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jeffclark

880 karma · joined March 16, 2009

I make Internet. Product guy during the day. Designer and developer and future billionaire at night. And lover of nachos. And enjoyer of run-on paragraphs. And maker-upper of phrases like "run-on paragraph".

jeff (at) http://www.clarkle.com

submissionscomments
jeffclark··on NYC Slice
I’m sad to learn that Mary Chung’s is gone. There was little better than a double order of extra spicy suanla chaoshou with a can of coke on a cold day.
jeffclark··on Ask HN: What services/apps are you self-hosting?
How common is it for websites to have RSS feeds, anymore?
jeffclark··on A summary of my learnings on how to find startup ideas
> How do I figure out if HR/recruiting would want/need my idea(s)?

My best advice is to try to make the sale, even before you have something ready. You'll learn what parts of your pitch are connecting with them, and which are confusing to them.

But more importantly, you're going to understand if you get the problem as well as you think you do. And you're going to understand if they like your solution to that problem as much as you hope they do.

So, email a few of these potential customers. See if they'll take a call with you. If none do, you're not there yet. But if even one does, you're about to get a ton of information in 30 minutes. Good luck!

jeffclark··on Ask HN: Starting blogging when you're not an expert?
Regardless of your current, perceived skill level, you're already an expert to someone else.

Start writing, be awesome, teach others.

jeffclark··on Ask HN: What makes a good place to work?

  - clear understanding of the problem I am being asked to solve

  - major influence (if not outright ownership) of the solution to that problem
Good bullet points for anyone who works, not just software developers.
jeffclark··on Ask HN: What is your side project for 2017?
That's a great idea.

Do you have any devices in your house, yet?

jeffclark··on Ask HN: What is your side project for 2017?
I believe that people want help finding "smart home" devices that will work well with the existing equipment in their home, and that they would pay good money for that because buying the wrong equipment is a frustrating (and expensive) mistake.

I'm building a way to help you pick the connected equipment that will work best for your home, based on what you want to control, how you want to control it, and the equipment that already exists in your house.

For example, I've got an Ecobee3 thermostat, Lutron Caseta lights, a SmartThings hub and an Echo Dot. My system will tell you the best connected door lock for your home that will work with that setup.

jeffclark··on Non-photo blue
It's more likely that they require blue ink so they can distinguish the original from a photocopy.
jeffclark··on Zappos’ experiment to end the office workplace
Complete guess on possible engineering teams that could make up that 250-350 people: SEO/acquisition, various "admin"/marketplace functionalities (adding, removing, updating products), analytics, financial reporting, marketing reporting, payment processing, probably some kind of "core" team, general bugs/RTB, etc etc etc etc.
jeffclark··on Amazon launches same day delivery for Prime customers
My best and completely uneducated guess would be location to warehouses. Maybe even cross-referenced with typical orders in the area and Amazon's actual ability to get some amount of those typical orders to door-steps same-day.
jeffclark··on Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?
We've hired 2 (so far). I was hesitant at first since those boot camps sound like a for-profit college.

One of the hires has been on my product team and is a total badass. Better with ~1 year of experience than I ever was.

jeffclark··on Show HN: Hooks – Get Custom Notifications for Everything Important to You
This is really impressive. How did you secure the games and scores data?
jeffclark··on Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?
Yeah, very much agreed. I have to scrape schedules together to populate games for my ticket site (http://www.boxrowseat.com).

The popular sites are wising up to scraping of information, so it's really an exercise in futility. But when it works, it's super rewarding.

jeffclark··on Spark Core Bathroom Monitor
My favorite part: "The next step involves complex analysis of historical bathroom visit data, to allow for statistical insight into bathroom habits. Oh, and a 💩 icon for when the bathroom has been occupied for more than 5 minutes."
jeffclark··on Ask HN: What would you do with a Billion dollars?
I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
jeffclark··on [dead]
Wow. Imagine the author's blog post when something actually significant happens in his life.
jeffclark··on Google breaks 2005 promise never to show banner ads on search results
> Also good to know that there will literally ALWAYS be people willing to minimize the broken promises of corporations

At some point, people realize that corporations exist to maximize profit and not necessarily for the good of the customer.

jeffclark··on Google breaks 2005 promise never to show banner ads on search results
In related news: I am no longer with my college girlfriend, despite the fact that 8 years ago I told her I would never leave her.
jeffclark··on It's not the $7, but the principle
If it's really just a front-end bug, chances are they're getting lots of calls just like yours. You may just be part of a pile of callback tickets once the bug is fixed and all the refunds are processed. Or, they could still be trying to track down the root cause of the bug in the first place.
jeffclark··on Did Frank Lloyd Wright create America's greatest office?
Relax. The guy writing the article is likely a journalist, not an engineer.
jeffclark··on Growth Hacking Notes
High fives don't pay the bills.
jeffclark··on Card management API
I swear that Stripe is monitoring my private repo. It's like they know exactly what kind of hacky workaround I just implemented on my project and wrote something to support it in an elegant way.

First ACH, and now this. Nice work, again, Stripe.

jeffclark··on How to get advice from powerful people
Connections should eventually lead to money (directly or indirectly). If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money.
jeffclark··on German City Set To Make Linux A Norm For Citizens
You're not wrong, but continue your thought process and think bigger picture.

If you do actual research on older computer users, you'll see that many prefer a desktop environment for the sole reason that they can get a monster monitor.

"But my Grandma!" you might say, and you might be right.

But expand your dataset and you'll start to understand why desktops and iMacs haven't become obsolete.

jeffclark··on HN Request to any browser devs: Master Tabs
I do this with multiple browser windows.
jeffclark··on Review my startup (background job monitoring as a service)
Don't worry about the stock photos. If you weren't asking for specific feedback, nobody would have mentioned it.
jeffclark··on Show HN: Give stuff away on Craigslist more easily
I did for tickets: BoxRowSeat.com

Sells a few thousand $$ of tickets per month. People seem to like it. Especially hockey fans.

jeffclark··on Sweating the UI and UX details: Emails and Email Addresses
Me neither. OS X Mail has a hidden option that you can enable, so that Mail copies just the email address. Copy this into your Terminal and restart Mail:

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool false

jeffclark··on Introducing A New Article Design
Bingo. Nothing gets past some guys.
jeffclark··on Introducing A New Article Design
As one of a handful of product guys on HN, I'd love to hear about the research and decision making that went into this redesign.
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