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Ask HN: Side Projects Gone Deadpooled
66 points by SomeoneAtHN on Oct 8, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 68 comments
As eps pointed out in the previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772224) about side projects gone big, there were also an enormous amount of side projects that just went dead. I am sure many of HNers are curious to hear and learn from them.

So feel free to list what the project is, how did you come up with the idea, and of course, when and how did it go deadpooled.




I've killed off a fair number of them over the years, mostly because I feel that if someone doesn't develop any traction at all I might as well pull the plug on it. Some were just ways to try out some new technology (ok, make that 'excuses', not 'ways'), others were done purely for fun.

If something did develop traction I would support it for years and years even if it ended up having very few members (livelog was one of those).

I find it difficult to kill off projects that have a few dedicated users, usually I contact them to find a way in which I can let the project go away without hurting their feelings.

Right now the biggest one that is on my 'deadpooled' list is the free drupal hosting site that I started a few years ago. At some point it had a few thousand domains on it, right now I think we're down to below 50, and every month one or two make the move to another hosting provider. Another three years and I can kill it.

Websites are like children, five minutes of work to launch them and you must support them the rest of your life ;)


Wow.

MIDDLE SCHOOL

HelpersSeekers.com - would have been yahoo answers! like site. Somehow never launched. Spent months developing.

HIGH SCHOOL

CricketFreak.com - a cricket news portal. Somehow never launched. Spent months developing.

trackmail(sp?).com - send email through it and get a notification when it's read(a personal omg moment)

COLLEGE

ChupChaap.com Classifieds site for India.

TextbookDaddy.com - textbook exchange site. launched. shut down. within few days

way too cool domain I need to re-register.com woot for young women. developed for weeks. shut down in couple days after launch

Hollr.org - CL-like site. Never launched. Good call!

ClassHunt.com - let students at my uni get a txt soon as a seat opened up in a class

became a huge hit on campus, over 50% of freshman signed up, had to shut down after uni's course registration moved to peoplesoft which made it impossible to parse latest class data

Good news: I pivoted to another product in same market which is now my start-up


Why shut down so many products within a few days after launch? Doesn't seem like enough time to test traction.


Yeah, single biggest lesson learned. Since, my ideas have had a lot more time dedicated to it, more iterations(vs. NONE) and a lot more traction to show.


I'll bite.

I've done a lot of side projects. True to what people have said in here, most of them still exist, but get no attention from me or anyone else. Some I have taken down. I mentioned a few successful ones in the other thread.

http://allyourwords.com, a site that made about $1000 selling word-to-website associations (kind of like million dollar homepage), but then I took it down due to maintenance.

http://ohbigdeal.com, was auto-updating by crawling forums for amazon deals and adding my affiliate code, but I could never get it to take off. Now I haven't touched it in months and the update code appears to have broken.

donotpress.me, donotpressme.com, etc., was a gimmicky attempt at a viral site that went nowhere.


side projects don't die, they just get put back on the shelf for another stab at it later on


That's very true; every side project I've ever done has a piece of it living on in my current projects. I've found its important in life to know when to kill a side project that just isn't working, understand its pros and cons, move on and don't repeat the same mistake.


FlowThing: an app to organize your search for...anything! (jobs, apartments, cars, air conditioners, match.com profiles, etc)

http://twitpic.com/2vedlp http://twitpic.com/2vef3n

You get a bookmarklet to save a listing from any site, keep track of the relevant bits of data (company, square feet, salary, bedrooms, mileage, etc), and move them through a little workflow (interested, applied, contacted, lost, etc). All the fields and workflows are completely customizable.

I built it after a simultaneous job and apartment search, having been incredibly frustrated that craigslist didn't have a "my craigslist" like "my ebay" or "my monster", and the fact that you're never looking at just one site when you're searching. I was always scared that I was applying to the same job or apartment twice.

It's been on the backburner for a while, since my day job has gotten busy, so there's no help available and signups are invite-only right now. But you guys seem like the kind of people who can figure it out pretty easily ;)

Here are some invite codes:

http://pastie.org/1208657


Out of curiosity, why invite only?


Not ready for open signups yet-- I don't even have a homepage explaining what it does, nor any help docs.

I'll try to bang some out next week...


Does anyone have an interest in selling their dead side project?

This idea is probably it's own dead side project, but if enough people show interest, I'll put up a community spreadsheet. Personally, I think there is definitely a market here and a buyers ability to execute on the marketing/business can certainly make a big difference.

Made the spreadsheet anyway. Use this form to add a listing: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFZQc0ZQQWZ...

See responses here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApjfoQFi7q_7dFZQc0Z...


the great thing about side projects is they cant "fail"

I have http://erldocs.com - nice ui to the erlang documentation http://arandomurl.com - blog / html5 games http://pastebin.me - pastebin that executes js http://erlangotp.com - information about erlang http://talk.io - chat client

some are virtually silent, some are reasonably popular, I dont worry about promoting them or getting visitors etc, 2 of them are still yet to be done and I am under no pressure to finish, I can just do them in my own time.


erldocs is my favorite docs site - it's a success in my book!


awesome, thanks :)


Seems quiet in here...

The trouble is, side projects go unfinished and become dormant, but they never really die - they haven't been born yet.


Here are mine (between 2006 and 2010):

(Some of these are offline because they are/were hosted on my personal computer which is currently on a moving truck)

Afk247 - http://afk247.com/ - an away message ranking site where people could vote on their favorite away messages submitted by users. This was back when AIM was my main mode of communication at school. Was going to make money with AdSense. Never really took off, but I did get an article in the school newspaper about it!

MadStatter - http://madstatter.com/ - Baseball stats site. I'm a huge baseball fan and love all those weird stats that go along with it. This site had a couple of (imho) cool interfaces to display interesting stats. Tried using AdSense but didn't make much.

SecureShirts - http://secureshirts.com/ - I wanted to learn how to screenprint my own t-shirts, so I bought all the equipment and learned how. I decided to print my own line of nerdy shirts and sell them online. I sold a few, but never got really big.

TweetShirts - http://tweetshirts.com/ - Twitter themed t-shirts. Made a tiny profit, but had a lot of leftover inventory when I decided to kill it.

Sideways Shirts - http://sidewaysshirts.com/ - In addition to my own nerdy shirts, I did custom screenprinting for events/groups/etc. I did it in my spare time, but became profitable and it was a lot of fun. This covered the cost of printing my inventory for SecureShirts and TweetShirts.

I had to deadpool all of the shirt printing businesses when we decided to move to CA after launching Notifo during YC. We left our townhouse in NC and relocated to a tiny apartment in SF which didn't have room for any of the equipment. I'm sad to let that go, but it was very time consuming and labor intensive. I'm glad for the learning experience though.

Flixpulse - http://flixpulse.com/ - This was the first Twitter Movie Review site that I know of. All of these new studies coming out about doing sentiment analysis in tweets all came along after Flixpulse had been out for a while. I did Bayesian analysis on a manually-trained corpus of movie-review tweets, and then it became pretty well self-learning after that. It was fun but eventually the old little computer that hosted it (900MHz gateway that was forever old) finally ran out of RAM to hold the Bayesian filter data. Oh well. Tried doing affiliate movie ticket sales through Fandango and affiliate movie poster sales, but nothing really came of it.

TheRentMap - http://therentmap.com/ - Apartment listings on a Google Map interface which led to affiliate apartment programs. Not quite dead yet, but it would take significant effort to get it to a point where it really makes any money.

There are a couple others on the verge of the deadpool, but some that I think might make fun side-projects for a while longer.

Mainly I do all these projects as learning exercises. Each one has something new to it that I had never done before, so after a while I have an arsenal of knowledge to throw at bigger, more complicated projects.

I think Notifo will be taking up most of my time for the near-future, and one I am desperately going to keep from the deadpool :)


Notifo is awesome! I have been using it for some toy projects like: http://github.com/himanshuc/macanator. Also, http://push.ly works great with notifo for twitter notifications. Overall, I am a satisfied user and think you will most definitely be away from the deadpool.


I loved Flixpulse and was disappointed that it didn't stay updated. Lately, Twitter searches have been doing the job for me though, example: watched "social network"


http://emailops.com - creates an ascii formated schedule for email arbitration. Was used by several professors in india to schedule meeting times for study sessions. Never took off.

http://celebrityladder.com - reddit like voting system for anything taggable. Was only intended for me to learn RoR- i killed it almost immediately. Thought it was a really dumb idea as soon as it went live, but I haven't been able to clear it completely from my mind yet.

http://theuniveristy.org - a really cool social network which only used the web for organizing. Rest was done through the mail. Inspired by the zine/mail art world that was more or less killed by the web. Basically, it paired 12 people randomly, then once a week for 3 months (12 weeks) somebody was supposed to send some thing to the other 11 people in their class. This actually worked for folks, but some people didn't participate, and I had no idea how to manage the community. Was around 2000, maybe friendster was just around, and there weren't establish patterns for handling things like this, and mostly I was interested in just creating it. But, this project has really stuck in my mind. If there is interest here in this project, i'll bring it back to life.

So many others that never were completed....


I was hoping someone would ask- it's as useful to hear about the 'failures' as it is to hear about the successes, especially since there are so many more of them.

Tweet my pasteboard and Speed Tweet - two iPhone apps I wrote. I probably spent 50-100 hours on them, and $200 (to be a registered apple developer for 2 years). One was ad supported, one was 0.99. Total revenue about $20. Both are officially dead now that only oauth sign on is allowed for Twitter.

Tankbuddy.com - my first shot at a ruby on rails app. You could enter the details about your fish tank(s), and record readings (ph, temperature etc). I had big plans. Sadly, after a few weeks I wasn't even using the site myself, and was still paying $15 a month for hosting. Traffic was essentially 0 and the project was killed when I cancelled the hosting account.

I have a new project (http://localbeer.me - helping you find locally breewed beer) that I am very hopeful for. I paid for a year of hosting in advance, so even if I choose to ignore the project for a few months it's not costing me anything. This week was big, I had over 200 visitors from a link I posted to reddit.

As others have said, I have many more side projects, but they're not dead, just forgotten. Unlike others, to date not a single one of my side projects has turned a profit.


Not as interesting as some of the others, but:

http://websitesthatdontworkwithoutwww.com - 'naming and shaming' websites that have a shoddy sysasmin, and a massive petpeeve of mine, but it hasn't been getting any traction so I plan on taking it offline.

Youtubetopten.com (no longer online) - daily top ten of youtube videos voted for by facebook users. Never got any traction either.


None of the ones mentioned here are still up:

(2001) gbafan.com -- A Gameboy Advance review site. It did pretty well. Had a staff of three writers and good amounts of traffic. I wrote the review submission system in PHP and it was my first exposure to web development.

(2006) saidsecrets.com -- Anonymous polling site. I can't for the life of me think of the name of that polling site that runs on the reddit engine, but it was just like that. I wrote it 100% from scratch using XMLHTTPRequest as a means to learn AJAX/JS before moving onto an AJAX framework.

(2006) fitaculous.com -- a Social networking site with a fitness theme. The idea was people would motivate their friends to keep working out/eating healthy. It tracked calories (or weight watcher points) as well as your workouts, BMI, weigh-ins, etc. At its peak it had about 2500 members. I did it with Rails.

(2008) -- Turrets iPhone game. I only had it in the app store for a 3 days and it made me $200, so I was actually pretty happy about that. I pulled it as my employer at the time did not allow that kind of moonlighting and I feared losing my job.


Why not sell the iPhone game to someone and just pocket a little cash from selling the rights to it?


I'm no longer with that employer so I am planning on sprucing it up a bit and re-releasing it.


2002 - LootMail - Audio (phone) based interface to your email. Built on top of TellMe (back when they had a service pretty similar to Twilio today, based on VoiceXML. Died when TellMe killed off their "Extensions" program.

2004 - http://openpodcast.org - At the dawn of podcasting, I thought a podcast feed anyone could fill with audio content would be cool. The system was email-based: you sent an attached mp3 to submit@opencast.org and it would show up in the feed (there was also a phone number you could call to leave a recording). It was pretty popular as podcasting was getting off the ground. Adam Curry helped promote it.

2008 - http://quotably.com - Got the idea that a threaded view of twitter would be useful. Built it in a weekend, posted about it here on HN Sunday night, Arrington wrote a TC post, Scoble tweeted it, and next thing I knew there were upwards of 250K uniques Monday. I ended up killing it 6 months later because twitter turned off the firehose.


Given that the OP created a bunch of Ask HN questions today and the account is 1-day old, I presume it's a throwaway.

I am curious to know why.


http://theshirtsite.com (No longer functioning) - I aggregated t-shirt designs across the web and built a centralized/searchable site for them. Every t-shirt I linked to was hooked up to some sort of affiliate program, so if the user clicked through and bought the shirt, I got a cut of the sale. Never really took off, but made a little cash for beer in my college years.

http://yaperture.com (Still up in artifact form) - A site for users to submit photos, have the community vote on the best, then we would mat, print, and sell them giving a user a cut of each sale. The market for real photography isn't that great, so it never generated enough money for us to break even. Regardless, it was a great experience and nice intro into some heavier development and co-founder life for me.


Yotophoto.com

Was the web's first search engine for libre (free to use) images, mostly Creative Commons and Public Domain. One of the things I'm most proud of was a "search by color" feature that was very fast, accurate and way ahead of what anyone else was doing at the time (IMHO).

Yotophoto was doing a million searches (~100k unique) per day at one point.


I did the exact same thing at reusableimages.com a few years back, but gave up due to lack of traffic and a growing sense of being out of my league. The site just uses Yahoo image search now.


How come you killed it? I'm guessing it's because it was tough to monetize?


It wasn't necessarily difficult to monetize (mostly via ads for Microstock imagery sites). But it was quite difficult to scale the technology. I made great progress optimizing the crawler and search tech but eventually lost interest.

Google and Flickr also added Creative Commons image search options eventually.


Mine was a predictive road traffic alert service in India. Wanted to use cell phone data along with congestion prediction to send SMS alerts about traffic jams.

We (me and a couple of guys and profs from academic research bodies) started work on it - I spoke to some of the biggest VCs. I was told by all of them that people in India dont care about traffic - so it is not a problem worth funding.

In retrospective, I should have stuck with it a bit more, but it was not a low-cost startup idea (most of the money would have been spent on Ph.D salaries) and maybe also have co-founders who beleived in the idea more (mine didnt).

But I ended up doing a services startup, which is doing OK - 13 people now!


Spam email autoreplier. I built a toy version in lamson which gave credible (to me) responses - "Yes, I am very interested in earning $1 MILLION ($1,000,000) dollars from your dead Nigerian uncle." I went into my gmail spam folder to look for a training corpus, and found that the Nigerians have given up.

Eigenshare - online document sharing for latex-using scientists. Basically, built in document sharing, version control, etc. Couldn't get anyone to use it.

Timeserieszen - scrape a lot of timeseries data from various government agencies, and make a nice display for it (answers questions: "how have annual working hours evolved since 1960"). Never really followed through on it.

Quite a few more.


Connect Shapes -- http://connectshapes.com/

Network Graphing/Flow Chart prototype. Started out toying with RaphaelJS, but I hit a lot of cross-browser bugs having to do with a DOM issues, arrays, and side-effects in general. There are a lot of cool graphing programs now, so I don't plan to work further on a standalone app-- but might use it as an interface for a later project.

On the upside, I learned about closures doing this project and ended up dropping it to learn more about functional programming.


Whenever one of my side projects fails, I try to write a post-mortem. This is often interesting to my audience, but even more helpful for me.

The most fun I had failing at a side project was my second online game, Engineering Faith. It failed due to Second System Effect, where I added so many variables and complexities that it was no longer a sane or fun game to play. My post-mortem on it is here, with annotated screenshots: http://www.antipode.ca/engineering-faith/


Know n' Show - knownshow.com was a startup weekend prototype that myself and a ColdFusion developer built in 2 days at the Microsoft campus during SW Redmond. It was a HR management web app that wasn't really going to be much better than any given wiki platform. The other problem was that our group was too big. The cool thing was that it was my fist attempt to build something so quickly and got to meet some really cool people. Just about everything else (the product, the name, the team, the technology) was bad though.


I guess I have also built about a half dozen html/CSS frameworks for different large scale projects but never bothered to put them out into the public. Also, I've built a couple wordpress plugins and hacks that I use extensively personally but never put out there as well.


What do the Wordpress plugins do?


http://www.celebtwits.com/ - Got no traction. Been dead since twitter auth change.


i wonder how many other twitter projects got killed when they dropped basic auth. implementing oauth in an old one-off project that only uses one twitter account to access their api is just a pain in the ass.

i used to let people tweet messages to @going2rain and have them show up on the bottom of http://goingtorain.com/ in a random rotation, but the process of switching it over to oauth was just not worth the trouble so i disabled that functionality.


> implementing oauth in an old one-off project that only uses one twitter account to access their api is just a pain in the ass.

There's a way around it. IIRC, you just have to sign up for the developer account using the same credentials as your Twitter account, and it allows you to create a permanent key. It's been months since I did it, but the app I built still works.


http://scripturefeeds.com - RSS feeds giving you a chapter a day from your choice of scriptural books: old testament, new testament, and others from the Mormon faith. Never made any money, never really had a way to try. Killed it when I switched hosting providers. Just never got around to putting it back up.


Had several, this is the biggest one:

http://findforme.net

I had a total absolute blast coding it the summer before last (python and django, interfacing with the Amazon affiliate program REST apis). But I never managed to build a user base for it (probably because it's just too complex to use), and eventually moved my focus elsewhere.


http://www.prximity.com

Thought it'd be a cool way to build a location based city guide -- but clearly this had to be mobile and we didn't have the right dev team to build the rest...we were manually entering information (we figured the best content would be curated, rather than aggregated) Deadpooled in feb 10..


SlimPoints: http://slimpoints.appspot.com -- a diary app for tracking Weight Watchers points

Create-A-Password: http://create-a-password.appspot.com -- an app for creating memorable (yet secure) passwords

Both created with GWT and Google App Engine.


RxnStream - http://rxnstream.com - Allowed you to share internet videos with your friends and watch them while they watched the video. Thought it would be great for sharing shocking videos, but it never really took off. Site is still up, but I'm not actively pursuing it anymore.


I made this huge-ass .NET version of digg which died really quietly. Spent months on the code base, did all kinds of cool stuff like converting links to images/videos/etc from specific sites (eg youtube) so you could view them in comments.


when I was a graduate student, I wrote tutor (http://github.com/mathgladiator/tutor ) which was a student-orientated compute algebra system. The idea was to give it a college algebra to calculus II problem, and it would spit out a right answer with a complete step by step explanation.

I actually had students using it, but I got distracted by my game engine.

If I go back to teaching, then I will probably make a start-up out of this.


Time constraints: we weren't making significant process on the core idea, and we're both very busy students, so the side project fell by the wayside.


A project managment based upon Google Wave :)


Still around somewhere?


No, didn't even made it out to beta. I don't know if that count as deadpooling though.


What, the app or google wave?


playfirstlife.com - started out as facetoflife.com - had a cofounder and a plan and everything, but then the cofounder decided to go do something else and I had some medical issues coincide at the same time. By the time I handled everything, there were at least 6 full-time competitors.


And of course, omnivoredating.com - a dating site for people who specifically want to avoid meeting vegans/vegetarians. That was an awesome brainfart.


Here's mine:

# InstantFileHosting - Simple one page site that allows you to instantly upload any file and get a public URL for it, without requiring registration or anything else that takes unnecessary time or effort. Project abandoned because many other sites do this, they are pretty well known or easy to find, the app consumed a lot of bandwidth, and was a popular target for malware.

# InstantSendMail - Simple one page site that allows you to send an e-mail instantly and quickly. Figured it would be handy when you need to send yourself a note but don't want to take the time to login to your webmail. Abandoned because even with restrictions it would be as handy for spammers as it would for real users, and because of the hassles of running an email server or the responsibility of making sure someone else's wasn't abused.

# WebCommandPrompt - This was a crazy idea to provide a command prompt interface to the web. It would have eventually an extensive list of command for all sorts of actions you might like to perform on the internet, such as pinging, running trace-routes, querying DNS information, sending quick emails, etc. Similar to how desktop application launchers SlickRun, Find and Run Robot, and Enso work but for the internet. Abandoned because it would be hard to leverage (each command would require its own design and development), and it seemed kind of a step backwards to build a text rather than graphical interface for the internet even if it increased usability.

# BuriedRiches - An ecommerce site for my own personal use to list stuff I was trying to sell during my eBay days, so that I could market outside of ebay and sell things for longer periods without paying for recurring auctions. Abandoned when I abandoned eBay, because it involved too much work that could not be automated, like taking pictures, shipping, etc.

# PicVersus - A picture rating site, based mostly around "cute" pictures of puppies, kittens, etc where visitors were presented with 2 pictures and asked to choose which was best. Similar to HotOrNot but for cute or funny pictures. Abandoned because it was too easy to create and had too much competition with no competitive advantage.

# IdentifyRE - A real estate analysis webapp, for RE investors. Input relevant information about properties you are considering, like price, square footage, tax and insurance amounts, market rents, etc and it calculates and displays estimated cashflow of those properties so you can more easily determine which are most likely to be profitable. Abandoned because of the subjective nature of the analysis and the highly specific market for this kind of application made marketing difficult.

# WealthBarons - An online browser-based game based on real estate, where you can buy virtual property, develop it, and accumulate wealth as you compete with other players to build the largest real estate empire. Never really got off the ground, as other projects took priority and games are very time- and resource-intensive to build.

# ApocRPG - An online browser-based RPG game. I'm a huge fan of RPGs and I spent a couple of solid years building my own from the ground up, including 2D graphics. Had some very innovative gameplay mechanics such as a choose-your-own-adventure style scenario system, automatic character alignment adjustment (good/evil) based on player actions, etc. Lasted a long time and I was very proud of it, but eventually abandoned as I moved onto other projects.

# ForumGlance - A tool for people who read web forums a lot, where you can specify the URL of the forums you want to monitor, and it would extract links to the most recent threads and show you on a single page the most recent posts of all your favorite forums. Abandoned because it was too dependent on a wide variety of constantly changing forum software, causing frequent bugs and requiring constant updates.


ForumGlance: Had a similar idea just the other day, although mine was mostly to watch to buy some cheap things/bid on auctions etc. Probably since I'd handpick the forums it'd be easier to tailor the parser though.


WebCommandPrompt sounds like http://yubnub.org/


mileguru.com - frequent flyer mile aggregator. it just never got finished and fell by the wayside due to other partnerships and projects...


candlestickpro.com - a site i created with a friend of a friend to track stock portfolios and offer buy/sell recommendations based on candlestick patterns. the business plan was to charge a monthly membership fee as well as invest some of that money in stocks the site recommended (which would also serve as marketing for how good the recommendations were). the business relationship went sour and the site never came to fruition.

1.8T.org - started as a vw/audi car enthusiast website offering web hosting and email forwards. i eventually started a vw/audi dealer ratings site on it instead which became very popular among the community and dealer network. a few dealers took it too seriously and started posting fake negative reviews of other dealers and constantly complaining to me. dealing with all the angry people sucked the fun out of it, and other, more generalized car dealer review sites popped up, so i shut it down. made money with adsense. still own 8t.org with nothing to use it for.

ramblin.gs - a forum site that i created to experiment with some forum software i was working on. the community never prospered much, but i released the (awful, hacked-together) software which some people ran with and created some new communities with it that continue to operate.

wen - an attempt to create a simple scheduling site that could parse natural language entries and turn them into calendars/alerts. got too involved in perfecting the parser that i got bored with it and never launched it.

deskto.ps - a screenshot sharing website to be like flickr but more adept at handling large images. users could tag programs (draw borders around them, like flickr's notes) running in their screenshots and it would automatically assemble lists of most popular software and connect people to find themes/icons/support/whatever for the software they liked that other people were using. it would make money by letting commercial software developers sponsor the pages for their software that users tagged. stopped working on it, never renewed the domain and someone snagged it.

sellister.com - a better craigslist that offered feedback profiles/karma like ebay to help people feel more comfortable dealing with strangers. never got it off the ground, but i still hate selling things on ebay and craigslist.

http://den.im/ - an rss reader that i made two years ago to clone the old bloglines interface because i hated the new one and their site was always randomly not updating feeds. added twitter integration, made an iphone/android version, and continue to use it every day but can never find the motivation to open it up out of private beta. there are much nicer rss readers out there now and i don't think i have the resources available to host a huge number of users for free.


Wow, have you ever looked into selling that domain name? A 2 letter .com would be worth a fortune, I would think a 22 letter .org would be worth quite a bit too.


Do you still have the parser from 'wen'? Seems like it could still be put to good use if it worked well enough.


i do, though it ended up being a lot like chronic (http://chronic.rubyforge.org/) except you could give it a full string ("walk the dog tomorrow at 3pm", "next monday is bob's birthday") and it could parse out the time/date and store the other parts as the event.


Can we rate limit Ask/Tell/Show HN posts? There are currently seven on the front page (and another nine on the second page). Three on the front page are from this new SomeoneAtHN anonymous account.

Maybe one Ask/Tell/Show allowed per user every week?


As I read on the unofficial FAQ to HN by jacquesm, "self" posts have a quite heavy weight on them. It's harder for them to get to the front page and they fall out of it faster than normal ones.

I think that this is enough and we don't need any more limits. Moreover some of them are really good and insightful in my opinion, so I don't feel the need of a limit at all.


Meh, it'll fall off the page soon enough if it's not interesting.


I think this is a legit concern, but there isn't enough evidence that this trend will continue.


Yeah, no fads roll on for more than a few days here despite people believing they will. Even around the iPad keynote and launch, it blew past after a few days (ended by a flood of Erlang related posts, I recall).




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