d_r

I also found JavaScript Garden (posted on HN a few weeks ago) incredibly useful in un-confusing my understanding of JS.

http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/

Direct link:

http://blog.simplegeo.com/2011/04/20/open-places-data/

There is an excellent discussion of status games in the book "Impro." Highly recommend it if you're interested in hacking the non-tech side of things.

http://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-John...

Authorize.net also offers a hosted option so that the merchant doesn't have to deal with the burden of PCI compliance. In other words, the merchant (you) never sees the credit card number.

http://developer.authorize.net/api/sim/

I'm almost done with a small web app I've been working on for the last couple of weeks. Nothing sucks more than using nice shiny markup that works great in Chrome and Firefox (rounded corners, drop shadows, or even a properly working display: inline-block;) and then going back and adding fallback support for all of these because each version of IE is incompetent to deal with them. Sigh.

And, as I just discovered, for this:

   var odd = ['quick', 'brown', 'fox', ];

"odd.length" in IE will return 4, not 3, evidently because of that trailing comma.

I'm a Mac user, so this all requires firing up VirtualBox (free!) to run Windows XP.

At least, thanks, MS, for including a "compatibility mode" button in IE8 so that I can quickly switch to an older version of Trident[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(layout_engine)

I'm surprised that people are scraping their content via bots, given that it's licensed under CC and freely available to download. (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/cc-wiki-dump/)

Great article.

Wanted to comment on this "The first project I did on my own was jeansbargains ... I built it and then realized that I did not want to spend the time looking for deals to put on it"

This seems to run as a common theme in many engineer friends (including myself, several times.) When approached with a sales-like problem, such as a opening a store or a SaaS product, or even starting a social network, we dig into the code first and build, but then get stymied by the "business stuff" necessary to get things off the ground. This might mean not e-mailing potential customers, sales leads, blogging, etc. In the meantime, we'd spend time polishing back-end code that no one will end up using.

I have several unfinished projects due to this syndrome (does it have a name?) And while I am not better at this yet, reading HN has definitely inspired me to do more than just code in that regard.

The site looks absolutely beautiful, but it's asking me for 10 bucks upfront without showing what it does.

I know you're talking about features more so than specific models, but I was tired of my iPhone 3G after using it for a couple of years. It was sufficient to me feature-wise, but the sluggish response time on every screen was just frustrating. However, after upgrading, iPhone 4 speed and retina display have been game-changing to me as a user.

What an excellent post. If nothing else, and you're a coder who wants to spend the bare minimum amount of time improving your designs, I highly recommend grabbing "The non-designer's designer book" mentioned in the text.

I guess this shows that you don't need fancy HTML5/CSS/rounded borders/custom fonts/etc. etc. to actually build a business. As much as I love eye candy and love spending hours tweaking my projects to get them to look "just right," this is something I have to always remember. Shipping and getting customers is what ultimately matters.

(One pet peeve though: many of the recent HN posts linking to company blogs don't include a link back to the homepage. Everyone, please have a link! The standard top-left logo works really well for this. Immediately after reading your blog, my first intention is to see your product. Don't make me edit out "blog." from the URL by hand.)

Fortunately, BeautifulSoup saves the day for HTML parsing tasks.

(http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/)

I'm sure devs would love a snazzy UI framework that "just works" on popular screen sizes. I, for one, would use it. If it was open-source and distributed under a permissive enough license, even better.

Agreed, just it adds another "I need to test this" configuration for devs. Have you found that many apps don't support this resolution?

Google actually tracks screen sizes of devices that access Android Market:

http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/screens.htm...

It appears that 240x320 (small + low density) accounts for 2.3% of users.

While unrelated to UI, another very handy page tracks Android versions in use out there. It looks like 2.2 has become the most common version in the last month: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...

Articles like this is exactly why I come to HN.

I was planning to move my server from Apache to Nginx soon. I suppose it's as a good time as ever to learn any gotchas.

iOS comes with a handy set of UI controls that look decent even without customization. You can use the default UITableView, for instance (looking at the Meebo screenshot) and get the nice look-and-feel out of the box. This especially helps a low-budget dev like myself.

Apple showcase of the controls that come out-of-the box and various ways to tweak them: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userex...

Default Android controls for some reason sport a more "circa-1990 MS DOS" look. The developers need to actually invest time to re-skin the components or make their own to get a modern look. This is made slightly more difficult if you want to support multiple screen sizes/resolutions. As such, many Android apps sadly seem to end up with the default look.

(I have written apps for both platforms.)

Incidentally, one big company actually claims to have a patent on "secret admiring". I wonder how this will play out.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/11/jdate-slaps-zoosk-okcupid-a...

Why not do something today, especially now that you know this idea is viable?

(Not being facetious, serious question.)

This won't help me learn a new technology, build my startup quicker, or even introduce me to others who are trying.

But it is pseudo-science babble that I might find in an e-mail forward.

Not Hacker News.

(Hit my 365 days yesterday so I am officially "allowed" to complain.)

This is interesting. Are you using Firefox by any chance? I was incredibly frustrated with Gmail speed on Firefox for a couple of years, but after switching to Chrome haven't seen a problem on any of my boxes.

Another excellent resource (a Git tutorial) by the same author: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/

One caveat for those conducting business from California is that you have to pay the CA $800 franchise tax even if you incorporate in another state. This seems to be something people don't catch after filing it do-it-yourself Delaware co's/LLCs online. If you're running your startup from California, incorporating in Delaware technically exposes you to costs from both states.

The CA tax is waived in just a few cases. For example, some types of corporations (not LLCs) are exempt in the first year, and an LLC that is dissolved before the first year and meets other requirements may also be exempt.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

Reference: http://www.ftb.ca.gov/FORMS/misc/1063.pdf

(Also, we're lucky to have contributors like grellas in the HN community. Thanks.)

After seeing it, I was hoping the entire thing is rendered via HTML5 goodness, but alas, it is just images.

I just wanted to say thanks for a great new site! It has also been interesting to see its inception/creation via HN as you posted a few months ago to gather interest and initial content.

(Disclaimer: I'm an indie iOS/Android developer, so I may be more biased on this issue.)

There are a number of apps of this type. "Real FBI GPS Phone Tracker Pro" (under various names) is another repeat offender. The description goes on to say that the application uses GPS satellites to pinpoint the location of any phone number, "It works, guaranteed!" and then as a last sentence mentions that it's a gimmick. This app repeatedly comes up to top 100 paid under different names and publishers. As soon as one version disappears, another comes up with another author and app name, but very similar description.

Example (top 41 right now in the US App Store): http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/phone-tracker-spy-pro-locate/...

What's fascinating is that the reviews (if you browse through them) fall into two buckets: 5 star reviews proclaiming that it works, and highly negative reviews. This smells fishy. The 5 star reviews must be fabricated, if I know any better.

   ★★★★★ Buy it! 
     
   by loganczyz
   Buy this app!! I would of paid millions for it

   ★★★★★ awesome technology 
     
   by Reynagreen
   It should be prohibited .... big brother ..

Word on the street is that these happen from operations that commandeer thousands of iTunes accounts to purchase and leave reviews, floating these apps to the top.

As a developer, I do find it kind of a bummer to spend many hours on my apps and then see these make it. Of course, I do know I should spend more time building apps and promoting them through creative means rather than being angry at the status quo.

However, I don't buy the argument that "people want these kinds of apps". I see the typical customer as a click-happy teenager who wants it to work, buys it, sees it doesn't work, and then forgets about the 99 cents wasted. In the meantime, the scammer gets wealthier.

I suppose this is no different from selling muscle supplements, acai berries, or get-rich-quick books, but still. Ugh.

I'm going to start adding this retro "Get Chrome" banner to my sites. I wish it was animated, though.

http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/static/img/1998/get-chr...

I just wanted to say that -- wow, this is one beautiful site design. Sorry it didn't work out so far. If you end up giving it away, I hope it finds good hands!

That said, I hope the two of you can take long vacations, find new energy, and that we'd see a "How we got 1000x users" type of post from you in the future months.

I also transferred all my domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap in the past year and never looked back. I was tired of having to navigate a maze of circa-1995-UI pages filled with upselling. Want to change your DNS settings? Oh, look for that teeny tiny link in the corner. Want to turn on domain privacy? That'll be another $9.95, and you have to log in to a different site with a different username+password to manage that.

Admittedly, GoDaddy has a genius business model IMO. The confusing UI is what probably makes them their bucks.

FWIW, while less known in the West, Taobao.com is one of the world's most highest-trafficked websites. It's the eBay equivalent in China and has many more use cases, such as buying plane tickets or new clothes.

FWIW, of all claims, the diapers example is somewhat bogus. Diapers.com is a very successful retailer of you guessed what (and, recently acquired by Amazon, I believe).

While I obviously have no data, I would vouch that mydiapersstore.com would have way less credibility in customer eyes.