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I have a FaceBook Group with 100,000 People In It...now what? | javery: Write an ebook on how to create a facebook group and get it up to 100,000 people. |
I have a FaceBook Group with 100,000 People In It...now what? | netcan: The domain (Shotgun.com) would be more valuable then the group, wouldn't it?In any case, throw up an online shop on it, posters, pamphlets, coffee table book, bumper stickers. See if any of it sells. |
Single person working on a web app. What platform to use? | RobGR2: I have been doing my pet projects in Drupal. I don't have much experience in the other options you mention, however.One thing I consider, is that side projects tend to die from lack of interest. If there is a person who might also work on it as a side project with you, using what they are willing to learn or already know might trump technical considerations. |
Gadget Question (A device that has email, google reader, twitter) | wmf: Forget about the device; I don't think there is any 3G data plan for $20/month. |
Other careers for a hacker? | mattm: Have you tried reducing your hours? I find it difficult to concentrate after 7 hours. If you can reduce to 35 hours a week, you might notice drastic improvements. |
Other careers for a hacker? | thaumaturgy: I have no idea what'll work for you.For me, I started in I.T. at 16, did the corporate thing by 19, and at 24 became a climbing instructor.It was great. The pay was crap, but I learned a lot about people and group management and all kinds of other things that I just don't think most hackers ever have to deal with. I mean, how often do you get to practice talking to a 6-year-old that's climbed to the top and refuses to let go?After a few years in the outdoor industry I returned to computer systems, much more well-balanced I think.I don't see much personal value in moving from programming to something tangential to program. Diametric opposition, now that's much more fun. |
Other careers for a hacker? | TheSOB88: How about taking a break at work? Or four? |
Other careers for a hacker? | dnsworks: Have you considered Dragon Naturally Speaking? Ask @benjyfeen about it, he works in SRE at Google. My understanding is his carpal tunnel got so bad that he had to stop typing 4 or 5 years ago, and went through some intensive training with Dragon Naturally Speaking. Now he's able to do all of his work without a keyboard. |
I have a FaceBook Group with 100,000 People In It...now what? | netcan: Found this site: shotgunrules.comIt uses the same text & sells a pocketbook. |
Other careers for a hacker? | access_denied: there are some sites marketing paid video tutorials, maybe you could team up there? |
Other careers for a hacker? | formerO: Purely anecdotal, but I had fairly severe wrist Tendonitus on and off. I starting taking vitamin B-6 (and occasionally B-12), haven't had trouble since. |
Is there RSS/newsreader software that groups related stories together? | amandle: I have been building a site which does this for news, with plans to allow arbitrary feeds.http://www.newsdive.net |
Other careers for a hacker? | blhack: I know that this wasn't your question, but I was having this same problem for a while... My wrists and arms hurt like hell while I was at work, it was really awful.I get made fun of for it now, but what I did was take two keyboards, and use one for each hand. Spreading my arms apart so that my wrists weren't cocked out really helped me...so much so that I've been able to go back to one keyboard (my trusty IBM model M). Think more about hugging your monitor than poking it in the stomach (if that makes any sense...I mean the orientation of your hands).The other thing that I did was replace my regular mouse with a trackball. (A kensington expert mouse [http://blog.nongraphical.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/expe...).I really enjoy coding...so it wasn't so much a "what else can I do" situation for me, it was a "how can I keep doing this". |
Lala Land Grab? | johns: I think a more likely scenario is they shut it down, give everyone iTunes store credit for the amount they spent on streaming-only songs and if you bought MP3s, you're OK since they don't have DRM. Sounds like a much cheaper solution than trying to run the service. They bought it for the talent, why would they waste that talent maintaining the existing site instead of building something new? Also, lala's contracts with the record companies aren't transferable and there's no way Apple can negotiate the same terms. The record companies don't want iTunes to dominate the market, it's bad for them.I'm a heavy lala user and LOVE the service, but spend your money elsewhere. |
Other careers for a hacker? | Mz: Nevermind. Not relevant. Thanks for the clarification. |
Is black-hat hacking harder now than it was 20 years ago? | dnsworks: Absolutely. 20 years ago telcos didn't bother adding password protection to digital "switches" because they didn't even consider war dialers or the proliferation of internal documentation through bulletin boards. Unix vendors like Microsoft (Xenix), SCO, and Sun left password-less accounts (like Root, Operator, Sync) on workstations which were then immediately plugged into a shared-bus network. Not to mention the wide-open nature of the various X.25 networks like Sprintnet which were used for inter-bank communications. |
Other careers for a hacker? | kabdib: A cow-orker of mine (now at Google) moved to Dragon Naturally Speaking, and also became a product manager. He changed from writing code to writing specs and emails.It seemed to work out, though he was a good writer of prose to begin with. |
Maximum length of time to respond to an email? | blasdel: I struggle with this kind of stuff too, I'll have drafts sitting around forever while I ruminate on my writing. Asynchronous communication provides the opportunity for perfectionism, and I have trouble resisting the urge to over-edit.The best trick is to parlay it into another medium, or at least send a brief acknowledgement of receipt. Taking a complimentary tack works well: "Your question was so insightful I will have trouble conveying a satisfactory answer unless we chat" |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | icey: Is this your startup? It looks really well polished. |
Other careers for a hacker? | jrockway: The syadmin stuff, the HTML, and the PHP/ColdFusion tend to be pretty hard on your hands. Lots of typing to not say very much. Maybe you'd like a concise language with a good IDE, like Common Lisp, instead?I find that most annoyance while programming comes from things like switching from the editor to the terminal to the documentation and back to the editor. As I bring more and more functionality into Emacs, I find myself typing less and thinking more (and generally being less annoyed). I have never experienced pain while keyboarding, though, and I am flexible enough to elicit grimaces from people watching my normal movements. YMMV. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | amohr: I LOVE the art explorer - it's like Pandora for art. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | markbao: This is awesome. I always liked Zappos's drill-down search, and I'm really happy that it works well here too http://www.zatista.com/search . See in a virtual room is an awesome way to gauge placement and the size of the piece.This is a great way for individual artists to get paid for their work. The only thing I can really think of is for more sub-categories: you currently have type -> medium -> style, but take a look at InterfaceLIFT's tag browser criterion: http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/tags/Color — Scene — Location — Medium — Event — Equipment — Subject. Some are irrelevant, but if I'm looking to drill down even further, these could really help. And, along with your explorer, it could drive a thing I call the Clicker User: the guy that clicks around the site looking for awesome random stuff to pop up.+1 for favorites functionality. Dunno why, but a lot of startups seem to forget about the power of favoriting. There are some sites that I wish allowed favoriting that don't do it, which I can't understand.I don't know about others, but I'm always looking for art to fill my pad with. Awesome startup, awesome execution. Startups should look to this co for some execution inspiration. |
Maximum length of time to respond to an email? | icey: Don't make them wait. If you want to answer the question but need time to make sure the answer is the correct one, I'd send them an email that basically says "I want to give you the best answer I can to your inquiry, but it's going to take me a little time to answer adequately. I'm working on it now, and I should have it over to you by XXX"Of course, you want to make sure you give them a realistic timeframe and make sure you commit to it.Blasdel's tip about parlaying it to another medium is pretty good as well. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | andrewljohnson: Your website is extremely fast! That in of itself is a very good place to start.Your site is also easy to navigate and clear in what it provides.Keep talking to your users... you seem to be on the right track. |
Other careers for a hacker? | roundsquare: Hmmm... no idea if this will work, but can you find a place that does pair programming? Maybe you could spend most of your time being the person not at the keyboard. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | sheena: Extremely well executed. My only quibble is the name, which makes me think of Batista or Zapatistas. I could be the only one, though. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | waterlesscloud: Very nice. Search is well done, though it's not immediately obvious there are more categories than shown.Explorer didn't seem to really show me things I liked, I think that's going to be really tough with art, as each piece is unique and things that may seem similar evoke quite different reactions.Still, the site has me seriously considering buying something. So there you go. |
Gadget Question (A device that has email, google reader, twitter) | cpr: iPhone 3Gs is around $70/mo, not $100. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | cubicle67: Looks very good. I'm supposed to be working, but I've just spent far too long looking through the artI notice if I choose a large picture, and then view it in a virtual room the picture overlaps the furniture instead of hanging behind it. |
Is black-hat hacking harder now than it was 20 years ago? | jodrellblank: I have been fascinated with stories of really clever hacks into systems. I've also been told to setup a scheduled database backup and when I opened the first backup to check it was going to work, found unencrypted credit card and billing details (only a year or two ago). Only a few weeks ago I found a small company system which ships with a default admin password (a dictionary word, no less) which the end user cannot change. Weird.Putting two and two together, I suspect that some extremely clever hacks happened (and still happen, I guess), but many many more were probably fortuitous stumbling on horrible or utterly absent security in some overlooked corner; as per dnsworks comment, except - is logging into a password-less account really 'hacking'? |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | samdk: Immediately bookmarked. Others have mostly covered the things I like (in short: the idea is great, the implementation is very good).A few notes:It would be nice to have the AJAX search stuff change the URL so searches can be linked to.(I have a lot of minor design quibbles. If you'd like I can go through more of them. These next two are the first things that jumped out at me.)The 'get live advice' widget seems very out of place to me in terms of design. The stock photo is annoying me particularly.There are at least four different button designs on the front page. Some difference is ok, but I think they need to have something in common. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | pkc: Its awesome, extremely polished. Very well done. Though I am not interested in much in art it has the drive to make me buy something. Very good work. |
Other careers for a hacker? | mahmud: Sales and marketing. There is no rush like the rush of money, real, serious money.Everyone you see programming is like a medieval craftsman, good at one thing and one thing only. As a salesman, you're the top dog, you have an eye for who is good and who is bad, you can choose whose products to sell, who to make rich, and who to work with. You're a phone wielding king-maker.If you love thinking, that's all you will do. You will try to understand everyone's business, what they do, who they sell to, how much, how often, and under what restrictions. You take your work with you, to the pub, restaurant, street, gym and home. You will be taking notes when others are talking. You will go over your girlfriend's browser history to learn what she shops for. You will be opening your parent's credit card statements to see where the money goes. A day at the mall will be like heaven to you; you will get a rush from seeing people spend. Information will fucking nurture you.You do that so often you can see trends before they hit the press :-)Nothing like being able to give your friends and family business, real solid leads, and all others will have to contend for your attention and rolodex.Sales makes bull-fighting look boring. It's as if the newspapers were published for your own amusement. Every little column brings in an idea, a lead, a name, an opportunity.P.S. and on good days you will be too thrilled that you end up talking like this. Guess who closed today? ABC :-) |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | silverpen: Great looking site.On my screen (1680 x 1050) the "live chat" graphic overlaps the "My Account" link & text in top header.Because, you're selling high ticket priced items, I would recommend you place a seal or two in the footer. Possibly near the "add to cart" & checkout buttons as well. I know it may sound silly, but a mcafee seal (as much as i hate this fact) can impact conversions significantly in certain industries. Do lots of testing before committing to any seal.I'm curious, was your cart completely built in house or is it based on some cart out there. I'm truly impressed with the sites performance. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | vaksel: I think for your art explorer instead of just giving a 3 tier cost image, you should say the actual price. |
I have a FaceBook Group with 100,000 People In It...now what? | covercash: Check out this interview on Mixergy: http://mixergy.com/jeff-widman-brandglue/The founder of BrandGlue talks about groups vs fan pages and how to effectively market to your followers on facebook. Some interesting tips about how to get your group mentions into other people's news feeds. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | hpvic03: I'm seeing a text overlap in the "Modify Results" area of the search.I'm on Firefox 3.5.5.Here's a screenshot:
http://i45.tinypic.com/awywcw.pngOther than that great site. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | quickpost: Nicely done. Clicking on your website instantly reminded me of this note in a PG essay:---Viaweb wasn't the first startup Robert Morris and I started. In January 1995, we and a couple friends started a company called Artix. The plan was to put art galleries on the Web. In retrospect, I wonder how we could have wasted our time on anything so stupid. Galleries are not especially excited about being on the Web even now, ten years later. They don't want to have their stock visible to any random visitor, like an antique store. [2]http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html |
Single person working on a web app. What platform to use? | savant: I agree with this sentiment completely. 12 months ago, I can safely say that my experience with PHP had been a simple modification of an ExtJS application and me screwing around with my Delicious bookmarks and the Yahoo BOSS API (both of these took more than a day to complete and I was very upset with life).I decided that I should learn how to actually create working websites and over the Winter Intercession, I looked at the various frameworks. Being on a Mac, I looked long and hard at Ruby on Rails, but something about it's syntax irked me. In hindsight, it shouldn't have as my only experience had been with Java and other related OOP languages, but oh well.I next looked at Zend, as many of the apps I developed for (Joomla, WordPress etc) were PHP apps, and therefore it made sense to go with what the Zend Engine people created. It took all of 2 minutes to realize that it would take me HOURS to figure out how to setup a basic MVC package. Not to mention a friend had used Zend in a previous project of ours - I developed the frontend in ExtJS, he the backend API - and was thoroughly upset with it.I moved on to CodeIgniter and Kohana and thought it was great... except that it required that I specify a lot. I hate specifying things. Love automagic.From there, it was Symfony, but it's application tutorial was too big and confusing for a PHP-noob like me (http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_4/Doctrine/en/). I think I just didn't give it enough of a chance.Then I read about the recently released 1.2 release of CakePHP. Loved the name, thought the documentation and community names were funny - The Cookbook and The Bakery, respectively - and I was able to do the blog tutorial in less than 30 minutes (to their credit, I'm an idiot). I was happy enough then to start thinking about more complex applications and start to do something about them. I'm here almost 12 months later with around 30 or so active, open source projects on Github, 4 or 5 deployed websites, a few web applications puttering around on my machine, and quite a few in planning.I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't limit yourself two a choice of two, but try several frameworks and languages. Try languages you don't know at all (Chicago Boss looked nice, but development has slowed. You could try using NodeJS! Django is cool too.) and try frameworks in languages you are familiar with (Someone mentioned Play Framework, which I think is the best RAD framework in Java, and PHP has CakePHP/CodeIgniter/Zend/Symfony/Lithium).Choosing a language and a framework isn't about what excites other people, but what excites you. Find a combination that excites you and do it. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | roundsquare: Very dangerous. The kind of "I might lose my job for spending too long on your site" dangerous.I'm curious, how did you market to artists? You seem to have a lot of variety on your site so I'd like to know how you got so many artists to agree.Edit: I like the Art 101 section as well. Especially this:
http://www.zatista.com/art101/getting_started/good_artEdit 2: On this http://www.zatista.com/art101/getting_started/hanging_artSome pictures might be helpful. |
Is black-hat hacking harder now than it was 20 years ago? | roundsquare: Interesting question. I'll add one more to it if you don't mind. Even if getting into the pentagon might be harder, do you think there is more data that is a) easy to get via hacking and b) useful? If so, this is an important way in which hacking is easier than it was before.I might think there is more data like this since more people put more data on computers with less knowledge about how to protect it. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | fauigerzigerk: It's impressive what you have built, however I wonder about the market you are in.My perception was that the art market has two main categories:a) Original art (no prints or reproductions), which is sometimes bought as an investment or by people who think they are art experts and can buy something unique from and up and coming young artist. It's not just a market, it's a community with its own reputation mechanisms and fashions. Nothing coming from that direction is ever being sold for $75 online.b) Mass prints of stuff to decorate rooms.It seems to me that you are trying to invent a new market. But it may be that I'm just not sufficiently familiar with the art scene.In any event, I wish you luck and congrats to your high quality website. |
Other careers for a hacker? | liquidcool: The pair programming idea got me thinking - what about hiring someone for half days doing your typing for you? This seems economical, esp. in this economy. Maybe a local CS student who would see this as an internship, or at least know the syntax well enough to make your dictation efficient. Since you have your own business you'd just treat it as an expense.I think the speech to text suggestion is also worth investigating.Since you've tried a bunch of things, I assume you've read up on ergonomics. A previous employer forced me to take an ergonomics evaluation when I wanted a new chair. I thought it was going to be a waste, but it was really useful and helped me improve my home office setup as well. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | aw3c2: Blog and Newsletter buttons look out of place. I'd put those links into the big "our blog is here" space. Might run into a human brain adblocking problem though so be careful with the design.Some \n\n in http://www.zatista.com/product/details/4155/sequence-10I'd horizontally mirror the "why buy art here" bubble, so it does not look like the content is asking but someone from the outside.You need some <noscript> hints.Nice! |
Is black-hat hacking harder now than it was 20 years ago? | mock: I'd say no it isn't in the aggregate harder. There are a few of forces at play that I think lead to this.First of all you can now buy pretty good hacking tools in a can (CANVAS, Core Impact) that come complete with non public exploits. If you don't have the money, metasploit is pretty good as well. This drastically reduces the need to know the details of a particular exploit, and reduces the amount of toolsmithing required to pull off a penetration. Also, the reality is that exploits are now a business - they're for sale, for better or for worse, on the open market. If there's one thing our PWN2OWN competition at cansecwest proved, it's that for a sufficient amount of money someone will find you a hole in anything. If you have money, even if you're not that knowledgeable, being a blackhat isn't that hard.Second, there is more stuff to exploit now than there has ever been before, both on and off the net (I'm looking at you SCADA). At least some of that stuff will be low hanging fruit built by programmers who either did not understand how to build secure systems, or didn't expect that those systems would be reachable in the way they are now. As the internet expands, and stuff keeps getting more smarts added to it, I think there is probably a trend in which new insecure stuff is being built faster than the old stuff is being secured (not that I can prove that). Things that previously weren't considered to be security critical, now are (XSS is still barely considered a "real" exploit).Third, information about exploits, how to write exploits, and how to find vulnerabilities is now massively more available, both because of the change in philosophy around full disclosure, and because we now have more than a decade (two maybe?) of open research into the field. Bugtraq can be argued to have revolutionized security research because it opened up what was previously secret to the eyes of interested amateurs and academics. Today there is a community of security researchers who openly publish information that previously was only the domain of governments and the occasional large defence contractor. I think probably the public community is better at it too.Balanced against this is all the research and technology on the defensive side (also helped by full disclosure), the forced public shaming to fix-their-broken-shit of various vendors (full disclosure again), and generally better knowledge of security best practices (anyone want to guess what I attribute this to?). All of which is to say that the things that worked 20 years ago are harder today than they were 20 years ago (social engineering sadly seems to be just as easy, and if anything more prevalent now) but it hardly seems to matter since lots more is easy now. |
Rate a StartUp Redanyway.com | Kliment: I'm not really interested in the service but I did look through the FAQ. The link to Gravatar is broken, looks like an autogenerated link, so you might want to check all other external links too. Back button is broken on the FAQ page. Also, why not have the answers on the same page as the questions and have a list of questions at the top instead of this ajaxy hide/show thing. It makes reading multiple FAQs a pain with too many clicks on shifting targets and breaks the back button. Also the frontpage seems very slow and loads stuff from facebook, which slows it down further. |
Resources for learning to write wrappers to C libraries | Kliment: With Python, there is a well-defined and well-documented C API, as well as support for ctypes. Ctypes allows you to call into C-interfaced libs with very little code. The Python C API allows you to write modules in C that behave like modules in Python. With Scheme, there are multiple implementations and no standard one, but most implementations provide a functionality for calling external code. Here's a nice list: http://community.schemewiki.org/?ffi
Rather than tutorials, I'd start by trying to dissect existing library wrappers and figuring out how they work. This is how I learned to write Python extensions. |
Rate a StartUp Redanyway.com | clistctrl: One thing I absolutely hate is not being able to use something without signing in/up for it. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | 3pt14159: Overall, I like it. It would be nice if there was less clutter, and larger pictures to draw me in.Being a data guy myself, it would be nice if you could build in some light algorithms to hide all the art that I find distasteful, but I guess that is a task for another day!Good amount of pieces, btw. How did you manage to get that many people on board? |
Other careers for a hacker? | wglb: I had severe finger pain two years ago and went to a chiropractor but none of that helped. I got a Kinesis keyboard and a good chair and the pain slowly subsided and is now gone. I find that the worst thing is the mouse, so I have a kensington trackball and switch hands. It really could be just a keyboard/mouse/posture thing. |
Legal rights to University project? | mechanical_fish: Now that is an interesting question.This advice may be so ill-informed that I'll put the disclaimer up front: I'm not a lawyer, let alone an IP lawyer. That said, if the university isn't paying you, and you don't use any university resources, and you don't assign them any rights, I don't see how they can assert any rights. Looking over your work and assigning it a grade doesn't make it theirs. Otherwise they would own everything.Now, if you were an assistant professor using university offices and labs and a certain amount of public funding to conduct work that is nigh-indistinguishable from the work your side business is doing -- to the extent that many of your grad students can't tell from moment to moment if they're doing schoolwork or startup work -- that would be a more interesting question. |
Legal rights to University project? | patio11: When I turned a university project into an internship with them, we made it very explicit to everyone concerned exactly when the project started becoming "something other than class work" and what consequences that had for all parties involved.I tend to think that 999 out of 1,000 legal worries people have are groundless. Want to sleep better at night? Draw up a simple letter of understanding between you and the University and ask for your professor to sign it. After doing so, take it to the university counsel or IP office (major research institutions have one) and ask them to sign off on it. If they do, congratulations. If they don't, consider your options. |
I have a FaceBook Group with 100,000 People In It...now what? | iterationx: Get suggestions from them then make an book that can be sold at urban outfitters |
Legal rights to University project? | pg: Most universities have some kind of IP policy. E.g. Harvard says that software you write using their money or facilities belongs to them:http://otd.harvard.edu/resources/policies/IP/In practice I've never known IP to be an issue for undergrads. So I wouldn't annoy your professors by bugging them a lot about this.You are many, many times more likely to lose because you built something people don't want than because your college sued you over IP. So if you're going to worry about something, worry that what you're building won't seem desirable to customers. |
Legal rights to University project? | chwahoo: This isn't legal advice, but software written by undergrads and not funded by the University is usually owned by the student. |
Legal rights to University project? | pmjordan: When I enrolled at York, it was required that I sign a contract which laid out the IP situation. IIRC, this was fairly lenient in my favour, although this was for an undergraduate degree. I gather that the situation was different for PhD programmes. You have probably signed something like that too when you signed up, in among the endless paperwork. Dig it up and read it. Chances are you're safe as long as you don't use their equipment and facilities.If there's any remaining doubt I'd probably try to solve the problem in advance by drafting a plain-English document which declares that the university has no rights to the works and get the advisor, the departmental head, and a relevant person who oversees research across the entire university to sign it. In fact, you probably have a dedicated person who oversees such matters at the university, so it may be best to take the draft to them directly and see if they have an equivalent standardised contract that they'll be more willing to sign than your draft. |
Legal rights to University project? | patrickgzill: If the issue is "copyright" the author retains all interest in the copyrighted work unless a specific form is signed; there is no other way to assign copyright.You should be easily able to ask for and receive copies of anything you signed when you first came to University.Personally I would not worry about it, just go ahead. Further don't bug faculty about it, it will only raise red flags. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | tsestrich: Really well done. I love the idea too, and if I hadn't already started on another project this was essentially going to be my next :)Glad someone beat me to it though, since maybe now I can find an easy avenue to sell some paintings on if I ever get back into it.I agree with others about how awesome the speed of the site is. It really makes a big difference, especially on a graphics-intensive site.What are you using for hosting? Or are you guys running your own hardware? |
Legal rights to University project? | tsestrich: For those curious, the response from my department head (who I worked with to set up the independent study):"
This is a complicated question.Effectively, the University owns everything (all IP) that we do while we are here, faculty, staff, and students alike. However, they have very limited capability to
effectively copyright, patent, and market everything that is created. If you were to go through the process of doing this through the University, they would return a portion of any income that they acquire. In return, they cover the legal, patent, and marketing costs to get the product to market, or to find some company that would want to market it. Given the number of things that are created in a university, the process of selecting which items to pursue is long and involved.My suggestion is that you proceed on your own. If you are hugely successful, then you would deal with the university at that time.
"So it seems like most people here are right on. If I can't easily get any more information, I'll probably just go for it. I was just trying to see where I stand so I don't get myself in a ridiculous situation later where I say "Why didn't I think of this earlier?". |
Other careers for a hacker? | abyssknight: I guess to approach this from another angle, I just had a chat with one of the senior tech leads at the corporation I work for (140k+ employees). He said that several of the developers he worked with moved on to do completely different things in the years following a project built about a decade ago.One went on to be an instructor of some sort, another a farmer. My realtor worked in the same place I did writing HTML and Cobol before she got so burnt out she became a realtor. That was 8 years ago.There's no limit to what you can do, both as a developer and outside the tech realm. Hackers are not just technical. Hacking can be anything you make it.Good luck, and I hope you find your passion. :) |
Legal rights to University project? | dctoedt: I'm an IP lawyer, but I'm not YOUR lawyer and so don't take this as legal advice about your particular situation; if you do consult a lawyer, this might give you some background info for use as a head start in your discussion.1. U.S. patent law says patents belong to the inventor(s), absent either (i) an agreement to assign the patent rights, or (ii) an implied-in-law duty to assign, such as arises when an employee is "hired to invent" or "set to experimenting."If your university has some sort of written policy about undergraduate- or graduate work belonging to X, you might well be held to have agreed to it by applying and/or enrolling, either in the school or in your particular course. (pg has it exactly right on this point.)2. U.S. copyright law says that the copyright in original works of authorship (which might or might not include elements of your project) are owned by the author(s) UNLESS (i) there's an agreement to assign the copyright, or (ii) the author's authoring activities took place within the scope of his employment, or (iii) the work fits into one of a comparatively few specific categories -- translations, contributions to collective works, and some others -- AND the parties agreed in writing that the work would be a work made for hire.3. U.S. trade-secret law might be a little trickier, because it varies state by state. The pretty-much-universal rule, though, is that at least some degree of secrecy is a sine qua non of trade-secret rights. |
Legal rights to University project? | pierrefar: Depends on the university as many have noted. Some universities have a technology transfer office or a commercialization director or something similar. I'd double check with them BEFORE you do anything for your project. |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | Kliment: Segmentation, interfaces, documentation.You want to make changes that do as little damage as possible. By structuring your project so that independent functions are really independent, you can think about them independently. Providing interfaces to your own code also helps there, you can ignore one part of the code and just use its functionality, and only have to keep the interface in your head. Also, notes-to-self often help provide context and memory cues to reload something you've forgotten. Either way, you should be using source control. That way you can look at the changelog for a file and reconstruct what you did with it, again helping you recall structure. |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | kylebragger: what scm system are you using? |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | patio11: This is one of my periodic pain points with Rails, as compared to Java. At the day job I work with multiple code bases with more than X00,000 lines of code each. My Rails site has 5k lines as reported by rake stats, and due to a combination of poor IDE support compared to Java and the toss-it-all-in-one-folder Rails conventions, that sometimes results in headaches.My suggestions:1) Refactor like it is going out of style. Rails classes (particularly controllers and models in my experience) have a tendency to accumulate cruft over time. Periodically evaluate whether something should be broken into two classes, or at least two files. Mixins and require are your friend here. (Breaking a controller into two changes URLs by default. I think letting Rails assign publicly visible URLs is a mistake, but most people do it. Consider carefully whether you can accept URLs changing as a result of code changes.)2) Encourage internal code reuse, and better separation of responsibilities, by breaking things into plugins when appropriate. I extracted code from my own classes to make A/Bingo for example. It keeps my own classes readable and makes it much easier to publish and reuse A/Bingo.3) Coding conventions are your friend. Since the IDE lacks a reliable jump-to-definition-of-this-function feature, I tend to try to put predictable things in predictable places. For example, model classes always have a consistent ordering of filters, validations, and associations at the top of the file prior to business logic. (Those could be externalized if they got realllly messy, via the magic of require.)4) Put partials into thematically coherent subdirectories. This saves you from having to find the right form partial from a directory with 20 views and 50 partials. |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | kvs: I maintain a codebase that is about 300KLOC C++ and about 900KLOC Java. Abstractions become important at this scale.We follow a simple MVC principle, C++ side is model, JNI-glue is control, and Java is view. Then, individual pieces are broken into functional modules and there is documentation on slides (flowcharts) on how these functional components interact.You should be able to let go and trust fellow developers. I don't know all of the code; There are four others who have their own pieces of functional modules that they are responsible for. I trust their judgement/decisions on their modules just like they trust mine-- we still question which is important.Rest of it sort of fall into place as we progress. Hope this helps. |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | peterhi: Well I've had a look at some of the project that are sitting on my hard disk (all are current by the way) and here is the Code LOC values for them: 50, 225, 261, 346, 402, 572, 857, 980, 1099, 1213, 1475, 1677, 1841, 2002, 2123, 2242, 2887, 3138, 3338, 3421, 3421, 7812, 7812, 46757, 57495The most used projects, used daily by our clients are in the 2000-4000 range, the smaller ones are supporting tools and the two massive ones are that way because the business rules are completely insane. Also they are quite old and could probably be trimmed down quite a bit.Some of the more actively developed code has been trimmed down through constant development, the two monsters do not get touched too often.Actually I'm quite surprised has to how small our core applications are, I would have guessed more in the 8000-12000 LOC. But then Ruby tends to be rather concise.What sort of numbers are you seeing? |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | rufius: If you can help refactoring into sub-folders, thats a small change that helps a lot. When I can, I break down components of my application as much as possible. In Java thats natural with the packages idiom. In C++ or C I just force it upon myself to do it.For example with the language/VM I've got built for doing some DSL work, I've got folders for the garbage collector (src/gc), the compiler (src/compiler), the runtime (src/runtime) and so on. I'm not entirely familiar with doing any sort of large-scale ruby development so I don't know how much that helps you (most of my ruby code are small 100-200 line all inclusive scripts).Hope that helps. |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | jsankey: First: you need good test coverage, so that you can refactor and restructure with confidence.Then, I would look into dividing up the code base a bit. Usually once you get to a certain size you'll be able to identify useful bits and pieces that could be extracted as standalone libraries. This will also render these more generic parts of your code ready to reuse.You might also find it useful to divide the application-specific parts into layers and ensure lower layers don't depend on higher ones. These types of divisions allow you to consider lower layers independently. And when you're hunting for something, you should have a feel for which layer it is in first, which narrows your search scope. |
Legal rights to University project? | gregparadee: That University wouldn't happen to start with a D would it? I know my university definitly says that anything you do while working on your Senior Project is technically theirs and makes you sign a waiver agreeing to it. However, you situation seems to be a little different if your saying you have some sort of agreement to not use their property to create it. |
Rate a StartUp Redanyway.com | sync: Typography on the homepage could be better... large font Arial just doesn't look good.Too many obvious photoshop bevels, especially on this page: http://www.redanyway.com/register.phpAll of the pages look different from each other. You need to get one consistent look and feel.Lose the registration process. Make someone register or connect with twitter/facebook in order to save something or send something.When I click about, I expect about the company, not about the team. |
Rate a StartUp Redanyway.com | bemmu: I don't really get it. So I can use the site to post my blog posts to it. Then what happens?... 5 minutes pass ...Okay, signed up. Now I get it. Pretty clever, actually. This allows you to follow people like on Twitter, except posting is done by just posting to your blog, which is polled by Redanyway. |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | known: I think your project's automated testing scripts are not keeping up with the development. |
Who else is attending the LeWeb conference? | bemmu: Might have, except had no idea this was taking place right now. Hmm... I wonder if there would be some way to subscribe to a list of events that someone or something thinks might interest me. |
Legal rights to University project? | Mankhool: I used to be a Manager at UNLV. I thought that Nevada was the only state that allowed IP to be retained by the individual instead of one's employer or school. In fact one of my staff created and patented 2 devices while working there. |
Legal rights to University project? | metachris: > and whatever I signed when I committed to coming to the University four years ago.I think this "education contract" could state that the university has the rights to use your generated IP. |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | TallGuyShort: As your codebase gets large, modularity becomes more important - so it might be time you refactor your code with greater size in mind.Another crucial aspect is unit tests - as long as you know the project well, you can go in and make a change relatively easily, as long as you know that a system of unit tests will catch any unintended side-effects. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | jmm: Agreed - pretty good implementation.But I wonder how sales in the higher price range (> $500 or so) are going. Historically, fine art pricing (especially as prices move out of the range of the casual shopper) has been very much tied to the identity of the artist. Am I going to pay $2000 for a painting from an artist that I know next to nothing about? And from a virtual gallery? Probably not.The brick and mortar gallery model relies on this kind reputation and identity. And even when an artist is unknown, the reputation of the gallery is shared with the artist.So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure about the consumer fundamentals here. Etsy's pool of sellers is quite different in that prices stay for the most part under a hundred bucks. With lower prices comes higher volume. And Etsy's model ($.20 per listing per four months) exploits that volume. Etsy also takes a percentage of the sale, which Zatista is doing.Sorry for a little ambivalence. |
Who else is attending the LeWeb conference? | chris100: Try this link: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/user/138148/(I'll let you figure out on your own why that particular link works so well) |
Simplest tool to build a web app | ErrantX: How long is a piece of string?Seriously though I would say PHP plus MySQL and Memcache for scaling. With a reasonably modern framework like Kohana PHP you can build stuff pretty quickly on dirt cheap, no brainer hardware. :)As to XSS/DOS etc. that is down to your code and to the server setup - somewhat difficult. |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | ErrantX: clicky link :)
http://www.effectgames.com |
Legal rights to University project? | jrockway: The University probably gets the copyright to your code.There are several ways around that. One is to link to a GPL'd project. Now they own the copyright, but they have to keep the source code available for others to use for any purpose. Including your business. (If in doubt, you can always do something like cut-n-paste Emacs' malloc, link in libreadline, etc.)Another option is to just rewrite the code. Copyright only covers verbatim redistribution of the literal program text, which is generally not too valuable. It is very easy to write a program a second time. Ideas and algorithms are not copyright-able, after all, nor is the experience in developing software you gained from writing it the first time. Those things are where the value is, and copyright does not protect them. (Software patents may, but the University will have to apply for one before that's even an issue. Then they will have to spend their own money to sue you, and then they will have to collect damages. Not going to happen unless you become the next Google, and if you do, you can afford to pay them off.OTOH, software patents are almost dead. So this might not be worth worrying about.)So anyway, to be extra safe, be open source, or just redo anything that you did with University resources. That is a lot faster than dealing with legal problems that may arise if you are successful.(Then again, most startups fail pretty quickly, so perhaps it's not really worth your time to "care" this time around.) |
Simplest tool to build a web app | digamber_kamat: You can try Kohana. |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | narendranag: It looks very interesting! |
Simplest tool to build a web app | narendranag: I've been using Codeigniter - a PHP framework. It's very very well documented -- you have to read the documentation to see how good it is. And the input class is very good at handling most XSS/SQL Injection type attacks. |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | peakpg: Looks interesting. Is this taking advantage (or do you plan to) of HTML 5? |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | truebosko: Do you plan to eventually use Canvas/SVG or do you find this way works better for the long term and overall? |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | intellectronica: One important thing to notice as a codebase gets large is that it's going to slow you down. Accept that, and pay more attention to maintaining a high quality codebase. Invest in reviews of new merges, refactoring of stale code and documentation. Automate as much as you can - make sure you can create good API docs, and that there are tools for working with the existing codebase. Finally, try to remove code as much as you can (refactoring, or simply deleting code you no longer use). |
How do you manage your codebase once it gets large? | audionerd: This video was pretty good -- "Living with legacy software": David from 37signals talks about how they refactored the Basecamp code as it grew:http://railsconfeurope.blip.tv/file/1555560/Breaking pieces out into modules (and even further into plugins) can help keep it manageable. |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | DanHulton: Huh. Very neat. I was actually kind of planning on messing about with Node.js and a javascript-only client to make a multiplayer game... |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | thechangelog: I tried Crystal Galaxy and it was amazingly smooth and felt native. Nice work. |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | e1ven: This is really wonderful! The games play quickly on Chrome, how well do they preform on IE?The Mario demo was great, and the Platformer demo really expanded on that to show it supports modern techniques.Just FYI, in Chrome, http://www.effectgames.com/effect/games/crystalgalaxy/ shows alert boxes complainigna bout unloaded resources.I didn't see it mentioned on the site, but what is your revenue model for this? Advertisements? Charge for the devtools?Do you deal with multiplayer at all yet?Best of luck with this project! |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | simplify: Looks great! absOrb is the only demo that doesn't load for me, os x / safari webkit nightly. Here's the console error: TypeError: Result of expression 'this.yH.gk' [null] is not an object.
engine-0.12b.js:52 |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | lpolovets: Looks awesome!Without necessarily being negative about Flash-based games, I think your homepage should clearly mention that users only need Javascript enabled. Seems like a very strong selling/marketing point for developers. |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | yannis: It worked very well for me in Chrome v 3.0.195.25. Impressed! Just a short observation, down the line you may wish that your pages are indexed by the search engines, by generating in js they will not. |
Rate a StartUp Zatista.com | Pete512: Thanks so much for the great feedback! Keep it coming (any and all honest feedback is welcomed).Pete Borowsky
Founder/CEO, Zatista |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | ericd: Awesome, I was thinking of doing a custom engine, since JS performance is reaching the point where it can compete with flash, and I have no desire to learn ActionScript. Big kudos for doing this and sharing it with everyone.Crystal Galaxy performs very well on Mac Chrome, and feels more responsive than any flash game I've encountered (though it sometimes stutters a bit on some of the explosions). |
Rate a StartUp Redanyway.com | vabmit: How will you make money with this site? I don't think using it is enough of a value add for people that you'll ever see the tremendous amount of traffic necessary these days to earn even a small amount of money from advertising. |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | jokergd: great system!we need to get rid of flash already and replace it with something that does not destroy resourceshow about the multiplayer aspects of games? have you any ideas about developing this?I am very interested in competitive games where we can play versus others in the same js style environment. |
Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine) | leej: congrats. one thing, though, license and usage pricing should be communicated clearly. |
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