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Show HN: I made an HN for the financial industry
- nicklovescode 13y agoI'm not a member of your target audience, but I can't imagine BoredBanker is a very motivating name for people to start interesting discussions.
- Jagat 13y agoBanker News
- GrahamsNumber 13y agoWhile that is no doubt a valid name, I find it extremely amusing for some reason edit: Probably too much time spent on hn
- chebucto 13y agoIt is close in pronunciation to 'wanker news'. Maybe 'Broker News' or 'Teller News'?
- king_magic 13y agoI actually love this as a name. I was originally going to say "just stick with Financier News", but Banker News is perfect. I actually like the idea of this site. I spent a few years consulting in financial services and always found the world fascinating. I could see myself browsing it on a regular basis.
- drippingfist 13y ago5?
- king_magic 13y agoI'm not sure what you're asking?
- tdeangelis 13y agoThank you sir. Banker News is a great name! So simple, yet I hadn't though about it
- ddeck 13y agoAnother vote for Banker News. Three syllables vs six. That, and Financier News might attract pastry chefs in addition to your target audience... As a member of your target audience, I'd suggest focusing on the discussion side since that's where you likely to be able to add value. Finance professionals already have content professionally curated and ranked by the various paid news services - Reuters, Bloomberg TOP, READ (ranked by views) etc., but there is no discussion there.
- samstave 13y agoBankstering
- agumonkey 13y agoBackerNews
- xerophtye 13y agoThat could work for investors...
- taude 13y agoNeeds more Silicon Valley ring to it....maybe BankrNooz.io. (I joke).
- robzyb 13y agoI am a member of his target audience, BoredBanker is not a very motivating name for me to start interesting discussions. And thats a big shame, because I was recently lamenting the lack of Slashdot/reddit/HN for the finance industry.
- phyalow 13y agoI'm also a member of your target audience. Change the name to something else from "Financier News" && "Bored Banker". Site looks good - have bookmarked.
- gk1 13y agoIt's the first thing I noticed about the site, and this was my thought exactly. I hope OP reconsiders.
- chaz 13y agoNor is it a good name for word-of-mouth. "Hey, I saw an interesting article on BoredBanker."
- kumarski 13y agoThe creator needs to buy boardbanker.com as well.
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoWhy? Who owns hackernews.com?
- GrahamsNumber 13y agoboard banker, as in a typo. I think he's implying people will misspell it a lot.
- rschmitty 13y agoI feel bad but I sometimes forget ycombinator and google hacker news when I'm away from a device I own/have HN bookmarked. Kinda like how you forget your wife's phone number.. I know I should know it but I always click her name in the address book :)
- tdeangelis 13y agoThat is true: I was going for a funny and short name that's easy to remember, but I realize now how boredBanker comes across as lazy and not conducive to interesting discussions. EDIT: I am currently considering changing the domain (and the title)
- whyleyc 13y agoDon't ! BoredBanker is an excellent name - memorable, amusing & not overly long. There's already enough dry, grey, "serious" content associated with this industry - having an offbeat and slightly subversive name will be part of your appeal. People who tell you they won't use the site because of the name are being disingenuous - if the quality of news & discussion is good enough they'll come.
- petercooper 13y agoExactly, Windows "Vista", the "Xbox", the "Wii", the "iPad".. and more were all ridiculed as stupid names early on but all became serious brands. You couldn't move online for jokes about the "iPad" being a female hygiene product for a while around the launch..
- garybizzle 13y agoBored banker here. I think it's a great name. It shows that even though a lot of people look at the finance world as high-energy and lucrative, in reality it's a bunch of overly-confident young guns looking at spreadsheets all day. I felt like the domain was calling my name..
- evoloution 13y agoBoredom brings me to HN and boredom makes me wanna learn new things. I think it is a great name. Plus broad audience, I have only met a few bankers that are not bored with their jobs... Has links to some nice articles btw
- Alex_MJ 13y agoIf hackernews was called "bored programmer" I would be reminded I was bored every time I visited. From a marketing standpoint, sounding cool and compelling is a thousand times more important than being literal and accurate. My first reactions to: "Hacker News" = "Whoa, hackers! This is what hackers read!" "Bored hacker" = "What kind of hacker is bored? I want to go where the cool up-to-date hackers are." "Bored programmer" = "Man, fuck those guys."
- yen223 13y agoWell, one of the biggest financial websites out there is called Fool.com...
- smsm42 13y agoI think name matters less than you think. Otherwise sites with names like "google", "yahoo" or "reddit" could never make it. If it's good, they will come, whatever the name is (within reason, of course).
- arielserafini 13y agoBut those names you cited are all easy to pronounce! Bored Banker is a lot longer and "stiffer" in my opinion.
- rexreed 13y agoInteresting. If I may ask, what is the business model? Or is there one? If not, what's the motivation?
- tdeangelis 13y agoThere is none. I have made this website because I wanted something like Hacker News for finance and economics and there wasn't one.
- kumarski 13y agoHow long/how much does it cost to run this? I'm curious. Well done with it. Other than a name change, I think this is very useful.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- billmalarky 13y agoHosting something like this would be very cheap. A $40 a month VPS could handle it for a while and if it outgrows that then it will be worth something.
- intended 13y agoTrue, but thats also because your target market has dynamics very different from your average hacker and even your early adopters behave differently. It always comes down to community.
- Sparky_twoshoes 13y agoHey! Awesome job. Can you please tell me how I can do this, albeit for the natural resource and conservation sector (which really needs disrupting)? Is there some off-the-peg software that I can use?
- djoldman 13y agohttps://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews
- tdeangelis 13y agoexactly
- meowface 13y agoAs someone who doesn't know LISP or any LISP-based languages, the source is surprisingly easy to read.
- loceng 13y agoPlease let me know once you get this up. :)
- sgdesign 13y agoYou might want to check out Telescope: http://telesc.pe http://telesc.pe
- t0 13y agoI'm glad you installed the actual HN lisp source rather than using telescope. This layout is so much better.
- krrishd 13y agoI think its a matter of CSS customization that can make telescope pretty useful as well, I don't think it should be discounted.
- clamprecht 13y agoI like it. If you'd like to add a full-text search feature, Searchify.com would be happy to power it for free, to get you started. It's a pretty simple search API, and it gives you lots of control over ranking results (you can combine upvotes with text relevancy, for example). I'm the founder, feel free to contact me chris at searchify.com.
- Jamsii 13y agoI can't believe the level of detail that went into making this site look similar to HN. Even the login page looks the same.
- brandonhsiao 13y agoIt's the same source.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoAwesome. It seems like there are very few comments. Have you considered advertising on economics forums? Grad students tend to like posting on sites like this, an HN has a very good format.
- tdeangelis 13y agoThe scarcity of comments is explained away by the fact that the website has been made public only very recently. But thank you, yours is a good suggestion
- austinz 13y agoThis is cool, and I hope it catches on. Despite its flaws and quirks I think HN has something nice going on in terms of the overall submission and discussion quality, and I don't think it should be restricted to just 'hackers' (or startup founders, software engineers, enthusiasts, etc). Just like how there's a whole ecosystem of Stack Exchange sites for a variety of interests, maybe there should be more HN-like sites as well, fulfilling a cultural role that (e.g.) subreddits alone can't. Plus, the software (minus some of the ranking algorithms) is out there already for anyone to use.
- edraferi 13y agoStack Exchange is an interesting example. they have a complex nomination and incubation system in place to figure out what sub sites to add. this ensures that they only sites when is a proven community to jump in. They have a very mature software stack that relies on a complex point system to automate curation. HN is much more of a one-man show
- BorisMelnik 13y agolove love love the name. not sure why the domain name (which is the one I like so much) does not align with the title tag?
- iheartmemcache 13y agoI highly suggest you curate the quality of your posts, users and comments. Perhaps, even at the expense of potential users. I think reddit is a prime example of how badly quality can deteriorate. I know there's no metric for 'good' vs 'bad' comments we can appeal to but I think we can all understand that all the 'true' subreddits[1] denote the fact that once you get far enough on the adoption curve[2] quality will start to suffer as I contend occurred on slashdot, followed by digg, subsequently reddit, and now HN. It will deteriorate into Eternal September[3] -- filled with one line quips and memes. I don't want to make any value judgments on this specific community but I'd like to say I miss the edw519s. Good examples of communities that have managed to maintain quality well are /r/askhistorians and lobste.rs. Ask Historians managed to do it by ruling with an iron fist. Lobste.rs by heavily curating which members are able to join. Another interesting example of retaining long term quality is visible in private torrent sites- many of which employ both an invite system and strict rules. Finally, what made Hacker News so good ~4 years ago was it was originally populated by people within the industry with decades of experience. You yourself said this was for the financial industry-- trying to pick up early adopters here makes about as much sense as trying to pick up adopters for a medical industry community on an economist forum. [1] /r/trueaskreddit, /r/truereddit/, /r/truerreddit [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- Brakenshire 13y agoMetafilter is another example of a website which has maintained its character. They ask for a $5 lifetime membership fee.
- Dirlewanger 13y agoRetained its character at the expense of being stuck in the mid 2000s. For a modern aggregator they have a shit layout to be honest. A site that gets as much traffic as they do and they still have flat comments?? Inexcusable.
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- GigabyteCoin 13y agoI'm curiuos what pg thinks about this or if he cares at all.
- nhsoccer7 13y agoThis is great.
- shubhamjain 13y agoI am working on a StackExchange style of subject oriented news communities with Digg like content curation but I am having trouble thinking what will be substantially new in my idea that will differentiate it from (sub)reddit.
- brandonhsiao 13y agoI love how the the HTML source generated by news.arc sets it apart. It has no boilerplate. It's literally: HTML tag, news.css, favicon, upvote JavaScript, title, humongous table.
- stevenj 13y agoAs someone who's tried starting a new HN for business news (forlue.com, now defunct) after New Mogul left us I found the most difficult thing was getting a niche community to consistently submit stories. If you know of a small group of people (ideally in the financial/money industry) who'd be interested in this, get them to use it amongst each other to trade stories during the day. I still believe there's a market for this. It just needs to start in the hands of small group of people who'll constantly use it throughout the day to communicate with each other about business-related stories. If you get people to consistently submit good stories, readers will follow, and then some time after, albeit slowly, commenters.
- turar 13y agoThe working solution (proven by Reddit) is to create a ton of fake accounts and post stories from them, and have them talk to each other in comments.
- darkrabbi 13y agohave a source on this?
- steveklabnik 13y agohttp://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of...
- darkrabbi 13y agothanks, interesting stuff!
- edraferi 13y agoNo chicken? No egg? use bots!
- rismay 13y agoThis has got to be the best trolling ever.
- locusm 13y agoWhy continue the HN way of commenting, once a post gets past 50 comments its impossible to follow where new content is landing. Maybe look at Discourse or something similar...
- THISISIMPORTANT 13y agoYou're absolutely right. I think this way of commenting is just awful.
- yuxt 13y agoThere is also NH for agriculture, in case anyone is interested: http://news.agfunder.com/ http://news.agfunder.com/
- allochthon 13y agoThe height of the banner at the top is just a little off. ;)
- tdeangelis 13y agoOh that's done on purpose :) I always thought that the HN banner was a little too small, so I decided to make mine a little larger
- frenchman_in_ny 13y agoMember of your target audience here; some others have done similar styled sites (up voting, but no discussion). Check out [0]. Might actually be run by someone who follow HN. [0] http://www.streeteye.com/ http://www.streeteye.com/
- bodhisattva1 13y ago+1 streeteye.com is pretty awesome.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ballpeen 13y agoI think you have something here. Like others have mentioned, find a way to filter out the crap posts.
- pgroves 13y agoSomething similar that didn't make it (shut down in May 2013): http://quant.ly/ http://quant.ly/
- ddeck 13y agoFor those interested in this area, I find The Whole Street's "Quant Mashup" reasonable. It aggregates blog posts from a broad group of quant oriented blogs: http://www.thewholestreet.com/ http://www.thewholestreet.com/ For a more academic bent, Quantivity on Twitter provides curated academic quant research: https://twitter.com/quantivity https://twitter.com/quantivity
- flavio87 13y agoDo you have ideas about why it failed?
- chollida1 13y agoWow, I'm deeply involved in the industry and I've never heard of the site. A quick poll of 20 people on Bloomberg chat indicate that no one else had ever heard of it. No wonder it didn't do well:) If your target audience has never heard of you, your going to have a hard time getting going:)
- interstitial 13y agoSo it's like HN with more bitcoin?
- MrBlue 13y agoBingo!
- VMG 13y agoIt would be great if it would completely run on bitcoin microtransactions. Charge 0.01 mBTC per comment (to limit spam). Charge 0.01 mBTC per vote, pay a portion to the commenter. Integrate tipping.
- mcherm 13y agoThat is a REALLY interesting idea. You'd need to add something to encourage highly valued contributions. Like perhaps the comments are paid for with points (purchasable for money) but the submitter of a story gets "paid" 25% of the points spent on comments unless another person submitted the same story within 6 hours (in which case no one gets paid). Posters of comments also can get back the cost of their comment if it receives more than N upvotes (tweak N until it works).
- pseut 13y agofucking jesus, I hope it's the opposite
- corwinstephen 13y agoAt the expense of a few rep points, this site is going to fail not because it isn't a good idea, but because finance people are just so frequently miserable human beings.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- zerop 13y agoThere are couple of HNs for other industries as well, I remember... can anyone list them??
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoKudos to everyone doing a "HN for this" but I feel like there is something else about "HN" that makes it "HN" than just the simple UI. So, I dunno ...
- xixixao 13y agoNo, there is everything about HN rather than the horrible UI. If you start new HN, go ahead and fix at least that. Make it a responsive site (among other things). I am sure the financial sector would appreciate that more than the 90s feel of this website.
- Houshalter 13y agoI like the minimalist UI, but a lot of the things seem broken. Reply doesn't work if you take too long to make a comment, the "next page" button often doesn't work, the reply button sometimes doesn't appear, the upvote button disapears when you press it so you can't take it back, there is no inbox, no way to collapse threads, etc.
- rfnslyr 13y agoI wonder if people would be interested in an HN style site, but one that is fantastically designed, and scales to all sorts of media (phones, tablets, desktop). I think that's what it needs. You can't simply download the news.yc, make a new colour header, give it a name, and then set it off into the net. I think you need to distinguish yourself and really just use news.yc as a base to build on.
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- eigenvalue 13y agoIt would be really interesting to see a follow-up post showing the number of sign-ups you got in each 5-minute (or whatever) period subsequent to posting this on HN. I think it's a great idea and long overdue.
- rshm 13y agoDoes not have an option to flag a submission. First thing i missed.
- ecesena 13y agoInteresting, it's only based on user submissions, or do you also import from sources? We have something similar at Theneeds, in the Money area [1]. I'd happy to talk more if you'd like. [1] http://www.theneeds.com/money http://www.theneeds.com/money
- Montareo 13y agoSince when are banks an industry ?. Ah ok, they produce debt, that sounds industrious.
- vegasbrianc 13y agoI don't understand how copying a website almost feature by feature can make it to the front page of HN
- steveklabnik 13y agoHacker News is open source; I'd imagine they're just literally running the same code.
- joelthelion 13y agoboredbanker.com is not a very good name considering a large portion of your target audience will likely browse the site from work.
- ooooak 13y agoopen source it op
- rms 13y agoI still miss nickb's former www.newmogul.com. Bring it back, pg!
- selmnoo 13y agoSince it was operated by nickb, why're you asking pg to bring it back? And, whatever did happen to nickb? Is anyone still in contact with him? Is he doing okay?
- DustinCalim 13y agoAre you going to open source it?
- jackgavigan 13y agoThe HN source is already available: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/lib/how-to-run-news https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/lib/how-to...
- jheriko 13y agosurprised to see zero working class backlash or jokes just because its for bankers. i'm sure that says something about the 'class' of people who frequent HN... good work though. whether or not its useful it works and its finished, and those two things are worth a lot. :)
- jackgavigan 13y agoFor context: I'm sat on a trading floor in the City of London right now. I had a similar idea (inspired by Slashdot) about ten years ago but, like so many of my great ideas (e.g. time travel, teleportation), I never got around to implementing it. A site like BoredBanker.com will almost certainly be targeted by wannabes, trolls and banker-haters. If you don't keep them off the site, real bankers will be turned off by the low SNR and abuse. If it were my site, I would put in place a mechanism to filter them out at registration. People registering with the site would be required to supply an email address. Anyone who could provide a Bloomberg account (i.e. an email address @bloomberg.net) or an email address at a domain on a whitelist of known financial institutions (e.g. morganstanley.com, citi.com, gs.com, etc.) would automatically be accepted (and potentially given downvoting rights straight away) and so would anyone they invited/recommended/vouched for. Anyone else would either (a) go into a queue for approval or (b) be given "on probation" access. If (a), someone would need to review the applications (presumably by checking the domain name of the applicant's email address (and, if appropriate, adding that domain to the whitelist) and/or reviewing their LinkedIn profile. If (b), there could be a feedback mechanism that would automatically hellban the user if they received enough downvotes (or were flagged by a moderator), or promote them to "approved" if they received enough upvotes. You could also allow "approved" users to hide comments from "on probation" users (similar to how Slashdot used to - may still do, for all I know - allow you to set a minimum karma limit). That way, you make it really easy for legitimate finance professionals to join, while putting hurdles in place to make life difficult for the trolls and Occupy-ists. And you also generate a bit of scarcity-desirability through the invite mechanism. Of course, as soon as it becomes successful/popular, you'll probably find that the site gets flagged for filtering out by the web proxy filters the banks use. :-/
- stevejalim 13y agoRelated to this, take a look at how lobste.rs handles new members: you either need an invitation from an existing one (and your behaviour is associated with that person in the public tree of membership referrals) or you go into a member-visible queue until someone who knows you and is a member can invite you personally.
- 13y ago
- VMG 13y agoPlease make it an API. Much easier to create custom clients for different platforms.
- talhof8 13y agoI think the idea is very interesting. Though, unlike the HN community - which is mostly tech audience - I don't think that using HN's design is a good idea. Programmers really don't care about the design as long as it serves the purpose well and is simple. I think you need to customize the design a little bit. Overall, it really is a great idea. Goodluck!
- oskarth 13y agoSmall suggestion of the bikeshed variety: I think you should strongly consider to make the top bar height the same as the one on HN. I believe there are design reasons for why it is the that specific height - symmetry, contrast, margins, leading your focus etc. That is: if you are not a professional designer and have a good reason to make it otherwise, leave the top bar as it is.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rodolphoarruda 13y agoNice. Let me zoom in 200% like I do it in HN. Why make headlines so tiny?
- rodolphoarruda 13y agoI can't edit parent comment. So I'm posting an image here to illustrate the difference: http://imgur.com/e3iCOoz http://imgur.com/e3iCOoz
- pof33 13y agorobbingwanker.com would have been a better name.
- foobarqux 13y agoIs this targeted at bankers? Why are people going to leave wallstreetoasis for this?
- manmal 13y agoI made this HN reader app for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly.hn https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly... Source code is here: https://github.com/manmal/hn-android https://github.com/manmal/hn-android Would you be ok with me porting it to BoredBanker? It seems that you copied HN's DOM pretty closely, so that might be a technical no-brainer?
- tdeangelis 13y agoCertainly! go ahead
- Nicholas_C 13y agoNot a fan of the name. Bankers are only a small portion of finance folks, and I don't want my boss to see me browsing a site with connotations that I'm "bored". Why not just "Finance News"? Great execution though. I wanted to do something like this, but now I'm glad I didn't because you've done a bang-up job. As a finance person I will definitely contribute.
- my3681 13y agoJust published an app to the Google Play store for your site. It's called Banker News and is available here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattyork.bankernews https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattyork.b... It is also open sourced here: https://github.com/MatthewYork/BankerNews https://github.com/MatthewYork/BankerNews An iOS version will be available soon. Great work! I love finance, so I hope the site does well.
- taskstrike 13y agoI feel out of the HN clones, designer news is the best because it didn't copy HN. Love to see better design on boredbanker. Also, is it illegal to copy the HN design?
- nick2021 13y agoIt's so nice how the site is so much quicker than Hacker News. My usual routine is to fire up HN and then go make coffee so that by the time I'm done it's ready. Then when I'm viewing comments or articles I ALWAYS open in a new tab so that I don't have to wait again. I have an N64 that I think I could convert into a web server that could run this site faster using a windows emulator that emulates linux that emulates windows which is running IIS.
- kedonkhal 13y agoI found the website really useful and registered. Just wanted to say thanks.
- dnc 13y agoNot first time that somebody tries to make quant news: http://quant.ly/ http://quant.ly/ . Wish yours site has more luck that this one.
- arcfan 13y agoNice work! I made one for Cryptocurrency fans! http://www.cryptocurrencylive.com/ http://www.cryptocurrencylive.com/