joncalhoun

Re the choice of haml - you don't have to use haml. That just happens to be what I chose to use, but if you watch the videos you will see that you can create partials with erb files instead.

I intentionally used erb in the videos to try to get this point across, but perhaps I should try to make it more obvious.

Truthfully, I haven't used rails_admin a lot. I can say that it is definitely more polished since it has been around much longer, but I have never tried to customize it or add in custom code so I don't know how it does there.

Maybe someone else with more experience with rails_admin could comment?

I am biased, but I didn't like a few things about active admin:

1. Customizing views requires that you use Arbre. Learning an entirely new tool for generating webpages when every developer is already familiar with partials, html, erb, etc seemed backwards to me.

2. I tried to design upmin-admin so it was easier to setup. Active admin requires a little bit more work (but truthfully not a ton more).

3. Adding things like actions was significantly easier in upmin-admin. You basically just say what method you want to have on an admin page and it makes it work.

That said, this is very early stage (beta at best) and active admin has been under development for a while, so active admin is definitely more polished right now. That should change over time.

I'm not sure if the site is having issues, or if I am just searching the wrong algorithms :(

Can you link me directly to an algorithm to check out the animation?

No problem, and thanks :D

If you have any questions there is almost always someone on our HipChat support room - http://www.hipchat.com/gvREostp6

Hi HN,

I am one of the founders of Upmin, and I am leading the development of our admin framework for Rails. It is still pretty early, but I would love to get your feedback on it as we try to prioritize our development efforts.

Thanks!

To simply answer your question, I believe the general rule is 15% or more and they can attend YC.

If you are simply adding him as a cofounder so that you are not listed as a single founder, don't do that. It may seem like you have to have a cofounder to get into YC, but founders who are new to working together are a bigger red flag than a single founder, and there were several single founder companies in the last batch.

I doubt there is a single thing that will drastically increase conversions, but here are a couple things I would try:

1. Retargetting with Perfect Audience[0]. The idea is that not everyone will buy from you when they first visit your site, but by showing them some ads after they do you increase the chances that they come back and buy something. These people are especially useful to target because they have shown interest in your product.

2. A/B Testing with Optimizely[1] or a PHP equivalent such as [2]. If you want to update your site to increase conversions, A/B testing is probably the best way to do it. Basically you just want to propose new changes, then test them alongside your current site to see which ones perform better, then go with that one. This one is tricky though, because without enough traffic to your site a/b testing is a lot less reliable.

[0] http://www.perfectaudience.com/ [1] https://www.optimizely.com/ [2] http://phpabtest.com/ - I haven't ever used this so you may want to do some research yourself.

How do they define open beta? Anyone with the app can opt into the beta, or is there some form of filtering out users?

If I understand this correctly, videos stored forever are being limited more now. Someone correct me if I missed something there.

If an acquisition is in the works I wonder why it would prompt this - surely Google can handle the storage requirements. A way to cover themselves legally possibly?

Was the lens ready prior to YC Hacks?

I am not trying to take away from what they built, but I am genuinely curious what all was done prior to YC Hacks, since building the lens there seems like a challenge in itself.

Here are a few things I would try:

a) Gain enough knowledge to make a more informed hiring decision. You don't typically need as much knowledge as you think.

b) Find someone who is knowledgable about the role and ask for help. If you know a company with a great infrastructure person, it is very likely that he would be willing to help filter out a few candidates for your company. At the very least he could explain what he does on an average day and what he looks for in a candidate.

I would also love to check this out :)

With hiring I feel like it always comes down to two potential paths to pursue:

1) Hire all good candidates as well as a fairly large percentage of bad candidates.

2) Reject all bad candidates, and hire a fraction of the good candidates.

Which route a company takes generally depends on what the company needs. In this case it sounds like his company needed to minimize bad candidate hires more than find all good candidates.

So yes, what you said is correct. This approach will filter out a large number of great candidates without extra time, but assuming the company is finding enough candidates to hire, this isn't a problem they need to address.

I believe this is the same reason why many startups can get away with trial work periods and other interview tactics that large companies cannot. The number of candidates willing to do this is significantly smaller, but it is seemingly large enough for the startup using the tactic.

I suspect that until the industry finds a significantly better way to filter good/bad candidates that this will not change. So if you are looking for a startup idea - this is a great area to get into =D

On most Google products (docs & gmail for sure) cmd+shift+v will paste minus the styling. It doesn't cover all use cases, but I have found the keyboard shortcut to be very useful.

How different is this from https://www.rainforestqa.com/ ?

I haven't used either extensively, but they look similar in a few ways, yet different. I am curious if anyone with knowledge of the two could elaborate on the differences.

I would imagine this is due to user behavior. How often do you refresh a gmail tab? I leave mine open for days, so having it load the entire app slowly isn't an issue. What is important is updating in realtime when a new email comes in and opening those almost instantly when I select them. If that is the norm, then initial page loads aren't nearly as important.

I have no idea what you are referring to with boosted stats, and I don't believe they exist.

I would say the biggest cause of this is likely the hundreds or thousands of people who applied to YC and are watching HN to see if any replies have gone out. This topic answers their question, so they upvoted it.

This may also be a product of scale. Cost per install is likely to change vastly as you increase spend from 40 to 40k.

I don't know of any founder who would agree to this. Every founder I have met would never want to give a third party that much control unless absolutely necessary, which means the only companies who would agree to it are the ones who have no other choice.

^ This. It is roughly the equivalent of them never investing in your seed round, and then again passing on your A round. That is a signal, just not a strong one of any sort.

Where signaling may seem off is when they invest 500k in your seed, and then don't invest in your A. They were heavily committed and liked your company, and then for some reason lost interest in investing any more.

Are there any yc companies that would really benefit from your company? Reach out to them and ask them for feedback and explain that you chose them because you believe they understand the problem because they experience it.

add your email to your profile if it isn't already and I'm sure someone would at least look it over remotely.

I believe Keen.io does something very similar to this as well. iirc they use hashed API keys with some user ID in order to show user specific metrics.

I always thought there approach was interesting. Kudos for coming up with something very similar.

If I had to guess this will ultimately turn into something where the seller gets the buyer to do it in app before they part ways. Buyer has a chance to verify the product works with the seller there and seller knows the buyer has validated the exchange before leaving.

Still leaves room for products that appear to work but have some subtle flaw but this issue is still present with craigslist with local sales.

The key difference between phone and email support is the expectations of the customer, not the underlying technology. When I send an email to support, I don't expect an answer for at least a few hours. When I call, I expect to get my issue resolved before hanging up. I may wait on hold for 30m, but I am going to resolve the problem before I get off the phone.

I don't believe this is due to technological limitations of email. I have had conversations via email that are essentially realtime chats. I think the real issue is that passive support simply gets a lot more support requests than non-passive support. Offering SMS sadly wouldn't resolve this, it would just be another support medium that gets flooded like email.

NOTE - By passive support I mean anything where you send a message and just wait for a response. Non-passive support would be something like a phone call where you wait on hold for someone to be available.

I realize this is the media playing out this story as well as possible, but this article focuses entirely on "free shipping" and never bothers to mention the fact that prime is "free 2-day shipping." The distinction is pretty major.

eg - The example used in the article is $10 + $3.99 shipping, vs $13.99 on prime. What they fail to mention is that $10 + $3.99 for 5-8 day shipping is not equivalent to $13.99 for 2 day shipping.

I'm not saying I love it, but I never once believed I was paying upfront for free shipping when I bought prime. I was paying for an upgrade to 2-day shipping. The 2-day upgrade may not seem like much now, because items ordered on Amazon often still show up in 2-3 days without it, but that was not the case a few years ago when items normally took 5+ days to show up on my doorstep.

Short answer - whoever raises doesn't work on the product nearly as much until raising is over. That is why closing a round quickly can be incredibly valuable even at a lower valuation.

From my viewpoint, I went to college in order to prepare me for my future. If my future likely includes the use of a proprietary product, then I think it is in the best interest of both the students and the school to teach that proprietary product.

I wouldn't go to a design school that didn't teach photoshop. These days I don't think many programmers will leave college and not use git or github at least once in their career, so I don't see a school using it as such a travesty.

Why would they rewrite if their entire staff knew PHP already and there wasn't any guarantee that the new language would perform at their scale as is?

I'm not a fan of PHP but I don't think their issues could have been solved by simply porting over to another language.