

Get credit for reading Hacker News - cmwslw
http://getfireplug.com/
Fireplug analyzes what you read and awards credit for what you learn.
Compete with friends, build credibility, establish your online reputation.
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yock
Get credit? Credit for what? Forgive me, I don't mean to be harsh, but is the
only purpose to obtain bragging rights over which articles you've read on the
Internet? I'm struggling to find a reason why I'd want to use this.

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jlarocco
I kinda see what they're trying to do. In theory, if a person reads a bunch of
articles on a topic, over time they should become an "expert" on that topic.

It seems they're pushing it a little far, to be honest. I'd say "expertise" is
_way_ too strong of a word for arbitrary knowledge gained by reading news on
the internet. At the very least there should be some kind of testing
component. I can click through every link on HN, but that doesn't mean I've
learned, or even read, anything.

On the other hand, reading through their blog, perhaps the whole thing is a
clever troll poking fun of the triviality of most "startups."

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ttruett
Expertise is definitely too strong of a word, especially for where we are at
right now... we need to refine our copy.

Our goal is to eventually build in some testing mechanisms but right now we
are primarily focused on testing out our tagging accuracy. We will probably
roll out some form of time-on-site metric soon that will modify the tag's
relevancy score to determine how much credit you should actually earn. In
addition we've played around with some word-relationship stuff and it actually
wouldn't be that hard for us to roll out some form of auto-generated quizzes.
Again, a lot of this is very new and we are open to any feedback...

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BinaryAcid
It looks amazing and the idea is really thoughtful. Great work guys! Just
another piece of the comming reputation economy.

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jhought3
This Guy gets it! Thanks for the support

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UberMouse
Why is this Chrome extension unpacked. What? They make users download a zip
file, extract the zip file, go into Chrome developer mode in the extensions
tab and load an unpackaged extension. They could have done that themselves and
then just have users drag the .crx file onto the extensions tab.

Am I missing something?

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JoshTriplett
Chrome will refuse to load .crx files from random websites, but it'll trust
.crx packages loaded from the local filesystem in developer mode, because it
assumes you're developing them. So, providing a .crx in a .zip and
recommending the use of developer mode suggests that they want to work around
Chrome's normal protections against loading Chrome extensions from random
sites. Doing so rather than just uploading it to the Chrome Web Store seems
very questionable.

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UberMouse
Yea but Chrome will accept any .crx file if you drop it onto the extensions
tab. So it would in effect be the same thing, just a bit nicer for the user
since they don't have to extract a zip and then browse to where it was
extracted and load the extension.

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ttruett
Good to know, that will be a lot easier and I will fix that right now.

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brianbreslin
Will these credits be transferable? Will ADVERTISERS be able to buy credit
pushes (someone requests something"interesting" and they push it to relevant
users?)? Can these credits be used for purchases?

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jhought3
All good questions. I'll try to help - ADVERTISERS would likely desire that
functionality, but we don't plan to monetize that way.. ancillary to
qualifying humans for knowledge we also gain the ability to show the most
relevant articles per subject (a timeless piece on Startup financing by Fred
Wilson in "Venture Capital Models" or a post on Startups from Paul Graham in
"bootstrapping"). All older posts that largely get covered up in the world of
'real time' that we have become so accustomed to in this age of twitter and
google. Thus advertisers could... target by keyword/s in subjects/topics (like
google ads). Credits per se aren't a currency for trade. They can only be
acquired through reading/learning.

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xijuan
I would like to try...But I only use android..

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badboy78
looks like they have a Chrome extension for desktop

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flipcoder
android plz :(

I really like the idea tho :D

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btrautsc
thanks - in due time!

