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Do you think there is room for mobile startups that neglect the Iphone? | blender: Symbian (Nokia) has something like 65% marketshare so definitely. |
Tech Start-up for people with families? | mixmax: This guy: http://mortenlund.wordpress.com/ is a crazy serial entrepreneur that has started around 40 companies. He was an early investor in Skype, started antivirus company Bullguard, etc. He has a wife and four kids...He is in Denmark, but according to the Economist Copenhagen is more expensive than both New Y... |
How do you share screenshots? | cjvino: Snapz Pro X for screenshots and department web site or email to share. |
How do you share screenshots? | junglist313: super+drag (ubuntu) and Flickr |
Tech Start-up for people with families? | gasull: > This is especially important in US because the cost of living is highCost of living in the US expensive? Have you traveled to Europe or Japan? Life is way more expensive in Europe, and in some European countries salaries are way lower than in the US.It's raising kids what is more expensive in the US than in... |
Best way to send MMS | pmsaue0: For 3 years I worked on a startup that built SMS applications. Although we did not work with MMS, I am very familiar with the struggles regarding carriers and just getting set up. Ultimately our startup failed - our costs were just too high, our slice of the pie was too small, and to reach the volume that we... |
Recommend a server co in Europe | cnu: We use Hertzner (http://www.hetzner.de/) in my company. Pretty good machines and cheap too. |
Recommend a server co in Europe | tahir: Callmeed, I am looking to use Slicehost, how is your experience with them? Thanks. |
Recommend a server co in Europe | mark_ellul: we were using Flexiscale (by XCalibre) but their last outage was long, and corrupted all our data. So I would avoid them! |
Recommend a server co in Europe | Russelldb: http://rimuhosting.com now have a datacentre presence in the UK (London). I find them very useful but best of all they have very, very good support. They are NZ based. |
Recommend a server co in Europe | Deadsunrise: You can find cheap dedicated servers in france at www.ovh.com . They have a lot of OS distributions and if you can manage your own servers it's a good choice. I work in an spanish ISP and we exchange traffic with them at AMS-IX so it should be properly connected to all the important european ISPs. |
Recommend a server co in Europe | silencio: ovh, vectoral (netdirekt dc, not reselling), leaseweb I've had personal experiences with. their support generally sort of sucks (at least they reply to you..hehe).oh, ovh doesn't sell to people living in certain countries. they said they'd change their policy sometime soon, but have yet to see it.. |
Pointless Spam? | ph0rque: Maybe it's to throw the email system's bayesian spam filter off? |
Pointless Spam? | noodle: a lot of spam nowadays is sent with the explicit purpose of pinging email names and bypassing filters, just to find out of the address itself has a person that checks it. war-emailing, as it wereperhaps that email had something like an embedded image or javascript that could/would dial out to tell the spammer t... |
Recommend a server co in Europe | Erwin: Rackspace does also have a datacenter in UK. We have a small server there to satisfy certain EU privacy laws. |
Recommend a server co in Europe | macco: DomainFactory works pretty well for me.
http://df.eu |
Pointless Spam? | andr: This is designed to distort Bayesian filters. From an economic perspective, this is fairly interesting, because the spammer that sends this gets no rent, or direct profit, from it, but helps the spammer ecosystem. |
Recommend a server co in Europe | 3KWA: OVH |
Pointless Spam? | MaysonL: It's actually a coded message meant for only a dozen of its 3 million recipients - Al Qaeda's way of outsmarting the NSA. |
Pointless Spam? | dcminter: Did you check the headers as well? I've seen quite a few emails that had the "body" of the email in one while the real body was empty or contained similar noise - I presume there are some broken mail clients that will render them regardless. |
Know any good Email Servers? | olefoo: I can heartily recommend postfix http://www.postfix.org/It's a good idea to keep a logical separation between the sending MTA and the receiving MTA (separate hostnames at the least, separate machines/instances is best because you can manage security policy better).Do plan on keeping the SMTP operations separate... |
Know any good Email Servers? | cperciva: I recommend looking at postfix and qmail -- they were both written by people who understand security, but there are significant enough differences in their configurations that most people like one or the other but not both. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, but it's worth looking at both so that ... |
Know any good Email Servers? | kngspook: I run an email server on a VPS for my own use. I run Postfix [SMTP], Dovecot [IMAPS], and Procmail [email filtering/sorting]. I think it would certainly be affordable for a startup.I've also, at some point in the past, looked at 90% of the email hosts out there, and tried my fair share. (And found none sat... |
Pointless Spam? | kajecounterhack: seems almost like http://scrumy.com 's url generator. |
Know any good Email Servers? | RobGR: I recommend you find a friend, or friend of a friend who does sys admin work at a company or school, who uses Linux and one of the common MTAs -- sendmail, exim, postfix. Pay them a flat monthly fee to handle your email, and do whatever they tell you, get a VPS or hosted service or linux machine on a cable mode... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | qhoxie: Try to give a (not too outlandish) problem that they cannot prepare for. People memorize algorithms or can adapt their mathematical knowledge, but when given an obscure or abstract scenario, you can get a good idea of how their mind works. Encourage them to take their time and think out loud so you can unders... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | eries: I would add, work together with them on a problem that is completely out of their comfort zone and/or background. See what kind of questions they ask, how fast they recognize a dead-end, and whether they learn from what you are trying to explain. If you have a hard time teaching them something new in an intervie... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | woid: http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | giardini: The answer is obvious and right before your eyes: you can't.This problem has been examined again and again. The only way to find people with sufficient skill in any field is to test them (formal graded test, not idiosyncratic problems).No one has ever demonstrated a reliable technique for selecting "great" so... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | swombat: I find that a 15-minute chat about a related topic that's not on their CV (i.e. something tangential to their "career") is a great way to sniff out hackers. Being a hacker myself, I have a very sensitive bullshit-o-meter and fairly varied interests, and I can quickly figure out whether that person is a "career... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | albertcardona: Sit down for a week with each candidate, perhaps with all candidates, in a hackathon. Solving a real world problem. Then you can see who is worth what, their strong points, their weaknesses. It costs you time, but it's --in my experience-- worth every minute spent. |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | gaius: I interviewed someone recently, someone much older than me, and it was a strange experience. We talked through his career, early on he had done some really interesting things, attacked some problems from unexpected angles and won big. But as we progressed through his career, it seemed to fade. Gradually all that... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | furiouslol: I would probably give them a problem that involves processing/handling a large copious amount of data and compare their strategies.Usually the great programmers come up with clean, elegant, efficient and scalable solutions. |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | tomjen: Set up a competition geeks would be interested in, then try to hire the bests (for your definition of bests). |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | maxklein: I'd give a real world problem that is quite large, for example: Develop a school management system which synchronises across several computers.I'd ask for 2-3 possible ways of designing the architecture. Then just drill down to the details, ask about the technology they would use, how they would go about impl... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | bitdiddle: I ask questions about two things that seem great predictors. The first is interest in music. I'm not sure why but people who can read music and play any instrument well tend to make great programmers. I have no explanation for this. The second question is what the highest level math course they had was and w... |
Recommend a server co in Europe | luis_ca: I use slicehost from the UK and performance is good. |
Recommend a server co in Europe | st3fan: I am very happy with http://hosteurope.de .. excellent service, good hardware, barely downtime. They have VPS instances and also dedicated servers for prices you can only dream of in the US. |
What is your database sharding strategy? | eries: We're just discussing over in this thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=296656I have had really good experience with a very simple centralized lookup facility. It's very easy to prevent that from becoming a CPOF, either using replication or, if you insist, some form of hash-based partitioning of the direc... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | watmough: Obvious answer: You probably can't identify the good ones without actually testing them.I worked at an oil services company where I fairly regularly interviewed candidates. I was 180 degrees wrong on every interview I did. The bad ones turned out good, and the good ones turned out bad.I would not, knowing wha... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | Locke: Despite how hard you try, you can't get this 100% right. This is how I approached hiring:1. Weed out the truly incompetent. A very simple programming exercise is sufficient. Keep in mind that the goal of the exercise is not to identify a great programmer, but rather to identify those who can't program at all.... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | ojbyrne: I think its obvious someone fresh out of college will have "excellent algorithmic thinking" since that's how they spent the last 3/4 years. So in that case you should be spending more time during interviews looking at the more likely areas of weakness, which I'd sum up as "real-world experience." If you're int... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | vaksel: Setup a dozen seemingly random questions that will help you know what personality the person has. |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | cosmo7: I've seen people do great, well-commented code at interview, and then after I recommend them, they turn into mediocre 9-5 coders.People always misrepresent at interviews; I can't think of a way around this. |
What is your database sharding strategy? | PJM: There's some good answers and examples to the questions about database sharding here:http://www.codefutures.com/database-sharding/ |
How do you share screenshots? | hs: import (ImageMagick) + hg (mercurial) |
Launching a new site next week, what do you suggest to promote it? | emmett: Just launch. Don't promote at first, except to those 30 users. When you stop getting useful complaints from the 30, start expanding it. Eventually you'll have to think about promotion, but not yet. |
How to virally market an individual website? | iamdave: How to virally market an individual website?
You don't. Simply saying "viral" doesn't make it so.How many readers/browsers can he hope to have in a month or two?
Totally depends on how he does as a blogger. Write great content, get readers. Write shoddy content, get naysayers.Should he CC license some of hi... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | yan: Well if you consider learning what you want to learn or grad school as a middle step, what do you want your destination to be?If you want to go into research or teaching, then a higher degree is probably a very good idea. If not, it might not be the best. That is not to say that you can rule it out with certainty.... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | lallysingh: One of my favorite things about graduate school is that you can be a complete information glutton. Go as ridiculously far as you want in your research, and then justify some of it later with a degree :-)If you've got the time, money, and diligence to do it, it can be a lot of fun. By fun I mean lots of ha... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | zitterbewegung: I would recommend SICP http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | stanley: What are your goals? General success? A flourishing startup? CEO of Google?Regardless of your end-goals, the steps you take to achieve them depend largely on your personality. Are you a natural born entrepreneur? Do you enjoy networking moreso than coding? Are you prone to take risks? Would you rather improve ... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | michael_dorfman: I'd definitely recommend trying some self-study before grad school-- better to find out on your own if the work really interests you enough for the required investment.As to recommendations, I second the recommendation for SICP, but I'd also suggest the video lectures: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/c... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | jacobscott: MIT OpenCourseWare is a valuable resource for college curriculum type stuff. You can get a cursory overview of the ugrad/grad CS courses, and pick which ones interest you. Some courses have audio/video.ocw.mit.edu |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | dustineichler: At this point I've learned a little bit about exactly this. If you work at a large company, grad degrees are somewhat essential. On the other side, no one can take an education away from you.Having said that, I know many cs grad students who know little and couldn't bootstrap a startup like self taught a... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | gills: There are some good things you can do to learn on your own (like SICP), but some CS grad courses or even high level undergrad courses will be more effective if you are interested in theory. |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | mwerty: My favorite is Sipser's book on theoretical cs: http://www-math.mit.edu/~sipser/book.html |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | wheels: I'd recommend grabbing a book on Discrete Mathematics. It's the foundation for much of CS theory and will get you into the terminology there. MIT Press's Introduction to Algorithms should be penetrable if you've had some basic calculus at some point. It's worth its price tag. I'm not sure that I'd recommend... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | smanek: For Math, I'd really recommend The Road to Reality and Beardon's Algebra and Geometry. TRtR is ostensibly a physics book, but it is one of the best math lessons I've ever read. (I have a bit of a review of those two up at http://arantaday.com/blog/the-new-classics/) |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | newt0311: Well... If you would like to go into CS a little with some rigor, a book on compilers would actually be very helpful, if only because compilers have to deal with some of the most complex problems in CS today. I would advise starting with the purple dragon book and then moving on to research paper to get a fee... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | raffi: On the topic of reading SICP and other things. I find the exercise of porting programs/concepts from the presentation language to one I use helps me reinforce what the book/paper says. It also helps me honestly contrast my tool choices with what is out there. |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | rmk: hello,if you are in california, you have a way of measuring your interest in cs before you commit. i would suggest you take a course or two at a community college in your area. i know that there are many in the bay area that act as feeder institutions to berkeley etc.
community college is usually less demanding th... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | raffi: Oh yeah Logic in Computer Science: Modeling and Reasoning about Systems by Huth and Ryan. We used this as a textbook in a formal methods class. The book teaches techniques for developing proofs and for specifying and proving properties about systems. All the way from basic logic, to proofs for structured prog... |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | dilanj: Uh courses! Just install visual studio and start hacking some c#, its super easy to build something cool. A lot of tutorials out there. Start with a screen saver!Then,
1. Get a mac
2. Look around MIT open courseware stuff.
3. Keep hacking. |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | enra: Keep the suggestions coming. I'm currently kind of in the same situation, except I just started Business School and I have been full-time developer and occasianally a entrepenuer over 4 years.What happened to me was that I got tired of hacking little things. I never kind of had the time or motivation to learn any... |
How to virally market an individual website? | ScottWhigham: I'm confused - does he want international, nationwide, or local shoots? He has a few celebs on the photo gallery so I can't tell. If local, I would suggest taking each photograph and creating separate pages for each that include the town/city/shoot info as content (all in an attempt to raise the PageRank ... |
Launching a new site next week, what do you suggest to promote it? | ScottWhigham: * Start running AdWords even if for no other reason to start learning how to run it successfully 2-4 months from now (there is a learning curve)* Set up a Google Sitemap.* Crete your blog, post useful content, and get it indexed* Make great products |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | tomh: ArsDigita University still has all their lectures online in RealMedia video format: http://aduni.org/courses/Here is the direct link to all the Discrete Math lectures, for example: http://aduni.org/courses/discrete/index.php?view=cwMuch more is up there, including SICP, Algorithms, some AI etc. |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | ced: Look at the course outlines for the math dept. at a few good uni, make a list a the most used textbooks, then head off to your local uni's library.That's what I would have done if I'd known better. I regret getting into the B.Sc. |
What does your room look like? | spydez: A mess.And after every time I have a serious go at cleaning up, it seems to devolve into something messier... |
What does your room look like? | dangrover: http://files.dangrover.com/markerdesk.jpg |
What does your room look like? | abstractbill: http://www.justin.tv/officecamThe white couch towards the top-left corner is my workspace - I don't like desks. |
What does your room look like? | thomasmallen: http://www.morleyfield.com/course/bench.jpg |
What does your room look like? | maxklein: After a while of mess, I redesigned my working area. The KEY to the redesign is that no matter what I do, it becomes almost impossible to make it into a mess. I also made the default position of things very conducive to not making a mess, so after a little work at the beginning, there is no further work.Step ... |
What does your room look like? | lallysingh: I hop around town a bit for different parts of work.Newsreading is at home, a desk in a very small efficiency.Writing (academic) is at on or two coffee shops downtown.Research is at the CS dept, a desk with my sun box, 2 monitors, keyboard, space for the laptop, small bookshelf, two drawers and a hanging fi... |
What does your room look like? | PStamatiou: After 4ish years of college (still in college), I finally got my own place. My productivity has shot through the roof now that I don't have roommates looking for a Mario Kart Wii companion.http://flickr.com/photos/pauls/sets/72157605398490674/That's when I was moving in, I have a more civilized setup now:ht... |
What does your room look like? | vaksel: Right now?Have a three point desk, all have some crap on them, the main one has the monitor and keyboard, also a water bottle and a bottle of ginger ale. The connecting piece has a laptop and empty water bottles(I drink it religiously ever since I passed my first kidney stone). The main piece has mostly crap li... |
What does your room look like? | zitterbewegung: Very messy. I really should clean it up. |
What does your room look like? | bootload: "... the whole point of it as far as Roald was concerned was that it was private, a sanctuary where he could work where no one interrupted him ..."I've long been interested in Dahl and his work area.He did his writing in a shed in the back yard of his house, Gypsy House ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload... |
How do you identify a great software developer in an interview? | timcederman: I honestly think too much emphasis is placed on fixed questions and a particular style of interviewing. I've had a huge amount of success with improvised interviews that have both conversational elements drawn from the candidate's resume and some kind of problem solving task drawn from the type of work th... |
What does your room look like? | iigs: It's completely full of junk and I sit in the living room with my laptop in my easy chair. Except today, as I'm on the BlackBerry sitting outside by the garden with the dog in the sun. :)Actually, my room is fairly full of electronics stuff: oscilloscopes, computer hardware, small electronics tools. I'm too asham... |
What does your room look like? | ryanmahoski: http://twitpic.com/ao6r |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | brentr: I was in the exact same position you are now. I went to the University of Florida and received a degree in finance. I have always had an interest in computers, physics, and mathematics.It took me three years to finally make the decision to go back to school. I am now pursuing a second and third BS (mathematics ... |
What does your room look like? | dustineichler: Clean desk. neat bed, organized room enough for desktop, server and laptop. Creative posters. Fans for cooling. |
What does your room look like? | dkokelley: Before: http://fuzzyshot.com/dkokelley/post/zpeM5KGvvn/photo/6PnHjhM...After: http://fuzzyshot.com/dkokelley/post/HQsw5xt2yd/photo/1ZSu6IQ...And the desk: http://fuzzyshot.com/dkokelley/post/vDo6FGezfF/photo/TRLWCje...It's a little private (it's my room), but I figure it would be neat to share here. Having t... |
What does your room look like? | noonespecial: My workstation. My wife calls it "the bridge".Posted once before in the "screen shots" thread. Seems appropriate here as well.http://www.jonandkarrie.com/images/P8087198.JPG |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | ltbarcly: You can't make a reasonable self study. People will say you can, but they are full of crap. There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who can do something like that, and they are all top caliber geniuses.In reality, we need the pressure of school to push us into spending the unpleasent effort to get ... |
What does your room look like? | hs: i have a leafless bookshelf which is placed next to a bedthat way i no longer need chair+table (i sit on the bed and readjust the shelf's height to put my laptop on) |
Recommended path for self-study math and CS? | patrocles: Work through Spivak's Calculus, then Springer Verlag's Undergraduate Texts in MathematicsSICP is as foundational as Spivak, however Comp Sci still doesn't have the equivalent of UTM, you have to target what you're interested in and go from there.... |
What does your room look like? | iamah: it has a huge glass window, all furnitures close to the walls, and theres a big free space in the middle... its good for walking in, you don't need to go around any obstacles... the bed is like a sofa, non perpendicular to the wall... |
What does your room look like? | jseliger: Mine looks like <a href="http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/new-workspace/">this</a>. The important thing is the cleanliness of the desk: just a computer and a backup hard drive I can't see when I'm typing. The books were ones I was using when the picture was taken.Mostly, the desk doesn't have a lot of... |
What does your room look like? | scumola: A couple of years ago, my setup looked like this. Since I've moved to LCD screens and a little nicer setup, but no picture as of yet.http://badcheese.com/~steve/gallery/albums/userpics/10003/no... |
Calculate Server Needs | jwilliams: 1. Most articles around start-ups, including Y Combinator, suggest that having more than 1 founder greatly improves the chance of success.2. It's impossible to answer that without a lot more information. Capacity estimation can be a black art... Unless you're using novel technologies, I'd focus on making sur... |
What does your room look like? | tdavis: You definitely don't want to see my room; it looks like a dirty clothes store threw up in there. However, here is a gallery of "TicketStumbler HQ" aka our apartment:http://gallery.me.com/binjured#100016&view=grid&bgco...The station with 4 screens is Dan's; the silver one is actually a TV so he can watch Foosbal... |
Calculate Server Needs | m0digital: For server specs it really depends on technologies you're using. Java, PHP, Rails, etc. Each will need a different amount of resources. It's probably easiest to get an entry level container from a place like Joyent and scale up as you need it. |
Secret military technology as groundbreaking as the tank and airplane were | michael_dorfman: (3) an exaggeration of massive proportions by Woodward and/or his sources |
Secret military technology as groundbreaking as the tank and airplane were | gaika: Tracking people by their shadows :)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1052250/Could... |
Secret military technology as groundbreaking as the tank and airplane were | gojomo: I shudder to think of the prize for guessing right. |
Secret military technology as groundbreaking as the tank and airplane were | menloparkbum: sharks with laser beams attached to their heads? |
What does your room look like? | kaens: I don't have a camera, but I can tell you what it looks like.I don't have a "room". I have a futon in a shared office room in the house I live in, some homemade bookshelves (read wood, eyelet screws and twine), and a laptop. In this same room there is also a silkscreening station. |
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