the new york times has had something similar to this for years.
you can highlight words and it will show a "question box" that you can click to see more information about the word, google search, etc. it's displayed inline so you don't need to navigate away.
these are pretty sub-par questions that were probably written by a marketing person: "But completely opting out of the platform won’t allow you to play any games and other third party features on the site?"
and this is one of the first times that i have ever seen 0 comments on a NYT post, especially on a topic this controversial. am i just missing something? where are all the comments? (when i tried to post mine, i got a message that all comments are pre-moderated.)
I'm in Maine right now. Here's a warning message from chatroulettemap.com that I see when I visit:
"We'd like to advise maine.edu to stop using
student's names in their hostnames.
We've decided, at least for the time being, to
hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable
information was found in some entries."
Get in touch with your school newspaper (if you have one.) I wrote for mine throughout college and I know that editors are ALWAYS looking for articles from people like you. Trust me, the campus wants your voice, you just have to be proactive about it.
it really disappoints me to see users with very high karma levels making such obscene, unnecessary and completely non-hacker-news-esque comments. you are hurting this community: please stop.
I really didn't have anything negative to say about the Craigslist post - we've all seen this sort of naivety before. Most of us have even been there.
But what really bothered me personally is that this was posted in the Boca Raton Craigslist area. If you can afford to live in Boca (median home price: 420k, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bpretire/2006/snapsh...), you can afford to at least provide some form of compensation (beer? pizza? caffeine? hell, just take me out to dinner and I'll help draw up some cost estimates.)
Maybe I'm generalizing based on an area (and who has spare cash around nowadays anyway), but I'm so tired of people with plenty in the bank asking me to develop an idea for free.
If you have a "considerable history in marketing," you should know better.
I live in a place with a median house value of over $500k (north san francisco bay), yet I am not swimming in money. The key is that I don't own a house. The monthly payments on a 30 year mortgage would be more than my monthly after tax income. I rent an apartment.
Living in a rich area doesn't make you rich. Perhaps he lives in Boca Raton because that is where his last job was or where his wife works. Maybe his mortgage payments are so high that he can't afford to buy you beer.
I live outside of Boston, where the median home price is way north of 500k. And living in a rich area doesn't make you rich - I can attest to that personally, too: I rent, I eat ramen.
But I know that if someone made this proposition to me, in the Boston area, I'd expect something in return. I don't think asking for a meal or some beer is out of line. It's more symbolic than anything.
If you're not in the position to buy me a dinner in exchange for a few hours of my services, then I really wonder if you're in the position to start a company. No offense intended - but if you are about to go the VC route, then the VC will be asking you to make a lot bigger personal bets than a simple dinner.
But anyway, this is all speculation, and HackerNews isn't a place for speculation. I'd go back and edit my comment, but the edit window is expired. C'est la vie, mod me down accordingly.
do you have any links to those "well-worn rules of thumb"?
i'm looking at building a "purchase!" button, that's obviously quite important in the whole scheme of my site, so i'd really appreciate anyone pointing me in the right direction...
Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com has lots of good, test-discovered guidelines in general. Though not specifically aimed at 'download'/'purchase now' buttons, all of the "Top 10 Mistakes" articles are worth reviewing. You could start at:
Jakob's "Law of Web User Experience", which is "users spend most of their time on other websites", is also a good guide. Study and mimic the best practices of other more popular sites that use the same sort of 'download'/'purchase'/'add to cart' button. They've done the testing and trained the users; novelty usually confuses.
you can highlight words and it will show a "question box" that you can click to see more information about the word, google search, etc. it's displayed inline so you don't need to navigate away.
it's a nice idea, but it's terribly annoying.