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Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | maxklein: Be organised as hell and keep things under control. The programmer will appreciate when things are running smoothly, and all he has to do is fill in the correct spots and then get to coding, and does not have to worry about if articles are out, if there are spelling errors on pages or stuff like that.Be the o... |
Where Can I Get Some Free / Royalty-Free Music Tracks | petesalty: shameless plug: You're welcome to use any of the music from my 2008 album, it's all CC - providing you can find anything worth using, I make no guarantees :)
Just let me know if you're interested.http://snugglytako.rpmchallenge.com/ |
How do you concentrate? | al3x: 1. Stop using IM. Period. Not just when you're working. All the time. You don't need it. There's email, SMS, phone calls, Twitter, and other social messaging services. IM is the most brutally distracting and easiest way to waste time when trying to work.2. Stop using Growl or equivalent. You're training yourself ... |
Clean Lisp implementation for study? | vu3rdd: Thanks for the comments. I have started looking at the provided pointers. |
Good strategies for networking while mingling with CEOs/decision makers | ScottWhigham: I would take it as though most people are there to hear Brian Tracy and not so much for the networking. While I doubt it is a "no sales" zone event, you will probably find a the full spectrum: people who don't want to be sold all the way up to people who are trying to sell the shit out of everyone they me... |
Good strategies for networking while mingling with CEOs/decision makers | wallflower: Some interesting tips here. The comments are interesting also (people share experiences of how they did it).http://www.keithferrazzi.com/blog/how-to-gain-vip-access-in-... |
Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | natch: I was a non-programmer, and I wanted a program written. Nobody was going to write it, and I didn't have the money to pay someone to write it.So what did I do?I learned to program, in order to write that program. It took a while, but it was worth it. And it turned out great. And years later I'm still learning. Th... |
How do you concentrate? | allenp: When are times when you can concentrate? Do they have patterns that you can see? Can you artificially re-create these patterns?Are you disengaged from your daily work? Maybe you need more interesting endeavors? |
Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | anamax: > How can I best approach a software engineer with an idea?Back up a step. Why are you approaching said engineer with that idea? Yes, I know that you want said engineer to build it, but why should anyone build that idea and not some other idea?I'm sure that you've got good supporting arguments, but if you don... |
Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | DannoHung: Show your tech guy your deliverables; what you're actually adding. He'll be able to point and say, "I did this and this and this and the proof is right there." You should be able to do the same.If you're talking about compensation, make sure that everything is clear and out in the open and that there is no... |
Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | fizx: - How do software engineers perceive business types?Business types are people. I evaluate on character plus effectiveness. When forming an opinion, I generally look at their past success, their history of screwing people over (or not), and their smarmyness (or not), as well as their ability to communicate.- How ... |
How do you concentrate? | killpg: Try working in a coffee shop. As a barista.You're not cut out for programming. |
How do you concentrate? | alexgartrell: I was having a big problem concentrating and getting work done so I tried something my friend told me to do. Sit for an hour, and do nothing. Don't plan, hardly think, just sit. It's hard to explain, but it feels like hitting the motivation reset button. I would say it's definitely worth trying. |
Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | gord: learn to program - a bit of lisp, a bit of C [not to do it but to appreciate the mindset]Mentioning VB, Microsoft or Clearcase are very uncool and will turn away any talented people you might want to learn from, hang out with, hire or become co-founder with.Can I suggest not use the words 'cog ... gear' - which s... |
Clean Lisp implementation for study? | sunkencity: i think this article is great, i read it, then downloaded the source to jscheme, and ported a portion of it to ruby. then i understood more about how lisp works, i got to a working repl that had + implemented.http://berlinbrowndev.blogspot.com/2008/07/simple-lisp-imple...then half a year later I thought wha... |
Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | auston: WARNING: THIS IS MY PERSONAL OPINION1. Uninformed.2. By not consulting on "business decisions" which are actually mostly tech decisions.3. Make sure you have AS MUCH COMPLETE as you POSSIBLY CAN - things like idea/strategy/wireframes/html mockups/product alpha/prototypes/customers who have intent to use product... |
Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | jeromec: It may be helpful to remember that programmers look at things logically. That's why I'm no good at sales. I look for direct paths and solutions, and understand yes/no, not negotiations. I tell you this to show how/why I have respect for effective marketers. It's a bit like magic to me because my brain doesn't ... |
Where Can I Get Some Free / Royalty-Free Music Tracks | anshulk: thesixtyone has a CC section with a very good collection. Here is their CC electronic section: http://www.thesixtyone.com/cc/electronic/ There are some other relevant genres too. |
Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | mdakin: Your choice of the word "cog" to represent a programmer and "gear" to represent a team indicates you might be internally (to your mind) objectifying the people involved with your potential projects. I could see such an internal objectification causing various problems with your interactions with the "cogs/gear... |
Please Review My Webapp | boundlessdreamz: This a side project I was working on for fun. If the site takes off I plan to aggregate the highest commented/liked tweets and celebrities. Beyond that I don't have any plans.Design is by a friend of mine: http://sandosh.info/v2/pages/home/Thanks in advance for spending your time on reviewing the site.... |
Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers | makecheck: - How do they come to respect or disrespect someone in this role?Earn respect by investing not only in your product, but in your programmers. If you're a carpenter, you'd think your boss was crazy for asking you to drive nails without hammers or a nail-gun; and yet, this is how programming environments some... |
have you built an electromagnetic levitator? | TrevorJ: Or you could use a high temperature semiconductor. True, there are cooling issues you'd have to overcome but the thing about levitating using a semiconductor is it is self-stabilizing. |
Questions for a Bank Analyst? | sarosh: What, if any, compliance or regulatory action is being taken preemptively by the bank? |
Whom do you admire most? | DanielBMarkham: This reminds me of George Washington's words: Whatever you do, please don't build a monument for me. I'm happy just serving.So what did they do? Built a huge freaking stone phallus in the middle of the nation's capital.I admire a lot of people. Too many to try to narrow it down. The difficult part about... |
Please Review My Webapp | moe: I'm not sure if this is a bug but the tabs (All, Movie/TV etc.) are all empty for me.The design looks appealing at a glance (nice colors) but I have absolutely no idea what the service does and why I should register.From the blurb on the right I can guess that you're somehow tracking celebrities. But I still don't... |
Please Review My Webapp | MicahWedemeyer: Login w/ twitter account maybe, instead of a full-fledged signup? |
Please Review My Webapp | NEPatriot: Simple concept.
Good execution.I would think about adding in a blurb at the top summing up what you do. Then follow that up with a sentence about why somebody should sign up - the benefits of being able to pick and choose celebs. |
have you built an electromagnetic levitator? | frankus: Assuming the penny is ferromagnetic you might be able to use DC to drive the electromagnet (i.e. you don't need to excite a current in the penny to get it to be attracted to the magnet).Also, the magnetic field is going to be proportional to current, not voltage (and because electromagnets are highly inductive... |
Is there a way to follow a page from email? | icey: Are you looking for something like http://www.changedetection.com/ ? |
Please Review My Webapp | fjabre: Well it's not something I would use but it is a pretty cool idea.I can see something like this really being popular, especially in LA and amongst the perezhilton.com crowd.. In fact you should try to get him to blog about your site. =)Best of luck.. |
Please Review My Webapp | alttab: After reading the discussion (all 14 comments that exist right now), it seems that people have given you plenty to think about.It looks like you wanted to make a web app that was simple, interesting, and attainable. For that, I give you an A+. Using the Twitter API is good practice because its extremely popular... |
Please Review My Webapp | reynolds: You might want to look into this: I just "liked" the same entry 10 times. |
Clean Lisp implementation for study? | CyberFonic: I actually like newLisp - not exactly Common Lisp, but I find the implementation easy to follow. check it out on www.newlisp.org. Compiles just about anywhere and comes with a nice testing framework so you can regression test your changes, etc. |
How do you determine an initial valuation? | icey: I assume you have some kind of neighborhood of your company's worth in mind, right?How much do you think your company will be worth in 2 to 5 years? Do you have any data to back that up? What are the valuations of similar companies? Are you able to grow to their size? What does your overhead look like? What sort ... |
Pre-Incorporating Founder Split | swombat: IANAL, but I have spoken to lawyers, and from what I gathered, if you want to be funded at some point it is important that you tidy up the intellectual property situation. You probably just need a paper that says that whoever's leaving did own the IP put into the start-up and that they're transferring all thei... |
How do you determine an initial valuation? | swombat: Avoid it like the plague. Get a lawyer and issue convertible notes instead. Valuing a seed company with half a product and no customers only ends up in tears. |
paying rent and bootstrapping - what alternatives are there? | JacobAldridge: One option may be to consider what sounds like multiple needs (a place to host people, dedicated business space, a space to sleep) and see if separating those allows you to spend less on rent.For the bought property to cost you less than renting (making generalisations about the area you live in, interes... |
Soma or North Beach | natemartin: First, remember that SF is a relatively small city, and you can get from pretty much anywhere to anywhere else in the city via public transit in about an hour max. So don't immediately discount all the areas that don't have startups. There are plenty of other areas in the city that get you more apartment fo... |
Soma or North Beach | lacker: I'd recommend the Haight (upper) or the Mission (closer to 24th than to 16th). They're good places to live, and you can get to anywhere else pretty easily. There will be techies wherever you go in SF. |
Soma or North Beach | slpsys: In my humble opinion, it doesn't matter so much where you sleep as much as where you hang out/hack/work (you are an entrepreneur, yes? why are you sleeping?). I presently live in NOPA, and for me, it's easier to find cheap housing, and a quick bike ride or bus ride on the 5 to (or 24) to downtown (SOMA'd be a f... |
Soma or North Beach | zaidf: I lived in SOMA on Market St. Super awesome for quick public transport to anywhere in the city. Try to be on Market St and you should be fine! |
Soma or North Beach | derwiki: Nob and Russian Hill aren't bad. I have a 20 minute walk to downtown, and easy access to buses and cable cars. It's quiet (compared to the Mission or North Beach), not terribly expensive, and pretty safe. The walk home through Chinatown is a nice change of scenery, too. |
Improve your concentration? | edw519: I've noticed that my concentration tends to lapse after spending 12+ hours in front of a computer.Then you're normal. Your body is telling you to get up and take a break. Listen to it.Not satisfied? Check out this thread from earlier today:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869034 |
Where Can I Get Some Free / Royalty-Free Music Tracks | erikwiffin: http://musopen.com/ is a pretty decent archive of classical music. Not quite what you're looking for, but a useful resource if others are interested |
paying rent and bootstrapping - what alternatives are there? | nobody_nowhere: It sounds like you have two separate problems:1. Your company is growing slowly, and you don't know how to accelerate the growth.2. You live in your office and don't have a way to change the situation.Approach the issues separately. It's hard to get into specifics on either one without knowing more.Cou... |
Pre-Incorporating Founder Split | nobody_nowhere: Here's what I'd do as a non-lawyer:1. Write down the agreement you'd like to make in the plainest possible terms. Use simple English and structure the document logically. Cover all the bases -- what you want to happen now, and in the future. Describe your theoretical idea as best you can.If you don't ... |
Soma or North Beach | malyk: It really depends on what you like. SOMA doesn't have a great neighborhood feel, IMO. I do have a sweet 1200sq ft loft with an awesome view of Twin Peaks out the west window and a cool view of downtown out the east window. Rent is $2200 a month with parking. It's right near all the clubs around folsom and 11... |
Best PHP unit testing tools? | christiancoomer: I use SimpleTest and it works pretty well for me. The functional testing tools are pretty neat. |
book recommendation for data visualization for beginners? | arfrank: Maybe not for beginners but what Ive been told is the holy grail for data viz is: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi |
Where's NM? | tghw: It's between Texas and Arizona, just north of Old Mexico. |
Where's NM? | rms: Nickb has gone away from the internet for long periods of time in the past. After a while people get concerned, then he turns up.News.arc, particularly the older version that Newmogul is running, is known to crash periodically. So the most likely explanation is that Nickb is off the grid and no one has the passwor... |
Improve your concentration? | jaekwon: when you push too hard, you will become counterproductive very fast (making wrong decisions that take much longer to work around or fix).focus on what your body tells you, burnout is real and terrible.otherwise, exercise would probably help you extend your focus integral. |
Any intro guide to creating text-based games? | spectre: I think it would be difficult to find a recent test-based game that could be considered 'well received', there hasn't been much interest in text-based games since the advent of the GUI.It could be quite interesting to see what is possible with modern languages and text-based applications. |
book recommendation for data visualization for beginners? | jscn: Check out Visualizing Data by Ben Fry http://benfry.com/, one of the authors of the Processing language. The book is based on his doctoral dissertation, and has a technical (as opposed to artistic or design) focus, but is easy to understand. The Processing language/environment is Java based. |
book recommendation for data visualization for beginners? | gtani: I think Cleveland was the first person to write about DV. Anyway, this book has been recommended to me several timeshttp://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Data-William-S-Cleveland/d... |
Any intro guide to creating text-based games? | nsfx: /Designing Virtual Worlds/ by Richard Bartle |
Where's NM? | jacquesm: This has to be the 10th link in 3 days asking the same thing. Wouldn't it be best just to register a domain and set up arc 3.1 there and move the community elsewhere and invite nickb as a user ? It seems a little irresponsible to not have a policy in place to deal with outages of an active community.I host an... |
Clean Lisp implementation for study? | kbob: Scheme 9 from Empty Space is both a small Scheme implementation and a book describing the source code.
I read 60% of the book this summer, and wasn't disappointed.Written in portable C, it implements bignums, garbage collection, (nonhygienic) macros, hashed environments.http://www.bcl.hamilton.ie/~nmh/t3x.org/zzz... |
How do you concentrate? | nreece: I take breaks, not concentrating on anything. |
Good books to learn Prolog? | JustAGeek: Thanks everybody for the suggestions! |
Any intro guide to creating text-based games? | chaosprophet: Whenever, I see "text-based game", I think of old school MUDs, not "Mob Wars". Being a more-than-casual-but-not-so-hardcore gamer, I find it quite silly, that something in which all you have to do is click a button is even considered a game.Also, apart from a few recent games, not many text-based games ha... |
Worst examples of ambiguity ? | yannis: Nothing comes to mind on written words, however, last year our HR phoned our sub-continent recruiting agent to arrange 50 tilers for a construction project in the Gulf. Three months later they all arrived, but none of them could lay a single tile. He sent taylors.:)On Air traffic Control see (http://www.scribd.... |
How do you concentrate? | known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development helps me a lot in concentrating on my work. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | gdp: I inherited a giant hideous stock-management system. It did a certain amount of automated ordering without manual intervention.Long story short: a nasty race condition meant that it was over-ordering duplicate products from the suppliers to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per day.On the general theme, my... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | SingAlong: One bug in Daylife's API tester's javascript. It just never worked in IE for some stupid reason. The solution was surprisingly simple.After some analysis with firebug, I just figured out that the variable's value wasn't being preserved after a particular point. So I just had to take it's value and assign it ... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | sdave: most embrarrasing:" #define INTERVAL 10 * 86400 "read the above 'C' statement.
Yeah, there are no brackets surrounding the '10*86400', INTERVAL was being used in some calculations.i wasted a lot of time debugging this crap. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | edw519: A batch run of only a few thousand items was running all night long, rarely finishing and causing all kinds of problems when people logged in in the morning. The users had been complaining about this for years.I was given the ticket and found a "SLEEP 10" (causing a 10 second pause for each item) in the 10 yea... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | dazzawazza: Every since time there is a memory corruption on a games console it takes hours and hours of tedious detective work to find.... shudder. Glad I don't do that any more. |
Voting on comments broken ? | niyazpk: I just upvoted this post and it is working for me. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | cmon_scum: A neat piece of software calculating the prices for customers Had a hierarchical pricing model for different contracts with large corporations. But the hierarchies were not separated. You started in one hierarchy and ended up in another one. While trying to read the tree from the bottom up you could end up r... |
Voting on comments broken ? | david927: That happened to me about two weeks ago on all browsers and on two machines. But a couple days later it was fine again. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | brazzy: Define "worst". The most costly? The hardest to diagnose? The one with the most stupid cause? |
Voting on comments broken ? | lionhearted: It happens if you refresh too fast. It's been like that for ages. While a minor inconvenience, a good thing about it is if you catch yourself making a reactive vote or misclick, you still have a second to hit refresh to null your vote. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | rm-rf: Worst software bugs, in increasing order of severity:An ASP.NET app that didn't consume it's record sets before closing it's database connections, thereby breaking IIS's connection pooling and causing hundreds SQL server login/logouts per second. Lots of interesting side effects on that bug.An obscure page latch... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | vanekl: Worst: c/c++ pointer memory errors, duh. Especially when there are thousands of pointers and don't know which one is overwriting memory that it shouldn't be overwriting.Second worst: linking c programs when some of the symbols are duplicated in more than one library yet are defined differently, Nobody mentionin... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | __david__: The most memorable bugs are the ones that cause physical damage. This was mine:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7i2KkYYulIDamage: Blown tire, dented rim, looking like fools in front of our peers. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | romanm: A multi threading system and a queue: it will be hard to explain all the algorithm here but sometimes you think that one thread can't affect others and it is not true I had to find an exception that kills no just the thread but doesn't allows the queue consuming to continue, I remember I went home something lik... |
Voting on comments broken ? | mziulu: Well, it is the same for me too. I noticed this behavior one or two days ago, but I dismissed it thinking that maybe someone downvoted the user I just upvoted more or less at the same time. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | mooders: Back when text messaging capability was a rarity on mobile phones, which were themselves rare, I was testing an SMS-based weather forecast service that I had written on behalf of one of the mobile network operators.The testing worked well on the emulator so I decided to test it over the public network to an ac... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | tedshroyer: Had an obscure picking id wrap around because a table wasn't getting cleared for debugging purposes which resulted in excessive amounts of beer being delivered to unsuspecting customers at an automated gas station.Here's a video of part of the result: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUhLDtPnSuQ |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | JeffJenkins: Non-strict comparator with the STL. Nearly impossible to identify when it's happening. It's happened once to me and once or twice to a coworker over the last couple years, and takes 3-5 days to debug every time.Example: struct FooSort {
bool operator()(Foo const& a, Foo const& b) const {
- ret... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | nomurrcy: Some users of a (shipped, fairly heavily used) web app we had deployed were getting kicked back to the login screen at random. Sometimes, very frequently.Looking in the logs we could see that these users were somehow losing their authentication cookie and the application was correctly bouncing them to login. ... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | uggedal: Peter Seibel ask this question in all his interviews in Coders at Work: http://www.codersatwork.com It seemed like most were concurrency related. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | philh: The bug itself wasn't very interesting, just a brainfart. But it wasn't doing what it should, so I added debugging output - one line per pixel. (I was generating a png from a custom image format.)Because there was so much output, I did a `| head` to keep it manageable. Saw what I was doing wrong, fixed it, reran... |
Voting on comments broken ? | romanm: I got the same problem today , I thought it is part of the karma rating algorithm and I can't give points because I don't have a high karma , but I guess it wasn't like that all the time |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | tjr: Was converting an avionics subsystem from Ada to C. It was a client application that had to talk to an Ada server, sending and receiving rather huge chunks of data, large, deeply nested, intricate structure types. The C structure type had to match the Ada type exactly, or else it wouldn't work.I got it working fi... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | Mark_B: A while back, I developed a program to generate invoices for about a dozen busy warehouses. During testing, for convenience sake, I hard-coded in my local printer.Unfortunately, I forgot to return the printer name to a variable when promoting into production. Hilarity ensued. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | masterponomo: The worst bug I encountered was due to IBM MVS (or COBOL--I was never sure which was at fault) losing addressability of part of a variable length record. Now you see it, now you don't. The solution at our shop was to move the whole record to itself before attempting to look into the record. I was a newbie... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | MrMatt: I worked on a taxi booking and dispatch system, written in c, and running on dos with custom networking via RS232. This system was installed at around 300 locations around the UK, and on one fateful day, every installation crashed.It came down to me to find and fix the problem, and it was subtle. The clue lay i... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | itgoon: I once worked an issue with a crashing Exchange server.It had to do with a connection being reset in the space of time between the server checking if the connection was good, and actually using it.The client could reproduce it at will, and after a little bit of code at home, I could, too. Back at the office, no... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | synnik: The store locator function on a national pizza chain's web site would completely hang their web server whenever an international search was done. Many, many hours and days of testing and debugging led us to conclude, and build a proof that it was a reproducible bug within IBM's Domino platform, only on AIX boxe... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | yan: From experience, any features requested to facilitate or hamper existing behaviors usually fail and get reverted or go unimplemented. Some examples from the past are marking high-karma users and removing visible karma.I'd say, just let HN run its course and it'll figure itself out. The more policy and rules you tr... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | yummyfajitas: The nastiest was an interaction between two libraries. If you simultaneously imported xml.dom and matplotlib (both python libraries), and then called functions in one of the libraries (I think matplotlib), the program would segfault.My incomplete set of unit tests didn't catch it because they were importe... |
Voting on comments broken ? | pg: I'm experimenting with changes to the code that decides which votes count. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | clistctrl: I've had a lot of frustrating experiences, but the one that made me slap my face the hardest due to the shear simplicity of it was the time I was working on a windows service. I was opening a socket and listening, but for whatever reason I could not get the client to connect! After a half hour or so of play... |
Voting on comments broken ? | hlizard: Also can't submit anything today: I get an error message that say: You are submitting to fast but I have no submits today. |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | AndrewDucker: I don't feel that Hacker News is swamped with off-topic discussions. I'm not having to wade through political or social commentary to find articles about Haskell, video adapters or Javascript. In fact, a quick look at the front page indicates that less than 5% of it isn't technical in some way - and mor... |
Any intro guide to creating text-based games? | jimrandomh: You may be interested in Inform (http://inform7.com/), which is a language specialized for creating interactive fiction games. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | bkz: After having launched our product I was spending some time reviewing commits together with the senior tech lead. Still to this day I can recall the commit number, the filename and write down the code from memory responsible for what turned out to be the source of a bug completely wiping out our users computers. So... |
Leaders' avg? | yan: I think I noticed mine fluctuating, so it might be only tallying recent (for some definition of recent) posts. |
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