imp

I think you're asking the right question, but I don't have any idea of what the answer is. It doesn't seem like answering that question is something you can crowdsource to us. You need a vision of what you think a great news site will look like. Right now, you're asking us for a vision. As users, we are mostly going to think of features you could implement on a current site like Digg, but if you want to challenge them you need to have your own innovative view of what it will look like. Reddit was "front page for the web," and "democratizing news." What ultimate goal are you trying to achieve?

So, I would say come up with your own vision and launch it ASAP because it will probably change over time. I think when reddit launched, they put a lot of emphasis on the recommendation algorithm, which no one ended up using. They didn't even have comments in the first version, yet the comments are now the most important part.

Edit: Try reading the books "Positioning", "Innovator's Dilemma", and "Innovator's Solution." Your challenges aren't technical ones, they're marketing ones. You're taking on big established websites, and you need to position your website in the correct way to even have a chance at taking them on.

It seems like a cool idea. I remember when I was in high school applying for scholarships, there was a scholarship website that had something similar. I had to browse around their website looking for coins or something like that. When I found enough coins I got entered into a drawing for a scholarship. It was kind of fun, and probably could be generalized to other types of websites.

At 1,000 karma, pg mails you an autographed copy of On Lisp.

If your email has something interesting to say, then absolutely it's still worthwhile. It seems to be a growing area, at least from my perspective. It probably depends on the product, but most likely you'll get some value out of an email newsletter.

Same here with only eight buckets and a couple hundred total objects. Maybe they're just overwhelmed right now...

I'm pretty sure that all of those (plus mint.com, which started as mymint.com) had VC backing to help pay for the domain. If you want to go with that kind of domain name, it seems like getting VC is going to be a requirement.

I also got the same reaction here in the midwest. Although people would be supportive, there was frequently a tone of sympathy as well. It was surprising to see how people reacted, especially those who are more indoctrinated into the corporate lifestyle.

My theory about alt text showing as correlated to higher ranking is that it's a result of people optimizing their pages. SEOs have been saying to add alt text for a while, and it's easy to do compared to changing URLs or a domain name. It's hard to prove whether it's a cause or an effect, but my gut feeling is it's an effect.

works for me

I can't tell if he's joking or not. He has a section titled "Don't Have Kids," yet he has two himself: http://www.kenrockwell.com/about.htm

So he obviously isn't taking his own advice. Maybe he could have posted tips on how to raise children cheaply instead of discouraging having them at all.

I really liked the article, and I think the Maximum Viable Product is a great concept. From reading some people's descriptions of MVP it seems like they expect their users to tell them exactly what to do. However, comparing user feedback to a bigger vision seems like the most important part of an MVP.

I've been slowly getting better with my bash skills by organizing it as a class on my learning website: http://curiousreef.com/class/bash-scripting/

It's useful because it helps me stay on track. I can take off a few days or weeks even and then go back and do a few bash problems out of that book. I know that I'm 38% of the way through it, and it's easy to pick up where I left off.

I don't think I've done the peripheral learning that you mention, but I think 30 minutes a week is still low-impact learning.

Some people have been working through this class together on Curious Reef. It's loosely organized, with people posting questions and ideas in the class forum: http://curiousreef.com/class/stanford-cs229-machine-learning... Might be a useful resource to people learning this material. (Disclosure: it's my website)

I don't have experience with this, but you've reminded me to rotate the password to my Gmail account :)

I agree you should launch sooner rather than later. Also, not to be rude, but if you do start a blog, you may want to have someone proofread your posts. A lot of typos like you have here won't instill confidence in your users.

Thanks, there's over 1200 registered users, but I wouldn't quote that as active users. The site got redditted when it launched and there's some people who signed up initially and haven't been back. I don't have a number for active users off the top of my head, but there's always someone submitting homework, writing a comment, or starting a discussion every day.

I haven't looked into hosting content yet. I feel that others do that pretty well already, but it would be more convenient to have it all in one place. What type of content do you think would be most beneficial to be hosted on Curious Reef? Embedded videos, PDFs, etc? Or are you thinking of something like replicating the content of all of OCW's classes?

I've built a website to do that! It's called Curious Reef http://curiousreef.com/ and I launched it a few months ago. People have been steadily learning a variety of subjects together since then.

The most active class so far is MIT's OCW 6.00, Intro to Computer Science: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...

There are others learning Vim, SICP, bash, etc. I'm also experimenting with a guitar class.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the site. My goals when designing the site were exactly as you have described above.

I've used MailChimp and I think it's great. No issues with spam. I use their RSS-to-email feature a lot, and it saves me tons of time. Haven't tried any other delivery services.

I love this quote:

No matter what your audience size, you ought to write as if your readership consisted of paid subscribers whose subscriptions were perpetually about to expire.

minimotivation.com (it's a random saying every time you refresh)

Cool, sounds like you have a lot of features there. I didn't know about the parsing part. What I would love is if you would poll those sites daily and then alert me whenever a car of a certain model is listed for a specific mileage and price. That would be amazing. It sounds like you have the parsing part already done.

I may be in the minority (not incredibly small though), but if someone isn't comfortable using a spreadsheet, they're probably not going to be comfortable using a web app either. Spreadsheets are pretty ubiquitous.

I'm not sure who your target audience is. I've searched for apartments, a car, and a house. Every time I used a spreadsheet to keep track of those things and it worked great. From my quick look at your site, that's all you really seem to be offering. I'm not sure what extra value you're adding.

Or "don't drink and text." It looks like he may have been trying to text a friend instead of tweeting.

Patents are completely separate from trademarks though.

You've managed to use this website though, despite no blue or purple links.

Venture Pimp has some unique startup reviews: http://venturepimp.com/

If you have some money to spend towards this, I can recommend the Name Inspector, http://www.thenameinspector.com/. He can help with the whole project, or even just review a list of names that you've developed. He's written a lot about company names on his blog:

http://www.thenameinspector.com/10-name-types/

http://www.thenameinspector.com/10-tips-for-naming-your-comp...

1) You're potentially breaking the web because those links you're posting aren't guaranteed to last forever.

2) By posting bitly links, you're encouraging people to click on shortened links. Shortened links can be used to disguise malware, viruses, etc.

3) I don't feel that you have the right to know how many people click on a link on a domain you don't own.

I prefer to nag people to not use shorteners at all if you're not on Twitter. I don't know if it works, but I feel that it's a habit that needs to stop.