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When to approach the press for coverage? | swombat: Go to press now, but one important note: go to press with a "Story".A Story is something the press will be able to tell. Something that captures the imagination. Prepare that Story in advance of going to that journalist, so that it comes out naturally while you talk to her. It should be inspiring, positive, human, not arrogant, something people can relate to. |
I just bought a Mac, where do I go to learn Cocoa? | yan: Don't forget #macdev on irc.freenode.orgAlso, this is a great rundown: http://andymatuschak.org/articles/2007/09/09/getting-started... |
Review my newest site | ejs: Clickable: http://dealwaiter.com |
Review my newest site | thomaspaine: You should be able to submit a query without having to enter your email address first. This was a deal breaker for me, because I don't like giving out my email address to websites I know nothing about. At least show me that by giving you my email address and potentially getting spammed I'm going to get something cool out of it. |
any suggestion for DNS providers? (need to outsource my bind setup) | moomerman: We've been using dnsmadeeasy for over a year now and have had great service from them. On features vs cost they win hands down. Had a quote from UltraDNS once and it was more than the total cost of our entire hosting infrastructure combined! |
Technical Patents | pclark: what area is your startup focussing on? |
Technical Patents | jacquesm: Did your previous patents bring you enough to make it worth your while ?Personally I'm against all patents, especially software patents. If a competitor would come up with a copy of your service would you sue based on your belief that they must infringe your patent ? Would you consent to being sued in case it turns out you are infringing someone elses software patent ?Don't you think the copyright on your software provides you with adequate protection ?I understand there may be a financial incentive to do this, and there is the angle 'if I won't do it someone else may do it', but especially in the field of software I think that patents are best avoided. Personally I've given every so called patent holder the finger (there was that outfit that claimed I was infringing on their patent to send video over the internet, then another one that claimed I was infringing on a patent to rank video based on popularity and some more that I've forgotten about). In all of those cases the so called 'patent holder' (I think patent troll is more appropriate) called it a day when I refused to budge. |
Technical Patents | teej: > I have a new startup nearly ready to goHow about spending that time getting your startup from "nearly there" to launched? Your patent won't mean squat if you don't have a good product. |
Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles? | patio11: Where do you go to find those non-technology blogs?Google for keywords of interest to you, talk to people in your market, talk to your customers, etc.Where do you go to promote your blog(s)/businesses in non-technology niches?The succinct answer: You use it to promote other people.The longer one: blogging other people's stuff and commenting on their blogs gives you a relationship with them. Once you have a relationship with them, and they trust you, it isn't "promoting your stuff" so much as it is sharing something that they think their readers will enjoy.Additionally, after you have a loyal fanbase, you will probably find that your most successful "promotion" efforts are a result of pulling rather than pushing. i.e. a portion of your readers who are more dedicated and savvier will take it upon themselves to spread your stuff elsewhere.[Edit: I don't make any money off the following recommendation, and only am mentioning it because its exactly responsive to your query: I wrote a chapter in a book called BlogBlazers about this. Its the above two paragraphs at chapter length, essentially. Aaron Wall's chapter is good, too.] |
Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles? | raptrex: I dont know of one, maybe this is a good idea to make one? or start a subreddit |
Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles? | edgefield: You might check out http://www.newmogul.com/ for business news... |
Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles? | jacquesm: how about off-line ? or google adwords ?Direct mail might make sense, or flyers at builders trade shows, I know that sounds 'weird' for an online business but it would seem to me that your potential customers are all much too busy to be hanging around on forums. |
Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles? | ekpyrotic: I concur. I've been keenly searching for sites in HN's vein, but centered around philosophy and the arts. 'HN's vein' is vague, I'll elaborate:1. Keen eyed moderators, stamping down on vandalism; including, bad grammar, and bad spelling.2. A intelligent community of readers dedicated to adding comments of value: carefully constructed, sourced, input.3. Clean, content-oriented design.(I might have to put my dailymis.com domain to use) |
Technical Patents | dominik: Patent prosecution has its own nuances; a few differences in wording can make or break a case in litigation.You could look at IP law firms and look through their roster of patent attorneys; alternatively, you could look for a small or solo patent attorney (e.g. google machine learning patent attorney).If you're associated with a university, you wish to investigate working with them to acquire the patent.Best of luck with your patent and startup! |
Should I go back to university? | josefresco: After reading your last paragraph, I'd stick with the professional world and try to craft a job you love, one where you control your own destiny.I would bet that school will still strike you as mostly bullshit from the sounds of your past experience (tech school/self taught) |
Are there enough people viewing (and up-voting) newly posted articles? | mjtokelly: In my experience, at any given time at least one article fromhttp://news.ycombinator.com/newestis on the front page of HN. That seems like a pretty good indication that all submissions are getting adequate attention. |
Should I go back to university? | rsayers: I'm in a bit of an opposite situation, I've been doing web development since high school (i'm 27 now), and am just now going to college for the first time. For a degree in religion of all things.That said, I would never have gone to school for anything related to computers. I'm still not sure if I plan to continue doing development or go into something else completely, but I'm fairly certain that I could pick up more useful knowledge outside of school. Experience is huge, and at 3.5 years you are about at that level where it doesn't matter if you have a degree or not to many employers. I've worked with many coders with formal degrees, did well in college, but simply fell flat when confronted with a professional development environment. The best programmer I know personally has also never stepped foot in a college class room.So my advice would be to stay away from formal education and keep coding. Do side projects when you can, You would be shocked how a weekend of toying with a new programming language will change the way you think of things and help your 9-5 programming. |
Should I go back to university? | cjenkins: One thing to try might be to put together a portfolio of some kind. This way you can show people that, yes, I can do X, Y and Z and here's the proof. Good recommendations certainly don't hurt either.I'm going to take a guess that just straight resume submitting isn't going to go so well. You'll likely get filtered out on the lack of college degree. This means you'll have to actively and creatively pursue getting in touch with a real life person to at least start the conversation on why you should be considered.I kind of waffle on the more education part of the question. It really depends on where you would go to school. If you can get into a really good program, then it's well worth it as you'll learn a lot from the profs but even more from your fellow students. If you end up in a mediocre program, you'll probably end up frustrated like you did before. I wish I could give you some magical advice on how to determine a good vs. bad program, but I have no idea. (For myself, Ohio State was OK, I didn't put in enough work to get the most out of it. Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering was fantastic. I felt like the dumbest person in the room many times and that's great for learning.) |
Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles? | brandnewlow: If you want Chicago-related news/announcements/weirdness my site, The Windy Citizen is (finally) starting to take off. http://www.windycitizen.comThere's not much tech on there yet, but there could be if local guys shared their stuff on there.As far as I know we're the only local, social news site out there. Kevin Rose himself told me it was a lousy idea. I'm intent on proving him wrong. |
Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles? | ilamont: Check out Slinkset (YC Summer 08) - lots of niche sites that are not about technology:http://discover.slinkset.com/(I started my own HN-like site for public corruption, using Slinkset: http://publicdime.slinkset.com/)Also outside of technology, I read Universal Hub (universalhub.com) to get a handle on Boston-based blogs, but it doesn't have a voting system like HN.In the tech sphere, I sometimes look at this one, focused on FOSS:Free Software Daily -- fsdaily.com |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | mikewhyley: I've watched this through it's development and various iterations and I can say that some serious dedication and work has gone into this. It's really taking shape - good work guys ! Good Luck ! |
Should I go back to university? | endtime: Going back to school is kind of a reset button, and generally something you can only do once or twice. It sounds like your situation might make it worth it, but only if you actually want a reset. If you just want to weather the economic storm, 1.5-2 years might not be long enough. But if you want to change your direction a bit, either out of programming (sounds unlikely) or to get a more theoretical background (which you may have; some of your spelling and terminology is [are?] foreign so I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "technical school"), then go for it. Especially while you have no kids and no real expenses.It also sounds like you aren't going to be happy if you're at a school where you're just an account number, as you put it, so maybe you should visit some schools and talk to professors and students. Then you can save yourself the time/effort/money of applying to, or even attending, a school that you won't like. Though this might not be practical for you if you have strict geographic constraints (e.g. you don't want to move).Disclaimer: This is from the perspective of someone who went from high school to a four year university (studied CS) and then went straight to a CS master's program, which is where I am now. So I thought about some of these issues, and talked to a lot of people about them, but I don't have actual experience to justify some of the above. Also, I'm biased towards grad school, which is hard work but a hell of a time. |
Spam Filters | icey: Gmail is likely using a Bayesian classifier for spam detection. So, it adds the characteristics of the spam to the spam filters, not the message itself.http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html |
Should I go back to university? | coolnewtoy: If you go back, get a degree in an industry. Technical aptitude and skills are great and transportable to almost any field. A "proper education" makes you more valuable if you understand the problems to be solved in an industry like biotech, or greentech, etc. (probably not so much financial services these days) |
Should I go back to university? | shimon: It seems like you still want to work in the same field, and are mainly considering school because of the credential it offers. While that addresses one reason employers might be throwing away your resume, it isn't on its own enough to make you stand out.The most effective way to stand out is through a personal connection.So instead of going to school, maybe you should try to meet a lot of interesting, smart people who are working on cool stuff. Work with them on side projects and stay in touch with people at companies that are expanding. This isn't hard for programmers to do: just go to programming language user groups, try things out at home, and get involved in some mailing lists. Hang out at local coworking spaces and BarCamps.It will probably take a few months of this before you get a good job offer. It will feel much scarier than school because there is not a well-defined end goal. But if you have an active geek social circle you will hear about job opportunities well before they get to the point of screening resumes for education credentials. |
Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles? | blhack: I run a site called http://www.gibsonandlily.comall the people that post there are nerds, but it is mostly non-tech news...we kindof joke that we're like reddit and digg...but for adults. |
Should I go back to university? | jderick: Yes.We can argue all day about how credentials shouldn't matter. But they do. Put up with a little BS for a few years and it will pay off. |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | antiismist: Works as expected, good job. It took me a while to figure out what the right window does though.Once I figured it out I had some fun with a chatterbloc inside a chatterblock inside a chatterbloc. |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | rokhayakebe: 1. What does freeze/unfreeze do?
2. What does the screen do? (I thought when I open window, participants would see it. Like if I opened Google and ran queries, they would see the same)
3. There is a bit of latency in your messaging. Maybe 1 and a half seconds.Otherwise if this application allows anyone to create throw away chat rooms and share their browsing experience with one another, then I can frankly say I love it. Great job. |
Should I go back to university? | biohacker42: I knew a brilliant hacker who also dropped out of college for the same reasons.It's a bit of youthful arrogance, immaturity, but also the kind of spirit youth would not be youth without.Anyway, a recession is probably the best time to be in school.But there are two very important things to keep in mind:1. Do NOT go into life crushing debt! A small amount of debt is OK, state schools are cool.2. Do NOT take school too seriously, OBVIOUSLY it's a for profit operation. Do not let their BS stop you from getting an education while having a good time.
You'll do most of your learning on your own and from like minded classmates, learn, have fun, get a degree. |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | scott_s: What's the benefit of this over email, IM or Skype? I already have communication channels through those mediums for everyone I want to talk to.Addendum: I just now realized you have a shared viewing feature. But I didn't realize that from looking through your app, but from your description. Shared viewing is what differentiates you from email, IM or Skype. You need to stress it. |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | DavidPP: Got a small bug with website that do not "like" to be boxed (ex : http://hardware.fr) Since they force a reload of the page, you can't access the room anymore because you get redirected each time you try to access it. |
Cheapest way to buy hosted bandwidth? | timf: "Is there anywhere cheaper?"I think most colocation/dedicated server centers give you a lot better deals than the more dynamic Linode/EC2 setups. And it matters how much you know you'll use ahead of time. For example, check out http://www.10tb.com10TB at .10/GB is $1000 but you get 10TB plus a 4GB RAM server for $199 at 10tb.com |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | RK: It would be nice to have a back button for navigation. |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | mtrichardson: This is pretty neat.The UI is pretty, but somewhat distracting. Not enough contrast, I think, and it could be more minimal.Freeze wasn't super intuitive.Having a history of what you've posted with thumbnails of previous things might be neat, but might just end up being distracting.The iframe thing, I go both sides on. I feel like sometimes I just want to show a picture of it (luckily with Skitch this is a fairly trivial process).It's really neat though, I'm enjoying it.(oh, and, as soon as you can, I would recommend not using the twitter password anti pattern and implement oauth there) |
Cheapest way to buy hosted bandwidth? | wmf: Some hosting companies charge per Mbps, which may be cheaper than paying per GB. |
Should I go back to university? | RobGR: When you thought the university was a load of crap, that no one gave a shit about you, that textbooks were meant for professors to profit, and that professors don't care about teaching you, you were right.It was not "youth angst" or "academic immaturity". It was just a correct assessment of the situation.Most people who think you should go back to school do not actually dispute that, they just think that putting up with bullshit like that is somehow character building, that "paying your dues" pays off, and that it is worthwhile to prove to large commercial corporations that you can be manipulated by the large academic corporations.They might be right, but if you love programming, you should program. You have to pay the bills too, of course, so you have to figure out how you can do both. Maybe work on a small project you can try to sell while searching for a job, or start doing contract / consulting jobs on the side ? It depends on the details of your situation. |
Spam Filters | RobGR: I don't know what gmail does, but what you describe can be done with spamassassin. The Horde webmail program has a way for users to submit false positives and false negatives to the spamassassin training command. |
Should I go back to university? | comster: Did you say WHY you want to go back to school? It is a very personal decision to make. Many make it to the top just fine (maybe not easy) without the paper in their hands. I have to agree with you on the BS that schools deal out. ASU made it clear during my time there, that they were a business in it for the money. But regardless, just worry about what it is you're looking to get out of the experience. |
The best way to convert paper drawings to digital images ? | poppysan: A scanner? If you want it vector then use illustrator to vector-trace it...There are far too many options... |
That AJAX-based SQL editor... | nreece: Was it WWW SQL Designer: http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/demo/?keyword=defaultAlso: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476028 |
The best way to convert paper drawings to digital images ? | patio11: Scan it, ship it off to your outsourced art talent, tell them what sort of deliverable you need, and let them worry about how they accomplish it. They're the professionals, after all.(Outsourced artistic talent is very, very cheap. Find somebody you like on one of the sites, develop a working relationship, bring them work on a regular basis. Its a win for you and a win for them: you don't waste your super-valuable time doing low-value-added tasks, they don't have J. Clueless Client asking for 15 revisions and then dickering around with actually paying them for services rendered.) |
US users, or Global? | jasonlbaptiste: Profits = Revenue - CostsIf you can't make money there, and with the business you're probably in, the costs are significant when it comes to bandwidth, then you should not be there.We're also not talking about a gain lots of users and monetize later type of plan like Twitter. There's no money to be made in these countries. With the economy being the way it is, and being a startup, you can't run yourselves into a wall of knives.Also look at it from a competitive angle. What would you think if your competitors went there just to be a bigger brand. You'd probably think they made a bad move. If dominating countries that are monetizable doesn't make you a big enough brand, dominating in countries that don't bring revenues surely won't. It will probably make you go broke. |
The best way to convert paper drawings to digital images ? | pasbesoin: If you want vector graphics, my meager experience fwiw:Some months ago, I used potrace to convert drawings to SVG. Specifically, on a Windows box, if I recall correctly, I used it via the front end Rasterbater (needs .NET 2). I was quite satisfied with the result.This was for some simple black on white images. The Wikipedia page for potrace (first link, below) has a bit of language about Inkscape being able to do a color decomposition. > Inkscape is capable of producing color images by
> decomposing each channel into several black and white
> images and tracing them separately with Potrace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potracehttp://potrace.sourceforge.net/Link to Rasterbater is under the anchor below (it's a link to a zip of the program; the program doesn't appear to have it's own descriptive page, although the hosting site has a one line description on the default page for the domain):http://potrace.sourceforge.net/#otherRegarding Inkscape, this boingboing page (I happened on while googling Rasterbater) has the following comment:http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/21/web-site-converts-ph.ht... > Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) uses Potrace
> (http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ ) and optionally
> Autotrace ( http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/ ) for
> it's own raster to vector. It costs 100% less than
> the price of Illustrator CS or Corel, a.k.a free. |
What's the best way to do due diligence on an Angel Investor? | rms: Talk to the entrepreneurs they have invested in. |
The best way to convert paper drawings to digital images ? | nreece: Scan, and Vectorize with Vector Magic - http://vectormagic.com/home |
What's the best way to do due diligence on an Angel Investor? | ekhjehcjkerch: sleep with their wife.sorry ;) |
What's the best way to do due diligence on an Angel Investor? | officiallyrad: Plant a 9mm and a bag of hash somewhere in their belongings that will easily be discovered while meeting with them, then see how they respond... |
The best way to convert paper drawings to digital images ? | NonEUCitizen: recently, i:1. used my camera to take photo of an illustrated page from a very old book (copyright expired). i borrowed the book via LINK+, and it was delivered to my local library for free.2. used Vector Magic to vectorize (within 2 free "credits" limit) the image.3. edited result of #2 with Inkscape, so it's much more "stylized" (much simplified; just a few filled-and-stroked paths). |
What's the best way to do due diligence on an Angel Investor? | cperciva: Make it clear that you're not committing to anything until it's in writing and you've had a lawyer look at it. That way even if the "angel" is less than angelic, he can't cause too much damage.Deals fall through; that's a fact of life. Deals with inexperienced angels fall through in particularly screwy ways. Shortly after I started working on tarsnap, I talked to a wannabe angel; it sounded like we had hammered out the framework for a deal, but "I'll get this put into writing and send it over for you to review in a few days" stretched into two months, and the draft he sent over was unlike what we had discussed on nearly every important point -- and then when I objected he accused me of backing out of a deal and threatened to sue me for the cost of drafting it (he never went so far as to tell me how much those fees were, though, so I guess he came to his senses).Seriously -- unless you're dealing with an angel who has a track record, trust them as much as you'd trust a second hand car dealer. |
That AJAX-based SQL editor... | GrandMasterBirt: What is funny about sql designer is that it is better than any other er diagram tool I've ever used till this date. And those were native applications, this is web-based. Just goes to show you that the idea and skill is what counts, not the platform, framework, or anything else. |
US users, or Global? | medianama: I would say it depends on marginal cost of growing in other markets. If you need to localize the site/content and/or need offline presence (sales team, etc), it might not be such a good idea.
If all you need to do is strike a couple of content partnerships or PR exercise in those regions and can be handled by one person - you must go for it... Growth of Orkut/Linkedin/Facebook in India is a good exampleMonetization might be lower today, but things may (and will) change going forward... |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | sam_in_nyc: In no order as they come out...Title attributes or tooltips for all buttons. I don't know what they do.Fade the modal in/out faster, make hitting ESC or clicking the faded are close the modal (the X is rather small)More importantly, the whole way you manage going to URLs (and "freezing") is very unintuitive and backward. For starters, the arrow to "type in a URL ... [as far as I intially read]" points to an unfamiliar icon. I go there and see "freeze" and "unfreeze" which makes no sense to me. Freeze what? It was not clear that the main window was meant to show a URL rather than being an introduction to the service.Furthermore, I'd never expect that typing a URL in chat would control the window on the right. It's a chat box. I type in it, and what I type goes into the chat log.I greatly suggest the following:Put an address bar above the window, or in the window, and next to it a "lock" or "freeze" button which says "prevents this URL from changing". Furthermore, it'll pay dividends having this bar up there when you add more options.. like maybe "new tab" and things like that.Initially have the URL be the actual URL of your "welcome" page... (eg: http://chatterbloc.com/welcome_to_new_room.php) It will immediately tell me two things: "oh I can change the URL" and "I'm currently at the welcome page, lemme see what it has to say."Explain features and stuff at this welcome page.. like that I can type "goto <url>" in chat to navigate . And that I can prevent navigation by freezing by locking the URL.Make back and forward buttons.Finally, let me name the room and give me a short URL.All in all, a nice little service akin to Gabbly, Twiddla, etc. I like the iciness of it.Hope this helps. |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | sam_in_nyc: More stuff:What is the point of "Reminder"? How about "share this room" instead. Reminding typically means sending me something that is time sensitive.Second, pop-up blocker comes up. Unless you're offering something extremely compelling, I'd be so annoyed as to leave. Pop-up blocker shouldn't come up for "onclick" events... you are doing something wrong in javascript.Third.. the more I think about it, the more I wish you had an address bar up there, and some sort of "help" thing near the chat window which would list out commands, like "!map" and "!<url>" and stuff like that.Best of luck. |
Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com | whyleyc: Great stuff Steve - my one big "want" would be permanent chat room names.A bit like you can claim a userid or brandname on Twitter or email e.g. http://www.chatterbloc.com/manchesterunited :-) |
Should I go back to university? | sqnz: I'm doing that right now!
Got a small thecnical degree, worked for 3.5 years..But my job sucked! So I decided to go to university!Why? It's a transition!
At university yes you get shit to do (in computer science the classes are horrible and disconnected from realty!!)But, there is no place like university to build a startup and make connections! So that's the main reason I stick to university :) Plus where I got in Québec they credit me one year + the interm because of my work experience.So...You will hate going to university because the classes are boring it's not practical, but you get a good degree.But what can help you put up with the BS and really stand out is building a startup, joining toastmasters, building connection with people and making contacts, etc.And when you know that most universities are like 60,000 people "little cities" that are all connected to the same community, it feel good :)So... while it may not be your answer, I love what I do! And in university there are some companies that are actually taking students for a job! I see "We need 25 programmers" ads in the bathrooms :P hahahaha |
How do you find a cofounder if you want to start a company | brk: I would encourage you to discuss your idea(s) somewhat openly, in the right audience. IE if you have some club or organization at your school that your idea would be relevant to (either a CIS type group, or a group in whatever "market" the idea applies to) go there and get involved and discuss your idea.Mention to friends, family, professors, etc. that you have this thing in mind and are interested in meeting people that can help/contribute/advise properly.A co-founder is best "discovered" instead of "located".I would also question if you need a co-founder yet, and what function do you want them to fulfill?Focus more on developing your idea (both programatically and conceptually) instead of on starting a company, per se. |
How do you find a cofounder if you want to start a company | rogercosseboom: I was actually in the same situation as you- unfortunately I'm out of school and seperated from the most important source of feedback/support/cofounders: the people in your program.Anyone can be a cofounder. Most often its friends, or friends of friends, but sometimes its an interested professor(MIT has a long history of this) or random people in your study group that show an aptitude in the field. I would strongly advise you to approach everyone with your idea, explaining what you hope to achieve and the possible setbacks/technical hurdles to come. Ask everyone you know if they know anyone who does something similar. If they come back at you with a few good ideas, or approach the problem from an angle you haven't thought of, then you have a candidate. Eventually you'll find someone as enthusiastic and interested in the area as you, which is perhaps the most important trait, and its a good indication of the type of person who will stick it out and help you change the world. |
How do you find a cofounder if you want to start a company | mindaugas: This may help a little:http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/03/how-to-meet-your-ne... |
What does everyone think of Charlie Rose? | coglethorpe: Maybe I'll have to watch more, as I've always considered him Ambien in human form. |
How do you find a cofounder if you want to start a company | tstegart: How to find a cofounder with talent and drive is the hard part. I know a bunch of people who say "sweet idea" when I mention starting a company, but most of them are not at the top of their game or ready to take the process seriously. The people who are already enjoy what they're doing. :( |
What does everyone think of Charlie Rose? | pasbesoin: Was it a new interview (Buffet was on a couple of months ago)?Rose does some really good interviews. Can be content heavy. And he also is friends to varying degree with quite a few people. He doesn't appear to deliberately skew interviews on this basis, but one should be aware that his personal connection may at times influence the trust he places in the messages being conveyed.Still, one of the best interview format news sources around. He used to be a lawyer, IIRC, and it shows in his interrogatory.Added: Those personal connections, plus the long format that really gives interviewees a chance to communicate what is of interest to them in a thorough fashion, also mean he gets interviews you won't find anywhere else. |
Load testing for flash swf files? | triplefox: Unless the SWF you are hosting also creates a new network connection, the only load you take on is from the file transfer. |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | cperciva: I wrote my own shell script -- given my minimalist needs that was much easier than figuring out how to use someone else's blog code. |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | rsayers: I used my own simply because I had already written it and polished it for release before needing it for a business site.If I was starting from scratch and needed something, I would use wordpress and spend my time elsewhere. |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | jncraton: I personally use Django with disqus for comments. It takes less than an hour to create a decent blog engine in Django if you know the framework, although it took me significantly more than that the first time I did it. With disqus, you can easily add a comment system in seconds.For me, Django was the best choice because I use it for everything else and I really like Python. If you are currently using a more typical LAMP stack, then something like WordPress may be the way to go. |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | pg: Yahoo Store! Bet I'm the only one. |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | pclark: Posterous. Easy to blog, they host it, pity you cannot theme it (yet) |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | Mistone: wordpress and posterous, both rock. wp for general day to day blogging, posterous for mobile blogging, sneak peaks, and other little bits of content I capture on iphone and want to post. twitter as well if that counts. |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | hbien: I rolled my own with Django, which I kind of regret now. A blog is really about the content (in this case, news about your product) and not the technology you use.If you're going to host your own, I'd recommend WordPress. If you don't mind someone else hosting it, try out Tumblr + Disqus. |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | unalone: We'll probably be designing our own. If we don't, it'll be Tumblr-based. |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | ejs: I usually roll my own, I dont care for most of the features that come with... and its easier to add my own features (like this one: http://codeachrome.com/blog/post/2-add-ruby-code-to-blog-com...)My problem is that the blog tends to be the afterthought for me, so building a site around the blog is not a features I want or need. |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | jacquesm: drupal.Though I have to say that their policy towards upgrades leaves me underwhelmed. |
FairSoftware--Good way to find a cofounder? | alain94040: I am one of the founders of http://fairsoftware.net (sorry for the late answer, you had to post this question just on President's weekend).The processing fee we charge is irrelevant to whether we are a good place to find co-founders. Actually, you could use FairSoftware, find people, use our Software Bill of Rights to start your business, and never pay us a cent.You only pay the processing fee if you use our payment backend. If your project consists of two people, then by all means, work out a deal by yourselves. But if you are trying to build something with a larger community of contributors, and having transparent sharing brings value and trust to your contributors, then you'll find out that our fees are reasonable.And as someone pointed out, we don't actually charge much at all for ourselves, we mostly pass other people's fees (PayPal) to you so we don't lose money. We are working on lowering the total fees, and it has to do with ACH and treating non-US contributors differently than US contributors, but we will eventually, in order to save money for you.There are scenarios where we are way cheaper than any alternative. If you are a couple of students with very little money to invest, we give you a legal structure, some amount of protection and privacy from your end users, for literally no money down. |
Should I go back to university? | herval: Speaking as a former enterpreneur, I don't think having a BS represents anything at all.Speaking as an employee, one thing I came to notice was that the BEST people I worked with did not even attend an IT course (they had graduations on other areas, like math or physics - one in english literature!). Of course there were some IT bachelors in the bunch - what I'm trying to say is that, as far as I've noticed, it didn't make anyone better than the ones without a degree on the field.I'd get to know new technologies, get to meet new people (both online and offline), take part on things (like JUGs or other technology groups - even give a try at setting up my own, maybe), get involved on open source, write.Investing in a bit of hype also helps - like jumping on RoR one year ago, when it was 1.0, for instance, would automatically turn you into a 'Rails Hacker', which is a 'niche'.Bottomline: I don't really think getting back to work or learning 'low level stuff' would really help in anyone's career (except if you plan on becoming an academic). |
What blogging engine do you use at your startup? | spoiledtechie: BLOGENGINE.NET OR Tumblr.comTumblr is damn easy, but blogengine.net is damn fun.For Example blog.drinkingfor.com |
Managing Two Contracts | edgefield: I respect you for carefully considering this ethical dilemma and not just jumping for the higher pay. I have several questions about your situation:1. What are the terms of the original written contract (e.g., hours per week, hours total, deliverables due, date for completion, etc)?2. Are there verbal expectations set forth between you and the client outside the written contract?3. When do you expect to finish the low paying project? Do you have 40 hours remaining or 400? |
Why are some of the older developers afraid of javascript? | noodle: a lot of older developers still view javascript as the unstable, insecure language.as an example, steve gibson (of grc.com) won't use it, iirc.and they're right, really. you can't put bulky business logic in javascript if you have any need for security. |
Why are some of the older developers afraid of javascript? | icey: If I had to guess, it'd probably be roughly related to things like this: var x = 1;
var y = 1;
function methodA()
{
return
{
javascript: x + y
};
}
function methodB()
{
return{
javascript: x + y
};
}
(Hint: They don't do the same thing) |
Why are some of the older developers afraid of javascript? | joe_bleau: I only turn javascript on when I need it for a site that I trust (easy with Opera). If I forget and leave it on, it seems like far too many sites bog down my machine with crappy eye-candy and advertising. (Maybe I won't care so much when/if I upgrade to a faster PC.)I find it terribly annoying when a site requires javascript, but doesn't do anything compelling with it. For instance, why on earth does this page require javascript to be on, just to show me a .jpg map? http://www.arkansashighways.com/Road/mapopt.htm |
Managing Two Contracts | dkokelley: Would the second (higher paying) contract understand if you wrapped up the first contract before offering more hours? Bailing on a contract is certainly bad for business, but more importantly, you could be on the hook for the amount paid to you depending on how the contract is written. |
Why are some of the older developers afraid of javascript? | amichail: I would not use javascript much in the same way as I would not use assembler. But using javascript as the target of a more stable platform with extensive tool support (e.g., Java with GWT) is fine. |
Managing Two Contracts | scorpioxy: Tough situation to be in. But it's great that you're stopping to think about it.I would say why do you have to stop the low paying project? Isn't it possible to cut down on the hours? Also, if you explain why you need to cut down on the hours, i am sure they would understand.(You can say "I need the money", nothing wrong with that) And if not, then they would've answered the question for you.That's what i would do anyway. Good Luck. |
Why haven't the industries embraced open platforms | aristus: I don't think it's solely politics or technical merit.Put it this way: I'll bet your personal computer is well-maintained, well-researched, and generally works better than the average civilian's. The same probably goes for people in your immediate family.Now imagine a lawyer who does not know anyone who is a programmer. Odds are her computer is a virus-filled default Dell piece of crap, or if it's not, she pays someone a lot of money to keep it running for them. It works, but is probably not A+ for the money.Meanwhile you pay lots of money for legal advice and general legal know-how... and how do you even choose the right lawyer? You end up depending on your friend's anecdotes. Ignorance costs you in money and quality.Same thing with non-tech industries. They simply don't know enough to ask and to evaluate risk/benefit correctly. |
Review my startup, After the Deadline - Proofreading Plugin for Wordpress, TinyMCE, etc. | spydez: I tried a sentence at PolishMyWriting.com. The sentence was: "Onec upon at time, there was a potato." It found my misspell, but it: 1) Didn't capitalize the correction suggestions.
2) Ate the space between 'once' and 'upon' upon correction.
And now that I've given it this reply to proof, it doesn't find the misspelling inside the double quotes. Is that intended?Also, it thinks every first word in 'single quotes' is misspelled. |
Managing Two Contracts | lv_: Dude - just finish it up, if you want to be a luxurious entrepreneur you must finish all assignment.s |
Why are some of the older developers afraid of javascript? | RobGR: I don't write javascript, because I don't run javascript (with a few exceptions). I associate javascript with crap websites. It is slow and it causes the browser to use up a lot of memory. The functionality gained by it is usually pointless fru-fru, the doilies and tailfins of the internet. I fully realize that to some people those doilies and tailfins are very important, but perhaps I can achieve my business goals by selling things to other people.The notion of writing a program to run on someone's desktop is reasonable; the notion of writing a program to run on my server, but send it's display information out to a browser, is also reasonable. The idea of having most of a program be on my server, but some random chunks be on the user's computer, seems like a bad split. I realize that in some cases such as input data validation it can remove a browser-server round trip, and in some cases it might be an over all win; but as a general rule it's a bad idea.There is an idea that you can avoid the load of running everything on your server, but also avoid the problems of writing client programs for all the variations of operating systems, by writing code that runs in some wrapper, usually associated with the browser. These attempts - flash, java applets, javascript, active X objects, etc - are all bad ideas.I realize that the majority of the population uses javascript enabled browsers. I didn't "miss the memo", I was there when the memo came out: I remember attending free lectures given by Sun Java evangelists when Java was first released, in fact I still have a free coffee mug with "headstart java" or something on it around here. I got excited, did the "hello world" app and then a calculator, and then suddenly had to disable java applets to keep the ads from crapping up my browser. Javascript came after that, then flash, now it looks like Microsoft is pushing this silverlight thing which sounds like v5.0 of the same bad idea.Now, just so I don't totally seem like an old grouch, here's some constructive advice: write your web app so it's interface is all very standard, very minimal html. Then, write an iPhone program that does the client-side stuff you think is so great. If you are still in business after that, take the iPhone app and make it into an OSX desktop program and announce your iPhone app is now available on the desktop. Presuming your idea is not the friendster or geocities of it's age and already dead, and presuming that people find these client-side features appealing enough to download and install something, then move on to making your desktop client work on other platforms. Do not take the shortcut of presuming that the browser is an appropriate platform. |
Why haven't the industries embraced open platforms | Tangurena: I think a lot of businessmen don't get it. They don't understand why one would write open source and/or free software, and many get hung up on the "you get what you pay for" thing (alternative: "anything free is worth what you pay for it"). |
Why haven't the industries embraced open platforms | Logic-Shop: In the Health Care industry, when technology doesn't work the way it's supposed to people can die, or at least be seriously negatively effected.Without at least the illusion of support from a big official distributor, that responsibility stays entirely on the shoulders of the person who selected the technology. |
Review my startup, After the Deadline - Proofreading Plugin for Wordpress, TinyMCE, etc. | dimitry: This is a startup? How? |
Managing Two Contracts | dkubb: As a freelancer myself I think it's really important to finish what you start, and keep your promises.Sure, there are times when you have to walk away from a project, such as when there are personality conflicts, or unreasonable expectations. It doesn't sound like that's the case here.Keep in mind that most software isn't actually done when you deliver on the initial specs. Companies will usually expect you to be available for some sort of maintenance phase where bugs fixes and small feature additions are done by you. They'll likely expect you to work at your original rate unless otherwise specified. Even though you think it's only going to be 200 hours I suspect you will likely be involved with them longer than that.What I would do is finish the contract, but start to set the company's expectations now so there are no surprises at the end. Tell them honestly that you set your rate lower than your costs, and that after you deliver the project you will need to charge $35/hr or whatever the going rate is for further work.On a side note, while $35 sounds like a great full-time wage when freelancing you'll be lucky if you can get 8 billable hours a day. Sure, while deep in code it's easy to meet that, but there's the downtime between projects that you have to account for. Also as a freelancer you're expected to be an expert, so learning everything on the job is normally frowned upon -- you don't get paid when you take time off to learn how to use a new tool or technique.I once heard the rule of thumb is that if you'd like to earn the same as you would working full time, but as a freelancer, that your hourly rate should at least be twice your full time wage. Depending on where you live $35 might be good, but I don't know any experienced freelance developers in North America who charge that. |
Do you trademark your brand / app name / business? | jakestein: I just went through the trademark process with my business. If you use the abbreviated form the filing fee is $275. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009january01_...Costs beyond that are lawyer's time for doing a trademark search and filing the paperwork. I used a lawyer (and ended up spending about $1,200 including filing fees), but you can also file it yourself if money is tight.I think it's definitely worthwhile. The odds of having to make use of your trademark are low, but having the trademark is extremely valuable if someone comes out with a similar product or service with a similar name. |
Why are you proud of your species? | Mystalic: Creation of the printing press, invention of irrigation, nearly every physics discovery. |
Why are you proud of your species? | troytabor: I'm proud that we can debate without physical confrontation; higher-reasoning I guess. Think about it, if all debates where a physical confrontation it wouldn't be the best ideas that would win, but just those who are stronger would win.Ok... So that's out there a bit. More on the lines of what you're asking, I'm proud that we realise it when we're getting out of hand and actually try to do something to alleviate the issue; philosophies of how to do that asside. |
Why are you proud of your species? | Allocator2008: The library of Alexandria was perhaps the noblest human achievement ever, compounding the greatest of our knowledge, historical, scientific, etc. into one location. |
Review my startup, After the Deadline - Proofreading Plugin for Wordpress, TinyMCE, etc. | snewe: I added it to a WP blog, but don't have anywhere in the admin area to add the API key (except hard-coded). I tried "plugins.php?page=atd-key-config", but got "Cannot load atd-key-config." |
Why are you proud of your species? | gaius: All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment... |
Do you trademark your brand / app name / business? | vaksel: Just slap a tm on it and be done with it.Once your business becomes mega profitable where the cost is peanuts...THEN you can go and get it registered. |
Why are you proud of your species? | jacquesm: unified field theory*general relativitybig bangthe theory of mindthe discovery of evolutionEinsteinRosalind FranklinDarwinGalileoMichelangeloNewtonAlan TuringDa VinciGhandiMLKThe list is endless... And who knows, maybe one of you will be on a list like this at some point in the future...* getting closer... |
Review my startup, After the Deadline - Proofreading Plugin for Wordpress, TinyMCE, etc. | anotherjesse: Interesting!A few days ago I blogged how I wished that my readers could copy edit my posts: http://overstimulate.com/articles/readers-as-copy-editors
I'll try this out. (I was debating prototyping a "copy edit" feature by hacking my Disqus widget to post changes as comments to a hidden thread) |
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