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Building a simple utility site to build pre-launch traffic? | zain: A bookmarklet for Password Chart would be cool. |
Is email "modern" technology? | brk: I think it's pretty obvious and probably also empirically provable that email can be considered relatively primitive compared to newer forms of communication.Care to elaborate?What modern form of communication allows you to:-Send a message using a basic plain text format-Send a message using an advanced layout (wh... |
What apps are essential for mac? | sh1mmer: There are lots of great suggestions here, one I haven't seen yet is Spirited Away. (http://drikin.com/spiritedaway/)This app hides app you haven't used for a little while so the app you are using currently is the most prominent thing on the screen. I find it really helpful to declutter my screen in a non-invas... |
What Web frameworks exist around Python? | Sal: This kind of question smells of lmgtfy.com |
How much time do you spend on the work vs. the rest of your life? | fburnaby: I'm working on a master's degree, play squash with profs, try to teach my research to my (ever so patient) girlfriend, and consider watching lectures on MIT OCW to be "personal growth". It's all blended together! |
How much time do you spend on the work vs. the rest of your life? | rjurney: My equation is to achieve fulfillment in personal growth (area 4) through work (area 1) without messing up my marriage (area 3) and still having time to keep up my health (area 2).The overwhelming majority of my time goes towards work (area 1) since I'm usually bootstrapping a startup while also consulting to ... |
How much time do you spend on the work vs. the rest of your life? | GiraffeNecktie: The question is meaningless for me. There's no dividing my life up into this area or that area. It's all one big rolling ball of string. Ok, maybe I could split it up into "job" and "not job" but health, relationships, personal growth are all blended together (along with entertainment, home maintenance,... |
How much time do you spend on the work vs. the rest of your life? | patio11: In terms of waking hours, let's see...1. Work/commute: 62.5%
2. Health (gym): 1.4%
3. Relationships (romantic & otherwise): 12.5%
4. Personal growth: meh. I don't itemize downtime, and I need downtime. Building the business quite obviously helps me prepare for the future -- spending time on my non-renume... |
How much time do you spend on the work vs. the rest of your life? | Zarathu: Before financial independence: 95%.After financial independence: 20%. |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | Dobbs: Look up git. |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | Zarathu: Github.comI'd use it for a 2-person team. It's incredible.(No. Use a repository.) |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | nostrademons: Headless git repository, hosted on a machine that you all have SSH access to?You really want a real version control system. Trying to hack one up from backup systems is just asking for pain. VCS gives you much more than just a central off-site repository - you get commit logs, conflict resolution, diffs... |
How much time do you spend on the work vs. the rest of your life? | amalcon: Counting waking hours only, work (incl. commute) 65%, relationships (marriage and others) 35%, health 10%, personal growth 100%. Yes, that adds up to 210%. I don't see why these tasks should be mutually exclusive.I live in the city, so I either walk or cycle to work, so my commute can double-count as health.... |
What Web frameworks exist around Python? | FraaJad: Python developers have tried to move away from the framework thinking for some time.The emergence of make-your-frameworks (Pylons), lightweight(juno, web.py) frameworks, and pay-for-what-you-eat frameworks (repoze)Choose libraries based on what serves you best, combine them together using WSGI. |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | saikat: Mercurial with bitbucket is great. Bitbucket offers one private repository (I think this is a new thing, but I'm not sure) for free, so it seems fine for use with closed-source code, if you need that.We also used mercurial for a while in conjunction with dropbox (just set up our central repository in dropbox).... |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | bbuffone: Formal source control is always a good idea, even if you are working on a project yourself. A three person shop will have some overlapping development of resources. So being able to undo changes and resolve conflicts will be necessary. As the team grows putting in other policies on checkin comments and ensuri... |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | khangtoh: I don't feel SVN is a little overbearing for a 3 person team. If you just don't want the trouble of hosting the SVN server yourself, there're a few options for SVN hosting.Unfuddle seems like a reliable and popular choice.http://unfuddle.com/about/tour/plans |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | FraaJad: bitbucket.org allows you to host One private mercurial repository for free. You might want to go with mercurial because it's arguably as good as git while having a better tool support on windows. Of course, it works excellently on linux and mac.If you prefer git, you can set up your own git repository with lit... |
"Dumbing yourself down" around your peers? | gurtwo: This reminds me of a sentence by Arthur Schopenhauer:
"... one's choice in this world does not go much beyond solitude on one side and vulgarity on the other". |
Website to give to charity anonymously, useful to you? | tom999: Network for Good, which, I believe, uses Guidestar's data on the back-end, permits anonymous gifts. |
Is email "modern" technology? | tokenadult: I still think Michael Kinsley had it best, explaining email in a television interview back when only a minority of Americans had email (when I already did have email):"Email has most of the advantages of the telephone, and most of the advantages of postal mail, and few of the disadvantages of either." Email... |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | carterschonwald: I like using darcs with the each person having a local repo and a shared one using dropbox |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | stevejohnson: Mercurial+BitBucket and Git+Github are almost interchangeable. If a team member is on Windows, go with Mercurial+BitBucket, as it has much better cross-platform support. Otherwise, use Git+Github because it has a great community, good documentation (both have this), and many pretty charts to look at. |
Your Hacker Workspace | dryicerx: I will start.My two primary work horses include a desktop computer and Thinkpad with Fedora core 10.Desktop server:- Gnome -> 8 workspaces on two monitors { Web (regular), Web (work), Emacs, Emacs, Emacs/Compile, Emacs/Debug (GDB/DDD), 4 shells, Thunderbird/IM/IRC/Music }- Fluxbox on VNC with 4 virtual { 4 Sh... |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | tdupree: I have been happy using Beanstalk for SVN hosting. The free version is working out nicely for my team of three.
http://beanstalkapp.com |
Best working file format for writing open source books? | aneesh: LaTeX is pretty standard for typesetting math/CS texts of any length. You can use your favorite version control system, and write a Makefile to build a PDF/PS document.If you want to make it easily readable on a webpage (and not just a PDF download), you may want to use html. |
start on my own or negotiate with the employer? | mankuthimma: Couple of things:
1. Do you think you are in the right job, right now? The way you're thinking about the architecture rehaul and the business aspects of the project you should be the architect/CTO of the company :-)
2. If you are convinced the existing thing might not work, go tell your boss, sit with the... |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | zacharydanger: Actually, you're onto something with Dropbox. Currently, I keep a copy of my Git repository in my dropbox and set it up as a named remote. Then I can just: git push dropbox
You can run into issues if two people push to the Dropbox before the files get fully sync'd between computers, if that's the case,... |
What apps are essential for mac? | jedediah: Carbon Emacs |
Your Hacker Workspace | jimmyjim: Just a request to all those who'll be responding: Please add screenshots!I'll be setting up xmonad and working on my layout for the next few days, if this post is alive until then, I'll post my screenshot. |
Your Hacker Workspace | dot: macbook air, a mouse and a rtw ticket. |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | paulgb: Subversion is a fair bit less overbearing if you ignore the branches/merging stuff, which you probably don't need in a 3 person team anyway (yet).I would stick to svn if the team is already familiar with it but not with git. Otherwise, +1 to github. |
Your Hacker Workspace | timtrueman: MacBook + 24" Dellhttp://farm4.static.flickr.com/3130/3219406843_af228d3a04.jp...(Not pictured: Airport Extreme with a USB drive for Time Machine--critical stuff I backup to Github if it's source code and Drop Box if it's not source code)Software-wise I work with IntelliJ, TextMate, vi or Xcode depending on... |
Your Hacker Workspace | llimllib: Nope, I hack most of the time with a macbook on my dining room table. Sometimes on the coffee table.At work I have a 30-inch screen for Vim next to the macbook, but it's optional. |
Your Hacker Workspace | scumola: It's dirty, crappy, no dual-screens, no mac prettiness, no butcher-block table, no glass, no stainless steel, but it's awesome and it's very productive. :)http://www.flickr.com/photos/scumola/3508980363/ |
Your Hacker Workspace | davidalln: If you're interested in that, check out:http://www.deskography.org/There are some pretty crazy and inspiring setups on there, and you can share your own. |
Is email "modern" technology? | varaon: Consider that most Web 2.0 forms of communication (i.e. Twitter, Facebook and the like) are still closed gardens. Yes, they have APIs, but they still hold the keys and own the technology. Anyone can set up an email server and have it talk to anyone else. |
A good open-source implementation of multi-key-value db? | stevedekorte: Make the key the tag name and the value the list of image ids. |
Best working file format for writing open source books? | SwellJoe: I used Docbook SGML (and later XML) for my book about Webmin. It wasn't worth the pain.I've worked on another large Open Source project that used Word (yes, really!) and OpenOffice with custom templates and conversion tools (they would, for the most part, save as HTML, and then convert from that to PyDoc, .c... |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | dryicerx: Svn would be perfect for youOur personal setup: linode with svn, redmine as issue tracker, wiki, and discussions). I went with our own server because I know for sure our data is private, and fine grain control. |
What Web frameworks exist around Python? | flashgordon: out of curiosity, what is bothering you about django? |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | psyklic: Wow just a year or two ago everyone would have said SVN/CVS! |
Best working file format for writing open source books? | makecheck: I have used reStructuredText (which both "docutils" and "prest" can use to generate documents). The source text actually is the plain text "output", while it is still possible to automatically generate HTML, etc.For something as complex as a book, reStructuredText is best; though I often fall back on the si... |
Your Hacker Workspace | travisjeffery: Here's a picture: http://is.gd/AU6TTypically I have Emacs, Safari, Terminal.app, and iTunes open all the time. Once in a while I open up MacVim and do some editing. |
Is email "modern" technology? | alanthonyc: Maybe my wording is a little too antagonistic. “Primitive” is a strong word, but I simply meant it in a relative sense: there are other methods more modern.Also, to brk's point, I am in no way advocating replacing email. Email didn't replace the telephone, handwritten notes or face-to-face speech, it augm... |
Your Hacker Workspace | alanthonyc: To facilitate traveling to client sites for my day job: MacBook Pro, vim, firefox and a (paper) notebook. When I work out of town, the one thing I miss the most about my home workspace is my 3x4 foot whiteboard. |
Your Hacker Workspace | ahold: Ubuntu + VIM + Acer AspireOne + 3 USB drives + external monitor, mouse and keyboard :) |
Your Hacker Workspace | mstefff: 2 desktops connected with synergy..a laptop..huge speakers..bottle of scotch..and a coffee pot. |
Your Hacker Workspace | vaksel: the only "tweaking" I did to my workspace, was build a cover for the desk's surge protector Power button. I always kept hitting it and its pretty inconvenient having your computer die in the middle of working on things. |
Your Hacker Workspace | thomanil: Physical whiteboard in the same room.Big screen.A command line (Terminal on mac, cmd.exe on windows).A launcher app (Quicksilver on mac, Colibri on windows)An editor (TextMate in mac os, NetBeans in windows).A mindmap editor for planning, design and notes. (Freemind, cross platform)(I purposefully stay cross-... |
Your Hacker Workspace | asnyder: I couldn't live without my 5 screens:http://www.deskography.org/people/yjg1097qMx/desks/786/photo... |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | mahmud: PHP. You don't even need to know it to whip out something in php. The application domain is pretty much all that PHP is good at, boring websites, and since it's an intranet application you don't have to sweat the security. It shouldn't take more than a week to do, leaving you plenty of time left in the summer t... |
Your Hacker Workspace | nickfox: Here is my workspace. I really like the 3 Acer 22" monitors. They were cheap and work well. I also have a laptop with Mac OS X for my iPhone work.http://www.websmithing.com/my_workspace.jpgNick |
Your Hacker Workspace | pg: (Fairly) soundproof room; lots of lamps, none too bright; Aeron chair; new desk designed by Kate Courteau (the architect who designed the YC offices), with a steel frame and butcher-block top; Macbook Air; bluetooth mouse; 23" Apple monitor; a bunch of terminal windows running either vi or the Arc toplevel or tail ... |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | andrew_k: Try Django. Documentation on their site should be enough for you to get going. Also there a plenty of reusable django applications available on the internet, like djago-registration, django-comment-utils, which will allow you to create a website with a lot of bells and whistles in a day or so. |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | scumola: Stick with LAMP - PHP, Mysql, Linux - you've got the tools. Don't fall for the Ruby/Erlang/Lisp croud. Don't struggle with the language. Get it done and worry about the details, not the language. |
Your Hacker Workspace | njoubert: http://njoubert.com/images/workspace1.jpgDual 22" monitors hackintosh running OSX 10.5.6
6 spaces, normally 2 spaces per project and one for random stuff. (I like to arrange all my code in one space and all the docs and the like in another and switch between the two as necessary).You'll notice the Macbook pee... |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | scorpioxy: What I think would help is picking a web framework. That would pretty much guide you towards a language and eliminate a choice.Look around at the popular available frameworks and choose the one that appeals most to you. |
Your Hacker Workspace | dbul: Mac Air with Philadelphia Brewing Co. sticker over the Apple logo for iPhone dev; cheap Toshiba laptop for web hacking; Chromium for browsing; Firefox/Firebug for dev; Gimp; Postgres; whatever aesthetically pleasing environment the coffee shops around me offer; sometimes getting pumped up listening to good musak ... |
"Dumbing yourself down" around your peers? | nickfox: Don't ever dumb yourself down just to be accepted by people. It seems like you have simply outgrown your friends. You are growing and becoming a different person. That is a good thing.I've always been the type of person who most enjoys having "deep" discussions with one other person. You need to connect with p... |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | plinkplonk: It depends on how much you want to learn a new language. If you just want to get the job done, use what you know already. If you want the to leverage the project to learn new things, pick a new language (or a new OS, or editor or version control system). |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | butterfi: check out http://drupal.org |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | vivekamn: RUBY/RAILS. As productive as Django. More books, good community and so on. |
How much time do you spend on the work vs. the rest of your life? | maketheearth: maybe 10%. even with the 10%, i might not enjoy too much about work and would love to find work that seems to blend in seamlessly with the rest of my life. |
Your Hacker Workspace | csomar: I have a PC with 17" screen, also a HP laptop, Microsoft Mouse and Genuis Keyboard, Wifi Router, External Disks, lot of CDs and MP3 Player. |
How much time of his time should a CEO in a 5 man team spend managing? | nostrademons: "Managing" and "planning" are distinct activities, and then there are a bunch of sub-activities that make up either.In a 5-person startup team, you should spend virtually no time telling people what to do (i.e micromanaging). They should be able to figure that out for themselves. If they can't, you're p... |
Your Hacker Workspace | csomar: i found this site too : http://www.deskography.org/ |
What have been your experiences using Piracetam? | rjurney: I took it in college. It made me smarter. No doubt about it. I'd take some and have to run off to the library to lookup things in back issues of journals such was my thirst for knowledge.It was potentiated like CRAZY by coffee and adderall. |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | sker: I'm gonna recommend .NET here, mainly because that's what I use and like, but my top reason would be flexibility.You don't have to use only one language, use many. If you already know C# you can start with that. If you get tired of it you can pick up F# to write algorithms and calculations. Want to learn Python? ... |
Your Hacker Workspace | Raphomet: I've got a Hackintosh tower - the first PC I've ever built (and I learned a LOT doing it!). I threw a Core 2 Quad, a Velociraptor drive, and 4GB memory in there. This is attached to a 30-inch monitor and a split, ergonomic keyboard, upon which I type in Dvorak.Considering how much time I spend in front of t... |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | csomar: if you happen to choose the Microsoft way, you'll have Visual Web Developer (and it's very Advanced) and ASP.net MVC (powerful for AJAX Application). Also you can integrate with it, Microsoft Expression to design your site when working with VWD!! You'll have also MS SQL Server which is very powerful and customi... |
Your Hacker Workspace | iuguy: I travel a lot so I keep everyhthing I need for hackery on my Dell XPS m1530 with a lot of VMWare images.Currently this gets synchronised with a Debian server, due to be replaced with a Mac Mini in a week or two. |
"Dumbing yourself down" around your peers? | themullet: I've dumbed myself down before, to the point where people didn't notice I was smart. Was nice going under the radar. Tried for a while to knock down my intelligence with heavy amounts of drug and alcohol abuse, reading crap and not remotely pushing myself.I developed a crazy hippy persona which allowed me to... |
Your Hacker Workspace | yason: I have a MacBookPro running Ubuntu 9.04. It boots to Gnome with StumpWM which has three groups (virtual desktops):- emacs and terminal (fullscreen, I'll just swap between those two)
- mail, irc, and cplay (screen split between alpine / ssh+irssi, with a horizontal pane for terminal running cplay)
- browser (spli... |
Your Hacker Workspace | mahmud: Two thinkpads, one running XP and the other running slackware. LispWorks and emacs/slime/sbcl on the win32 box, tested there first, and when I need to implement Unix FFIs I have two putty terminals to the linux box. I have been using linux since 1996, and I don't think I ever ran a full Unix desktop for more th... |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | mlLK: You mean like this? http://corsair.cs.iupui.edu:20181/prospect.phpI wrote this last semester, nothing fancy, but it does what the assignment required, which is very similar to what I think you're trying to do. |
Your Hacker Workspace | wehriam: The office:
White enamel, 92" Oval Ikea table
24" Dell monitor on articulating arm
Macbook Pro
Speakers on Airport expressThe rest of the house:
Old Macbook Pro connected to 42" LCD TV, mounted on the wall running Bittorrent with RSS subscriptions / iTunes
Logitech 5500 connected to MBP + speakers built into t... |
Your Hacker Workspace | gurraman: A few different desks:http://www.deskography.org/people/gs/Current setup includes:- Aluminum MacBook- Apple Cinema Display (24")- Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse- Apple Wired Aluminum Keyboard (recently switched from wireless)- A functional IKEA desk.- A not-so-great IKEA chair (we're getting new chairs!)- vim (a... |
Your Hacker Workspace | Herring: The problem with these threads is that skill is largely in how you use these tools. It's very hard to communicate techniques with just a list of tools. I have no solution. |
Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code? | billclerico: thanks all |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | helium: Maybe you could try IronPython. You can use it with the ASP.net MVC framework. Then later on if you decide to rather go with Django you already know Python. |
How much time of his time should a CEO in a 5 man team spend managing? | mahmud: You code to execute vision, just as you step up a marketing campaign to execute a vision/strategy. If you're growing so fast that the coding can't catch up with the pace that your vision needs to be executed, give up coding and delegate it to someone else.You feel you're not accomplishing anything because of "m... |
Your Hacker Workspace | neuromanta: Here is mine... both :Phttp://tobal.extra.hu/karik/PICT4672.JPGhttp://tobal.extra.hu/karik/PICT4673.JPGhttp://tobal.extra.hu/karik/PICT5571.JPG |
What Web frameworks exist around Python? | apoirier: Nagare (http://www.nagare.org) is really different.
Not yet-another-MVC-framework clone but based on a true components architecture and using continuation, like the Seaside framework, to free the developers of the Web constraints. |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | brendano: python is better for future work with matlab-related stuff like data preprocessing; or its matlab competitor library (scipy). |
Your Hacker Workspace | jdoliner: Well here you guys go, pretty simple small desk, although it is all glass which is kinda nice looking. Nice big monitor, but only one. And then my computer which is really the reason I'm posting it has an acrylic case and uv lighting over reactive tubing, neato huh?http://tinypic.com/r/2eewug5/5here's one of ... |
Your Hacker Workspace | swombat: Every hacker has a workspace and coding/working environment that has been personalized, optimized, improved, tweaked and hacked for countless hours and days. This is one of the, if not the most, sacred things each hacker posses.Sorry, don't buy that. Many hackers just work from anywhere, and many who do work f... |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | gaius: Haskell. Why not go the whole hog? |
Your Hacker Workspace | andrewljohnson: Here's our space. We recently added a third desk to the room.http://www.flickr.com/photos/33766454@N02/3146045372/in/set-... |
Please review my new social learning site | bdmac97: Just wanted to say thank you all again for the valuable feedback.I have taken many of the suggestions from here and updated the site's landing page to be less wordy and more to the point.Also, I have streamlined the signup process so that you no longer have to validate your email address (although now I probab... |
Your Hacker Workspace | uggedal: Couch, laptop in lap, and Norwegian soap operas in the background. |
I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language | utsmokingaces: If you already know PHP then go with Codeigniter MVC framework. It runs fast, very straightfoward, and the documentation is superb. |
Your Hacker Workspace | c00p3r: Browser, pdf and chm viewers, IM.Nokia E90Dell D830 (1920x1200), last Ubuntu x86_64/Fedora-development i586 (for Wine). |
where do you draw the patent research line? | swombat: I'd go for (c).If people sue you for infringement of an obscure patent, they'll only do it if they think you're successful enough to be worth suing. Even then, you win (as in, you've managed to build a successful product).From the protection side, imho, if you have to rely on patents to protect your business, ... |
where do you draw the patent research line? | sgrove: Back in my research days I was going to apply for a certain patent, and spoke to a lawyer at the university about monetizing it. He ended up telling me that it can actually be dangerous to be too exhaustive in your research. You want to do a general search of a few databases of your general idea, but if you're ... |
where do you draw the patent research line? | 10ren: Just FYI, here's the link for making a poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll |
where do you draw the patent research line? | 10ren: c) None, just get it out thereAt first I thought you were doing a patent search to apply for a patent - which makes sense. But on rereading, I think you're just checking to be sure that you're not infringing on anyone else's patents. I agree with your IP friend: if you're not going to patent your invention - the... |
Your Hacker Workspace | jfd: My desks: http://www.deskography.org/people/jfd/ |
Your Hacker Workspace | Jem: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jemjabella/3296058718/Really need to get off my butt and get some shelves up. |
where do you draw the patent research line? | frankj: Before hiring a lawyer I would check out Patents.com and do a quick search for my space and see if there is anything out there that is adjacent to my IP. This costs nothing and gives me a good idea of what others are thinking. |
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