
Show HN: The Honeybadger - jaequery
http://www.gethoneybadger.com
======
dabent
I found this not just to be useful for people researching potential
competitors or partners from a startup perspective, but it's also useful for
someone who's researching a potential employer. It provided a fairly accurate
snapshot of my current employer for example.

It might be nice if Honeybadger could also provide links to sources for
further reading. Basically a "Google it for me" feature that would save a few
more clicks and keystrokes.

If it gets good enough, maybe it could work as a freemium service, should you
decide to go that far. But I'm impressed with what you've put together so far.

~~~
jaequery
Appreciate the comment! I like the concept of that, it goes in the same line
of thought where I was thinking in the lines of "sites like this /
alternatives", can be useful. especially when you are shopping for stuff
online.

~~~
jsavimbi
> also useful for someone who's researching a potential employer

Exactly. Thanks for sharing, will definitely find uses.

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jaequery
It looks like Traffic section will not be available as I'm over the quota
limit from compete.com. Major bummer. Anyone know of any other free
alternatives out there to get traffic stats about sites?

~~~
jaequery
Unfortunately compete.com has a 1,000 reqs/day allowance ... so expect to see
a lot of "Honeybadger don't care" message. I'm going to try to see how much
the api costs and see if I can get the quota removed.

~~~
johns
Email someone there and offer to include their logo and a link in exchange for
a higher limit. API limits are almost always negotiable.

~~~
jaequery
ok just did, hopefully we can work something out. thx :)

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masonhensley
Can someone explain to me the difference between a MVP and a a cool
side/personal project?

Jaequerry, I'm going to install it and check it out. The extension looks cool.
It solves a pain for me, but not one I would go to the trouble of paying for
(sorry). I'm genuinely confused as to what the difference is between all the
free non revenue generating chrome extensions made out of love and one made by
an HNer that are labeled as potential products (which implies revenue
generating to me). Which category are you gearing this toward?

Is your desire to monetize this? If so how? I feel kinda harsh, but there have
been a few Show HN MVP posts lately that have been confusing me regarding the
line between potential revenue generating products and nifty side projects.

Note: I failed at a project hard this month after pouring 8 months of my life
into it... I am probably having one of those days.

~~~
jaequery
I can understand where you are coming from. I feel the same about some MVP
posts on HN time to time.

But if you were to ask me, MVP literally is what it says, a minimum viable
product. Just a product decent enough so that other people can use it or to
check it out.

I know many companies that spends over a year getting ready for MVP, myself
included, and it depends on the product. Some products take a long time to get
the MVP out and it's just the nature of the business.

As for honeybadger, I put this tool up over two weekends. I use it for my
purpose and it's still too early to tell what I can do with it. All I know
right now is that, this tool comes in handy for me even at the current state,
just pulling up crunchbase data site to site. But learning from today, I
realize I am facing an issue in that obtaining the API to get the traffic
stats isn't free (there's a daily quota limit) so there does need to be a way
for me to offset this cost somehow when I upgrade to premium. I just hope it
doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

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tstonez
Not to be the forebearer of "seen this before" type comments but...

* Duedil has a pretty nice Chrome extension (currently companies registered in UK & Ireland only) - <http://www.duedil.com/?share=c99a9be592>

* Some guy at Polaris Ventures (I never heard of them either) built a Chrome extension pulling CB, Quora and LinkedIn - <http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/26/polaris-insights-extension/> [TechCrunch's somewhat superfluous write up]

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rvenugopal
This is quite a time saver and works well most of the time. However, I get
this message for a few sites "Honeybadger could not retrieve any data about
this site or he simply doesn't care."

e.g. sites, <http://www.westelm.com/> <http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/>

~~~
jaequery
Thanks rve. For those sites you mentioned, Honeybadger actually cares a lot,
but the honeybadger only knows how to pull in data from the
crunchbase/compete.com at the moment. It's just an mvp at this stage but
expect to see some more as time progresses.

~~~
andrewcooke
it would be great if you could avoid showing the H in the address bar (or grey
it out) for such sites (i can't see how you do this without hitting your
server on every site, which i imagine you are trying to avoid - but perhaps
you are smarter than me :o)

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Samuel_Michon
Please adjust the kerning of the "Testimonials" heading on your site --
there's a ginormous space between the 'T' and the 'E'.

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lowglow
Sweet. I'm currently looking for a new job, so this will definitely help me
evaluate potential companies. Thanks a ton. :)

Edit : Single gripe to an otherwise very cool project. When I click on HB, and
switch to another tab to look up the names of the people, it closes out HB for
that tab I was on so I have to go through clicking again. Any chance you can
get this to persist and maybe add some google anchors to the entities HB
provides?

~~~
jaequery
I found that Chrome has a pretty nifty thing called "Webkit notification" that
persists across all tabs. Maybe it's something I can try experimenting with
just for this purpose.

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tectonic
Might I suggest adding (my) UnderTheSite.com to display technical details?
Contact me if you want any integration help.

~~~
jaequery
that was definitely on top of my to-do list! is there an API somewhere for it?

~~~
tectonic
Awesome! An API is in the works, but in the meantime I suggest just grabbing
[http://underthesite.com/sites/<domain>.com](http://underthesite.com/sites/<domain>.com)
and DOM parsing the simple markup. Let me know if you have any questions.

~~~
jaequery
thats a really cool site you have there, once i get this implemented, i'll
make sure to backlink it to your site to give credit where it's due :)

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tstonez
On the plus side. I dig the name. Any animal that can chow down a poisonous
snake, pass out, then shake it off like it was just a hangover is just fine by
me - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c81bcjyfn6U> [skip to 2:50]

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adrianwaj
"The icon will be visible when the plugin can act on the current page"

Does the plugin send every new domain or url back to your server? Would you
say there are any privacy or bandwith issues?

note: the current info window on my browser is only about 4 characters wide
when the icon is pressed.

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brandnewlow
Oh man, I was just wanting to have an extension like this myself yesterday.
Installed!

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jrberger
small UI tweak: change funding amount display from e.g. $400,000.00 to $400k

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phankinson
Really cool. You may even get some additional data from AngelList.

~~~
jaequery
just added it, thanks

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jamiequint
This is awesome. I use WebRank SEO for this for a lot of stats but the funding
info I find myself looking up all the time.

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mmahemoff
Looks good. I can't see the video right now but are you looking at
/humans.txt? Might contain useful info.

~~~
jaequery
Never heard of humans.txt before but it sure looks interesting.

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riffraff
interesting, maybe you could steal some ideas from polaris insights[1], such
as showing linkedin informations data

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/golfffpdocdndgkahj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/golfffpdocdndgkahjdgofkbcoiefdmo)

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snampall
Nice. I can see myself using this a lot. Thanks for sharing.

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nchuhoai
I really liked to use Apture for this use case.

~~~
jaequery
Care to elaborate?

~~~
nchuhoai
Apture allowed you to highlight the company for example and would show you the
Crunchbase entry for it

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lindacambrian
Awesome. Great job! It's simple and useful.

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FPSDavid
Any chance for a FF version of this?

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djbender
What's with the piggybacking name?

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MichaelGagnon
Augmented reality for the web

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robk
Every VC associate will be using this in a matter of weeks!

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ibadaxx
Cool stuff! Found a bug though: It recognizes local files (file:///Users/...)
as a website and still displays the Honeybadger icon

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akadien
Honeybadger don't give a shit. It just takes what it wants.

