What do you think about http://news.ycommentator.com ? It does some HN-enhancement (shows top comments on the front page), but using a server to do all the processing instead of a client script.
I built it a few months ago. If there was any interest, I could expand it to include collapsible comments.
An icon to access the sort menu would make the interface a little easier to use. Context meus are nice, but they should be a shortcut to an action rather than the only way to trigger it.
I also noticed that the search box only searches document titles. It would be nice to have it filter document titles as you type, and then perform a full-text search when the user hits enter (like Google's online Drive search).
This is a great example of a Minimum Viable Product. It has just enough features to be useful (multiple accounts, search, editing) and no more. From the website, they have plans to iterate quickly, with the help of what I'm sure will be a lot of feedback from the initial release. This kind of discipline in feature selection is admirable, and something we should all strive for in app development.
My only critique is that in the new user dialog, the app showed a screenshot of adding an account _before_ the screen where you could actually add an account. I found this a little confusing (why can't I click to add my account now?). I wouldn't mind seeing that screenshot after adding my first account to let me know how to add another.
That's a great idea. My preference is to have the comments always expanded so I can skim them quickly, but an expand / collapse feature would increase the app's appeal to people who like the regular HN front page and want quicker access to comments.
Normally collapsed comments with individual expand buttons and an "expand all" button would handle both of our use cases pretty well.
The comments on HN are often at least as good (if not better!) than the links. I built this app to have a way to quickly read through all the top comments on front page stories. I hope some of you find it useful too.
The decision on whether to release your work under a free license depends a lot on the purpose you write it for. If you're writing, say, a blog to express your thoughts or as a self-promotion tool (e.g. to make your name recognizable to people in your field, like Joel Spolsky, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Paul Graham), then you loose nothing by allowing your work to be disseminated as widely as possible. Maybe you stand to make a little bit of money from a particularly popular piece, but for someone like Spolsky, the income from a contract resulting from his blog's popularity is likely much more than he could expect to make from publishing a few of his blog entries.
If you intend to be a writer, you might think about things a little differently. As a given, you'll want to get paid for what you write, probably by being commissioned by a magazine for a piece or by working as a staff writer. In this case, you probably feel squeamish about giving your work away for free since you're sometimes able to make money off it.
If you're already willing to publish a piece for free on your blog, it seems unlikely that you would later be able to sell it to a magazine. Magazines seem to like original content, and (with the exception of Hacker Monthly) wouldn't want to republish something already out there.
A few people have experimented with republishing their blogs as books. The two that come to mind are PG's Hackers and Painters (his essays weren't exactly a blog, but they're pretty similar in that they're regularly updated freely accessible online content) and Scott Adams' Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. From what I've gathered, both of these had limited success, making this strategy of generating income from blog content seem rather unfeasible.
The only remaining strategy for making money off your blog is ads. This has certainly been proven to work, although only for blogs in the top one percent or so in terms of readership. Boing Boing, the most read blog on the web, licenses it's content under a Creative Commons license, and it doesn't seem to have hurt it much. XKCD also releases all its content under a CC license. (They both use the Attribution-Non Commercial license, which does raise some questions about what would happen if they removed the non commercial clause.)
So, if you're not in the top one percent of blogs, it seems like you don't have much to loose by giving your content away, and having it available in as many places as possible. You can turn the notoriety you gain from people listening to your thoughts and ideas into something profitable if you like, such as promotion for contract work, publicity for a book you write, or even starting a startup incubator. Don't get caught up in the details of the value of a few blog posts, think big picture.
Lim Cheng Soon, the creator of the Hacker Monthly, deserves a good deal of credit for securing the rights to reprint all of the content in this magazine. I'm sure that was the most time-consuming part of putting this together. In the Curator's Note on the second page he says, "I've also exchanged near hundreds of emails asking for reprint permissions."
Projects like these make a good case for open-content licenses like Creative Commons' and the GNU Free Documentation License. If all the articles included in the magazine used the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (which allows content to be reused as long as any modified versions are available under the same terms), Lim could have saved countless hours by not having to explicitly ask permission for each piece he included.
Lim, if you're listening, perhaps you would consider encouraging the people you talk to to license their works under a Creative Commons license. This could make things a lot easier the next time around if you pull material from the same blogs, etc.
I like your summary of the talk. One subtly to his position that made the talk stand out for me was that he wasn't completely opposed to the top-down model for determining the weight of subjects in schools based on industry demands. Rather, his argument was that schools weren't keeping up with the needs of the industry they educate their students for. He seemed to be making the case that as an increasing number of the methodical aspects of industry become automated as technology progresses, problems which require more creativity such as determining "what" to make rather than "how" to make it become much more important.
I've been using websnapr.com for the web app I'm working on. It seems to be the best web-based solution around, but it does have some drawbacks, like thumbnails for new sites take some time after they've been requested before they're available. The "unavailable" thumbnail that they show in the mean time is a bit obtrusive too.
I think I'll be looking through the links in this thread to see if any of them are a better alternative. There's definitely room for a web service to do a better job at this, and it probably wouldn't be too hard with these utilities in the backend. It could even let you choose which one to render with...
There are a few good brief articles up on Guy Kawasaki's VC firm's site (Garage Technology Ventures). The most memorable points from the articles were:
1. The purpose of a business plan / pitch is to sell your company to an investor, not just describe it. (This is a pretty self-evident point, but it's helpful to hear from my perspective as a hacker who's usually very interested in how things work, and sometimes needs to take a step back to think about those kinds of issues.)
2. Don't try to fool an investor - they see hundreds of business plans a year, and already know all the tricks out there. Just be honest and rely on the merits of your product / team / strategy. If you have a good idea and a plausible way for it to be successful, you've already got all you need. (Another simple idea, but it's nice to hear from an investor that honesty is appreciated, and that a hacker with good communication skills has a chance against a smooth-talking MBA.)
Do you have your web app backend coding skills down pat, but don't know where to start to give your front end that nice clean look? It's not as hard as you might think. We're no experts, but we'd love to help get people started by sharing what we've learned from going through the process of designing a site as coders.
I went to last year's Boston BarCamp and it was a great event overall. Some workshops were a little "eh", but others were really good. I'm thinking about doing a session on "Graphic Design for Coders" - anybody here have any thoughts on whether that would be a good topic?
A neat thing I saw at last year's BarCamp was an early demo of Dropbox by Drew Huston who went on to be part of YC Summer '07. I think Reddit demoed at the Boston BarCamp the year before that too, before they went into YC Summer '06.
$172 per month (single person coverage) with a $2000 deductible (routine physicals, dental, eye care covered with small co-pay).
I'm in Massachusetts and use FCHP. The premiums for me have been going down a few dollars every year, which, come to think of it, is pretty remarkable. :-)
I recently read Free Culture (by Lawrence Lessig), switching between a paper copy and the PDF version on a monitor (which was free - hooray for Creative Commons licenses!). Reading on the monitor was great for when I wanted to read during lunch - no need to try to hold the book and a sandwich at the same time. I also used the PDF version when I was somewhere with a computer and wanted to read, but didn't have the paper copy with me.
The rest of the time I would read the paper copy. I also print out longer articles to read - paper seems less fatiguing to read from than a screen.
The font, font size, column width, and line spacing seem to make a big difference with how tiring it is to read on the screen. The Free Culture PDF was one of the the easiest documents I've come across to read. The default WordPress and Blogger themes use similar column widths and line spacings - this suggests that there might be an optimum way to display text for readability.
This is a bit of a leap, but if you're designing a site that has a lot of paragraph-form text, mimicking the typography of a typical paperback will probably do a lot for your site's readability. Does anyone else have specific text formats that they prefer for reading on the screen?
My take on the new rules is that anyone with a pending H-1B gets the 17 month extension automatically, but that anyone else in the OPT period on an F-1 with a science / technology / engineering / math degree working for a company that required skills related to the degree could file for the 17 month extension even if they don't have a pending H-1B.
Another side issue (not challenging your comment) is that it's very difficult to get an H-1B to work at a company that the applicant owns a big chunk of. So a founder wouldn't be able to get an H-1B at their own startup. However, they can be on the payroll at a company they own during their OPT, and it's conceivable to be acquired within the new 29 month period.
This is wonderful! It could save us from having to hire an administrative assistant to do manual scraping.