Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Workfrom – The best coffee shops and cafes to work from

workfrom.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 77 posts

Re: Show HN: Workfrom – The best coffee shops and cafes to work from

#32

Post by k__ »

icedog wrote: post #23

Am I the only one who prefers to work in public libraries? The San Mateo library has plenty of seating/power outlets, a respectable cafe, and free underground parking.

I like libs more too.

The "Landesbibliothek" in Stuttgart has real office desks with outlets and wifi. And since I'm a student, I get it all for free.

It's also a nicer atmosphere than in coffee shops. Way less foot traffic and most of the people are silent. Also, noone expects me to buy anything...

Re: Show HN: Workfrom – The best coffee shops and cafes to work from

#33

Post by Udo »

simzen85 wrote: post #30

similar project http://coworfing.com/

There are two flavors of coworking spaces, one where have a community office that allows you to work there on short notice without a lot of commitment, and the other one is basically a shared rented office space.

It may be cultural, but coworfing.com results for my country (Germany) yield only permanently shared office space. They're not places where you can just pop in every once in a while.

Re: Show HN: Workfrom – The best coffee shops and cafes to work from

#34

Post by jakejake »

darrenbuckner wrote: post #18
jakejake wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that places who have wait staff would not appreciate people taking up tables without ordering since it would directly affect their pay. But a coffee shop that does mostly take-out business may not mind so much having the appearance of a busy, popular cafe. I do think it's good to be mindful that you are utilizing a business's space and facilities, and they are able to provide these to you by selling foo…

We've gotten a lot of feedback from business owners that the average patron staying to get some work done is a good steward of their space and spends money often. We hear stories of people staying for hours and hours, not buying anything - but we've found this is just not the norm. With that said, we do encourage our community to support businesses with their evangelism AND money.

That's nice to hear, I've always wondered about that. I grew up in a small town where every business for young people to hang out would fail. It was partially because we didn't have much money to spend, but I realized later in life that we didn't feel any responsibility for supporting the businesses in return. It's not that we were selfish necessarily, we just didn't understand how things work. Then when a business would shut down we would all complain about how we had nowhere to go, but failed to consider the fact that we had utilized the place to the fullest extent without making many financial purchases. As I recall this happened with an arcade, a couple of coffee shops, a skating rink and various other businesses.

Now that I'm older I do see a lot more clearly that when you find a business that you like, you should make a point to support them and help them to stick around.

Re: Show HN: Workfrom – The best coffee shops and cafes to work from

#35

Post by Udo »

Adding new sites should be easier. I get that this is a tradeoff between rapid engagement and trust, but since the project is so new it's vastly more likely that a visitor will want to add something as opposed to successfully looking it up.

Maybe the focus on cities, while great for the lookup scenario, should not play such a big role when adding data points. My suggestion: just open it up, have a form where any member can add a coffee shop, at any location (Google Maps-powered). As site admins you could review the submissions later and sort it out.

For example, I was initially motivated to add some places near me. That's in Germany, so no cities there yet. This means I've got to jump through the hoop of adding a city, at which point any user who was previously excited about adding stuff to the database becomes stranded and loses interest. I would like to add sites in different cities, so technically I would have to open up requests for 3 cities - in a sparsely populated area like Germany that's not feasible. I'm more interested in how far away a location is than what city it is in.

Also, you should make use of the browser Geo API.

Re: Show HN: Workfrom – The best coffee shops and cafes to work from

#36

Post by collyw »

I find my workplace distracting enough when trying to concentrate (thank god for August, most people go away for a month where I am).

Do people actually find it productive to work in a coffee shop? There will be even more distractions and noise than my office.

Re: Show HN: Workfrom – The best coffee shops and cafes to work from

#38

Post by blowski »

collyw wrote: post #36

I find my workplace distracting enough when trying to concentrate (thank god for August, most people go away for a month where I am). Do people actually find it productive to work in a coffee shop? There will be even more distractions and noise than my office.

Depends on the work I'm doing. It helps for creative work, but it's more challenging to do basic admin.

Also, the distractions in an office are difficult to block because they all seem relevant to me, which puts me in a constant state of being alert to them. In a coffee shop, I know that the noise is completely irrelevant to me, so it just moves into the background.

Re: Show HN: Workfrom – The best coffee shops and cafes to work from

#39

Post by dustintran »

I'm not sure how useful this would be. Do people willfully drive from work to a coffee shop in order to get work done, and not simply walk to their favorite coffee shop within walking distance? It seems like distance is more the contributing feature than anything else.
Post reply on HN