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impon ASK HN: Randomization at work

I don't know, that seems like a passive aggressive way to handle the problem. If someone feels like they have an issue with the work they've been assigned, they should have the responsibility to handle it themselves. It seems lame to have them hope that everyone else recognizes their problem and help them deal with it. I'm also not a fan of the daily standup meeting, so maybe I'm a little biased about that approach.

impon How to Avoid Some Startup Danger Points

1. Yeah, that stuff is a pain, but it's a "good problem to have." Nothing to be scared about, just annoying.

2. Cache your landing page and upgrade your server beforehand. If it's any help, I survived getting to #4 on the reddit home page with a Django app that used middleware caching for anonymous users on a 2GB Slicehost slice.

3. Incorporate as a business, avoid processing credit cards at first (use PayPal, Amazon, Google, etc.). If you make money now, you have until next tax year to worry about the accounting stuff. Another good problem to have.

impon Show HN: didtheywinornot.com Single Purpose Scores Site

I don't know. For some reason they never really put it all together. I've only loosely followed them since the 1997 world series. Been more of a Browns fan lately. It's easier because I don't have to worry about being disappointed. Any win is a celebration.

impon Show HN: didtheywinornot.com Single Purpose Scores Site

Yeah, that seems non-commercial.

One suggestion: After the initial team search, it would be nice to be able to browse the teams or games somehow. I liked the surprise of the score and description, and it would be cool to easily browse or view a random game or something like that.

impon Show HN: didtheywinornot.com Single Purpose Scores Site

Cool, that's fun. Could be more fun if I wasn't an Indians fan :( Where are you getting stats from?

impon Ask HN: product idea

I used to get a lot of emails from companies and organizations too. Then I just unsubscribed from all of them. Problem fixed.

impon Pmarchive - Any thoughts?

Awesome, I'm glad this is still alive somewhere. His writing really was great while it lasted.

impon A 13-Year-Old Takes On Everest, and Sets Off a Debate

The article above links to the page for Annapurna, one of the deadliest mountains on earth (40% fatality rate for climbers), which said this:

The second summit team, Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz and Vera Watson, died during this climb. (Vera Watson was survived by her husband, the computer scientist John McCarthy.)[5]

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

impon DuckDuckGo Searches Are Not Anonymous

I can't figure out what the trivial fix is. Would proxying all S3 requests through his server fix the issue, or do the headers get passed through to Amazon anyway?

impon Sales is awful. I want to be a web developer. Where should I start?

Learning web development will take time. How you approach it will depend on your financial situation and general life flexibility. Even if you need to keep your day job, you should be able to start learning on your own in your free time. It would be best to focus on a smaller project first that you can complete. Try HTML and CSS, then either Django, Ruby on Rails, or PHP. If you're brand new to web stuff, buy the book Head First HTML and CSS and set a goal to build a simple website in a month. After you've spent some time working on it, then you'll have a better idea of whether or not you really like it as much as you thought you would.

impon Ask HN: Simple exercises for a python beginner?

There's an MIT OpenCourseWare class (6.00) that is an introduction to Python and computer science. If your friend wants to do the problems in that course, there are people working through it together on Curious Reef (disclaimer, it's my website): http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...

You can post your work, view others' work, leave comments, and ask questions. 29 people have done at least the first lesson so far. It's one of the most active classes on the site.

impon National Geographic, Feb, 1922

That's awesome. The article on the Mayans is really interesting.

impon Rate my new startup, Appointment Reminder

One last thought on this: In DropBox's lessons learned slides they said they had a lot of trouble getting customers via search because that was just a way to harvest demand, not create it. This product feels like it may fall in the same trap. DropBox at least had a 2-syllable name to fall back on for word of mouth marketing, but this has an 8 syllable name and could have more trouble.

impon Rate my new startup, Appointment Reminder

You're obviously going for maximal SEO with a name like that. Good luck getting ranked highly. I know you're a whiz at that, but that keyword looks pretty darn competitive: http://www.google.com/search?q=appointment+reminder

I'm guessing you'll have to rely a lot on your AdWords kung-fu that you talk about so much, because I think customer acquisition is going to be your toughest challenge.

Edit: Actually, I partially take that back. The ads look competitive, but the results look penetrable. Your blog post announcing the site is already #21 for that term, so you appear to be in good shape.

Edit 2: Although you may do well for SEO, I can't help but wonder if you're taking a hit on word of mouth sales with such a generic name that doesn't use a .com. "Have you tried Appointment Reminder Dot Org? My sales increased 10%!" It make work, but I think you're putting all your eggs in the SEO /SEM basket.

impon Ask HN: How to get traction?

If you're at zero, just try to get to 10 first. Then go for 100. Think small, get feedback, and improve. I think Paul Buchheit said that a startup's first goal is to reach 100 passionate users.

impon Etacts (YC W10) Builds What I Want

They don't use the word "important", they use the words "top contacts", which I think more accurately refers to "frequent contacts." So you would know ahead of time that the investor's email isn't going to be in that list.

impon Ask HN: How do you stop an app's email getting flagged as spam?

Send it through AuthSMTP to avoid any EC2 related problems: http://www.authsmtp.com/ (and set SPF correctly). It does cost money though.

You can also send an email to this address and get a report on basic spam and deliverability issues: check-auth@verifier.port25.com

impon How to get a 15-year-old started with coding?

1) HTML/CSS -> PHP/MySQL -> Javascript -> Python

2) Random tutorials online and an O'Reilly PHP/MySQL book.

3) Yes, and that was critical. I basically learned what I needed to get the next thing done

4) A friend helped get me pointed in the right direction, and I took it from there.

5) General best-practices. I started with just notepad and had horrible coding style. I think just having someone to answer questions and occasionally review code would have been a tremendous help.

Although PHP pretty much sucks as a language, it was extremely gratifying to see my work progress quickly ("Look, I made that dynamic list out of values in a database!").

impon The Nokia N900 is better than the iPhone

The N900 is definitely an awesome phone. Amazing browser. Nokia doesn't seem to want to market it much though.

impon Ask HN: Users who register but never activate

Wow, cool. That was fast. Hopefully you'll get an increase in activity.

impon Ask HN: Do you ever show appreciation to a site by clicking on Google Ads?

No. It hurts the advertiser. Send an email to the website saying how much you appreciate what they do. That's worth a lot more than $0.30.

impon Ask HN: Users who register but never activate

It's most likely not nefarious. The combination of your email deliverability and people's laziness will mean that a lot of people probably won't click the activation link.

How are you sending email? Are you using AuthSMTP or something like that, or are you just doing it straight from your server? Is your SPF record correct? Have you tried a Port25 scan?

You're not an average web user. For a lot of people, checking email is a separate activity from web browsing. If they use Outlook, they have to open a completely separate program just to use your site. They don't have GMail open in a separate tab at all times.

I would wonder if you really need people to activate their account that early in the process, but I'm not that familiar with how your site works.

impon Ask HN: How long can you actually work standing up?

I set up a temporary standing desk at home for my work at night and on the weekends. I didn't really have a problem typing for five hours at a time or more. However, after about three weeks, I was getting aches in my ankles and calves. I took down the standing desk soon after that. I felt like it was sucking up my energy. I think standing about 20% of the time would be ideal.

impon Ask HN: How can I make something which people appreciate?

I did that on a small scale, sort of accidentally, and dozens of people have emailed me with the equivalent of "Wow! That's cool!" It has also developed into a small, active community.

Although customer development is great and popular right now, what I did didn't use any customer development. It also wasn't originally intended as a business either, but your post doesn't mention anything about money :)

I took an existing web application and gave it a great user interface. That's it. If you can take an application that already exists and make it:

* 10X easier to use

* 10X more fun to use

* 3X faster to use

* Free

then you'll grow to thousands of users via word of mouth and your users will love you.

The easy part about it is choosing the application. Anything that you currently use that's cludgy can probably be improved a whole lot. The difficult part is innovating the user interface, but luckily that is also the fun part (at least it is for me).

This is also similar to what Gmail did. They made web-based email much easier, faster, and fun to use (while staying free), and that app probably has the largest number of appreciative users on the planet. Google didn't have to reinvent email to get those passionate users; they just took an existing thing and made it much better.

impon "Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"

...because I didn't have my own backup."

impon Ask HN: Why is AllRecipes.com so fast (Featured in those new Chrome Ads)?

Yeah, that's interesting. One thing to note is that they don't sprite their small images, which is one of the first things people recommend for improving page load time.

impon Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?

Yeah, that's a good point. I guess I forgot how dumb they were.

impon Ask HN: Do you brainstorm regularly?

Rarely, usually only when I'm stuck on a problem or before I begin long-term planning for a website. It's usually both work and fun. By myself. No techniques, just a fat sharpie marker and lots of blank scrap paper. Sometimes I tape up pages to the wall around my desk to help visualize ideas.

impon Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?

I think the DC sniper is a bad example. Once they were caught, people stopped running around in zig zags, and only people in DC were worried at all. If a small terrorist attack needs to be running at all times, or at least once a week, then the terrorists will quickly run out of people. I don't think they're that effective.

impon Why Is Business Writing so Awful?

A search for "Gargamel Robot Fan" with quotation marks returns zero hits.

Not anymore...

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...