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What's your favorite beer? | deniscales: Stella Artois |
What's your favorite beer? | antidaily: Bell's Two Hearted Ale |
What's your favorite beer? | cschep: I tend to like the wheat beers. Franziskaner has a hefeweizen and a dunkel that are both fantastic. Also Hoegaarden's belgian white is delicious.For a cheap everyday kind of beer, I love finding PBR on tap for $2 a pint in a ton of different places. |
What's your favorite beer? | intellectronica: I am really disapointed to find this featured on the front page. |
What's your favorite beer? | bdfh42: Draught Bass!
If you can't get that then Marston's Pedigree or Banks's Original.We are talking ale here of course - not that nasty yellow lagery stuff (to be fair Grolsch is not bad at all) |
Review My Website - Trip Reports All Over the World | andrewljohnson: We started indexing trip reports from a few websites, and it's really filled out the map with information. I hope this helps someone find a hike! |
What's your favorite beer? | sc: I'm love-hate, lately, with these two "extreme" breweries: De Dolle Brouwers, and Dogfish HeadI've also been enjoying Three Floyds' Alpha King Ale. |
What's your favorite beer? | henriklied: Hansa Pilsner is the best Norwegian beer. Internationally, I'll go for a Carlsberg Jacobsen Dark Ale. |
What's your favorite beer? | guruz: Rothaus Tannenzäpfle(german).But right now I "have to" drink Tuborg, Carlsberg, Ringnes. |
Review My Website - Trip Reports All Over the World | keltecp11: Check out: www.tripsharer.com |
Review my relaunched startup | dbul: Sweet! Looks like you put a lot of work into this. More content probably needs to be added before you can see exactly how it will be useful to your audience.I would get rid of the ads for now and spend a bit more time reconsidering the user experience. For example, the color scheme, bold headlines, brief blurb of what the page you are about to click on is. It would also be nice to know what pages are external and which are not. |
lighttpd or nginx for a low grade server? | mattmcknight: I use Apache Web Server on a four year old server. It hasn't gone down outside of two server moves. Coming from the Java application server and IIS worlds, it's seems pretty simple to me. It seemed to be a more widely supported choice amongst my customers, and thus worth my time to invest in learning it. |
How to cache for logged in users? | dmix: I keep track of logged in users via sessions that are stored in a DB.Every time the user goes to a new page it is updated. This happens so frequently that caching doesn't really make sense. Accuracy is also important. |
Review My Website - Trip Reports All Over the World | sgrove: I suppose I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this. I looked at my area (orange county, california) and there were a few icons. clicking on them didn't give me any description - I suppose it's because you don't have any for those places (I do see the link to add info there).But you show me some info that I don't really understand. It doesn't change based on my interaction with different icons. Maybe give me a one liner telling me "Hey, these are interesting reviews of places near where you're looking." Just a thought to make it more immediately engaging - I wouldn't personally take the time to figure out this interface as it is right now, even though I enjoy hiking quite a bit.That said, you guys have ben iterating quite rapidly it seems, and making great progress, so I'm sure all of this will be taken care of shortly. |
Is AI a growing field? | HSO: as peter norvig said at a recent conference, it depends on how you define AI.to gauge the field, why not start with his textbook (http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/). right next to this link, i just saw this one here for more resources on the web (http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ai.html).btw, i wouldn't really think too much about what other people are interested in or not if you are at your stage. if you are drawn to the field, do it. tech is too unpredictable to make this kind of career calculus. |
Is AI a growing field? | ktharavaad: There are a LOT of publications on AI if you look at all the conference papers and journal papers floating around on the net. The field of AI itself is divided up into lots of sub fields such as logic theory, machine learning, language processing, search/optimization.Examples of "AI research at work" are the face detection in google picasa/iphoto ( machine learning + vision ). You email spam filter ( text classification ).As AI research matures and as computers get faster, its safe to say that there is definitely a greater demand for AI but its hard to come up with "obvious" applications of AI algorithms like the ones I listed above. |
Is AI a growing field? | jpirkola: Try searching AGI or "strong AI", which is a new movement trying to achieve general AI rather than application specific. I have got a good article on that: http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=689 |
Is AI a growing field? | jey: Depends on what you mean by AI. It's not a single area of study. |
Is AI a growing field? | frisco: If by AI you mean machine learning, yes. If you mean "human-like-interactive-thing," yes but not in a way that means we're substantially closer than we were 15 years ago.AI in the ML sense is quickly becoming critical to business and is opening up lots of possibilities that we could only dream of 5 years ago. At its heart, Google is basically an ML company for one big example. Facebook is moving in that direction as well. There are lots of startups solving old problems with AI, too, such as Knewton (tutoring), and for some self-promotion, my company (Quantios). |
Is AI a growing field? | njoubert: I'm currently going around visiting potential Ph.D. programs as an admit for next year, and at all the top schools (CMU, Stanford, Berkeley) the amount of people studying AI and machine learning is staggering. The field is definitely academically very active. |
Is AI a growing field? | natmaster: Shameless plug for my University: http://z.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab/publications_recent.php |
Review my relaunched startup | tdoggette: The promise that you, too can make a web page, and it's as easy as surfing the web(!) smells really 1997. Especially considering that the content is all about programming languages and the like, I doubt anyone in the target market is intimidated by making a web page.Also, just looking at it, what's it for? Making web pages about technology? There are lots of web pages about technology, and lots of places to host new ones. |
Shopping cart advice? | mahmud: ZenCart. |
Shopping cart advice? | asnyder: No money is necessary, check out Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/). It's very flexible, fully open source, and has a very active community. |
Review My Website - Trip Reports All Over the World | phillian: FYI- when I clicked on the link I received nothing but a blank screen. |
Is AI a growing field? | vaksel: I'd say no. My dad worked in AI 20-30 years ago(worked on some AI project for Russian military, something to do with nukes), and he looks for jobs in the field, now and then. And from what he say about, it seems like the AI field is pretty much frozen right now.There are almost no jobs available, and the few available are usually the be assistant to some professor who is trying to do something that was already done 20 years ago. |
How to cache for logged in users? | blasdel: It's easy -- assemble the 'blocks' on the client-side. |
Is AI a growing field? | amichail: For me, AI's goals are very cool but most of its approaches not so much. In fact, I find most AI talks rather boring.The only parts I really like have to do with human computation (e.g., ESP Game) and stealing ideas from nature (e.g., genetic programming, ant colony optimization, etc.):http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Biology-Peter-J-Bentley/dp/074... |
Review My Website - Trip Reports All Over the World | dawie: I really like your site!I live in Calgary Alberta, and I am always looking for hiking trails, but it takes time to find them. I will definately use your site in the summer. |
Review My Website - Trip Reports All Over the World | rrival: Great coverage of Colorado - verynice! |
What Visa for a UK team to come to YC? | critic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460914 |
Is AI a growing field? | dfox: Main problem with AI is that nobody really knows what it means. When something starts to be remotely useful, it is not called AI anymore :) |
Is AI a growing field? | brianobush: I do AI for work, however, it is not my only task. Most of my work is development work, data wrangling and debugging. Pure AI jobs probably exist, but I like the diversity and hoping to do more research is a lost cause in most software applications since so much time is required doing development. |
Is AI a growing field? | queensnake: My total out-of-butt reasoning: with low-level AI-ish things becoming commonplace (computing power getting cheaper, and devices becoming more ubiquitous; ever cheaper, more sophisticated robots, O'Reilly books on Collective Intelligence) and more data around, there'll be more demand for harder, truer-AI stuff. And if somehow there isn't, it still helps to have an understanding of the lower-level, easier stuff.And, there's a lecture on Google video (don't have the link) of a guy going on about how there are lots of expert systems out there run by companies that don't advertise themselves. |
Review My Website - Trip Reports All Over the World | jmorin007: First off, I really like the concept of being able to see potential outdoor activities within my area.Some feedback:- As some other people have mentioned, it's tough to tell exactly what is happening when you drop onto the page. You need at least some description as to what you are all about, even though it seems obvious to you.- Have a key for all of the different icons that show up. It may seem obvious that a notebook is information about something, and a water drop is a river/stream/etc. but it won't be obvious to everyone. A followup to that is to show more information when I hover over an icon. Showing me a name when I hover over a waterdrop doesn't do me much good. Tell me it's a stream, river, lake, pond, puddle, etc. as well as its name and why I would want to know that this exists (the point of the website is to find places to do things outdoors, right?). Tell me that I can go fishing or boating on a lake. Whitewater rafting on a river with rapids. That sort of thing.- Clicking on an icon adds a point, but it's not altogether clear as to why it does that. I would expect it to show additional information (which it apparently does in the floating pane...I'll get to that momentarily) but why do I need multiple points? And reclicking on a point does a reload of the page? Again, just make it blatantly clear why some of these actions occur.- The floating pane. I totally get why it's there...you need some sort of window to display detailed information about all of these different icons, but let me hide/minimize or close it if I want to. The title of whatever I click on looks like it's in an input box, which makes me think I can edit it...which I can't. Make it look like a title not an input box. Additional, if I've clicked on an icon and want information on what that is, then just show me information for that point. If there isn't any, then don't show the point. You'll quickly have a bad user experience if you have lots of points with no content. (It appears that there is a user generated content aspect to this where people can input information about a point, so this may be a tough balance...maybe have a toggle to add content to the map, but hide points with no content if you're just searching) Give me the option to view other related/interesting areas in proximity to this, but don't default to that if there is no content. Also, clicking on the title of a nearby/related trip report should show more information in the pane about that trip report, not take me away from the site to somewhere else. Let the URL at the bottom do that, or have a link to the source website.- Your homepage (the place that your Home link goes to) just goes into a continuous loading indicator when searching on my zip (21045). Are you planning on having people drop onto this page when going to Trailbehind? If not, why have it if you already have a location search on the map? If it's an About page rather than Home, then call it that, not Home.- Eventually do some geolocation to default the map to a point close to the where the user is accessing Trailbehind from. Defaulting to a location in Ghana does not help me at all (no offense to the country of Ghana).Anyway, there were just a few thoughts after a quick glance through the site. Congrats on getting something out there and keep iterating! |
Review Our Website - Online Resume Management (cvboss.com) | simonk: Opening the site automatically brings up a box to login or signup. Annoying as I didn't even know what the site did at all. Maybe just push everyone into a demo mode and put a sign-up link on there.Also try and contribute more to a community before you spam it. |
Shopping cart advice? | csbartus: Zencart was/is the leader, Magento is the newcomer but looks very strong.Wordpress has very good shopping cart plugins in case you want to add a publisihing & advertising platform to your shop. (highly recommended!)Also Shopify can be a solution. |
lighttpd or nginx for a low grade server? | csbartus: look on forums, let's say on slicehost: many people uses both of them, there are lots of comments there. |
Review My Website - Trip Reports All Over the World | bprater: Andrew -- I was in and out in about 10 seconds.You've been staring at the webpage for weeks or months now -- and you get exactly what's going on. But nobody else does. (Or at least the slow-minded amongst us, including me.)You may have the most wonderful service in the world, but if you cannot quickly convey the benefit that you offer me in 10 seconds, you've lost a potential customer -- and probably one that was difficult to get to your site in the first place.Personally, I will spend weeks crafting and re-crafting my site's message. And when I think I'm done, I'm still tuning it based on feedback.This continues to be the weakest link with most new sites I see.Best of luck with the project -- I truly hope you find amazing success with it! |
Review Our Website - Online Resume Management (cvboss.com) | 3pt14159: 1. Pop-up right away = bad/annoying.
2. Having a bookmark/share box on the pop-up where the reflexive [x] should be (to close the damn pop-op = even worse.
3. After I finally figure out how to close the damn pop-up (by clicking 'try demo') what happens? ANOTHER DAMN POP-UP.Now for the good news:4. The actual app is damn marvelous. It is a great idea and the execution is good.Here is what you have to understand though: 1000 people hitting your site will make a .5 second decision whether or not to stay. In that critical time you need to portray what you guys actually do QUICKLY! Slices of screen shots. Etc..
Check out freshbooks.com, (my employer) right off the bat what do you see?"The Fastest Way To Track Time and Invoice Your Clients"
"Send Invoices and Estimates Online"
"Web Based Time Tracking"
All with screen shots of the actual app and a giant toll free number, that inspires confidence in our longevity.You should do the same with your service.
"Professional, EASY, resumes and CVs in seconds"
"We help you get to the interview, the rest is all you!"Something like that. Polish (er... scrap and start over with) your splash page and you will have one solid product.Best of luckEdit:You should also get a copy writer to start filling your blog with some actual useful content, unless you think you will have the time/will power to do it your self.Right now it looks like you guys are just starting up (which is fine) but you should definitely hire someone to keep that blog roll going, or you are going to look stale. I know some good (University Educated) copy writers that could easily help you out there. The important thing to remember with a corporate blog is that absolutely no more than 20% of your content should be about your site. The other 80% should be useful (and original) articles that have to do with something relating to your service. "How to find companies with a good corporate atmosphere" "Crossing the t's on your resume" "The interviewer says 'come casual', but do they mean it?"Hope this helps! |
Is AI a growing field? | ivankirigin: I think robotics is in a lull, and will be for a few years. This of those out there (pleo, roomba, packbot, kiva, anybots), and you'll find they are all "dumb". Interesting physical intelligence like BigDog isn't really a product.It will be a few years before any intelligent robots come out. 6-10 years is a good time frame to start a robotics business. |
Is AI a growing field? | sscheper: By AI, do you mean Asians and Indians?In the Silicon Valley, yes. |
Review Our Website - Online Resume Management (cvboss.com) | volida: the UX is broken |
Is AI a growing field? | zandorg: I took a degree in AI, and now I'm firmly convinced that AI == search. If you make something searchable in a simple, new way, that's AI. If it's grandiose but doesn't work, that's not useful. |
Do you teach the old generation to use internet? | ggchappell: Your question presumes that knowledge and understanding are the primary issues in getting "the old generation" on the net. They are important, of course, but I wonder if, in some cases, the critical issues are those related to filtering a large number of inputs.Consider: I'm 43 (and at least on the edge of what some of you would call "the old generation"). I find large portions of the web to be unusable without flashblock. I'm sure I have a well developed case of banner blindness (of which I'm very glad), but some pages are still rough.Now take a 70-year-old who grew up in a media-poor environment and has little computer experience, and stick a typical web page in front of them. If it's something to read, sure, they can read it. But navigation, search, etc., all require finding the right thing to click on, and ignoring all the distractions. Can they do that easily, even if they know how?I just went to the Amazon home page, certainly one of the calmer commercial pages on the web, and counted the number of clickable regions on my screen. Result: 143. I can easily imagine someone who knows what they want to do and how to do it, still having trouble getting it done, when confronted with that many choices.Now take that person to an animation-heavy page. They see 100+ choices, of which 30 of the wrong ones are insistently clamoring for attention. Is this going to work, even if they know what to do?The real question here is whether the kind of unconscious filtering we all do is something the old can (easily) learn. And if it is, how to best ensure that someone learns it. I'm afraid I don't know the answer to either of those questions. |
Review My Website - Trip Reports All Over the World | eli_s: Really love the idea. I'm sure you will get loads of attention from the hiking community. It's a great niche to target too - I imagine its quite underserviced with lots of enthusiastic people who can help promote your site.Something to look out for: the site seems very processor intensive. Using IE7 on a Core 2 6400 1gb ram the site becomes unresponsive and CPU is pegged at 50% - 90% each time the map is moved/zoomed.Full screen map seems to be a killer. Maybe anbother way to display info such as large static map where you choose a region and then a smaller interactive map overlaid?Also - is this a hobby project? If not how are you planning on monetizing?Great work overall though. |
when will property prices go back up? | alnayyir: Hopefully never. Why should housing for humans grow more expensive? We aren't running out and materials continue to grow cheaper.It seems inhumane to me to hope that one can profit off of homelessness and a reduction in the overall quality of life of your fellow citizenry. |
Market research and HN community norms | frisco: That's ironic. A subtly disguised poll to ask if polls are ok. |
when will property prices go back up? | pg: There is no such thing as "back up." Prices go up and down. "Back up" presumes a certain price is the appropriate one, but in reality no price is more appropriate than another. |
when will property prices go back up? | patio11: You don't need "dynasty wealth" to manage property. It is one of the most common small businesses in the United States. (Fairly low capital requirements by the standards of physically-extant businesses, low expertise requirements, well within the capability of many middle class families.) It also has significant risk and requires lots of manual labor. (That is why I don't do it. You can outsource the manual labor but that ends up outsourcing the positive part of the cash flow, too.)Risks:+ Property prices fall.+ Competitive options for housing in vicinity of your property decline in price, causing rent you can charge to fall. For example: if you can buy a modest house in Detroit for $10,000 why would any worthwhile prospective renter pay you the $500 a month you need to cover the mortgage and maintenance on the modest home you bought back when Detroit had viable industries in it?+ Can't find a tenant, get to eat mortgage.+ Renters trash house, enjoy $20,000 repair bill.+ Renters stop paying rent. Enjoy eviction process.+ Your local government decides evil landlords are exploiting poor people to make money, institutes rent control. Enjoy low rents, impossibility to unload property on another sucker, etc. |
when will property prices go back up? | davidmathers: You should look at the chart:http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/08/26/weekinreview/27...We recently passed 150 on the way down. Still got a ways to fall.When will prices go back up? 10 years? 20 years? Never? Why should they go up? I've only heard one reasonable explanation for increasing prices. Apparently certain areas, like New Jersey, are now effectively "full". Therefore people who want to live there will be spending a higher percentage of their income on housing going forward.I don't know if it's true, but it sounds plausible at least.EDIT: the reason for New Jersey being completely built out is NIMBY laws, not that all the land has been used. |
How should I approach publishing a book? | jgrahamc: I have gone down two of those routes:1. I self-published my book for really advanced GNU Make users via Lulu. The market for such a book is way too small for a traditional editor to get involved.2. When I had the idea for The Geek Atlas I approached O'Reilly directly without an agent via an acquaintance.If the market is really small I'd do #1 since that way you'll actually keep a good % on a per copy basis. If the market is large go #2 because of the marketing reach. |
when will property prices go back up? | noonespecial: Prices were bid up to artificially high levels by the pretend money that banks were lending. (Pretend because there was no reasonable way it could be paid back and nearly anyone could get it).Prices probably won't "go back up" the way anyone hopes. The prices were fake. The crisis will end when the prices either 1) Fall to their "real" market value, or 2) The government pulls a fast one and inflates the currency until the shrinking value of the dollar meets the prices people have come to expect at that real value. (And everything on the dollar menu at McD's costs $2.50)I think its fairly obvious which choice has been made by the suit-monkeys. |
How should I approach publishing a book? | vladocar: Here some useful link:6 Ways to Publish Your Own Book http://mashable.com/2009/03/01/publish-book/ |
Market research and HN community norms | medianama: Go ahead and post it. |
when will property prices go back up? | ars: Prices go up when babies are born, and down when homes are built.Except that in many cities there is no room to build any more houses, so prices go up based on how many people want to live in a city.People want to live in a city usually for economic reasons. (Close to jobs, cheap services etc).So basically, unless you are buying rural property, prices will go up when people want to move to cities.All that's economics - but the real world is a bit more complicated. People determine how much to pay for a house based on two things: how much the seller wants, and how much money they have.Easy loans made it such that people had lots of money for houses. Sellers like to make a profit when they sell a house (it's emotional, not logical).Put those together and you have a housing price boom. But it can't (couldn't) last because it doesn't match the real economics of the situation.At the end of the day prices should move based on population in cities, and inflation.And BTW people are already buying up city blocks in Detroit. The biggest problem there is crime though, which makes it hard to buy a house and hold it for a while. |
how do you process payments? | stympy: I'll plug myself here... :) If you are using Rails, take a look at http://railskits.com/saas/ -- a great starting point for your Rails apps to not only do the recurring billing (with Auth.net, Braintree, etc.) but also do account management, upgrades/downgrades, etc.It has a lot of the work done for you, so you just plug it in and go. |
Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data? | vaksel: Just use both at the same time. Use S3 for active stuff, and Mosso as your secondary backup. The chances of S3 and Mosso crapping out at the same time are pretty much nill. And the cost of hosting something on S3/Mosso, as a one time backup is dirt cheap |
Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data? | spkthed: Sure? It's like anything else, don't trust a single solution. In addition to local backups S3 is good, in addition to S3, Mosso. There will always be accidents, data loss, corruption, etc. The only way to mitigate that risk is simply to cover your bases and avoid relying on a single thing. |
I've had some software developed, now the coder is holding me for ransom. | abyssknight: I'll agree with the others and say drop this guy without a second thought. That said, if you wrote the contract to include disclosure of source code you should be able to legally ask for it. That said, $2500 is a relatively small amount when we're talking about a complete system with source code rights. Your best bet is likely to file for small claims (usually costs you between $25 and $250 depending on the amount, and you can only file for up to $2500 here in Florida). You likely will not make it to court, and he'll settle. Why? Because everyone fears litigation, especially when they're wrong.Next time around, write the contract the way you want it to read, and account for failures. Make certain everything is in writing, even if there is a deviation agreed upon by both parties. And above all, get what you paid for in increments and never pay in full before the project is done.As a developer, I respect the 50/50 plan as well as the hourly one. 50% up front to cover development costs, 50% at the end to ensure I finish. Works like a charm. |
Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data? | charlesju: I trust S3 and Mosso Cloudfiles more-so than my own single-failure HDD. They have a lot of redundancy built into their system, and although every system has risks, its risk are far less than our person undistributed implementations of file storage. |
How many times do users mistype their password on a registration form? | noodle: in my experience, typically, the registrations that have you type in just one copy of your password tend to also send you your password back in the registration email to verify.if you're dealing with financial processes, though, i'd suggest sticking with the double password field and not emailing a password. |
How many times do users mistype their password on a registration form? | aristus: It's not just the % of people mess this up. It's the cost of correcting each error. If 99.44% of people type their password correctly and remember it later, but the remaining 0.36% waste your time with support calls, it's a bad idea. |
What Visa for a UK team to come to YC? | Major_Grooves: So have there been any UK companies on YC? |
Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data? | mikecuesta: I have a lot of faith in S3, more so than any local storage I may have. |
So, you have a million dollars. Now what? | elv: aim for 5% annual return, leave 2,5% for inflaction, and you'll be forever free with 25K/year
yea you should carefully pick up your bank or your freedom could vanish in the next credit crunch :) |
So, you have a million dollars. Now what? | Allocator2008: "Two girls at the same time." |
Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data? | jasonkester: S3 does this for a living. I don't.S3's entire business revolves around never losing anybody's stuff. They have hordes of smart people working on the problem, and they have an architecture that makes it really hard to lose anything by accident.My business, on the other hand, revolves around letting people draw cartoon testicles onto other people's powerpoint presentations in the pretense of a "web meeting". Which of us would you rather trust to keep hold of your valuable data? |
So, you have a million dollars. Now what? | vaksel: is that 1 mil before or after taxes? |
How many times do users mistype their password on a registration form? | lucumo: I can't tell you about the password, but we had a registration form which asked for the e-mail address. You could actually read the e-mail address (like normal) so people could easily see and correct their typos had they bothered.The thing is, they didn't. The e-mail address is used for activation and we had huge numbers of unactivated accounts. I don't have the exact numbers any more, so this is from memory: when we added another e-mail field and checked if they were the same, the number of unactivated accounts halved.Currently, the number of unactivated accounts is consistently between 10% and 20%, so that should give you an indication on how much it saved us.I can only assume that for passwords the problem of typos is worse, since you can't proofread. |
So, you have a million dollars. Now what? | sho: What do you mean, now what? "Now what" is you go and make the rest of the money you'll need to buy a decent apartment in any world city. A million bucks ain't that much anymore and you certainly couldn't retire or anything, unless you plan on living in a lower-income country.On the bright side, you won't need an angel investor for your next startup.. |
how do you process payments? | Bill_N_Payments: I actually work for a software firm that created a billing and payments application specifically for recurring and subscription services.
Feel free to send me an e-mail and I can answer any questions for you or provide some information for you.
My e-mail addy is pcain@ipapplications.con
or feel free to check out our site at www.ipapplications.com.Cheers.Paul |
How often do you swap between languages ? | noodle: i use about 5 languages at work, and 2 or 3 more at home. you get used to it, really. a good IDE helps in the case of forgetting something like how to find length. |
How often do you swap between languages ? | TJensen: I use Java and Flex throughout the day and switch to Python and Objective C in the evening. I agree that I've reached my limit on storing the massive standard libraries these languages have in my head, but I think use of IDEs in the past has made this worse for me (I got lazy).I'm back to using Emacs almost exclusively in an attempt to remember the APIs. I know I'll take an early hit for it, but I'm hoping I'll make up for it. |
Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data? | bbuffone: S3, Mosso and other cloud providers are not an appropriate back up mechanism. These are good for sharing files and a temporary storage system. The only legitimate backup is a physically stored disk. S3 doesn't provide versioning nor deletion protection.The problem is I hear about these new "Cloud" storage companies claiming backup, but when asked what do they do. They rely on Amazon to move the files into different data centers. But anyone can delete a file or directory by accident and poof the files are gone forever.If the storage provider does have permanent physical storage in there backup plans, don't think your files are forever. |
Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data? | iamelgringo: My site, cuuute.com is hosted on EC2. I use Elastic block for database storage, and I back both that and my EC2 instance to S3 on a regular basis.I've been using that as my hosting for 2-3 months, and I couldn't be happier. |
Dealing with multiple internship job offers | vorador: You may find this an interesting reading : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/26.html |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | hcho: The amount of time spent in front of a computer with an internet connection in a working day would be the key to success of such a site.It would probably have higher traction among, say, graphical designers than medical staff. |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | chanux: Get HN code & build your own doctorsnews, autonews etc. :) or may be add categories to HN system. |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | RossM: I think so. I have a concept I'm working on that's more a request forum than a Q&A board but I'm borrowing a few things StackOverflow has implemented well (nothing unique - mainly the simple wiki revisions).Something else to consider are the 'game' factors. StackOverflow implemented badges and they work well initially (and teach the user how to use the site). At the end of the day the things that tie you into a site are the things that make you want to keep going at it. On most discussion boards it's reputation/karma but little things like badges and medals help too.Obviously it depends on whether the field needs/can have a question and answer platform, but I can see this discussion model working for most technical areas of knowledge. |
How often do you swap between languages ? | sdp: I use Groovy and Java at school; PHP and Python at work; and finally Smalltalk and C at home.I have recently switched from all emacs, to TextMate at school and home, and emacs at work (although I'm trying to see if JEdit will work better). |
when will property prices go back up? | anamax: > wait until prices go back up, and rent them out in the futureOr sell - rental housing is work and illiquid. After "back up", there's probably something better to own.> except that in this case, why aren't the rich and wealthy buying it up?What makes you so sure that they aren't? (I know folks who are.)Also, some may be waiting for a better deal. For example,http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/03/give-investors...andhttp://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/03... |
How often do you swap between languages ? | iamwil: Ruby and Javascript at work.Otherwise, I'm playing around with Lua, Ruby, Erlang, and Python. |
How do I penetrate the hosting market? | noodle: if all you're doing is reselling hosting from some other host, you're unlikely to penetrate the market at large.find a niche and cater to it. |
How do I penetrate the hosting market? | rms: Start practicing your SEO voodoo |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | vaksel: I think it'll work for other fields but not as well as programming.Programming gets you a much higher volume of traffic. The same programmer, might come to your site 100 times during the week to find solutions to the different problems. Its also a field where you have a lot of amateurs and students looking for solutions.The other fields you mention under specialty, are all the "oh shit my car broke down what could it be?" type. Its a one time problem, after which the person won't come back for 2 years. So you'll never see the same growth as SO, because you don't have any repeat users. |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | bbgm: Perhaps. The advantage with programming is that there is a lot of general knowledge that goes beyond languages, etc and even at the language level you have sufficient number of people with general interest. Where you can replicate that it should work. In the sciences I am not so sure. You tend to get too specific and there isn't a general enough dialogue you can have in most communities. |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | timcederman: I had thought so. On closer inspection though, it's unlikely.Why? Have a look at reference sites online. There were plenty of sites like experts-exchange before StackOverflow, and if you trawl Google Groups, you'll see a similar thing. Plenty of people asking technical questions, not so much anything else.Certainly, you don't see medical students out there asking the best way to diagnose a rare disease.There is one exception though -- Travel sites. Travel questions and forums are pretty big, and I think a Q&A site for that could be enormous.Meanwhile Yahoo Answers, AskMeFi, etc continue to fill the gaps for other niches that might actually work. |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | sachinag: http://www.sermo.com does this for docs - docs talk to other docs, and pharma companies and hedge funds pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to eavesdrop and seed specific questions they want answered. (The sign-in page restricts randoms to MDs and DOs to register.) It's a brilliant business model. |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | brandnewlow: Are you famous in your field? No? Then it won't work.HN works because PG is here. Reddit worked because PG was there to help it start.Digg works because Kevin Rose is there.StackOverflow works because Joel and Jeff are there.Unless you've got a large audience to toss at the project on day one, expect a long, hard slog. |
Dealing with multiple internship job offers | aristus: In every interview you must be clear about when you will make your decision, and when they will. It's basic politeness not a negotiating tactic. When A calls you back, tell them thanks and that you will let them know by X. When dealing with B, tell them that you will make your decision by X as well.If A want an answer now, be firm but polite. If they want you they'll wait. If they think you are a dime-a-dozen they won't. Better to find that out now. In the future make date X clear from the getgo. |
How do I penetrate the hosting market? | ErrantX: I tried this in about 2005. Getting any kind of custom was HARD (mostly the only customers were clients from my freelance web design work).After 4 years (wow that seems so little really!) we have only a few regulars and are unable to bring in new custom because of being unable to compete price wise.You'll be better off offering "simple hosting" to niches. I.e. one idea I had was to offer cheap gaming clan websites - with a small forum & all the default pages a clan would need with a couple of nice looking templates to choose from (your welcome to use that BTW, no way I have the time to implement it).Sucessfully reselling space from an account like you have takes serious legwork.. if it's just for fun I would pass it by :) |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | sgrove: I think so.In fact, I believe it so much, that's my startup: http://www.chuwe.com - "Stackoverflow for startups and small businesses."As brandnewlow pointed out, starting it is a massive uphill battle - chicken and egg problem as it were. The software's only small part. We're attacking it in what we hope is a novel way, but you would have to find an approach unique to the area you were targeting, I imagine.If you're interested, I've been planning on open-sourcing chuwe in a bit after we make it a bit more robust. Contact me and we can work out something if you'd like to just take the software and modify it to your own niche! |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | KevBurnsJr: as a site? sure.as a business? hard to tell.Yahoo Answers holds the potential to encompass every use case for StackOverflow and all your offshoots. However, I sincerely believe that the added context that a site like StackOverflow provides (being that it's curated specifically toward programmers) does provide real value. That sort of context injection could certainly be carried over to other verticals (provided the sites can attract seed contributors and curators). |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | rguzman: Something like SO could work in other fields. But, the devil is in the details of the moderation and incentive schemes. The features of the site matter, but not nearly as much as the community. So, it is more of an anthropology and sociology problem than a build-a-webapp one.For law and medicine, for instance, you'd have to fight the mindset of "online is not reliable". In programming it is fairly easy to check if someone's answer is trustworthy because you can go and test it yourself relatively quickly and unambiguously. In other fields establishing the credibility of someone answering a question is a lot more tricky. That said, I think bar associations have (bad) sites to ask each other questions.I agree with Jeff that you can't make a general site of this sort without an intense amount of moderation. (he said so in a recent SO podcast)In short, it all comes down to the community. And it is probably hard to figure out what incentives and moderation to have for a given community if you are not a part of it yourself. |
Review my prototype (webnodes) | hotshothenry: you should def fix it so http://webnodes.org doesn't throw a fatal server not found error |
Do your users actually use those social bookmarking icons (ShareThis/AddThis)? | noodle: i use bookmarklets. however, the occasional social bookmarking icon will make me think to share the thing using my bookmarklets. |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | igorgue: Is computer-related but I read @codinghorror tweets about a SO for sysadmins.I just imagined a SO for the medicine field, I'll read it everyday!, imagine a doctor asking for help to another doctor?, and not only that, a doctor asking for feedback on a research... wow |
Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? | DnB: A large part of the problem and solution relies on the field we're talking about. There are law forums, but unfortunately, the law is incredibly specific and varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There would have to be a LawOverflow for every county. Medicine is incredibly situational as well, and that doesn't include the doctor patient confidentiality clause, which means the doctor needs permissions even to ask general questions. Now, if you were talking about students, then the style still wouldn't work, because the answers are in the textbooks, not in other people.
Cars and home improvements have the best chance, but as was mentioned, The people answering the questions have to be spending a lot of time at the computer, rather than spending their doing work on cars, or doing construction work on a house.The reason StackOverflow works is that computers work based on their code, and so a certain compiler will interpret C# code in a certain predictable way, so the people answering the questions don't have to be anywhere near you. And they are able to answer in a relevant way. The same is not true for other fields. |
How to promote an API contest? | noodle: a good place to start might be a link so that we could take a look, either to participate or give input based on what you're doing :) |
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