This is great. I manually monitor usage quite regularly at my meter (unfortunately not easy to get a smart meter in my country yet...) but it's just a number and you need to work out the current instantaneous usage. This just gives an intuitive sense. I really like interfaces that have this 'always-on-ness' and such a low barrier to insight.
I've actually considered making a glowing light in my office to link to the conversion rate of my SaaS app. For emergency & binary type alerts I get an immediate text alert. But for slightly softer & less urgent metrics a variable color glowing light could be a good way to get across how fast I should look into things ('this week, tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon since it's looking quite orange!').
Amazing what putting a flashy UI around an outwardly boring piece of software can achieve. LIBOTS has been around since 2003 I think... Mint and Yodlee, Hipmunk and Orbitz - I wonder what other unglamorous services could be improved with a better UI? Maybe GDS?
Congrats to Jeremy for the coverage - good luck with any plans you have for TLDR!
Well there's a bit more to it than just OTS. I do a little work on the summarization part myself then there's also the extraction piece. I did spend a few hours writing code. :P
Thanks for the congratulations, though; who knew a quick little weekend hack would get so much coverage? I didn't (hence why I didn't pump up the volume on the server's resources initially ;)).
Indeed, but his startup was not. And that's the critical point. It's unlikely the company would have had a chance at the global market when based in Africa. It's somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people aware of the lack of chances pursue them elsewhere, spreading the gap even more.
Yes, he did move to Canada and then the States. He may not have looked back. At the same time, as a South African myself, I would find it hard to discount my South African heritage, or say that I was not at all influenced for the better by it: the diverse melting pot of people, the rhythmic languages, the sports, the myriad of cultures, people like Raymond Ackerman and Anton Rupert and Nelson Mandela, children dancing in the dusty township streets, vast natural beauty, the tension and miracle of pre and post 94 Elections, Rugby World Cup 95, FIFA 2010. South Africa lives and breathes hope.
Regarding not having "a chance at the global market":
Mark Shuttleworth's Thawte was based in Cape Town, South Africa yet captured almost 50% of the world's SSL certificate market, in the 90s, at a time when South Africa barely had dial-up. In South Africa we have a saying "'n boer maak 'n plan" (a hard-working man makes a plan).
But that was then. Today, I can read Hacker News from my desk in Cape Town, South Africa while looking out at Robben Island or Table Mountain. I can SSH into Amazon EC2. I can PayPal. I can send an email. I can be connected. I can ignore the hype of the Valley when I need to. I can use the distance to think. I can focus on my work and put the hours in. Sometimes, the "disadvantaged" are in fact advantaged.
I think it would be a good idea to be able to flag articles on HN with a distinction of being either spam or linkbait.
I personally feel this article lacks sufficient specific insight to not be linkbait, especially considering both the "list of n things" style headline (http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html) and suggestion to use the authors product - but understand that other people might see differently. If there was a "flag as linkbait" option I think this would reduce comments discussing whether articles are or are not linkbait.
False positives could be a problem: i.e. maxklein's posts - on initial inspection some of these could perhaps be seen as linkbait but they actually each generated interesting discussion. So perhaps a greater quorum could be required for a submission to be rated as linkbait.
Thanks! I'll be writing a blog post on the tech shortly (actually moving right now -- on the road but saw our press release pop up), but a quick rundown: at the core is Pylons, with a bunch of custom modules for making sqlalchemy nicer, handling forms in a sane way etc; on the frontend, it's your standard HTML and CSS, but uses "pyvascript", a Python->JS compiler I wrote for this, which supports real macros. I spent quite a while building up the framework to simplify the development, and I plan on releasing all of it when I have the time.
I think this is something that is highly variable - based on personal requirements, cost of living in your country and your acceptable minimum standards of comfort. I think techniques to minimise burn would be more interesting than actual rates.
One tip from my startup: I think a lot of people think getting employees and office space should happen at around the same time. I don't think office space is worth the premium you pay for it until you have more than a couple employees. We have one already and will probably only move after we have employed at least three more. Obviously a caveat here is that the house must be sufficiently pleasant for work and living and that your work is not something that requires client facing offices.
If you're going to spend money on a building with room for developers and a fast internet connection, there are much cheaper places to find that building than an office park in the suburbs.
Kalymnos, for instance, has apartments you can rent for $20/day in the off season, which is why you'll find me there this fall.
Don't sign any long-term leases (over 6 months), and keep it month-to-month. If you start to take off, your damn lease will come back to haunt you... this is a burnt-out economy - grind those leasing agents down, get them to throw in free furniture, free rent, renovations, etc. with the promise that you'll expand out in a couple months with a larger space in the same building. When you get office space - you'll likely need insurance, phone setup, internet, etc... so get the landlord or phone company to throw all these things in for free.
REPEAT: no long-term lease, nothing more than 6 months, and better month-to-month. And nothing beats the kitchen table with a few guys around it.
I agree with what you write re: bargaining with the leasing agent - a couple of my friends have got really good deals recently by simply saying "I'll take it now if you include 3 parking bays and give us a shorter-term lease" or equivalent. Now is actually a really good time to lease space if you are certain that it's the right thing cash flow wise.
Another idea is to sub-lease un-used space of a business. A couple investment banking firms in Manhattan that have significantly downsized have rented out floors to start-ups. You get free phones and private WiFi as part of the deal. My friend's start up is doing this and its pretty nice. There are a couple of micro-startups (3-5 employees) on the same floor with his company right now, so it got that "incubation" feel.
Google says "...we think there is room for more competition..." - but now they own both how most people find tickets and the service that provides the link between the airlines and the internet. My guess is that they will keep with their mantra of giving user's the fastest possible answer by providing links to buy tickets in response to queries like "cheap sf tickets". Problems for companies like Orbitz ahead?
Google is already starting to apply this approach to accommodation, another high value segment. Searches for hotels in most cities now return as their first result a Google map with listings of actual hotels - over time I expect these to become more expansive and traffic to independent hotel aggregators to decline. With the current strategy Google is moving to an approach where they scrape review and hotel data from all the aggregators and then serves this in its own listings - eliminating the need for its users to perform a secondary search with a independent aggregator.
Allowing such easy changing of the homepage is a great idea - it helps contextualise what the app does into something that might be useful to a user really fast. Good luck!
I agree, though I'd do one change: once I go from "Band's website" to "new iPhone game", put the third option in the second position, rather than swapping the first two. That's just a gut feeling of course, but I feel that a visitor who wants to see a second option would be interested in seeing the three options as well. By just switching the first two options, you make the third one just a bit harder to reach than the other two. (especially considering the size of the control)
I agree that many gamers are keen for StarCraft II - but I think that the OP was describing StarCraft as a "disaster" in the context of how Activision usually approaches marketing its games. There is a new Call of Duty almost every year - keeping mass interest in the series alive continually. Thus to Activision - for whom the marketing cycle is almost annual and built on continual release so to speak - the original StarCraft could definitely be considered difficult to market in the sense that there haven't been StarCraft releases in the last few years.
Despite this, I agree with both you and the OP - few games have as much "cred" as StarCraft and I think Activision Blizzard have done a poor job marketing it despite huge anticipation. It will probably still succeed though since the game itself is actually quite good.
I've actually considered making a glowing light in my office to link to the conversion rate of my SaaS app. For emergency & binary type alerts I get an immediate text alert. But for slightly softer & less urgent metrics a variable color glowing light could be a good way to get across how fast I should look into things ('this week, tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon since it's looking quite orange!').