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Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

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Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#241

Post by harvestmoon »

aleem wrote: post #79
harvestmoon wrote: post #57

I designed a new name generation software called namebird: http://shobia.com/namebird It allows you to make words that are fairly awesome and are great startup brand names. It even let's you make words via regular expressions - r.* im .* a creates words like retima and rimbra. (no spaces) It didn't get a great HN response and in the 2 years since launch, I have spent a large amount on hosting and gotten no return wha…

Pretty cool. How do you bulk query .com availability?

Thanks. Verisign is kind enough to let you sign up (for free, iirc) to get their list of taken .com domain names.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#242

Post by harvestmoon »

lohengramm wrote: post #225
harvestmoon wrote: post #57

I designed a new name generation software called namebird: http://shobia.com/namebird It allows you to make words that are fairly awesome and are great startup brand names. It even let's you make words via regular expressions - r.* im .* a creates words like retima and rimbra. (no spaces) It didn't get a great HN response and in the 2 years since launch, I have spent a large amount on hosting and gotten no return wha…

Oh my god, it's so amazing! The web app is very simple but the names quality is awesome. I used several similar name generators recently and they all sucked each on its own way, but this one rocks.

Thank you! Now that's the reaction I was hoping to get, hehe. Glad it helps and hope you find the perfect names for your projects!

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#243

Post by harvestmoon »

zaidf wrote: post #217
harvestmoon wrote: post #57

I designed a new name generation software called namebird: http://shobia.com/namebird It allows you to make words that are fairly awesome and are great startup brand names. It even let's you make words via regular expressions - r.* im .* a creates words like retima and rimbra. (no spaces) It didn't get a great HN response and in the 2 years since launch, I have spent a large amount on hosting and gotten no return wha…

You did better than my domain finder( http://DomainKush.com ) side project :) Btw, multiple names suggested by namebird could also be drug names(pharmas pay a lot of money in settling on the right name.)

Thank you. Actually, in testing, the Namebird has been able to generate multiple names that are actual medication names. So there is something there, maybe I could modify it and make a version for use by pharmaceutical companies.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#244

Post by harvestmoon »

mabcat wrote: post #194
harvestmoon wrote: post #57

I designed a new name generation software called namebird: http://shobia.com/namebird It allows you to make words that are fairly awesome and are great startup brand names. It even let's you make words via regular expressions - r.* im .* a creates words like retima and rimbra. (no spaces) It didn't get a great HN response and in the 2 years since launch, I have spent a large amount on hosting and gotten no return wha…

I needed something like this literally last night, glad to find it now. If you want it to be more widely used, maybe it could use some SEO or marketing love? You don't seem to be on page 1 for company name generator, business name generator, name generator, etc., and you deserve to be. Get an h1 tag, get a few blogs to list you on their "top 5 web 2.0 name generators" articles.

Thanks, the kind words mean a lot. To be honest, I am not sure why the website has done so poorly in terms of search, but that is a good idea to reach out and try/get it on some top lists of web 2.0 name generators.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#245

Post by highl »

kgc wrote: post #202
highl wrote: post #87

~4 months ago announced http://pdf-highlighter.com/ It's a server side solution for highlighting search terms in PDF documents. Can show highlights in a web based PDF viewer (customization of PDF.js) or burn them to PDF. Supports navigation between hits. So far, most customers used it with search solutions based on Solr and dtSearch but it could be easily integrated with any search engine. Didn't get any comments on…

What was the motivation to create this?

End users love it when they can open found PDF document on a page where search terms occur and when they can easily jump between matches. Very useful feature when documents have thousands of pages although some clients use it even with single page document archives.

Earlier versions of Acrobat Reader had support for term highlighting using “PDF Highlight File Format” which is XML-like file specifying word offsets in page. There are search solutions that relied on this feature but Adobe deprecated it with Acrobat Reader X.

Anyway, my solution re-enables search term highlighting in PDF and does not require any special viewer – web based viewer [1] works on both desktop and mobile web browsers. It's easy to integrate with existing search solutions and can use either Adobe's PDF highlights file as input or highlight for a search query.

[1] http://pdf-highlighter.com/docs/Highlighting_PDF_Viewer.html

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#246

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

frakkingcylons wrote: post #173
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Project Wonderful.

Knowing what you know now, do you think using a different one would have made a difference?

Maybe. Part of the problem is that we were strict about user privacy and most ad networks felt too invasive.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#247

Post by sytse »

vsviridov wrote: post #229
sytse wrote: post #165

In 2012 I did a show HN for GitLab.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 It didn't trend so I started baking pancakes. When I checked my phone I saw that it got on the HN homepage and comments were flooding in. I asked my then girlfriend (now wife) to take over the baking and started responding. I ended up eating the pancakes behind my computer :) Hundreds of people signed up for the beta. In 2013 the auth…

We love GitLab :) I wish you guys add private NPM repos :)

We love you too :) Please see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19095 for the package server, right now that is still far away.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#248

Post by sytse »

erlend_sh wrote: post #233
sytse wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it started as GitLab.io and I later aquired the .com and .org domain names. In the beginning we ran GitLab.org for the open source project and GitLab.com for the company and the SaaS. We later consolidated everything under GitLab.org

Could you expand a bit on why you opted to consolidate the two? We have to make the exact same decision for discourse.org

Of course, I would love to elaborate. We found that there was a lot of duplication between .com and .org. Same news (tweets, blog posts), overlapping email lists, overlapping members, etc. That duplication lead to duplicate effort, confusion, people missing news or comments on news, and bad SEO.

The reason for having two sites in the first place was to separate the open source project from the commercial organization. In practise the same people controlled both sides. It felt like a Potemkin village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

We realized that it doesn't help to present yourself as an independent project when you are not. What matters is that the commercial organization is a good steward of the open source project. So we detailed how we want to do that https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship and instituted a core team https://about.gitlab.com/core-team/

At times situations will come up that will allow you to show your true colors. For us it was the VLC people asking to open source a feature on HN and our competitor Perforce adopting GitLab. How you handle those situations is far more important than having multiple domain names.

I recommend that you consolidate everything under one website but you open up your company. See https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ for inspiration.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#249

Post by meir_yanovich »

josscrowcroft wrote: post #108

I posted Open Exchange Rates[0] as a Show HN 1,534 days ago. It had just moved away from publishing free currency data into a GitHub repository, to its own website. In fact, they had just asked me politely to take it down due to the high traffic. Open Exchange Rates was initially a portfolio piece (a labour of love that I hoped would land me a job at Stripe!) I launched it as an adjunct to money.js[1], a minimal Java…

This is great ! From where you are polling the data ? Mind share how to plan to scale ? which stack are you using ?

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#250

Post by nojvek »

jasonkester wrote: post #7

I actually first found HN in my weblogs nine years ago, when this guy called "pg" posted a link to a post-mortem I wrote up of Twiddla's accidental launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389 I actually spent today working on a new document viewer for Twiddla. It has been relatively successful, with tons of happy users, but still isn't bringing in the same sort of revenue as my other bill-paying product. Edit:…

When this guy called "pg". When I first joined HN, I always wondered, who is this "pg". Then I read hackers and painters. O_O when I made the connection.
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