The Art Commission, an online platform that connects artists with design and art professionals as well as private individuals seeking commissioned art.
We'd love your feedback on the site!
http://artcommission.com
Here's the pitch:
It can be hard to keep up with all your friends.
Wouldn't it be great to be able to catch up with a different friend each week over some delicious food? Food with a Friend will automatically match you up with one of your friends each week for a tasty meal at a local establishment.
You tell us what days you're generally free and we'll match you up. Then all you have to do is pick a restaurant!
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What do you think of the idea? Is it worth pursuing as strictly an educational project or do you think it would be a useful apart from my goal of teaching her web development?
I find the output hard to read and sometimes it just tells me that the entire old file was removed, and the entire new file was added, really giving me no information about what was actually changed.
It would be great if there was some command line tool that would give me a little bit nicer output (something that's easier to read than the traditional pluses and minuses).
Has anyone else encountered this problem and/or found a good solution?
One of my friends is an avid hunter and fisherman. He had the idea for a social network for hunters and fisherman to share pictures. I'd love HN's feedback on the idea and the current implementation!
Does anyone have advice on how to find potential part time work for a start-up this summer?
Here's a taste of my background:
I attended Wesleyan University, from 2004-2008. In '08 I applied for YCombinator, got an interview, but didn't get accepted. I continued with the project and eventually handed it over to another undergraduate at Wesleyan, but the site hasn't really changed since I handed over ownership. You can check it out here: http://collegeacb.com
After graduating from Wesleyan I have been working for a large heath care software company in Wisconsin. The job was not intellectually stimulating, and the technology we use is outdated, so I'm quitting.
Here are a few things I know that I can do well: * PHP/MySQL * Write valid XHTML/CSS markup. * Decent sense of design (check out my portfolio here - http://orionstudiomadison.com). * C/C++ (wrote my thesis in C++).
Some things where I'm more fuzzy, but will be expanding my knowledge over the summer: * JavaScript/JavaScript libraries (mootools) * Qt C++ UI framework * PHP MCV framework (CakePHP, Zend or CodeIgniter) * Maybe Ruby * Joomla
I'm living in Madison, WI so unfortunately any places outside of the area I would have to telecommute. Are there any places out there that would consider employing me part time or do you think I should just work on some of my own ideas while I'm taking classes?
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
www.mysite.com?school=someuniversity
My question is this: In terms of scalability is it better to query the db for the specific school info each time a page is loaded or should I query only the first time a user visits a particular school and cache the info in session variables? Or is there a third alternative that is preferred? Any advice would be greatly appreciated or just a point in the right direction to finding this info myself. Thanks!
So it’s been 4 months since we had our interview with the YC in Mountain View CA. It was a really exciting experience and although my partner and I were really upset that we didn’t get funded, I decided to continue developing the project. I remembered reading a bunch of posts after the interviews were over from many of the teams who did not make it. What I haven’t seen thus far is the story of what happened after the rejection, so here it is…
My co-founder and I were both seniors nearing the end of our college careers when we applied for YC. By the time we heard the amazing news that we had been invited to interview in Mountain View neither of us had even a potential job offer lined up for after graduation. We were pretty much banking on getting accepted.
After we were rejected we pretty much put the project on hold as we scrambled to find jobs. Luckily I was able to get a position as and my co-founder got accepted into the google summer of code program. My employers wanted me to start work at the beginning of June (only a few days after my graduation) but I knew that once I started work I would have no time to continue development on the potential startup. Luckily, I was able to push off my starting date for a month. At this point my co-founder was busy and wasn’t able to help with the programming. But where he failed to deliver in lines of code, he made up in sound advice and encouragement. I moved back home and coded away for the first 3 weeks of June. At that point I had a buggy version of what I had hoped to create, minus a few features, that I chose to drop/postpone. I started my “real” job early July and have been fixing all the bugs up until now.
So if you’re still reading at this point here is a description of the idea from my YC application:
“Our product is an anonymous social network geared towards the college community. The site is centered around a forum where students can vent their frustrations, talk about taboo subjects, or tell stories about their lives. However, as users interact with one another and post their thoughts to their community at large, they have the option to reveal their true identity or request the true identities (verified by University e-mail) to and from people whom they would like to reach out to in real life. It is our hope to connect our users not by their already established social identities, but by their common interests and character.”
PG and company were worried that it would be too difficult to spread our idea. We have observed an incredible viral effect when launching the site at a few test schools. Usually we are able to reach 50% or more of the university within 3-5 days. The problem is that the viral effect does not spread from school to school, only within the specific school. It requires a friend or other contact at the school in order to spread the word. That means that we need a friend or contact for each school we want to launch at.
So this is where I do the shameless plug for help. If there are any college students out there who had the attention span to get to this point then we would love it if you would help us spread our site to your school. We are willing to offer you 100% of our advertising profits (from your school) for the first 2 months for your help. Usually all that it takes is for you to create a facebook group and invite all of your friends, and maybe put up some fliers. Were expecting that our contact will make between $25 and $500, so its not a bad deal for the little amount of effort it takes.
If your interested in helping out please email me: aaron [at] collegeacb [dot] com
Here a link to the site if you want to check it out: http://www.collegeacb.com. I’d definitely love to hear feedback (especially on design and usability or other ways to spread to new schools).
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
