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Asperger Syndrome common in tech but a killer for startup founders? | dbrush: Not if you're solving a problem you yourself have encountered. And, a cofounder can help with the difficulty in seeing the perspectives of others, although Asperger's Syndrome has more to do with difficulty in social interaction than being able to observe why something sucks and requires fixing. |
Review my Startup -- wokhei.com | run4yourlives: I'm not going to comment on the site itself, but I've read through the comments here and would like to put something forward: You aren't focusing enough on making this a win for your customer.I'm a potential customer. Right now, I see a process that limits my input to next to nothing, won't allow me to m... |
A better metric than lines of code | gdp: I believe compressed source code size is one of the metrics available on the "Computer Language Benchmark Game":http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/I feel relatively strongly that LoC is almost entirely worthless as a metric. Even compressed source code size makes me uneasy. Shameless self promotion: I wrote a bl... |
Review my Startup -- wokhei.com | aw3c2: Completely Javascript reliant and (for me) painfully slow (the site loads, then the content flickers into view. A good half second I guess) if I enable it. Opera 10 beta on Linux.edit: Actually it takes 4 seconds for the content to appear. And it borks my navigation-back. I have to press back at least 2 times to... |
What is the preferred cheap host (for low bandwidth sites)? | noodle: could you define your parameters for "cheap" and "host"?my cheap host is a slice from slicehost. |
What do you think of e-cigarettes? | drobilla: That addiction - that very, very strong addiction - will never leave you. Ever.Understand? If you quit entirely, and never smoke for 10 years, if you were to smoke at all, it would be the greatest thing, ever. Good luck not starting again if you ever do. Even reading this thread about someone considering ... |
Learning Industrial Design | hop: Screw a book, start making things. If you have access to a shop, start prototyping things.Practice sketching objects freehand and learn a 3D modeling program like SolidWorks.Learn manufacturing processes - injection, thermoform, and rotomolded plastic. CNC machined, cast, and extruded metal. Composites. - Because ... |
A better metric than lines of code | huherto: For business applications take a look at "function points". It is not perfect but it may help you.Some people use LoC without comments or blank lines.In general these measures can be useful indicators but have to be taken with a grain of salt.Also take a look at this Martin Fowler's article http://martinfowler... |
A better metric than lines of code | rntz: According to Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html): The most meaningful test of the length of a program is not lines or
characters but the size of the codetree-- the tree you'd need to represent
the source. The Arc example has a codetree of 23 nodes: 15 leaves/tokens
+ 8 interior nodes.... |
What is the preferred cheap host (for low bandwidth sites)? | snewe: Webfaction |
What is the preferred cheap host (for low bandwidth sites)? | yannis: You probably looking for Hostgator and a Wordpress or Drupal CMS and I would never let my mother touch python! |
A better metric than lines of code | Derrek: The LoC metric drives me insane. To entertain myself, I mess with the LoC "bean counters" by writing overly verbose, first-pass code and then optimizing it down once I'm finished. It's my own little form of rebellion."Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress... |
Review IGF, a site to find co-founders and stay motivated | astartupaday: Clickable link: http://www.igfactory.com |
What is the preferred cheap host (for low bandwidth sites)? | rntz: If your site were static or PHP-based, nearlyfreespeech.net offers a really good deal: you pay only and precisely for what you use in terms of bandwidth and storage. Unfortunately the only way to use Python or other languages on it is via CGI (not even fastCGI or SCGI, which would be tolerable). |
A better metric than lines of code | mrshoe: I'm going to slightly disagree with other comments here and say that LOC is a meaningful metric. It might not be the best, as OP suggests, but it's worth something.Having written a lot of Python it is now frustrating to write C++, mostly because of the verbosity. Instead of thinking about the problem I'm trying... |
Review IGF, a site to find co-founders and stay motivated | brk: This is a very neat/noble effort. However, I personally would never co-found a company with a person that I essentially found on a 'dating' site.I see that you "built" this on Ning. Are your plans to actually move it to a more robust platform if it takes off? |
A better metric than lines of code | jganetsk: Nodes in the parse tree |
What is the preferred cheap host (for low bandwidth sites)? | edb: If you're canadian, or from quebec in particular http://globecite.com and http://www.hosting-canada.ca/ are really good and have good support. I think they're run by the same company, and they're not going anywhere. |
A better metric than lines of code | gnosis: The metric I use is lines of comments. |
A better metric than lines of code | mpk: WTFs/minute during code review :http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m |
Review IGF, a site to find co-founders and stay motivated | icey: I think the idea is great, but man the signup process is terrible. I went through it with a bunch of b.s. data because it's irritating to have to provide my birthday, zipcode, email address and gender just to take a look at the messages. I don't know if that's a ning thing or not, but it's a real turn-off. |
Why do you use framework X? | radu_floricica: My own, java + apache velocity. In the process of switching to compojure.Why my own? It's simple, does what I want and does it well, and when it brakes it's my fault. No learning curve :p |
A better metric than lines of code | jaspervdj: The only good metric in my opinion is time spent. |
Review IGF, a site to find co-founders and stay motivated | johnbrunswick: @astartupaday - This is definitely an interesting idea.A company that I have been working with is doing some similar - they have created a private, invite only community for connecting with talent, resources, capital, promotion of ventures on a global scale. It is geared toward early stage ventures of a... |
A better metric than lines of code | scott_s: A common claim I hear from software engineering researchers is that the number of errors in X lines of code from a person is constant. "Lines of code" is supposedly independet of programming language.If this is true, then the implication is that when you can implement the same functionality in less code, it wi... |
A better metric than lines of code | tetha: I think anything directly related to the syntax of a language is a very, very dull metric. I say 'dull', because the LOCs certainly can tell you something about the size of the project (if 3 guys crafted 3 million lines of code for a project, and 3 other guys did the whole thing in 12k lines of code in the same ... |
Todo lists | kailden: MonkeyGTD? |
A better metric than lines of code | ken: Both metrics seem to assume that source code is a fixed thing. My bottleneck when working with source code is not write or read, but modify. Therefore, the most important metric to me is whether an O(1) conceptual change requires only an O(1) change of source code.A small line count / compressed size / AST node ... |
What should I ask companies during interviews? | aaronbrethorst: "Are you happy?" |
A better metric than lines of code | MaysonL: Probably the best way I've seen of comparing languages is by what proportion of the program is problem solution versus how much is language/syntax cruft. |
What do you listen to when you code? | jamesbritt: Postrock. Lately it's Epic45, Lymbyc Systym, Petrograd in Transit, The Berg Sans Nipple, My Education. |
What do you listen to when you code? | gkelly: Groove Salad on SomaFM: a nicely chilled plate of ambient beats. |
Learn math faster w/ computers | mbrubeck: Project Euler is a fun way to motivate yourself to learn some algorithms, number theory, and a few other math topics, by solving programming puzzles: http://projecteuler.net/O'Reilly's Statistics in a Nutshell is a good stats textbook and reference, has some good exercises to be done in R (or S or Matlab), an... |
What do you listen to when you code? | drhowarddrfine: Every forum on the internet gets someone to start one of these threads which goes on seemingly forever and nobody reads them. What is this? MySpace? |
A good book on Calculus? | jpwagner: volume 1 of the best series out there...http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-One-Variable-Introduction... |
Todo lists | vlBeta: There's something about Todoist's hierarchical functionality that I really love. It's def not the best out there, but by far the best organization oriented task list manager.http://www.todoist.com |
Great startups with affiliate programs? | wensing: We do. Email me stormpulse at gmail for details. |
A good book on Calculus? | enum: Michael Spivak's Calculus text:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0914098918 |
A game to show users every iPhone app in a quick and interesting way? | sorbus: Present the top few apps (representative of the content of the store, I assume), and then give them the option of taking a quiz about their interests which will give them a more specific list which they might be interested in?Not that good if the goal is to get them to go through the entire store, but workable ... |
Todo lists | DenisM: google tasks? part of gmail. |
A good book on Calculus? | jeffcoat: You may be having trouble finding things because calculus done with full rigor is called "analysis". The classic introductory-but-extremely-dense text is Rudin's _Principles of Mathematical Analysis_. If you're reading on your own, though, I expect you'll get a lot more out of a friendlier book; my first anal... |
Would you use this service? Voice to text for mobile phones | Alterlife: The promo video is nice!But does it recognize foreign accents?Does it work on a train :-) ? Or at a coffee shop.I have never had good experiances with voice recognition... so no, I wouldn't use this. |
What is the preferred cheap host (for low bandwidth sites)? | catch404: Google AppEngine |
Service to distribute beta invites? | dannyr: bravura,My site Launchset distributes beta invites but I don't have functionality yet for other users distributing invites. |
What is the preferred cheap host (for low bandwidth sites)? | metastart: Google App Engine is free up to a certain usage level (certainly accomodates low bandwidth). I'd avoid dreamhost or other shared hosts as they won't handle spikes well. Someone like mosso cloud/rackspace cloud or amazon cloud computing would be better I think. Maybe even a virtual machine with fsck or lin... |
Would you use this service? Voice to text for mobile phones | stijnm: Some open thoughts:1. Doesn't every phone these days have a voice trigger to call someone? My old Nokia has and it works pretty well.2. It seems to require some touching to use. Tap to run app. Tap to start recording. Tap after a status update. Tap tap tap... I thought this was voice-controlled?3. Searching the... |
A better metric than lines of code | peterbraden: I actually like LOC as a metric.Base on the truism that every line of code has a potential bug, even if the line is cruft, then the length of the codebase is proportional to the potential bugs.It's a simplification, obviously, but LOC is useful in this respect.The main problem with LOC IMHO is people try a... |
Why do you use framework X? | etherael: Bought in to work on an in house framework that was to be fair quite outdated, needed to find something that would fit the same space as the technology it was replacing (Basically Java + J2EE) but at the same time wanted something that was friendly to rapid app dev + agile, had used Django extensively before ... |
Why do you use framework X? | peterbraden: I started using django a few years ago. Previously I'd been using php and had built up my own 'framework' of tools. I'd learnt python though, and loved it (perhaps the finest language in the world) - I'd heard some talk about django and thought I'd give it a go.And it blew my mind how easy it was. And how ... |
Yahoo Buzz as Traffic Supplier | ScottWhigham: You might have better luck with this if you post it in the morning M-F (US hours) |
A good book on Calculus? | billswift: Apostol's Calculus texts (2 volumes) are the best with the supporting theory. I'm more from an engineering perspective, for readers looking for a book from that direction is Kline's "Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach".Introductory general biology texts have a lot more variation in how the materia... |
Where do you live? | macvijay1985: Waterloo, Canada |
An alternative to advertising that is fun and boosts your IQ? | tdoggette: What does this memory game have to do with advertising, and why would someone tell people about things using it? |
Best Startup Phone Option | brk: I've used thinkingphones.com at my last 2 startups. They seem to have a good mix of price/value and will work with you.VoIP has it's downfalls, the quality of the call is a factor of your bandwidth, and you can still get some echo or noise issues from time to time, but offers you the most flexibility and portabil... |
Share your simple, time consuming bugs | zackham: I'll start this off with my favorite one that got me for hours the first time many years ago when I was learning SQL, and still bites me occasionally when I don't have my guard up:Working with MySQL columns that have the same name as a keyword. My favorites: order, table, and the less-known but equally painfu... |
Share your simple, time consuming bugs | davidw: I once had a bug with Apache Rivet, where Tcl was linked to one version of the 'stat' struct, and Apache to another, meaning that, on occasion, the wrong size thing would get written to the wrong place and overwrite some memory that would, at some later point, cause an error. It was a bitch to debug. |
Has PG written any essays about "people who shouldn't do startups"? | rokhayakebe: That would be a rather negative essay and it would not be any productive. Instead of talking about people who should not, we can keep talking about people who should or skills to acquire prior to starting a startup.In the end, no one knows. |
Has PG written any essays about "people who shouldn't do startups"? | mfalcon: Something like this?: http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | breck: benz and I just launched our beta to friends and family (http://www.jobpic.com). The idea is anyone can auction off their time and services.I did freelance programming for a while and hated the experience of the existing sites(like elance, guru, etc.). I think they are good sites for the buyer, but aren't good f... |
Companies that provide a hosted wiki? | noodle: http://pbwiki.comits undergone some changes lately, but try the free version to see if its something you'd like. i forget if privacy features are free or if you have to pay |
Companies that provide a hosted wiki? | stuff4ben: Google Sites might fit your needs, although I'm not sure about the export feature you require. |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | noodle: design reminds me a lot of airbnb.i think you need some sort of mechanism to inform new users as to whats happening. also, important information like, are you guys going to take a cut? how are payments made? etc. |
Has PG written any essays about "people who shouldn't do startups"? | icey: You know, there is absolutely nothing wrong with not wanting to do a startup.You'll find that a lot of people here have something crazy in their genetics that makes them know that they have to do a startup. Like, they could be really happy doing whatever they're doing today, but they'll never stop thinking about ... |
Postfix sexps? | khafra: Let me introduce you to Reverse Polish Lisp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPL_(programming_language)Not everything is postfix, but it has some elements of that, to parallel the reverse polish notation. |
Where do you live? | barryrandall: Iowa City, IA, USA |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | ohlol: took me too long to figure out what the site is for. closed tab. |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | Barnabas: I don't know why this is, but personally I think making friendly URLs is a mark of attention to detail. So, with a little htaccess kung foo, you could make links that look like this: http://www.jobpic.com/auction/35 and http://www.jobpic.com/profile/38 instead of http://www.jobpic.com/auction.php?id=35 and ht... |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | huhtenberg: It is a good concept, but the site really needs some sort of a reputation system. Or at the very least a way to look at people's previous work.Take this entry for example - http://www.jobpic.com/auction.php?id=99 - $25 for a business card design is like 1c for a hotdog. Makes me suspicious what it was made ... |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | dimarco: Searching by City would be pretty clutch. Nice site, though. |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | proee: Change the sort order of the "End Date" for listings. Since it's an auction style site, let me see the listing that is "about to end" at the very top, not waaaaay down at the bottom.Looks good! |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | jakecarpenter: I think your concept is sound, but I'll second the addition of a reputation system. Also, you're front page needs to let me know whats going on. If you cut down the number of auctions on the front page (maybe by only show the most active, which might also allow you to show just the best auctions), you'll... |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | joshuarr: I like it, but already think of it as elance for people without marketable skills. That's probably just because the user population is low, but when the front page is littered with auctions like 'learn how to bake a cake' or 'make a cornhole toss board' I have to wonder about the usability here. I'm hardly in... |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | benatkin: I don't think that photos are the best way to choose who to hire, unless their appearance has something directly to do with their jobs. I would rather be pitched first, and then see the extraneous information, or not find out the extraneous information at all until I contact someone. |
Just launched our beta, tell us what you think | UpFromTheGut: I like the design. I knew immediately what it was. It might be nice to be able to list a job that I need done as well, instead of hunting for a someone that I think could do it. |
Has PG written any essays about "people who shouldn't do startups"? | skmurphy: Although I had posted it earlier and been trashed for it I will point to "We Don't Encourage Individuals to Form Startups" at http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/12/04/we-dont-encourage-in...My thesis is that most entrepreneurship is involuntary (either due to fundamental personality characteristics or lack of ... |
What happened to AwesomeHighlighter.com? | twism: http://www.awesomehighlighter.com/ |
What happened to AwesomeHighlighter.com? | arfrank: Looks like they are having database errors. Also looks like that page is based off of CodeIgniter, unless there is another framework that has similar database error pages. Someone know what they built the site in? |
A good book on Calculus? | splat: If you'd like to read a refresher on the calculus of multiple variables, I think you'd enjoy Div, Grad, Curl and All That. It's in the same sort of informal style of Feynman's Lectures. It's not rigorous like Rudin, but it gives you a good intuitive understanding of the subject. |
Trivial etiquette question - can he touch my laptop screen? | bajanme: Haha! Pisses me off too, just like people that adjust my car stereo! |
Auto-upvote when commenting on a story? | chrisduesing: I think it is reasonable to keep them separate. Replies are often arguing against the merit of the original premise, or simply offering an opinion. Upvoting says you think a story belongs on the front page to be viewed by more people. They are not directly correlated. |
Auto-upvote when commenting on a story? | rms: Put it in feature requests. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 And no, I comment all the time when I don't upvote, like right now.Stories start at one point because you automatically upvote your own story. |
What do you do for bookmarking? | DanielStraight: Browser bookmarking with TagSifter in Firefox. |
What do you do for bookmarking? | bbgm: delicious, pretty much since the day it started. Probably would not be using it that heavily without the Firefox plugin. Ctrl-D is one of my more used actions. |
What do you do for bookmarking? | chrisduesing: I tried delicious for a while but it never really clicked for me. I now use Xmarks with Firefox and love it. It keeps my bookmarks the same on my several personal and work computers with different views for each, not to mention it syncs usernames and passwords. |
Has PG written any essays about "people who shouldn't do startups"? | Mz: I'm actually innately risk averse but I wind up looking wildly devil-may-care to some people because my life circumstances have consistently put me in a position to choose between the safe, secure path of certain doom or the risky, unexplored path of possible doom. Given that scenario, "possible doom" is the conse... |
What do you do for bookmarking? | jperras: A combination of Instapaper for PDFs and the like, with Delicious for everything else. |
Auto-upvote when commenting on a story? | Tangurena: > What do you think about HN automatically up-voting a story once you've commented on it?I think it is a bad idea. If we wanted this place to be Reddit, we'd do what you're describing. To make the "karma" be a useful metric, we'd need to break them out into comment vs post karmas just like Reddit.> If a stor... |
What do you do for bookmarking? | nostrademons: Browser autocompletion, with Google for the tricky ones. I visit the same 6 sites all the time anyway.I figure that if I can't remember a useful keyword off the page, it must not've been a site worth remembering. |
What do you do for bookmarking? | alanthonyc: command-B |
What do you do for bookmarking? | ams6110: I use InstaPaper for stuff that I want to "read later" as is its intended purpose, or stuff that think I might want to return to occasionally. I like that I can get to it from anywhere, doesn't matter if I'm using my local machine.For pages I use all the time... I have a local HTML file as my home page. It's... |
What do you do for bookmarking? | earl: zotero for saving pages that I'll want to see again or want to be able to search locally |
What do you do for bookmarking? | tokenadult: I use standard issue Firefox bookmarking, including a large group of bookmarks imported from the last time I was using IE. I refer to those bookmarks often during online discussion--I just did this afternoon. |
Can you be a successful entrepreneur without being passionate? | pg: Yes. I wouldn't say we were passionate about Viaweb. We found some of the technical challenges interesting, we liked the idea of helping our users, we wanted to make money, we didn't want to have bosses, and we didn't want to seem like failures to our friends. But we weren't jumping up and down about e-commerce.... |
Can you be a successful entrepreneur without being passionate? | patio11: I don't know if I'm successful or not for your definition of successful, but I do know that I don't consider my project much more interesting than toothpaste. The business, on the other hand, I'm passionate about. |
What do you do for bookmarking? | bowman: I got through hundreds of site a day and never bookmark them. For me the internet is more an experience and I don't' like to read things twice. I can usually find what I want very quickly using google. So my suggestion is to just use google. |
A better metric than lines of code | known: How about number of users and applications per line of code? |
Can you be a successful entrepreneur without being passionate? | whatusername: Have you ever read 'the millionaire next door'? While it had a slightly different use of entrepreneur than HN - he wasn't in any way talking about high tech - his point was that the typical millionaire ran their own business - and it was usually something boring (eg Dry Cleaning, Construction, etc).It's ... |
Who is looking for a co-founder | adityakothadiya: I'll start with my own background and requirements -I'm currently working on a social shopping startup - Shopialize. Shopialize is a Founder Institute (http://founderinstitute.com) incubated company. Currently I'm the only founder and developer at Shopialize. I'm actively developing the product and hop... |
Who is looking for a co-founder | brianlash: Would you share a little more about yourself? Particularly, Do you already have an idea, If "yes" have you started working on it, Are you willing to share equity with a new contributor, What are your skills, Where are you located... |
Can you be a successful entrepreneur without being passionate? | scorpioxy: I think that depends on your definition of successful. If you mean make a lot of money, then yes you can do it without passion.If you mean "waking up with a purpose" successful, then I think passion is a must. |
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