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What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | cool-RR: I've reposted this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=827071 |
Startups founded by MBAs? | CyberFonic: You may want to consider where people gained their MBAs. Some second wave MBA programs were a blatant attempt to cash in on the successes of the first wave, but have much lower standards of admission, teaching and content. Any analysis and statistics would be most interesting to read. |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | ivankirigin: A full economy, with people on normal sleep / commute / eat / work schedules. Each person is a free agent. You'd model different relationships and the likelihood of in person interaction.And then you simulate a zombie outbreak in your virtual society. |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | sp332: > What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of?Supernova http://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/3772984024/sizes/o/ !> ... a simulation to implement...Oh :-/ |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | mattiss: I remember reading an article about fish population simulation in Scientific American a while back. Modeling how fish swim together with external influences like currents, predators etc. etc. Each fish was modeled independently with knowledge only of the fish surrounding it.The results were very interesting gi... |
Songs for Startup Inspiration? | waldrews: Clickable link to "First we take Manhattan:"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFBKV0zVXSE |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | mrshoe: The Matrix |
Songs for Startup Inspiration? | firefoxman1: What About Everything by Carbon Leaf |
How will twitter make money? | yan: They will be rich once they discover a way to harness these questions to turn them into clean energy. |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | drcode: The best "bang for the buck" in a simulation I know of is the evolution simulator from the classic article "Simulated evolution: wherein bugs learn to hunt bacteria" by A.K. Dewdney.Here's a java applet version someone made:
http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/projects/dewdneybugs... |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | th0ma5: There was this simulator of that hyroplaning / hydrofoil sailboat that may have set the water speed record for sailing... they had their own simulator with the complete code and source available (for the mac). Another awesome sim (imho) is the Charles River RC Simulator, because its physics is so nice. Then oth... |
How will twitter make money? | johnrob: In all honesty, the only thing I can think of is a big sale to either Yahoo or MS. Either might want to keep twitter away from google, and there's a good chance that owning the firehose would produce the best 'real time search' product. |
How will twitter make money? | jasonlbaptiste: ?????????????? |
About all this Lisp fuzz | CyberFonic: The axioms you refer to is Church's lambda calculus, the seminal material may be found on John McCarthy's website: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc. The stuff is like 1960's !There are basically two main camps, Lisp-1 and Lisp-2 and consequently two divergent major families, Scheme and Common Lisp. From... |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | scotty79: Two black holes colliding. |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | lacker: Long ago (1998?) I had a cool screen saver of little creatures that would fight, grow, eat things, reproduce, and evolve. The creatures were just geometric shapes made up of 5-10 lines or so in a 2D world. The evolution worked because there were a few types of lines (like plant, eating-things, defense, reproduc... |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | lanny: Blender's Bullet Game Engine? It's fun to dink around with, although it's still has a long way to go before it becomes a viable professional option for me, especially the cloth and fluid simulations, It just takes too much processing power, and the results are hardly stable. |
About all this Lisp fuzz | mr_luc: Your questions are reasonable ones given your experiences, but their nature makes it unlikely for people to expend much energy answering them -- questions like "why isn't anyone moving to fix them?" may be perfectly reasonable to you, and inspire eye-rolling in others.Nonetheless, you'd be able to answer most o... |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | steveplace: Black box equities trading + monte carlo voodoo would be nice. |
Aspect Oriented Programming? | mgreenbe: AOP was the next big thing five years ago. I've never heard of a serious, non-dog-food project written in any (pointcut-rich) implementation of aspects.The fundamental problem with aspect-oriented programming is that it makes it impossible to reason compositionally: any part of your program could be affected... |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | aeroevan: Just out of curiosity, have you looked into SimPy (http://simpy.sourceforge.net/)?I've used it before and it is a nice framework for process-based discrete-event simulation. |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | newsdog: Creatures. Man that was a great program - I wish I had a spare machine around just to run it full time.http://www.gamewaredevelopment.co.uk/creatures_index.php |
If 37signals apps were free... | sfall: free vs paid is not the question i would be asking. I would be asking why? why use your service over another. Is it tailored for an industry? specific feature set?Or are you just jumping on the trolley? |
How to successfully launch an iPhone app? | andrewljohnson: Your worries are unfounded. Release.If it's great, you'll sell a lot of apps. |
If 37signals apps were free... | maxwin: If copycat apps could succeed, there would be millions of Twitter and facebook clones since it is not that hard to duplicate their technology.What make 37 signals successful are not just their app, but their brilliant marketing skills,well known blogs and fantastic designs. These set of skills are not that easy... |
Is there any vimlike image processor? | jyf1987: upwait for replying |
how do you regression test your web apps? | jedediah: I don't know about all of the browsers you mentioned, but my team regression tests on a handful of those browsers using Selenium. [http://seleniumhq.org/] We use a ruby library to drive the Selenium engine and it seems to work pretty well.Edit: Btw, nice job on skulpt, it looks really nice. |
If 37signals apps were free... | Travis: Lots of businesses prefer to pay a small fee. It puts a(n implicit) contract in play. I pay you money, you operate this for me. Free apps are scary from the POV that they could either disappear, or are insecure.Something about a company being willing to charge makes them appear more legit to other companies.... |
Songs for Startup Inspiration? | mahmud: "Juicy", Notorious B.I.G. |
Social web features for an elderly/mature audience | shrikant: As an aside - will you be using the Across Lite plugin from Litsoft?I suppose it'd be nice if you let users collaborate on a puzzle - I know Puzzler's Cave doesn't have this feature, and it would be nice to do a crossword with a friend or a relative. I like the way the UNO Facebook app has been implemented (l... |
Social web features for an elderly/mature audience | roundsquare: Instead of a social networking aspect, how about an online hits option? I'm not a die hard CW person so I don't know how popular it would be, but it could theoretically keep people online. |
What's the coolest computer simulation you can think of? | Moschops: "I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and h... |
Review of my 1st webproject: Australian Event Lister | zv: Bug - green event popup just wont disappear even when you change location.Suggestion - rather than show popup, expand the selected event.Suggestion - try to make text more readable like title bigger etc. |
How to successfully launch an iPhone app? | cpr: Try prmac.com -- Ray Barber will help with PR for a completely reasonable price. |
What features would you like to see in a social news aggregator? | jacquesm: Zero spam ?HN does pretty good but even there sometimes there are more than 4 flagged but not 'dead' spam on the new page.Tough job! |
Visual FoxPro for charity POS app? | jojosime: Yes, it is a good choice to develop small database centric applications. In a certain way is similar to Delphi ou VB but more database centric than VB.However it has been shelved by Microsoft in favor of .Net, so support may be a concern in the future. |
check out my micro app - pygments syntax highlighter via HTTP | trevorturk: This is an unofficial API for the Pygments syntax highlighting library, version 1.2. It's designed to provide syntax highlighting for web applications that don't have Python installed. I made it so that I can use the Pygments Python library from http://heroku.com, which is Ruby-only.I saw something similar ... |
Please help with an AB test. (Live results in comments.) | notauser: My last day at my full time job was Tuesday, now I'm working on my own projects. It's a lot of fun so far (except for testing in Internet Explorer - this works in 8, haven't tried 7 yet).I wanted to get something up quickly to test my tool chain/environments and I thought that running a simple experiment was ... |
Does storing CC data in the session violate PCI compliance? | adelle: Use Javascript to change the caption of the submit button from "OK" to "Confirm" the first time it is pressed and then submit the form on the second press. That way, the data doesn't reach your server until the user has confirmed the purchase. |
Please help with an AB test. (Live results in comments.) | jsm386: a/b testing is a great tool, but wouldn't telling people they are participating in an a/b test trying to determine a specific question 'requesting e-mail addresses from visitors' bias the results? |
How accurate is Google Adword's Traffic Estimator? | zaidf: Great question. I'm wondering the same about Facebook. |
check out my micro app - pygments syntax highlighter via HTTP | jgrahamc: You might like to make a simple form where I could paste some code and select the language from a drop down. |
How accurate is Google Adword's Traffic Estimator? | agbell: Here are a couple tips:- Use the keyword tool instead of traffic estimator: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal- Look at the difference between exact, phrase and broad matches. (On Keyword tool)- Rumor has it Google changes the broadness of broad match to suit their needs. I have heard of "Be... |
How accurate is Google Adword's Traffic Estimator? | transburgh: I have been doing paid search for a couple of years and have had different results when comparing the Traffic Estimator to Adwords results:The most common outcome I find is the estimator tool shows more traffic and a lower cost per click than actual adwords results. I have even had the cost per click off by... |
How accurate is Google Adword's Traffic Estimator? | EinhornIsFinkle: 1. You select the area (country, city, whatever) you want to target.2. Take the numbers with a grain of salt. They're good for directional or relative comparisons (same KW in different parts of the world, or KW vs KW) but by no means present an absolute measure of demand. |
How accurate is Google Adword's Traffic Estimator? | effektz: I've found that most of the time, the Google Traffic Estimate usually OVERESTIMATES how much traffic each keyword get. For example, I have the #2 google spot for a food keyword. I get about 1,500 visitors a month from Google for that keyword, but the traffic estimate tool estimates "74,000" searches for that k... |
How accurate is Google Adword's Traffic Estimator? | mcdowall: MarketSamurai should give you a wealth of information about your intended keyword.(Disc - no affiliation to the product, i just use it a lot!) |
How accurate is Google Adword's Traffic Estimator? | JoelPM: A year ago it wasn't extremely accurate. When I left there was a project underway to significantly improve it, but I'm not sure if that happened. |
Feelings of regret over career path? | rick2047: I dont know about the others but I do feel just like you. I had also posted something like this here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824178.And about philosophy I think every true hacker is a philosopher in its true sense. Hacking is in my opinion a type of philosophy of living. Philosophy can be summed u... |
Feelings of regret over career path? | replicatorblog: You are in the best possible position and have the ability to craft your career any way you would like.Your technical skills could command a high salary at a fairly stable company that would provide ample time for extracurricular philosophizing.You could apply philosophical principles to starting a comp... |
Social web features for an elderly/mature audience | pdebruic: You mean like www.clutu.com or something different? |
Feelings of regret over career path? | htsh: I think its natural for an intellectually curious person to feel doubts about whatever they choose.Personally -- I studied Econ as an undergrad, worked at 2 startups for 2 years, then nonprofits for the next 3, and then law school and a big firm job. When I was sitting in that law firm office, I hated my life re... |
Feelings of regret over career path? | dimas: Familiar feelings, ha ha. I believe it is human nature to occasionally doubt what you and whether directions you are heading is a right path. I have heard it countless number of times. Though at any given period of time you have to have predominant focus otherwise you will get lost in your choice and will ne... |
Feelings of regret over career path? | edw519: It is the nature of the hacker to question everything, even his inherent hackiness. You're perfectly normal. Now relax and go build something. |
Feelings of regret over career path? | patio11: I'll give you a little secret: they let us engineers read whatever books we darn well please. We can also go to coffee houses and drop names of French intellectuals while finger snapping to beat poetry.We just pretend to be totally square so that nobody notices we can actually be employed while doing this. |
Feelings of regret over career path? | acg: I remember having similar feelings when I left University. For me it some of my concerns were about the change, I'd become so used to studying that I found the idea of the working world a little daunting. There are a few things that I've found out:- No two jobs are the same: technology, opportunities and people c... |
Feelings of regret over career path? | blender: The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.- Bertrand Russell |
Feelings of regret over career path? | jyellin: First and foremost, procrastination is death. We were born to take action, even if the action we take is not in the direction of our ideal life, it still enables us to begin a journey and experience everything that the world will present on our path. I believe that life is a puzzle, made up of millions of piec... |
Feelings of regret over career path? | larrykubin: I had this same feeling when I finished my junior year as an Electrical Engineering major. The truth is, I chose that major when I was barely 17 years old, and it was accidental. I chose my major from a drop-down list on a web application. I was going to choose Computer Science, but then I saw "Computer Eng... |
(Freelance) Do you host your clients' sites? Why, or why not? | noodle: i've tried both, and i now no longer attempt to host client's sites. i'll do it on request or on certain occasions, but i find that the money you make from hosting doesn't tend to offset the time and the headaches that come from having to deal with it. |
How does Y Combinator deal with conflict of interests? | pg: It already happens. If you fund as many companies as we do it's unavoidable you'll end up with some overlap. Even if you tried not to accept competing companies, you'd still get overlap because startups' ideas morph so much. So the way we deal with it is that when two startups are working on related stuff, we do... |
Feelings of regret over career path? | thdd: I am interested in philosophy, and this is the _reason_ I chose computer engineering. You now have the tools to find the answers to your philosophical questions, in a way that has never before been practical - you can study the nature of the mind by developing models in computational neuroscience; you have enou... |
(Freelance) Do you host your clients' sites? Why, or why not? | byoung2: I always host clients' sites. In the past it was such a nightmare dealing with all of the various shared hosting companies that I made the decision to only work with clients who agreed to my hosting.The way I did that is by offering subscription billing for the site, so instead of paying one huge upfront fee,... |
Anyone around Chantily, Virginia/Wash DC area? | yan: I am ~25 mins north of DC but will unfortunately be out of town this Sunday. |
Feelings of regret over career path? | NoBSWebDesign: I got two engineering degrees (ME and EE), and you know what I learned? I learned that engineering is an amazing field and a boring career (for me anyway)!So, I started doing something else. I now own two companies and in the 6 months since quitting my engineering job, I've doubled my income. No regrets,... |
Anyone around Chantily, Virginia/Wash DC area? | arfrank: There is a DC/Nova Hacker News group on meetup.com. http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News-NOVA-DC/I would be interesting in meeting up, but this weekend is the High Holidays and can't really do much else. |
Help with a file conversion | khafra: http://jackaudio.org/ claims to take the PCM output from your audio player program and save it in any of a number of formats. |
Anyone around Chantily, Virginia/Wash DC area? | spoiledtechie: Seems like that group is MIA... Not having a meetup since June.... Sad really. |
Why isn't Zappos the first result for the query "shoes"? | biohacker42: Perhaps it's deliberate? Can they really maintain their level of customer service if they get too big or grow too fast? |
Feelings of regret over career path? | akeefer: I struggled with what to do when I was in college, and ended up with a philosophy bachelor's and CS masters. I've been working as a software engineer since then.One of the hard parts for me, both in school and later, was that I never really fit in with the CS crowd, since I wasn't nearly geeky enough (I didn'... |
Why isn't Zappos the first result for the query "shoes"? | Grinnmarr: Google's ranking algorithm give's significant weight to keywords in the domain name. |
What's your startup's competitive advantage? | adrianwaj: VCs like to hear that your market size is huge, because even if you take a fraction of it, it's still significant.Look at the way you approach a problem, can you hit two birds with the one stone. What about 3? |
What's your startup's competitive advantage? | lsc: Who are your customers. VC? or the people using your service?Its an important decision. |
What's your startup's competitive advantage? | adrianwaj: Competitors are those that provide you with the inspiration to innovate more on your products and solutions. They usually are trying to solve a similar problem for the same set of people.edit: for the more pragmatic, add "Be grateful to your competitors and then have them crushed." |
Help with a file conversion | zandorg: Try Psiwin 2.3. |
What's your startup's competitive advantage? | pedalpete: I think when VC's talk competitive advantage they are obviously looking for what sets you apart from the competition, but I suspect they want it framed in such a way that it speaks to the lock-in factor.If your competitive advantage is that you have the best UI, that isn't good enough, because that can be co... |
Help with a file conversion | timwiseman: It seems like there are good software suggestions made, but if they fail a last ditch effort would be to run line out from your SUSE 8.1 machine to line in on another machine (or with a sufficient soundcard the same one). |
Feelings of regret over career path? | branden: Sounds an awful lot like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis#Personal_ana... . I've certainly been there (well, I am there), and I don't know of a solution, if there is such a thing. The conclusion I've come to for myself is to use my doubt and let it inform me, but refuse to let it paralyze me. If... |
If you have Photoshop, which version do you have? | ScottWhigham: CS4 is buggy but faster than CS3, particularly if you use Illustrator, Bridge or InDesign in conjunction with Photoshop. Overall I use none of the new features but the speed improvements makes it worth it. |
If you have Photoshop, which version do you have? | Tangurena: I just got CS4 (from one of the suites). I haven't had time to use it. |
How accurate is Google Adword's Traffic Estimator? | dcnstrct: Not that accurate -- a better method is to use the Google keyword tool and numbers you have internally on response rates. You will get a more accurate range that way.Of course, relevancy of the ad to the keyword is the critical factor. If your ad or service is not appropriate to the keyword then you cannot ex... |
Help with a file conversion | jacquesm: In case anybody else ever needs this:mv file file.wvesox file.wve -2 -c 2 -r 44100 file.wavlame file.wav file.mp3Enjoy. If you have more of them send them over and I'll convert them in case you can't get the recipe to work.I mailed you that one mp3. And I messed up the recipe, the first line of course should ... |
If you have Photoshop, which version do you have? | Gibbon: I still use CS2.. many of the printers I've worked with in the last few years still use Illustrator 9 and photoshop 7 |
What do you use to store code snippets? | cesare: http://www.tiddlywiki.com/It has tags, search, and there are many useful plugins (you may want to have syntax highlighting: http://tiddlywiki.org/wiki/Syntax_Highlighting).It's all javascript so it runs locally in your browser. No need for a server. But you can't also host it on your server if you want: http://... |
Feelings of regret over career path? | donniefitz2: I studied Philosophy and Political Science in college and I hack for a living. There's nothing that says you must have a formal education in a particular discipline to do something as a career.I say pursue the discipline you have the most interest and ability in. |
Why doesn't Y Combinator have a separate link for teams? | pg: We've found that startups are much more likely to succeed when the founders have known one another for a while. If we set up something like this, we'd be implicitly encouraging people to go down a path we know tends to result in failure. |
What do you use to store code snippets? | nreece: I use EverNote |
(Freelance) Do you host your clients' sites? Why, or why not? | RobGR: I have hosted some sites, and I don't mean hosted as in put them on a machine that Rackspace or someone else hosted, I mean hosted as in I put their computer in my closet on the business class cable modem I have.It all depends on the client and the site. For high traffic sites where the client has money, I dire... |
What do you use to store code snippets? | jmonegro: I use snipt.net |
What's your startup's competitive advantage? | medianama: source of sustainable competitive advantage... as they say |
Review my email collaboration app - MooGroups | m0digital: http://moogroups.com |
Why isn't Zappos the first result for the query "shoes"? | mooism2: Any particular reason why they should be? |
Review my email collaboration app - MooGroups | ScottWhigham: I have NoScript and, when I browse, it says, "This text will be replaced" in the top bar.It says, "Use any email program" but all screenshots are from a Mac. Would suggest a few screenshots from Windows if that is also your audience.Good luck! |
What do you use to store code snippets? | ScottWhigham: I use a combination of files (.sql files, .cs files, etc), OneNote, and Google. Not very elegant, I know, but it works.I tried this one out once upon a time: http://www.snipitpro.com/. I didn't buy - it was $40 at the time I downloaded it and then they raised it to $50 IIRC. I see now that it is back to ... |
Why can't I delete my own posts? | jacquesm: Wow. That's the first time I've ever even heard of moderators editing a post, other than at the request of the poster or to correct a broken link or something like that.Are you sure it was a moderator action and that your account was not compromised somehow ?edit: it looks like you're right and people have be... |
Why can't I delete my own posts? | rms: Usually the policy is to change links to link to the original source. Probably the mod didn't look too closely in this case, but I can't see your original post to see what you added to it.You can only edit/delete posts for one hour, to prevent various kinds of abuses. |
Why can't I delete my own posts? | ErrantX: Ok here goes an answer on this.The first instance the link died possibly because lots of people flagged it.With that said I was a bit confused too. Your original link read like a blog - of which the first post was about that one form of traffic calming. I think it was an easy mistake to make thinking it was bl... |
Why can't I delete my own posts? | wheels: The original HP "tablet" headline was also a "lie". It's not a tablet. It is a photo screen, but a significant evolutionary step in that market with some tablet-like features.http://h71036.www7.hp.com/hho/us/en/pclc/articles/series-dre... |
Why can't I delete my own posts? | lucumo: Feature requests go here ⇒ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 |
Why can't I delete my own posts? | pbhjpbhj: "two posts of mine"
They may be your posts, haven't checked the ToS, but I'm pretty sure HN claim full editorial power and so can edit them how they like. The only problem I'd have is with that not been clear - when they edit they should add a "edited by X from an original by Y" type statement. |
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