HMO: Help Me Out
I just read this [1] post, and I think we can do it at a big scale here at HN.
So, if you need any help with a project, a startup, or an idea, just post it here. Mention any details that might be required, and make sure to add contact details!
Let's see how we can get some good rolling here.
[1] http://tomcritchlow.com/post/82380207991/let-me-know-how-i-can-help
191 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadEmail: dan [at] danhough.com
## Help me out
1. I want to open up a co-working space in London, or possibly elsewhere in the UK. Idea is pretty fully-formed but I'm missing a few pieces to the puzzle. Anybody experienced in this?
2. I'm releasing my first non-free iPhone app pretty soon, marketing advice would be super useful. It's meant for London Pub Crawls.
## Let me know if I can help
1. JavaScript & iOS dev advice for newbies
2. Help with honing ideas esp. when it comes to maps & collaboration
3. I can play the guitar & sing pretty well [0]
Currently in Chamonix, back in London in May.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmDXpLbi2w0
More on-topic, have you contacted http://theskiff.org/ to see if they can help you fill any gaps?
I haven't contacted them, no. I've been meaning to go to Brighton though as I hear the tech scene down there is actually very interesting indeed. Thanks for the link, I'll get in touch!
FWIW, I work out of a coworking space at http://wyche.in, out here in The Shire. Ping me an email (in profile) if you'd like me to intro you to the boss here, in case that's helpful.
I'll be in touch :) Thank you very much for the offer!
EDIT: Apologies about the Oasis cover, I'm afraid it's just such a moneymaker. I can't resist.
I helped (very slightly) get a co-working and business hub going in my area: http://sierracommons.org/. It's going to be celebrating its 5th anniversary in a few months, and I can possibly put you in touch with the guy who's done all of the real work in keeping it running, if your scope matches his.
It might help him out if your conversation with him gives him some ideas on presenting talks on starting co-working spaces, since that's the sort of thing he's into these days.
Send me an email (address is in profile) if you'd like to get in touch with him.
This should answer a lot of questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7592282/
Help Me Out
If you happen to live in Ottawa or Toronto, I’m trying to downsize some of my possessions, by trading them for anything really (Canadian dollars, Bitcoin, Dogegoin or a chat over coffee). I’m updating my list – http://eswat.ca/dpac/ – of stuff I want to get rid of weekly.
Let Me Know How I Can Help
Have or know an open-source, web-related project that could use some UI help? I can take a look and see what I can contribute.
Can I use your design on my site? I already copied it. :P
https://github.com/eswat/dpac
I know very little about marketing both online and offline, i've had some ideas but really have no knowledge on whether its good or not. I'm kinda in an analysis paralysis state of not knowing if i'm going to piss away all my money because i dont know what will work.
Email in my HN profile.
https://www.getosmosis.com
I'm willing to give out free accounts to people who write reviews, if it's the type of product you'd use.
Email support@getosmosis.com if interested.
:edit: I wanted to add that I believe I want a dynamic pricing scheme like Heroku's where they have a slider for how many dynos you want. The problem I run into is that I have a couple metrics that I can charge for, I just don't know how to meld them together.
Intercom.io is a brilliant example of this. They could have priced a million different ways, but they chose to charge by active users on their customer's apps. Now I don't even care about the price, I'll be happy to be doing so well each time I go up one of their price bands!
"We think getting your whole team on Intercom is a good thing. And we think talking to your customers is a good thing too. So we won’t tax you for either. We charge you more as your user base grows. Our interests are aligned."
I'm learning full-stack JS as I go and sometimes I wish I had someone to code with. One problem I see is how to keep my idea mine while getting help from others?
Generally, don't bother. Focus on executing fast and well. Otherwise, someone else who does focus on execution will have your idea before you're done and blow you out of the water - blow everyone else out instead, with whatever resources you can bring to bear.
Help me out:
I just finished a PhD in math. Before that, I did a bunch of tech startups. I'm not staying in academia, nor am I looking for a job right away. Here's some of the things I'm thinking or would like to talk about:
- I haven't done much hacking in about 7 years. Loosely speaking, I'm looking to bring my new math/analytical skills to bear while renewing my technical skills.
- designing hardware. I've designed an built a few boards, know some Verilog, etc., but looking to increase my EE knowledge and design capability.
- building EDA tools, think learning "compilers for hardware".
- formal proof systems, HoTT, Coq, etc.
- learning some probability theory (something I never had to learn properly) with an eye, perhaps, towards finance.
How I can help:
- Math. I know some. My research is in topology, I'm not sure that would be of practical use to anyone (unless you're trying to learn topology).
- deep background in compilers, computer architecture, programming languages (co-founder of compiler/tools startup, bunch of patents, Fortune 500 acquisition)
- lots of tech startup experience, but I'm not sure I have anything special to add beyond what the larger HN community can offer.
As for interests, however...
Feel free to get in touch with me to talk EDA and EE stuff as well. I'm presently a bit fed up with EDA usability, and I'd love to discuss ideas for how to move low-cost EDA away from "mspaint" and toward REPL.
I'm also very interested in building a tight-loop GNSS/inertial navigation system from scratch using an RF front-end (MAX2769) and a 9DOF IMU on-a-chip. I believe all current DIY inertial nav projects like this use absolute position output from an off-the-shelf GPS. I think by including inertial information during the signal processing phase it's possible to get accurate and precise absolute and relative positioning.
Along those same lines, I think it'd be cool to try to build a single-station RTK GPS by measuring carrier phase across multiple GNSS systems/bands. I'm not 100% sure how to go about this however, but I have a feeling it involves a tunable multi-band receiver or multiple single-band receivers feeding into an FPGA.
Not on the first of the month, though—too crowded. Perhaps the second Friday of each month, since that's what today is. :)
My original motivation was for fun and learning, but now I have several hundred people playing every day (average 1 hr each) and it's making $600/month in ads.
Problem is, I don't know how to take it to the next level. I think my main issues are no marketing knowledge and a complete lack of connections in the video game and sports industries. I think this could be much bigger if I could somehow overcome those deficits.
Longer version of this post: http://basketball-gm.com/pitch
Email me if you're interested in what I'm doing: jdscheff@gmail.com
For me, the basketball version is fun to work on because I'm a huge basketball fan. Other sports wouldn't be nearly as fun for me. If I thought that making versions for other sports was the path to riches, I might be motivated enough to try it. But if the basketball version can't grow beyond its current popularity, then the other sports probably won't be hugely profitable either.
That being said, I am working with someone to make a baseball version, but it's too early to say if anything worthwhile will come from that effort.
Do you mean TOUGH decisions?
- Help Me Out
I'm trying to bootstrap a software product (see profile) and would love to get a marketing advice on how to, well, market the thing.
- I Can Help With
Anything .NET. Close to 10 years of experience with everything starting from backend high-performance services to front-end with ASP.NET MVC to APIs and everything in between.
Help me out: Need to find educators (who happen to know how to code) - My co-founder and I run a 1-to-1 mentorship program turning people into software developers (heavy emphasis on JS + frameworks) need help finding more instructors. We're looking for people passionate about education/love to teach who happen to know how to code.
How I can help: 1) Learn to Program Advice - Was a middle school teacher turned software engineer so I can help people get started on their programming track over a Google hangout consultation (won't sell you anything, just advice) 2) Business Idea Discussion - Love helping out any entrepreneurs talk about their business ideas/models, we bootstrapped ourselves, worked only part-time, and made revenue from day 1 3) High touch sales - All our sales are high touch sales $5-10k++ if you're trying to do high touch sales I can definitely share pointers/advice
Are you teaching remotely?
What would be helpful for me is the names of any smaller/independent live music or event venues in your area that you know of. Venues that would be best are those that are typically cash-at-the-door or that don't have a good ticketing system or website. I'm working on a simple ticketing system that lets venues like these list shows and sell fee-free tickets and I'm just looking for more beta testers. Send any you know of to contact@showboarder.com and use the subject line HMO
Thanks!
HMO:
I'm launching a static site generator that comes with a fully-featured CMS so that your non-tech friends can edit the site. It allows frontend engineers to build a custom CMS through a form-builder and then scaffolds templates out of them.
I'd love to have some general feedback on the concept and what would keep you from using it. I'm worried that we're targeting too small a segment (frontend engineers that don't want to touch backend code).
http://www.webhook.com has a video demo, and there are more in the blog.
How I can help:
I've launched a few businesses before, including a few with decent sized exits. I can give you some honest feedback on your product as well as your design. I also do open source design work, recently redoing the theme for readthedocs. If there's something small you need design help on, feel free to contact me. Usually I only have a couple hours a week to hack on open-source, but always looking for engineery projects to spruce up.
In fact, I had someone pick my brain just a few days ago because they want to build a professional-looking site for a friend, and they're comfortable with HTML and CSS, but they don't understand how Wordpress works.
I did find a few things that I think needs some work though.
You're presenting a commandline interface. I love commandline. I much prefer a sensible CLI to even the best graphical interfaces. But your target market? I'm not sure they'll like that nearly as much. If they were comfortable with CLI, they'd be probably be comfortable enough to find their way around a server. Is there any way you can manage testing & deployment without the CLI?
On your site, you advertise the virtues of a static site as being fast. But, in the video, images are loading slowly on your demo page. It really stood out to me. You might consider having the page's images already in your browser cache when you load the demo page.
And the video -- the video is really a bit rough. You're clicking around way too fast in the video. I had trouble keeping up with what you were doing. The page template you're using in the video isn't sexy at all, so that makes it less attractive to designers. Having some kind of default page template along the lines of what you'd find for Wordpress would probably be good.
The video was also too specific. You went into some detail on embedding podcasts or Soundcloud stuff, but didn't really explain any of the rest of the interface. In your intro video, I don't necessarily need to know step-by-step how to embed a podcast, I maybe only need to know that it's possible. At the end of the video, I still felt like I had no idea what Webhook could do, which sucks because although I'm not your target market, I probably know 6 people who are. Along the same lines, there were a number of typos and miscapitalized things in the video, and some of the dialog was a bit hokey (like when you remembered that you actually had to go into chat to invite a participant). This adds to the "rushed" feeling in the video.
And the thing is, it looks like you've got a really polished product! Then you have the video, which makes it feel a lot less professional.
Also, it seems like you could tap a secondary market, by hosting a template shop on your site and taking a cut from sales of the templates. Just because someone's comfortable with HTML & CSS doesn't necessarily mean that they want to start from scratch. With the explosion in popularity of things like Bootstrap, I think there's pretty good evidence that people are avoiding that as much as possible.
Also agree about the theming. The nice part at least is that theming in theory is very easy. Themes are just git repos that are downloaded and installed through the browser and unpacked via a websocket. I think you're right though that we need a few solid, well-designed themes there in the beginning though. It'll likely be my primary concern over the next month now that the product is finishing up. Although opening a store might be a good way to go, I'm thinking we'll likely just try and partner with one of the many buy-a-theme sites out there and simply let them continue serving that niche.
Part of the fun of startups though. Trying to octopus your way through a launch, building every little bit.
Again, thanks for the comment.
With Webhook being Node (I'm guessing based on the distribution via npm?), you'll feel right at home. As a Node guy myself, I found it immensely valuable when I was building a toy desktop app.
Great job with this by the way. I started on a similar project a few months ago (fell by the wayside), and it makes me really happy to see someone execute it, especially this well. Keep it up!
I signed up for the beta, I look forward to testing it.
sam@email.ly
Unfortunately we're probably too far into dev at this point to switch (we went with a rails app), but this problem comes up pretty regularly for us and I'm looking forward to giving Webhook a try.
Here's a suggestion on the video: instead of having one long recording, create multiple, much shorter ones that explain pieces of functionality.
So far, I've been trying to outsource the electronic design as much as possible in order to focus on the firmware. Even then, I am starting to reach a limit.
I'd like to get in touch with someone who would know how to program something useful on a random micro-controller given the micro-controller's data sheet and a circuit diagram. Or someone who understands weird terms like "ISO/IEC 14443" or "JTAG".
How I can help: I have years of experience as a full stack web developer and have a very good grasp of Javascript, Node.js and web standards. I can also remunerate if you feel I'm taking too much of your time.
Help me out!
So defensive publication is a provable publishing of material that discloses the invention in sufficient detail that the notional skilled worker in the relevant field could reproduce the invention. Once published a subsequent patent application for that invention would fail to be novel or inventive. That doesn't mean no one will apply, nor even that such an application wouldn't be granted, just that prior publication of the invention is an absolute defence.
Of course you'd want to be sure whether the invention is already patented before you try to exploit it commercially.
Worked full time as an EE for a few years, and now have a small niche electronics business on the side. I can't say that I have the time to take on a design project right now (depends on specifics) but I should be at least able to help you vet the skills of people you find or help you over any sticking points if you want to DIY.
I also recently learned what node is and think it's pretty cool. Contact info in profile.
I am launching a message board/forum powered by Google Drive. getforum.us (Every 'workspace' is a Google Doc and all the documents attached are stored on your Google Drive.) I would love feedback on the user experience and your thoughts on the product.
How I can help: I can look at your product and use/review it for design and features. I also know some html5 and frontend javascript stuff if you have questions.
Minor thing upfront: The Signin-Workflow. First, signing in with Google, ok. Then, signing in again with Google into Forum? That didn't work, I tried it multiple times, until I just waited a bit after the login and the forum appeared by itself.
I'm behind a slow, flaky connection, but she seemed to be alright that moment.
I'm working on a localization library / SaaS called Localize.js (https://localizejs.com). It's a new way to localize websites that's much easier to implement than traditional localization techniques.
It works by automatically detecting and translating text on on the client-side, and allows you to order translations (machine or human) via the web interface.
The library is stable and is working well so far. It's currently used in production serving millions of pageviews on https://www.verbling.com/classes (to demo, select a language in the dropdown on the bottom left).
I'd love your feedback or thoughts on the approach. If you'd like a free account, shoot me an email! brandon@localizejs.com
I want to improve myself. I am working on the Linux kernel but I have no idea how to get better at it, nor at networking. If anyone can point me to some (advanced?) topic related to networking or Linux, that would really help me.
I have done my own small version of tcpdump but I still behind behind other developer.
If anyone have any good resources about these subjects, I would really appreciate:
- How to write English (non-native language)
- Program well in c in userspare (Currently reading 'The Linux Programming Interface')
- (Advanced?) topic about networking (everything from Cisco routers to network security)
- Linux kernel networking programming
- Embedded development (I don't even know where to start that one...)
Also, as a second request, can anyone point how to simulate a network (simulate a small internet) using visualization (qemu and the like)?
I suggest writing a blog in English. Practice is probably the best way to learn. There is also http://english.stackexchange.com if you have specific questions.
> Program well in c in userspare (Currently reading 'The Linux Programming Interface')
In my experience, reading other people's code is the best way to get better at a language. I don't have much experience with C but I guess there are a few projects that would be interesting to read here: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=language%3A%22c%22&ref=si...
Relevant links: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/925754/resources-for-lear..., http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Pra...
> Embedded development (I don't even know where to start that one...)
I am currently learning embedded development (maybe we could help each other?).
I would love to!
And thanks for the links, I will try/read them.
Did you consider getting a Cisco certificate as a way to upskill yourself in the networking area? CCNA will give you a solid base, and Jeremy Cioara from cbtnuggets [1] has awesome video presentations about the subject.
>Also, as a second request, can anyone point how to simulate a network (simulate a small internet) using visualization (qemu and the like)?
Take a look at gns3 [2]
[1] - http://www.cbtnuggets.com/it-training-videos/course/cisco-64...
[2] - http://www.gns3.net/
I am also a very good programmer. As a freelance software consultant I work 100% from home on OLAP web applications. If you're stuck on a data design problem, need someone to riff on for debugging a problem, want help hacking together an HTML5 demo of some kind, need help reviewing software engineering job candidates, or want to do a net-based pair programming session or two, I'm available.
If you're in the Alexandria, VA area, I could even meet in person for any of this. Also, beers. Beers for project kibitz. That would help me, too. It's lonely out here.
A few friends and I are developing a web-based tool for writers. We call it "Just Write, Dammit!" (https://www.justwritedammit.com)It's free, it's open source, it's browser-based, it's responsive, it syncs your writing to Dropbox or Google Drive. It's still pretty raw, but I think there is something here that could really make a great project. Our vision is to build it into a tool that not only works well for writing, but encourages the user to write more, write better, and write to completion.
Mentorships. An hour or less a week to talk about where I am, where I should be going.- a marketing mentor: I started a Google AdWords campaign yesterday, but I'm an engineer, not a marketer. I want to learn, but all I'm doing right now is random shots in the dark.
- a startup/fundraising mentor: if this is a project that could take off and find traction, I'd like to run a kickstarter or find some other patronage to be able to work on it full-time. What you see here is basically three weeks of part time work. If it were my job, I could make it into something great.
- a user experience-centric developer or mentor, for building an on-boarding experience for new users: while part of the experience is that it is a streamlined tool, there isn't much to help people who aren't my best friends who can call or email me at any time they want.
My email is in my profile and on the JWD website.
I don't really get the app. Can you provide a quick introduction on what it does?
My wife and a friend of mine both "won" NaNoWriMo using a previous, desktop-only version. It was very similar to programs like ZenWriter or FocusWriter.
I've since rewritten it as a single-page web app to start to target a few features at smartphones. To that end, it sports a responsive layout that automatically drops you into a snippets form on mobile devices for quickly jotting down and saving ideas. The writing mode is also useable on a smartphone as well, but nobody has used it significantly for that yet, so I don't know if people find it very helpful.
I'd like to eventually build in better management of book-writing projects, basic formatting and ePub export, text analysis algorithms for honing the writing, and "creativity encouraging" minigames that serve to stimulate the writer out of writer's-block or teach us better writing habits.
I would appreciate:
- Advice on what to cover/the kinds of activities to put on
- Resources for cool cheap/free science-y things to give out/use
- Cool demos/graphics that explain difficult concepts (think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diffie-Hellman_Key_Exchan...)
- What you wish you had seen as a kid in STEM education
- General advice on teaching science/math/technology to people without much background in the middle of the woods
Thanks!
jp [dot] smith [at] wq23 [dot] org
[1] http://jeremykun.com/2011/06/26/teaching-mathematics-graph-t...
I have a opensource project I would like to have off the ground. It's a Web based chat much like Hipchat and Slack... It is still in early stage and needs a lot of design work... But anyone that want to get involved is more than welcome :-)
Http://Github.com/fmarani/tunnelchat