Very interesting tool. Are the content pieces usually just a link back to someone else's trending piece? Is there a way for me to understand my own content pieces?
Our property is getting full of small (10'x10'ish) sheds, greenhouses, and the like. It's so soothing to be able to just make and follow a plan and have concrete solutions to straight forward answers.
That being said, building the old-fashioned pole barn (36'x54') using logs, sawmill, and kiln to make the lumber, almost killed me. There needs to be some sort of limit to everything.
Felt good to read that. I started an 8x12 shed two years ago and really need to get it done this spring so we can actually use it. I kinda have the same plan: just keep erecting outbuildings when I get bored.
It's awesome because youtube is (intentionally) annoying,
plus, it's nice to give back bugfix/feature patches when
someone else (jwz) is kind enough to give their code to
the public.
EDIT: Thanks detaro. Link removed. I didn't know it was an issue, and obviously, couldn't see it.
You know what's even more annoying? Someone with a public website who breaks links in such an overtly antagonistic way. I've seen other people do this by simply having a text message that kindly asks people not to link to them.
Anyway, it seems to be a static website, and it should be able handle HN traffic for a fairly small amount of effort and/or money.
The second link you posted '/20160127052944/' is bad. It links to an old
version, 1.681, and the current version is 1.711 as of an hour or two
ago. The version number matters.
The url I posted and removed still works fine, so long as
it's not originating from HN (i.e. 'referer' checking). If you do a
quick web search on 'youtubedown' you'll find it.
Thanks for letting me know the latest archive version was already outdated!
If jwz is trying to avoid the HN-effect, then sending people via another route won't completely mitigate the problem.
I went ahead and updated the archive.org link. Providing that means HN users don't need to do yet another search and his site shouldn't get hammered nearly as much.
I'm working on a programming language which will allow fully automatic distributed computing by having everyone using the language participate in a SETI@HOME-style p2p network. I'm under no illusions about it being fast, but it's certainly fun.
Not really ready to share the URL yet, things are still coming together.
Very delayed response: I'm focused on first building it assuming the trustworthiness of the actors on the network; extending to trustless distributed computing is an even bigger tangle than I've already gotten myself into. Have you written about it anywhere? I'm always interested to hear how other people think about these things.
These turtles use a raspberry pi + webcam to turn to a face, recognize "flash cards" via QR cods, and chase a ball. All parts are open source, so if you have a 3D printer, you can pretty much build one yourself. (The pcb you would need to order from dirtypcbs, though I have a few spare if needed).
Yup, well aware, I had originally started this idea before Dan Shapiro came out with his excellent game. I haven't however bothered to change the name of the project yet... If you have a good alternative name do let me know ;)
ClickRouter - because it allows me to use all my affiliate accounts (CJ, Skimlinks, Viglinks, shareasale, etc) at once. This has nearly doubled my affiliate revenue.
At first it was an internal tool I ran for a long time, but been working to make it a service.
Looks interesting. I'm curious why you built this. Prosper202 is the canonical approach used by most affiliates. It's got both self-hosted and hosted options.
From your landing page, I can't tell what missing features led you to roll your own.
Maybe I don't get Prosper202 but it seems quite different.
ClickRouter makes a realtime decision where to send your clicks based on your affiliate accounts.
Say you have a forums with thousands of posts which have thousands of links. "Affiliatizing" them all would be a huge and nearly insurmountable task.
With ClickRouter, you install a piece of javascript in your footer. Every click is intercepted and sent to the best Affiliate account you have. It also tells you what affiliate accounts you SHOULD create because you're losing revenue.
The issue for me was just that, trying to affiliatize thousands of links that users put on my site. Now it's done automatically and if I signup with a new affiliate network, it knows automatically those affiliates are available.
We are setting up a trailer at 7th & Red River for SXSW doing cell phone repairs and selling external batteries, cables, chargers and cases.
Why it is awesome: I have done a lot of things as an entrepreneur, but I've never street hustled before. As an introvert, this is pretty intimidating, but I think it will be good practice for doing more sales in the future. Plus, it gets me out from behind the computer and into the real world, talking face-to-face with folks! :)
Wow, great idea for the personal growth aspect! It certainly tickles the brain on my end, being in much of a non-sales/people person! Here's to wishing you great success on both fronts!
Our hosted load testing service which uses real browsers, driven by javascript, ruby or java code the same way you'd write your usual selenium/webdriver tests.
It is awesome because it will make load test script creation/maintenance just like anything else. It will also be the first "opinionated" load testing tool.
Right now everything is open source, but I've started work on a replacement user interface which would be temporarily released under a proprietary license. I think the project is awesome as understanding workflow in a complicated application is a challenging task and at some stage all work will be released back to the open source version.
Connectomo - smarter marketing automation for startups and small businesses (http://connectomo.com)
It's awesome because we're building a marketing automation platform that learns from customer preferences and behaviours to build a better customer experience.
Some Feedback on the site:
"Free demo" makes you register and the description makes it sound like you have to link your account to Stripe right aways. This is quite misleading, imo. "Demo" in my mind doesn't even include registration, it should be a demo of how the service would operate.
"Sample Menu" is something that looks like a demo, but it is quite worthless, because it's not a bit interactive. You can't even add menu items to the basket.
If I was a restaurant owner I wouldn't be very impressed by the "Sample Menu" and I would be very reluctant to register because a "Free demo" doesn't entail signing up for Stripe in my opinion. This sounds more like a trial than a demo.
The registration description was inaccurate, you don't need to sign up for Stripe right away to look around the members area, thanks for pointing that out. Also, I agree with the free demo comment, I'll change the button to "Sign Up".
The add to cart functionality on the sample menu should work, what browser are you using?
GreatSchools has a monopoly in this space but their 1-10 ratings scale is opaque and their website hard to navigate. EdScore has a more granular 50-100 rating scale, modern search, better mapping, and soon will feature search filters by distance and home price so parents can evaluate, say, top schools within a 1hr commute of SF with a median home price under $1m.
I think it's a good idea. One thing I worked on in the past was being able to link school scores for my residential real estate startup. However, there's always been the question of "How credible are these scores" - are you guys doing the rating yourselves?
Yes these are proprietary ratings. This is typically the first question we get: how credible/accurate are these scores. Since this is HN I can dive into this a bit more than with a typical parent:
-There are fundamentally two data sets in play here, a national one, NCES, that provides basic school information: name, # of students, demographics, etc. And a State data set.
- Each state administers their own state assessment tests for most, not all, grades. So for example, Massachusetts does tests for grades 3-8 and grade 10. Other states do a different mix. To assign a "score" to an Elementary, Middle, or High School you combine the grades, but there is judgement around, for example, what constitutes a middle school? Grade 6? Grade 8? It varies by school district, let alone state.
-The subjects covered are typically Math and English. Some sites, especially for high school, also test Science or additional subjects. In our case, we include ALL available tests in the score calculation. GreatSchools provides no insight into whether they do this or not. SchoolDigger used to just use Math/English but recently added all tests to their rankings.
-The "results" for, say, Grade 3 English are typically broken out by Advanced, Proficient, Not Proficient, Failing. But this, too, varies by state, some include 5 buckets.
- Special needs students. This could be a really active community for you.
- Arts/Music/Theater programs and participation rates.
- Innovative educational programs. One of the HS I attended had an on-campus fish hatchery that was almost entirely student run, it also had a professional choral program--as in, students in the "varsity chorus" got paid professional rates for a summer show series. Another that I attended had a pretty unique combined history/literature and later math/science program. I could imagine parents being interested in finding those kinds of things.
- University affiliation. Many colleges/universities are affiliated with K-12 schools where they are involved in applying the latest in educational practices.
- Early college programs. My wife managed to get her first 3 semesters of her Mech-E degree paid for through an innovative relationship between her HS and the local Community College. The local CC also has a great direct-to-university relationship (all credits transfer) with two local Universities. Allowed her to graduate undergrad a year early and with half the student loans she otherwise would have.
- Proximity to cultural institutions. Friends Select in Philadelphia is located on the Ben Franklin Parkway... walking distance to the Franklin Institute, Academy of Natural Sciences, Phila Art Museum, Barnes Foundation, Rodin Museum... It's almost embarrassing.
Standardized test scores are important, but they aren't necessarily the only thing parents are looking for.
I completely agree that standardized test scores aren't the only thing parents are looking for. The main issue is: What other data set is there that exists state/nationally given we're working with 100,000+ schools?
-Special needs: Hadn't considered this, but the data is there to break out numbers and performance of special needs students. Are there other factors we should consider?
- Arts/Music/Sports etc: Yes, would LOVE to include data on this. I'm not aware of a dataset that contains it. Manually it'd be tough to do for 100,000+ schools.
- Innovative/college programs: Yup, great idea. As we expand the site we want to find ways to highlight features like this. A simple example we can do now is Language Immersion programs. But we want to extend it in the future.
- Another "problem" with the education data in general is that there's no way to compare schools across states. Common Core might have addressed this but currently you can only say, This is a top high school in Massachusetts. What if I live across the border in New Hampshire? How do 2 schools compare?
The two main issues when we've thought of this are:
1) how do you ensure the data is accurate/up-to-date?
2) the graveyard issue where you don't want to show what's NOT on your site. As an example (and I know I'm probably picking on them unfairly) check out GreatSchool's crowd-sourced photos here: http://www.greatschools.org/search/search.page?q=boston%20ma)
Run contests for schools/clubs to incentivize people. Try scraping their websites to come up with guesses. Maybe go state by state initially, merge the data as it grows.
I think you're right that contests are the way to get reviews, at least, from parents/students. Niche is taking this approach actually, largely through FB I believe. It provides some interesting data. There is the same issue of timing--how relevant is a review from years and years ago--but it's interesting data.
Scraping sites is probably more of the way to go or just using Wikipedia as Google does, for example, in their school info boxes.
It's definitely something that, longer term, would be good to seriously look into.
You could possibly also try to partner with organizations that are focused on different special interest areas to get them to help coordinate getting the data.
Yes, I think for special needs students or subsets of that, this would be a good way to add supplemental data. For example, a parent wants to do a search of public schools with resources for autistic children near Boston. That's a good use case and there probably is an organization with that data.
Honestly, you might even be able to get some grant money or financial support if you commit to helping them include whatever data they have in a user-friendly manner.
It might not be the full-scope of what you are trying to do, but it might be a way to help bootstrap part of your development.
Awesome. It'd be a huge value if you can really help parents understand the scores and how to interpret them instead of giving a flat result with no explanation.
Thanks for this feedback. We will add info on this. Perhaps a high-level overview and then a detailed one for parents that are interested in delving deeper.
The Illinois Report Card is a great resource. If every state had such a tool, I agree you probably wouldn't need EdScore, GreatSchools, SchoolDigger, etc.
I built EdScore out of frustration that this data is all public but buried in disparate state/federal databases and not accessible to parents, even though we're paying for it to be compiled/collected.
I think ratings (controversial as they are no matter what methodology you use) help parents do a quick sort of local options. And our goal with EdScore is to add search filters like commute distance, home price, school size, special ed offerings etc so that parents can search for the "right" school for their individual child based on various inputs, not a simple "best" rating or 1-10 scale that, absent other factors, is not very informative.
It is awesome because it gives,you more power than AWS Lambda and because you have a sane way to manage it via effe-tool (http://github.com/siscia/effe-tool), also it is written in go which should make it faster than competitor...
http://codehappy.info - awesome because it's trying to help people find information about a company that you can't easily get anywhere else so they can code happy.
I'm working on a platform backing the existing desktop app for users to create, share, and explore lightroom presets - kinda like a package manager for photography presets.
628 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadPlease do this every month on HN!
Also, an updated version of a turn-based game engine, now with ES6 classes.
That being said, building the old-fashioned pole barn (36'x54') using logs, sawmill, and kiln to make the lumber, almost killed me. There needs to be some sort of limit to everything.
It's awesome because youtube is (intentionally) annoying, plus, it's nice to give back bugfix/feature patches when someone else (jwz) is kind enough to give their code to the public.
EDIT: Thanks detaro. Link removed. I didn't know it was an issue, and obviously, couldn't see it.
Anyway, it seems to be a static website, and it should be able handle HN traffic for a fairly small amount of effort and/or money.
And it is most amusing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150930225625/https://www.jwz.o...
[edited with more recent version] https://web.archive.org/web/20160310204843/https://www.jwz.o...
The url I posted and removed still works fine, so long as it's not originating from HN (i.e. 'referer' checking). If you do a quick web search on 'youtubedown' you'll find it.
If jwz is trying to avoid the HN-effect, then sending people via another route won't completely mitigate the problem.
I went ahead and updated the archive.org link. Providing that means HN users don't need to do yet another search and his site shouldn't get hammered nearly as much.
Not really ready to share the URL yet, things are still coming together.
https://github.com/RobotTurtles https://github.com/RobotTurtles/home
These turtles use a raspberry pi + webcam to turn to a face, recognize "flash cards" via QR cods, and chase a ball. All parts are open source, so if you have a 3D printer, you can pretty much build one yourself. (The pcb you would need to order from dirtypcbs, though I have a few spare if needed).
http://www.robotturtles.com/
At first it was an internal tool I ran for a long time, but been working to make it a service.
http://clickrouter.com
edit: fixed the link!
From your landing page, I can't tell what missing features led you to roll your own.
ClickRouter makes a realtime decision where to send your clicks based on your affiliate accounts.
Say you have a forums with thousands of posts which have thousands of links. "Affiliatizing" them all would be a huge and nearly insurmountable task.
With ClickRouter, you install a piece of javascript in your footer. Every click is intercepted and sent to the best Affiliate account you have. It also tells you what affiliate accounts you SHOULD create because you're losing revenue.
The issue for me was just that, trying to affiliatize thousands of links that users put on my site. Now it's done automatically and if I signup with a new affiliate network, it knows automatically those affiliates are available.
Why it is awesome: I have done a lot of things as an entrepreneur, but I've never street hustled before. As an introvert, this is pretty intimidating, but I think it will be good practice for doing more sales in the future. Plus, it gets me out from behind the computer and into the real world, talking face-to-face with folks! :)
The last hope to save mankind from civilizational collapse brought on by The Javascript Complexity Singularity.
It is awesome because it will make load test script creation/maintenance just like anything else. It will also be the first "opinionated" load testing tool.
beta access signup here: http://signup.browserup.com
Right now everything is open source, but I've started work on a replacement user interface which would be temporarily released under a proprietary license. I think the project is awesome as understanding workflow in a complicated application is a challenging task and at some stage all work will be released back to the open source version.
It's awesome because we're building a marketing automation platform that learns from customer preferences and behaviours to build a better customer experience.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rsbrowser....
Restaurants pay way too much for bad online ordering systems. Menucamp is a simple, inexpensive system that gets the job done.
Have you had anyone sign up yet?
If I was a restaurant owner I wouldn't be very impressed by the "Sample Menu" and I would be very reluctant to register because a "Free demo" doesn't entail signing up for Stripe in my opinion. This sounds more like a trial than a demo.
The add to cart functionality on the sample menu should work, what browser are you using?
GreatSchools has a monopoly in this space but their 1-10 ratings scale is opaque and their website hard to navigate. EdScore has a more granular 50-100 rating scale, modern search, better mapping, and soon will feature search filters by distance and home price so parents can evaluate, say, top schools within a 1hr commute of SF with a median home price under $1m.
-There are fundamentally two data sets in play here, a national one, NCES, that provides basic school information: name, # of students, demographics, etc. And a State data set.
- Each state administers their own state assessment tests for most, not all, grades. So for example, Massachusetts does tests for grades 3-8 and grade 10. Other states do a different mix. To assign a "score" to an Elementary, Middle, or High School you combine the grades, but there is judgement around, for example, what constitutes a middle school? Grade 6? Grade 8? It varies by school district, let alone state.
-The subjects covered are typically Math and English. Some sites, especially for high school, also test Science or additional subjects. In our case, we include ALL available tests in the score calculation. GreatSchools provides no insight into whether they do this or not. SchoolDigger used to just use Math/English but recently added all tests to their rankings.
-The "results" for, say, Grade 3 English are typically broken out by Advanced, Proficient, Not Proficient, Failing. But this, too, varies by state, some include 5 buckets.
- Special needs students. This could be a really active community for you.
- Arts/Music/Theater programs and participation rates.
- Innovative educational programs. One of the HS I attended had an on-campus fish hatchery that was almost entirely student run, it also had a professional choral program--as in, students in the "varsity chorus" got paid professional rates for a summer show series. Another that I attended had a pretty unique combined history/literature and later math/science program. I could imagine parents being interested in finding those kinds of things.
- University affiliation. Many colleges/universities are affiliated with K-12 schools where they are involved in applying the latest in educational practices.
- Early college programs. My wife managed to get her first 3 semesters of her Mech-E degree paid for through an innovative relationship between her HS and the local Community College. The local CC also has a great direct-to-university relationship (all credits transfer) with two local Universities. Allowed her to graduate undergrad a year early and with half the student loans she otherwise would have.
- Proximity to cultural institutions. Friends Select in Philadelphia is located on the Ben Franklin Parkway... walking distance to the Franklin Institute, Academy of Natural Sciences, Phila Art Museum, Barnes Foundation, Rodin Museum... It's almost embarrassing.
Standardized test scores are important, but they aren't necessarily the only thing parents are looking for.
If you can showcase that, your website could be a really powerful resource!
-Special needs: Hadn't considered this, but the data is there to break out numbers and performance of special needs students. Are there other factors we should consider?
- Arts/Music/Sports etc: Yes, would LOVE to include data on this. I'm not aware of a dataset that contains it. Manually it'd be tough to do for 100,000+ schools.
- Innovative/college programs: Yup, great idea. As we expand the site we want to find ways to highlight features like this. A simple example we can do now is Language Immersion programs. But we want to extend it in the future.
- Another "problem" with the education data in general is that there's no way to compare schools across states. Common Core might have addressed this but currently you can only say, This is a top high school in Massachusetts. What if I live across the border in New Hampshire? How do 2 schools compare?
You could try to crowdsource this information, or contact schools in an effort to get them to self report.
The two main issues when we've thought of this are:
1) how do you ensure the data is accurate/up-to-date?
2) the graveyard issue where you don't want to show what's NOT on your site. As an example (and I know I'm probably picking on them unfairly) check out GreatSchool's crowd-sourced photos here: http://www.greatschools.org/search/search.page?q=boston%20ma)
Scraping sites is probably more of the way to go or just using Wikipedia as Google does, for example, in their school info boxes.
It's definitely something that, longer term, would be good to seriously look into.
It might not be the full-scope of what you are trying to do, but it might be a way to help bootstrap part of your development.
It appears a flat % score is the main draw, but without any sort of information on what that score means, or how it stacks up, it's sort of useless.
I built EdScore out of frustration that this data is all public but buried in disparate state/federal databases and not accessible to parents, even though we're paying for it to be compiled/collected.
I think ratings (controversial as they are no matter what methodology you use) help parents do a quick sort of local options. And our goal with EdScore is to add search filters like commute distance, home price, school size, special ed offerings etc so that parents can search for the "right" school for their individual child based on various inputs, not a simple "best" rating or 1-10 scale that, absent other factors, is not very informative.
http://github.com/siscia/effe
It is awesome because it gives,you more power than AWS Lambda and because you have a sane way to manage it via effe-tool (http://github.com/siscia/effe-tool), also it is written in go which should make it faster than competitor...
It is a side project I used to learn Go. The site is up, but it is not pretty to the eye yet. I am working on a new theme for the it.
I'm working on a platform backing the existing desktop app for users to create, share, and explore lightroom presets - kinda like a package manager for photography presets.