cmontgomeryb

By preselected he means it will be the active field. So you can "start typing" - type "Han" and "Hannah" will pop up. You just don't have to manually click on, or tab to the contact field.

There are a few people talking down about open plan offices, but I'm moving from a company where we all have our own offices to one where the developers are in open plan.

I don't believe what gamble said, that companies do it because it's cheap. That certainly helps, especially for newer companies, but there are many people like myself who prefer this environment and consider it to be a bonus.

I think it's more about company culture than the layout. My old company had a toxic culture. Most office doors were closed, people thought it was OK to just walk up and talk at you while you're working etc. A company with a good culture of people who understand each other's needs and the work they're doing will be much more able to get along in an open plan office.

If anybody reads this: I think I have made 2 primary mistakes.

1) In this post, I was much too verbose and a lot of it wasn't relevant or interesting to anybody who isn't already interested in the idea. I probably did more to turn you off, than on to the idea. I will bear this in mind for the "Show HN: MyCalling is live" announcement :)

2) I have overcomplicated what is a simple idea. To remedy this I have started the web app again, and am focusing on a CLEAN and SIMPLE UI. More of a Google/StackOverflow than a Yahoo! When the website in it's simplest form is complete, I will shift focus to developing the interfaces to other websites.

Cheers to the 24 people who played with MyCalling, and especially to you hobonumber1 for your comments.

I'm doing this more and more too. It's easier than on a lot of larger sites such as Reddit as the signal to noise ratio is much more in our favour, and I do find interesting stories that never make it near the front page.

> I don't think that your current UI facilitates this

I completely agree and this is the thing that I am spending time trying to work properly at the moment. The tabular view that you get at the moment is more for demonstration purposes. The intention is to allow a more 'at-a-glance' view of each job, as close to side-by-side as is possible, and to allow the user to filter through the jobs.

I have a few ideas for this as I think that is what will make the difference between the tool being useful or not, but thus far they are mainly implemented in static HTML with dummy data, or only on paper.

Thanks a lot for your feedback :)

Clickable link: http://mycalling.co.uk

I'm using it increasingly less, as the quality of discussion has largely been reduced to memes and pun threads. To me this is fine in certain subreddits and for certain posts, but it seems to be infiltrating many of the once-safe subreddits too. I never made a conscious decision to go to Reddit less.

Could you expand on your first suggestion, writing, please?

I would like to write more often, and though making money would be a bonus, having a topic to focus on would help greatly. Where can I look to get started?

Thanks!

Why 'tin foily'?

> Especially when knowing that most people aren't successful entrepreneurs that know what will work,

But surely that isn't the point? Most Amazon customers, most Walmart customers, most McDonalds customers aren't succesful entrepreneurs that know what will work - but they're the guys spending the money. Hopefully on something; (on something that they presumably want, or see some value in) that will make _you_ succesful.

I still go to my University library. It was a fantastic place to work when I was there, and has only gotten better. There's a nice atmosphere - people are generally working, but having a laugh and enjoying being together too. There's no music but my own headphones, and the WiFi is free. I'm surrounded by books on any subject I may need through the day.

My local library however, is drab, too quiet and I feel out of place with my lap top working there. Like I'm being watched for doing something odd. I get more distractions as the noise level is less consistent.

I don't know if this is common in the rest of the world, but many Universities in the UK offer an industrial placement scheme, whereby each participating student has to get a job (relevant to your degree) for a year of their course. So in the 4 year course, the 3rd year is work experience.

I did that, which was fantastic experience (good coworkers, nice codebase to work with and an interesting industry) and led to me being employed by the same company upon leaving University. While interviewing for my next job, it was often mentioned that I had 18 months more experience than others in my position (recent-ish graduate), and they valued that much more highly than they would one additional year of in-University education.

As for getting a job without a educational backing, it's all about proving yourself. I have a friend who's co-worker had never been formally educated, but was a senior developer at the firm. He had a solid portfolio and ran his own small web development effort on the side. Code things, and show them to prospective employers.

My first result was tweetrage.com. Which if anybody has an idea for, I think is an awesome domain!

One point that I hasn't thought of until it happened to me: I took my car in to be serviced. My primary email address is on a .org domain. I read out the email address, and the .org bit completely flummoxed the person booking my car in, and she must see 20+ people a day with email addresses. She wrote "<myname>@<mydomain>." and paused. I repeated, "dot org", and she continued to type ".org.com".

I think with a purely technical audience, you have much more freedom with the TLD. However with anything less, you may struggle. Remember even popular non-.com's like Wikipedia are probably accessed much more via Google than by typing wikipedia.org.

That is the secret to successful Redditing; use subreddits.

When I Reddit from work (on my lunch break boss, I swear!) I rarely log in. As a result, I don't stay long as I get tired of cat memes and in-jokes. However when I log into my account and just use the sub-reddits I subscribe to, it's like going back in time to when Reddit was much smaller and less about memes and such, and more about real discussions of news/events/new tech and such.

I agree with this. I'm still young and relatively inexperienced, but I'm in the process of moving to a new job - taking a 40% raise.

My current employer offered 10% when I said I was leaving, and all they offer annually is the rate of inflation. I don't know how common this is, but speaking to a few people as I was looking for my new job, it isn't at all uncommon unfortunately.

I don't doubt that there are companies that are more keen to reward good employees, but as a general statement I concur with jumping ship every 2-3 years while young. I also believe that this will increase your value in itself (especially while you are young) as it will give you a wider experience, show that you are able to integrate into new environments and 10 years later you won't be stuck in the mould of your first company.

edit: I should add, I'm a Software Engineer in the UK.

Many people do this. If you see a website for a product developed by a single person, more often than not they will use "we".

I bought my first Mac ever back in September 2010. Prior to this I was a Windows and Linux user, and now routinely use all 3 platforms.

My immediate perception was how important design was in Mac software. It's common to see the beauty and simplicity of a UI being used as a major selling point, which is not the case on Windows.

Though both Windows and OSX have HIG guidelines, they are routinely ignored by their creators _and_ 3rd party developers. I think the fact that Apple/Microsoft ignore them gives a license for 3rd party developers too also. It was quite a shock to me when the first time I updated my Mac, the close/minimize buttons in iTunes rotated by 90 degrees!

I believe part of the reason that people like to have beautiful apps on OSX is that if you are a Mac user, you probably _chose_ to be; whereas Windows is almost the default due to its ubiquity.

I agree completely with evanmoran; the developers are the same, but what sells on each platform differs.

A friend had a client who purchased 1000 domains for his site. I've never even imagined buying this many - can you explain how you use them?

Do they all point to the same site? Is the reason simply to catch people who may mistype your real URL ie ycominator, ycombinator, ycombinates etc?

I find this fascinating, as even with these thoughts in mind I could only get up to about 10-20 domains for my current project! Thanks for any insight.

I always liked the example of expertsexchange.com. These are the only situations in which I would prefer I hyphenated domain, though I'd rather rethink the domain entirely as Expert Exchange ALWAYS looks like Expert Sex Change to me now.

Thankyou very much philjackson and stefanobernadi, interesting & appreciated links :)

This is something I was considering. I've never personally dealt with the full deployment process by myself with Rails, so I was going to look at this when I get to coding. I wasn't planning on CI, but it's something else that I'd like to do.

If you use Rails, any recommendations for CI? Thanks for the comment.

It's interesting that you build your models first. This has been the way I've worked, but has felt clumsy so far on this project - hence my asking of this question. I do like the idea of controlling the models entirely from the console before building any UI though; that's definitely interesting to me as I can continue to develop the models to fit use cases that I find (I will be able to speak with a potential customer in the coming week so I'm hoping to glean more insight then) and nothing at all is wasted.

I am also not that visual, I do find it easier to fit the jigsaw together mentally, but I like to get this down somewhere solid where it can be reviewed/altered. Also, my memory isn't so great and in the past I have forgotten realisations that I'd made regarding faults in my design or changes that I should make.

Thanks for your insight; I'm edging towards the idea of modelling directly in Rails migrations.

Hmm, I would have liked to have an idea of the market size before working too much - though the size of the market for the core functionality is huge, I have absolutely no idea about the crossover to those who also own Android devices - it could be almost nonexistant for all I know.

I will mention that I have found an app on the Market that doesn some of my idea. There were 4 reviews and 6 ratings. It had 2 stars, and all 4 reviews were about the UI (which was indeed aweful). I wonder if the fact that there is only 1 app currently (that I could find) there is no demand ... or it could be that the demand is just not filled at present.

I like the idea generally, and it would probably be the first place I'd look - communities and such. The problem here is that the market isn't one that has necessarily _chosen_ to be a part of the market and wouldn't for the most part be interested in a community/forum/gathering place.

I think a good way to think about what I'm looking at is medication - how many people are on medication? How many of those own Android devices - this is the number I'm looking for. People "on medication" aren't a group like "people who like skiing", and so mostly aren't to be found in online communities.

But if I were to do that (with sample made up numbers):

Android - 700 users worldwide

Functionality - 500 people in the demographic

That certainly doesn't mean that there are 1200 potential users, as I don't know where the crossover between people who require the functionality and also own an Android device are. In a technically disinclined demographic, maybe only 50 of the users that require the functionality also own an Android device - and only 10 of those would be willing to pay for the (an) app.

I agree to an extent, but I'm fairly new to the Android platform and I'm still using the Eclipse+ADT setup described in the official Getting started guide.

I've never been a fan of Eclipse, I used it a while back before moving to NetBeans for Java work, but for the work I've done so far in Android it works just fine and for the most part gets the hell out of the way - and when I want it to get in the way it usually has a wizard to help me out while I'm still green.

I think this is definitely good for new Droid devs, especially those that are new to programming in general - the books I've read, the online material I've read, and the official guides all have used the same development environment. So my opinion is that althrough you CAN use anything you want, you're guided towards the Elipse way unless you know what you're doing enough to work how you want to work.

I had a 2GB one back when 2GB was huge, it's symptoms were odd: You could write to it, and the OS would appear to write fine, but all that would show were files called "00000000", which contained only huge amount of "0" characters. If you looked at the drive size specifically in Windows, it reported 16TB (yes terra, not a typo :P) but Linux still reported 2GB.

Aside from that, I have a story similar to joe_bleau's (and probably many other people). The company I work for buys them in bulk, branded with our company logos and containing promo material. They fail fairly regularly - good enough to get the material to clients, but not good for use after that! Terrible - but it's worth bearing in mind that they're the cheapest the marketing guys could find.

On the positive side I have a Kingston DataTraveler that I think I've had for 4 years, maybe 3. It is used all day, every day and hasn't missed a beat. I've recommended them to family and never heard of any problems.

The important thing to take from this is that if you buy quality, failures are rare - but try to never have only one copy of important data!

This is just copy-pasted from Wikipedia:

"The creators of the format pronounced GIF with a soft "G", /ˈdʒɪf/, as in "gin". However, another alternative pronunciation uses a hard "G", /ˈɡɪf/, as in "graphics", reflecting the expanded acronym. Both pronunciations are given as correct by the Oxford English Dictionary[2] and the American Heritage Dictionary.[3] According to Steve Wilhite, the creator of the GIF format, the original pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand, Jif, and the employees of CompuServe would often say "Choosy developers choose GIF", spoofing this brand's television commercials.[4] This pronunciation was also identified by CompuServe in their documentation of a graphics display program called CompuShow.[4]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format

I didn't mean to make a mountain out of a small off-hand remark, but I thought it was interesting point. I too say "GIF", with a hard "G" - always have and always will :)

Jiff is actually the correct, though rarely used, pronunciation