Show HN: HN Store

http://www.hnstore.co/

by raimonds • 13 years ago

190 70 13 years ago

hnstore.co

cheeaun• 13 years ago

I think your email address points to the wrong domain? s/com/co

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Damn, thanks for the heads up!

negrit• 13 years ago

This is actually a good idea you should also add filters (like "Only books from paul Graham on Amazon") and a search box.

And for the UI... well hackernews style I guess.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Thanks for your feedback! I will look into implementing filters and search!

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

Careful with copying the livery of hackernews as it may contribute to a successful claim for passing off or similar trademark-y infringement claims.

tucson• 13 years ago

Good idea.

I'd be interested in the same for web apps / web services.

tzaman• 13 years ago

What is it?

raimonds19• 13 years ago

This is an index of all the links to Amazon/iTunes/Google Play/Chrome WebStore on HN (submissions and comments). You can click "# mentions" to see relevant HN stories/comments.

famousactress2• 13 years ago

Neat! I'm surprised to see no affiliate links. Seems like an obvious way to cover expenses.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Thanks for your feedback! I'm newbie here. Is it OK to use affiliate links on projects like this?

siong1987• 13 years ago

Why not? It is always good to make some profit from the amount of work you put in, no?

famousactress2• 13 years ago

I certainly don't see any problem with it at all, though I didn't understand the dust-up when pinterest was re-writing links to include their affiliate code either.. so maybe there's an argument there that I'm unaware of.

iagomr• 13 years ago

As long as you are not putting some shady redirects, I think you should put some affiliate links. People will buy it for the same price, the difference is that you get a cut for the trouble :)

polskibus• 13 years ago

You could mention the use of affiliate links in the footer, just in case someone gets snarky.

jole• 13 years ago

Great idea! I've added it to bookmarks. Yes, I think it's ok to put affiliate links.

mseebach• 13 years ago

Don't over-think it. It's not sinful to make a bit of money from a helpful tool. Don't even bother with the switch to remove the affiliate code, if your users can't grant you that, they can copy-paste the link and remove your affiliate code manually - that is, if they don't already have a browser plugin that does that for them.

mrjbq7• 13 years ago

You could have the default be affiliate links and have an opt-out button that sets a cookie to turn them off, maybe.

That allows you to make both groups happy.

bkanber• 13 years ago

This is generally a pretty heated debate topic, and there's no clear answer. Some people will be outraged; how dare you try and make some money!

But in general, if you're upfront and honest about using affiliate links (put a friendly notice in the footer about it), most people should be OK with it. I certainly am.

mattmaroon• 13 years ago

My thought is as long as you're not editorializing it's fine. If you're recommending products and affiliate linking then people have to question the legitimacy of your recommendation. If you're simply linking to every book mentioned on HN then there's no conflict of interest.

nlh2• 13 years ago

As others have said, totally ok. Everyone should have a chance to make some money from a project like this.

Shameless plug: check out http://viglink.com to get it done. Sign up, one piece of JS, everything gets automatically affiliated. CEO is a major HN addict (and friend, in the interest of disclosure).

h2s• 13 years ago

There's a strong entrepreneurial spirit on HN and that's why a lot of people are telling you that "It's okay to make money".

Personally, I think it would cheapen the whole thing. Websites that contain nothing but affiliate links to "Products I might like" are already a thing: it's what all those millions of parked domains such as testing.com are.

evolve2k• 13 years ago

If you do upfront disclosure is the best way, if you can imply that the funds go towards something cool you are working on or towards even better. Alternatively you can just say its an experiment and direct people to comment here. But yes tell visitors upfront if the links are affiliate.

nathan_f77• 13 years ago

I was also surprised, that was the first thing I looked for. Go for it!

captn3m0• 13 years ago

Nice execution. I really like it. Especially that you decided to do both "all time", and "Recent mentions"

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Thanks for the kind words!

josephb• 13 years ago

Looks great, I like how plain and simple it is.

It would be interesting to include some other data, like top wikipedia links etc.

Also the right hand column can sometimes feel a bit disconnected from the left when there is a long line of text in the left column.

Maybe some shading across both columns under the header text would help?

Keep iterating!

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Thanks for your feedback! I'm very bad at design so I kept UI as minimal as possible. But I will try to iterate on it. I like your idea about shading.

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

Watch out, if it gains traction, it will be gamed.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

That would be nice. :)

I take into account points and karma of users to build list of top items.

_chrismccreadie• 13 years ago

This is fantastic. One thought - once you have some data on the top 20 (say over 3 months) you could keep track of items that regularly come up in HN discussions. Show them as popular or regularly mentioned.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Thanks for your feedback! Now I use number of mentions, aggregated points, number of users and their aggregated karma to build lists of top items.

firesofmay• 13 years ago

So clean and well made! Thumbs up

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Many thanks for your kind words! I'm not a designer so this is almost vanilla Twitter Bootstrap and all the kudos should go to them.

pak• 13 years ago

One quick plug: the Hacker News Sidebar under Chrome WebStore hasn't been updated since 2011 and doesn't work any more. My fork of it is more up to date:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-sideba...

It's useful if you want to know that there's a comment thread for any given website that you are browsing.

tpsc• 13 years ago

Neat idea. I was looking for book recommendations here on HN just yesterday.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Thanks, tpsc! Another great source for book recommendations is "Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4966230.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

There are a lot of other HN-ish sites. Usually with post like this everybody mentions t hem. Here's a top-level comment to put them under.

Shameless plug for my own site: http://hn-books.com

On mine, if you pick a book, say "Four Steps To The Epiphany", you get a review, a video, and about half-way down in a tabbed box called "the buzz", an up-to-date synopsis of what hackers think about the book from all the major sites. http://www.hn-books.com/Books/The-Four-Steps-To-The-Epiphany...

Bunch of other sites with similar (and sometimes better) features. I wanted to collect a list, but never got around to it.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Great work with HN-Books!

Udo2• 13 years ago

The "questions" widget is broken. For example, on the Four Steps page there are three links, all ending in 404 like this one: http://hn-books.com/v1Main.htm#Q=1&Q2=1

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

I'll be danged. They sure don't do they?

The whole website is static, a templating engine which runs in f# on mono generates it. I haven't rebuilt the side in, gosh, a year? Two?

Looks like I had some bad data. Thanks for the heads-up.

Note that you can still use the "AnswerQuestions" page to create your own book lists and share them. So, for instance, if I wanted to give you my top 3 books for smart people, I could link like this: http://www.hn-books.com#B0=29&B1=161&B2=133&BC=3...

So the home page is working. Must be something else.

Thanks again.

spangborn• 13 years ago

Sweet! I wonder if there's a way to gauge public opinion on these links - one of the apps obviously has some awful reviews on iTunes (Vapor). It'd help keep people away from apps that are doing malicious things like stealing contacts and uploading them to their servers.

A link to where the item was mentioned would be cool too, in addition to popping up the mention.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Thanks for your feedback! "# mentions" is actually a trigger for pop-up that has a list of links to stories/comments item was mentioned in.

ivzar• 13 years ago

Great site. Add tweet/fb share buttons to help others find it.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Thanks for your suggestion! I have a tweet button but it's only on "# mentions" pop-up.

ChrisNorstrom2• 13 years ago

Hmm... Well I don't have a book but I did launch a premium 15x25 square-less wall calendar. It's at it's lowest price $6.99 since calendar buying season is over and I'm overstocked by 200. So it's quite a good deal considering similar calendars are $15 at Staples, OfficeMax, & OfficeDepot.

https://dayonepp.com/products-page/product-category/calendar...

ChrisNorstrom2• 13 years ago

OoooH. I thought the HN store was a collection of products / books that HN members have MADE or WRITTEN. I didn't realize it was just a curated list. Nevermind about my calendar then.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

> products / books that HN members have MADE or WRITTEN

That's a great idea for a service.

javadi82• 13 years ago

If it is OK, could you please describe at a high-level on the de-duplication involved in mapping the following 3 links to a single book - a) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=836633 b) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1527084 c) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1718951 because the amazon links contained in the HN comment links are all very different but still point to the same book - "Javascript: The Good Parts".

philfreo2• 13 years ago

The same ID appears in all the different forms of the Amazon links: 0596517742

raimonds19• 13 years ago

I extract ASIN (Amazon ID) from URL and then use Amazon API to get so called "parent ASIN" (to acount for different editions like paperback, ebook etc).

Splendor• 13 years ago

Off-topic, but I just wanted to let you know that I use another one of your sites (Lessmeme.com) everyday and I think I'm in love with you.

raimonds19• 13 years ago

Wow, thanks, this is very encouraging!

thehodge• 13 years ago

Would be great if you could also add links to audible, I'm always looking for hacker recommended audiobooks

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