instruction stringlengths 4 105 | output stringlengths 8 56.7k |
|---|---|
For a simple forum, should I use bbPress or is there a HN/reddit style one? | chanux: Pligg.com maybe? |
Do you watch cartoons? | chanux: I love cartoons. Specially bugs bunny, X-men & Avatar. People say it's childish watching cartoons but not all the cartoons are childish. |
One YC application per co-founder? | ErrantX: I've toyed with the idea but sadly got a pay rise in my day job which means it's worth more to me (well, us).(which I do consider a shame because I would love to give YC a crack and see if I am up to it! :D).Let us know how you get on: I for one would love to see someone blog about the whole process from the get go right through. For those of us who are/were never funded like this it could be insightful :D |
One YC application per co-founder? | vaksel: Its one application per company. YC usernames of all founders, including you, vaksel, separated by spaces. (That's usernames, not given names: "bksmith,"
not "Bob Smith." If the startup has 3 founders, there should be 3 words in this answer.) |
Review my site MusterBlog (www.musterblog.com) | sant0sk1: You're operating in a very crowded market and I can't distinguish any added value from this prototype.It just looks like a tumblog, and a very average one at that. |
Do you watch cartoons? | eru: Cartoons are the only thing respectable on TV. |
One YC application per co-founder? | unalone: You submit a single application, and include all your founders' Hacker News account names there. If you have multiple ideas, you submit multiple applications, one per cofounder, but each idea gets only one application.We're applying for YC summer - we've been updating and trying to fine-tune our application since we first submitted. I'd advise you to get what you've got submitted, and to spend the next day or two looking to perfect what you have. |
Do you watch cartoons? | HeyLaughingBoy: I seem to have become an evangelist for Robot Chicken! |
Do you watch cartoons? | throw_away: some non-comedy cartoons that I have enjoyed for their escapism: afro samurai & death note. |
What headphones do you use in the office? | menloparkbum: I've had a pair of Beyerdynamic DT250-80s which haven't had any problems in 7 years of daily use. |
Where do uk startups go for advice online ? | jwgb: Business Link is good for general business advice but you're obviously better off with people that understand your technology, business model, etc. Again, general business advice is one thing but for UK specific tax and legals you need someone over here to talk to.Open Coffee (http://opencoffee.ning.com/) is a great place to start, there's probably one near you. We've got roughly 3:2 - start-up businesses to lawyers, bankers, accountants, etc at OpenCoffee Bristol.LinkedIn is OK, but better for finding potential mentors, advisers, etc, rather than general Q&A. I've found it a bit spammy with US 'experts' plugging their websites.Twitter is rapidly becoming a real time Google and there are plenty of good UK people that will offer advice. Hat tip to http://twitter.com/z303 for pointing this thread out to me. :)Another avenue is to get friendly with your local University incubator. Even if you're not a graduate, they'll usually dispense pretty good tech/start up advice and (should) be good hubs for finding additional advice.As a last resort there's always email! If you talk to someone at a networking event, drop them a note to see if they'll be willing to chat. In this climate most people are willing to put in a little business development good will. Obviously they'll want payment for any heavy lifting but you should be able to work out what you need far more accurately before making that decision. |
Review my site MusterBlog (www.musterblog.com) | fixie: Maybe I'm missing something, but this looks like a personal blog. If I am mistaken, you should consider modifying the design to have a better call-to-action and quick explanation of what's in it for me (the user). |
Getting Buzz for your site on popular blogs & media, how much is really PR? (Yes, Techcrunch sucks) | noodle: its probably both, as well as a chicken/egg problem.having said that, techcrunch has gotten kind of insular and ... i dunno. weird.if there were a more open/objective(hopefully) version of techcrunch, would there be interest? i've kind of been mulling that idea around for a while, if nothing else than to try and snag some sweet private beta invites :) |
Review my site MusterBlog (www.musterblog.com) | thorax: It's really hard to tell what is compelling about this and how to use it. It looks like someone's personal blog at first glance, and the formatting doesn't make much sense to me.It's hard to tell if those other features add value as described if we can't figure out how to use them, where they would apply, etc. |
Getting Buzz for your site on popular blogs & media, how much is really PR? (Yes, Techcrunch sucks) | gregparadee: I'm fully opposed to anything TechCrunch does anymore. I pointed out how they were wrong multiple times and instead of fixing them I had Arrington call me wrong and blame it on someone else. I was later blocked from their twitter account.
TechCruch is just posts about whatever Arrington or someone chooses to biasedly write about and to me is loosing its credit more and more every week. I would love for it to go back to how it used to be when they were reporting on interesting start-ups that readers would love to hear about. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | wim: http://www.thymer.com, for people using browsers without copy-paste features ;) |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | suhail: Personally, I am not sure why you're in a private beta. Just launch it and iterate as fast as you can. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | sant0sk1: Wow, this looks like a really nice app. Very polished. |
Increasing Karma Implies Decreasing Variance? | swombat: Anyone who's followed some of my threads here know that I don't shy away from controversial arguments (some of which got downmodded to hell), despite being in the top 15 on the leaderboard.Let me be clear - I clearly do enjoy the game of accumulating karma points, but I enjoy the game of speaking my mind far more.I've seen plenty of controversial arguments (some of which got downmodded to hell too) from other "high karma" people, so I don't think this is a problem here, though it may be a problem in other communities. |
Getting Buzz for your site on popular blogs & media, how much is really PR? (Yes, Techcrunch sucks) | jfagan11: Techcrunch is 100% biased |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | TheDigitalNInja: Yeah My entire company would like to use this service, id say as long as its 90% bug free, launch! |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | timmorgan: Oops. The video on your front page is no longer available on YouTube.[edit] Now it's back. Weird. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | herewego: This is the most intuitive scheduling app I've ever used. The way that you just hover over everything and get to see what different features do without committing to anything allows me to explore your app without much fuss.Feature requests:1.) When I add a task, sometimes I'd like to add a really detailed description (or any description for that matter) (i.e. a project spec) and I'd like the ability to do that. The ability to bold, italicize, change font size and format, etc, would be helpful in descriptions.2.) Attachments. I want to be able to attach files to my tasks.3.) Keep the above features out of the way. Most of the time I won't need them, but when I do, I really need them.EDIT: 4.) Just realized that the projects aren't hierarchical. I expected them to be, and it doesn't allow me to be super organized for more complex projects/tasks. An example of this might be Work>Websites>ClientA and another might be Life>Exercise or Life>Clean-Up.If I think of more, I'll let you know. Nice job so far. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | peregrine: A bug would be I can add items to projects but they don't show up in the project. I can find them in the all tab but not the project they belong in. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | m0nty: On your frontpage: there are some graphics under the video which frankly are too small to make out. You may as well drop them - maybe replace with a screenshot tour (I don't usually like watching videos because you can't skim through them).Also on front page, your tag line ("For individuals ...") is too close to the word "planning" with a big gap underneath it. The tagline could be very much bigger and make better use of the available space.Your signup page is a bit of an eyeful. I like the narrative on the fields, but maybe put the elements in a table with the narrative in a column on the left (in place of regular labels) and the fields on the right. However, thanks for guessing my timezone correctly (or maybe it was a lucky default ;) and letting me change the date format up-front.The video is too long at 5 minutes. My (admittedly short) attention span ran out at 2 minutes. In fact, the first two minutes were enough to convince me to sign up based on the look and feel, etc. Someone I know who does marketing told me "give them just enough information to choose you over your competitors. Everything else is wasted." So less is more on the video front.However, I did sign up and I like the look of the app itself. Judging from your help page, there's a lot to know so maybe you should make those pages into a PDF so people can print cheat-sheets? Looks like each section should fit nicely on an A4/letter page.Sounds like I'm being critical but it looks like a great app and I wish you luck with it. I'll try to use it some more and post again. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | bouncingsoul: -- I think the "D" discussion icon is superfluous. What's the point of marking something for discussion? Why not just start a discussion?-- The name did make me think there'd be live timing function. Unless the thing with the broken, blinking 00h00 is it.-- Project naming is broken. You allow projects to be named with more than one word, but things break if you do that: you can't use @Project Name, and todos added to a multi-word–named project are saved incorrectly and only get tagged with the first word of the project, so they aren't added to the project at all.-- The projects should not be listed with arrows between: they imply a hierarchy where there isn't one. Also the general design breaks with more than two realistically named projects: http://imgur.com/Q49W.jpgSeriously, everyone should work with real examples. It takes time and mental effort to enter realistic data, but how else will you know how well your product works? And you'll be able to take much nicer looking screenshots that actually show what your product can handle rather than only hint at it and make me figure the rest out myself. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | peregrine: Maybe create an API so I can update this from my phone(via app) or maybe allow SMS updating. Mobile use is crucial for me, heck even allowing emails to create new todos/projects would be nice. |
Where do uk startups go for advice online ? | ricmorton: What makes it harder to startup in the UK versus the US? Not much, maybe the higher cost of living/higher legal fees etc. However, I agree that making a successful startup in the UK is a far harder, and it's probably due in part to that lack of an identifiable community.There just doesn't seem to be the same depth of startup culture that exists in the US; the UK has no Silicon Valley and the online situation just reflects this. I think that's because we don't have a long history of really successful Internet startups.The European VC scene does seem to be a little bit of a cargo cult version of the US model. The UK YCombinator doesn't exist, because there was no UK Yahoo! to sell the UK Viaweb to. As a consequence of this today's UK startup community is shepherded by individuals and companies with little Internet startup experience of their own.It's kind of like having parents who were never themselves children.As others have suggested on here, we could certainly build the software to create a place for UK startups to hangout. To go further and create something that makes starting up as easy in the UK as in Silicon Valley would take far more resources. Although probably not as much as you would think, as Paul Graham himself pointed out; http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | sketerpot: When I tried to register, I got a timeout on <http://thymerdev.stunf.com/accounts/register/>:"The server at thymerdev.stunf.com is taking too long to respond."But when I tried again, it worked. Is your web server having trouble with load? If so, do you have plans for scaling?Edit: yes, it definitely could use some more speed. It's decent, but just a little too laggy for my liking. That said, this is the first time tracking thingy I've seriously considered actually using. I wish you the best of luck, and my reasons for doing so are largely selfish: I want Thymer to be great.If you're serving this from a machine in the Netherlands, that could be a problem for those of us in other continents. The perception of quickness is important, so this is probably something you should sort out soon and then launch. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | trickjarrett: Just this morning I was bemoaning my lack of a simple todo list. I've played with most of the big names, RTM, Tadalist, etc. but this one looks, at least initially, to be much closer to what I need. I'm going to get my girlfriend / brain on it later hopefully to see if we can begin using it for coordination.I love the plain text entry, reminds me of another of my favorite web apps, 30boxes.com. The calendar I use which manages my entire life :) |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | sgrove: a few bugs I noticedIf I type in @today twice (because it didn't move it to the "today" section), it assigns it to a user called today (I believe, at least that's the same visual language as when I assigned a task to another team member).Is it possible to access my google calendar? My biz team member probably won't use this, but we share a google calendar. Would be nice to be able to manipulate it through your interface.Overall, very nice. I'm very, very cheap so I'm not sure what price point I would be ok with, but it's still very impressive. Thanks for sharing! |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | siong1987: I like the registration page. But, it would be better if you could align the textfields. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | sketerpot: How do I delete or rename projects? I can't find an interface for that anywhere.When I wanted to edit tasks, I tried double-clicking on them. This did nothing. You can detect double-clicking with the dblclick event, and I think that would make things a bit more intuitive. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | jonmc12: Thanks for sharing - I'm a GTD fan, and have implemented on both windows and OSX systems.. tried just about everything out there. I have also played with just about every piece of project management software that seems useful.First, your interface is very nice, and mostly intuitive.However, to me, I could never see using the application unless it integrated into my e-mail system. This is a minimum for actually using as part of my workflow. As a bonus, I usually configure my GTD systems to integrate with my calendar (ical and google cal).A nice web app is interesting, but to me, and I expect most power users, GTD is about managing existing information (e-mail, calendars, folders, files, etc), not for creating meta-lists which indirectly and subjectively modify the information I need to deal with. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | snewe: Great start. A bug:1. Create a project with a space in its name "project name"2. Add a task to that project and only the first word is tagged as @project |
Good coffee shop near CMU? | cpr: There's Kiva Han on Craig Street, and another place I can't remember (I'm not there all that much). That's easy walking distance from CMU.Then there's the Walnut St. complex in Shadyside, a little further away (harder to walk), including the usual upscale stores (Apple, etc.) and some decent coffee shops with Wifi.Much further east on Forbes from CMU (probably easy bus access), there's the Squirrel Hill complex, with a lot of options on Forbes and on Murray.Hope that helps a bit--I'm not really a local, but I do get in there fairly often. |
Good coffee shop near CMU? | dbul: http://www.gathergo.com/list/20 |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | CarlHoerberg: look really promising!
but submitting anything but ascii characters gives error 500, like the swedish letters å ä ö.. |
Increasing Karma Implies Decreasing Variance? | time_management: I don't think it applies to Hacker News, because no one "games" karma, and having a high score doesn't seem to give anyone special influence over site content.Wikipedia certainly has this problem, though. It seems to appeal to those with the petty-tyrant mentality, too. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | sundeep: Any plans on an iPhone app soon ?This would be the "make or break " feature for me.(I have signed up and am using the app. Great work !) |
College internships? | lsc: how much are you willing to work for? what skills do you have? what hobby cs projects have you done? (when I hire, that's what I look at. If you don't have hobby experience, you are probably a 'just a job' type, and you are at a serious disadvantage competing with someone who is actually interested in the technology. I can give you production experience. I can't make you think it is interesting.)If you don't need money, your options are wide open. you can do a starup with $0, if your living expenses are taken care of. |
How much would you pay to keep your local newspaper afloat? | simonk: $0 my newspaper isn't going anywhere. It's just going to bring 3 major papers in my area down to 2 and get rid of some of the smaller papers. |
Increasing Karma Implies Decreasing Variance? | quizbiz: The simple answer is no.
Case sample: Rush LimbaughAn interesting theory. |
How much would you pay to keep your local newspaper afloat? | MaysonL: In an interesting side note to all the death of the newspaper stories, our local NPR station (KPCC) just opened its own Washington DC bureau! It also has its own iPhone app, and widgets for embedding its feed on your website. |
Increasing Karma Implies Decreasing Variance? | adrianwaj: Would some please explain how the article's actual headline:
Do influential people develop more conventional opinions?
led to this being a Ask HN question. Is the question suggesting that more karma = more conformity with mainstream views? |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | rgrieselhuber: I really like the idea and how easy it is to add tasks / manage them. Some feedback:1. It's confusing to see the equivalent of two checkboxes on the left, one that is an icon and one that is an HTML checkbox. What is the difference?2. In general, the icons could be a little more intuitive. I'm not sure what "D" means (discuss maybe? Then why is a discuss button also on the left?3. Going to a new page to discuss / comment is kind of annoying. I'd prefer something like FriendFeed-style inline commenting.Good luck and thanks for the invite! |
College internships? | hbien: Do some projects for fun to build up a portfolio, then apply showing your sample work even if you don't have the years of experience to qualify. I think a lot of dev leads and managers would hire you if you show that you're passionate about it, even if you don't have the years of experience. |
Best hosted solution to sell digital products? | hbien: Have you heard about e-junkie? I've only been on the customer side, but I see it a lot when buying ebooks. Plus they've got an affiliate system baked in. |
College internships? | amitt: To echo what was said earlier, the independent projects help a ton. At my previous job we would ask for X number of years of exp. but would overlook that requirement if the person genuinely seemed passionate and intelligent. The way we would figure that out is through their projects outside of their job.Also, even if a company doesn't have an internship position listed on their website it doesn't necessarily mean they won't hire an intern. Just email them your resume and a cover letter that highlights a couple projects you have done, how the projects may relate to their business/software, and, if possible, a link to an online portfolio with screenshots/demos. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | onedognight: It would be nice if you would overlay the help image over the input box instead of forcing me to go to a non-functional page to see it. I don't want to have to "go back" to use what I learned. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | onedognight: Maybe double-click to edit an item for faster access? |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | pmikal: Certainly seems like it. |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | GeoJawDguJin: There are a lot of bogus links showing up on the front page with obviously falsified vote counts (numbers starting with the digits "1337"). I'd say, yeah, it's been seriously compromised. |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | unalone: Yes, it has been. Looks like the site had some major vulnerabilities.I emailed PG, if he didn't know already, and slowly some of the things are being fixed back. PG's account is still vulnerable as of this posting. EDIT: No it's not. |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | pelle: I caught it here:http://skitch.com/pelle/beksu/hacker-news-hacked |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | Spyckie: http://source.notabank.appjet.net/ |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | markbao: Whoever did this, please post a Tell HN or otherwise an article on how you did it. I'm sure others are curious (and would make a good starting point for patching Arc)From the source, it looks like there was a vulnerability in which the fnid (I'm guessing a string that authenticates a user to edit an item?) was searched for on PG's profile page (using the regex /<input type=hidden name="fnid" value="([^"]+)">/. Then a POST request was made on the standard profile saving resource news.ycombinator.com/x, with the fnid which authenticated the user's permission to edit the page, along with the about text, as parameters.Edit: PG says the fnid just points to a closure on the system. See above. Which means... all you needed was a randomly generated fnid, and that's all that you needed to edit anyone's page. Apparently?Clever, or just poor authentication design. But that's only one half of the exploit. How were the points done? I'm going to rule out millions of accounts created. |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | pg: Yes. I made an unbelievably stupid mistake in the code that generates forms with labelled fields. It was basically functional programming taken a little too far: I generated the same form whether the fields were editable or not, and then later if there were no editable fields I just omitted the submit button. So anyone looking at the source of one of these pages could find a fnid that would work to modify the object displayed on it. (There's still a fnid, but it no longer does anything.) |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | joshuaxls: Yes, it was hacked. Here's the original post from a lesser hack earlier today with pg's response containing the "not a bank" quote:http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=518752 |
Best site for Photoshop tutorials? | froo: I found PSDtuts to be most excellent - http://psdtuts.comYou can also find some gems on Smashing Magazine's site http://www.smashingmagazine.com - while not photoshop specific, there are some good articles like http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/10/adobe-photoshop-t... |
Best site for Photoshop tutorials? | BenS: http://psd.tutsplus.com/ - has a mix of free and 'premium' tutorials.Also, smashingmagazine.com frequently has good links to tutorials. |
Best site for Photoshop tutorials? | character0: The Revision3 podcast, Pixel Perfect, is also a fairly good resource:http://revision3.com/pixelperfect/ |
Ask HN:SMTP Relay EC2 | aristus: You don't own the IP address your EC2 instance uses, even if it's a "static" IP. It will be difficult/impossible to get the reverse DNS (aka PTR aka IN-ADDR.ARPA) record set up.But even if you did have a proper PTR, SpamHaus (which Hotmail relies on) blackholes the entire EC2 address space. I can't blame them; I would do the same in their shoes. |
Good coffee shop near CMU? | krishna2: Kiva Han was our place to hack at. So much so we even named our then startup inkiva.com!!! |
Best site for Photoshop tutorials? | callmeed: All the ones mentioned are good. Here's some from Layers magazine: http://www.layersmagazine.com/category/tutorials/If you're willing to pay, www.lynda.com is great. |
Best site for Photoshop tutorials? | ptomato: http://www.vunkysearch.net/ is a more visual search, links to other tutorials... find effect you want, click. |
Good coffee shop near CMU? | rms: Kiva Han is my favorite and it's at the corner of Forbes and Craig. I like it for the friendly leftist atmosphere more so than the coffee, which is only ok. And sometimes the Wifi cuts out and you have to ask them to reset the router. Coffee Tree Roasters probably has the best coffee but the one on Walnut St. is almost always packed, don't plan on getting a plug. The wifi is limited to two hours per drink. Also consider Crazy Mocha but it's about the edge of what is a comfortable walk.Your Inner Vagabond in Lawrenceville is absolutely sublime but it's a little too far to walk. It's worth the short drive/bus though. I have never seen a better drink menu in a coffeeshop. http://www.yourinnervagabond.com/If you are a l337 hacker you can probably get yourself on the CMU wifi.And if you'd like to meet for coffee or food one evening, maybe we could throw together a mini HN meetup. We have one tentatively planned for the 28th. |
If HN is trust-based, why not remove the passwords? | alecst: Here's what I want you to do: 1. find the person you trust most, then 2. send them a document containing all of your sensitive personal data, i.e. your social security number, bank statements, bills, receipts, etc. Then call them and tell them how many people you've slept with last month. Do this because you trust this person.Oh wait, I think my comment may have been a little witty and assholish. Oops.Maybe it's because your post entails that we should have to publicly disclose our passwords to members that aren't even part of HN, who may or may not be trustworthy. Maybe people have passwords they use universally. Maybe if you would have thought your Ask HN post through a little more, you would have realized how utterly inane it was.I don't like to be mean, especially here. But what was the purpose of posting this? It would have been just fine as a comment. And furthermore, if you understood that your remark was "assholish" (your words), why did you bother to post it in the first place? |
Best site for Photoshop tutorials? | mahmud: I decided to learn Paint.NET "over a weekend" to do some mock ups, ended up spending weeks and actually getting fairly good at it.My advice to you, if you're creating any type of logo, start downloading fonts like crazy. I recommend a site like www.dafont.com (unaffiliated.) The reason? you can find very interesting graphic elements in wingding-type fonts and you can scale them to any size. |
Feedback on Thymer - a GTD/project management app for teams | Mr_Shark: Some quick notes on a app that I think I will use in the future to manage the todos for our small firm (just need to convince the CEO/wife :-)1. Being a swede I like the date format YYYY-MM-DD2. The controls for changing the projects (private, completed etc.) on the bottom feels unconnected to the project. Perhaps you should place them just below the project bar or to the right of it.3. The term changelog feels like programmer talk, perhaps you should use reports or history |
If HN is trust-based, why not remove the passwords? | slackenerny: I think group is expanding lately also to include people who have nothing much to do with their time.While I agree with what PG said in this particular case, I think it should nevertheless be silently patched just in anticipation of further grow, which is inevitable, at the very least due to layoffs and which is also bound to include bored, occasionally malcious, people. And certainly Zach is none of such. Attitude should change. |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | sho: Dodged a bullet there I'd say. At least your "hacker" seems to be a reasonable guy. Seems like he could have done a lot more damage. I hope your backups are up to date and verified recoverable; a more malicious intruder might not be so kind.While I appreciate and admire the sentiment that this is a "community of trust", security still must be taken seriously. There are plenty of guys out there with the ability to pull such tricks; they may not care about trust, and the website is accessible to anyone, good or bad. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | pg: You don't use much of the stuff you learn in HS math in everyday programming. You don't need to understand calculus to write most programs, for example. But the underlying ideas you learn in math can make you a better programmer. E.g. the idea that the right notation can be very powerful. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | Rod: "we've to be very good in maths in order understand anything about programming and moreover, you are too young"That's nonsense!!! I started programming at age 8. I know people who started at age 4.You DO need to know math if you want to develop software for avionics systems, robotics, or cryptography (among many others). If your interests are none of the above, all you need to learn how to program is time, passion, and dedication. It takes time and effort, not maths. OK, some basic concepts of logic are helpful, but not strictly required. Last but not least: read PG's essays on programming. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | vladimir: I think you don't need to learn maths to enter into programming. I am a web developer for more than 1.5 years, and I don't need maths at all. |
Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked? | chanux: Of course it was hacked... By the creator of it :). That's why other hackers find it interesting.For the question whether it's cracked... I dunno but nothing is perfect. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | andrewljohnson: Everyone knows math. The more math you know, the better a programmer you will be.That said, there are more important things to programming than math. The very first of these is practice, as with anything. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | ErrantX: Im a very poor mathematician and I think I am a pretty ok programmer!The math I have ever used in programming has been minimal/low level stuff. So yes you need to be ok at maths: but only to a basic level.At the moment I am doing a lot of work with hash algorithms and that is fairly heavy math: but still doable with some research.I've always said that a good ability to write english (or whatever your native language is) is more important. If you are a good writer chances are you will be a good program writer too (note: not necessairily a good programmer).A strong writing ability will let you write solid looking, readable, fluid code (which is often one of the most important things) whilst a basic mathematical grounding and some "out of the box thinking" (focus on the latter) will give you the ideas for the code to write ;DYour never too young. |
If HN is trust-based, why not remove the passwords? | ErrantX: There is a difference between trust and anarchy.Without the passwords there is no trust. With accounts and account passwords you assume that one account == one person. That is the trust we put into the community.Having no passwords does not mean extra trust: it just means we would have to trust what people post less because there is now a higher chance that it is not them. :) |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | patio11: The people you are talking to are totally wrong on the second point and neither wrong nor right on the first.You will never be a good programmer unless you are very, very good at certain kinds of math. You can start programming if you have a fair grasp of arithmetic and know that a symbol can stand in for a number. That is, in many countries, covered in pre-algebra.Much of the math that generally gives people trouble is not needed in the day to day lives of most professional programmers. You can also proceed quite a ways into learning foundational programming concepts (syntax, input/output, etc) before you start hitting things that will be impossible to understand without more rigorous math or formal logic. |
feedback on The Great Movie Experiment - an alternative to IMDB star ratings. | matthias: Hi everyone, I would very much appreciate your feedback on a new site. The gist is that we're compiling a list of movies based on head to head votes, as an alternative to imdb star ratings.The format is 1000 movies facing off in a round-robin tournament (~500k votes per round). We needed a non-arbitrary sample of movies to vote on, so we've started with a list of the Top 1000 US box-office takings. Each round, the bottom 50 will be culled to make room for the top 50 in the Up & Coming.We're working on... 1. an 'add movie' page, allowing you to add any movie to the up&coming 2. member pages showing your own votes & reccomendations, 3. actor pages, ranking the movies people have been in by popularity.Monetising... 1. netflix add-to-queue buttons, 2. amazon links (the site is great at reminding you of things you want to see), and feasibly 3. targetted advertising (ie. only show this ad to people who have voted for romcoms). |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | yason: It depends. :)You don't need any in-depth knowledge that e.g. a university math student would gradually attain. On the other hand being rather good at, for example, high school math will help you understand basic concepts such as complexity (why 1000x operations is better than x^2 operations...)Logic and logical thinking is also valuable but it can exist without much math per se. It also helps a lot to know set theory because you can think of many things in programming as sets.On the other hand being smarter is more important than knowing math, because if you're smart you will usually pick up enough of any basic math that you need. Also, there are lots of people who like to, for some reason or another, explain and model their ideas and algorithms mostly "in math" whereas doing it "in English" would also be possible and much more comprehensible, thus removing an artificial barrier to understanding something.However, most important of all is practising and hacking as much as you can because that's what eventually makes you smart, with regard to programming too. |
How many of you (coders) use marijuana? | penisman: YOU ARE ALL GAY; BURN IN HELL |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | awad: I actually had the opposite experience in high school. I could program, but my math was terribly poor. My last math teacher was also a computer science teacher, so he helped me to make connections between concepts in programming and concepts in math that allowed me to grasp things I otherwise would not grasp.So, no, you don't have to be very good at math. It can help, and is needed in certain fields, but I don't think it's needed to be a math whiz. If anything, it can help your math. |
feedback on The Great Movie Experiment - an alternative to IMDB star ratings. | buugs: Seems like a really weird way to compare ratings, when you have match ups of childrens movies to horror movies or something along those lines I know I for one cannot compare two movies in separate genres well as you can't base them relatively. Just an opinion of mine, if you compare lets say stuart little to the omen, one person may choose the omen because they don't like animated childrens movies, another may choose stuart little because it made them feel fuzzy or w.e, now if you put the omen against halloween or stuart little against madagascar you get a more truthful comparison.I guess I'm saying I would like it better if you had like different genres, they don't even have to be that specific like say horror action comedy family; and could compare withing those, but I guess that is limited with your selection right now. |
feedback on The Great Movie Experiment - an alternative to IMDB star ratings. | samueladam: I would prefer a Liked, Disliked, Haven't seen choice pattern where "Liked" and "Disliked" reload both pictures.It will be less annoying than clicking on "Haven't seen it" ten times on both pictures and will provide more comparison data.Edit:If you don't like the "Disliked" choice, you could simply reload both pictures when clicking on "Haven't seen it". |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | p47: For graphics its essencial to be great in math.Rest of programing skills lies in pattern recognition skill.
Its like learning new natural language.I would recommend You to learn esperanto (many good programmers known to me are pros in eo), latin some greek (my professors from univ told me so, i know little of them).As previous speakers pointed out, logic is essential. I would say that logic is a base line of all success. Cooker like programmer use the tool - brain.And good luck! |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | sunkencity: You don't need math for programming web/pages or text-parsing. What you do need is a simple understanding of basic logic.But as soon as you want to start on 2d (or 3d) graphics you'll need more math.My tip is, learn programming first, and then use it as a vehicle to make learning math more fun. Build a simple vector graphics engine! |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | andhapp: You do not have to learn maths unless you are going to start writing complex algorithms for encryption and other complex calculation may be like data mining and so on. At your age you should start by writing simple scripts and read books to understand the concepts. Pick one language and learn it. I am sure when you start learning let us say, Ruby or Python you will notice they hardly go over mathematical concepts. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | peterhi: It helps if you are going to deal with the harder stuff. Graph Theory tends to help no end, Complexity Theory (which you should get taught in a CS class anyway) is pretty essential, as is Logic and Sets. If games interest you then you will need to understand basic physics and calculus.Solving hard maths problems will grow the habbits needed to investigate problems when googling doesn't cut it. Infact anything that forces you to concentrate and be analytical would be good, so if you fancy studying biology then you will pick up some useful skills there.Besides programmers tend to be better when they have interests and expertise beyond the field of computing.You can get by with arithmetic if all you want to be is a Code Monkey / Web Developer / Java programmer. Just learn to use the tools that are given to you. But if you want to create the tools that other people use, if you want to write new code, then mathematics is going to help.Seriously, until you know which area of computing you want to work in having the maths will offer you more options. Just remember that most of the fields of professional programming did not exist until a few years ago. When you graduate who knows what technology will be available, organic computers, optical computers, quantum computers? So learn the maths to the best of your ability and keep your options open. |
feedback on The Great Movie Experiment - an alternative to IMDB star ratings. | lionhearted: Consider:What satisfaction does the user get from voting? Why vote or visit more than a few times? Why would they recommend to their friends? |
feedback on The Great Movie Experiment - an alternative to IMDB star ratings. | Erwin: I'm missing some visual feedback that a new set of movies is loading. Nothing really happens when you click -- according to Firebug it took 13.6 for the next set of movies to appear.I'm not sure on the statistics, but maybe you'd be better off showing X movies at a time and asking the user to pick 2 of them; that might generate preferrence data faster. That way, when some of those X movies repeat, you would get more reliable ranking data. you could also ask the user to order the movie as it's common in studies, but that would potentially take too long.Some kind of "progress" to show to the user would be nice too, e..g "you rated 5123 movies", even when not logged in. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | chomchom: No you do not need to learn mathematics, just like you do not need to do anything to 'get by'. But I recomend not satisfying with just 'getting by'. Try your hardest to learn everything which can increase your skill set and it will help in aspects of your programming. I have not benefitted from a well grounded education in mathematics but I constantly have to retrofit my knowledge, you have the opportunity to start from a good base. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | pmarin: Don't worry, you will not need them at the begining. When you find some problem where you need maths just learn about it (the wikipedia is nice place to start). The problem is to identificate which maths fields you need to solve de problem.
I think that programing is a good motivation to study maths, for example I didn't care about graph teoric, trees or logic until I found that they are a great tools to solve problems.
Just learn maths by programming. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | strlen: Do you need to be "good at math" in the typical sense? Certainly not. Learning away certain mathematical concepts, however, helps.To answer your question more precisely, I'll ask you a question: do you code in any high level language (Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP)? If so, chances are you're using 'associative arrays', 'dictionaries' or 'hashes'. How do they work under the cover? What is special and unique about them (A: hash tables and hashing functions).Now, can you use the concept that's used by the hash-table primitives in your language, to sort an array of size N in a time proportion to N? What are you giving up to gain that speed advantage, how can you offset that by giving up slight speed advantage?Now if someone is studying the same mathematical topics without having already programmed they won't have the same appreciation and attentiveness. To them "hash function" don't immediately click with programming techniques right away. Essentially my advice is start coding anyway, so the relevant topics in maths will "just click".This is also a very different kind of math: it's largely discrete and even the continuous portions of it are elegant. This isn't sitting for hours and doing symbol manipulation or number crunching. You don't need to know what continuous and discrete mean: just pick up a discrete mathematics textbook and see how far you can work through it.Attempt calculus, if only thing, just because the first elegant example SICP provides deals with a tiny function to compute a derivative of another function at a point.http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/03/not-lisp-again.htmlIf you decide to pursue computer science in college (which isn't strictly required if you want to program), this book may be of help:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_MathematicsAddendum: for certain applications of programming you do need certain mathematical knowledge that goes beyond abstract concepts and notation; but even with those topics, don't let "not being good at math" deter you from trying. |
feedback on The Great Movie Experiment - an alternative to IMDB star ratings. | rlm: None of the movies seem to be loading.A problem on my end or is the site unable to handle all the traffic? |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | gb: As others have mentioned, you don't strictly need that much maths to be a programmer - and almost none for web development, for instance. It does depend a lot on what you do.I'm an interactive designer, and certainly not a good mathematician (not to mention truly awful at mental arithmetic), but the maths I use mostly - trigonometry, vectors, matrices, some basic calculus - I mostly picked up while I was working on things.There are things I wish I knew a bit more about no doubt, but considering I left school at 16 with a C in maths, I think I've managed pretty well so far! |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | pavelludiq: Math is important, but not the main thing in programming. If by "good at math" you mean "I can get perfect score on my exams", well then, i suck! Number crunching is what computers are for, high school math treats you like a computer, don't ever let them convince you that math is about solving equations on paper. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | sidmitra: Just start with building something small. And learn math along on a need to know basis for a start, so that you don't get swarmed.And maybe start with a language like Python. In my opinion its simple and lacks syntactic cruft. |
Is it necessary to learn maths to enter into programming? | michael_dorfman: First of all, congratulations. The fact that you are here, asking this question, at this age, bodes well.In terms of books/links, I'd suggest: just study your textbook. For now, try to really understand the "school maths" you are currently being taught, and do as much actual programming as you can. There will be plenty of time for more advanced mathematics in a few years. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.