5 ms·
Ask HN: please review SmartPeople
Hi everyone,
I made a website that allows you to 'follow' any hacker-newser. I think such a service is needed, because this kind of great website is 'comment' centered.
The principle: you get an e-mail with the comment of your idol everytime he comments on HN (with a slight delay because I don't want to request the site too much). This will personally help me a lot to follow patio11 :)
Thanks for reviewing SmartPeople, and If in the near future you are still using it, you'll find out that I'm adding reddit and some other boards you may belong to.
Please allow a 30 min/one hour delay between the comment crawlings.
Site : http://nasr.ath.cx
Edit: my english...
- ashleyw 16y agoClickable: http://nasr.ath.cx http://nasr.ath.cx
- zaveri 16y agohttp://nasr.ath.cx http://nasr.ath.cx
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- die_sekte 16y agoChrome 5.0.375.125 on Mac Snow Leopard: Some kind of layout error. The right part doesn't float properly or something. I'm not sure what causes this.
- jordanmessina 16y agoIs this what you're talking about? The layout is messed up for me in my manage area: http://twitpic.com/2cjzay http://twitpic.com/2cjzay
- ritonlajoie 16y agoThanks. I'm sorry the pictures seems to have been deleted. I don't have a mac, but will try to install Safari asap. edit: It's back on twitpic! yay Ok ! Will have a look
- andymoe 16y agoSort of a creepy idea. But no more so than Facebook or twitter I guess. I long for the days when people, myself included, hid their real contact info and used a pseudonym. edit: Also, the pencil's pixilation is distracting and I think you should get rid of the alpha effect that goes away when hovering over the logo. (Safari 5.0.1)
- hugh3 16y agoExcept that at least on facebook or twitter you know when someone is following you, and have the option to block them.
- andymoe 16y agoOn the other hand I don't think you should have any expectation of privacy in "public places" on the internet. That's just foolish.
- limmeau 16y agoAnd the service is just a convenient abbreviation for having http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=andymoe http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=andymoe permanently open in a separate browser window.
- ScotterC 16y agoAgreed. I recently decided to go all out and open on the Internet and embrace all that social networking has including some of the inherent creepiness. So far I've received little to zero odd encounters / phone calls / emails. It's kind of relieving actually but certainly blurs the line of where my Internet persona ends and my real privacy starts.
- hugh3 16y agoOf course not, in the same way that you don't expect privacy when you're walking down the street. On the other hand, if you find that someone is following you whenever you walk down the street, well, that's a little creepy.
- 16y ago
- rick_2047 16y agoWell this is good but what I would really like (and was just thinking about since yesterday) would be the ability to follow a conversation. Some time on an article, the a particular thread starts to become much more interesting than the story itself. At those times (and it happens very often) I wish HN would allow me to "watch" that thread. Sure I can bookmark the link of the thread, but its just a pain to maintain that. And also I usually forget to open it again
- vyrotek 16y agoAnd on top of this, I would love the ability to know which comments were added since the last time I viewed the thread. Sometimes posts like 'Review my app' get a lot of feedback and spawn multiple discussions, but I can't easily tell which were new comments from the last time I looked. I can only see that the 'comment count' increased.
- johnwatson11218 16y agoSeems like I watched a demo of google wave online and it had stuff just like this. I thought that google wave would have been a perfect replacement for the threaded discussion model that we have here. These discussions seemed too short lived for my taste. I know that many people come up with insightful observations after they think about an issue for a day or two. By then the story is off the front page and what is the use in making the comment?
- rick_2047 16y agoThese discussions seemed too short lived for my taste. I know that many people come up with insightful observations after they think about an issue for a day or two. By then the story is off the front page and what is the use in making the comment? We really need to solve this. People have a tendency to comment only on things which are on front page. This is in part the fault of being karma centric and also the sheer volume of traffic.
- 16y ago
- harscoat 16y agoDid you think of a directory of HNers (with their about) we could follow?
- spooneybarger 16y agosort of like: http://hnhackers.com/ http://hnhackers.com/ ?
- ritonlajoie 16y agoYou can use http://news.ycombinator.com/lists http://news.ycombinator.com/lists which is a good start to get high quality user lists.
- kashif 16y agoWell, I was designing something similar to make it easier to track submissions by people who I consider a good source of interesting articles. Unfortunately, what time of day you make a submission has a significant impact on whether it gets to the home page and from there into my reading diet. I don't enjoy all the content on the home page, and would rather read some submissions that have only a few votes but were made by members who are interested in the same subject as me. So, a feature request, please add a way to follow submissions by specific people on the web not on email - an alternate home page, much like a twitter stream.
- ritonlajoie 16y agothanks for commenting. well,I'll trynto fit that in my todolist!thanks for the idea.
- hotmind 16y agoConsider integrating Slashdot into your service. I love Slashdot, and the comments there are the best anywhere.
- ritonlajoie 16y agosure,I plan to have it.I am an avid reader of SDot!have you registered?that way you would receive email updates on improvepents!
- hotmind 16y agoI am registered :)
- itistoday 16y agoNice idea! I noticed though that you're including the user's password in the confirmation email. This isn't recommended for security reasons (as it's easy to intercept, and users often use the same password for multiple services). Also, I hope you're storing the salted hash of the password on your server (as opposed to the actual password).
- ritonlajoie 16y agothanks! i use drupal,the security is quitengood.in the db,a hash is stored,the only clear pass is in the mail.i ll try to change that,you are right.
- KeithMajhor 16y agoIt'd be really cool if you brought in the content of articles. That way you could follow real people outside of the Hacker News community (assuming that the content was posted on Hacker News). Then if a public figure like say, John Resig, made a post to his website I could get that in my feed as well.
- ritonlajoie 16y agoThanks, it's in my todo list :) Will keep you updated !
- tnorthcutt 16y agoJust saw this, posted in a duplicate thread (why's there a duplicate...?) Reposting here: Nice idea. Haven't registered, so forgive the ignorant question, but are daily digest emails an option? If not, I'd suggest making them one. Also, suggested users to follow would be neat, similar to Amazon's "other people who bought x also bought y".
- ritonlajoie 16y agothanks for sharing you thougts.all of that is on my todo list.the thing is,i made that this afternoon in 2 hours..i didnt expect such a success ;)
- ulvund 16y agoChrome @ Mac http://i.imgur.com/TqZJR.png http://i.imgur.com/TqZJR.png
- ritonlajoie 16y agothanks ! Which browser are you using ? (Safari ?)
- akkartik 16y agoGreat idea. I tried something similar a couple of years ago: http://blog.hystry.com/post/20252078/my-favorite-commenters-on-hacker-news http://blog.hystry.com/post/20252078/my-favorite-commenters-... But it wasn't designed from the ground up for following people.
- ecaron 16y agoGiven any thought to putting this on GitHub? I'd love to see OpenID support rolled in, but people posting "I want this" could put their money where their mouth is - by adding it themselves! PS: Did we just talk recently about LinkUp.com?
- troygoode 16y agoGreat idea, I would contribute (or try - I have no actual Drupal experience). I'd love to see a sorted list of the top N followed people. I imagine pg would be #1, but it very well could be patio11. Seeing #3-10 would be very interesting.
- ritonlajoie 16y agoWell, I can tell you patio11 and pg are on the top list, but I don't have many users right now !
- kyenneti 16y agoGreat idea. Do you mind asking this - How are you managing your email delivery ? Are you using any email delivery networks or managing yourself. Congratulations on the launch.
- ritonlajoie 16y agoThanks !! I'm using a gmail account for now.
- samratjp 16y agoInstead of email, I'd rather get growl or notifo like messages.
- ritonlajoie 16y agoHmm I never heard about those. Will have a look. I'm thinking of adding twitter. Say, you have a twitter account. You enter your twitter name in your profile info on PeopleSmart. You'll then receive notifications on Twitter (also, or only, as you wish). What do you think ?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- samratjp 16y agoI'd rather not on twitter, that's just a waste of your twitter API calls limit and besides, I'd want this to be as non-intrusive as possible. Growl is an OSX app with which you can get notifications from all your apps in one place. It's very flexible as in the API is quite good. As about notifo, it's the same concept as growl, but for the iPhone - and I dare you to find an easier to use API than notifo's (though I have no affiliation with them, but they've solved a very big problem of mine :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- chbarts 16y agoI'd sooner we port one more feature form Reddit: The ability to know when someone has replied to one of your comments. This will make it much easier to carry on discussions, the main interest of this site, even when they're attached to old articles that most members have forgotten about. Otherwise you might as well be speaking into an empty room after a couple days, regardless of how enriching the conversation would have been.
- ritonlajoie 16y agoI added the ability to follow a thread ! Thanks for testing !