benjamincanfly

It does make me think about drains, sewers, menstruation, etc.

The soft-focus effect that the glowing creates is really disturbing.

It isn't so much about how often it happens as it is about the fact that it happens at all. No, 90% of apps aren't being turned away for competing with the iPhone's built-in apps, but if any application is turned away not because it sucks, but because it's too good, that's a problem and it will discourage innovation.

The difference is that it's unpredictable, based on Apple's whims. If they said "Hey, here is a list of apps we won't accept from third party developers because we consider them to be competitive," that would be one thing. But as it stands, we don't even know where the line in the sand is, because the line is based on Apple's best interests, not those of the developers. Dozens of developers have released apps that duplicate (and improve upon) the functionality of the built-in Notes app, but when someone writes an app for podcast streaming (which the iPhone does not already offer, but which I'm sure they're planning on adding eventually), Apple nixes it. It's not just difficult, it's demoralizing.

You have a great go-get-'em attitude, but the issue isn't remotely similar to the question of whether or not to diet and exercise. It's more like, "Should I spend huge amounts of time and effort on diet and exercise in order to enter this bodybuilding competition, only to be disqualified at the last minute because I look too much like the competition judge's nephew?"

I think most handheld devices will be application-based in a few years, instead of relying on SMS, which is basically a cell's version of the command line.

If you're focusing on Anroid, yeah. If you're betting on SMS-based services lasting very long, that'll be a losing bet.

By enumerating all possible moves, one can show that the first player can always win in normal-play games starting with n = 3, 4, or 5 spots. The second player wins when n = 0, 1, 2, or 6.

Am I missing something, or is the outcome of every sprouts games predetermined?

This paragraph is a real nugget:

> In most organizations the developers are some of the highest paid employees. They get paid well because their skills are scarce and hard to reacquire. This leads to entrenched “senior” developers who produce little, but “know” (and therefore get paid) a whole lot. It also shifts the emphasis to stability and away from being quick, nimble, and adaptive. Over time this turns your development teams into an occupying force rather than a fighting force.

When this process is unhindered a company's right brain starts to wither and die.

For an article whose author sets himself up as a sarcastic judge and jury of basically the whole web community, this provides very little insight or information.

I consider myself to have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome), though whether it should qualify as a "syndrome" is debatable. I don't need more sleep than the average person, I just need it later in the 24-hour cycle. I wouldn't be surprised if many/most hackers are the same way.

Try Amazon's "See a Kindle" program: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_5915932_1...

Last week I asked for feedback (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267049) on my web app, Circle of Conversation. HN readers were enormously helpful and I've implemented a number of your suggestions.

The initial site broke too many conventions in an attempt to differentiate. I'm now focusing on adhering to convention in areas where clarity is key. The site has a shorter name ("chchchat"), chat rooms are no longer called conversations, and users are able to give rooms custom titles in addition to tags. The "intelligent" features of the site are now dormant, and even when active will remain transparent to users.

I've removed redundant content and minimized certain features so that the interface is focused on the chat rooms themselves. I've also redesigned the chat room listings to look more like the layouts of popular media sites like YouTube. Also it's now easier to invite friends to chat rooms, as each one has a static URL which is displayed prominently for copy/pasting.

Thanks for taking another look, and thanks again for all of the feedback you shared last week!

By default, all iTunes store purchases are verified. Only if the user specifies that they don't want to have to confirm again does the store allow one-click purchasing. Though it would be nice if there were a big-ticket override, i.e. every item over $25 must be explicitly approved.

If you removed thumbnails for apps that only have one screenshot, and moved the "suggest changes" button directly to the right of the vital details, I think the top of the reviews section would be visible above the fold.

I like this better than most web 2.0 directories I've seen (http://www.listio.com etc.), but it has to feel pretty exhaustive before I'll depend on it. If I don't expect it to give me better results than just plain Googling, I won't bookmark it to give it a chance.

Link directly to each site from the browse/search results page. I want the option to skip your site summary page and quickly open ten blogging sites in new tabs for comparison.

On the summary pages, I almost didn't realize there were reviews. If there are only one or two, it's not enough content for me to realize it just by looking at my scrollbar. That adwords block is going to be a wall for most people. I'd remove the screenshot altogether and put truncated reviews right next to the vital details.

Edit: There's another reason for removing the screenshot - for me, it just registers as a flash ad, and I almost don't even look at it. At http://www.wappied.com/apps/mint my brain wants to think that's a Vista ad on the right. Once you do look at it, it's still only about a quarter of its original size, so you're absorbing purely visual data(does it look cool?), which you already kind of get from the nice-sized logo.

I think that's Samwise's point - if you can manage your own startup (i.e. find and communicate with a co-founder) without the startup-management application you're planning to build, it looks like you're shooting yourself in the foot - unless the pre-app process is super difficult, a la infomercials that make traditional can openers look unusable.

If I understand correctly, though, you aren't doing it as a marketing ploy, you're doing it to find out for yourself just how difficult it is to manage a small company without specialized mobile applications. My guess is you'll find out that it isn't so hard, but I get what you're doing and it's kind of cool.

If it's an experiment, the site he links to doesn't add any details or explain why it's challenging/wacky.

Edit: Actually - the site doesn't go into detail as to the nature of the app he's trying to build, but it sounds like it might be some kind of mobile staffing/placement service, i.e. something built for iPhones. If that's the case, trying to find your co-founder by using your iPhone PRE-application could possibly be used as a wacky little test case to prove the necessity of the app you're looking to build.

This is the kind of helpful feedback I was banking on. Thanks much.

Originally there was no recommendation system planned, but once I realized how easy it would be I had some infatuation-based feature creep. Going back to the drawing board with 'don't tell them, show them' as priority 1.

Thanks for the notes, I'll take some of these suggestions. The "YouTube of conversations" idea really resonates. Sometimes a simile does far more than a detailed explanation - Command Shift 3's "like Hot or Not except (...) you click on hot websites" is perfect, for example.

I guess that's a bit of a GeoCities throwback. Changed it to "in the works," thanks.

Thanks! In a way the signup process is my favorite thing about the site, since there's no process required at all. I love it when I stumble upon a painless method of any kind.

You can post the link from your address bar, but the next step will be to make each tag and conversation a static URL which can be crawled by Google.

The theory page was basically written for the HN and reddit/r/programming audiences, because I wanted to get some serious feedback on the concept itself. In the next month or two everything will be made more palatable.

Thanks for the feedback.

>I didn't completely understand it until reading your comment.

I'm finding it hard to sum the site up in a phrase, but I know this is important.

>Seems very difficult to get off the ground without a large, extremely active userbase.

Yep, same old problem. I don't have a marketing budget, so I'll just have to try doing it the hard way.

>Domain name is wayyy to long..

At this point in the game it's either made-up words, non-descriptive domains, or descriptive, long domains. I like conversational speech, so I went with the third option. I think it's very easy to remember, which may offset the length. I think it's funny that we consider three words so long when it comes to the web, but I basically agree with what you're saying.

Hey guys! I've been building this app in my spare time. It's based on a simple idea I had over a year ago - somehow after all this time there still has not been a great web 2.0 chatting site to come into existence, so I've been steadily working at it whenever I've had the chance.

You can read my whole spiel at http://www.circleofconversation.com/#tab=theory, but basically the idea behind the app is that people like talking to strangers online(like we're doing right now) as long as there is a sufficiently precise topical specifier(like we have here). The app attempts to accomplish this by letting users give their chat rooms tags which fade out over time and then disappear if they aren't refreshed/spoken aloud. They're constantly replaced by now-accurate tags, so ideally every conversation has a very precise set of topical specifiers at all times, making them worth joining.

I'd love to get some feedback on the general concept as well as execution specifics, though the UI is rough and the feature set is basic. Thanks, HN.

P.S. I'm intentionally posting this in the evening to try to avoid any significant traffic, and to give myself time to hot-fox any glaring bugs, since I do client work during the day. I bet this sounds familiar to at least half of HN's readers.

I'm a little surprised that PG hasn't already capped the number of users.

I think it would be great if user registration happened in seasons. I.e. every three months, there's a 48-hour period during which new people can sign up. The purpose of this would be to allow the site to retain a unique personality. If you constantly add new people, it's hard to know who's who and what we're doing here. Treat it more like a large and semi-exclusive collective, and give it a chance to center itself for a while before expanding again.

So the real questions are: how do you get a bunch of anonymous people who don't know each other in real life to decide on the purpose of an already-existing website, and once you've done that, how do you keep the influx of new users in line with the site's stated purpose?

I prefer to think of the motile, living, thinking Hobbes as a real being that most people can't see.

The Flickr image is actually just a photo of the latest issue of Mad Magazine. http://macenstein.com/default/archives/1547

Not imaginary.

It could be because Reddit has a subreddit specifically for XKCD (http://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd), and many HN readers are already familiar with it.