instruction stringlengths 4 105 | output stringlengths 8 56.7k |
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You have two ropes. | Oompa: Light rope 1 on both ends, and rope 2 on 1 end. Once rope 1 is gone, 30 minutes have past, and light the other end of rope 2. Once rope 2 is gone, it has been 45 minutes. |
You have two ropes. | notaddicted: Forget the ropes, use a clock. |
Corporation types and "maximizing shareholder value"? | frisco: Shareholder value and revenue aren't necessarily the same thing at very early stage companies. Shareholder value can be built through brand recognition and integrity, and sacrificing that for short term revenue is destroying long term shareholder value.Shareholder value should never be at odds with the goals o... |
Corporation types and "maximizing shareholder value"? | robdimarco: If the founders care about not being forced to "maximize shareholder value", simply don't give out any controlling equity to non-founders. Consider how the NY Times or Washington Post, and WSJ operated for a long time. The controlling interest was held by a single family and not by all of the common share... |
HN for science? | Stasyan: There is academic hacker news:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/ |
Corporation types and "maximizing shareholder value"? | jhancock: I hear the "maximize shareholder value" rule quite a bit. But I have never seen a reference to a law that proclaims it or defines what it means. Can anyone find such a reference? |
You have two ropes. | anigbrowl: (perverse alternative method)
Travel to equator (or pole, but equator is nicer). Take 1 rope and form a Turkish head knot. Attach to second rope to form pendulum. Set pendulum in motion and wait for plane of oscillation to precess 11.25 degrees, or 1/32 of the way around the circle. |
HN for science? | bbgm: Different format, slightly different crowd, but if you are interested in the life sciences, the Friendfeed room is a great communityhttp://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists |
What is the nature of deafblind people's and animals' thoughts? | Mz: Not all people think the way you do. I've spent a lot of time learning about the different ways different people think and learn in order to effectively cope with the needs of my sons. My oldest son thinks in pictures (like Temple Grandin, who wrote the book 'Thinking in Pictures'). He's been very interesting to... |
do contest/test taking skills correlate with research skills? | mechanical_fish: You've neglected to name: a field, a sample group, and a definition of "research skills".Among the general population, skill at taking physics tests probably correlates pretty well with skill at doing physics research -- both are dominated by people who know something about physics.Once you're among th... |
do contest/test taking skills correlate with research skills? | neilc: No, they obviously do not. (Being bright is always helpful, of course, but they are pretty different skill sets, I think.) This is supported by the fact that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly important for admission to most top research PhD programs, in CS at least. |
What is the nature of deafblind people's and animals' thoughts? | tokenadult: Agreed with the first reply. People with normal sensory function have different habitual thinking styles. Noticing those differences in thinking styles is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my work as a mathematics teacher.What I like to do as a teacher is help my pupils discover that they can learn new t... |
What is the nature of deafblind people's and animals' thoughts? | 1diggnews: Mz - the imagery-rich manner of some peoples thinking style does not preclude utterance as the main mode of thought; for example dyslexic people seem to have serious issues with "abstract" terms, such as "the", versus nouns/verbs and thus many say they are "visual thinkers": but verb/noun utterance could go ... |
Where to find great Enterprise salespeople for startups? | mahmud: Define "enterprise". |
Where to find great Enterprise salespeople for startups? | rms: I would ask that question on LinkedIn: friend a bunch of people in your local area first. I think you have to pay to actually be able to broadcast a job on LinkedIn, but it can have pretty wide reach via your friends and your friends' friends. If you ask generically enough you may not need to pay. |
Where to find great Enterprise salespeople for startups? | newacc: try craigslist - you'll be surprised - i've seen VP (sales) posting their resumes there ... |
Where to find great Enterprise salespeople for startups? | ScottWhigham: In my experience, enterprise salespeople desperately want to be found. They put themselves out there in all kinds of ways - they join associations, they network in their communities, they network within the startup community, etc. Generally speaking, the investors know who the best enterprise salespeople ... |
Where to find great Enterprise salespeople for startups? | mixmax: A small note of caution.I did a startup some time ago where we were four founders. One of them was an excellent enterprise sales guy. In his previous job he had managed sales in excess of $100 million on a yearly basis. His job was, of course, to push the product. It didn't work out because he was used to a big... |
Where to find great Enterprise salespeople for startups? | lucaf: Back in 2000 I did a startup with a B2B web-based app for an enterprise vertical (large homebuilders). We tried both hiring an enterprise sales guy and schlepping it ourselves, and here are my take-aways from that experience."Successful enterprise salesperson happy to join a cash strapped startup" is an oxymoron... |
Where to find great Enterprise salespeople for startups? | webwright: This is a really common problem (we have it, too, FWIW).Question: Which outstanding salesperson would join a startup that had a low base salary, no draw for salepeople, no proven sales model, minimal marketing material, a moving target for a product, inexperienced management, no sales peers, no leadgen team... |
Fabrication startup name? | brk: Big Blue Saw? |
using dependency diagram as the primary way of browsing code? | DenisM: The best I could do so far is to make a "rule" for myself that files in the list can only reference other files above them, not below them. This seems to preclude formation of cycles, but is still too coarse. |
using dependency diagram as the primary way of browsing code? | mahmud: CFlow does what you want:http://www.gnu.org/software/cflow/It's primitive compared to the stuff you find in with more reflective languages, at least Common Lisp and Smalltalk, or for that matter binary analysis utilities like IDAPro.But, theoretically, you could do that only with C-like languages and binary exe... |
using dependency diagram as the primary way of browsing code? | Zev: In Xcode, look under the "Design" Menubar item.http://edr.euro.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conce... looks like a decent introduction to the menu (note: I don't use this menu and only skimmed this doc, so no promises) |
Fabrication startup name? | dpnewman: this recently appeared here in HN. emphasis on stainless steel tho.http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/08/04/the-future-of-fabricati...shapeways.com |
If you play an instrument, which is it? | apu: Clarinet |
Summer readings? | brianto2010: Currently, Code Complete 2 by McConnell. I'm in chapter 5 right now. Also, Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments by Doerfler. It's extremely difficult for me to follow, so I'm still in the first chapter.Sometime in the future, I might read Essential Java and Unit Testing in Java: How Tests Drive ... |
Summer readings? | revertts: I've been reading Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), Code Complete 2 (McConnel), and Algorithms: A Functional Programming Approach (Rabhi, Lapalme). Those first two are well-known and commonly recommended; the last one I just happened upon recently, and have really enjoyed it. It's the first algorithms/data struct... |
Summer readings? | pasbesoin: Robert Pirsig's follow-up to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", that being "Lila". I started it some years ago but didn't get too far. However, his addressing the concept of quality, plus the impression Zen had on me, leave me feeling I really should give it another go. And I just turned up my p... |
using dependency diagram as the primary way of browsing code? | DenisM: I think this does what I want but only for .NET:http://codebetter.com/blogs/patricksmacchia/archive/2008/09/...It also seems that Doxygen http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/diagrams.html can generate the diagrams I need. Now all I need is to integrate this into XCode... |
Summer readings? | xel02: Working through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, as well as some books on Statistics and Machine Learning. |
web-based decision making software? | michael_dorfman: Make your internal tool, and use it for a while. See how it works, and then decide if you can generalize it to a larger market.No sense in putting the cart before the horse. |
Summer readings? | jacquesm: 3) The Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder.3) Neal Stephensons wired article on laying fibre optic cable across the globe: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html |
web-based decision making software? | apsurd: To answer your last question, I think you are way-over-thinking the problem. But hey, I'm just one guy with an opinion.Personally, I don't know why I would need all of the stuff you described just to make a decision. Think about it this way. If the decision was a significant one, it would be embedded in your th... |
What should I do with my domain name of 11 years? | etix: What's the domain ? ;-) |
What should I do with my domain name of 11 years? | jacquesm: well, that's a bit hard to answer without knowing the name of the domain.I take it that it is not 'carlmercier.com' or 'ajaxwhois.com' because they are is still in use.Anyway, if you have had a domain for a long time and you are sure that you are never going to use it you could try to park it and get at least... |
What kind of desk chair do you use? | bkbleikamp: Interesting post on this topic: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/01/27/office-chair...I also use a terrible chair and am looking at investing in a more ergonomic one. |
Summer readings? | leif: 1. Candide2. The last few chapters of GEB3. Regardless of whether you're a programmer, anything by Carl Sagan. The Demon-Haunted World and Dragons of Eden are my favorites. |
What should I do with my domain name of 11 years? | imp: Keep it. It's cheap and if you feel at all emotionally attached then it means you may have some value for it eventually. If you're asking for outside advice then that's too much thought that you've already put into this. I've let several domains expire, and it was always an easy decision ("what was I thinking w... |
Summer readings? | rodrigo: 1. GEB
2. GEB
3. GEB |
Review my Site | physcab: I applaud you for taking on such a great cause. I have written quite a bit about academic integrity issues, and I believe more people need to be thinking about it for something to be done.With that being said, you're assuming people are coming to the site to cheat as you say several times "This site is not fo... |
What kind of desk chair do you use? | spooneybarger: I have a human scale freedom chair with head rest.I felt like a moron paying over a grand for a chair.I had tons of lower back and leg problems.I sucked it up and bought the chair.2 months later, my back and leg problems went away.I sit in the chair anywhere from 6-12 hours 5 days a week.I've been doing ... |
Review my Site | keefe: Load was very slow with lots of requests from some cafe on haight. Other sites load fine here. Design is OK but elements that I actually interact with should attract my attention more, rather than the background. Navigation in the site is slow. Categorization of essays is limited and needs work. Blurbs about ant... |
How do you see the future of the internet? | jhancock: These ideas posted a week ago on HN http://al3x.net/2009/07/31/two-unfinished-ideas.htmlGood stuff |
What kind of desk chair do you use? | arthurk: "Markus" from Ikea |
What kind of desk chair do you use? | Xichekolas: Herman Miller MirraI prefer it over the Aeron and any other chair I've sat in. |
Review my Site | joez: I like it but I have some concerns for you.How will you monetize? Freemium?How will you scale? It looks like you two are personally reading essays to approve/disapprove them but how will you scale if you're receiving 100 essays a day? To reach real scalability, I think you will need to crowd source the approval p... |
Review my Site | mrshoe: The site looks great and I think it's a great idea.Here's one small visual bug you can fix: you suffer from the Safari PNG gamma problem (http://hsivonen.iki.fi/png-gamma/). In short, a PNG of a certain RGB color will not match up with that same RGB CSS color in Safari. The easiest solution is to use a 1px by 1... |
Review my Site | apsurd: Overall, I like the design of the site. First thing I noticed was the "what is uberessay" block of text on the left column. I think the way you've written the text is a great attention getter.The biggest issue I have with the usability of the site is navigation and scoping problems.Front page:I like the essay g... |
What kind of desk chair do you use? | rdl: I use an Aeron; I actually found this one for free, but in the past I've bought used for $250-350. I did actually buy a new aeron once, and then had it air-freighted for $300...and it was entirely worthwhile, sitting in it 15h/day, 7 days a week, for a year or two, and then selling it for the price I paid.(relati... |
How do you see the future of the internet? | MikeW: I've been clicking around the web since 1996 and each year I find more and more data inaccessible because of DRM and region blocking.The content was there before, but in pirated form on youtube, etc... now it's being replaced by the copyright owners and locked down. I encounter SO much content online from so man... |
Review my Site | apsurd: Ah I see you have a direct question. I'll answer that as well.I think the idea is fine. My friend is obsessively into philosophy and dreamed up relatively the same idea: An open place to publish and share written essays.Seems great for anyone interested, only one thing: theres no money in it.Another very very l... |
Could one get sued for helping people remember names? | jacquesm: As long as they are public figures I think you'd be in the clear, if they are private individuals who have an 'expected right to privacy' it's a different problem altogether.Describe it as good as you can and then go to a lawyer who knows the local laws for your jurisdiction and how those might apply to stuff... |
Review my Site | Alex3917: I like the concept of the site. Two issues though:1) I read a couple of the featured essays and they were both pretty bad.2) I don't think the emphasis on cheating is necessary. It just comes off as weird to be honest. Better to focus on finding really high quality stuff. |
What kind of desk chair do you use? | christofd: Used to have a swiss Giroflex 33-7777 (about a grand -> http://www.giroflex.com/content/produkte/giroflex_33.php?pro... )... now just a decent Staples office chair -> not much difference |
Review my Site | chris11: The site seems interesting, and from the brief glance I got I think that the design is clean and works well. But I noticed that the font for most of the subsections is really small and basically illegible. For example, the text for http://uberessay.com/about/about-uberessay/ is a whole lot smaller than the Abo... |
What kind of desk chair do you use? | ohlol: At my last job (just left), I used a Steelcase think - http://www.steelcase.com/na/think_products.aspx?f=11845I found it in a bunch of office junk that we had in storage. Everyone else at work sits in cheap Ikea chairs, sadly.It's a great chair. |
What kind of desk chair do you use? | dylanz: daveambross... stop before you make any rash moves, and listen to me (someone with chronic back pain from crushed discs).get two cheap metal telescopic saw horses, put a cheap foldable table or a raw wooden door on them, and then invest a ergonomic and comfortable architects stool.now, you can sit and work, or,... |
"How to make something people want?" | callmeed: Doesn't halfbakery.com do something along these lines?The main problem I see with your idea is that consumers/users have no benefit or incentive to continually use your site.They are providing their time and input on something that doesn't exist. People take time to provide input at Yelp because, in return, t... |
"How to make something people want?" | thaumaturgy: I don't see this working out very well, unfortunately.For one thing, although users can express needs and desires in very vague terms, they can't usually be specific enough to actually help someone that's trying to implement an idea.I _think_ it was Guy Kawasaki that described this in "Rules for Revolution... |
"How to make something people want?" | patio11: Can I give a suggestion? Get off the Internet.I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean that the type of person who, when they have a problem, thinks: "You know, I bet there is some social networking service out there where I can post about this problem in a real pretty AJAX-y looking form and then Twitter... |
web-based decision making software? | yannis: This is one hacker's way of decision making (as an example choosing a final employee from interviews):1.0 Start with the first interview2.0 If short-list keep CV on your desk3.0 Second interview, if better than previous swap with first one. First one gets regret letter.4.0 Next interview repeat steps 2 to 3.Ess... |
"How to make something people want?" | lionhearted: > Any input on the concept?For a first foray into business, I'd recommend against building something that requires network effects.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effectFor every Facebook or Yelp, there's hundreds of network-effects-based sites that never gain any steam, and they don't see anything fr... |
"How to make something people want?" | siong1987: Instead of making something people want, make something that you want first. Solve your own problem. 6B people in the world, I am sure someone will have the exact same problem as yours.If your product could not get mass usage, at least, you will always be the user of your own product. |
Review my Site | satyajit: Great site, well designed, neat. Concept is good. But I wonder how you can/should sustain the avg readers/writer's interest to come back to your site again and again. I love Scribd's ePaper viewer, and I believe you can add that to your site as well. Providing a pdf download should be optional and should be u... |
"How to make something people want?" | 10ren: Two problems:1. Market: People don't know what they want til they see it.2. Development: You don't know what problems your idea has (nor their solution) til you see it.It's an entrancing dream to anticipate all this stuff, which is what corporate new market development and new product development is all about. I... |
Help with this 301 redirect? | jacquesm: mod_rewrite will do this for you without any work on your part.Simply move your data and set up mod_rewrite to allow access to the data in its old location.You can 301 it but there are all sorts of pitfalls to avoid there. (not sure how much traffic you get from search engines but they tend to react badly to ... |
JSON or XML, questions about an idea ? | jasoncartwright: XML/JSON: Answer is both. If you've built it well then you can just switch a template.Your plugin system sounds a bit like AppEngine. |
JSON or XML, questions about an idea ? | nreece: XML - because it is easily parsable, both client-side and server-side. |
JSON or XML, questions about an idea ? | thelonecabbage: JSON if you need SPEED at the client or server ends.
If speed isn't a major factor than XML may win out, depending on the complexity of the data your sending back. XML in large, hierarchies is going to be easier to read. |
JSON or XML, questions about an idea ? | TomOfTTB: My first question would be "what are you writing this social network in?" Because I think every mainstream language in existence has free libraries to create both XML and JSON output (Javascript is made for it, .Net has WCF, there are several Gems for Ruby, php has _encode, etc...). So implementing both sho... |
SICP says "Program == Language Evaluator" What does this mean? | jacquesm: The input data would be considered to be 'in' the language.Think of the evaluator as a classic unix 'filter', the language it implements describes how the input should be formatted.Just like when you write 'english', you expect the processor of your 'output' to be able to evaluate the english language so that... |
SICP says "Program == Language Evaluator" What does this mean? | tuukkah: Consider your example of a web app: if you implement the app following the REST principles, then the app simply evaluates a language of HTTP methods (verbs) and URIs (nouns). "GET /users" "POST /orders"...Edit: And your program printing the Fibonacci numbers has a single verb whose semantics is to calculate an... |
Has anybody here worked with the Connection Machine or the Lisp Machine? | zbyszek: I worked with a CM (at EPCC in Edinburgh, Scotland) in the mid-nineties for a little bit. I think we used CM Fortran -- basically Fortran 77 with extra knobs on for parallelism. I remember it as being a pleasant experience. The programming paradigm effectively hid details of the data decomposition and commu... |
JSON or XML, questions about an idea ? | jimfl: And advantage of XML is the ability to easily get substructures out of the data using XPath, and/or use XSLT to transform the XML directly to XHTML. So if you expect API users to be doing any filtering of the requested data on the fly at the client side, XML may be preferred.Another rule of thumb is that the dee... |
SICP says "Program == Language Evaluator" What does this mean? | harshavr: The user of the web app has a model and a desired result in mind and somehow needs to communicate this intention to the system. Viewed this way, it is clear that there must be a language in which this communication happens. Of course, we call this the interface. A user interface can be thought of as very high... |
SICP says "Program == Language Evaluator" What does this mean? | devijvers: 1. Turing machine: there is no difference between data and instructions. Meaning: any data can be interpreted as instructions (e.g. 1 + 1, GET /, [ 1, 2, 3], ...)2. Writing is turning ideas into meaningless symbols, reading is turning meaningless symbols into ideas.3. The alphabet consists of meaningless sym... |
SICP says "Program == Language Evaluator" What does this mean? | horia314: Hello,I don't really have as deep an understanding of this subject as I'd like, so my explanation might seem rough, but here's my two cents.You can say a language is a set of rules. Syntactic rules describe what proper sentences in that language look like, while semantic rules describe actions associated with... |
"How to make something people want?" | qaexl: http://steveblank.com/2009/02/23/theres-a-pattern-here/http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09... |
JSON or XML, questions about an idea ? | tmikew: I prefer JSON. Though I do agree with the other comments that xml is more readable if the structure is big, and that one can easily (and perhaps should) do both.In practice I have noticed that where I work we tend to have complex data structures but not very deeply nested ones. We wrote a simple find function t... |
"How to make something people want?" | ad: This is more general than what you want but if you haven't read pg's 'why smart people have bad ideas' it's well worth it.
http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html |
"How to make something people want?" | tophat02: Make something YOU want. Hope you're "most people." |
JSON or XML, questions about an idea ? | hboon: JSON first. XML when people ask for it and when you have no more excuse to delay it. It is so much easier to play with JSON, or to pick a particular value. Most languages (with a library built-in or not), lets you manipulate the result as a combination of dictionary/hashmap and array/list. It is SO easy. |
JSON or XML, questions about an idea ? | pauljonas: JSON.It makes for a significantly smaller payload (especially important in that in most cases, you're transmitting a great number of smaller chunks) and I don't buy the readability argument — especially when it's almost a no-brainer to employ a function to display to "pretty" indent JSON represenstation — pr... |
JSON or XML, questions about an idea ? | amutap: I would suggest provide support for both. As it has been mentioned, there are libraries that you can use to generate either of these. Tumblr is the first that came to my mind - it provides support for both.Give developers freedom to choose either of them... |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | idlewords: Regular expressions. They don't take a long time to learn, and can save you endless work in a wide variety of domains. |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | alexgartrell: Their prospects are going to kind of suck at first.If I were to do a crash course, I'd say: Java/C#
Code Complete/related software engineering books
Eclipse/Visual Studio
svn/cvs
You'll notice that there's nothing overly exciting there. I think it's most important for them to get the stan... |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | davidw: Languages: start with one of (Ruby, Python). At some point learn: C, Java. Also fool around with Erlang/Scala. That's the short version.The economics guy could probably do well with R and some stats stuff... there's apparently beginning to be a big market for that kind of thing.I think web stuff has a lot of... |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | pj: Okay, so here again is an opportunity for me to talk about my company, but I will try to avoid it.Here's the deal. The web is the future. So for application domain -- the web is where it is at. And the web includes mobile. Mobile devices are web devices. The whole point of the web was to enable mobility in a s... |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | WarTheatre: Databases and SQL, everyone developer needs to know about them. They are easy to learn, incredibly ubiquitous and actually quite fun to work with. Have them start out simple by downloading MySQL and reading, say, <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/>W3 Schools tutorials</a>.Regular expressions. Very useful no... |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | gregwebs: I was thinking about this recently, and wondering if my own experiences are seriously biasing me, but Ruby On Rails does not seem that hard to learn, and is fairly well structured. You have to learn the parts of Ruby that are used for Rails. You don't need to know SQL to start off, CSS and html are pretty str... |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | abecedarius: When I retooled myself from a physics dropout to a programmer (back in the 80s) the most valuable single thing I did was to work through SICP, doing most of the exercises plus little projects sparked off it. (I already had years of hobby programming experience, though; and I'd hope there's a better most va... |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | pvg: One decent way is to learn the software technologies and tools used in their particular domains. There's usually some set of fairly standard tools and plenty of self-taught experts to provide guidance.
The other path is the more general - 'learning to program a computer' which these days really means web programm... |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | tezza: A dash of Linux SysAdmin, a hint of bash, taken with a large glass of Perl. (Python seems to be the favoured Perl replacement here on HN)It is amazing what you can accomplish by just learning those first.You will have tasks (mostly sysadmin) straight away and build your programming from there. |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | arupchak: I have always thought that getting familiar with a command line is a good way to think of programming for people that are familiar with computers, but not with software development. If they can start with some basic things (moving one file from one folder to another) and then start to get the concept of chain... |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | berntb: There is often a good leverage mechanism if you can do more than one thing well.For instance, has the biology guy a suitable background for bioinformatics? |
Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts? | locopati: Tell them to start from their domain. Find a simple problem that could be solved using a command-line utility (ex: bioinformatics tools). Pick a scripting language (Python, Ruby, Perl - any big one will do since they don't have deep coding knowledge yet). Read an intro book, tutorials and create the command-... |
How to reduce sloppy mistakes? | gaia-forming: 1. Get a good editor, and watch the syntax highlighting.2. Start unit testing your code, there are plenty of libraries available for this.3. It comes with experience. |
How to reduce sloppy mistakes? | amichail: I would say get better at using a debugger and/or use a higher level language.My guess is that worrying too much about low-level correctness while writing your code could lead to very poor productivity and even OCD. |
How to reduce sloppy mistakes? | notaddicted: Some good advice already.Don't try to always be coding. You need to have total focus when you work. If you work when you don't have it you are just creating more work for yourself later. It's a net loss. |
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