andreavaccari's comments

andreavaccari | 5 years ago | on: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

No matter your position on this, please take a moment to watch the excellent response by Charles Hoskinson.

andreavaccari | 13 years ago | on: Sugar : Diabetes = Cigarettes : Cancer

The key finding of a new article in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links sugar to diabetes like cigarettes to cancer: “Each 150 kilocalories/person/day increase in total calorie availability related to a 0.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence (not significant), whereas a 150 kilocalories/person/day rise in sugar availability (one 12-ounce can of soft drink) was associated with a 1.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence.”

andreavaccari | 14 years ago | on: Glancee: A Nice-Guy Ambient Social Location App For Normal People

This is something a few people asked for. What would you like to use it for? Besides matching people to people, you can match people to products (if properly tagged). Do you see other uses for something like this?

andreavaccari | 14 years ago | on: Modern Web Applications are Here

We are a startup called Glancee. We build a mobile app (iphone version + android version) that finds people in your area with friends or interests in common with you. The apps are native objective-c and java apps, and the backend is a mix of python, mondodb, and a bit of erlang.

A month ago we decided to build a facebook app to reach users that don't have a smartphone. We chose not to change one bit of code in the backend, and we were able to build the web app in 3 weeks with backbone, jquery, and websocket-js.

You can try it here: http://apps.facebook.com/glancee

The app is just one 40-line html page, the rest is javascript (and templates embedded in js). You never refresh the page when clicking a link, which gives you the feeling of using something as fast and robust as gmail.

CSS files and JS files are compressed with requirejs before being deployed, so to load the page you need three requests (plus images). Right now our biggest bottleneck is the facebook api, which is tremendously slow.

andreavaccari | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: I am wasting so much of time, what can I do?

I just stumbled upon this interesting article on HBR: How to become a great finisher.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/06/how_to_become_a_great_finish...

Rather than thinking in terms of how much time you do or should work, set your objectives and make sure to finish what you started.

andreavaccari | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: Glancee, a mobile app to meet people with common friends and interests

Hey all,

We're a small group of hackers from Italy, Canada, and Ukraine. We just moved to San Francisco to launch our startup Glancee.

Glancee is a mobile app that makes it fun and safe to meet people with common friends and similar interests that are near you.

We'd love for you to try it and let us know what you think. Thanks!

Note: we ask you to signup with facebook. We need this to make sure your account is authentic and to populate your interests.

andreavaccari | 14 years ago | on: Jig, the first product from Tasty Labs

It's great to see Jig finally launching to the public. I had a first look in June, when I used it together with 200 others foo campers to coordinate the trip to Sebastopol. Then I used it again when I moved from Chicago to San Fran to find a new accommodation.

I don't see Jig as a Q&A site because needs, unlike questions, tend to be personal in nature and change (or even die out) over time. The same need could be posted by multiple people in different locations, or by the same person over time, and all could get different answers.

With that said, Jig will have to fight the only known certainty of any online community: as your user base grows, your quality declines. I can already notice the difference in both the needs and the answers posted now from those of just few weeks ago. Let's hope the Jig team has a strategy in mind to keep the trolls at the gates.

In any case, great job!