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

"Website like Amazon"

elance.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: "Website like Amazon"

#81

Post by DoubleCluster »

rodw wrote: post #55
fizx wrote: post #11

I'll throw out another idea--maybe this is a honeypot for bots making automated responses to every proposal.

Good point. It seems like there is a variation on Poe's Law here, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It works as a honeypot either way. On a more practical note, Derek Siver's advice at [1] to ask bidders to post a "magic phrase" of some sort has worked really well for me. I literally just select a couple of random words from /usr/share/dict/words and add something like: To prove that you have actually read this…

Heh, that blog post is funny. After step 6 the difficult work is done. Writing code is really not hard if you can define your goals clearly. If you're able to complete the first steps take a week off to learn programming and then build the software yourself. Much cheaper and easier.

Re: "Website like Amazon"

#82

Post by jere »

stan_rogers wrote: post #80
jere wrote: post #21

I was sure this was a joke, but I didn't catch a punchline. Why would you want to jam all of that functionality together anyway?

So you can be richer than Jeff Beezo, Mark Zapperberg, Pierre Omigosh and Craig Newman combined, of course. It's a big-picture idea, real entrepreneurial stuff; you're probably too mundane to "get it", which is why you're only worth $750 to the project.

>which is why you're only worth $750 to the project.

Pffttt... if only. I can only dream of being the lucky devil who wins that prize and ends up making that kind of cash.

Re: "Website like Amazon"

#83

Post by DoubleCluster »

CaveTech wrote: post #31
balabaster wrote: post #6

... for $1,000 do you want it to scale as well or do you just want something faked that'll work for 1 concurrent user? Do you need full reporting and analytics? Load testing? Unit tests? etc.? Ridiculous.

You almost make it sound as if it could be done if you didn't care about scalability and "nice to haves". Make me the site he described, and have it work for only 1 user, even half the time, and I'll give you $1000 gladly.

I could do that, please specify where you are going to click and what you'd expect to see. It will work every time but only for those exact steps! Scalability could be done but will cost you extra!

Re: "Website like Amazon"

#84

Post by Dylan16807 »

CaveTech wrote: post #31
balabaster wrote: post #6

... for $1,000 do you want it to scale as well or do you just want something faked that'll work for 1 concurrent user? Do you need full reporting and analytics? Load testing? Unit tests? etc.? Ridiculous.

You almost make it sound as if it could be done if you didn't care about scalability and "nice to haves". Make me the site he described, and have it work for only 1 user, even half the time, and I'll give you $1000 gladly.

For a handful of users you can proxy basically the entire site and reduce your code to a userscript and maybe some database callbacks.

Re: "Website like Amazon"

#86

Post by RandallBrown »

DoubleCluster wrote: post #81
rodw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. It seems like there is a variation on Poe's Law here, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It works as a honeypot either way. On a more practical note, Derek Siver's advice at [1] to ask bidders to post a "magic phrase" of some sort has worked really well for me. I literally just select a couple of random words from /usr/share/dict/words and add something like: To prove that you have actually read this…

Heh, that blog post is funny. After step 6 the difficult work is done. Writing code is really not hard if you can define your goals clearly. If you're able to complete the first steps take a week off to learn programming and then build the software yourself. Much cheaper and easier.

Take a week off to learn programming? Are you serious?

Re: "Website like Amazon"

#87

Post by thwarted »

grecy wrote: post #5

I think this highlights the interesting lack of fundamental understanding by the general public about software and how complex and expensive it is. Intuitively people understand things like cars and laptops are expensive, time consuming and difficult to build requiring complex tools and machinery. This is not the case with software, where we see time and time again requests like "same as Facebook..." or "Same as Amaz…

>I wonder if we can change that lack of understand, or if the general public will always be at a loss to understand the complexities of software ?

Considering that one of the base tenets of software engineering is to create abstractions, those abstractions work against communicating complexity because they are meant to hide/control/abstract the complexity. It's easier to see and explore the complexity of a physical object.

In some sense, software is more like the useful abstraction of the model of the atom (with the electron levels, etc) which help explain the nature and interaction of it even if it's not physically like that. A car doesn't have abstract abstractions like that, what abstractions it has are easily exposed and physical entities.

Re: "Website like Amazon"

#88

Post by drewblaisdell »

dbond wrote: post #53
drewblaisdell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Digg prototype was the product of a single freelancer and two hundred dollars.

If I remember an episode of diggnation correctly Rose paid $10 per hour, though this is probably wrong. 20 hours is doable for a prototype of the first version of digg.

I remember this episode too. It looks like he misspoke judging by what I can find online: the eLance forums have people correcting $200-$300 estimates saying that Kevin Rose actually spent more like $2k (as the parent of my comment claimed, sorry).

Re: "Website like Amazon"

#89

Post by chii »

julian37 wrote: post #44
yareally wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education can also be dangerous in the hands of a potential client. I've had to explain to clients why they were paying what they were paying for a website when one of the owners of the company pipped up saying "But it's just a bunch of HTML, I could do that, so why are you charging us so much?" In this situation, you really want to say "then go do it yourself if it's so easy", but that's not the best way to put it.…

But it's just a bunch of HTML, I could do that It sounds like you might have the wrong kind of client. I can only recommend reading this great piece by fellow HNer patio11: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-... It's full of gems such as: The general thing that people find both in pricing products and in pricing services is that at the low end of the scale you deal with people who perceive le…

unfortuantely, that might be the only kind of client you get when you start out?
Post reply on HN