Hacker News Reader

geekfactoron What if the Secret to Success is Failure?

Great article on character development in education, with clear implications for entrepreneurship.

geekfactoron Show HN: How I built a self-driving (RC) car.

Wow, very nice. Congrats on putting the course into practice!

geekfactoron Show HN: Damn Simple Carpooling

In terms of monetization, this would translate nicely to an iOS/Android app, for one.

geekfactoron Show HN: Damn Simple Carpooling

This is a great idea and initial execution. Consider K12 carpooling as well.

I've got kids in middle and high school, and in our community most of the kids get to school and home via carpools. My wife did most of the driving, and it was a perpetual headache for her. She'd forget when it was her day, kids would get sick and need to cancel pickup, or kids would decide to walk home. Parents would trade driving slots and then no one else would know who to contact when things 'came up'.

We're not carpooling this year, but she would have loved group messaging (msg parents, msg kids, msg all) and the roll call features. She also would have appreciated it if you guys kept track of who was driving and if she got a text message 30 minutes before it was her turn to drive.

Congrats!

geekfactoron Ask HN: Leaving GoDaddy. Is there a Domain Registrar with a decent UI/UX?

Possibly a good option, but I use DreamHost for shared hosting, and would like to keeps domains separate. Thanks, though!

geekfactoron Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

This is wrong. Everyone knows that modern startups are looking for a Desingineerketer.

geekfactoron The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

PG argued pretty effectively against this kind of "tribal reflex" in Keep Your Identity Small:

http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

geekfactoron Classmates.com settles class action suit alleging spam and privacy violations

I've often griped about Classmates.com's incessant emails and the total inability to unsubscribe from them. I eventually created a gmail filter to trash them. I guess I wasn't the only one, as they've recently agreed to settle a class action lawsuit over their email practices.

I never remember to file for these things and I often pass because I didn't feel wronged by the alleged infraction, but in this case I will gladly take my ten bucks.

geekfactoron Startups should not use GoDaddy. Ever

It turns out GoDaddy only issues the certificate to the domain attached to the hosting (which is somewhat of a stupid association, really, because it shouldn’t matter what domain you use as long as you’re accessing your content via a correct route).

If hosting with GoDaddy was the first mistake, this assumption was the second. The whole point of an SSL certificate is to say that the server you are talking to is a server that is authorized to speak on behalf of domain xyz and, as such, they are generally tied to one or more domains.

geekfactoron Text Editor Intervention

Looking for my next editor is a famous time-waster for me. I need to print this out and hang it up right above my monitor!

geekfactoron Dear procrastinator

Not once in my life did I have to "trick" myself into playing a video game a few extra minutes or watch a big basketball game.

I can't speak to what's going on inside your head, but I think people trick themselves into playing those few extra minutes all the time. I know I do:

- "I've got plenty of time. A few extra minutes won't hurt."

- "I didn't really need to get that done today anyway."

- "If I stay focused I can catch up."

- "If I blow off some steam now I'll be able to focus better later."

- "I can do this and watch the big game at the same time."

geekfactoron Ask HN: What are the stupid things Rails developers do?

This looks like a really good resource. Thanks!

geekfactoron Show HN: My first Rails project is like Groupon for movie lovers

This was my first rails project after going through Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. It was something I wanted myself--a way to make sure I didn't miss any of Amazon's video on demand daily deals (99 cents to rent, 30 days to watch).

I learned a ton working on it and have already made a whopping 20 cents!

I'd really appreciate any suggestions for improving or marketing it.

geekfactoron Ask HN: Rate name for our startup or propose your variant!

Sounds very cool. I could really use something like this as infrastructure for a project I've got in mind. Not sure if you're planning an API or to open source any components.

Regarding the name, both surfscrape.com and clickgrabgo.com are available. Those were just the first couple things that came to me.

geekfactoron How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit

I liked this post but am not quite sure where to start in applying this to software development. I created a follow-up "Ask HN: What are the stupid things Rails developers do?" here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2848169

geekfactoron Ask HN: Rails for Django developers?

I just read it online.

geekfactoron Ask HN: Rails for Django developers?

I was in a very similar boat two months ago and went through Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial (http://railstutorial.org) and found it to be a great resource. You'll be able to get through it pretty quickly with your Django background, you'll learn some good stuff about workflow and testing in the process, and you'll know enough to build your own basic Rails project when you're done (with lots of reference-checks back to Rails Tutorial of course).

I also played with Rails for Zombies but found the pace to be a bit slow with the emphasis on cool multimedia and the simulator.

geekfactoron I tried DomainPolish. Here are the results

Front page on HN yesterday and the prices are double today.

(At least for the basic offering -- I didn't pay attention to the others yesterday.)

geekfactoron Steve's Outfit

Absolutely brilliant and a great example of the simple side-project opportunities that exist at every turn.

geekfactoron Ask HN: who launched something in July?

Not sure you're going for type-in traffic, but that is a lot of i's and l's.

geekfactoron Ask HN: who launched something in July?

I soft-launched Flixxed (http://www.flixxed.com) which I like to call the "illegitimate love-child of Groupon and Netflix".

I've been meaning to post it as a Show HN, but I guess I've hesitated because it's pretty basic. Please let me know what you think and sign up if you like movies.

geekfactoron Ask HN: Is passion a fair thing to ask for from an employee?

Dan Pink's RSA talk came to mind for me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

He mentions a couple of studies.

geekfactoron The Loneliest WordPress Plugin

For the record, when I said "try something similar" I was thinking about a banner/notice across my own plugin's settings page. I think this may be worth some experimentation to see what works.

geekfactoron Helps finding a theme/design by listing just screenshots from all marketplaces

This is brilliant and I could have used it many times!

geekfactoron The Loneliest WordPress Plugin

I agree that it's bad form to plaster this all over every admin page, but I do like the idea of asking for ratings and can't blame the dev for trying. Seeing this, I may try something similar with my plugin.

Besides from just having a great plugin, how do others get folks to post high ratings on WP.com?

geekfactoron Scroll Reverser for Mac OS X

With one machine on Lion and another on Snow Leopard, I was going crazy. (But not crazy enough to revert the Lion machine to legacy scrolling.) This free app does the trick.

geekfactoron How The Hell Is This My Fault?

The irony of course is that the story didn't go viral for almost a month after it was written. That was plenty of time for them to make things right, take good care of the woman, and get an NDA and non-disparagement agreement in place. Based on her account they didn't even attempt to do so. Instead they chose to "let it ride" and as a result have lost way more in goodwill than this could have ever cost them "making things right."

geekfactoron Google To Buy Mobile Loyalty Card Startup Punchd

It’s been a great week for 500 Startups, which has now sold a company to Twitter (BackType), LinkedIn (CardMunch) and Google.

Isn't the CardMunch deal months old?

geekfactoron A new productivity app -- tell me my baby is ugly (or not)

You crammed a lot into that video but it looks pretty interesting to me. I especially like the work tracking feature. It would be great for tracking and increasing focus over time.

geekfactoron [dead]

Agreed. Not to mention the guy has founded a number of alternative solutions/competing companies. Of course he'd take any opportunity to say sensational things about the incumbent technology.