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Hi all, I want to find a job as a RoR developer, but as I have ~10 years coding gap in my CV (I played poker, ran poker forum and did other poker related things

• cstuder 10y ago
  There seems to be at least one major laptop brand missing and there's certainly not a to lack of discussions about their new Pro models.
  • ythn 10y ago
    Perhaps it's because most people buy said laptop at apple.com and not amazon.com
    • woogiewonka 10y ago
      Bingo. No affiliate income. This site is biased not to mention inaccurate. More mentions does not equal better.
      • sean_patel 10y ago
        >More mentions does not equal better. Nailed it.
      • plankton_sb 10y ago
        I took amazon links because: 1. They are most popular links to products on /r/SuggestALaptop and 80%+ mentions of laptops in Reddit comments come from this subreddit (second popular site is Newegg). 2. There is an easy access to product details via Amazon Products API I wanted to ship it fast, so these are the reasons. Affiliate program is a nice addition to it, but even without it I'd still collect laptop mentions this way, as it's the simplest way for me to implement such a tool. >More mentions does not equal better. I totally agree with it, it's only one step in laptop research, but if you don't have time or knowledge to do some more research I think it's quiete safe guess.
• samsnelling 10y ago
  Congratulations on shipping. That's the hardest part. Very clever on Amazon links in reddit being the source of truth. That will obviously leave a lot on the table, but gives you really reliable parsing. Honestly, this is a great site. I'd keep it simple, but you could definitely expand on the styling a little bit. Great work!
  • akerro 10y ago
    I like the styling. Clean, readable, works on hi-res screens and small screens like mobile. What would you want more? 3MB of CSS?
    • onli 10y ago
      Styling the links, giving it a proper header, dividing it more properly into sections, and that will look infinitely better and still work equally well on all screens. The site is a good idea, making it looks like a real project by giving it at least craigslist level of design will take half a day and increase the appeal a lot. And visitors like won't have to check whether the css just did not load before writing a comment like this ;) Op, if you'd like some help with that, shoot me a mail (in profile).
      • CaptSpify 10y ago
        With all respect: I completely disagree. I think this looks great as is. Dividing it up, adding a bunch of extra CSS would make it less usable and readable for me. Of course, that tends to be subjective.
        • JonnieCache 10y ago
          All it would really take IMO is picking a nice colour for the links to give the site some kind of recognisable brand/theme/personality. Perhaps move the other text away from pure black to decrease the contrast slightly.
        • onli 10y ago
• rihegher 10y ago
  I'd like to be able to filter by comment about laptop used with linux. This feature would be great
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    Great idea, especially as I use linux on my laptop as well. Probably some other keywords like gaming, bussiness, study would be usefull as well.
• shortformblog 10y ago
  Good idea, but needs more Apple. I can't imagine they haven't come up at all.
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    I fixed it, there were only 2 Apple "mentions" in my db, so I put them in Other.
  • smonff 10y ago
    It looks a bit weird that there is not more Apple products. These devices seems to be very popular, why is there so few talks about them?
    • burkaman 10y ago
      Because "mentions" just means Amazon links right now. Most people don't buy them on Amazon, and even if you do, you don't need to link to it. You can just say "MacBook Pro" and everyone knows what you're talking about.
      • ProAm 10y ago
        It's also only links from Reddit to Amazon so probably not the best source of good information
• mistermann 10y ago
  How do you know if a comment/link on reddit is positive or negative?
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    You can't. But looking more into laptop mentions I see that comments with links are usually recommendations. Submissions are a little different, they can be negative, positive, neutral. And usually are just questions 'I narrowed it down to 3 laptops: LINKS. What do you think about them?'. So I thought links in comments are positive opinions is fair enough guess.
• vxNsr 10y ago
  I get those type of questions all the time too, and I also feel at a loss sometimes if it's been a while since the last time I went on the hunt. Another place to scrap/pull from might be Slickdeals.com because my friends are looking to get a good deal not just drop a lot of money on a laptop so after finding out what the best model is I end up creating a bunch of filters to notify when that model shows up there.
• dovyski 10y ago
  I would say you did an impressive first step towards your goal of filling up a coding gap. This is spot on regarding utility! Congrats on shipping and implementing such a useful tool :)
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    Thank you :)
• kuro-kuris 10y ago
  Love the clean readable style, great job!
• frozenport 10y ago
  You missed an opportunity to use amazon referral links.
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    No, I didn't :)
• alexmorenodev 10y ago
  A little off topic, but why did you leave poker?
• downandout 10y ago
  Great site. Did you finally crap out at poker or are you just bored with it? I have a theory that most poker "pros" aren't actually beating the game, but rather are making money from sponsorships and selling pieces of themselves at a premium. There are also probably a few that just happen to run lucky for a statistically unlikely period of time - enough to make them think they are "good".
  • licyeus 10y ago
    I had a similar story to OP, only over just 2 years. I likely was in that run-lucky group, but don't have the volume to know for sure. In my experience, there were clearly, provably good players in the top 1-2%, then a bunch of professional grinders (next 5-20%) with the majority of their winnings coming from rakeback (cash back from the house's cut). OP, congrats on shipping. I'd recommend reading a bit about UX and throwing a CSS framework around your work to make it more palatable to general public. :)
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    It's both actually. I've never been a big winner in poker, just made enough to have a good living as a single and with time it was getting more and more difficult to win. Besides that I didn't like the lifestyle anymore and couldn't see myself playing poker in my 50s-60s. It was time to change something. I didn't play single hand since I decided to quit :).
• eriknstr 10y ago
  I think it's a decent site but you should have separate categories for Lenovo ThinkPad and non-ThinkPads because they are very different in terms of quality, the ThinkPads (up to a certain semi-recent point, at least) being very good and the non-ThinkPads not being on the same level.
• dmalvarado 10y ago
  Just curious, have you already made money off of this? Would you mind sharing some stats?
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    $8.60 :), but I hope it's going to change :)
• rplittle 10y ago
  Great idea, and I'm also looking at laptops at the moment so I'm finding this useful. My only feedback would be to add a bit more UI / UX improvements - but I do think the default visited link color is helpful as a user. The ability to search by certain keywords (e.g. Linux, developer) would also be nice. Maybe add some HN mentions as well ;)
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    Thank you for suggestions :)
• danielhooper 10y ago
  I think the UI and design is absolutely superb.
• Dwolb 10y ago
  I believe there's a ton of uncovered value in parsing Reddit threads, especially those centered around buying or discovering things. Subreddits like r/BuyItForLife, r/malefashionadvice, r/rawdenim, and any city subreddit have great suggestions. In fact when I need a new laptop, I'll use Google to search Reddit and change the filter settings to show only recent reviews i.e. ```windows laptop site:reddit.com/r/suggestalaptop```
  • TkTech 10y ago
    It's not really uncovered, it's actively used and exploited. There are thousands of companies doing trend & sentiment analysis that use Reddit as one of the input. I've been paid to do it a couple of times.
  • sean_patel 10y ago
    > I believe there's a ton of uncovered value in parsing Reddit threads, especially those centered around buying or discovering things I'm very interested in doing something like this for an app idea. Can you (or OP or someone else) tell me what the "path of least friction" is, to parse sub-reddits programatically? Is it using their API? Are there PaaS (Parsers as service) available? After that, what would I do? Apply some sort of NLP or AI?
• nqzero 10y ago
  would like to see a sortable matrix with specs, along the lines of how wikipedia does it, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ultrabook_models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ultrabook_models
• yarou 10y ago
  I really like its simplicity. I'm thinking of buying the first laptop on the list, so you can consider me your first conversion. Are you using Amazon affiliate links? I'd hate for you to miss out on potential revenue, as you're offering a decent service.
  • sean_patel 10y ago
    Yes. All the links have OP's affiliate tag => ?tag=laptophits-20
• drvdevd 10y ago
  This is great. Useful. Simple. Sharing it. Thanks! [edit: personally I love the fact there's 0 images of the laptops, etc. Just data...] [edit 2: regarding mobile friendly, I had no problem browsing this on mobile. If you do so, try to do it with CSS only and layout, IMO]
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    Yeah, at the beginning it was looking little strange with no images, but I couldn't see any value for user to put them, so I decided to leave just a text links.
• tent 10y ago
  I hate to bring up styling when it's been covered so much, but I think it is critical you make this mobile friendly. There are a few big reasons for this: - Since it's computer shopping, you'll probably have a fair amount of users accessing this site from a mobile device. - Mobile users are more likely to leave your site if it looks even a little frustrating to use. Google offers several mobile friendly sites that recommend laptops. - Google will not rank your site as high if it does not deem it to be mobile friendly. - You said you are looking for a job as a Rails developer. It's a fair bet that any potential employer will expect mobile-compatible sites. Perhaps you don't really intend to do much front end work, but knowing more about it will benefit you regardless. I understand that what your site offers is very special, and probably much better than hand picked recommendations. Many mobile users simply don't care. They don't want to zoom and pan to select options. Why should they stick around on your site, when they can just hit "back" and choose another result from google? All that said, I really like what your site has going on. It seems quite functional, and the minimal design is a breath of fresh air. There are two other things I would change, but these are just personal preference. Feel free to ignore them: 1. I would like the option to view more items per page. 2. The default, bright blue link color hurts my eyes. Something a little darker would be great. Keep up the good work!
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    Thank you very much for this suggestions. I know it doesn't look good on mobile, will try to fix it.
• sean_patel 10y ago
  > I played poker, ran poker forum and did other poker related things) How did that work out? Like seriously (not trolling). Did you make a lot of money? Always wondered about dabbling in Gambling / online games / casinos. Why do you want back in on software development?
  • Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
    > Why do you want back in on software development? Why play Poker when you can write some AI to do it for you? ;) No, that is against online sites terms, but I do wonder how often it happens. It's certainly not the kind of thing the sites would want to own up to.
  • plankton_sb 10y ago
    I had ups and downs, nothing spectacular but I had nice living. With time it got more difficult to win good money for me, and I stop loving it as much as on the beginning. I want to go back to software development because I want regular pay with no variance :), and as I have a lot of ideas for side projects like this I'd love to work with advanced coders to learn more about web development, good practices, tips and tricks :).