Earlier quoted context omitted.
what country?
Laos
How did you get there? Are you with a company or doing volunteer work?
Ask HN: What are you working on?
221–230 of 235 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#222transitioning away from my legal work back to startup work, learning rails while working on 2 early ideas and 1 underway. the 2 ideas i'm at will to share: 1 - .org - wikipedia-style database of case-law commonly used by pro-bono lawyers -- create something that would assist legal clinics manage their information locally but also something that stores that data and shares it with other clinics doing similar work. cas…
to clarify #2 - the question is whether businesses can be crafted somewhat similar to how open source software is crafted, which is democratically. Somehow, entrepreneurs could get together and butt heads and form small idea-groups that go off and talk on their own, with features like the software figuring out how much each person's contribution is worth, etc.
With free software, say someone has a good feature they want implemented, they have a means to affect that change in theory in a way a user can not do with closed source software. If they can't win the project over, they can fork the idea and start their own variation. the theory is that these kinds of mini-democracies lead to the most efficient software, could this work for businesses as well?
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see that. We thought we'd keep it wiki-style at the beginning, possibly setting it up as a foundation. we think its more likely that legal clinics & others are more likely to trust it & use it that way. We would start as narrow as possible, possibly focusing on mental health working with the clinic I used to work with and then expanding outwards.
I started to write a comment on how/why this could easily be a business. I have recently been involved in this area. But then I remembered some interview with the founder of betterworldbooks.com: "This idea would be best embodied in a company." In this case, maybe it's not. Lowering the barrier for a non specialist lawyer to work on the kind of cases that attract pro-bono attention is good work.
I think there's something to be said about the indication users of the site will get from knowing that profit-maximizing will never be a goal of the software. It may pay some salaries (as wikipedia does) but it will never sell out its purpose first and foremost as a collaborative tool.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#224reading everyone's tasks on hand, i feel like an ant standing in a herd of mammoths. anyways,I am working thru clojure -using the only book available. reading some code. unlearning OOPS...and trying to make sense of the marsh of doing many things and not accomplishing anything. in one word - struggling.
Heh. I'm probably standing with you, further down the food chain in this thread. That said, everybody started out somewhere, and you're learning. The only advice I can give is to work on an actual project, however small, while learning a new language. It helps me learn ALL of a language, instead of just the tricky bits, and I feel more accomplished when, instead of having just read a book, I actually BUILT something.…
Thanks. I will get the rubber burning. " The only advice I can give is..." a very crisp advice. I am going to stick to your advice rather than borrow from it.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm quite familiar with club owners, and I'm well aware that they have no idea why lighting control matters[0] even if it's explained to them in painful detail. I'm honestly not sure how best to go about marketing such a product. I suspect I'll do better to market directly to people who will be using the product and make them handle selling it to club owners. What was your product? [0] I'm not sure if it actually doe…
I may be speaking out of turn, since I have no special expertise with either club owners or club lighting, but you might try taking it to the channel to market. If you can find club lighting supply houses (which I am only guessing exist) -- and allow them to make hearty margins, they'll push your software for you as part of their new installs / sales. Again though, I don't know the market or niche, so take this sugge…
It's not a bad idea. At the consumerish end of the market, people often buy club lighting from Guitar Center[0], which sells a large selection of generally low-end to midrange DJ and club equipment. An aggressively-priced low-end version could sell very well there.
The higher end of the market is served by specialized lighting dealers. Professional lighting equipment is very expensive, such that prices are not usually listed. A lower-end professional console goes for around $10k (based on used prices I've found for an Avolites Pearl Tiger).
LightJockey, the market leader I mentioned in my original post costs about $1300 and sits somewhere between consumer and professional. It is not available at Guitar Center, so that's a potential means of displacing it in the market. All I need to do is make a superior product, and I'm sure I can do that.
[0] A US chain store that sells and services musical instruments and related equipment.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#226I've been slowly creating a site to help japanese students learn kanji reading and context at readthekanji.com. I'm quite happy with it as it gets much better with every release and I'm learning a lot as I go.
Very nice! Have you considered adding pinyin for people who speak mandarin?
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#227Doing feasibility on white label mobile social network.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#228I'm working on a startup that's, well, it's a secret. Not everybody is going to tell. ;) Last November I was laid off from my job. Haven't been able to find a new one, so I've been teaching myself to code in the meantime. It's a completely different field but I'm in love with it. :) I come from a mixed business/finance/IT (Win sys admin) background. I've run several self-employed small businesses which weren't scalab…
Wait, so you want someone with Python, Django, .NET, sysadmin, and Cocoa experience? That's a heck of a lot of hats, even for a startup.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#229Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
i actually worked at be, back in the day, before they went out of business. i've since moved on to macosx, but beos was pretty cool for that time period.
Cool. What did you work on? Just curious.
i did my best work on beos before i worked at be, unfortunately. this is what got me hired:
http://www.platinumball.net/pineapple/news/beos/
be had their "focus shift" shortly before i started. after that, they were no longer pushing beos as a standalone product. they repurposed it as an os for embedded devices. the whole company was working on the ill-fated sony evilla when i got there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_eVilla
it was pretty obvious to me and most of my fellow employees i talked to that this product was not going to be a success. it wasn't.
be went out of business seven months after i got there and i was laid off. would have been a good experience if i'd jumped on the bandwagon two or three years earlier, i bet.