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Is $5k really worth 5%? | anamax: mu.The right question is something like "Is ycombinator worth the equity it will cost my company?"While other people have talked about what ycombinator is worth, the right answer to that question also depends on the meaning of "my company". |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | baddox: If every piece of human technology disappeared, I would probably die in a few seconds, since I sleep on the 7th hour. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | cmos: Now that we have all witnessed the greatness that is online porn, probably not that long. |
how do you process payments? | lakeeffect: Amazon payments for cost efficiency. We thought considered using pay pal but it was more expensive. The other nice thing about Amazon is they let payers use their amazon payment accounts. |
How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches? | sunkencity: The trick is to be comfortable working with a system that you don't know much about. I personally love figuring out new systems, and starting to work in new unknown environments. Yes it takes a lot of time to figure things out, but when you have done it enough times (figured out 3rd party software), you get a feel for it, and can draw the right conclusions on how a program works fast.Inexperienced troubleshooters often enter the work with pre-concieved notions of how the system works and hold on to them for too long. Always doubt your knowledge.I think it usually takes 1-2 days with a system until you start to get our bearings. Before that, you are just collecting data, random tidbits of how the system works.I second the recommendation to use recommended libraries, and I love github for the code network analysis. Back when I did a lot of java development there was often a java library available which solved the problem available on the internet even for a specialized problem, but more often than not it turned out to be a completely shit implementation that needed to be replaced. Of course there are good java libraries, the trick is to know someone you can trust who can recommend libraries.OTOH for some rails tasks that can be resolved by just adding a plugin the quality of the code doesn't matter much, since it's just a few lines of code configuration. Still a good library is much better than a bad. I wish there was some kind of leaderboard, or official plugin list for rails, it can be very hard to judge plugins for a newbie. |
Is $5k really worth 5%? | developingchris: The money is not the draw. The chance to be mentored, and get money earlier are to me. I would pay more than 5% of the current venture to benefit from being mentored by these people for long to come. |
The VC and the Geek. Do VC's only care about 'management team'? | pg: Only bad VCs are looking for startups founded by MBAs. The better ones are looking for people with technical backgrounds who are willing and able to figure out how business works. |
How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches? | DanielBMarkham: Use 3rd party stuff cautiously. I think "never use 3rd party stuff" is a little extreme, but remember that when you pick up the tool, the tool picks you up too. (Sorry -- watched too much Yoda) That is, you may want the tool for 1 or 2 really cool things, but the tool may demand out of you a week of playing around, pain and suffering, and a dedication that your spouse doesn't get.One rule I use is that when I pick something up, I make sure that I can google help whenever I need it. If Joe-Bob's awesome language or widget set has only 47 people using it, and you have to put up with abuse on an IRC channel or buy 15 books just to get respect from the community -- forget it.Wise choice of tools also means your cognitive load decreases. You simply don't have to remember so much crap anymore. Problem remembering how to attach events to an element in Javascript? Ten seconds with Google and you've got your answer. There's a certain tipping point that products reach. Be careful using stuff before acceptance grows to that point.That's _platform-ish_ stuff. Tools, widgets, languages and such. For whatever you're actually doing, consider rolling your own stuff. Most times you only need a small subset of functionality, and if you're a good coder it's as easy to write it as use somebody else's. Plus, you understand what's going on. Many times I've used stuff with open source code only to spend hours plugging through their code trying to figure out what the heck they were trying to do. That hurts. Don't do that if you can help it. Sure it's great to modify OSS, but it's probably just as easy to spend that time learning more about the technical problem domain.For instance, I'm playing around with the idea of writing another web app. I took a look at YUI -- I really like it. But at the end of the day, so far at least, it does a whole lot of stuff that I don't need, and payload size is important to me. So I'm just going to roll my own stuff. You're always weighing future hassle against productivity. Sometimes, like with learning functional programming or picking up COM or something, the rewards may be much greater than the hassle. But for most stuff, like version control, project planning, configuration, deployment, setup, etc -- you don't have the luxury of taking 3 days to figure some of these tools out. So don't. |
I've had some software developed, now the coder is holding me for ransom. | spacecowboy: To the original poster on this topic...I know you made a deal with this developer but the fact that your original deal was to build your app within 2 months and it has been almost a year now - you REALLY need to walk away. It hurts both emotionally and financially, but based on all the feedback you've received - you should really consider what the community is telling you and move on.I write software for a living and I have been in positions where other contractors have written software for my groups so If I ever made a deal with someone that included having software done in two months - waiting almost a year later for the project to be completed is just plain ridiculous and totally unacceptable. Especially when you take into consideration all of the things that you have mentioned.It hurts us to hear about your story, we wish you the best but help yourself and start over. Take what you have learned from this experience and apply it to the next iteration. The fact that you've worked through a lot of questions, issues and the conops of how your application would work - take this experience and knowledge and find someone that comes recommended and is trusted and give it another shot.Best wishes. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | brianobush: funny thing was just the other day I was showing my children how to make fire with two sticks. Didn't work. Father failure, though they did understand the idea of friction and the result: heat. Now, my second attempt is using a boot lace with bow (from curved stick) to turn a wood axle with a top brace. Makes smoke, but no fire yet. Somehow, this was much easier when I was younger. However, my point is the basic skills are just as important as the knowledge. |
how do you process payments? | vaksel: I like cdgcommerce, they have reasonable rates and very good reputation. They also give good support. You can find a whole bunch of reviews on webhostingtalk |
Is $5k really worth 5%? | apinstein: Your question is nonsense.I'll assume for a moment that you are presently a "good software developer contractor" and you currently gross "$10k" a month.Given that, $10k a month is your opportunity cost for doing something else, for instance, doing a startup.That fact has little to do with your question "is ycombinator worth 5% of my biz for ~$15k"?If you want to do a startup, then you'll be giving up your $10k a month to build something that scales beyond your time. I recommend doing this, if you have the risk-tolerance for doing a startup.IFF you decide to do a startup, THEN you have to decide how to fund it. YCombinator offers your team ~$20k for 5% of the company to kick off your startup efforts. Plus, they offer you the "prestige and access" you'll get due to YCombinator. The alternative is bootstrapping, or "normal" funding channels.From what I know about YCombinator, it's definitely an outstanding opportunity if you can get your idea accepted. If you're young and inexperienced and mobile, do it.Alan |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | gcheong: Do you have an interview at Google or Microsoft? |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | raquo: So the question is whether the humanity will be able to stabilize before current generation (with the knowledge of technology) will die (including because of age) |
how do you process payments? | jng: I use Plimus (http://www.plimus.com) for ViEmu and Codekana sales (http://www.viemu.com and http://www.codekana.com). It's very good, and the price is good, too. I used to use share-it (http://www.shareit.com/) for a few years, but they were more expensive and less informative.I'm using them from the EU. ShareIt is based in Germany and Plimus in California, and still Plimus is cheaper.These are one-time payments only, so no idea how they work with subscriptions. I'd expect them to work fine if they provide the service, they are very professional. |
how do you process payments? | axod: I use paypal subscription thing atm, it seems to do the job ok. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | pg: Despite the generally frivolous answers, this is an interesting question and one I often wonder about. What turns out to take up all the time if we want to reproduce where we are now? Presumably the optimal plan is to spend practically all your effort on machine tools.It would be interesting to be able to figure out what would be the best benchmark of progress. Would it be the precision with which you could machine metal? That might do up to about 1900.It might turn out that most of the time was spent on something nontechnical, like moving stuff from place to place before you'd developed fast ways of doing that. So maybe in practice the most important benchmark would be how fast you could move stuff.Reproducing where we are now would in some ways be harder than getting here was. E.g. the most accessible coal and mineral deposits used to be sitting right on the surface, but now those are gone. |
How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches? | antirez: My guess is that there are multiple factors:* Not invented here syndrome: 10x coder may code small things himself that many times is faster then learning other stuff.* Selection of the tools to use: it will use Ruby instead of Java, for example, and for a reason. In general he'll try to figure the fastest path to solve the problem so will try a lot less. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | nixme: Are you asking this question in reference to last night's Battlestar Galactica finale? It was somewhat surprising to see everyone give up technology so easily and start anew with just clothing, some food, and their own language. But I guess being cooped up in those ships for that long and seeing how the abuse of technology led them to such events could have that effect.To answer your question, it's hard to guess. Without medical or agricultural technology, I think most of our current population would die out. The rest would war over the remnants of societal structure. Technical progress, as we see it, would take a long time to begin -- primarily dependent on stability. There are too many unpredictable events that would alter the length of time before returning to stability and our current standards. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | yters: One big problem is that we need working technology to access much of our technical knowledge. |
How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches? | conanite: The head-banging gets less and less over time. Or else I've developed a thick skull, not sure which.Experience makes a huge difference - simply because you've seen this problem before, or at least seen this kind of problem before, or maybe you saw the solution to this problem a year ago when you were googling the solution to some other problem and tucked it away in a cavity in your brain.With experience, you happen to know that there are certain kinds of many-to-many relationships Hibernate can't map in a legacy schema where the foreign key is a subset of a composite primary key. So when you encounter that on your next project you drop right down to SQL, to the wonder and bewilderment of your new colleagues whom you've just converted to an ORM tool because it "abstracts away all that sql stuff".With experience, you know the kinds of ways certain systems go wrong, the kinds of solutions and workarounds to apply, and most importantly the kinds of things to google for when hunting for the solution.Even scanning search results pages - to a novice they're homogeneous, but after some time you start ignoring whole classes of results. For example, you're trying to find what some annoying ActiveRecord exception is about, and you realise half of your search results are pointers to subversion log messages mirrored in a thousand places all over the internet. And they don't have the information you're looking for.As some other commenters observed, you have to push and solve those problems that seem impossible, because the next time around, you'll find the answer a little faster. Keep up the head-banging. It eventually turns into supernatural powers. Just be careful with the wall. |
how do you process payments? | ScottWhigham: I use PayPal, Google, and Authorize.net currently. We are dumping Google in a few weeks - 1+ years of "1 in 5" chargebacks and poor (non-existent?) customer service. PayPal is best of breed but we do not use them as our primary payment handler; it's an option presented to customers upon checkout though. |
how do you process payments? | chaosmachine: Choose more than one. It's important to have redundancy when it comes to getting paid. Ask anyone who's had their PayPal account suspended for arbitrary reasons.I don't think you can get away from PayPal, their market share is just too big to ignore. Amazon Payments sounds like a good second choice, but it depends on your customer base. |
Are you getting screwed? | tvon: > Is having a job alone good enough in this economy?Don't leave unless you have something else lined up. |
how do you process payments? | chops: I use Authorize.net and am quite pleased with it, though, admittedly, I've never used any other service.I don't currently accept automated payments through them, though they do have a recurring payment functionality built in. I haven't used Auth.net's recurring payment system.Before they implemented that, when I was building a service that relied on automatic recurring payments, I built a script that managed it (as the amount could vary from month to month depending on the selected features), and ran it on a cronjob.It was quite secure as the processing server itself was firewalled from the internet (no way of accepting incoming connections, and operated from my home, away from the data center). Furthermore the data was all stored encrypted in the database (but it didn't survive on the public servers longer than 5 seconds or so). Whenever it processed the payments, it would pipe the output to a file and then to the printer for the hard copy records, resulting in daily printouts of the service.Unfortunately, my service never went live, but the homegrown recurring payment system ran flawlessly for months (until it was decommissioned, that is). |
How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches? | ghempton: 10x coders are also 10x system admins |
Is there online service like Delicious that saves series of URLs for later viewing? | bouncingsoul: I don't think it's possible for a website to do what you describe: a webpage doesn't have access to or even know about your other tabs.The best I can think to do would be to use the browser's bookmark all tabs feature and then export the bookmarks to a usb drive.Not pretty or convenient, but maybe faster than saving each individually. |
I've had some software developed, now the coder is holding me for ransom. | joanou: Walk away. There is no point in having the relationship when trust can never be there. |
how do you process payments? | goodkarma: We use Payflow Pro Recurring Billing (PayPal).If you don't need access to the funds for a few days I would recommend using Braintree for recurring billing. But if you want the funds in your Paypal account immediately Paypal's Payflow Pro is a decent option. |
how do you process payments? | garethr: Paypal is good and pretty feature rich, but it's not the most straightforward thing to work with. It's not really that the API is under-documented, more that it can involve lots of back and forth and your code needs to deal with lots of cases. The advantage is ease of use. In terms of time to implement and wide spread user awareness it's a good starting point to get the money coming in - with more options provided as time permits. |
how do you process payments? | figured: http://www.zuora.com/http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/http://aws.amazon.com/fps/previous HN thread
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432284 |
how do you process payments? | reidman: Google Checkout has no customer service, not for merchants at least. No phone number, no email address, just a knowledge base and a forum where GC merchants vent their frustration by making threats and typing in all caps:http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/checkout-merchants/lab...In addition to the rate hike which now puts them in the same fee range as Paypal, Google Checkout is missing basic functionality.True story: you can't download your complete transaction history. You can download one day of transactions at a time, but if you want something to give to your accountant at the end of the year, you've got to download 365 .csv files and combine them yourself. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | kenver: If we woke up and all the technology was gone, would we want to get back to where we are now...a second time around would be a good chance to fix/improve stuff. |
If you woke up tomorrow and...part 2 | johngunderman: Microsoft :P no, I jest.Conventional knowledge would still exist for the most part (assuming an approx 10 year time frame), so we probably wouldnt have geocentric delusions or anything like that.I would guess that as far as technologies went, the internet would be designed in a much more secure manner. Also, it probably would be designed as a scalable network instead of the scale-free network it currently is. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | cool-RR: I think it's a very interesting question.I would say three to five years. In my opinion, technological tools are overrated. Most things can be built by hand using common materials.Actually, it would be a very cool project! Take a bunch of hackers. Set up an isolated camp for them in a remote area. There will be no technology there, but there will be plenty of edible plants, fresh water, and some medical supplies. The hackers will be supplied with a sample of every raw material that Earth has to offer. And when I say raw, I mean, for example, iron ore. Have video cameras all around the place to make sure they are not bringing technology from anywhere. Measure how long it takes them to build, say a computer. I think it will be less than a year. (The reason I answered 3-5 years to the main question is because in the situation you described most humans will be busy fighting each other, and hackers will have less time to devote to rebuilding technology.) |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | geuis: Was this somehow inspired by the BSG finale?However, I find this kind of question fascinating. This question is posited in the book Marrow, and it takes a very advanced society about 5000 years to get back to where they were.I think the situation right away would work more or less like this. Within the first few weeks to months, nasty. We're literally talking about BILLIONS of people that will starve to death within a matter of several months.Based on your scenario, we're not looking at instantly restored nature. Vast areas of the world would suddenly be large, vacant, barren land where the cities were. Places that were verdant farm land before being paved over by roads, cities, and suburbs are likely to be nutrient starved and unfarmable for many years.You would immediately have millions of people moving out into surviving "wilderness" areas. Trees burning, wild animals being hunted for food. I'm mainly thinking of the U.S., but the ideas apply to most other industrialized countries. "Third world" and agrarian societies might actually fair better. We're talking about the utter decimation of many remaining "protected" species. Suddenly removing everything humans have built, at this point in history, would seriously fuck what's left of nature on the land. On the other hand, humans would no longer have immediate access to the deep ocean. Given the results of ocean recovery in protected areas in recent years, its encouraging to think that many threatened and endangered species and ecosystems would immediately start recovering.The next important thing to take into account is culture and religion. There will likely be surviving populations worldwide that represent the varieties of cultures and religions that we already have. In small pockets, you might find members of the intelligentsia trying to recreate primitive paper as soon as possible, to re-record as much general knowledge as they can. In other parts of the world, particularly the Muslim populations, there will be a religious fervor and general destruction of any remaining advanced knowledge. This will also happen in much of America, due to our retarded Evangelican populations. We might actually find more preservation efforts in Europe and Japan, due to their longer-term cultural histories mixed with being extremely modern. I can't say about China, but they have a long history and might also work to preserve knowledge.People are adaptable, and anything short of a global disaster that fucks the basic life processes of the world, people will survive. It would likely take several hundred years at a minimum, and at most several thousand, before we saw some resemblance of modern technology re-emerging.However, the only cultural artifacts that people would have is what was created from the morning after, onward. There would be no Pyramids, Stonehenge, Jerusalem, Aztec ruins, or anything. No cave paintings, primitive burials, etc. By saying "all technology", this means that all physical remains of our progress would need to disappear too. We would only be left with our memories. In every graveyard around the world, all caskets would disappear. All pacemakers and artificial joints would be gone from the skeletons. They would also be gone from the living.After a couple of generations without any physical remnants of our civilization's evolution, with no pre-history, our descendants would be completely cut off from their past. They would of course be able to re-learn about evolution over the billions of years of life because fossils won't go anywhere. They could relearn about our own evolution, but only from the biology side of things.I would imagine that future historians would eventually realize their legends of an ancient global civilization might have some credence, even though there is no physical evidence. There would be the tell-tale signs, the footprint, that our technology had even though the tech itself is gone. There would be the atmospheric carbon levels, the concentrations of uranium where reactors and weapons were, and hundreds of other alterations to the physical world that we've made. |
I've had some software developed, now the coder is holding me for ransom. | jodrellblank: Its now almost april and hes almost finished.Call me skeptical, but...:) |
how do you process payments? | knewter: Authorize.net is great for customer service, I've never once needed to talk to them and had to wait more than 5 minutes (granted, on-site text support, but it's useful and they're efficient).We used paypal's payflow pro on our latest project. PayPal is TERRIBLE for development. For auth.net, you just put the account in test mode, send it some transactions, and get the appropriate responses. For PayPal, you have to have a sandbox account, and users in the sandbox, and this and that and blah. What it ends up meaning is that it's HARD TO SHOW YOUR CUSTOMER THAT PAYMENT IS WORKING. They have to have a sandbox account, and manage all of that stuff. Or you just conference call and screenshare, right?Now, it turns out PayPal's not TERRIBLE, but I'll never use it again. WAY more hassle on that project than any of my others (I do ~10 ecom-enabled apps in a given year). |
I've had some software developed, now the coder is holding me for ransom. | pixpox3: Thanks for all the advice guys. I'm not from California or even the US, so I wasn't sure about my legal options here. But I've done a little reading and the advice here has helped a lot. It's amazing how solitary you can feel doing this sort of thing! Thanks to all. |
how do you process payments? | 10ren: Worldpay.comThey are a pain to work with, they delay payments by a month, and they're expensive but they do multi-currency. This is important for me in Australia, because it means a customer in the US can buy in US dollars, and their credit card is billed in US dollars, with exactly that amount (no mysterious currency fluctuations). Same for Euros.Their take is about 4.5% (better than PayPal etc when you take into account its hidden currency conversion spread).Every so often I look around for an alternative for my situation ("there must be something better than this"), but so far they're the best in this. |
how do you process payments? | madmotive: Spreedly looks like an interesting alternative for outsourcing the hassle of subscription payments: http://spreedly.com/Not used them myself yet. |
The VC and the Geek. Do VC's only care about 'management team'? | kanny96: I agree with your thoughts. It is sometimes difficult to digest not getting a fair opportunity, but after all, the world outside the school is not, well, the school. I also have EE background, with .95 PhD, and despite being ahead of the tech horizon, it's especially painful to be rubbished by some haphazard investors.However, i am sure, if i put my full energy behind it, someday it will certainly fly with or w/o VCs on board. So, the real key is perseverance and commitments. And of course, finding like-minded or like-positioned people helps getting there. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | jodrellblank: All technology? I guess we're back at the bottom of the Civilization advances tree, eh? Do you want triremes, maths, militia or granaries?England has ~65 millions of people. Take away all manmade technology (including buildings, tarmac, concrete) and any city would be many square miles of bare earth collapsing into holes where sewers and tunnels and underground trains once were.Within a day or two it would be many square miles of human waste, corpses, mud if it rained, and people making their way to the nearest rivers.Within a couple of weeks, significant fractions of people have starved or died of lack of medical treatment, fighting, illness from river water contaminated with sewage and corpses, etc.OK, you can drink from the river you may not get ill for a while. What can you eat but other people? City areas -> wastelands.Out in the country, farmers with easily harvested crops in season are the best off, until they get looted. With no food stores or shops, animals and current crops will be eaten quickly and that's pretty much that. Good luck surviving on hedgerow food and hunting with no experience and everyone else trying to as well.Some strong willed resourceful people in remote niches will survive (nobody could travel to them very quickly). After a few years we'll see who. Small farms, maybe some farm animals, fast growing trees coming into usable sizes. Levers, (wooden) wheels, barrows, hammers hoes, heaters, cookers, flint/stone axes, they'll be around.Maybe in short order some beach sand melting -> glass jars, glasses. The people who survive are the people who currently live with reduced technology and will be busy staying alive.What then? I don't know. A few decades to a population big enough and connected enough for mass trade, I suppose. By then a similar sort of grind up through metalwork, blacksmithing, banking, debt, economic collapse...What technology could we skip to that would hasten us through such developments? I say at least two hundred years. |
Do you teach the old generation to use internet? | mcav: Yes. I taught my grandma how to use the Internet, E-mail, and Skype. She played Freecell often before, but nothing else on the computer. (She still says "So can I X-this out?" to close a window.)I sat her down one afternoon and explained things very slowly, using metaphors such as the postman bringing mail to your house, and you putting mail in your mailbox when you want it to go out at some point.For the internet, I used the metaphor that "your computer talks to other computers" and shows you pages that live on other computers. I had to explain about hyperlinks, ads, etc.The key point to remember: They're not stupid; the internet is completely foreign to them. You have to explain things that we take for granted, such as hyperlinks, the windows taskbar, what a "window", "application", etc are.Technical details: I put her in Chrome, and added a shortcut to her start menu for Gmail. She can feel safe because the home button always gets her out of wherever she wants to go. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | stavrianos: Seems to me that there are two ways it could go, depending on how you take the question.If when all the tech disappears the resources reappear, I'd say it doesn't take too long at all. Maybe ten years, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand, but nothing more than that. This is a sort of "If people with modern knowledge fall back in time" scenario.On the other hand, if the resources aren't available, ie all the iron that's been mined over the last hundred years is simply gone then we'd be pretty boned, and would probably go extinct. This is more of a post-apocalyptic scenario, except you can't even mine the I-beams out of old skyscrapers, but all the cheaply accessible metal's been mined anyways so your civilization simply can't advance past the bronze age (or wherever you manage to scrape it up to). We'd be like the australian aborigines, who lived for (if wikipedia is to be believed) an astronomical 40000 years on the continent without developing anything more sophisticated than the boomerang. |
How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches? | mattmcknight: My approach to this is that my creativity and expertise lie in creating unique software. I am not out there to build a web server, so I look for the stuff that is commonly used, well documented, and has easily googlable problems. I try to learn them really well. I stick with the stuff that works. With small open source things, I have been known to pull in the code and get going with it myself...Here are mistakes I see people make that I try to avoid:
1) Making decisions on technology before they have actually tried it.
2) Upgrading to the latest version of products too often. For every problem it fixes...
3) Fail to give developers system administrator access rights. Nothing worse than not being able to install stuff, but it happens all the time. |
How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches? | wheels: You use what you know rather than switching to the language of the month every, well, month.I've been using the same toolchain for a decade now. I don't have to futz with the configuration: I learned it 10 years ago.There's a balance there, between keeping on top of technology and focusing on solving problems.It's been interesting for me doing a little Ruby of late because coming from mostly C++ (with bits of Java and Perl) I find myself fighting with the interpreter a lot. It's not that C++ doesn't have its quirks, it's just that I've known them all for so long that I work around them intuitively. |
How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches? | mpk: Well, experience goes a long way.After having built software in different languages for different targets on different systems a few times, you start recognizing patterns.One of the strategies I use to become comfortable with new environments is to build a piece of software (usually a prototype) using only the core language, standard library and maybe one or two 'mature' pieces of third-party library code.This takes a bit of time and I usually end up with a codebase that is a bit crufty (especially when I'm learning the language as I go). However, this usually gets me to the prototype stage with a lot of newly acquired knowledge about performance of the language, best-practices, etc. As well as a lot of testing code.After that I'll start looking into third-party libraries and start factoring out my own code with third-party libs where appropriate.For Java, for example, I've found that a lot of the language helper/util code I write can be replaced with code from org.apache.commons.For interacting with crufty stuff like webservices in all their non-standard glory, I usually build a few classes in Ruby with breakpoints so I can interactively analyze and poke at them. Much, much faster than going through the 'change code'-save-recompile-run cycle with breakpoints in C# and Java.When dealing with loads of XML config files, I'll quickly do a git init and also keep all the files open in vim buffers. (Vim and Emacs are excellent tools for working your way through XML junk). Then I'll put print (or equivalent) statements in the code so I can run the app from the command line and filter the output through grep or even some custom scripts that'll filter the output for me and provide some basic analysis or correlation points.The list goes on and on.You have to realize that apart from the code that operates solely within your codebase (and not even then), you are always dealing with third-party code. The OS, compiler, the VM, the windowing routines, the threading model, etc.As you go on you have to learn techniques to handle this. And one of the first things you already seem to have learned is that you should never be quick to voluntarily add to the pile of third-party software you're already dealing with.And that 10x programmer working opposite you who generates mod_rewrite configs like there's no tomorrow? Yeah, that person spent about 3 days getting to the bottom of that engine and testing the hell out of various configs a few years ago. There's not much of a short-cut for these kind of things. |
how do you process payments? | charliepark: We use Braintree (http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/), and I've never had a better experience with a service provider. They're consummately professional, know their product and category inside and out, and are eager to educate people on the ins and outs of credit card processing. I had heard at one point that they had a higher rate for services billing less than $1MM a year, but I've since heard that that doesn't apply to SaaS companies that are using Rails (I'm not sure what the definitive answer is on this; I know they were the best price we could find, and I looked extensively).For recurring billing, we use a Rails-based billing framework called Freemium (http://github.com/cainlevy/freemium/tree/master), and have been very happy with it. It integrates with Braintree flawlessly. Also, its primary developer is a freelancer (http://cainlevy.com/) who is available for hire, if you're looking for someone to help you get set up. We hired him, and couldn't be happier with his work.One thing to keep in mind when you're looking for a payment processor is this: How transparent are they with their costs? Do they complicate their fee structure with hidden costs? Credit card billing can be a really complex beast, and having a partner who's interested in helping you make sense of it is very valuable. That's what we found in Braintree. I'm sure there are others that are good, but I'm glad I haven't had to look for them, and that I've been able to just focus on building my business. |
Good SDK for client-to-client game prototype in the browser? | wmf: RTMFP or proxy all communication through the server, probably using Comet. |
I've had some software developed, now the coder is holding me for ransom. | Kaizyn: Go ahead and get this guy to give you a full copy of your source code as it now stands. Since he did not finish the project in two months as specified in the contract - you have a written contract, right? - you can terminate the business relationship on the grounds of breach of contract. There should be no need to reverse engineer software that you paid for. The nature of the business relationship here is that you own full rights to the software. Best of luck to you as this sounds like it will be a real pain to resolve. |
I've had some software developed, now the coder is holding me for ransom. | michaelneale: Yes reverse engineering is trivial (unless a very good obfuscator is used) if you have the binary jar files.However, like others have mentioned, its highly likely there is nothing there of value - so you there is a pretty good chance you will have to write it off.I have heard of similar things happening to this - commonly when the development is done in SE asia (have heard of several cases in the Philippines of this exact thing happening, interestingly). |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | nazgulnarsil: I think people speculating in this thread would greatly enjoy Earth Abides by George Stewart. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | tesseract: You'd hopefully get pretty far while current experts are still alive. Otherwise, you'd better at least have a plan for getting printing and libraries up and running pretty darn quickly so they can leave instructions for the next generation... |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | electromagnetic: Well I suppose the bigger question is, does everything the technology created go away too?Technology built everything, but do all our houses disappear or just all the wiring and plumbing and crap? Because if the house goes, then surely so should all the people who were brought about by technology.Realistically there would be approximately (assuming the max for 10,000 years ago) about 10 million people on the planet. If so, with the distribution spread throughout the world then I think if humanity were born with our present knowledge I think we would do rather well, presuming we were swapped out with the Cro-Magnon. I bet about 50% of the people would probably die off within the first decade just through lack of knowledge (again presuming even IQ and knowledge distribution), but if people managed to start bringing back technology I think we could advance things pretty quick.I mean one person with the knowledge of how to make steel and devoted their life to teaching everyone how to make advanced tools, well we'd have skipped 9,800 years in the space of maybe 50.So I suppose it's all in how it would happen and then a large handful of random chance and human nature. I mean if the one guy who remembered how to build a blast forge, also knew how to make gun powder (I know the principle on how to build both) decided to instead of helping the world decided to build a machine gun and build his own country then it could all end when someone usurped him without the knowledge to build tools or weapons. |
If you woke up tomorrow and...part 2 | rglovejoy: Vacuum Tubes. We would go straight to transistors and other solid-state devices. |
how do you process payments? | plusbryan: Cybersource is an oft-overlooked option I'd recommend considering. We were going to go with the defacto AuthNet, but ended up choosing Cybersource for the added features (better recurring payments, international currency support) and the fact they gave us a pretty sweet deal (same price as Authorize.Net, which is their lower-priced option).I think a lot of these companies that typically target larger businesses are more willing to cater to startups these days to drum up new business. |
how do you process payments? | teuobk: On a related note, could anybody comment on their experience getting PCI compliance?I'd like to have the payment process a bit more integrated with my web site, but many of those solutions seem to require PCI compliance, and that looks rather involved. |
Is there online service like Delicious that saves series of URLs for later viewing? | ashwinl: thanks for the suggestions |
how do you process payments? | dhyasama: I work at PowerPay which is a payment processor. Unless the person or organization you sign up with is a registered ISO than you are actually doing business with a company such as PowerPay. Visa and Mastercard require the ISO to be clearly stated on the merchant account application. Most of the time merchants go through sales agents who are working for or with a registered ISO. Just an FYI, as the industry can be a bit sketchy. I've been at PowerPay for a few years and for what it's worth I've always been impressed with how we do business. |
how do you process payments? | izak30: I got a local merchant account (huntington national bank), which is flexible, and I get a choice of gateways (we chose authorize.net). Great service at both the merchant account and gateway level, also pretty good rates. |
Do you teach the old generation to use internet? | tokenadult: I'm IN the older generation. But I've been using the Internet since before AOL and other commercial online services set up gateways to Internet services. My parents' generation among my relatives includes people who don't use the Internet at all, and some who use it for email. I've had to tell one relative to check Snopes before forwarding emails to a distribution list of all her friends. |
Is $5k really worth 5%? | MaysonL: If you and your company are good enough to be accepted by YC, then it probably is, both for you and for YC. It's the classic win-win proposition. YC will probably get a return on their money, and your company will be worth enough more that your share, now 95% instead of 100%, will be worth quite a bit more than it was before their investment. |
Do you teach the old generation to use internet? | buugs: I help them if they ask, my grandfather learned how to use the net and email on his own and knows about the hazardous attachments that live and about spam, and I'm guessing my grandmother checks email through him, on the other side my other grandmother has no use for the internet and has no plans of ever using a computer.My father although not in the older generation (senior) is relatively new to the internet and pretty much just knows ebay gmail and google, but one thing the it guys at his work have done is instill a good fear of opening attachments as he seems to get a large amount of virus spam.Most just want to use email to keep in contact, send pictures, and relay internet jokes and if they ask they can get my help.I think the best thing to teach them is about malware and maybe even show them how to do a virus scan, also show them how to send pictures and open pictures, as that is what they want to do. |
If you woke up tomorrow and...part 2 | daydream: Anyone ever read "A Canticle for Lebowitz"? I recently recently discovered it and am very intrigued. |
Can't Find Old Post | tokenadult: any other information that would help me find this articlehttp://searchyc.com/orhttp://www.google.com/search?q=email+newsletter+site%3Anews.... |
Can't Find Old Post | ctingom: I don't know about the post, but Carsonified used to / still has a product that did exactly that. |
Good SDK for client-to-client game prototype in the browser? | cpr: Cappuccino might be a good start, as it's pretty cognant to Objective-C, and also provides the same kind of graphics primitives as you'd be using on the iPhone. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | jodrellblank: On reading the replies, I suddenly remembered this: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/planning-fallac.htmlMy revised estimate for the time it would take to recreate all of history is approximately as long as it took the last time, plus a bit. |
how do you process payments? | grandalf: We use authorize.net ... authorize.net provides remotely stored credit cards (you just store a token). This is available through pretty much all auth.net resellers.For some reason Braintree has gotten a lot of hype but offers nothing any better than the most lowly auth.net reseller. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | jodrellblank: The last time a similar topic came up at HN, it was the "what if you time travelled back to the past" question.I didn't think of it in time for that thread, but I wanted to turn the question around: Looking back through history, if we wanted to spot a technologically advanced person appearing in the past and trying to create 'future' technology, what markers should we look for? (and ... has this happened?). |
How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches? | known: I had been through this phase.
Since most of the 3rd party software is closed source I could not debug their code.
I ended up writing work-around code to circumvent the bugs in closed source 3rd party software. And the culprit here is MS Excel and VBA. |
If you woke up tomorrow and...part 2 | czcar: Drum brakes? ...something i have always found interesting is what mistakes could we have avoided. Serious mistakes brought on by ignorance and pseudo-science, such as the act of bleeding to heal. |
how do you process payments? | rbiffl: TrustCommerce.com is very fast (<2 sec.) and developer-friendly, and they run on open source systems if that's important to you. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_Away |
how do you process payments? | known: http://www.ccavenue.com/ for Indian customers |
how do you process payments? | mjtokelly: Amazon Simple Pay Subscription has worked out very well for me. Startlingly easy site integration.https://payments-sandbox.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=pa...It's described as being in closed beta, but Amazon's friendly representative gave me access minutes after I emailed them. |
If we woke up tomorrow and... | kellishaver: I think you would see a large drop in population before we were able to rebuild. Population growth only occurs when the technology can support it.If we were starting over without any of the knowledge we have now, then it seems reasonable to assume that it would take roughly the same amount of time.If we had history to look back on, then maybe we would be looking at a few hundred years instead of a few thousand.I think the more interesting question is, if we had the knowledge of our past history to look back on, what would we do differently? Would we be more green from the start, for instance? A lot of the problems with adapting to green tech today isn't that the technology is necessarily so knew and unknown, it's that well-established infrastructures and systems are in place that are implemented on vastly different technologies and the cost/logistics of replacing them is prohibitive. |
lighttpd or nginx for a low grade server? | dfranke: Have a look at mathopd: http://www.mathopd.org/. Very lightweight and stable/mature, and unlike lighttpd, an excellent security track record. |
lighttpd or nginx for a low grade server? | petercooper: I'm not a heavy user of nginx although I've read more than I care to about all of the various options lately.. and my single data point is that nginx would be the better option of the two right now. |
lighttpd or nginx for a low grade server? | zepolen: I've used Lighttpd, Cherokee, Nginx and of course Apache (although stripped down for speed) on a high load production site for serving static files and reverse proxying.Nginx wins no contest. Highly stable, serving for almost 2 years now with zero issues.Lots of features, much simpler config, uses less resources.Hot config reloading. Hot binary upgrading.Low grade? Hardly.Issues with others:Lighttpd - configing slightly annoying, uses more cpu and memoryApache - slow performance and memory hog even when stripped of all it's extra modules, (just try and support 5000 keep alive connections on it)Cherokee - very nice, well thought out and featureful and fast but had some stability problems in production, I may take a look at it again later on because it has a sweet admin interface |
Is $5k really worth 5%? | sjs382: The real question is whether $5k + $5k/founder AND startup school is worth 5%. |
lighttpd or nginx for a low grade server? | ezmobius: nginx hands down. nginx is probably the most stable piece of software with the least problems we run here at engineyard. We've had thousands of nginx instances in production for years now and I can truly say it is one of my favorite pieces of software. |
Are you getting screwed? | ram1024: uhh... 2 years will get you half a mill in addition to your normal salary?why wouldn't you stay? :| |
Can't Find Old Post | chanux: I Google for
site:news.ycombinator.com <key_words_here>
when I want to find an old article. |
how do you process payments? | edsull: Hey...my name is Ed and I'm the founder of Aria Systems (www.ariasystems.com) which we started based on my experience building a very large subscription based service (2.5 Million users). I'd encourage you to think about a few things when creating a subscription based service:1. Think beyond taking people's money. Consider all of the use cases (credits, refunds, upgrades, downgrades, partner commissions, activation etc.). This way you can create a great customer experience, reduce cost of acquisition and maybe more importantly reduce the cost of owning a customer.2. caveat emptor with payment processors and payment methods. Make sure you understand things like processor fees, reserves, chargeback fees, chargeback disputes and window for chargebacks. Also, please please please treat processors and payment methods separately...almost like different layers in your application. The timing of fund settlement is critical...it may be worth it to pay a little extra in fees for faster cash.3. Scale. Volume and velocity of transactions. Some pay methods and merchant account providers only offer a best effort service. Think deeply about your projections, response times of each step in the process vs. your needs. Ask for latency SLA's if you think you'll spike volume at launch or PR etc.4. Security. Think about security from a process perspective and don't rely solely on your processor's PCI compliance. Compliance needs to be END TO END!I hope this was helpful. |
If you woke up tomorrow and...part 2 | raquo: no QWERTY! |
What's your favorite beer? | gstar: Beer is hacker news on Sunday, so my answers:* USA: Sierra Navada Pale* Australia, in order: Little Creatures Pale (on tap, at the brewery), Coopers Sparking and Coopers Vintage Stout* Belgium: tripel karmeliet, duval or hoegaarden (too many good'uns and styles, can't choose)* UK: Anything from Meantime is pretty good, but I'm fairly nonplussed by british beer. Especially 90% of cask ales - rubbish. Oh, I forgot Cobra which is an excellent, excellent lager.* Germany: Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel |
lighttpd or nginx for a low grade server? | sho: To add my voice to the chorus: Nginx, hands down. It's a great piece of software - simple enough to configure, small and efficient, and it just works and keeps working. I have literally never seen it crash or do anything it wasn't supposed to do.As for lighttpd, I messed with it a while ago and while it has its advocates, I found it fiddly to install and configure and quite old-fashioned. The arrival of nginx means you don't really need to consider lighttpd, IMO, it's kind of the older, worse version of the same thing.However ...Your other option is of course just sticking with Apache. I don't know the details of your server (maybe should have said?) but it doesn't use that much memory! For many common scenarios using it could be quite a bit easier. Well, it would likely be no work at all actually, since it's probably already installed and running fine. There can be a tendency to over-optimise up front; why not take the path of least resistance, get something up and running with Apache first, then switch if and when you need to? Just a thought ;) |
What's your favorite beer? | akeefer: I'm a fan of Belgian-styles ales. At the moment, my favorites are La Fin Du Monde (actually made in Quebec), Golden Draak, and Gouden Carolus d'Or (Red). For more regular bottled beers my favorites are probably Leffe, Hoegaarden, Blue Moon, and Paulaner Heffeweisen. |
What's your favorite beer? | sho: Asahi Super Dry. It's just got this really clean, pure taste. I like quite a few others, of course, but .. ASD's the one I always "come home" to. |
What's your favorite beer? | vaksel: I'm not really a huge beer drinker, so I don't really know the specialty brands that well.From the ones I tried so far, I prefer Heineken the most |
What's your favorite beer? | nanexcool: Indio, XX Ambar, Victoria, Bohemia Oscura. We don't know why Corona is so popular outside Mexico. |
What's your favorite beer? | lyime: Coors Light. |
Review my relaunched startup | aristus: Quick notes:The design is a turn-off.The demo editor does not work. I gave my page a name, but none of the link or text buttons work.Posting a review request at noon on Sunday limits your exposure.I don't quite get the value prop here -- even if making a page is "easy", it's not easier than writing something on my own blog.I can't open my own subjects without asking you? What if I don't care about the dozen languages listed?Server went down at this point. Sorry, man. This is a nice idea but you'll need to give users more power and more reason to use it. Maybe importing links from delicious or similar. |
What's your favorite beer? | shizcakes: Easy to Find: Guinness
Hard to Find: Bellhaven Scotch Ale
Impossible to Find: Milly's Pumpkin Ale (Seasonal, Manchester NH brewpub) |
What's your favorite beer? | tbeseda: Pandora's Bock from Breckenridge Brewery here in CO. nomnom |
What's your favorite beer? | jimfl: I will have Manny's Pale Ale from Georgetown Brewery anytime I find it on tap. It's a perfect balance of hops and malt. |
What's your favorite beer? | ComputerGuru: I don't drink... ever. :) |
What's your favorite beer? | weaksauce: Craft brews: Stone IPA is one of my favorites and Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale is great when it is in season.
Sierra Nevada Pale is great too. |
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