jhubert

I drive a 2009 Subaru Impreza Outback. We bought it used recently right before our first kid was born. It's a solid car with plenty of power but nothing all that fancy.

The reasons we went with a Subaru, besides it being well priced, were:

- AWD so we can drive to Tahoe without chains in the winter

- Extremely reliable engine

- Plenty of room and flexible storage for skis, bikes, roof rack, trailer etc.

Basically, it's a great car that we can get dirty and use to go play outside.

jhubert

13 anni fadiscuss

I'm not really talking about just handing out the code... although I suppose it could just be open sourced. That being said, I'm not opposed to the company being taken in a different direction.

jhubert

13 anni fadiscuss

Of course, I realize that by telling people to contact me on about.me there is very little chance that a discussion will happen on Hacker News and this post will probably end up buried. :|

jhubert

14 anni fadiscuss

The intent of the post is to start a conversation and to have people take another look at YUI. After using jQuery for years in both small and large projects, I took another look at YUI when 3.4 was released and I've really been impressed. I don't think it gets the credit it deserves, mostly because YUI 2 was such a beast. I realize I'm missing a lot of concrete reasoning in the post, but that's primarily because I didn't want this to be a conversation about the right and wrong ways, or simply a syntax comparison.

jhubert

14 anni fadiscuss

A student from Georgia Tech did a fantastic job with one of these last month as well. He called it CodeBook:

http://danielchasehooper.github.com/CodeBook/

You guys might want to think about working on it together. His version includes the introspection on an item in the canvas as well as some other great things like inline, as you type JSLinting.

jhubert

15 anni fadiscuss

Thanks. It was a bit helpful. I'm mostly curious what other people do because it feels like something that has been done over and over again.

jhubert

15 anni fadiscuss

Thanks. I definitely will. :)

jhubert

15 anni fadiscuss

From an execution standpoint, I fully agree with you. That's what I did when we first found out that the domain had been registered and saw the site he had put up. I collected information and then left it alone to focus on our March 1st launch.

Now that he is being more aggressive, it's rude and a nuisance. He setup a similar facebook group to ours with a hyphen in the name instead of a space; He is tweeting about it and it's showing up in our name searches; etc.

Also, he is offering something similar to what we are offering as a (very inexpensive) service, for free; Which is just annoying and potentially confusing.

Trying not to focus on it. Serenity Now. :)

jhubert

15 anni fadiscuss

Yeah, I started filing it this morning before writing this post. Trying to cover all of my bases. :)

jhubert

15 anni fadiscuss

Agreed about Lawyers. I am happy to spend money on them as necessary for the right things, but this seems like something that could be very lengthly if not approached the right way... and one thing I know about hiring lawyers is that long problems have big bills. :p

jhubert

15 anni fadiscuss

Yeah, I like this route a fair bit. I'd like to think that I'm not the only one who gets frustrated by people who would do this type of thing.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion. :)

My hesitation on something like this (and also the reason I didn't put our company in this post) is because I don't want to give him any unnecessary attention until necessary. Plan of attack being worked out now...

jhubert

15 anni fadiscuss

Yeah, just contacting him and asking him what's up was my first reaction. I want to make sure that's not a bad idea or that I don't say something that could complicate things in the future.

jhubert

15 anni fadiscuss

We have a company that is registered with the same name, and I'm filing for a trademark right now.

jhubert

16 anni fadiscuss

According to the lawyer that I spoke with, I think I'm ok from a legal stance because you're not actually buying a chance to win 10k. You're buying a product (advertising on TweetFolk.com), and I'm simply selecting an idea from the pool of customers and making an investment in them.

From an accredited investor point of view, I don't think that applies. I've spoken with a number of VC friends of mine and they said that I'm in the clear. I can give 10K to anyone I want, from my wife to a random stranger I've never met before. The terms are just based on the agreement.

As for shaking off $10K being a very long time, I disagree. Many startups kick off with 10K and make a profit in their first year, especially in the product space. 10K is enough money for a young person to leave their job for a few months to build an invoice suite or iPhone application. It's just enough freedom to let you move on your idea.

jhubert

16 anni fadiscuss

I just wrote a plugin (Gem) for Ruby On Rails that makes system level A/B Split Testing really easy and uses Google Analytics as the dashboard.

I'm coming at it from the software side, but if someone (read: You) was interested in approaching the business / advisor side of it, I would be happy to talk about partnering up.

Personally, I think A/B testing is going to get more and more important in the coming / months, years. So being where you are with the knowledge you have is a pretty sweet place.

The project I put together is here: https://github.com/jhubert/rails-split-tester

I'm currently using it to test this (silly) site: http://www.tweetfolk.com

If you're interested in talking more, just get in touch. :)

Cheers, Jeremy Hubert @jhubert

jhubert

16 anni fadiscuss

I replied but clicked the wrong link, so the reply is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2078872

jhubert

16 anni fadiscuss

Thanks for the suggestion and support. :)

A friend of mine actually bought some pixels off of the MDHP back in the day. Apparently the guy who started it even sold all of the customer details to outside advertisers for money. My friend received a bunch of spam to the email address he had used. Bad pool.

Personally, I like that simple ideas like this can be the seed funding for future projects. Not just in currency, but also in education.

jhubert

16 anni fadiscuss

Thanks for the feedback Rubyred.

Personally, I think the idea is relatively juvenile but I never intended for the headline to sound spammy. I'm just excited.

As for the "Awesome. I love the internet" portion, I'm not sure I can change that one. I do love the internet. I can't think of any industries where something like this is possible... well, no other legal ones.

I ran a large (1+ million member) community website back in 1999 - 2000 and realize that every community has their style and voice. I'm sure given more time on HackerNews I'll learn to speak with the one that's appropriate for the audience.

jhubert

16 anni fadiscuss

The 8 large squares along the top row are now $100 each, and I had originally started everything out at $10 and $50 until people told me it was way too cheap.

So, the math worked out something like this:

(15 * 10 + 2 * 50) + (26 * 15 + 3 * 100)

jhubert

16 anni fadiscuss

From my point of view, there are a number of things that are "unfinished" about the site and they don't all have to do with technology. Here are a few.

1) Figuring out the right price to charge for the squares is something that probably would benefit from some more thought.

2) There buying process is pretty rough and there is very little text to reassure the customer as they are going through the checkout process.

3) The incentive structure is very rudimentary. People have to get it in order for them to see the value, and that takes a bit of imagination. The initial sweep of squares seem to be purchased from either the "it would be neat if this takes off" or the "i have some extra money in my paypal account" people. I could spend a lot more time working out this part of the site.

4) The design is, heh, rough.

As for the technology, I'm happy to go into it in more details but I'll summarize here for brevity:

  - Ruby on Rails 3, hosted on the free Heroku cloud stack (Ruby, PGSQL)
  - Paypal handles the payment processing and invoicing
  - Basic REST Twitter API for pulling down the twitter account details
  - Twitter OAuth is used to handle the optional account signup
  - Twitter's S3 account serves up the avatars, although I'll probably have to change that
  - Each purchased square is assigned a bit.ly URL that I use for tracking clicks and surfacing statistics to the owner of the square
  - Google Analytics for the tracking
  - Page caching is used for each of the pages to minimize server load

Total Cost: $0

Submissions

Want to take over my startup?

Use YUI instead of a whole mess of JavaSCript

Selling my startup book collection before going traveling (San Francisco)

Ask HN: Business bank account for a Delaware Corp

Please advise: Someone is blatantly copying my startup, on the .org of my domain

What do you think of this 10K micro-funding idea?

Feedback please: 3 reasons I use Git instead of SVN

Success Story: Launching my simple twitter idea early actually paid off

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