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Ask HN: How does Groupon or Grubwith.us do their group payment system?
I have heard that they don't use PayPal. And I cannot imagine the hassle of rolling your own system. Any ideas? Maybe WePay?
I have already wrote the scripts (I used to write screenplays). I try to simplify each scene so that they can be accomplished by just using moving images (similar to dropbox's video). I know they used stop-motion to accomplish that, but I imagine there must be an even easier way to do it all on the computer.
What software would be good for that task? Flash?
Also, voice over syncronization is a different matter, but if you know a good tool for that, that will be helpful too.
But HN is so news oriented it doesn't give me the kind of hacker/entrepreneur community that I'm envisioning.
What are some other sites where hackers/entrepreneur go to just to ...
- discuss early stage startup ideas
- brainstorm implementations and solutions
- give each other feedback on prototypes
... as suppose to commenting on news? I guess like a forum?
Reading news gets old after a while and makes me feel like I'm just a follower not a leader.
I'm planning to start a web community if there isn't one. I did a survey to see if people would be interested here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358654
But that post quickly got drown out by the noon news flood, which is part of the problem that I'm talking about.
(P.S. I do go to real-life meetups of hackers/founders. Those are great but scarce. The only good one I have been to so far in the Bay Area is "hackers and founders". And they don't even meet that often in San Francisco.)
So I have been looking into a few social networks for entrepreneurs, and they all kinda suck. I think the key is to make it super niched, i.e. hackers / internet entrepreneurs.
What I really want is a place for internet entrepreneurs to brainstorm, get feedback from each other, survey, basically things that is already happening on HN that is not "news"
Yet, hacker news is build more as a news site so some of the other usage cases cannot be fully exploited. Non-news discussions tend to get drown out in the sea of regular news (though the addition of Ask HN section has made things better).
I want to do a survey to see what features will be good. - Video chat brainstorming - Site / App feedbacks - Organizing local meetup - Ardvark-like context matching of profiles to recommend relevant discussions - Weekly group Q&A, Contest - Plain old forum
And of course the site will following a set of rules of conduct such as constructive feedback, limited self-promotion, etc. It will probably have some sort of rating / karma system.
Any suggestions? Thanks.
Topic: Assume you are Diaspora (or any competitor), also assume that technical issues have been solved. What are some strategies to convert users from facebook?
Rule 1: Be as far-fetched as possible - quantity over quality
Rule 2: Only reply to someone's idea when you can build on top of it. If you really want to express that certain ideas won't work, start a separate comment with your explanation and an alternative idea.
For example: I will start with a few ideas in the comments below.
2. Do you do it for work or for fun?
3. Do you do it by yourself or with others?
4. What brainstorming techniques do you employ?
Ideally this should be someone who not only understands the problems of user interface on a psychological level, but also is proficient in HTML/CSS/Illustrator etc.
Unfortunately, I just never had any friend like that.
I have been thinking about hanging out at art schools or meetups. Can someone who has some experience with this give me some tips?