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How do I teach myself to be a salesman? | avdempsey: Try door to door canvassing for a month (or three). After returning from some travel I picked up a job at greenpeace to tide myself over. Any inhibitions to putting myself out there and selling were hammered out in the three months I fund-raised for them. They train you, support you in the field, and most im... |
Coders' guide to the investment lingo | sgoraya: The book:
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business LawHelped me tremendously - I was in the same boat as you and gave this book a shot - Easy to read, good as a reference as well; |
Universal libraries? | JabavuAdams: What about a wizard-style code generator, instead?I'm thinking of a machine-readable algorithm collection (with options and trade-offs defined) that rather than being executed, generates source code. |
consultancy, how to? | lionhearted: Hey Errant - not sure if you're still following this thread, but you got a hell of a lot of some bad advice.Most people are really "mine mine mine!" oriented, they're telling you be careful of the split, watch out for getting filched, etc. That's all well and good to some extent, it sucks to be burned. But... |
Universal libraries? | beagle3: What do you envision as the use case for this?You are not insane, but if you don't have a specific use in mind, you're bordering on being an architecture astronaut.Simple scheme implementations sans closures/callcc exist in ridiculously short amounts of code (100 lines or so), for just about any underlying lan... |
Facebook Connect & Google Friend Connect as only way to register & login | frossie: Visualise a person who is neither on Facebook or Friend Connect. (Hint: there are quite a few of those).If you are happy for that person not to use your site, then by all means do what you plan. |
Universal libraries? | Raphael: Just use JavaScript. |
Universal libraries? | NonEUCitizen: forth |
How should I deal with constant anxiety problems? | IonicWalrus: Try:
* daily exercise
* meditation
* new hobby - learning a new skill/hobby will provide you enough distraction to worry about anything else. |
How should I deal with constant anxiety problems? | dlnovell: I find meditation to be the best cure when I'm particularly anxious about something. At first I just spend a few minutes trying to completely empty my mind. This can take significant practice if it doesn't come naturally. Then I start into a visualization of the powers of 10 video (yeah, I know it's cheesy bu... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | noonespecial: If they don't take a good bit of time to read, then you're not doing it right. These are books full of tools for the mind. The best way to read them is a little at a time, taking the parts that click in your mind and trying them out on problems that seemed insurmountable before. The first time you open a ... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | dinkumthinkum: Perhaps you just like the idea of reading all these books rather than the actual reading of them. |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | michael_dorfman: Basically, this is just a classic inventory control problem. If the inventory is piling up, you need to either decrease the rate of acquisition, increase the rate of consumption, or (preferably) both.I can't say how typical the situation is, but it's definitely not just you. I have quite the stack of... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | jk4930: I often buy books and read some chapters that interest me. I get most out of such books months or even years later when I can appreciate their content better. It's good to know that I've the stuff at my hand, often there are explanations, algorithms, concepts in a depth one rarely finds on the net. |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | electromagnetic: I tend to collect lots of books, usually at times when I'm not really reading much. However, I eventually (usually a matter of weeks or sometimes months) get back to reading and will crunch through endless amounts of books. I've managed to get through 500 page books in a day, every day for over two wee... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | robryan: Definitely best to sift through them slowly, get the most out of them. No use hammering through a good book then taking nothing from it at the end. |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | plinkplonk: In my student days, before I became a working programmer, I was desperately poor and couldn't afford all the books I wanted to buy. So I got into the habit of buying books when I had money in my account to avoid a future in which I have to look longingly at a book and not have money to buy it. So, yes your... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | Herring: My parents are in academia & they've each amassed a huge collection of books. I learned very early on that I should be collecting digital books instead. |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | pragmatic: I bought a Kindle b/c I don't have room for all my books.
I recently had a child and his books already fill one of my bookshelves. So I've been cleaning out my physical books, only keeping those I really like. The Kindle DX might be the way to go for texts. So you get unlimited space (Amazon will keep you... |
How should I deal with constant anxiety problems? | spaghetti: Take a break from computers. I notice an increase in stressful thoughts when I do too much programming. When I take a break from programming all the stressful thoughts vanish. I know "taking a break" from programming can be hard, especially if it's your job and you have financial obligations. In my exper... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | Arun2009: I have the same problem. I have TONS of Mathematics (mainly) and Physics books, but I've not really worked through most of them. I've spent a fortune on them so far. I always keep saying that I'll take a couple of years off to concentrate on nothing but hard science, but I know that will never happen.I actual... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | bluishgreen: The problem with math books. Succinctness. There you have it. This is the single most annoying problem with succinctness. When you go over a line of text sometimes it is justified to spend 3 hours with it. But sometimes its not, its just something that you are not seeing. The thing with math books is you c... |
How should I deal with constant anxiety problems? | na11: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnxiolyticPerfectly normal people with anxiety problems take them. |
How should I deal with constant anxiety problems? | superjared: It would be good to read into Anxiety disorders[1] to get a feel of what sorts of coping mechanisms exist so you could benefit from the good ones, and avoid the bad. It's also helpful to monitor exactly what happens when you get spikes of anxiety; note the situation, your previous state, and any other detai... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | zackattack: I would try to take them cover-to-cover and then use them as reference. Also, perhaps, if you really wanted to learn the material, you would simply check them out of the library. There's been an article posted on the frontpage recently about how verbalizing a goal makes it less likely to be actualized: I th... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | michael_nielsen: I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this question. I found it very useful to develop several different styles for reading mathematics and physics. Mostly I did this in the context of reading papers, not books, but the comments below are easily adapted to books.One unu... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | twopoint718: Textbooks are indispensable for really getting the material down, but I've found it much easier to read lectures.Feynman has great examples of this type of work: "The Character of Physical Law" or "The Feynman Lectures on Computation" are both excellent. I've found that these books walk somewhere between t... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | keefe: Yeah, I have a wide variety of very interesting books collecting dust on my shelves. I don't know why really, I think maybe I spent my time in graduate school immersed in theory and these last few years I have been completely focused on understanding how that theory relates to practice. Maybe the pendulum will s... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | justlearning: Thanks HN, Many times a rhetorical question is answered in ways more than i can ask for. I have few attributes that I suspect are behind my depression. This being one of them. I have been doing the same- but unlike the OP and others, I get depressed that I bought a book and by not reading it completely, I... |
How should I deal with constant anxiety problems? | clevercode: What worked for me was proper diet and exercise. I used to suffer from pretty bad panic attacks that would occur randomly, and it was really debilitating. The thing that really helped me was taking up jogging. Some form of daily exercise is essential. Also, cutting out caffeine completely helped a lot.G... |
good math books | spmacdonald: A really good book for analysis:http://www.amazon.com/Analysis-History-Undergraduate-Texts-M... |
how do you decide which idea to use? | ektimo: Start with a small one, predict how data will turn out and see how close you get. Then go for a bigger one. Disclaimer: This opinion based on (almost) no real experience. |
What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? | jwb119: clickable link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zizoaped950 |
What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? | gojomo: This is fairly close to how find already works in Firefox and Safari... instant, progressive advance-to-next-match and highlighting of all matches. I would expect that style to gradually migrate to other apps without any promotional effort.Besides the fact that the keys/gestures for 'next/prev' and 'repeat' are... |
What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? | yangyang: It looks like a nicely implemented and useful utility.But there's nothing really new in incremental searching (emacs has had it for years and years, firefox search works in a similar fashion). I suppose the main thing is the cross-application support.I don't personally think you could make much money out of i... |
how do you decide which idea to use? | bprater: The one that keeps floating to the top. The one you find yourself most passionate about. Otherwise, when you are bridging the gap between start and finish, you'll give up. |
What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? | _pius: Perhaps you could repurpose it as a library that app developers can incorporate into their products. |
What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? | thorax: You could make money off of this shareware, at least some.Personally, I see the video and I think it's useful enough that I would pay $4.99 provided a trial worked well and that I knew it worked with Vista/Windows7/etc.Perhaps I'm not alone?Edit: I'd love if you made a Firefox extension for this. I like your ap... |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | menloparkbum: I used to buy math and science books all the time. I probably read 25% of the books I bought. I quit buying books in general after I moved. Moving 500 books sucks.Now I only buy math and science books if I actually plan to work through them. I usually try to do the problems first and only go back to the w... |
What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? | herdrick: Firefox and Safari and some text editors already have incremental search which is most of what you have here. I do like like the way you change color to indicate already-seen text. I wish I had that in FF and Emacs. |
How do I teach myself to be a salesman? | bavcyc: Best book on sales is "The Selling Bible; For People in the Business of Selling", the summary is know what you are selling, keep track of what you do and listen. |
how do you decide which idea to use? | ektimo: One thing that would help for evaluating your ideas is to include links to existing sites that are most similar. This would save the evaluator time in getting the basic lay of the land and show whether you're aware of the strongest competition. |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | numberzer0: It takes me a while to read the books I have as well. I've bought lots of books than I haven't been able to read yet and my list of books to buy and read keeps growing as well. Another thing that adds to the amount of time it takes me to read a book is that I'm a very meticulous reader. I like looking up an... |
What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? | jbr: This seems like it might have an accessibility audience; easy navigation for people without a mouse.Simple question to frame the inquiry: What's the advantage of your technology over control/command F and control/command G? The answer to that probably has hints as to a possible audience.--I've been hacking on a b... |
What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? | sheriff: I found the green bubbles incredibly distracting in the demo video. My eye was drawn to a bright green bubble that contained what you were typing, and less drawn to the part of the text which matched your search. It was really hard for me to tell if this would be useful to me... perhaps just going a little s... |
How should I deal with constant anxiety problems? | adrianwaj: Don't be scared of a panic attack. Let it wash over you. Attempt to get to the root cause of it. |
What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? | I_got_fifty: C-s and C-r on emacs does pretty much the same thing.
It is cross-application, but maybe not quite in the same way. |
Do you read math & hard science books? How? | modelic: I read all the main theorems without even reading any of the definitions and examples for the first pass while at the same time I write down any questions I have with a reference to the theorem it pertains. For my second pass I go back and look at the examples to see if they answer any of the questions I wrote... |
Anyone working here on twitter apps esp games etc | shabda: You may want to leave your email address in your profile. |
what unwanted domain names are you sitting on? | nfriedly: screwbeingsingle.com - entirely unusedmisticflame.com - used occasionally, would be willing to part with. |
Rate this Idea: Analyze your life with the help of a GPS data logger | matt1: HackerNews, this is an idea that I was seriously considering spending the next few months of nights and weekends on.I've decided not to pursue it and was hoping to hear your thoughts. Specifically: is this something you would have been interested in using? |
The long tail of Founders at Work | patio11: I'm quite a bit down the long tail from Peldi, but if you're still interested, I have a quick summary post on my blog that I update from time to time.http://www.kalzumeus.com/start-here-if-youre-new/ |
The long tail of Founders at Work | andhapp: Well if you listen to the Venture Voice podcast or the start up success podcast then you will encounter a tons of start ups that are not huge yet are successful to some degree. |
The long tail of Founders at Work | dangrover: I'd be really curious to see tales of failed startups.It could be called "Founders Out Of Work" |
The long tail of Founders at Work | csomar: a link: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/10/14/personal-whats-your-... |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | scscsc: I think you ought to be able to write your own resume. People hiring you would expect at least that much. Why in the world would you want to work for another company if you already have your own (and it's running well)? |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | jakozaur: Writing the resume is not a rocket science, you should be able to do it on your own. Although, you may need someone to proofread it. |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | caffeine: I think there may be other forums where you can get more feedback. Check the XKCD forums (http://echochamber.me) maybe?In general, though, your education is essentially irrelevant compared to the fact that you've been building websites. So I'd make the degree one line at the bottom of the resume, and put yo... |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | edw519: Welcome, cmpeters. It's always nice to hear from long time lurkers.Sounds like it's time for you to kick it into high gear. Tell prospective employers and customers (I wouldn't rule out continuing your business) what you've told us here. Be completely sincere and open. Tell them what you already know (skill... |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | falien: Unless your resume is simply horrific, it should only really keep you from getting interviews at the large companies with a wall of HR before anyone technical will be aware of you. For most companies, you should pay much more attention to your cover letter, which will matter much more to alot of people than whe... |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | csomar: I don't have experience, but if I was in your place, I would build an Open Source software with few mates, this will demonstrate and proof your competence |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | ashishk: how well do you know java? i know of an opening in nyc. |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | avner: Fellow Penn Stater here. The IST program, in its infinite wisdom has its strengths and weaknesses. One issue that you may have acknowledged already, especially in such economic times is the lack of awareness about the IST program and its various tracks amongst the business circle that recruits from Penn State.Si... |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | andymoe: Are you still in PA? I'll be no help there but we are looking for a junior software guy/gal. (Downtown SF - small consulting company) email in profile... |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | SingAlong: Did you try job boards like 37signals job board, TC, ReadWriteWeb board, Mashable, etc?Also, there was a recent post on HN about a sample resume template. It's here http://sampleresumetemplate.net/ (also there are some useful links in the comments here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646277)You could use... |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | vaksel: the market just sucks now. Only 20% of college graduates found jobs this year, compared to 80% last year. So at this point there are 4 times more competition, than usual. And since most companies are firing instead of hiring you also have additional competition from older people who lost their jobs.You need to ... |
HN Timeouts Today? | pg: I think Rtm installed something on the server this morning. |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | vishaldpatel: Feel free to send it my way - I'll be happy to proofread it for you (email's in the profile). |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | JimmyL: I've got a similar question (I'm a guy in a similar place to cmpeters), so as opposed to opening another HN on a very similar vein.Like cmpeters, I'm a recent college grad (BEng in Computer Engineering) from a top school in my Western English-speaking non-American country. I've got a good education, a respectab... |
HN Timeouts Today? | moe: http://hnstatus.net/ |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | jacoblyles: Monster.com's resume service was horrible, at least in 2005. It did give me some good ideas to build off of, though. |
Simple, simple, simple editors for Linux. | sorbus: Mousepad or Gedit. |
Why not use technology to find people to talk to at a conference? | jedediah: When I'm at a conference, I prefer finding people with entirely different sets of interests. This gives me the opportunity to potentially learn something new and maybe even find out about a field I didn't previously know about.This idea sounds interesting. I'd like to see where it could go if you built it onl... |
Simple, simple, simple editors for Linux. | makecheck: Terminal-based "pico" (part of the pine distribution) is pretty simple to use. |
Simple, simple, simple editors for Linux. | empone: I think Kate is the default in KDE, have they tried that? |
College Graduate, Job Prospects | auston: If youre willing to move I may be able to help you. http://miami.craigslist.org/pbc/eng/1228872309.html |
Simple, simple, simple editors for Linux. | cschep: Is having a GUI a requirement? If not, check out Diakonos (http://purepistos.net/diakonos/) I haven't used it much, but the keyboard shortcuts are all "standard", and it's branded as a "Linux editor for the masses". Maybe the lack of a GUI would be helpful? |
Simple, simple, simple editors for Linux. | joeyo: I'm generally a fan of SciTE. It runs on Linux, Mac and Window with the exact same UI; you can drive it with a keyboard alone. It is very simple to use, but it's intended as an editor for code (it has built-in syntax hiliting for a large number of languages) so it may not be _exactly_ what he is looking for unle... |
Simple, simple, simple editors for Linux. | pasbesoin: A while back, someone came out with a prototype driver for a mouse that used, for lack of a better word, "stabilization" to compensate for a jittery hand. I want to say it was an IBM Alphaworks project, but I'm not sure. Think of image stabilization, but applied to mouse input rather than a camera image.If... |
Rate this Idea: Analyze your life with the help of a GPS data logger | bayareaguy: Isn't this precisely the sort of thing criminals are made to use in some places to monitor parole compliance? (i.e. the kind of thing I would only use if my alternative were somehow worse). |
Why not use technology to find people to talk to at a conference? | fburnaby: I'm in town for a conference which starts tomorrow. I was planning on seeing the talks that sound interesting, and then talking to the speakers, or other people who thought that same talk would be interesting.I agree with you that I'm not here for the talks, but everyone still goes to them (at least the marin... |
Why not use technology to find people to talk to at a conference? | Zev: This sounds remarkably like what Twitter gets used for during major conferences. I know its what I used it for during WWDC, at least. |
Missing needed skills for startup | Oompa: Learning is cheap, replacing all the code, however, is not. |
Missing needed skills for startup | gizmo: I made three attempts at replying, but they all boil down to the same thing: just wing it.If it's bad, you'll learn from your mistakes. If you study up beforehand I can guarantee that the knowledge will do you no good. You'll forget the good parts because you can't relate them to real world scenarios, and you'll... |
Missing needed skills for startup | ntoshev: If it is a web app, use Google App Enigne. You don't have to know dbs for that (in fact it would hurt because you would have to unlearn stuff) and it is much easier to change than a traditional db schema.It will also save you from doing lots of admin stuff that you probably have no experience with. And it will... |
Missing needed skills for startup | rjurney: You can learn as you go. Schema are rarely static anyway. Get a book, learn some SQL, and network aggressively to find help in this area. Join user groups. Get some momentum behind your business, promote it aggressively, and you'll find someone to fill this gap if you need to.You don't need to build for sc... |
Missing needed skills for startup | mstefff: If you're talking about a database in terms of a web application or something similar, it's very simple. I remember I learned my way around MySQL in a matter of days. Check out w3schools.com and go over the quick MySQL tutorial. |
Missing needed skills for startup | justinsb: At least for prototyping & early development, I'd say you want the schema flexibility & rapid development that a relational database can give you.SQL lets you issue very complex queries incredibly easily (both for production & for measuring your own metrics). With alternative systems you'll have to do a lot ... |
Review My Site - Studylance.com | empone: is that a bookworm holding a cigar? |
Missing needed skills for startup | whirlycott1: Most companies don't fail because of their database. Just build the damn thing and focus on the really big risk, which is that nobody will use it. |
Review My Site - Studylance.com | RiderOfGiraffes: Clickable: http://www.studylance.com |
Review My Site - Studylance.com | karanbhangui: Are you Felix.f on the site? |
Review My Site - Studylance.com | csomar: This is extremelly useful for math and physics students who generally can't make an income through the web unlike IT students.I believe it can succeed, one thing to watch: Keep your site SPAM free, Ban the people asking for very hard and long questions and giving few money for it. Also ban users who bid on ever... |
Review My Site - Studylance.com | caffeine: Your "about us" page is full of lorem ipsum. Doesn't inspire much confidence in the company... |
Missing needed skills for startup | lsb: If you don't need a terabyte of data stored, just use an in-memory data structure, and have 1 server process in whatever language you're using, and manipulate whatever you would do in memory, and work from there. Maybe SQL is the right choice, maybe not, but you'll at least have a better idea of the problem space... |
Good communities like HN | amichail: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgihttp://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board... |
Review My Site - Studylance.com | ianbishop: Nice site, I will definitely be giving it a try.My only design complaint so far is the green on blue buttons at the bottom of a question ('Ask Student a Question', etc.). |
Review My Site - Studylance.com | hwijaya: I think design/usability are acceptable. At least i can understand it after playing with it for less than 1 minute.The only thing that you need to be careful of is probably a market-risk. This type of site is platform model and usually run into chicken-and-egg problems, therefore, takes longer than you imagine... |
Missing needed skills for startup | mingyeow: I have a really really good db expert as a co-founder, but we still started out with a simple mysql when we got started. the very simple reason being that specs are never obvious and we wanted to keep things as fluid as possible. We were very iterative - mysql, federated mysql, and now we are moving to a bigt... |
Missing needed skills for startup | pj: you might also want to try qrimp.com don't need a lot of database experience and it's easy to build it then tear it down, then rebuild it until you get it right and since you don't have to write a lot of code, you don't lose all the time recoding stuff to match your data model. |
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