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Books That Gratify One's Intellectual Curiosity? | lionhearted: My favorite book on conflict management, and dealing with bad situations as they're happening rapidly and getting to their root causes:http://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-what-M...My favorite book on small business and why things usually go wrong:http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou... |
Rate my Russian Roulette iPhone App | spaghetti: Looks great. Seems snappy and responsive. Good sounds. Personally I like to see elements of humor in iPhone apps. So perhaps you could add some sounds for the pull trigger "nothing" and pull trigger "shoot" cases. For example when someone pulls the trigger and nothing happens you could randomly play a "Whew!" or "Well Kiss My Grits" sounds. Then for the "shoot" case play a nastier sound. Also some gun smoke might be nice. |
Best encryption solution for personal stuff (images, videos etc)? | zain: http://www.truecrypt.org/ |
computing in 2014 : your predictions? | thepanister: How many cores will a typical personal computer have?Well, maybe by 2014, there will be something else other than cores??? Almost some geeks will create something innovative!!! Who knows?EDIT: This world is changing in a crazy way... so fast pace more than you think... specially when it comes to the IT!!!EDIT: Why would you really give me "0" point?!!!! 8-} |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | thorax: Just a fun shrinker we cooked-up. It will be a very long time before these urls get very long.For example, Hacker News is:http://➡.ws/퐐They won't work in IE6, but that's just the way it goes. Should work great on Twitter, hopefully. |
Best encryption solution for personal stuff (images, videos etc)? | mishmash: On the Mac it's hard to beat Automator and encrypted disk images:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1578 |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | ram1024: but...the whole point of a tiny URL is it being typable. what's with the symbols :| |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | thomasswift: This is just awesome. |
computing in 2014 : your predictions? | thomasswift: On a massive scale things won't change that much. It would be cool, but things will stay mainly the same and people will still use IE 6/7 then. |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | albertcardona: If only the http:// part was to disappear, that'd be a huge win.For example, emails and http:// addresses are already recognized as such in places like the gnome terminal (which is great then for irssi IRC) or even in this forum comments. But can't just domain.com/that/ be enough info to ne recognized as an url? |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | ScottWhigham: FF3: Address not fount - Firefox can't find the server at www.%e2%9e%a1.ws. |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | ivey: I love it! I snagged http://➡.ws/♥ ... much fun to be had, here. Great job! |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | chanux: Found it on hacker news & created a Firefox Ubiquity command for it. Here it is http://➡.ws/⇷
(tinyarrows don't show up as links on twitterfox though.) |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | vasudeva: Not working for me in Chrome or Firefox. It's like a Mac-only splinter of the Internet. |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | trjordan: Bookmarklet for it. It just displays the link (no copy to the clipboard like tinyurl, but I don't actually know javascript.), but it's better than nothing, I guess...javascript:void(location.href='http://tinyarro.ws/api-create.php?url='+encodeURIComponent(l...)Also, is there a better way to display this in the comments? |
Books That Gratify One's Intellectual Curiosity? | albertcardona: Try books by Jared Diamond about world history:"Guns, Germs and Steel""Collapse"They are not just informative: they change the way one looks at the world. And their prose is excellent. |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | dshah: Very creative idea.However, I'm not convinced that mainstream users will get comfortable with it (because it looks "different"). This, plus the fact that enough problems can exist from creation/sharing/clicking that it's likely just not worth the hassle.Maybe it's just me, but lack of compatibility is a high price to pay for a character (or two) shorter URLs. |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | brfox: I really dislike these abbreviated URL services. I prefer a moderately sized and human readable one. I always type URLs into my address bar, also. |
Best encryption solution for personal stuff (images, videos etc)? | BjornW: It depends on what you want to do. Do you want full-disk encryption or just one encrypted partition/file? Personally I use full-disk encryption. From what I've read its recommended to encrypt the whole system and not just a partition if you don't want important data leaking into the non-encrypted parts of your system.On Ubuntu Server I selected full LVM encryption during installation. Everything except the /boot is encrypted, which works great without too much overhead even on this aging 1,3 Ghz machine. I heard good things about TrueCrypt as well, which should work with OS X and Windows but I haven't used it myself.Btw I did use Filevault on OS X for my whole disk and the experience was less than pleasant. Especially with resume and hibernation. This was with 10.3 (Panther), so it might be better now. |
How do you do your company's taxes? | vaksel: Use an accountant, doing it yourself is not worth it, since the accountant will pay for himself by catching a lot of deductions that you missed |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | psadauskas: Doesn't seem to work in Firefox 3.0.6 on Linux, strangely enough. I get: Firefox can't find the server at www.%e2%9e%a1.ws. |
Site idea for project matching | aneesh: HN user fsav and I have created a site to connect hackers interesting in working on small projects together -- http://clusterify.com. Check out some of the projects posted, and let us know what you think of the site. |
How do you do your company's taxes? | sachinag: Nthing using an accountant for the company. I do my personal taxes myself, however. If I make a mistake for myself, it only affects me. If I mess up my company's taxes, I affect my company's investors, employees, partners, and a whole lot more people. |
Just replace my DBA: painless db admin and scale without the cloud? | jacobscott: If it helps, I asked a more concrete version of this question focusing on PostgreSQL on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/556325/postgresql-managem... |
Just replace my DBA: painless db admin and scale without the cloud? | charlesju: Managed hosting works for us (Engine Yard), it is significantly cheaper than hiring your own DBA. |
Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) | tome: I made a cycle :-)http://➡.ws/♲♲ |
Just replace my DBA: painless db admin and scale without the cloud? | xenoterracide: There is no easy out, if you really need to scale, regardless of infrastructure you are going to need someone who understands databases. If you're lucky you might be able to find someone who can do more than one job. e.g. dba+sys admin. Just make sure that they really do know both things. |
Just replace my DBA: painless db admin and scale without the cloud? | DenisM: Try a commerical database, such as Microsoft SQL Server (FD: I work there as a developer). To bring up a recent example, it can build indexes without locking the whole table so you wouldn't need to jump throught the hoops like the FriendFeed guys just did with MySQL. Unless your time is free it will cost you less to buy SQL Server than to write your own "online index thingie" on top of MySQL.And if your time is free, then you are probably a startup and you can get SQL Server and bunch of other MS tools for free via http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/MySpace runs on SQL Server: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/steve_jones/archive/20... and if it's good enough for them it will likely be good enough for your site as well. I'm not sure if the scale-out story is any good (there are "partitioned views" which are basically "sharding" but I never used those), but scale-up story is as good as they come - it can efficiently utilize 64-cores of the HP superdome.I don't know much about Oracle and IBM DB2, but I know that the latter has a free version without too many restrictions on it, so give them a spin as well. If ease of use is importnat to you, common wisdom has it that Microsoft's is the easiest to use among the top commercial vendors. NB: I did not verify the common wisdom, YMMV :-) |
Just replace my DBA: painless db admin and scale without the cloud? | iamelgringo: The state of the art _is_ hiring a DBA. They get paid to be up on all the database monitoring, scaling, managing and management tools. This is why DB consultants charge $200+ an hour. It's pretty arcane knowledge, and for a business of any size, the database quickly becomes the lifeblood of the organization.This is also the reason that databases like Couch DB or Amazon Simple DB or Google's App Engine are so appealing. They all have the promise of reducing db management headaches, at the cost of sacrificing features. |
anybody looking for a technical intern? | pg: http://www.justin.tv/p/jobs#se_intern |
anybody looking for a technical intern? | thinkcomp: http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/jobs.html |
Content Serving Cluster | wheels: You could use a distributed file system like:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustre_(file_system)A simpler option would be to do a little scripting magic to catch inotify signals and then trigger an rsync. |
Content Serving Cluster | patio11: Honestly, I think you're likely to find that Amazon S3 is the best option. It costs money, but assuming your business generates money (many businesses do) it will probably be more reliable and cost less expensive, expensive you-time than anything else.Otherwise: rsync is your friend. Run it in daemon mode. If you've just got a handful of machines I'd nominate one machine as the server to receive all uploads. Everybody else just syncs their upload directory to that machine's.You may also want to consider offering bittorrent as an option, since this situation appears to be tailor-made for it. |
Content Serving Cluster | jbyers: MogileFS will get you close to this, but stores files with its own ID and directory scheme. If filenames don't matter, or if you have a gateway that's handling the mogile lookup and filename translation, it's a great solution.If you already have a reliable central filestore, varnish or squid might accomplish faster distribution without having to replicate all your files.Otherwise, I'm curious to see everyone's suggestions. I've looked at more *sync programs than I can count to handle this use case and come up empty-handed. |
Content Serving Cluster | cperciva: You say "someone uploads xyz.tar.gz to Machine #1"; does this mean that all the bits are uploaded to the same machine, or will you have some files uploaded to machine #1, some files uploaded to machine #2, et cetera?If files are uploaded to multiple machines, is it possible that you'd get two different files with the same name uploaded to different machines? If so, how do you want to handle this?Will you ever have files deleted?Do you have any ordering requirements, e.g., files have to appear on each machine in the same order as they were originally uploaded? |
front-end news? | mikeyur: I'm a fan of Net Tuts - http://net.tutsplus.com/ - also the ThemeForest blog - http://blog.themeforest.netThey do a lot of jQuery tutorials. |
Content Serving Cluster | jawngee: Panther express is cheap, cheaper than S3.Let someone else worry about that issue. The amount of time you'll spend setting it up, testing it, maintaining it, is time wasted on other important aspects of your business/application. You are not going to be able to do it any better or any cheaper. |
Content Serving Cluster | Steve0: rsync is built for this: http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/ |
Content Serving Cluster | bluelu: Why not write a custom 404 handler which when triggered tries to download the file from the original server, and when the file hasn't yet been downloaded, redirects to the master server as well?This worked pretty well for a friend's site and you don't to care about replication anymore. |
Content Serving Cluster | olefoo: Your options (if you are going to do it yourself and not use S3 or cachefly):1. rsync on the backend; it's easy, it's relatively fast, but it is asynchronous and files won't be immediately available on all servers.2. An inotify watcher that copies files to the slaves when a file is written or changed on the master. Faster than an rsync solution, but you'll need to write it yourself.In either case you will want to seriously question whether you should do it yourself, look at the costs for keeping machines operational and how much you are paying for bandwidth. |
Can Alexa ratings/rankings be trusted? | tokenadult: Alexa users are a convenience sample, not a simple random sample, and they may badly misrepresent your user base. Essentially, installing Alexa (which I did once, but haven't done on my current browser) is something like participating in a voluntary response poll. One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.[quote=Paul Velleman]-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM
To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson
Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu
Subject: Re: qualtiative studySorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.[/quote]http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...But to answer your underlying question, if I had good Alexa stats, I would talk them up. You may as well talk about the most convincing data you have, while acknowledging that the data may not be definitive. |
do you design websites so that they work without JavaScript? | derby: Testing. I like to design/build my sites with graceful degradation so I can easily script testing (what can I say, I'm a barebones type of dev). |
do you design websites so that they work without JavaScript? | geuis: A lot of the decisions around this depend on what your app is doing. We are building a profiles section to our site with typical social networking features. We didn't provision at all for non-js because a) you need js to even get to the app and b) the director of engineering is an incompetent wanker and has no experience building web apps.Normally, you need to start by breaking down what sections of an app absolutely need js code to work. Regular forms dont need any js to run. You can have a fancy form that falls back to a basic form.Also, don't rely on js 100% for styling. Use css for everything. Except for ie6 and :hover. Bloody IE... |
Can Alexa ratings/rankings be trusted? | geuis: No. Use Compete.com or Hitwise |
do you design websites so that they work without JavaScript? | scorpioxy: I don't; but that's because i mainly develop intranet websites.But even when i do develop public facing websites, deciding to put in the effort for graceful degradation depends on your target audience.These days i find more clients asking for UI features on websites that cannot degrade gracefully at all. Again, depends on your audience. |
Can Alexa ratings/rankings be trusted? | jacquesm: I think all 'free' online ranking sites give you data that you should take with a large grain of salt. You can use some of them for relative comparisons but not if the comparison is a close one.Another use is to extrapolate from 'known' numbers to an unknown site (say a competitor).It helps to separate truth from bull, but it is definitely not an exact measurement. If someone is off by a factor of 10 then you're on solid ground to call bull, if it is a factor of 2 or less then it gets a lot harder. |
Content Serving Cluster | vlisivka: I recommend to look at GlusterFS. It fast, modularized, layered clustering file system. It is not tied to Linux kernel because it built for (patched) Fuse. With Infiniband hardware, it is fastest clustered system available for free. See http://www.gluster.org/docs/index.php/GlusterFS_1.3.pre2-VER... for example. |
front-end news? | sbaronnet: my google reader JS subscription :http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F15326952957925465... |
do you design websites so that they work without JavaScript? | zepolen: Yes, and it's actually easier.The trick is not to think in terms of 'supporting graceful degradation', but in terms of 'javascript enhancements'.Which means, do your entire app to work in html. Then add javascript wherever you can to enhance the app.Force all your javascript to run /after/ the page loads, it's a constraint that will stop you from cheating.An example is a delete button. Do it in html as so: <form class="delete" action="/delete/something" method="post"><input type="submit" value="delete"></form>
Then, with your framework of choice (jquery here): <script>
runOnLoad(function(){
$(".delete").submit(function(){
var form = $(this);
if (confirm("Are you sure you want to delete this?")) {
$.post(form.attr("action"), function() {
form.replaceWith("Deleted!");
});
}
return false;
});
});
</script>
(Code untested)So instead of the delete button causing you to go to a new page, it will just popup a confirmation, and when you click 'ok' will do the ajax call, and change the button into a 'Deleted!' message.With a decent framework, the code to 'enhance' will maybe add a tiny bit of overhead in terms of loc and time, (this example for instance, 3 lines more than if it was javascript only).But you get a much easier to debug app and it works everywhere to boot. |
Can Alexa ratings/rankings be trusted? | bbuffone: I typically utilize Alexa and Compete or others as a good way to compare sites of a similar demographic. Having access to google analytics for two different sites; one being my blog and the other site is the company I work at.I know that my blog gets about half the traffic of my companies site but the corporate site is ranked 370,673 and my blog is ranked 395,487. I would think there would be more of a difference in the two sites ranking.But if I compare several of our companies competitors sites the numbers seem to line up. The numbers also make sense as trend data for a single site. I know from monitoring my blog when there is a spike in traffic; Compete and Alexa show a spike in their rankings.Because Alexa captures their information through a browser plugin you want to make sure that the set of people that visit each site are equally likely to have the plugin installed. If people that read hacker news are half as likely to install the Alexa Plugin then people that read the new york times then there would be variability in comparing those two site. |
Rate my Russian Roulette iPhone App | chris24: Looks good. If you want to increase sales by 500% (and the silliness by 1000%), add fart noises. |
PhD and First Year BSc Grades | pg: PhD programs care much more about recommendations than grades. The most important thing you can do is get a good recommendation from a professor at your school who's known to whoever you want to work with at the target school.As for grades specifically, you can probably just tell them the truth, which is that you screwed up freshman year. Grad school admissions are done by smart people (usually the profs themselves). They'll realize that if you got good grades in the later, harder classes, you could have done well in the easier ones. |
PhD and First Year BSc Grades | Logic-Shop: If you are serious about getting into a PhD program then you should have a clear idea of your academic/research goals and some professors you have impressed with your work. Compile professor recommendations, the write up of your goals, and any supporting evidence you have of your abilities: i.e. particularly noteworthy papers, projects, etc.If you do end up getting rejected, then look around for a project with which to prove yourself. You know what skills you have and how they could be useful. Find another student's project, or a start-up company, or a professor's research which you can contribute to in an important and impressive way. You can use such proofs of your abilities as a ticket into a PhD program next year. |
anybody looking for a technical intern? | Logic-Shop: Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but take a look:http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/vol/1053791733.htmlIt's unpaid, but also totally remote work so no relocating. It's a start-up company, but they've been around for three years so it's also an established team. If you're wanting to learn a lot about start up companies, it could be a great opportunity. |
Hacker news on friendfeed - do you like it? | wallflower: I think it's a good idea, and FriendFeed has a decent search facility. It would be interesting to get a historical snapshot of the top news stories (e.g. scrape top page -> submit to scribd -> submit to friend feed)Also check out Atul's FriendFeed (Atul is the top Techmeme tipper):http://friendfeed.com/atul |
Any possibility of making a pay-to-use Firefox extension? | ajkirwin: Firefox.. is not a platform. |
Any possibility of making a pay-to-use Firefox extension? | ajkirwin: Okay, real answer. First of all, you'll never be able to avoid piracy. Nature of the medium.Second, the best way would be to embed individual user credentials into the extension. As in, they signup and pay or whatever, and you generate a unique extension that contains their authentication information, which they then install.What is this for? |
Do web startups hire CS majors? | smidwap: Just finished interviewing 5 programmers, all of them CS undergrads or grads, for my startup. (This might be a bit biased because CS majors were the ONLY ones we interviewed so far.) Two things occurred to me during the interview process: 1) CS majors have some formalized training in designing software, and 2) the most important part of their resumes was the experience/internships/projects section. Nothing can replace the work that is done outside of the classroom. Classes can't expect 40 hours/week of coding but real jobs can. So, initiate projects yourself or find internships that will actually utilize and grow your skills.I am a sophomore in college, so take my advice for what it is. But, I wouldn't think I'm too far off from reality. Good luck |
Do web startups hire CS majors? | triplefox: You are simply conflating CS with programming, which is very commonplace.Programming is the craft/art skill of manipulating digital code and data. Within programming you can learn about specific domains - for web apps that would mean databases, networking, a host of standard formats and protocols, and user interfaces. Many commercial programmers go their entire career focused only within one or two domains.Computer science is the academic study of computation. As the rigorous curricula of today would have it, it is a more mathy endeavor than programming by itself. In particular there is a focus on provability and formality that doesn't come up in commercial programming.Basically, stuff you learn in CS won't help you ship the ideal mix of features, stability, and time cost for (insert app here). What it will tell you is about a variety of methods with which you may approach the underlying computation problems and direct your own original research efforts. |
Any possibility of making a pay-to-use Firefox extension? | earl: Does the license even permit this? I'm not going to do the legwork for you, but I'd examine this very carefully with the help of a lawyer who has worked on these sorts of issues before. This may mirror the driver issue in the linux kernel -- even plugins may be contaminated by open source licenses. (Contaminated used in the nicest way possible; I'm a big fan of OS licensing and software.) |
Any possibility of making a pay-to-use Firefox extension? | safetytrick: I think its possible, I would pay for firebug now that I've used it so there is a market. |
Any possibility of making a pay-to-use Firefox extension? | SwellJoe: I (actually mostly a contractor, though I ended up maintaining it) built a toolbar back in the neolithic era (Firefox pre-1.0) for managing a URL black/white list for a product I was developing at the time. We gave users a username and password (the same one they used on the website version of the tool), and they simply logged in. Anybody could download it, but it didn't do anything useful if they weren't logged in. |
Do web startups hire CS majors? | nailer: Have been working with Linux for over a decade. Had 9 interviews for a site reliability engineer role at Facebook here (which I gather is considered a startup until it becomes profitable or gets bought), before I got a 'no'. Interview that lost it for me was a guy (who'd just graduated college) presenting a page of math and telling me to write some Python to implement it. This wouldn't have been my job function, but I couldn't read the math = 'definite no hire' in Facebook speak.Worked out better in the long run. |
Do web startups hire CS majors? | rms: http://code.google.com/soc/ maybe? |
Do web startups hire CS majors? | Zev: If startups hire CS majors, they code. CS at your college probably isn't pure theory, but rather closer to Software Engineering. And you can't expect college to teach you everything that you'll need to know on your own.Take this summer and spend it hacking on a project you find interesting. Learn a particular language (preferably one that your college wont go over. Be it Haskell, Ruby, a Lisp variant, whatever) and learn it as well as you can in a few months.Then when the next summer rolls around, you'll have two years of class + that summer building something on your resume. And that summer will help out a lot in terms of practical experience working on a project (as opposed to a 1-2 week assignment that you drop as soon as it's handed in for a grade). |
Do web startups hire CS majors? | strlen: Having interviewed people fresh out of college for both web-startups and established companies, from my view the most important thing you'd need to know if you want to work in a web start-up are:1. how to get around a UNIX system (be comfortable with emacs and/or vi, know your shell, be able to install Apache/your favourite web frame yourself on a machine2. know basics of TCP/IP networking (know how HTTP works, be able to debug it using telnet/netcat and tcpdump/pass through proxies)3. know databases (not just "SELECT Ajax FROM Php", but know about indices, joins and normalization/de-normalizations)4. or more dynamic languages (Python, Perl, Ruby, Php etc...) as well statically typed as object oriented languages (Java is common for enterprise web development)These are really just the basics (give or take). Most of these (except for databases and dynamic languages) are a standard part of any CS curriculum. Databases course should be readily available as an in-major elective. Dynamic languages -- if not available as an elective -- should be easy to pick up as you go along.These are also very nice to have and would make you not look like a "PHP script kiddie":* Understand how your OS works, at the least be comfortable using strace and gdb and digging around /proc and tuning sysctl/proc/kernel parameters* Understand more about networks: more about DNS, know how a load balancer works (NAT)* Know C/C++: that's what the extensions for your dynamic programming language are written in, that's what your web server/web proxy and database are (usually) written in.* Know algorithms, data structures. Be able to do bitwise manipulation (e.g. how would you track on which day of a month a user visited a site?). Understand the advantage a message queue would provide, understand non-blocking I/O and threading/forking models.* Know more about OO, meta-programming/reflection, functional languages -- be able to hack up your own ORM layer/ad-hoc MVC.There are jobs in web development that don't even heavily touch HTML/CSS/Javascript and tend to be heavier towards algorithms, databases and UNIX hacking. These are called "back-end jobs". The other end is "front-end", which requires more familiarity with UX principles/Javascript/ActionScript/Flex and basic graphics design/layout in addition to HTML/CSS. The specific hot things (current frameworks, etc...) change but the general of computing is an invariant. The latter is what you learn in computer science classes.Lastly, you should absolutely do programming/web-development for fun -- first, it's the way to learn things you won't learn in class (or at your first job). Secondly, many start-ups operate under the maxim of "don't hire anyone who doesn't code for fun", thirdly -- chances are, working for a web start-up won't make you a millionaire: if you don't find programming to be fun and worth your time (making long hours non-monetarily rewarding), enter a field that you would (you're lucky to be amongst the few who has the chance to choose). |
Do web startups hire CS majors? | ninjaa: A good way to get a leg up:1. Do some jQuery tutorials and really bone up on flashy javascript.2. Learn to use any popular web 'stack' - LAMP is easiest on *Nix servers, RoR and Django are not rocket science. Nor is ASP for that matter.3. Go out and find a web designer, or yourself bone up on design and CSS4. Find easy contract work such needs basic web programming. Eg "install a picture gallery in my website" = $200/300/400.5. Move on up with the contract work or launch your own site.6. ???7. Profit!If you do this through college (and I didn't start until my senior year, a deep regret), you will level up to the forefront of web programming by the time you graduate.Also, now that web is mature - there are multiple paths to success. I think getting the Server Side Language/ Javascript/ CSS/ HTML loop right in your head is the most important. You can follow that up with MVC frameworks, Adobe Air, Silverlight there are at least 4 or 5 solidly "employable" paths you can take |
How to grow a service that is popular but never took off? | eru: > Question is: what can I do to get the service out of its current letargy and maybe make it a viable side-business (not planning on making a living out of it, really)?How about establishing a small but steady stream of improvements to keep the interest, and charge for the password protected maps in a freemium model? Be sure to do lots of testing e.g. A/B testing, to assess the impact of your changes.(Disclaimer: I have no experience.) |
How to grow a service that is popular but never took off? | patio11: And gives me a feeling that I'm leaving money on the table here.That is a virtual certainty, considering you are not charging money.My advice is to consider splitting the service into two levels (does the Maps API let you make money with it? I guess that is moot since you're already doing it) and selling some portion of the people on the upgrade. It is a rare, rare, rare application that will take in more in donations than it will in payments. One useful feature might be allowing embedding in other people's websites. (Remember, with a freemium application you need to make the -mium something that solves a pain point for people. "I want to offer maps" doesn't strike me as an obvious pain point, but given that people are actually using this, "I want people to not leave my site" does strike me as worth paying for for a business.)Don't be put off by free competition -- I have scads. They're wonderful people, and they display AdSense ads for people charging for similar things. i.e. you. |
What's the name of the site? | slater: the freehackers union?http://freehackersunion.org/joining.html |
automate submission from popular sources? | RossM: True, TechCrunch is another of the always-submitted sites here. It wouldn't be too hard to setup a script to automatically post to HN whenever the RSS feed is updated, so this could be done for a special user.Personally, I'm not as bothered about karma on here as I am on other communities - I'm much more of a reader than a contributor - and I agree with your comment on finding "unknown writers". The more obscure articles are what I use HN for at the end of the day. |
automate submission from popular sources? | nanijoe: How will your 'automator' determine what stories are interesting? |
automate submission from popular sources? | wheels: Karma can't be traded in for anything in the real world. Contrary to urban legend, Paul Graham does not make you a sandwich (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129). So it seems a little silly to get bent out of shape over who's getting lots of karma by submitting things.More problematic seems that people are submitting stories to get karma rather than because they think they're interesting. That seems a dangerous trend. Perhaps the solution would be to nullify karma gains on such "obvious" sites.However, what would suit me more would be if things were adjusted inversely to their PageRank -- meaning less stories from CNN, New York Times, BBC and so on, but things that are a little further out would be ranked better. |
Please, review my startup - Mobiquus | silentvoid: A clickable link - http://www.mobiquus.com/ |
How to grow a service that is popular but never took off? | juliend2: Maybe a little design realignment (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/redesignrealign) would help (not that it's ugly, but that would help). For example, clarify the font in the logo, play a bit with the general colors. The header background could be re-arranged. It would be refreshing for your audience to see that it's evolving.Make it look fancy! Good luck. :) |
Please, review my startup - Mobiquus | trapper: That's pretty impressive. The demo needs a better loading screen (applets can do that you know, http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2008/08/a_better_...).What is Mobiquus?
Mobiquus is a push-mail application for your mobile phone.
>what is that? - I know but most people won'tIt works with any mobile phone that supports java and it has some features that make it unique.
>your second sentence should make me want to use it, more than the first. Technical specs need to come later after you have me.What does using your product give me? Spell it out. |
Please, review my startup - Mobiquus | catch23: How about a video? I tried the demo and I don't get it... |
Please, review my startup - Mobiquus | markessien: This is an email client for phones? But most phones that support java already come with an email client - and in most cases, you can set this client to auto request emails every once in a while. How is your service different? |
automate submission from popular sources? | DanielBMarkham: Perhaps instead of automatically submitting them (which would just increase the firehose nature of the "new" page) whoever submits them the first time simply makes the articles active. This will encourage people to find more rare articles.For me, I like articles from joe the blogger, since I'm that guy. If I wanted Seth, 37Signals, or some such I'd just subscribe to their site (which I don't). I get the same signal-noise ratio from them as from the average blog post that has been upvoted several times. Perhaps better. |
How Important is Professionalism When People Apply to Your Startup? | ivey: You already know my opinion, but yes I've done hiring, I like A much better, and I got interviewed at my very first tech job (at least partially) because of a funny cover letter. |
How to grow a service that is popular but never took off? | lacker: Keep making it better. If you're out of ideas, ask some of your users what they use it for, what if anything annoys them about it, what more they would want. Take everything with a grain of salt but maybe it'll be helpful.It might be handy on your homepage if you linked to some popular examples of people using this. That will get them some more traffic and make your top users more likely to use it in the future.Add a send-to-friends feature after someone has made a map.If some of the maps are public, how about having a combined map that shows all notes live as anyone using your product posts to it. That will give people a sense of what they can do with it.Add a video showing people what they can do with it.Try to white-hat SEO your site a bit for searches like [make your own map]. Do you get a lot of traffic from Google? What are those searches for? Looking at that might give you some ideas for what they are looking for.Make widgets that make it easy to embed these map in peoples' Myspace or Facebook pages.Make a mailing list for people interested in your product. Or a forum. Start creating some community; talking to your users will help you understand what they want or need.Start a blog where you talk about and link to cool uses of your product.Make a twitter mashup where anyone who tweets with a lat & long gets their message posted on the myguestmap. (Maybe you have to ask people to add a #mygm tag too.)Just some thoughts. Good luck! |
How Important is Professionalism When People Apply to Your Startup? | bentoner: A is better. The kind of person who prefers B doesn't hire 16-year-olds to work remotely. |
automate submission from popular sources? | swombat: I'd vote against this. I don't think the fact that some people gain karma by being the first to post popular articles is so terrible a thing that it should be offset by auto-submiting all that stuff. Most of what 37signals post is trash, anyway... one-liners and quotes that really don't belong here.If you really want to deal with the "karma problem", then make submissions from those sources karma-free - i.e. they don't influence the submitter's karma. But since I don't think that there is actually a "karma problem", I think this is a non-issue and not worth dealing with. |
How Important is Professionalism When People Apply to Your Startup? | alabut: I actually like B a lot more, and not for the reasons you cite. It's not that it's more "professional", whatever that means, but that it's shorter and more to the point. The A version is riddled with apologies and "but this" and "but that", lots of preconditions on what kind of work and conditions you'd be qualified for, etc. Overall, A is very convoluted. |
E-learning startup and blackboard failure | zxcvb: I guess no-one here hates blackboard then :) |
Tell us your problems | Logic-Shop: I would be happy to brain storm with you on your startup, but I'm not sure what kind of problems you are having. I've posted a bunch of personal insight into basic entrepreneurship on my blog, but I'd be happy to get more specific if you could share your situation.http://logic-shop.blogspot.com |
How Important is Professionalism When People Apply to Your Startup? | mkyc: Proofreading is useful, so have some of my time. Or skip to last paragraph.Now for the downside: I'm not looking for the position in your job posting. I'm much more inexperienced (I believe the business term is "cheap to hire[no period here]") than you want for that position[, and - period here. runon] I'm a junior in high school looking for a summer job working remotely - [, as ]relocating is unrealistic given my age.[avoid brackets] I would be able[really?] to perform the Rails and Java work [that you want done - remove], but I would do so from my house[you've mentioned this], and after summer[, no comma here] I would have to drastically reduce my hours. [I would need drastically reduced hours?]I hope that my lack of job experience and inability to work permanently do not prevent you from considering me. I have solid knowledge of how to program[I am a capable programmer?] (see my resume for AP tests and projects [that prove it - awkward][. parenthetical notes don't get their own periods])[avoid parenthesis unless it's just a side note/quip]. I could be a jolt of energy helping you get a few new, cool features out the door. I also have a business-oriented facet of[to] my mind, so I could help think of [premium - don't need this] features that people would actually pay for [that would generate revenue, etc.] or possibly even float other business models[I hope you have serious credentials to back this up].As a high school junior, I am looking for a summer job working remotely. [After summer,- move this...]I would be able to continue on a part-time basis [after the Summer [when classes resume]]. While[Though] I plan to continue my computer education in college, I have solid knowledge of how to program right now (see my resume for details). As a young person[you think older persons aren't "jolts of energy"?], I could be a jolt of energy helping you get a few new, cool features out the door.Not bad overall for writing. It lacks tact in a couple of places. You need to make these of similar length, content, and quality if you want an accurate comparison.I prefer A, ending right after "than you want for that position", followed by B. Make it casual but terse. |
Tell us your problems | BigCanOfTuna: I'd like a screen that resize correctly on a Mac, a car that gets 100MPG, and I want women to love me NOT for my great looks.Not interesting problems to solve? Probably because they don't directly affect you. Find something that MATTERS TO YOU and solve that....oh, and don't give up after only a week of brainstorming. |
Why are patent holders allowed to sue years after their patent was infringed upon? | cperciva: Why is this allowed to happen?IANAL, but in general if you can show that a patent holder deliberately delayed enforcing their patent, any award of damages will be reduced under the clean hands doctrine.That said, there are many cases where patent enforcement takes a long time for no fault of the patent holder. If the patent holder is an individual who doesn't have big pockets, it might take a few years before he is aware that his patent is being infringed; he might spend a year trying to get the infringing company to negotiate a licensing deal; he might spend a year trying to find a law firm willing to take the case on contingency; and that law firm might spend a year trying to negotiate and/or collecting evidence before actually launching a lawsuit. So even without any deliberate attempts to delay enforcement it's entirely possible for a patent to be infringed for five years or more before a lawsuit happens. |
Has anyone used the Freebase Wikipedia Extraction? | rchiniquy: Totally wondering about this myself. Not convinced Freebase is perfect for me. |
Has anyone used the Freebase Wikipedia Extraction? | babyshake: Using WEX for a web application will require a ton of work that you want to avoid if possible.Freebase does have a summary of each topic, typically pulled from wikipedia. |
E-Learning Startup | goodgoblin: One thing to keep in mind - educational markets are like enterprise markets - very difficult to sell to. Products don't generally catch on and spread virally there - you'll need a salesforce. The decision makers aren't the users of the product, but its administrators. |
Best places to live in Silicon Valley for families? | thepanister: Check out this blog: http://www.svmoms.comI think it could contain helpful info for you, specially for your wife and kids. |
Best places to live in Silicon Valley for families? | iamelgringo: Silicon Valley is really pretty family friendly. A trip to Ikea any night of the week, and you'll notice tons of parents and families towing younger children along.We don't have kids, but my wife didn't really think that she'd enjoy life here. She likes it probably more than I do at this point in time. |
What's your homepage? | markup: My homepage is set to http://keyboardr.com/, but I rarely hit the button to go there; my browser starts with a blank page |
E-Learning Startup | babyshake: Now is a very ripe time for disruptive innovation in the e-learning space. This is especially true as the raw stuff of learning - think video lectures, wikis, forums - is increasingly accessible for free, while college tuition rates keep rising.However, the key phrase there is "disruptive innovation". Perhaps you may be able to serve the lower end of the market, such as tutors and individual students, schools be damned. And once you do manage to get some traction, you're likely to have a lot more success down the road with institutions.The preeminent scholar in the field of disruptive innovation has actually just published a book specifically about education:http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Disruptive-Innovation...I've been reading it in the last few days and publishing some of my favorite passages to my blog:http://bit.ly/mad82 |
E-Learning Startup | snewe: As a TA forced to use such systems for course management, I agree that they are ugly and inefficient.Unfortunately, I believe the leader in this market has sued a bunch of competitors for "patent-infringement." |
What's your homepage? | cperciva: My home page is set to http://www.sfu.ca/ -- my undergraduate university's website. It sounds crazy, but this actually turns out to be quite useful: I very rarely go to that website deliberately, but having it as my home page means that any interesting news is likely to catch my eye in the fraction of a second between opening the browser and going to whichever website I actually wanted to look at. |
What's your homepage? | andhapp: My homepage is Netvibes.com straight to my feeds and hours of procastination... |
Best places to live in Silicon Valley for families? | evgen: Most of SV (except for San Francisco itself) is family friendly. This is suburbia with a large tech population. The big issue you are going to face, depending on the ages of your children, is school selection and you can expect to pay a premium ranging from "a lot" to "you must be joking" for housing in areas with really good schools. |
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