It's neither. It's hopefully good content which people get to decide by voting up, or voting down.
You don't game HN by writing link bait, because articles without substance are rarely voted up. You just write what you hope is great content, and HN is one of the places you will seed it if you think it is appropriate for a tech audience.
Oh, well it's a good thing this has any content that couldn't be had by just reading the Wikipedia article it links.
I guess it's novel in that the headline says something completely different from the article. Do you have a separate editor for your headlines, or is that excuse only for newspapers?
In attempting the rewrite, the developer who covers the 40% of the existing tech would be a critical component of the new build....so probably not viable to do both.
Yes I agree the details are important, but initially avoiding mentioning the tech means I hopefully got some less biased answers. I found that valuable.
The backend of the app is PHP, and it already has an API. The front end is Adobe Flex. The rewrite would involve dumping Flex for a HTML/JS approach.
We initially went with flex because our app is quite rich in interactivity, but we could do the same thing in JS now.
It's not an enterprise play, but it is B2B. We could cross-train, but hiring more tech's for Flex would be expensive and hard to do (not a lot around). It is a SAAS model, so my customers don't care at all what tech I use (unless they are a tech firm, at which point they screw up their nose at Flex). But they don't mater, as they are not our target market.
Essentially, changing to JS would double our speed of dev in the last 8 months of the runway. But, it may take longer to do than we expect and we may cut off too much runway to make it worth our while.
It may be better to stick with Flex to the point of cash flow positive....then rewrite.
You don't game HN by writing link bait, because articles without substance are rarely voted up. You just write what you hope is great content, and HN is one of the places you will seed it if you think it is appropriate for a tech audience.