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Is Twitter lost on me? | sfphotoarts: I'm sure there are others like you. Twitter is something that is very difficult for people to understand because it is many things to many people.I just don't think you can split the Twitter community into two groups like that.Flawed analysis.Fail Whale :) |
Is Twitter lost on me? | tlrobinson: I gave up on reading every single tweet, just as I gave up on reading every RSS entry in my reader. I just check it when I get bored or need a break for a minute or two.I probably don't spend more than 15 minutes a day dealing with Twitter, but I still like using it. |
Graphics creation for games? | TomOfTTB: This might help...http://www.tdt3d.be/articles_viewer.php?art_id=99 |
Does HN need to have a delete account feature? | davidw: You could probably just email pg and ask nicely, making your case. It probably depends somewhat on whether you want to delete all your comments too. |
Graphics creation for games? | J_McQuade: For simple 3D modelling (and just the modelling, mind), I've become very much a fan of Wings3D. Ignoring the geeky bias I might have because it's written in Erlang, it has a very shallow learning curve and, in combination with Blender, you should be able to get some usable renders pretty quickly.If you want ... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | mdakin: Twitter is a platform upon which social connections can be built and maintained. It's a very flexible tool for working within that social domain. It somehow gets even more compelling when you and all your actual real-world friends use it via SMS. If you are concerned with the social aspect of life and if you... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | david927: When I first heard of it, I didn't get it. Then I got it and thought -- that's really cool. Then I ungot it. Twitter is a mullet. It's not just a fad, but a fad that will embarrass us later.Listen, I'm all for technology. And new things really require a shift in our mindset. I love the "global realtime-... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | marcusbooster: If rss is not lost on you, then neither is twitter - it's just smaller.It's a good way to keep up with what people in your field are working on, or what they're consuming that might influence their work in the future. If someone "over-tweets" it's easy to not follow them. |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | markerdmann: If you're looking at all of the code that evolution has ever written, then yes, I suppose you could say that most of it is very poor. The fraction of code that survives and propagates, however, is awe-inspiringly beautiful.If you're looking for some insight into what makes it so beautiful, The Selfish Gene... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | kin: i fall into the 1st demographic and I don't use my twitter account at all. I originally got it so that I could follow the Kogi BBQ truck but got annoyed at not always seeing what I want(seeing irrelevant @ replies). Here's what I would use it forVery small group of friends (less than 5 or so) talking. Too many fri... |
Graphics creation for games? | triplefox: I'm going to speak in terms of techniques rather than tools. These are the best/fastest techniques I've found:1. Procedural generation in your own code. People forget about this option because classical 2D games were too processing/memory-constrained to allow for anything but tiles loaded direct from ROM, bu... |
Graphics creation for games? | hvs: Which tool you use to design your graphics won't mean anything if you don't have some artistic ability. I speak from experience. That said, if you decide to go 2-D, I would highly recommend a vector graphics editor like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. I would argue that vector-based drawing, especially for the l... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | goodkarma: I find it to be a great way to communicate with friends and folks I'd like to know a little better. It's like IM but you don't have to catch them online individually or disrupt their workflow. |
Graphics creation for games? | aaronblohowiak: Many cartoons you see on tv (and cartoon-y games) are actually 3d rendered with a 'cel' shader.For instance, check this out: http://www.crazycoder.co.za/wp/?page_id=36Anyway, your best bet is to actually team up with an artist. Working with people you like is fun, and artists think differently than pro... |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | russell: Good grief! Take your favorite OSS project, or even Windows. What do you think it would look like after 4 billion years of cut and paste. |
Is Twitter lost on me? | noodle: you know, those are such generic demographics that you could apply them to any communication medium.i can easily imagine people saying the same things about email, the internet, instant messaging, etc. |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | schorndorfer: Just a guess, bu biology research is probably rewarding to some at least in part because there are so many important consequences to our lives for understanding how it works. Curing disease seems pretty rewarding, doesn't it? |
Is Twitter lost on me? | sid: I think what you have said is true (to sum extent, i think there are 3 demographics though not to)as i have seen people not within those 2 demographics you mentioned have no interest to use twitter, however those 2 demographics are very large. There are alot of people who are students and alot of businesses and pe... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | chollida1: I'd put a third category of people in your list.There are people who have a lot of followers due to them having some form of celebrity. People like Jeff Atwood have talked about how due to their large number of followers they are able to get very high quality answers to questions that they have.For some one... |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | paulgb: Evolution may write poor code, but it can accomplish some really cool stuff with it. The human brain, for example. If a programmer had managed to recreate the human brain in code, even if he did it in spaghetti-coded COBOL, people would want to have a look.Also, evolution isn't always elegant, but it often is. ... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | jimfl: Yes. If you're asking that question, then Twitter is lost on you. For now.It's like happening upon a pad of post-it notes. You either say "Sweet, I have a use for these," or you say "Hmm," and file it away somewhere.Eventually, you may develop a need that is filled by little bits of paper with weak-sauce glue on... |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | adamcrowe: "If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail."Bert Hubert - DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/index.html |
Is Twitter lost on me? | Tichy: Have you actually tried it? I don't really understand the "I don't have the time" argument, how much time does it take to type 140 characters?Also, you could set something up to tweet automatically, just for fun.The nice thing about twitter is that it is quite forgiving. You don't have to read everything, and yo... |
Graphics creation for games? | erik: I have two suggestions that are somewhat contrary to your question.First, learn to draw. I recommend a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. That and lots of practice.Second, learn to produce and animate pixel art. You'll be surprised by the results you can get with the retro/nos... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | zeeone: Hallelujah, brother!
I, much like you, never found Twitter even slightly compelling. I even opened my own account and tried to get into it, but I couldn't and I canceled it shortly after.
It's been all over the news lately but I still can't find a real use of it. Not even for searching things. |
Is Twitter lost on me? | christefano: The way I described Twitter recently to someone I work with was, "Have you ever used IRC or a chat room as a backchannel during a conference? Twitter is like that but for the rest of life." In other words, if Twitter is lost you you, then you are lost on Twitter. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you d... |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | philh: I think it's probably more like trying to understand machine code written by very short-sighted programmer, on an arcitecture that you're unfamiliar with, for which no documentation exists, and which you don't have access to for testing purposes.I think that's an interesting problem, regardless of the quality of... |
How should I get started with Linux application programming? | GeneralMaximus: Use Qt with C++.Advantages:1. Solid, stable, well maintained, well tested.2. Great documentation, a huge library of code to learn from.3. Batteries included. Web, databases, scripting, everything is painless and simple. Stand on the shoulders of giants, and stuff like that.4. It's C++, so it's wicked fa... |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | 10ren: Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding?Because biologists aren't looking at the code, but the product.For example, I really liked NN 4.7. It was responsive and consistent. But the codebase was so poor, that they rewrote it - and nuked themselves. Joel on Software wrote an essay ab... |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | saurabh: I think evolution writes "good enough" code, if I can put it that way. |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | prakash: AS Number: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2072 |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | Herring: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/too-many-tabs-firefox-add-ons-t...That's what i use to manage 50+ tabs. The list is missing firegestures & swifttabs.links:
AutoCopy - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/383Googlepedia - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2517AutoPager - https://addons.mozil... |
How to create your own Wave server? | grandalf: Check this out:http://github.com/JackDanger/wave/tree/master |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | Confusion: Evolution writes excellent code, because it is understood perfectly by its intended audience. |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | ujal: Tabs Open Relative
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1956 |
OpenFace - Facebook without privacy? | wmf: I'm not sure what this has to do with privacy. If anything, anonymous trolling is more private, not less.Web annotation has been done and discussed, as has anonymous "stupidity of crowds" decision making.
http://131.193.153.231/www/issues/issue4_10/margolis/index.h...
http://www.avantart.com/personal/nototv/saynot... |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | Beanblabber: Abduction: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3408Let's you take a picture of a part of your page by rearranging a square. Helps so you don't have to go to paint or photoshop to crop your recent screenshot. |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | windsurfer: Did you know that Autocopy just changes "clipboard.autocopy" in about:config to true? |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | leed25d: clear fields, a small but very useful extension
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2408 |
How to create your own Wave server? | drawkbox: I always start with the standards. Typically you will find that engineering protocols are more simple than you think. But when there are lots of solutions it starts to cloud it.http://xmpp.org/rfcs/Check the bottom of : http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3920.txtIf you like to look at full products using the standa... |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | papaf: I don't think the code metaphore is a good one. Its more like reverse engineering self duplicating and self healing nanotech hardware i.e. hardware so complex it can't be artificially designed with current understanding.The situation is made more complex by the fact that this hardware is interacting with differe... |
Sleeping/living in the office? | RobGR: A few points:1) If you at the point of considering living in your office, then you are past the point of worrying about social acceptability. Don't pay attention to what we say, it sounds like you need to figure out if you will get away with it in your particular situation, and then just do it.2) I think if you... |
please review my technology. | RobGR: I think the idea is sound.However, my experiences with Java have been so consistently horrible that I won't bother to try it as is. If you make a native application that I can install, and make sure the download is a few megabytes at most, I will try it. It sounds like a good idea. |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | aswanson: Because we have diseases to cure, lives that we want to enhance and curiosities to satisfy.Insofar as the code metaphor goes, I don't think you can comment on the quality unless you completely understand what it is doing and how robust it is. For example, the code that architected your neocortex is significa... |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | wglb: Wait--who says it is poor code, and by what criteria? And what we think of as parsimonious as a quality is not a useful metric for DNA. |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | boundlessdreamz: Favourite: PDF plugin for Mac OS X. This uses the mac's native pdf rendered and makes viewing pdf's a joy rather than a pain. http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/Shameless plug: If you are a google docs user you might want to look gdocsbar [http://www.gdocsbar.com]. an update with some more featur... |
Graphics creation for games? | jcromartie: I have to say that I don't really like the 2D-sprites-from-3D-models look. I much prefer hand-drawn pixel graphics... but that might just be the taste of someone who grew up playing SNES instead of Xbox. |
Recommend solution for scanning forms? | noodle: its not quite what you're looking for, i think, but i've heard good things about http://www.pdftoword.com/ |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | epe: If you do any web development that involves web metrics (Google Analyitics, Omniture, etc.), Omnibug is quite useful:http://www.rosssimpson.com/dev/omnibug.html |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | DarkShikari: Tree-style tabs:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890An absolute must if you love having 50-100+ tabs open. Oddly enough, it works rather well with Tab Mix Plus as well. |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | paddy_m: mozrepl This has so much potential. You can telnet into your firefox instance and run javascript commands, on documents and on the chrome. When I get some time I have ideas about integrating this with emacs (there already is mozreply.el , but it does little more than telnetting in). |
In which modern language/environment/framework is programming a joy? | marram: I like Python on Google App Engine + Prototype.js |
Is Twitter lost on me? | peregrine: Twitter is for the type of person who values simple communication. I use twitter at work and after or during long meetings you can see instant feedback on the meeting. Also its nice to have these simple communcations cause instead of being long emails or long conversations its like the short water cooler typ... |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | dave_au: Leechblock:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476Lets me set fairly fine grained time limits on various sites that I'd otherwise spend too much time on. |
In which modern language/environment/framework is programming a joy? | travisjeffery: I find Python a real joy generally.JavaScript is fun in the sense that you can do some very cool and interesting stuff fairly easily. |
In which modern language/environment/framework is programming a joy? | caffeine: This isn't a programming language, and I'm very young, and obviously you're past this ...but I'm taking my first baby steps in Vim, and damn but it's bringing me joy! (I like it so much, this post comes to you courtesy of vimperator firefox plugin). |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | travisjeffery: I use Safari more than Firefox these days. But when I use Firefox I quite like Vimperator, especially since I can write simple but functional extensions for it easily. |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | chaosmachine: Colorzilla:http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/ |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | bmac: Hide Menubar (alt to show menu bar)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4762Hide Navigation Bar (F2 to toggle nav bar)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8769Both are awesome for netbooks. I find hide menubar nice to have even when I do have the space to spare because I use the menu bar so ... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | SkyMarshal: You're not alone. It's also for 24/7 news junkies meets ADHD generation. Daily updated blogs weren't short and frequent enough, hence Twitter.Personally, when I'm not working I prefer to lose myself in a book at the bookstore. Being able to block out everything and completely focus your mind on learning ... |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | weaksauce: Mouse Gestures Redox - Emulates Opera mouse gestures and now has rocker gestures for the mac.http://www.mousegestures.org/Speed Dial - Emulates the Opera speed dial home page.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4810 |
Recommend solution for scanning forms? | weaksauce: You probably have to roll your own version if you want it. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090421184939AA...I haven't looked too far into this domain but I would imagine that it is not too difficult to do on a smallish scale.On the actual form itself have some kind of scale and position marker ... |
Recommend solution for scanning forms? | dxjones: Doing a little more online research, it seems like I am looking for a free/open-source solution for OMR (optical mark recognition) using a generic image scanner or PDF (instead of a specialized device that just scans OMR forms).I wonder if there are computer/machine vision hackers who might know where to find ... |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | mediaman: Find advisers and mentors who have run and scaled small businesses. Talk to them casually and ask if they'd be willing to offer advice on occasion. That's how I did it, and I built to 15 employees while avoiding many (but not all!) of the common business basics blunders due to their assistance. If you find th... |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | aristus: The best training regime for X is actually doing X. If you want to work in TV you get a job as an assistant. If you want to be a ski instructor, go work at a resort. Etc.Go work for a successful, multi-person small business, the kind you want to build yourself someday. Study it from the inside. Be useful & ded... |
Graphics creation for games? | SingAlong: I was just lurking on #gamedev and found a nice 2D graphics program called Graphics Gale (for pixel art). There's a free version and a shareware version. the shareware version is around $20here's the link http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/Anybody knows a better free alternative for this? |
Is mobile internet a threat to creativity? | thristian: I expect we'll be just fine.From my own experience, when I'm tired I want simple, easily-digestible input - stories to read, video-games to play, websites filled with fresh user-nominated content. Without internet access, I'm just bored, not creative. On the other hand, when I'm well-rested and feeling alert... |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | vaksel: Jump in head first, when something comes up that you don't know, crack open Google and do a search. If you can't find an answer, go ask around the more knowledgeable people you know or post on HN |
Which one is better for writing a SQL parser? | flashgordon: Hang on is your sql LL? in which case writing a top down parser is not too difficult.. especially if you use flex for your scanner... |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | sachinag: It's not hard - just ask someone. Seriously. The mechanics aren't particularly hard, and if you act in good faith, the vast majority of mistakes are fixable. Step one is by far the hardest (assuming you're including "selling it to customers" in the "make something people want"). |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | pj: The best way is to have no fear. Do your best to treat people right and build something with a vision of the future. Figure out what is impossible and do that. People may not want it right away, but concentrate on building something they not only want, but are willing to pay for.Subscribe to the Wall Street Jour... |
eliminating cable TV - how should I set up my media center? | weaksauce: One thing that I love to do is watch the streaming netflix stuff. Get a roku device and go to town with a $8/mo netflix account. The roku has a great interface and tons of outputs.(hdmi, composite, component, svideo, etc...)This is not a complete solution because you do not generally get shows or movies unti... |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | alex_c: One of my first year Engineering courses, "Engineering, Society, and the Environment", was complete BS and an utter waste of time, but I did end up retaining exactly one thing from it: the course made the distinction between "Knowledge separated from experience" and "Knowledge embedded in experience".While wor... |
Is Twitter lost on me? | andresmh: I think an acceptable twitter strategy is to read your tweets once or twice a day. Perhaps it defeats the point of it but it's a way to manage the tweet-overflow. |
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding? | jaskew: Evolution does not write code.'Code' created by a long series of chaotic events manages to survive or not survive.The research is rewarding because it is challenging. Both the discover of the raw data and the interpretation of said data is dumbfoundingly complex, to the point where any tiny amount of comprehen... |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | DenisM: Find a good accountant - s/he will take care of your tax issues. Accountants also see businesses come and go in large numbers so if you find one who chats up his clients you will have access to interesting pool of information. |
eliminating cable TV - how should I set up my media center? | paul9290: I use a Mac Mini connected to a large LCD TV and use a wireless hand held mouse(gyration) as a remote. Works great to enjoy Internet TV sites (Hulu, Fancast, CBsNews/video, etc..), as well it allows me to read the net from 10 feet away via Fire Gestures (firefox plug in).At one time I used Windows Media Cente... |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | drinian: Rikaichan -- remarkably detailed Japanese - English dictionary (hover over words to show definitions) http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/ |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | matth2: I've been a contract software developer (in Australia) for a few years now and have been doing this via a company that I set up. Creating a company to contract through certainly creates work and (in Australia at least) there is no tax advantage in doing so - but a lot of the basics of running a company (particu... |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | markbao: Blood, sweat, and tears. |
Graphics creation for games? | yeti: You can always go into Second Life, there are a bunch of cartoon avatar shapes you can start with then customize..and then take high res screenshots to process in GIMP or other |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | hs: just do it, one man show -> you take all responsibility, if it fails, it's all yours.btw, don't confuse MBA with actual business experience. |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | RobertL: Hacker news probably isn't a good place to go for learning how to run a business. Not much experience in that area here.I think the secret in your situation is to simply focus on what marketers call "pushback". What I'm talking about here is to get your product concepts as far as you possibly can without spend... |
Plain English ToS - Is This Legal? | eds: Haha. I like it. Looks good to me, though I'm not a lawyer. Only thing I could think of adding would be a sentence that explicitly says something like "you assume all responsibility for your use of the site and any information you get from it." |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | krishna2: LORI - Life Of Request InfoAwesome plugin for quick/constant perf measurement. It shows how long it took the browser to get the first byte, the total time for page rendering, the total size of page and the total number of requests. For example, for this page, the stats are :0.160s 0.600s 26.14KB 5 req |
Plain English ToS - Is This Legal? | noodle: i think you could summarize it better. maybe... "disclaimer: never use trailbehind for any reason" |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | jamiequint: Books are a good start. Here is a (very) short list of must reads.1. 4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank (Recommended by Marc Andreesen and many others, for starting a company you only need to read the first half)2. Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (Understating whether what you are doing is a s... |
Graphics creation for games? | xsmasher: I use blender (for modeling and animation), Daz3d (for human figures and the large content library) and of course Photoshop.I'm still in need of a good tool for combining multiple .tga frames into a single sprite sheet. It takes too long to do the task in Photoshop (load into a stack, change canvas size, dist... |
Plain English ToS - Is This Legal? | huhtenberg: The target audience of T&C legalese is not your users, it's their lawyers if it ever comes to that. Create proper, lawyer-friendly version and then make a non-binding user-friendly summary in plain English if you feel like it. |
Is mobile internet a threat to creativity? | hs: iff (mobile) internet makes you passive (like TV) -- clicking on url is nothing more than a glorified mode of switching channel on TV |
Plain English ToS - Is This Legal? | ErrantX: No. You should never write your own license - the same applies here. You will get it wrong (simply by not being a lawyer :)) and it wont cover what it is supposed to.Get a proper ToS drafted and then do what Creative Commons does with their licenses: do a page with just a few lines detailing in plain terms wha... |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | zouhair: Open In Browser : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8207Will give you the possibility to open a file (especially file that you are sure is text) in Firefox instead of downloading it. |
Plain English ToS - Is This Legal? | RiderOfGiraffes: Direct link to save time:
http://www.andrewljohnson.com/article/Plain%20English%20Term... |
Is mobile internet a threat to creativity? | zimbabwe: Creative ideas happen regardless of situation. Idle or active, they happen on their own schedule. |
Is mobile internet a threat to creativity? | johnnybgoode: I took "mobile internet" to refer to surfing the web from a cell phone. Considering today's phones, my answer is no, not really. |
eliminating cable TV - how should I set up my media center? | a4agarwal: I second the recommendation to get a Mac Mini. Works so well to do everything you would want on your entertainment system:
• Use the apple remote, or the Logitech Harmony remote
• Optionally get a bluetooth kb/mouse or use VNC
• Everything in iTunes plays via front row
• Rent/Buy HD TV/movies via iTunes
• Hu... |
your favorite obscure Firefox extensions? | bagheera: Table tools - useful for sorting and filtering tables inline
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2637 |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | asb: I know this isn't any help to you personally, but if anybody reading is in the UK then the Business Link website (http://www.businesslink.gov.uk) seems to be a great resource. |
Plain English ToS - Is This Legal? | michael_dorfman: If you have a lawyer, why are you asking for legal advice from a bunch of amateurs?Discuss your concerns with your lawyer, and pay him to draft a TOS document. Ask him to use the reader-friendliest language that protects your interests. |
How do you learn about the business aspects of running a startup? | spkthed: Just jump in and try. You'll probably fail a few times. You learn and get better and try again. Eventually you'll get it. Or not, in which case time to try something new! |
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