zachster

This is really great. I love the concept and simplicity.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Use the Amazon API to autosuggest book titles and author names.

2. Normalize the lists. That is, count up which books are recommended the most and use those statistics to recommend books.

3. List similar lists on each list :) Lists that list the same books might be related. If they list two or more of the same books, they're probably related.

But even if you don't change a thing, it's still a great little project!

Any requests?

Haha... no... this is the first "missed connections" I've gotten on HN.

It's kind of an obvious idea, I guess. But I haven't seen anything that let's you listen to the bands playing nearby.

I'm not sure how much potential there is here for a business. I go into some of that on my blog.

I wrote Hip.ly last Thursday because it's something I've wanted for a long time and I needed a break from my startup. I wrote a blog post about why I did it here:

http://zachster.com/2010/11/08/hip-ly/

I included San Jose to make it relevant for my distant friends out there. I was surprised how many cool shows are coming up... in the surrounding area...

http://hip.ly/1288

This is a great post. And it's well written!

I can definitely relate to the sentiments, but I think giving developers a "pass" on their involvement in The Scene (or maybe their own scene) is letting them (us) off easy.

We have our own superficial criteria for who's hot/not. It's what language you write, how you host, how you deploy, how you test, how you data (Yes it's a verb now. You're welcome).

I know it seems like these are substantive issues. And sometimes they are. But ultimately, as long as a technical solution gets the job done, it's fine. I'm not talking about getting the job done poorly. That's not getting the job done.

And as someone who's working on a very un-sexy project (that I hope will be substantive and meaningful to a lot of people outside this community), I can say being outside the scene is a cold place to be.

I'm not really complaining. Nor offering a solution. So take that.

You're living your life in fear! <g>

I like this article.

I like how they talk about drug smuggling technology in terms of natural selection against an inhospitable environment. It reminds me of hacking.

Less people die from hacking.

It seems to me that Demand Media is the realization of the original dream of "The Mining Company" (later became About.com). They've created an efficient marketplace for generating content in direct response to user's search queries.

But how does content specifically designed to answer a question, make more money showing contextual ads than it costs to produce the content in the first place? If the content is answering the query, what ads are users clicking after reading it?

It was kind of a rhetorical question. The process clearly encouraged rebellious behavior. Though I don't think this really qualifies as such. We're entrepreneurs. We network. We promote. This is what we do.

Rules? I don't understand.

Thanks for the nice memorial. I didn't know Luke, but it sounds like he's leaving behind a great example and a lot of inspiration.

Is it fair to say that eBay is taking the profits? Or have they just created an efficient marketplace with such a low barrier to entry for both the seller and the buyer that profit margins are getting pushed smaller and smaller.

If eBay cut their fees in half, wouldn't sellers lower their prices to compete against each other?

I think this is the natural consequence of efficient consumerism where the sellers offer no valuable differentiation of service. I appreciate it when I get fast shipment, and maybe some free candy included with my purchase, but that hasn't yet inspired any 'brand-loyalty'.

On the plus side, I think this helps build a market for sites like Etsy where there's a clear scarcity of merchandise.

Thanks for the pointer! This looks interesting. The edge conditions seem like they might pose a problem. I'll have to check out how often it would occur. Maybe the geospatial indexes are a better bet. It looks like MongoDB supports them also. Good excuse to try that out.

I've got this on a site I'm building that offers a sort by distance option. There's definitely a performance hit. I'm going to look into 'dumber' ways of filtering out the data prior to running this function. Maybe start by including state in the where clause, for example.

Any other ideas?

One solution I saw used more simple arithmetic to calculate a range of coordinates within levels of distance. That could be pre-cached, but it's a lot less accurate.

It seems to me there was a dating-site boom back in the early 2000's. At that time there were a few sites that offered nice white-label packages. Spring Street Networks seemed like the best to me (powering the often lauded Nerve.com site). I worked with a company called Vintacom who had an API. They ran their own site called DreamMates, I think.

But I haven't seen anything similar in recent years. It seems like the market for premium dating sites has somewhat dried up. Sites like OkCupid and PlentyOfFish (free) seem to be doing alright though.

My recommendation would be to look into the Facebook API. While you can't poll the whole userbase, many new dating sites start by listing all the friends of anyone who authorizes their app. I think this is a small dance around ToS, but maybe if you don't use PII it's allowed? Regardless it can be used to give the impression of having an egg before you've got a chicken.

Yup, that's right. Also quinoa. Grain Free looks pretty intense too.

As someone who tries to keep a low profile (or at least only be noticed for things I think are cool about myself) it's not ideal having such a dietary restriction. But the benefits erase the question in my mind.

Yeah, I wonder if that's part of it.

But I still eat a ton of carbs. They're just in the form of things like potatoes, corn, lentils, etc. It's one of those things I try not to think about too much. I worry that if I decide it's all psychosomatic that I'll go back to feeling how I did before.

I can attest to this. I gave up gluten last year. I don't know if I was really allergic. I never had the blood test done. The result is that I pay greater attention to everything I eat and stick mainly to whole grains, vegetables, seafood and dairy.

But I eat a lot more dairy. Something about the diet makes me crave ice cream and creme brulee type things. I must be consuming more fat than I ever did before.

The net result is I lost about ten pounds, which is about 8% of my body weight.

If I wasn't allergic to begin with, I also gave myself a gluten intolerance, so it's not something to enter into lightly. But I feel like a new man.

Thanks for posting this. I'm committed to my current venture, but often wonder how long it will be until my curiosity takes me somewhere else. But Tony's line about "would you be able to say you’ve been doing what you truly care about today" is a pretty great litmus test for anything we do.

High School? That can limit the options, I suppose. Cross country party tours can raise thousands: http://causeitsmybirthday.com/

Neighborgoods.net charges a fee to "verify" your existence as a real person (how's that for a CAPTCHA?). I like the idea and thought of it like they turned my whole area into a Costco. But I had to pay to get my membership card. On thing their founder has been talking about recently is how more than saving people money, it's having a dramatic effect on communities that embrace it. The idea of sharing might be more powerful than the sharing itself.

This is a big topic. If you want users to respond to a shortcode (like 40404), you have to register that and pay a monthly fee for it's use ($500 - $1000/mo). If you go that route, you probably want to pay a mobile aggregator like mBlox to manage the connection for you. They have an API and you can integrate that into your application.

If you don't mind using a long code (10 digit normal phone number), you can do it with a GSM modem hooked directly to your server. But that has some redundancy and reliability issues. There is free software to support this though: http://www.kannel.org/ http://www.gnokii.org/

If you don't mind your users needing to use a keyword at the beginning of all your messages, like "BofA BAL", you can use a shared shortcode. That's a lot cheaper and there are a bunch of providers who can supply that service.

Sorry there's not too much specific here. It's a big topic. But if you google around using some of these terms, you should find more info. Or respond back with some more specific questions.

This looks nice!

I recently had to implement something similar on one of my projects. Other areas that would be good to address would be translation between client time, server time and GMT (in unix timestampt format). A library that offered that functionality, combined with what you've built, would be very useful!

I think that's part of what YC funded wufoo provides: http://wufoo.com/

The "teach a man to fish" argument has been around for a few millennium. But saying that philanthropy ends in giving away fish seems to me like an excuse for people to abandon charity altogether. Isn't Kiva still a form of philanthropy, even though it's just a loan? Charity cannot be about cementing poverty by creating dependence, but can work if it's a reallocation of resources (outside the free market) that results in more balanced partners.

There's http://ad.ly. That's started by some former MySpace/Fox guys. But to offset $0.03 per message, you'd need to get $30/cpms. That's not impossible, but you could be sending your users ads for services they might not want. Ringtones and whatnot.

You're right that email gateways are risky. They're not consistent and they show up as from random consecutive numbers to your users.

I suppose it's not possible to utilize the Twitter API for this?