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joncalhounon Enabling Multiple Users in Ghost

For anyone looking to try out ghost, I highly recommend Digital Ocean. You can get an instance up and running in a couple minutes[1] and it only costs your $5/mo if you keep it up 100% of the time.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-use-t...

joncalhounon Y Combinator applicant advice

The metric is important in the sense that you can't iterate quickly and figure out what does and doesn't work if you spend 2 years per version. Successful companies tend to be ones that iterate on new ideas quickly and double down on the ones that stick.

joncalhounon Fundraising tips for first-time startup founders

To the site owner - your site isn't readable on mobile. Hiding the floating element on mobile may be enough to make it readable.

joncalhounon Ask HN:Why do you all use macbooks

fwiw I use a macbook pro retina and push to a 30" dell monitor (2560x1600) and a 24" monitor (1920x1200) at the same time. it probably can't run games at max res but it does great for movies, Netflix, coding, etc.

joncalhounon EasyPost (YC S13) Sees Transactions Doubling Every Month

In case there was confusion, we charge 5c per shipment, and you still pay the carrier directly for the shipping label, so the total cost per shipment is the shipping rate + 5c.

joncalhounon From Show HN to Funding In Less Than 3 Months

is this happening on all links or a few specific links? I am looking for the cause and I can't see any reason why this wouldn't work.

joncalhounon Free Address Verification by EasyPost

The bottom of the page now has a "countries supported" text with an american flag. Hope this clears things up a little bit . If you are interested in getting notified when we support other countries i would be happy to email you.

joncalhounon Free Address Verification by EasyPost

If you want to try some out via curl it is pretty quick. See https://www.geteasypost.com/docs#addresses

I do agree tho and a quick form to test out all of the APIs is in the works so users can quickly see what the API will return.

joncalhounon Free Address Verification by EasyPost

The idea is awesome, but handling products via a SKU is hard. For instance, if you had the SKU 517030000077284 (a Gibson Les Paul) how would you determine the package size that each customer individually uses? Or determine how much extra weight was added by packaging to keep the guitar safe?

I would love to solve this problem but it is definitely a hard one to solve.

joncalhounon Free Address Verification by EasyPost

For testing - try to keep it reasonable (a few req/s).

If you are worried about exceeding our limits in production (via bulk or your site has that much traffic) feel free to email us: contact@geteasypost.com

joncalhounon What did you cover in your undergrad CS degree?

I feel like there should be a follow up survey asking recent grads what their degree enabled them to learn outside of their coursework.

My CS degree hardly taught me anything in comparison to everything I learned outside of my coursework, but I don't feel like my coursework was lacking. On the contrary, my education allowed me to learn new things on my own that would have been significantly harder otherwise.

eg a basic algorithm course lead me to get involved in TopCoder. An introductory course on software development (source control, testing, etc) gave me enough knowledge to find an internship where I learned about peer reviews and how to work effectively with a large codebase - something that is very hard to pick up in a semester of college.

joncalhounon North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

Does anyone have any demographics for the HN community's age? I am curious how many people here have attended schools with standardized tests.

If you did attend a high school with standardized tests - do you feel it negatively affected your education? How? Do you have specific examples or courses?

For clarity - I am not claiming that standardized tests do/don't help. I just want to hear form recent HS grads.

joncalhounon Next big buzzword: Pre-commerce

this has been around for quite some time. why do you think some infomercials offer products that won't ship for 2 months? kick starter has just made it more obvious that it is a presale.

joncalhounon Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

I really wish someone would install some of the dye packs used to prevent theft in stores/banks in shipping boxes and mail those to scammers. it would be interesting to see if walking around with blue dye on their face would decrease their desire to scam others.

bonus points for a cheap cell phone camera that uploads a pic after the scanner is sprayed with the dye.

joncalhounon The only two ways to build a $100m business

Refresh worked for me.

joncalhounon The only two ways to build a $100m business

Are these two ways really that different?

Essentially all the article states is that a profitable business needs to have profits per user that scale according the cost per user acquisition. Viral is cheap acquisition, so profits can be less. Non-viral costs more per user and typically has a smaller market, so profits per user need to scale accordingly.

joncalhounon Show HN: We got tired of asking 'What browser are you using?' and created this

https://aboutmybrowser.com/2605932122

This is an error page and I am requesting the page using Chrome (18.0.1025123) on Android ICS (4.0.4 on a Galaxy Nexus).

Something to note - if i check the "request desktop site" setting in chrome it seems to work, but that may be because chrome pretends to be running on linux in that case.

joncalhounon Using Streak to Find an Apartment

In our defense, if you don't have javascript Streak won't work.

joncalhounon Using Streak to Find an Apartment

I added a link on the word "Streak" in the first sentence. Thanks for the advice.

We will look into adding a link on the side of the blog as well so it is always there.

joncalhounon Calculating The 5,000 Most Frequently Used Domain Name Prefixes and Suffixes

I'm really curious if any common prefix + suffix domains are available. cancercollege.com? yes please.

joncalhounon Tell HN: YC Application Responses Are Out

And on top of that - most of the borderline projects would probably get an interview if they didn't have so many applications, so even those would be impossible to give a clear reason as to why they weren't picked aside from saying "we thought X other projects were more promising"

joncalhounon Ask HN: Would you hire me out of college? Willing to live in the office

Do you know what sort of startup you would want to work at? I am guessing you will want to find a startup working on a problem that you are passionate about so some info about what you want to work on would be useful.

joncalhounon How I lost access to my Google account today

Out of curiosity, what about gmail is so important that you dont move to a different mail client (paid or otherwise)? Or is it simply the fact that you haven't found an alternative that you like?

joncalhounon Email sucks. This is how you fix it.

We are actually working on a way to allow companies to host all of this internally while still using our services. This would mean that any company with security concerns could host everything internally and we would still be able to provide support and features.

Along with that we also plan on providing offline support through standalone clients - though this isn't something we are focusing on at the moment. Right now we just want to get the user experience perfected.

joncalhounon Email sucks. This is how you fix it.

Perhaps I should have said "email management sucks" but that isn't quite as succinct in the title of a blog post.

I am really focusing on ways to turn your email into something that is easy to act on.

joncalhounon Email sucks. This is how you fix it.

I'm not trying to filter spam. Gmail does great at that. I'm trying to manage the non-spam emails I get. In fact Roockit's goal isn't to be an email provider - we simply want to help manager your current email.

joncalhounon Email sucks. This is how you fix it.

Its possibly that Posterous had a hiccup. I have only written 2 posts there so they probably didn't expect 8000 views in a few hours.

joncalhounon Email sucks. This is how you fix it.

Power is out on my block, so sorry if I'm not answering emails or questions from everyone very quickly. I am currently running on laptop batter (1.5 hrs left) and my cell phone tethering.

sigh - Good ol' Silicon Valley Power.

joncalhounon Email sucks. This is how you fix it.

Lets hope we don't end like Google Wave did. Shutting down a service is never fun.