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Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

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Re: Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

#41

Post by peteforde »

dangrossman wrote: post #38
peteforde wrote: post #8

I have a major frustration with payment providers — even contemporary players like Stripe — that can't offer a 3rd party payments system. That is, anything resembling a "marketplace" where you sell things on behalf of someone else, take a cut and pass on the rest to the content creator requires the integrator to come up with a half-assed payout pipeline. This often results in sending cheques and/or making PayPal paym…

I think both Amazon Flexible Payments and PayPal Adaptive Payments support everything you're asking for. They're separate products from Amazon Simple Payments and PayPal Website Standard / PayPal Pro which, as you know, can't be used for that kind of business.

Sadly, Amazon doesn't support Canadians yet.

I have a personal policy: I will never build a business that relies on a PayPal product. I've read too many horror stories about frozen accounts where people were punished for being successful to risk my client's money with them.

Re: Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

#42

Post by OafTobark »

peteforde wrote: post #41
dangrossman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both Amazon Flexible Payments and PayPal Adaptive Payments support everything you're asking for. They're separate products from Amazon Simple Payments and PayPal Website Standard / PayPal Pro which, as you know, can't be used for that kind of business.

Sadly, Amazon doesn't support Canadians yet. I have a personal policy: I will never build a business that relies on a PayPal product. I've read too many horror stories about frozen accounts where people were punished for being successful to risk my client's money with them.

I've been on the receiving end of it so believe me when I say it royally sucks

Re: Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

#43

Post by damian2000 »

OafTobark wrote: post #4

Probably not worth solving, certainly not something I would solve myself but... I'm up late all the time working. True nightowl you could say. The earliest I'd go to bed is 6am. I sleep during the day and wake up around noon at the latest. I don't lack sleep, this schedule works for me. Point is, I'm up late and I'm sure there are others like me. I get hungry often. I don't cook. Few places if any are open. Those tha…

It sounds like that would be solved by some sort of 24 hr personal delivery service ... preferably local to you and on some form of cheap transport like a bike. Its been attempted at least once before ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com

Re: Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

#45

Post by Kluny »

milesokeefe wrote: post #18
bobrenjc93 wrote: post #9

I would like more users to register my side project ( http://getmousetrack.com ), but I can't seem to convert anyone who visits the project site. At this point, I think I would pay for some service that gives me honest feedback on my landing page and maybe suggest ways to improve conversion rates.

A few suggestions: 1. Increase the padding on nearly all the divs; the text is too close to the borders. 2. Remove the "Confirm Password" field. IMO the risk that the few people who mistype their password will never return is worth making it easier for the rest. 3. The video could be shorter. You don't need the 4 second title before the video starts, and the simulation of the signup process takes too long and is bori…

1. Agreed

2. Meh, doesn't matter

3. Yes

4. Agree, I signed up and am intrigued, but still not totally clear on what it does.

5 and 6. Sure.

7. How do I add it to a wordpress blog? (just wondering, not a criticism).

Re: Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

#46

Post by bartonfink »

OafTobark wrote: post #37
cperciva wrote: post #33

I get lots of email from cron jobs. I probably spend 5-10 minutes every day clicking through them and making sure that there's nothing "odd" in them which needs my attention. I would love to have some software which reads my cronmail, figures out what's "normal", and warns me when something isn't normal.

Is there no way for you to create filters to solve this right now? Or is it too complex the way the reporting comes out?

I don't know the scope of Colin's cron problems, but filtering out mail in this case seems like a less preferable solution than simplifying the way cron does email to begin with. Filtering e-mail in this case is like putting your fingers in your ears when you walk by a loud stereo you've left on instead of just turning it off. As a developer, cron doesn't give me a lot of control over where e-mail is sent unless I jump through hoops to give myself that control. Ignoring the complexity of the reports, and the fact that filters like that don't easily scale across different recipients, the fact is that cron's e-mail capability is extremely coarse-grained. For every run of every job, the entire output is e-mailed out to the address specified in the crontab. This gets very unwieldy.

I've had to write cron table entries with a blank mail recipient in the crontab itself, and handle the specific mailing cases in the job script. This sucks. I'm not sure I think the solution is something that reads cron-mail and automatically generates filters, but I would very much like it if cron supported e-mail lists based on return codes or something else like that.

Re: Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

#47

Post by msohcw »

bobrenjc93 wrote: post #9

I would like more users to register my side project ( http://getmousetrack.com ), but I can't seem to convert anyone who visits the project site. At this point, I think I would pay for some service that gives me honest feedback on my landing page and maybe suggest ways to improve conversion rates.

You've got a useful product, it's just that I have no clue that it is one. I'd suggest you throw away the video for a list of features, or something that'll highlight how quick and easy it is to use your product. Check out good landing pages of other startups. (They're a dime a dozen, think Shopify, Stripe etc.) Six Revisions has a good article on the basics you'll need for a landing page. (http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/designing-landing-p...) If you're not much of a designer yourself, you could consider paying a little bit over at 99Designs and getting a landing page out.

Re: Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

#48

Post by cynicalkane »

imcqueen wrote: post #30
yummyfajitas wrote: post #7

I pay $X for clothing (I haven't calculated it, but assume it's relatively average for a man who doesn't wear suites). I'll pay $2X if you can make me well dressed. Key point: I need to trust that your decisions are correct. What I want to pay for is not thinking about this and knowing that it's handled.

One major factor in appearing well dressed is having clothes that fit properly. Even expensive clothes look bad when they're not the right size and cut. It may be cool if a startup could curate clothes that match both style and body type. This could exist by the way, I don't know of any off the top of my head though. Bonobos.com is the only thing that comes to mind. They're not specifically doing the above, but I thi…

Some companies do computerized made-to-measure clothes. These reportedly work pretty well, but the lead time and effort required by the consumer is very large. The ones I know about only do business wear.

Re: Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

#49

Post by continuations »

michaelochurch wrote: post #11

This isn't my problem, but some of my friends were talking about it: something like Kickstarter, but for consultants. The genius of Kickstarter is the "transactional" (in the database sense of the word, wherein a set of operations is packaged so that either all happen or none do) nature of the thing: either the money is raised, or not; and if not, it's all returned to pledgers. If the consultant gets enough pledges/w…

The Kickstarter model doesn't work for consultant. It's about wants vs. needs: the kickstarter model is for wants, consultants are for needs.

If I pledged to a kickstarter project to buy yet another iphone case and the project failed to launch, I'll just have to make do without yet another iphone case. No big deal.

If I need to hire a consultant to build an e-commerce website or to set up a payroll system, I need that to happen no matter what. I can't wait 21 days only to find out the consultant never gets enough pledges to "launch." Then what? Pledge to another consultant, wait another 21 days and rinse and repeat?

Re: Ask HN: So, what is your problem?

#50

Post by ganz »

I have a poor sense of how I spend all my time, and that leads to sub-optimal decision making. I've been building a web app to easily track my time usage and display it as a historical calendar, and adding features to get the most insight out of reflecting on it (running stats, notes, etc.) The most recent handy feature was an xmpp chat bot interface for lowering the friction on adding data.

The inspiration was the quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", which jives with the observation that how one spent their time last month is a better predictor of their future than how they wish they would spend this month. People have a lot of inertia, but tend not to notice.

I'd be especially interested in any tips about research on past-time perception.

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