should just focus on providing great hub access - big monitors, ethernet, wifi, disk. Students should be issued or be assumed to have laptops and there ought to be a tech support center. Why do colleges continue to overbuy hardware when it's clear from the outset every year how many machines and licenses are needed?

> Or am I crazy? If you're crazy then I'm crazy too because what you have described I have felt in some form or another for a long time. You're definitely not alone and I think you're posing smart questions and yeah if I had some more time I would want to suggest to you that there are ways to channel your gift in an inspired direction.

Look, what I really liked about Ayn Rand is her perspective on selfishness. She basically said Stop listening to altruism b.s. and be relentlessly selfish. If you "get" that then you grant yourself the freedom to architect your own future, your own world. So number one, you're the painter of your life's canvas and you owe it to yourself to satisfy yourself long-term. What should you paint? I say sketch it out at first. You're talking about being frustrated with stupid people: stop focussing on them. Avoid toxic people and spaces - cultivate your selfish world. And don't let anyone tell you that taking care of #1 isn't beautiful. It is. It's the only way I know after reading a ton of philosophy how to be happy. (And please no one should take this to mean screw over other people. It's way more fun to be loving, selectively.)

Be honest and stay rational, righteous friend.