dgunn

This is something that will be exciting to developers who don't want their side projects anymore. The other side of the marketplace will be more difficult.

I think your market for that side is actually the people on google searching for "technical cofounder". They want something they can't do for themselves. It's more tangential but I think you would need to spin it in that direction.

Tech people like to build products. That's why we have side projects that we want to sell in the first place. We're probably unlikely to buy more. You need to get marketing people in there to buy them. The difficulty with that is that these people will need a functionally complete application.

I think you should get rid of the word Beta. It's a "kid friendly" site that a bunch of moms are going to find through search. None of them are going to know what that means. That said, it probably won't hurt anything. I just think people go out of the way too often to let people know that their site should be treated like an unfinished toy. It's not a toy. You made something you think is useful. Tell them it's useful and see if they tell you otherwise.

Any plans on how you're going to make this a startup? Making money etc?

I had a similar idea a while back but it didn't have as noble a goal. Really just another time waster but I could (and still do) see some potential.

It was going to be an extension of something like HN or Reddit and it would have been called "Internet Fight!". The premise is that arguments happen all the time on these forum sites and I thought it would be funny to highlight them as the primary content of an application.

I was going to promote it primarily by using it on Reddit first. I would make it easy for anyone to initiate a formal fight between any two reddit users. For example, I may happen across an argument taking place between two users (reddit_user_1 and reddit_user_2) and I would reply to one of them with a link to their fight - say, "www.internetfights.com/reddit_user_1_vs_reddit_user_2/ or something.

It would create highlights, declare a winner at some point, allow others to comment on a parallel thread about the fight itself. I still think it would be great. Someone make it. As many fights as there are on reddit, your go to market plan is basically you just setting around initiating fights til it catches on.

That's interesting. I'm not sure how common it is but I sign in all the time by doing just that. I just always try to use sites immediately because they usually cause signing in (or up) to be part of the flow.

For example, I go to my bank website and click "My Account" cause that's what I want to do. It asks me to sign in, and then redirects me to my account page. I don't click sign in.

I'm not saying this makes it ok. This just made me aware of my technique for the first time and I thought it was interesting.

This could be great. You need to monetize in a better way. Make searching free for everyone (cause no one is going to pay for it). Then, package up some pre-built searches (backlink search, competitor stuff, etc), build a special interface, and sell that to SEO's as a tool. This is just my first thought. You have data from over 140 MM pages. You can almost certainly use that data to make a product worth money to someone.

I just can't imagine selling searches will work. The big players in the space have made search into a human right. I know you have to make money somehow but charging for searches almost has to be the wrong answer.

Does anyone else just want a written description of things? Make it look pretty. Create beautiful pictures/characters throughout the page. I don't care. I just want a good explanation of what a service offers.

- It's user-friendly.

- Compatible with everything.

- I can read as much or as little as I want.

- If I want to re-read something, I know exactly how to do that and it doesn't involve clicking a play head trying to find the place it was in.

I feel like people keep trying to bring back reincarnations of flash interactivity and since it uses html5 and other buzzwords, it's ok. Well, it's not.

Every time someone "fixes" the experience of what should just be reading online, they make it much more cumbersome and annoying. One day everyone will look back at what people did with html5 and laugh the way we all look back and laugh at flash intros and playing music on load.

> Anyway, what are you worrying about? Another 9/11?

Yes. Of course. I want NSA to keep horrible things like that from happening.

Yes. There are other ways to die than terrorist attacks. They're also bad? I'm really not sure where you're going with this.

I haven't been noticeably affected by the NSA collecting data on me. I can't think of many ways in which I would be affected. I would probably be affected if I were interested in doing something illegal and needed to communicate with someone about it. I'm ok with that reality.

Seriously, someone chime in if you've been negatively affected by the NSA collecting coms data on you. Everyone acts like its the end of the world but it all seems like hype to me. Just another way to get traffic to a news site. One thing I haven't heard is how it's affecting people. People didn't even know it was happening til some guy decided to tell them. If something can go unnoticed for this long, how horrible could it be? Everyone's just creeped out by it and I guess I don't care.

> A constant state of fear, always at war, our enemies are about to attack us. Isn't this what North Korea fuels the fire with?

If you think a country this size could ever reach the point of having no enemies, you are delusional. We will never be close to this condition. Spreading peace sounds great. In fact, I fully believe that the highest calling of mankind is to respect and care for others. I don't want hate and fear. But I'm also not delusional. We are a highly targeted country. We have enemies and will continue to have them inside and outside of our borders. Recognizing that does not make me or any other rational person a fear monger. Not recognizing it makes you appear naive.

I think your comment was intended for me.

Their goal is protect the US. Do you think there are no threats within our borders? Seriously Americans, what's wrong with you?

See? We can all try to make each other look stupid if we want. It doesn't make your opinion correct. Show me how I will be negatively affected by the NSA continuing to do what they've always done. I assure you, I can be convinced if you're right and I'm wrong. I just can't see the down side.

One, I don't think the NSA isn't allowed to spy domestically. The NSA is charged with collecting foreign and counter intelligence in an effort to protect the interests of the US. If there is an intelligence need which requires domestic collection methods, you better believe they are allowed, by law, to collect.

Even if they weren't allowed to spy domestically, I'm not convinced that would be an appropriate limitation on the NSA. They are the best at this type of intelligence collection. As long as the US has enemies within it's own borders, tying the hands of people who can help us is going to be a pretty bad idea.

Is anyone else still trying to understand the goal here? I know the big lofty goal is to cause NSA to stop spying on people but what will convince people that they have stopped?

Is everyone unaware that the NSA's mission is to collect digital intelligence through clandestine means? It's right on their website. Their mission is to spy on people and has been for decades.

I may be unaware of what people are really upset about. I just can't understand how people are so up in arms by this. I'm legitimately interested in how I'm affected by this as a person who doesn't conduct activity online that the NSA would ever care about. Can someone help me out here?

I've used mezzanine before but ultimately removed it from the code. If you're interested in adding a company blog to your app's domain, it just touches too many things and makes a mess. I use zinnia now http://django-blog-zinnia.com/.

I think mezzanine is a great alternative to wordpress. It makes a great blog if that's all you want. If what you need is a CMS to handle the content side of your app, you may want something a little more flexible/light weight.

I've actually wondered about this a bit before. You're kind of the "Marketing Engineer" around here so I'll ask you.

Do you do what you described in option 1 or 2? I know you use WP for your blog but what do you do for the marketing/landing pages of your apps? Do the marketing pages live in the same code base as the app? I'm inclined to do it this way personally so that integration of something like ABingo! is easier.

I think the design looks pretty good and the service sounds fine. The trust issues you may have are in your grammar. Because the website is written in English, I assume you want to be seen by English speakers. If that's the case, you need to clean it up.

If you don't have much copy to look through, I would be happy to clean it up for you. My email is in my profile.

I can't commit much time so if there is a lot to do you may need to ask someone else or pay someone to do it.

Edit: You can't pay me to do it. I'll do a small amount for free just to help out but I won't do a lot even for money. I don't have time.

Things like this don't make great revolutions. People won't care enough. People need to see a real threat to their lives before you can get an uprising. They have to be hungry or homeless or in some kind of actual pain.

Being spied on sucks. I don't want it to happen to me or you. But in the end, the government is only infringing on what it, itself, established as our rights. It keeps the economy moving along just enough to keep food on our tables and roofs over our heads and thus keeps us, in large, satisfied enough to stay home and not fight them.

There are other countries which don't even have a false promise of privacy. Some whose citizens don't eat daily and whose lives are constantly threatened. These are the countries which have unrest. They fight their governments and ultimately cause real change. We have had those situations here in the past. Privacy wasn't what caused it.

You can "#restorethefourth" if you want but it will be like most first world protests. You'll wrap up around 7, go to your comfy homes, eat dinner and sleep feeling completely secure and you'll dare not do anything to screw that up.

In my experience twitter is just a bunch of marketers trying to sell each other stuff. More specifically, it's a bunch of marketers' tweetdeck accounts trying to sell stuff to other marketers' tweetdeck accounts.

It seems like twitter is so widely used because businesses think they have to use it. They make their account, have a third-party app post stuff for them periodically and assume they've made the right choice.

Am I wrong? Are there people out there who use it for more personal reasons like keeping in touch with friends? I'm sure there are a few but predominantly, I think it's a business tool. The problem is that businesses are assuming the general public are on the other side listening to them but I know I'm not.

If you're going to build something specifically for this interviewer, you should make it useful to him/her or to his/her company.

Maybe think of some data their company would find useful and give them a good way to consume it / interact with it / take action on it.

Without explaining any details, this may be the best answer you'll get. People won't spend much time commenting when all they can really recommend is another generic list application or something.

agreed

I agree strongly about coloring whites red and calling foul on well-meaning participants. Sure a lot of these guys might be pretentious, smarmy jerks but that's no excuse to act like this is any sort of meaningful exercise. This could just as easily lead to the conclusion that humans taste, to some extent, based on what they're expecting.

For example, if I was told I was drinking milk from a glass but it was actually filled with beer, I would probably not take more than the first drink even though I really like beer. This example is a bit far but I'm just saying expectation means a lot.

Hmmm... I really expected you to break and at least hint that you were joking...

Agreed. Those who would love a replacement really have very little say in the matter. That's what anyone selling enterprise-y software has to deal with. You're usually selling to the people who won't be using it. This changes the conversation quite a bit regarding the benefits you emphasize about your offering. For instance, you may have to show a higher-up that they can save time/money by using your software rather than telling them they're employees will enjoy using it more because that high-up won't rightfully care.

You need to turn DEBUG off in Django.

Not positive who you're trying to attract but if it's the average Joe, "A daemon will get the tweet from Twitter’s API and create a new event with the extracted date and description." won't matter much to them.

Just tell people how they will benefit from using it and leave out all the nerdy implementation details. Talks of daemons/apis/data extraction/etc really shouldn't be on your marketing page unless you're marketing something specifically to devs and really even then it's questionable.

Position your product as something that benefits people. Not something with daemon processes.

I have no experience in this domain at all but just taking a shot at answering you. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and more I believe are all producing original content now. They're huge but I suspect they operate differently than the large networks. If you intend to really go for this and try to get in front of someone to pitch, make your effort count more by not going straight for the whales.

Completely agree. Idea sites like firespotting and halfbakery just turn into a really good way to waste your time. If you have a reasonable idea, do some research on it. If it turns out to be feasible, do some customer development and start building it out to really test it.

Doing these things and failing 100 times in a row will almost certainly turn out to be a better use of your time than spending even 5 minutes looking for an idea by skimming through the likes of this:

  [1] "A pinterest type service where if u spot a deal.." blah blah

  [2] a rotating tube house

[1] http://firespotting.com/item?id=1061

[2] http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/rotating_20tube_20house#13702...

I would say you have it right here. Link shorteners really aren't a great way to track visitors to a link. You really need something like Google analytics or count how often your server actually served a resource.

Someone should really make a to-do-list-app framework to make building to-do-list-apps more efficient. Think of the amount of time that's been wasted making to-do-list-apps.

Dude. DEBUG is True right now. If you didn't code this, tell the person who did that DEBUG is currently True so he/she can change that.

Also, why did your devs create the entire django project in a single django app? I bet that's difficult to keep track of.

5 minutes have elapsed. I didn't think HN still operated without patio11...

So it's not Marvels responsibility to keep people's passwords safe because,

1.) If someone was trying to get the person's information, the least of their worries is an easy password to for them to get? This may be the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

2.) Anyone who uses the same password for multiple accounts shouldn't do that? Yea. Saying that doesn't fix the issue. You have to tell users to use secure passwords and assume they won't. Because they won't.

3.) Because it only protects their comics from being read? That's still private property that Marvel claims to protect by requiring passwords to gain access. The fact that they treat security like it doesn't matter shouldn't be dismissed with a "so what?".