yakshaving

I don't comment on Hacker News very much -- in fact, extremely rarely, but I do remember this more than a decade ago and its awesome that you've stuck with this for this long.

Congratulations to you and all the work that you've done and the impact that you've had. That's pretty cool and something I think many of us aspire to. Cheers Chase!

What ensures compliance with LI TOS? Nothing, really. Including Dux.

Interesting, what is your job? Contract lawyer? do you work in biglaw or in house counsel? or a vc firm?

Seconding this :)

Ride (Uber for commuting) just launched yesterday. Given the size of their team and funding, I'm surprised that they'd pull something off like stealing an image from Apple's support page and replacing a logo.

This is very cool! makes me want to take a vacation... if I didn't have a 5 month old!

I like that i can almost 'sketch' out possibilities with the tool. reminds me almost like a vacation planning version of hipmunk in that sense. I like UIs that are flexible like this.

That WSJ article that Jessica was quoted from HN yesterday also made me think of you!

Hmm... I don't completely agree that adding Show HN would be a replacement for Product Hunt. It feels like the two communities are pretty different, and creating a separate community for product launches gives you the flexibility to incorporate new social protocols (like the AMA) more easily, and add in visual elements like mockups.

Just my 2 cents!

Congratulations Ryan, I feel lucky to be an early part of this (user #3 baby!) when you just sat down to think about doing it. It's come along a long way already, I can't imagine where this is going to end up in a year.

It’s a shame that this post can even be deemed heretical when in fact it’s the normal mechanism for completing tasks by the vast preponderance of developers for overcoming technical challenges.

Understanding the ways in which technical people find answers, and can fully grok and socialize those answers internally with options is invaluable in a technical interview.

Products fall into multiple categories based on patterns of usage and intended audience.

Some products are daily/heavy use products which should optimize for the expert user. These products need to be designed such that, once the user has an understanding of how to navigate and understand the product's functionality, they can perform regular actions with ease.

Examples: A Todo list, a weather app, or an app for sports scores and the news on a mobile phone. A POS (Point of Sale) system where the operator has some sufficient time for training [Keep in mind that POS systems are designed for fast transactions to keep lines short and moving smoothly].

--

Other products are used many times by different users, infrequently. These interfaces need to be designed such that they're intuitive, require as little handholding as possible, and should offer 80% of the benefit for 20% of the effort. Additionally, that 20% of the effort should be possible by almost all of the people who enter into the experience.

Examples: a photo kiosk at the local drugstore, a fast food ordering counter with an iPad or self-checkout system at a grocery store.

What does this have to do with UI walkthroughs? Because the first class of products are not designed to be intuitive on first usage, they need scaffolds (extreme way of conveying this is a "crutch") for the user to understand their operating protocol. Once the user understands how the system works, then they will be able to use the product quickly and effectively on a repeated basis.

Nice! this is a cool service, pretty excited to see it taking off

You can follow @pingpoll

We used all of these: Rasmussen Reports, ABC News/Washington Post, Investors Business Daily/TIPP, Gallup, Monmouth/SurveyUSA/Braun, CBS News, NBC News/Wall St. Journal, Washington Times: JZ Analytics, Politico/GWU/Battleground.

This is a great thing for startups to exploit who really care deeply about all of their customers. They can easily take business away from large, monolithic companies that don't really care about losing one measly person.

Many of our big wins come from doing something better that Microsoft or Google already might do, but doing it 10x better AND offering great customer support.

Ohhhh, nice! This is sick, I could see using this as a way better CopyCopter replacement.

Thanks, I'm sure you mean that with the best intentions and not to be a troll. I'd love to hear your ideas to build a useful tool that we could 1) use for ourselves on our own startup (http://lizi.ai) during a Rails competition as a way to have a quick creative diversion :)

All that aside, I'd love to hear your worthwhile project ideas, Moe! contact@deploybutton.com

Hmm - really, that's odd. What browser/OS and netbook are you using? Any chance you can send me a screenshot?

contact@deploybutton.com

Exactly - Changing copy via a tool like the now-defunct but open sourced CopyCopter, small tweaks here and there could completely be within the scope for a non-technical analyst to deploy once deemed ready.

It's also nice for a consultant who manages many clients, which we included in the copy in other places.

Thanks David! We found that out after deploying for the competition (RailsRumble 2012). We can't quite fix it now, but it should be changed after the judging.

I appreciate the support and heads up!

Clever. When we create that one, I'll password protect it and make sure it stays off HackerNews ;-)

Thanks for the props, Flyinglizard!

Thanks a lot - I DID notice that -- For the first time after a friend pointed out that we were on HackerNews and I was in line waiting to eat a delicious veggie burrito. We opened the link in horror to notice that our catch splash page was unusable on mobile.

Sorry about this, a fix for this is coming too! From what I understand, we're not allowed to check in or "deploy" until the competition (judging) is complete, but its now on our list.

Thanks so much for your support!

(I am one of the site's creators)

Thanks for the overwhelming response - making the front page of HackerNews unexpectedly. DeployButton was our entry to RailsRumble this year, and it's a solution we created because we wanted something like this for ourselves for our own startup, Lizi.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be updating a few key issues that have been raised in these comments, including the ones about security.

We don't immediately accept that enterprises will jump to use DeployButton, but for a series of smaller consultancies, the security features we will offer will be more than enough.

Thanks again for the support - Sometimes I wish there was a "Whoops, we're not ready for HackerNews yet, don't taze me bro" break-the-glass button that puts us back on after a month's time.

The ad-hoc thing is really nice for teams that seem to form spontanteously : Read as StartupWeekend, Hackathon, etc. But probably not for firmly established teams that have protocols and ways of working that are already formalized in project documentation and tools they've been using.

A todo list should definitely get out of your way (for the MOST part), but be intrusive enough that it helps you get the work done to be meaningfully differentiated. (just a personal opinion).

Keep trucking, I think this is a good tool for ad-hoc team task lists, and I'm sure you'll come up with some good use cases for that specific function.

And most importantly, don't let the nay-sayers get you down :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IvnptQJ__U

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.

But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.

The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends.

Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, 'Anyone can cook.'

But I realize — only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more."

-- Anton Ego, "Ratatouille"

Blows. My. Mind. Amazing, amazing work.

I wish we could see this level of design work for products that aren't for hipsters and celebrities though.

From a look at Josephmark's webpage, it looks pretttty similar to We Are Hunted (http://wearehunted.com/a/#/emerging/) and The Global Mail, which are their works. I imagine the conversation went something like this:

MySpace exec: "Nice work on WeAreHunted! Can you replicate basically the same site with some venn diagrams?" Josephmark: ::shrugs:: Sure, how much?

All cynicism aside, it doesn't really matter where myspace got the idea, the video actually looks like this is executed pretty well. I hope myspace will resurrect into something cool and useful to people.

Congrats to the design and dev teams!

Apprenticeships used to be the way that people became masters at anything. Master craftsmen, master artisans, master chefs, and master sushi makers (http://www.magpictures.com/jirodreamsofsushi/). It wasn't until reading this story that I truly thought about the relationship between apprenticeships and the batches of graduates from "accelerator" programs.

Today, accelerator programs are largely exclusive. In fact, their popularity has risen in part to their exclusivity and privilege. The exclusivity stems from the fact that after the period of "acceleration" is over, the ability to raise capital is much higher. After the apprenticeship, the apprentice just has a "job", most likely for the master.

Accelerators have done a great job exploiting their "artificial scarcity" to a great extent, making them highly desirable. The "masters" or "mentors" in the accelerator model differ from apprenticeships in that they are multifaceted and have a variety of different backgrounds. In an apprenticeship, usually the masters are focused uniquely on one trade.

According to the article, "apprenticeships are still fighting an image battle. Only 0.3 percent of the American workforce are apprentices, according to a report from American University economist Robert Lerman."

This sounds like the job of a great design and marketing team. A project I worked on as a student in Design School called the New Options Initiative (http://www.newoptionsproject.org/home) sponsored by the WK Kellogg foundation sought to create new alternatives for people who dropped out of school. The project recognizes that school isn't for everyone, and we need alternative career/job paths for people that are similar to the apprenticeship model.

It'd be interesting to see what happened if we just changed the words apprenticeship to accelerator, and provided more means for self-employment and entrepreneurship to the participants. I'm willing to bet that more people would consider it a viable alternative.

Nice work Kirill - As a designer, you've really done a great job creating a site that I think people would want to actually use on a regular basis.

Nice work on this! The illustrations are superb -- Sort of reminds me of the "Fake steve jobs", "Fake Grimlock" and that whole set of cool meme-generating twitter feeds.

Seems a bit overdesigned/overengineered though right? Do you really need the adlib typeahead? Or did you realize that people needed more constraints than just being able to type whatever they wanted into a box?

Seems like you could have an entire conversation between a few famous celebrities (alive or deceased) and then take that conversation page and make it atomic and shareable... and I feel like that would get traction.

Just my 2 cents.