jaytee_clone

I will check them out. Thanks a lot.

Things that I don't need to get separately when I buy a computer.

I'm not advocating for Microsoft. In fact, I use Linux, Open Office, and Gmail. But for regular consumer, they just want something that comes in one package and works without additional effort. That's why iPad is hitting the spot, because it's even more packaged than a Microsoft PC. Microsoft couldn't careless about Ubuntu, but they should definitely be worried about iPad (or packaged computing device in general).

I'm curious how are they are going to solve the problem that most people hate to learn new interfaces of their old tools.

For example, it took me a while to start using google reader, google calendar. I told all my friends how great those tools are, but none of them has converted.

People are used to their twitter, facebook, newspaper interfaces. Crossing the chasm from early power users to mainstream users will be hard.

Five hours a day at $10/hr for two years could have earned him $30,000 (5x10x600, i'm sure he was bartering during weekends too)

His car only worths $15,000.

Interestingly, this post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488225 talked about how morning people rule the worlds.

So the conclusion is - less intelligent people rule the world.

Of course, I always take IQ score with a grain of salt.

Actually, the future is recommendation via brain composition. Or better yet, direct brain stimulus that makes you think anything is a good recommendation.

Facebook is the future? I hope we are a bit more imaginative and ambitious.

I remember somewhere in MongoDB documentation that states why you shouldn't use Mongo for sensitive information (i.e. money related) because of the lack of transaction. (No reference, but obviously I read it somewhere because I remembered it.)

Maybe he skipped that part?

Which do you think grabs more attention in a resume:

- Graduated from xxx University with Honor in computer science

OR

- My site was so engaging to students that my university had to threaten to retract my degree three months prior to my graduation in order to force me to shutdown my site.

This is the kind of PR Bill Gates get by dropping out of college. If I was him, I'd keep the site running, let the university take my degree, then take them to the court (knowing that I won't win), just to create more media attention.

"A few weeks away from getting his degree" is exactly the kind of thinking that I'm trying to avoid. But of course, who knows what I would actually do when I'm in his shoes.

His site is worth so much more than his degree, IMO.

I guess this is the I-am-pot-committed-so-i-have-to-go-through-with-it effect. It's hard to make decisions based on future returns as suppose to past efforts.

This one is also good:

http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/09/six-secrets-of-farmvilles-...

How about a mailinglist automatically filters out posts based on relevancy? Using ardvark-like NLP?

A small niche mailinglist is probably the closest thing to a real online community, for two reasons:

- relevant emails always get read by everyone in the mailing list - people read emails anyway, so there's less step involved as suppose to going to a website to read posts.

But a conventional mailinglist is not scalable - some of the lists I'm in get so many posts everyday that I become de-sensitzed to them.

There's a solution however.

The way to keep the posts relevant is to sub-categorize them much like subreddit, but that's also work and it's manual. That's where NLP and machine learning comes in so that the system can learn your preference and only email you the relevant posts. Of course, you also get an option to receive less-relevant posts too.

(I should probably make this into a post as suppose to a comment.)

Yeah, count me in too.

I agree with you.

However, I don't want to stay solo. I have been solo for two years. It's too much work and not as fun as a partnership.

Building a community is a long-term investment. It will give me a wider range of resources and opportunities.

Plus, I have often found that I become more creative, focused, and generally better at things when I interact with other people periodically, even with regular non-hacker-founders (alone time is important too of course). I imagine having a social circle of smart entrepreneurs will be exponentially more beneficial to each individual. Y-Combinator is so sought after because of that social aspect.

Great products are nice, but great friends are even better.

Thanks. What does ISV stands for?

Yes. I don't really see how this solves my problem though.

The design of HN is news oriented, not discussion or community oriented. And because it doesn't have categories, when the amount of submission reaches a certain size, up-voting "new" posts has marginal effect compares to random floods of submissions.

A year and half ago, I was reading every "new" post, because I wanted to be fair, but it's just not feasible right now.

We have exactly the same problem. (I'm a solo bootstrapper too).

It sounds like I should just go ahead and start this entrepreneur forum that I'm envisioning.

Has anyone tried these?

http://econnect.entrepreneur.com/

http://www.partnerup.com/

http://www.startupnation.com/

http://cofoundr.com/

I already have a google tv. It's call projector + laptop.

But of course, I'm not the market segment they are going after.

There's a place for command-line and there's a place for shortcut. It all depends on the number of options in an interface.

If you only need to do a few things in an interface, shortcut is better because it's clean and intuitive. But when you have lots of behaviors (i.e. millions of potential websites to go to), shortcut just doesn't make sense. That's where an auto-completable search command-line becomes useful.

Plus, I rarely see people use the address bar the way it was "meant to be" or the way that the author described it. People either google the website that they want to go to or the address bar auto-complete it before one finished typing.

Even facebook has a global auto-complete search box.

Watch it, when the number of frequently-used apps in an iphone reaches a critical amount, it will make more sense to use app search/run interface.

Two full-time projects?! That's dedicated. Don't burn yourself out!

Thanks. I will check out duggmirror's code.

Yeah, college students tend to be more rebellious too. Maybe they will even organize delete-your-facebook parties. Getting one of these parties in the media will be pretty effective PR.

Targeting school newspaper / TV station for that kind of PR is a good first step.

I like this idea a lot! I'm surprised that no one has done it.

Do you code?

I agree. Hence this process of figuring out MVP. Why guess what the MVP is when I can ask?

Build a tool so that a facebook user can scrape email addresses of her friends, which can then be used to jump start a new social network.

Organize a national quit facebook day (Sept 1). Build website for it and ask people to publicize the url in their facebook profile, status, twitter, etc.

That's a very Zen way of dealing with conflicts. The level of self-control to pull this off is admirable and something to learn from.

This is probably on your to-do list already.

Beginner gardeners usually start out with herb pots (i.e. basil, oregano, parsley) because they offer longer-lasting rewards for less initial effort and applied skills.

Having this option may give impatient beginners a sweet preview of what they can do (which of course translates to more revenue for you), as suppose to trying to grow difficult plants, get discouraged by failures and never use your service again.

You should definitely assign people to their own message boards according to their zip codes.

While it's nice to know when and what to grow seed, there are a lot more nuances to gardening for each specific region. Having a community of local gardeners is an invaluable resource for material and moral support. This is coming from my observations of a few cities' community gardens.

Not to mention having a social network will make your service a lot more human and resilient.

Hobbies are great. Crafts are even better. (i.e. things that you can get better at indefinitely like playing an instrument)

Why think? Just put up the button and see if people click "order now". Worry about your attention when your customer actually demands them.

Awesome idea btw.