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Review my Craigslist killer | vaksel: well first things first you need to realize that your audience isn't tech savvy. So your site should work without javascript.Install Noscript in firefox and try your site out. When you do, you'll see that your site is completely unusable if the person doesn't have javascript.(can't change categories)So either remove it, or add a javascript check that shows different content when it doesn't detect javascript |
Review my Craigslist killer | TweedHeads: There are one million sites like yours out there. Half of them scammers. Yours looks like one of them.It has to be clean and professional to give me some confidence.And let me tell you, I really really hate CL. |
Review my Craigslist killer | psyklic: I realize you're targeting small towns and neighborhoods, but I live in LA and travel between numerous zip codes every day (and wouldn't mind stopping in any of them). |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | apu: Alan Kay has been asking this question for a long time now. His "Viewpoints Research Institute" is doing some interesting work in this direction.http://vpri.org/One of their projects is to see if they can build a complete software stack -- from the OS through the GUI and networking/graphics libraries to end-user software -- all in 20,000 lines of code total.They have already made some major progress in the past few years. I highly recommend reading (or skimming) their progress report from last year. In addition to being quite impressive, it also has several cool ideas that I had not seen directly before:http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | watmough: Practical implementations of languages based on lambda calculus and graph-reduction.KRC, SASL, Miranda. Simon Peyton-Jones was a key driver of some of this work, and obviously he's still a major force behind Haskell. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | vlisivka: Inversion Of Control principle and Dependency Injection - 2002-2005. That is single possible answer. |
Review my Craigslist killer | mdasen: How do we provide an incentive for users to post on our site when we have very few buyers browsing the site?That's the big question that none of us probably have an answer to. Like PG said about auctions: "a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work" and like he said about dating sites "if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem."Building a better CL isn't such a hard thing. The hard part is overcoming the momentum that CL has or in your case (since you want to go for people in rural areas) figuring out how to get people using it before there's a reason to use it (i.e. other people using it).So, the chances that your site will succeed aren't wonderful. It's not that it isn't a worthy site, it's that there's a high level of random chance involved in whether a site like this succeeds. Success for a web office suite will be based on features, polish and the like. Success for your site will be (mostly) determined by whether other people use it since the majority of the value will be the user contributed content and not your code.But, in terms of the code:* Better search. CL only matches whole words as far as I can tell and it's just not great. Do it better. Get people to what they want more easily.* Logins. I don't like having to create logins and until you're big don't put that hurdle in front of people. When your site has a million users, they will see the value of an account. Right now, an account is another reason not to use your site. Why should I register for a site with no one on it? However, if I can just post without registering, well, I might. Maybe offer the option of either ala CL. |
Review my Craigslist killer | truebosko: I'm going to be overly harsh on you simply because you called this a Craigslist killer ;-)- Your site does not work with Javascript turned off. If you're trying to get the small towns and such, you need to be careful on this.- At first entrance of your site, it looks like a typical domain parked page with some ads. Make it more clear your site is about small towns and neighbourhoods. Display your top cities up front, or at the very least use some simple ip location to grab where I am and display relevant content.- You want to make me register to contact someone. Not going to happen- All the AJAX you are using is totally unnecessary.- Stop calling yourself a Craigslist killer and focus on a single niche, in a few small towns and do it well. Dominate those towns and that niche, then expand.That, along with everyone elses comments should start you off .. good luck |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | jimfl: XSLT. Hahahahahaha! |
Review my Craigslist killer | cmars232: I could see having to sign up and register with menkle to sell something -- CL does that. But if I have to sign up to contact a seller, I wouldn't use it.Its little things like that that make CL such a winner. CL tells users that it cares more about them than profiting or collecting data from them.Also, there's no listings in central Texas.It does look a little bit (like someone suggested) like a parked domain. I think its the overabundance of whitespace and soft pastel colors. Do something different and unique. I suppose it can even be ugly, just make it a different kind of ugly than Craigslist and domain squatter pages.There are a lot of things people would like to do on Craigslist but can't (your question above). Many of them are unfortunately viewed as illegal or immoral by various cultural groups, municipalities and governments. Perhaps you should host your site offshore and tap into new markets, offer new features like anonymous cash, etc.? I wouldn't do it, but it'd be interesting. |
How could FeedBurner be better? | iamwil: The graphs for "All time" loads slower than before the move to google.com.Often times, I find I just check which of my posts people like reading, and it gives me a tingle bit of feel-good before I close it and go look at something else. However, I often have to do 4 clicks to get there. |
Review my Craigslist killer | RobGR: * Incentives for users to post, i.e. beating the chicken and egg problem:
1) Find a way to offer a payment service, or easily integrate with google checkout, so that the user's "Buy" button is automatically hooked to their GC account and the item description, link to menkle.com item, etc is in the GC transaction email. Don't use PayPal.
2) At least at the start, advertise some posts in other ways. You might buy google adwords that link to specific items, make a single-page poster listing half a dozen good items and have it put up around college campuses and other place, etc.
3) Attract buyers by buying certain items and re-selling them through the site, trying to break even on the transaction and taking a hit on the overhead of finding, dealing with the customer, storing it in the mean time, etc* Best Catagories: I am not sure there is anything in particular you can focus on. If there are catagories that Ebay and Craigslist forbid, that are easy to handle, then you might advertise to buyers / sellers for that catagory, but the only such catagories that come to mind are firearms and used underwear. You can probably do the firearms, as long as you try to only assist in-state transactions, and you prominently warn parties that transactions are archived on the site forever. Maybe you could allow someone with a FFL to pay for a special account where they could do interstate firearms posts. Offering pets for free is another one.* What I wish I could do on Craigslist:
1) Make a good search engine for historical pricing data, so I can see if something is a good deal, and price my own offerings. This is hard on CL because there is no way to tell if a posting ever sold, or if the transaction occurred at the advertised price.
2) Archive all posts in a searchable manner. This is good for pricing, but also for tracking down stolen shit.
3) Don't stop people from selling, trading, or giving away pets.
4) Swap meet - see below
5) Never completely delete posts. You can make them "go gray" YC-style with a few flaggings, but if the poster wants to remove it, or the transaction is done, it should go into some permanent archive. Access to the permanent archive can be sold at a subscription of $10 a year or something if you need to keep out spammers and etc.* What I would change about your site to make it better:
1) Use a simple, no java script, craigslist like or google like interface. Look at plentyoffish if you want something a little more featured than CL. This site (yc) is also good.
2) In addition to searching by zip or region, have a "special region" called "mail order" for people buying or selling through the mail.
3) Offer a way to do an auction. Avoid the sniping crap by extending the auction for an hour every time someone makes another bid (i.e., make it a real auction)Here's a way to try to get jumpstarted: hook up with some small flea market to do a "county wide garage sale". Charge $5 to pile your shit in a parking lot to sell it, free admission, the $5 charge is waived if you post all your stuff for sale on merkle 30 days before the swap meet.I would love to consolidate all my meeting of potential craigslist buyers, and all the driving to check out items that turn out not to be as advertised, into one day and one location. I could tell people I'm interested in the item, and they should bring it to a certain place at a certain time, and then I could do all the haggling and get my business done in one hour and save gas.I like your idea. The most important thing is to make the interface cleaner, don't use ajax or javascript or anything else that a web designer would think was cool. |
Have you raised money from your friends for your startup? | smoody: I did both times. The first time was a big risk because it was my first startup. I don't have advice on the best way to do it, but I can tell you this: If you're anything like me, then taking money from your friends and family will insure you keep the startup going no matter how bad things get. There's almost no greater motivator not to give up than taking money from your friends' savings accounts. I should have given up several times before we were acquired. I had to ask all the companies interested in acquiring us for a small amount of money if they were serious about entering into 'strategic relationship' discussions -- the money was used to keep the power on, the net connected, and to keep my team from being evicted from their apartments. Honestly, I would have shut the company down six months prior had it not been for the fact that some of my best friends had provided capital. It paid off financially, but took a big toll psychologically. |
How could FeedBurner be better? | mixmax: My blog (http://www.maximise.dk/blog) uses blogger, but they can't tell me how many RSS subscribers I have. By asking Google I found out that I could get this number by redirecting my feed to feedburner and back, and let them count it.I never figured out how to do it. There were two problems involved for me:1) I couldn't tell whether it worked or not before I posted something on the blog, thus sending a feed out in the ether.2) I didn't try very hard.I don't know that much about RSS feeds and how they work, and frankly I don't care either. I just want it to work.A straight and simple approach that doesn't require me to have any prior knowledge would work wonders. I think there are many people like me that have a blog, but don't really have the time or expertise to get acquainted with how feeds work and what you can do with them.Btw: I love this:Can statzen handle a very high traffic blog?We think so. Maybe. Hopefully. [write me]Hope you didn't post it anywhere else than HN where people will understand that this is pre-launch :-) |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | arjunb: I hacked up dalampati.com/ihacker/ a while ago, but it's just the consumption-side of HN. |
How could FeedBurner be better? | bjplink: I can think of two things, right off the top of my head, that FeedBurner could do better:#1. Accurately measure subscriptions. That seems obvious but FeedBurner is actually terrible at one of their core features. It's not uncommon for your subscriber count to bottom out to zero from one day to the next as their system fails to work.#2. Find a way to find and eliminate the cheaters. FeedBurner's subscribe-via-email feature is a great way for people to scam the system and raise their subscriber counts. All you have to do is make a bunch of dummy accounts, which is trivial for anyone with any kind of decent hosting package, and then use those accounts to subscribe to your feed.---Subscriber counts are an important metric for both ego and site valuation. The fact that FeedBurner has such a struggle with accurate counts hurts their credibility too much. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | stuki: Don't know how transformational it has been yet, but I feel the idea that all side effecting code needs to be specifically noted by the programmer, a la Haskell, will one day be seen as a watershed.We're only at the very early stages of the parallelisation of hardware, but as that trend intensifies, I can't imagine compiling efficient code without explicit compiler knowledge of what code might side effect. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | cchooper: How about regular expressions as an essential part of a modern, general purpose language (rather than a separate mini-language)? |
What's a good database schema for "Top comments in last 24 hours" | paulgb: SELECT * FROM comments WHERE posted_at > SUBDATE(NOW(), INTERVAL 1 DAY) ORDER BY karma DESC LIMIT 50;My SQL might be a bit rusty, but you get the gist of it. Why not do that?Your question is a little confusing without knowing the schema you are using already. Do you want the top comments of each hour? |
What's a good database schema for "Top comments in last 24 hours" | russell: I would add a time stamp for the last update and a total column. Update the total and timestamp every time you update a bucket. Zero any buckets between the saved timestamp and now. To get your list select comments updated in the last 24 hours and ordered by total. You will have some rows with artificially high counts, because of numbers older than 24 hours. Adjust the totals for the row and keep reading until you have the number you need. If you cache the list, you dont even need to do the select except on restart. Email me if you want clarification. |
What's a good database schema for "Top comments in last 24 hours" | aristus: Um, very. 25 columns?Just record each commentid and vote like so: create table vote_history (
commentid int,
ts int
primary_key (commentid, ts)
);
Where ts is a unix timestamp. Now you can get rankings for any time slice:select commentid, count(commentid) as points from leaderboard where ts > <TIMESTAMP> group by commentid order by points desc;That gives you to-the-second resolution, which is probably overkill. So instead you can try this: create table votes_per_hour (
commentid int,
hourid int,
score smallint,
primary_key (commentid, hourid)
);
Where the value of hourid is the unix timestamp divided by 3600. |
Is it essential to have personal websites? | alabut: Yes, utterly and absolutely.If you're a designer: personal websites are a sandbox where you can experiment with new designs, see what works for what kind of content or app, try out latest trends (if you're like that) or buck them with your own style.There's a book on the subject by Joe Shepter called Personal Web Sites: Top Designers Push the Boundaries with Experimental Design and Graphics.Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/cfqz67If you're a coder: your site can give you a place to tinker with building basic projects like a blogging engine, picture portfolio, a useful app or etc. And if you blog out your process and share what you've learned, you can slowly build relationships with others and some googlejuice for your efforts.These are all things you need to try on your personal corner of the internet that you can call home and that has your stamp on it - being able to customize a theme on someone else's site isn't enough. |
Is it essential to have personal websites? | russell: It's useful to have one, because prospective clients will go to your domain to see what your work looks like. If you have a domain but no web site you get questions. If you have a portfolio, then it is not really a requirement, but it does add to the image of professionalism. If I were you I would go for simple but elegant with links to your blog and sites that you have done. |
Is it essential to have personal websites? | unalone: Essential? No. You get a web site to fulfill a need. If you have no need for a personal site, you don't need one and shouldn't have to get it.That said: I use my personal site to organize the work I've done, and that's something that no other web site does well, so for me (and very possibly for you, if you do lots of work), the organization makes it worth it. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | cpr: What's funny is that even all the latest trace-compiling (V8, TraceMonkey) and JIT-ting (lots of others) implementation technologies for dynamic languages date from the early 80s (the Schiffman-Deutsch JITting Smalltalk compiler, specifically).Though there was also a fair bit of Self optimization work going on at the same time--don't know if Alan's and Peter's work was the very first of its kind. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | DaniFong: I would say the programming aesthetics really do count for something. This has influenced Python, Mathematica, Arc, Fortress, and the list goes on. Yet it's fairly new. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | bestes: Aside from the issues mentioned (#1 up/down vote arrows too small and too close together, #2 screen is too wide, which makes the text too small, #3 links are useless without copy and paste unless they are live or super easy to remember):
#5 When you click into the comment or reply box, the iPhone goes into a super-slow mode when trying to type. I found that if I can pinch and make it smaller, then everything works just fine. But, it's hard to do quickly because you have to grab space outside of the actual comment box.
#6 Flash. I hate clicking on a link to be taken to some lame Flash-based site. Some kind of warning or flag or something so I don't waste my time. This would be nice on the desktop too, but it's quick enough that it isn't a big deal.
#7 The "home" page link is pretty hard to hit all the time.
#8 The comments link is often hard to hit (without hitting the story right below).I do about 80% of my HNing on the iPhone, so any improvements would be huge. Thanks for looking into this, Paul! |
Have you raised money from your friends for your startup? | russell: Dont ask for what they cant give. $1000 is reasonable. If you ask for large amounts and fail, you could be sued and you will loose because you will have violated securities laws.If I were you, I would draft a short letter stating what you were going to do with the money and state that the venture is highly speculative and likely to fail. This doesnt protect you but sets the right level of expectations. I think you need to state what the expected results are. I suggest a non-recourse personal loan with an understanding that this turns into stock. I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant. If you want legal advice see one of them. |
How could FeedBurner be better? | aj: I recently quit using Feedburner. Why? While it was a pretty good service, it got bought over by Google.Personally, I'm planning to get rid of Google in my life. Entirely. And Feedburner was just the first step |
HN useability problem: multiple visits to comments clumsy | qhoxie: Yes, and it has been discussed many times. Some of the proposed work-arounds are quite good.Check http://searchyc.com |
HN useability problem: multiple visits to comments clumsy | jpendry: I agree it would be nice to see new items, but I would be afraid of losing the simplicity of the design for the feature. |
Review my Craigslist killer | unalone: You have very low information density. I go to Craigslist and see an incredible amount of data instantly. On your site I get very few things at once. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | jderick: Model checking. |
Review my Craigslist killer | algul: Take a look at the Craigslist message boards. You'll find all sorts of customer complaints about how Craigslist has been taken over by spam, in all sorts of areas, including the personals. Offer your site in those cities where the "overtaken by spam" complaints are the loudest and you'll provide a real alternative. There are lots of international destinations as well where you won't find Craigslist. |
What's a good database schema for "Top comments in last 24 hours" | bprater: Sometimes denormalizing a database is okay. But when you get into programmatically mucking with CSV data in a field, you probably have pushed things a bit too far. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | breily: The only improvement I can think of is to set the pre areas to wrap. Right now they completely ruin browsing on the iphone, as they make the screen way too wide and this makes the font way too small. |
Perfect language to use for hopefully widespread Unix prog? | cperciva: C has worked pretty well for me. |
Perfect language to use for hopefully widespread Unix prog? | SwellJoe: If the project is larger than trivial: Perl, unless you need an X-based GUI.Shell has the problem of being inconsistent across several platforms.../bin/sh on Linux systems (except Ubuntu) is BASH, but on FreeBSD, Solaris, and others it is a classic shell. If you are extremely careful, you can write in very standard sh, but it's a pretty challenging language to build anything bigger than 100 lines or so (I built our installer in sh, and I've regretted it ever since it grew up to about 300 lines...it's now at 1143 lines, and I'm in the midst of translating it to Perl, where it will be dramatically shorter and more powerful.Anyway, Perl is pervasive, and has been backward compatible for about a hundred million years. I have code that I wrote 11 years ago that runs unmodified on modern Perl 5.10. This means that if you target, say, Perl 5.8, you can expect your program to run on any system that has pretty much any Perl version less than 7 years old. (If you go back too far, you lose a lot of really nice features that make programming in Perl enjoyable. Unicode didn't get perfected in Perl until 5.8.2, I think, maybe 5.8.4, so we consider that our baseline and what we target.)Python, while it's very nice and also widely available on many platforms, is not particularly backward compatible. If you target Python 2.4 or 2.6, it will not run on Python 2.2. If you shoot for a least common denominator, you will still find there are some incompatibilities. I worked on several Python projects a few years ago during the transition from 1.5 to 2.0, and that code required serious changes...then several minor changes from 2.0->2.2->2.4. I wasn't around on those projects when 2.6 came along, nor 3.0, but I get the feeling that both required some changes and brought some incompatibilities. While this may lead to a cleaner language, it means you have numerous concerns about cross-platform compatibility, and your testing requirements go way up. My Perl testing environment consists of a Perl 5.8.mumble installation, and nothing more. If it runs there, I know it'll run on every version from then up to 5.10.x, which spans about seven years worth of Perl versions.Binaries are practically impossible for this task. People expect native packages, which are extremely time-consuming to build and test. Linux distros break backward compatibility in their libraries regularly, so you'll have to ship statically linked binaries. On platforms that don't break backward compatibility, like Solaris, you still have to assume a pretty minimal environment, since those systems are quite anemic on the library front, so again, you're shipping statically linked binaries. And, the moment you get a customer that wants it for some whacked out platform like HP/UX on Itanium, you'll be kicking yourself...and you will get customers running bizarre systems, if you call yourself cross-platform.If you need an X-based GUI, Tcl/Tk might still be the best choice (five or ten years ago it was the only sane choice for such a creature). Perl has good bindings for Tk and WxWindows, but neither is likely to be available. Python has Tk bindings out of the box, so if you hate Tcl, and like Python, and need a GUI, this might push Python into the lead. The biggest problem with Tcl is that it's just not very active or growing. Perl and Python, on the other hand, have very vibrant communities. All are pretty good languages, though, in their own way...though I never really got the hang of Tcl whereas Perl and Python seemed pretty natural.To pile on the anecdotal evidence, my co-founders project, Webmin, is probably one of the most cross-platform pieces of software in existence...supporting at least 150 different operating systems and versions (the last time I counted in 2003, it added up to about 150 variants, not including architectures, and probably 30 or 40 new variants have been added since then). It's about 350,000 lines of Perl, plus a touch of sh for the installer.Of course, this assumes all things being equal. Do you hate Perl? If so, it's probably not worth working in it just for compatibility (though I suspect you don't know modern Perl very well, if you truly hate it). You can just tell your customers to install Python, if they don't have it, or upgrade if they do. I find the two languages roughly equal in terms of how much I like working with them, and how productive I can be.The other cool choices, like Ruby, Lua, Lisp, Haskell, all have the problem of being unavailable, by default, on most UNIX systems...and so you'd have to support your users in installing the language, as well as your app. |
Perfect language to use for hopefully widespread Unix prog? | davidw: Depends what it needs to do, of course. Can you tell us a bit more? |
Review my Startup, MotoListr.com | tontoa4: Clickable link / http://motolistr.com |
How do I protect my start-up from law suits? (USA) | raquo: I think you are to pay lawyers to figure out what disclaimers you must make, etc, if you are in this kind of business, otherwise is just gambling. |
Review my Craigslist killer | MaysonL: One possible method for building user bases - one zipcoed at a time: signs - see the thread on SomeLittleTownsingles.com a while back. |
Review my Startup, MotoListr.com | satyajit: Not much happening here, but a very simple interface.
Clear, easy to navigate. Though little basic.
Sending email page has funny question "Are you human?" - isn't that too easy to crack? You don't even take 'y' as an answer, only obvious ans is 'yes'!From biz perspective - how do you plan to monetize? By $9 listing? What would this provide that Craigslist doesn't? Sorry to sound -ve, but I just wonder... because I am dealing with similar questions about monetization in my startup, though in a diff space.
All the best! |
How do you find work? | davidw: Open source projects are a way to keep yourself visible, although of course that's not an immediate way to find work. Ask friends, lower your prices... it's probably tough with the current economy. |
How do you find work? | rdrimmie: Are there any relevant local meetups or foo/bar/startup/etc camps? Any sort of gathering where there'll be other local people you can meet and talk to? |
How do you find work? | tontoa4: Did you try Scriptlance.com, HireACoder.com, or any of those type of sites?I know there are some cheap people on there, but those that use that kind of site often know not to hire the least expensive.Do you have any ideas of your own?Take this time to create your own startup. I have a ton of ideas that are self-sustaining if you're interested. |
How do you find work? | jacquesm: Hm. My work finds me most of the time, but every now and then I'm running on 'idle' for a month or more and I start to look around. One of the things I've found over the years that it pays big time to keep in contact with all your business buddies. Let them know you exist and that you still remember them and every now and then a job will pop out of that.Networking is a thing that I seriously hate, you won't find me on cocktail parties / friday get togethers, I live far away from my customer base but an occasional email does wonders in staying attached and maintaining mindshare.It's a bit like a pipeline, jobs are always pushed in on one end and out the other when they're done, if you neglect the 'in' queue while focusing on a job you'll see a longer gap by the time that you're ready for the next one. That's a tricky balancing act when you are a single freelancer, maybe teaming up with a few other people with similar or complimentary skills would help you to find work easier, and if too many people say 'yes' at the same time you can always divide the load.Also, the economy really is down, and lots of tech projects are on hold or being scrapped right now, this is not the best time to be looking for work. |
How do you find work? | nolanbrown23: Put a some info in your profile here; you never know who needs help with their startup.Have you tried some of the Gig boards that are out there like 37Signals and Joel on Software? I've had good luck with those before trying to find a way to make some spending money. |
How do you find work? | palish: I found my first job by going to my highschool job fair and begging a guy from Boeing to let me work as a programmer. He told me I was too young (just turned 17 at the time) but since I was "highly motivated" he would call some friends on my behalf. He referred me to a local business that develops frimware. After I explained that I had been developing game development skills for years using C++, they said I'd probably be a better fit at Ageia (a St Louis company that developed physics middleware called PhysX, and was recently acquired by nVidia).I thought, "How am I going to get the attention of the executives? I'm 17, there's no way I can just submit a resume and get hired." So I scoured the internet for any Ageia phone numbers I could find. I called one of them, and a guy who spoke Chinese picked up. "Um... hello?" and he hung up. But I noticed a pattern in all of the numbers I found. They all started with the same 5 digits (for example, 555-1212, 555-1286, etc). So I changed the last two digits to 01 and tried, and nobody picked up. Then I tried 02 and got one of the top execs on the phone. I convinced him to let me show him some of my gamedev demos the following day. After that, he told me that he was impressed, but to prove my skills, I had two weeks to create a demo using PhysX. Two weeks later, I had created three simple but effective demos.He seemed pretty impressed at that point, and even told me "you definitely have a job here". Then I didn't. He couldn't get special permission to hire a 17-year old, because I couldn't sign the NDA. But he asked John Ratcliff (who worked at Ageia at the time) if he knew of any local companies I'd be a good fit at. He did, and it turned out that there was a gamedev studio about 30 minutes away from where I lived. I was really excited, and they invited me to take their programmer test.The guy who handed me the test said "I hope you know your C++"... he wasn't exactly confident in me, apparently. (I don't blame him, most candidates suck.) But I took the test and got a decent score. Up next was the interview phase, where around 8 programmers came in and sat at a large table in the conference room. I presented my demos to them (including my three previous Ageia demos).I dropped out of high school and worked there as an unpaid intern for about 8 months, at which point I was hired and worked there for three years. Also, the time between the job fair and my first day on the job was several months, so the whole process took a lot of effort.So my advice is, demos are key; talk to the decision-makers, not the middlemen; and demonstrate your skill in every other possible way (but mostly shut up and let other people talk, because you don't know 1/10th of what you think you know).Also, be genuinely interested in other people. Almost everyone likes the idea of being a mentor. |
How could FeedBurner be better? | ComputerGuru: It's perfect if only it would work as advertised.Or rather, it was perfect until Google bought it and then it tanked. |
Review my startup, mobify.me | sam_in_nyc: This is really cool! I hope everything works out for you guys.I hope you guys got the "mobify.it" domain |
Review my Startup, MotoListr.com | sam_in_nyc: This is an idea that requires reaching a "tipping point" in order for it to work. It could work, but you're going to need a solid strategy for getting people to adopt this over, say, craigslist or one of 20 other classified sites.Being "incredibly simple," at this point, is probably not enough to get enough people using it.Best of luck |
How do you find work? | iuguy: Think about the things that you've done. Think about the sectors, the solutions, the requirements.Find similar things. If you can re-use what you've already done you're halfway to a profitable solution, but it lets you bid lower than the next guy.Find your niche. Exploit it. Reuse it. Recycle. The possibilities are endless. |
How do you find work? | mikeyur: As simple as it sounds, be social. There are countless times where I've been looking for work and a simple twitter message has resulted in business friends pointing me in the direction of their friends, and so on.Use twitter search to check out who is looking for a RoR or PHP dev. This is how I get most of my SEO work - there's usually a business asking for someone and I just follow and send them a quick message. |
How do you find work? | rubing: Start offering free weekly classes on programming at your local starbucks. Make it something real general like homepages for small business. Or facebook profiles, crap like that. Then if somebody wants more substantial private help or consultation you can charge them for it. |
How do you find work? | joshsharp: There was a similar thread not long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445776And my comment from that thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445836 |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | charlesju: Just toss a view into your code that uses iUi |
How do you find work? | JacobAldridge: I'm...asking everyone I know if they know anyone in needGood, but: Are you clear on exactly what your ideal client looks like? If you're not, then this question won't be clear. If the question is vague or general, it's easier to answer 'no' than to think about it.You'll get more responses with a clear question like "Know any business owners with less than 20 staff who want to use their technology better?" than asking the vague "Know anyone who needs RoR and PHP work?"(Obviously, you know how to phrase this for your service offering better than I.)Also, don't just ask if they know anyone in need. Ask who they know that may know anyone in need - this will open more doors, and prevent dead ends in your contact base. |
How do you find work? | menloparkbum: You're doing the right things. It's just very bad right now for freelance work. I have an artsy-fartsy startup but do heinous "enterprise" style Rails contracting to make money. My contract was just terminated, because I was too expensive.
I think I was replaced by two others who were charging a lot less than me. So, I guess if you want to keep working you'll probably have to lower your rate or else get lucky.That sounded a bit pessimistic.. I guess for practical tips, Twitter seems to be a new venue for finding work that actually seems fruitful. |
When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages? | tlb: One place where big new ideas are badly needed is in robotics. No existing language is a good match for programming continuous, dynamic movement. I've been working on a bunch of techniques to make it easier, but they're not ready for general use yet. |
How do you find work? | sanswork: If it's an option for you relocate. I'm desperate for PHP/Ruby developers in Sydney and I know when I was last in Toronto it was the same way. We just can't find decent developers that aren't already in a great job. Even if moving isn't an option try finding cities with real shortages and looking if you can telecommute? |
How do you find work? | ejs: I find this very difficult as well (although I am just getting started), but I can only really blame myself for not being more social (as mentioned here). It is just much easier to code up more stuff or work on a new project then it is to really market ones self.
I also worry that I focus too much on learning different things and should instead focus on a just one or two specialties.I am glad I came across this thread, very good information and advice to really keep motivated. Thanks again for the great advice HN. |
How do you find work? | amjith: Write tutorials on your blog. Don't hesitate to share your knowledge. Even if you don't have great writing skills, people are attracted to quality content and tips & tricks. Put a link on your blog that you are available for hire. Publicize your blog through the right medium (reddit, digg, dzone).There are plenty of wall in the hole restaurants that don't have a good website. Offer to build them one for just $100, it doesn't take more than 3 hours to finish a website for a small restaurant. Some of the mom and pop restaurants don't even know how to host websites, so offer them to do all the hosting and maintaining for them in exchange for free food every week (or an extra fee of say $100). Put a webcounter and keep track of who is visiting and try to publicize it in Yelp, local.Yahoo, local.Google etc. Expand your offer to small businesses (clothing stores or boutiques) and show them your portfolio. Don't just try to impress them with the webdesign showcase. Try to show them how a website for a restaurant had brought more customers to them. Show them some numbers.Start building something on the side and try to make it popular. It doesn't have to be the next big thing. It can be a small news aggregator or a recipe collection site with some user interaction. Keep your skill set sharp and use it to market yourself. If you truly made a new product that people love you won't even need to find work, you'll be working for yourself. |
How do you find work? | shuleatt: For one thing it is not obvious how to contact you. Your blog has one ambiguous link for email but it doesn't even load. Maybe obvious, but you need to make it simple for someone to reach you.Nevertheless I am actually looking for RoR help. Hit me up: sam dot huleatt @ yahoo dot com |
How do you find work? | jjguy: You need to find the thing that distinguishes you from your peers. My story is undoubtedly different than yours, but I'll share parts; perhaps it can help you.I went to college on a military scholarship. After four years of school, I spent 6 years in the military. Three critical things came from those years: contacts, credibility and experience.After a couple tours, the military's plans for my career and my own ideas didn't sync up. I left and used a contact to land a nice job doing exactly what I wished. I floated my resume around, but serious offers only came from those I knew. I got other offers, but they were in a different class.I've been with the same organization for several years. It's awesome. I get calls occasionally from those old contacts, asking if I'm ready to move on yet. I'm not, but when I do, I'm unlikely to "hit the market." I'll make a few calls, express some interest and find a home.I'll say this: your technical skills alone will not land you the _awesome_ work. There are plenty who (claim to) have the same skills; in the world we live in, it's very difficult to distinguish between us and charlatans without experience. For me, the military provided the contacts and touch of reassurance a hiring manager needs to make a decision.You need to find your distinguisher. If you don't have one, make it. The other comments here provide plenty of ideas how you can do so. |
Help me make HN work well on the iPhone | umjames: Pardon my ignorance, but what's specifically wrong with the HN site on the iPhone? I've been accessing it since the first gen iPhone came out, and I haven't noticed any problems. |
How do you find work? | petercooper: There are lots of people looking for freelance Rails developers. You need to engage with the community more somehow to ferret them out. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | aneesh: My doctor. Or my hospital. Or pretty much anyone in healthcare. |
Is it essential to have personal websites? | chris11: I would suggest that. I was applying for a job at my college doing programming work for a website and database. One of the questions was whether or not I had a personal website, which I didn't. I did not end up with that job.A website will make you more professional. Let's say I come across your blog. If I read more than a few entries, it would probably be that I was interested in your writing. Since your writing sounds technical, your blog might make me interested in having you work for me (assuming that I was in a position where I was managing people). Well, if your blog was on a website, I would be able to find out a lot more about you. And things like a resume and a project portfolio might convince me that I wanted to contact you.So basically my point is that a website related to your work and career will help you market yourself and build relationships with other people. Not everyone will be looking for programmers, but it at least gets your name out to more people. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | freejoe76: My employer, The Denver Post. My bank. My library. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | lux: Most public services ought to have them. Not just APIs, but even simple stuff like an RSS or ical export for garbage/recycling days so I can throw it in my calendar. It's about usable data formats too.Great question, by the way :) |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | mtrimpe: Albert Heijn, or any other supermarket. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | tptacek: My municipal government. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | mwerty: imdb |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | vaksel: traffic lights system |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | liangzan: dropbox |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | natrius: Most gyms make you swipe a card to get in, so they have a pretty good idea of how many people are in the gym at a given time. If they anonymized that data and made it public, I could go when I know it's not going to be crowded. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | arjunb: interface Energy {
getUsage();
setPowerState(outletID, powerState);
...
}I wonder if we could create a developer community oriented around defining interface standards we'd like to consume. |
Have you raised money from your friends for your startup? | RobGR: You will have to research the law yourself, but there is a limit to how many people can invest in a business before you cross a line into "selling securities" and have to formally be a real corporation with stock. Not that you can't do it, you just want to be aware of this and do it correctly. I think the Nolo books on incorporation should have the information. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | sam_in_nyc: Not too many. If they don't I just use Dapper, and then Yahoo Pipes if needed.Amazing "hack" about Yahoo Pipes... they block usage based on an IP accessing a pipe. Yet, you can make that pipe access the "singleton" version of itself many times. So let's say you want to pull up Delicious tags of 10,000 URLs (something I did to generate very nice marketing data), you could access Delicious yourself 10,000 times (and get blocked very soon) or you can access a pipe (which accesses Delicious) 10,000 times... or you can access a pipe 100 times, each time sending it 100 URLs, and that pipe will just loop through and do it (Yahoo will count 1 access against you rather than 100). Since there are loads of pipes servers, and it's a semi-trusted source (in this case very trusted, since Yahoo owns Delicious), not all the Yahoo pipes servers will get blocked by Delicious. Actually, at the rate I was pinging them, some of them did actually get blocked :)Another interesting experiment: Make a Dapper App which contacts Yahoo Pipes for an RSS. Make that Yahoo Pipe access the same Dapper App. Fun! |
How do you find work? | Trainwreck: Have you tried oDesk or Elance type of venues? There are also Rent-a-coder type sites as well. Good Luck! Send me your resume in case I hear of anything. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | gibsonf1: I really wish gmail had an API! |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | gnaritas: Google analytics, it'd be really nice to have access to all that data. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | noblethrasher: Academic Application Suites like Blackboard and the University IT system - but that's mostly for allowing better interoperability between organizations on campus.My wireless telephone service provider. I would especially like to be able to query and download my voicemails.Better ODB (On-Board Diagnostics) API. Every new car should include a webserver and either an ethernet or wireless NIC (and an easy way for the owner to explicitly enable/disable it).Actually, every high end household item should have an API (which I suppose is what Java was initially going to do). |
How do I protect my start-up from law suits? (USA) | newy: Incorporate.Seriously :) You basically detailed one of the primary reasons why folks incorporate. Not quite following your analysis of how that is "putting the cart ahead of the house"... |
iPhone app development on Windows via Apple Remote Desktop on a mac mini? | wmf: So now you can't afford an iPhone or a KVM? You're cutting way too many corners here. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | psadauskas: Congress |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | rokhayakebe: InfoUSA. |
iPhone app development on Windows via Apple Remote Desktop on a mac mini? | wallflower: Yes, it's possible. I'm assuming you don't have the MacMini in the same building (otherwise, just plug a monitor, mouse, and keyboard in). The co-location service below does what I'm assuming you'll be doing with your friend's MacMini.http://www.macminicolo.net/macmini.html |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | andreyf: Elevator. I want my iPhone to tell it when I enter the building, and that I'm going to the 6th floor. Ditto for when I'm going back. |
iPhone app development on Windows via Apple Remote Desktop on a mac mini? | menloparkbum: You can do it, but it will suck. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | shalmanese: Hacker news doesn't have an API yet... |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | petercooper: eBuyer.com - they're like the NewEgg of the UK. They have some great bargains from time to time but you always have to visit their site to dig around for them.. they have no Twitter feed, no blog, no API for their products, no affiliate program.. it sucks because otherwise they're the best place to buy computer parts/gadgets/techie gear here.A more general answer is.. ALL e-commerce sites. Preferably with a standardish API so that you can do stuff like put together comparison engines easily without scraping HTML. |
Programming internationally? | davidw: It's not all that easy - you need to find a job before you go. One way might be to just go to your target country and look for a job. If you find one, they can help you do the paperwork. You'll probably have to go back to the US at that point to get a real working visa. It's a bunch of bureaucratic BS, but c'est la vie of the average immigrant (the US treats its own immigrants in a similarly shoddy way). |
How do you find work? | bkbleikamp: Network like your life depended on it (maybe it does?). A few good contacts are worth more than any job board or anything else.You need to find other good networkers. Once you find them, help them before they help you. Prove to them that recommending you will make them look good, too. |
Programming internationally? | menloparkbum: I've worked in Japan. It is easy if you already have a job offer. It's probably impossible if you don't. Getting an apartment there is painful because Japanese won't rent to foreigners without a Japanese person signing the lease. I think it might even be a law? So you either need a Japanese co-signer or you have to rent a place owned by the mob. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | timtrueman: Power grid data would be nice, maybe then devices could start knowing when it best to power down or charge. |
Programming internationally? | sanswork: It honestly depends where you are and where you are going. I'm from Canada originally. When I moved to England I had to go to the embassy and fill out a form and show some birth certificates(I was claiming ancestry). I'm now in Australia on a working holiday visa. To get that I filled out a form on a web page and got an email a few hours later with my visa number.In both cases I found a job when I got there. |
Which company do you wish had a developer API? | pietro: Rail, bus and airline companies. It would be useful to query not only the timetable, but also any delays or changes, and of course booking via an API would be awesome. |
iPhone app development on Windows via Apple Remote Desktop on a mac mini? | alnayyir: It won't support OpenGL, and it will suck. |
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