chrishaum

Who have you had the best experience with, and what were the key factors that made them good? Were they fast, personable, well-connected, able to negotiate on your behalf? Or was there something else that made them great?

I just bought a 1/2-page full-color advertising slot (retail rate: $2,814) for $15, with only 1 hour of work.

If there's enough demand, I'll write a blog post detailing the process in full.

Let me know in the comments!

Does anyone think there would be a market for crowdsourced conversion rate optimization, e.g. 99designs for CRO?

Hi Hacker Newsers!

With summer here already and your friends off interning at Google or Twitter, some of you may be worried and frustrated about not having an internship of your own.

Perhaps none of your summer plans materialized. Or you didn't decide that you wanted an internship until it was too late, and now you're stuck.

Well, here at Zannee, we've still got open internship opportunities for this summer! If you are reading this, then you may be an ideal candidate!

By interning with Zannee from now to the end of August, you can:

- Gain real-world experience helping to develop products for a successful B2B software company.

- See Lean Startup principles applied first-hand.

- Get to build your sales and marketing mindset as you learn from Dane Maxwell (founder of Zannee).

- Possibly get university credit for the internship (depends on the university, but we'll help in any way we can).

Please note that the internships are unpaid.

We are looking for interns with skills in two main categories of web development:

- Frontend design and development. (Relevant skills: HTML/CSS, Javascript/jQuery, Photoshop/sketching/mockups, a good design sense).

- Backend architecture and development. (Relevant skills: Python, Django, Amazon Web Services, some familiarity with Linux).

It's fine if you currently only have experience with some of these; we'll give you opportunities both to reinforce your existing skills, and to learn new ones.

Even you are interested but aren't a technical person, still contact us - we'll discuss your skills and interests and see if there are other ways you could contribute and learn.

Interested? Please contact the intern coordinator (a.k.a me, Chris), at chrishaum@gmail.com.

Hi Hacker Newsers!

With summer here already and your friends off interning at Google or Twitter, some of you may be worried and frustrated about not having an internship of your own.

Perhaps none of your summer plans materialized. Or you didn't decide that you wanted an internship until it was too late, and now you're stuck.

Well, here at Zannee, we've still got open internship opportunities for this summer! If you are reading this, then you may be an ideal candidate!

By interning with Zannee from now to the end of August, you can:

- Gain real-world experience helping to develop products for a successful B2B software company.

- See Lean Startup principles applied first-hand.

- Get to build your sales and marketing mindset as you learn from Dane Maxwell (founder of Zannee).

- Possibly get university credit for the internship (depends on the university, but we'll help in any way we can).

Please note that the internships are unpaid.

We are looking for interns with skills in two main categories of web development:

- Frontend design and development. (Relevant skills: HTML/CSS, Javascript/jQuery, Photoshop/sketching/mockups, a good design sense).

- Backend architecture and development. (Relevant skills: Python, Django, Amazon Web Services, some familiarity with Linux).

It's fine if you currently only have experience with some of these; we'll give you opportunities both to reinforce your existing skills, and to learn new ones.

Even you are interested but aren't a technical person, still contact us - we'll discuss your skills and interests and see if there are other ways you could contribute and learn.

Interested? Please contact the intern coordinator (a.k.a me, Chris), at chrishaum@gmail.com.

It seems like there are many niche markets that do not yet have a sophisticated online marketplace developed for them.

For example, it was only recently that Flippa.com emerged (from SitePoint marketplace) as a marketplace catered specifically to the needs of website buyers and sellers.

My question for HNers is this: What markets are in the greatest need of a new, sophisticated marketplace?

Some examples I have considered:

- coin and stamp collecting

- artisanal foods (e.g. cheeses)

- baby products

Thanks!

I have the following problem:

Givens:

There are N types of item.

For each item type, M instances exist.

Each item instance has two integer attributes, A and B.

There is some subset S of item types (i.e. a set of up to N distinct item types)

Goal: For a given set S, choose the optimal set R of item instances corresponding to the set (i.e. one item instance in R for each item type in S).

Let SUM be the sum of all the values of A in R. Let MEAN be the mean of all the values of B in R.

The optimal set is one that meets one of the two following conditions (depending on which one we are looking for at the give moment)

  a) SUM is the minimum possible, and MEAN is within some range.

  b) MEAN is the maximum possible, and SUM is within some range.

My approach: Two-part stochastic beam search. In the first part, the objective function is based on the distance from the center of the constraint space (i.e. the space where SUM or MEAN is within the acceptable range). This goes until we have k states within the constraint space. In the second part, the objective function is defined by the qualification for an "optimal set" defined in the paragraph above. At each step, only successor states within the constraint space are considered. Iteration continues until MAX_STEPS is exceeded.

What other approaches would you consider for solving this problem? One issue I have with the current approach is that, while it does generate results that satisfy the conditions, the results are not optimal, in the sense that I can run the algorithms several times and get different answers.

In the process of creating a new marketplace, I'm trying to think of novel features that would give the marketplace an advantage over existing ones.

One example I have considered is to be able to choose an arbitrary "basket" of services, and find the optimal set of providers of those services, for the customer's desired price and quality ranges.

I would greatly appreciate any other ideas!

Perhaps the following question will stir up your thinking: What annoyances have you experienced with online marketplaces, that could be fixed with novel features?

Thanks!

I am the co-owner of http://www.novapress.net, a site that sells test preparation products developed by my business partner. We recently made a major change to our website (switching from Drupal to Wordpress, which should make our lives easier, since we want the site to be as 'hands-off' as possible). Since the transition, site traffic has decreased noticeably; I think the main reason is that we changed our site structure, and the new site navigation is not reflected in our Google listing.

I believe that our website has great potential to be a profitable medium for selling our test prep products. What actionable advice do you have for how we could increase directed traffic to the site, increase conversion, and generally make the site more profitable?