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What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | benofsky: Objective-C and Cocoa, not new but my new favourite development environment. I love the documentation, in my opinion the best documentation of any language.I love the way Apple doesn't care what anyone else thinks about their language and has ridiculously verbose 40 character long method names to make code clearer.Love it! |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | grinnbearit: Currently working through Joe Armstrong's programming erlang. I'm interested in functional programming and concurrent programs and erlang seems to fit really well.I also find Clojure very cool :) |
Please review my DropZap web demo. It's written using GWT. | ericd: Awesome. I hit the level cap at least 3 times before coming back here. Please make the web version unlimited, I would like to play more and don't want to drag out my phone while I'm at my computer. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | emilis_info: Helma NG (Server-side JavaScript).Easy to get started, fast, stable, the community is helpful and it is easy to read their source code if you get stuck somewhere. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | ra: Cassandra. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | pavlov: XMPP, BOSH and the Strophe library (both the JavaScript and C incarnations).Earlier this year I got tasked with implementing a system which involved multiple mobile clients talking to a rendering server. The mobile devices had a fairly beefy browser (Nokia N900), so the client was clearly suitable to be delivered as a web app. On the server side, we already had a realtime graphics system I had written earlier, to which the web clients would need to talk over a bidirectional connection with near-realtime responsiveness.Being a C/desktop guy with little network experience, my first intuition was to do the simplest thing I knew how to handle: linking a small embeddable web server (e.g. libmicrohttpd) into the render server, and devising some cheesy custom application-specific protocol over HTTP.Luckily, my work partner is not as stuck in the 1990s as I am, and he suggested we use XMPP. I was sceptical at first (XML? A server written in Erlang? Do we really need to go there? I just want to tinker with my pointers...)He showed me some demos of realtime XMPP web apps built with Strophe.js, and I was rather impressed. Then we went over our system's client/server design and how it would map to XMPP, and I was sold.We ended up using many more XMPP features than I had initially imagined, including publish/subscribe and multi-user chat rooms. Had we gone with my original approach, these concepts would have been implemented in some haphazard way in the render server itself. Now the rendering system just talks to the XMPP server like any other client. It's stable, scalable and fast.Still, while BOSH in the browser is pretty amazing in practice, it does feel like a hack that's stretching the reasonable limits of what web apps should be doing over HTTP. Hopefully this time next year I'll be able to say that one of the best technologies I've worked with in 2010 was HTML 5 web sockets... |
Please review my DropZap web demo. It's written using GWT. | maxklein: I could not figure out what was happening in the first minute of playing it, so I closed the page. And I'm not too dumb, so I think about 70% of people will be the same.You need to explain better how the game works. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | csytan: Google Appengine:
Probably _the_ easiest platform to develop a webapp on if you use Python and are okay with its limitations.Tornado:
If you are going to develop on GAE, Tornado is the way to go. It is fast, well written, and only includes the core features needed for a web app.I can't highlight how much easier it has made things for me since switching from Django. Debugging Tornado's source code was a breath of fresh air compared to Django's monkey-patched bird's nest of dependencies. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | dantheman: E4X - ECHMAscript for XMLThis is in AS3, used in flex. It's a joy to process xml with it. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | paraschopra: Solr for super-easy full text searching and Memcache for a no-brainer distributed queue |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | ahlatimer: zsh - clearly not new, but I recently switched from bash to it. Spelling correction is very cool, and I like the tab completion a lot more.Rails - again, not new, but I've really enjoyed it. I've built web apps in COBOL (had to at my previous employer), so being able to work with Rails has been a joy in comparison. I actually started playing around with Rails last year, but I never really did anything with it until this year. I like Ruby, although I'm not entirely sure I like it more than Python yet. It's growing on me, though. I like that I can have a basic prototype up and running in basically no time at all. When I was learning it, it was also nice that I only really had to learn one piece at a time. I tried out Django shortly before I began using Rails, being more comfortable with Python, but I felt that the learning curve was a bit steeper with Django.Google Chrome - I'm not sure if this is the type of response you're after, but Chrome quickly supplanted Safari as my favorite browser. It's faster, the UI is slightly better, and my gripes are few and far between. |
anyone interested in forming a group to review each others' copy? | mkyc: Why waste 20 minutes of a professional developer's time, multiplied by the average number of reviewers, with a bonus for bad advice due to inexperience?You know those clients who think programming is easy? Writing and reviewing copy is hard. So is pretending that you're an unbiased fresh-minded user, in a group of novice reviewers.https://www.mturk.com/1) Tell me what you think the site is for. 2) Is this site attractive? 3) Try to perform task X, cancel before it asks for credit card info, and tell me what the most annoying thing was. 4) etc.Send them several sites to review, including yours and your competitors'. Save $200 or heaps of everyone's time. Or pay a professional. |
anyone interested in forming a group to review each others' copy? | pmichaud: It's interesting that you shut the previous community down. Why didn't you iterate? Force people to provide X feedback for others in order to get Y feedback for yourself? |
Review my App - Freeciv.net | roschdal: Thanks for the reviews from everyone. I'll use this to improve the game soon. |
Lesser known blogging apps? | ique: You want every feature of Wordpress, but you don't want Wordpress. Not once in the last 3 years have I had a plugin that didn't work with a newer version. I haven't had to "reinstall" it even once either. Maybe you just need to choose your plugins more wisely, or if you really care about the quality and security of your blog; write your own plugin.You're not adverse to switching platform entirely and if the comments here are to be followed, you don't mind rolling your own platform. But you can't write your own theme that's compatible with future versions?I'd say if you pay attention to the capabilities of Wordpress and actually use it as you're supposed to (I've not seen one major security vulnerability that affected the current version, someone can correct me if I'm wrong) you won't find a better fit for your requirements. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | kylebragger: redis - insanely fast - I've been using for some stuff at Cork'd
mongo - very excited by this one, too. not having to write ALTER TABLE statements is pretty great. |
anyone interested in forming a group to review each others' copy? | Mz: Probably part of the reason your community ended up the way it did is because it is a very common paradigm that there are a few people who are deemed "experts" and the rest are deemed "beggars". I've belonged to a number of lists where a few people were treated like they had all the answers and everyone else acted like they had nothing to contribute and were only there to get support, not give it. (This is similar to the school paradigm where the teacher and one or two bright kids are viewed as the only folks having answers. So most people readily adopt such a social assumption.)I have managed on some lists to reduce that tendency. One issue is that giving advice is "status-y" and often the people giving most of the advice try to hog status. One way they try to protect their turf is by vehemently arguing with anyone who puts forth a different point of view. This kills conversation and makes most people scared to speak up, especially if the owner/moderator is someone who happens to be doing this. One thing that helps reduce this tendency is a requirement to 1) cite your sources or 2) speak from first-hand experience. The second criteria means that saying "I think" and "I feel" and "In my experience/view" works better than saying "You should" or similar. This is hard when the express purpose of a forum is to give such feedback but keeping it from coming across as personal criticism makes a big difference.Another thing that helps is "greeting people at the door". Encourage new people to post an intro. Make sure you personally welcome them warmly no matter how boring, bland, and uninteresting their intro is. Set the example for others to follow in that regard.On one list I belonged to, introductions got replied to only if someone said something interesting and engaging enough to inspire commentary and discussion. I noticed that folks whose intro inspired conversation jumped right into discussion with both feet. People who got utterly ignored seemed to never post again. When I became moderator, I had two personal rules: 1) Greet everyone at the door and 2) Don't tolerate 'orphan' threads -- if no one said anything in reply to a thread, I would go back after a few days and reply even if I had no answers. Sometimes this did help get other replies. If it didn't, the person at least did not feel shunned. Within a week, the list went from cold and low traffic, to warm, lively and high traffic.Good luck with this. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | dchest: Grand Central Dispatch and C blocks. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | JeffJenkins: CouchDB was probably the most interesting since it had iterative map reduce, but I ended up abandoning it for MongoDB because it was much faster.The second best is Mako. A month or two ago I switched from using Django for templating to Mako. Depending on the composition of the pages there was a 2-6x speed improvement, the code got significantly cleaner since special tags/filters weren't needed for basic opertions like less-than or modulo. Also, the ease of creating custom tags in Mako made me more willing to create them and drastically reduced code complexity.The best technology I first used this year was jQuery. As someone who knew ECMAScript extremely well and JavaScript a bit it made me an order of magnitude more productive and made things possible that I would have been too frustrated to complete otherwise. It immediately seemed natural to work with the DOM using set operations. And it has tons of plugins which are just as easy to use. This is one of the best designed libraries I've ever used. I hope using it will act as an introduction to functional programming to people who might have otherwise been scared of it. |
What hosting do you use for personal projects? | ralphc: For my personal projects my main consideration was price, I found fsckvps.com. For $12.95 a month I get 512MB memory, 30GB disk and 400GB transfers a month. |
anyone interested in forming a group to review each others' copy? | nonrecursive: update: google group created: http://groups.google.com/group/writing-feedback |
What hosting do you use for personal projects? | ideamonk: Free Yahoo Developer Accelerators from Joyent, they apply same terms and conditions and AUP to free developer accounts as well as their customers - http://is.gd/5uR3IPCSmart Hosting is cheap at 4.95 pounds / month - http://is.gd/5uR4E unmanaged linux vps, pure bliss for the low price. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | sdave: in-house column oriented database,
source code generator for diameter protocol application..
et. al. |
What hosting do you use for personal projects? | Pistos2: I use WebbyNode as my main VPS provider, but over the years I've made enough friends on the Net as to be able to get shell accounts on several servers, as well. Add to that a machine at home which is used for less important stuff. |
What hosting do you use for personal projects? | Keyframe: I have a server at fdcservers and one at theplanet - both "unmetered" 100Mbps, no problems so far (I'm with theplanet for more than 5 years, since ev1) |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | lssndrdn: F#. I work in a primarily Microsoft-based environment, and I wanted to learn a functional language, so F# is a good choice for me - I can actually put it to use at my "day job".jQuery. A great javascript library. |
What hosting do you use for personal projects? | mark_l_watson: I prepayed for a 3 year reservation for a small Amazon EC2 instance and I am very happy with that decision because I frequently deploy customer projects to AWS, and any experience from my own projects is a big help.I also permanently rent a small VPS from RimuHosting. I like their customer service and their low costs.And, the elephant in the room is Google AppEngine. I have several deployed apps and an effective price of free is difficult to beat. Surprisingly (to me) I have had no customer interest in deploying to AppEngine. I have had ongoing problems using JRuby+Sinatra on AppEngine, but the Java support is fairly much hassle free. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | yummyfajitas: Rabbitmq (and AMQP in general). It's just simple, straightforward message passing.My C++ process creates a queue, and binds it to the key "yummyfajitastasks". My python process (a django webapp, in this case) sends messages with the key "yummyfajitastasks". My c++ process receives them, does work, sends messages back.Combine this with JSON or some serialization method and you've almost got erlang style messaging, except you can write part of your code in python, part in C++, part in ruby, etc. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | cmelbye: I've loved playing with Heroku and I'm excited to deploy my real project to it once we finish a stable version of it.I've also liked working with Rails, because it has made things like i18n, testing, and implementing new features so much easier.Finally, I've enjoyed using beanstalkd for my message queue. It's tiny and fast and it just stays out of the way. I'm using a new library I made called Peon (based off of an AMQP-based library called Minion) and it's a really easy, scalable way to bring long running tasks into the background. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | vyrotek: We started using Windows Azure with our latest project. The Message Queueing and Schemaless Storage are very cool. It completely changed my opinion of the 'Cloud'. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | koevet: - Play! Framework - finally something close to Rails productivity for Java developers. And supports Scala too.- Redis - the fastest NoSQL engine around. Easy and elegant.- Solr - Indexing for the masses. If it only had real time search... |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | chipsy: Software technology: I spent most of my time implementing my own tools and tech using haXe, Leo, wxPython, SQLite. haXe+Leo is an amazing combination for maintaining code.Not a software technology: http://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-49This thing is amazing, especially if you aren't already an experienced keyboardist; it makes all the note relationships easier to learn so you get to the "fun" part of playing faster. |
What hosting do you use for personal projects? | vlisivka: RackSpace Cloud ($10 per month for 256MB instance w/o traffic). RSC allows me to follow modern administration practice ( http://vlisivka.pp.ua/en/modern_administration ) even at my own private host. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | ronnier: -VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org)-ASP.NET MVC-Visual Studio 2010 |
anyone here moved from academia to corporate? | RiderOfGiraffes: Not sure it will help, but I had two three-year post-doc contracts. During the second I was doing external consultancy, and as my University contract was coming to an end, the company with whom I worked most closely offered me a job, which I took.After many mergers, split offs and other coporate movements, I (and some colleagues) did a management buyout, so now I (part) own the descendant.It's working well for me, but I think my position is a bit unusual.Still, if you want to get into the commercial world, see if you can do some external consultancy while still employed by the University. They will want a cut, but it will give you a taste of what's wanted, and what it's like. |
Please review my DropZap web demo. It's written using GWT. | andrewcooke: as everyone else is saying - this is pretty awesome, but you need to have some kind of auto mode running or something that shows people what it does. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | paulgb: Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Streaming. You just write a few lines of python (or your language of choice), upload your data, and it takes care of the rest. |
anyone here moved from academia to corporate? | dmd: I'm in exactly the same boat - finished my PhD in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, now a postdoc, also at Penn, and want out. Funnily enough I'm also looking at things like McKinsey and BCG, but they hire on a yearly basis only - as in, I couldn't even get an interview until September 2010, and they wouldn't be making a hiring decision until January 2011.I'd love to chat with you about this - send me an email to my username at 3e.org. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | macemoneta: Revisor (see: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=236679).The ability to create custom Linux spins and even full system software thumbdrives make drive failures / system recovery much less impacting. It also makes "ready to go" installations a snap. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | charlesju: Amazon EC2
Engine Yard's Flex
Ruby on Rails
Ruby |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | dyogenez: XMPP and Bosh with Strophe - hit a XMPP server with Javascript instead of a web server. Realtime Javascript Push on an established base (XMPP). Real cool stuff, just need something to use it on.Sinatra - Very fast/easy ruby framework. (Similar to Cherry.py in the Python world).Jquery - Can't imagine using any other framework after a year working with this.Facebook Connect - Much more robust than I thought possible due to things like FQL and FBML.Heroku - Super simple ruby hosting |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | dlevine: Rails and JQuery. It's amazing how quickly I can build rich, interactive applications. I can do with two or three lines of code what would require 20 just a few years ago.Also, GIT. Best source control hands down. |
Finding hackers with the entrepreneurial virus | nicholasreed: Just get out and start meeting people. The best way to expand your social circle and network with like-minded people is to just start going to as many events as you can. Recently I've been going to different biznik events as well as whatever entrepreneur events happen in Seattle. Most people in the startup scene are immensely helpful and if you just start asking, you're bound to find someone who knows someone you might be interested in working with, and will introduce you. |
anyone here moved from academia to corporate? | losethos: Take a stop watch, stop it, use the hundredths for picking a random word or phrase. Do it with nanoseconds. How can nerves do that? Isn't that, umm..., a little too fast for them? It's probably my superego, huh?Spirit says...
fashioned begannest perceivedst passage reckon baggage since
teaching comparing loads aware murmured dedicate protracted
notes modestly studiously forsakest powers wondrous Wherefore
sons fling lastly entireness transported talked effaces
experience begotten unpassable Let director dies consenting
puppies tempered Eating rashness addition toward electronically
everlastingly coats Canticles occasioned instant wandering
beware down preferred dwelleth slumber valuable txt embraced
rational hitherto exposed constituted standing sings deeds
commemorated severing reproves mislike Descend Rebuke |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | milestinsley: MongoDB has helped me rethink everything I thought I knew (and disliked) about DB's.Javascript. This year, the full potential (and diversity) of this language has truly revealed itself to me, especially with the maturing of frameworks like Cappuccino (which is a testament to what can be done with JS).Using Git is the first time I've properly been able to integrate source control into my workflow, without it being a pain!VPS (cloud hosting). Being able to spin up a server quickly and cheaply has really facilitated my ability to experiment and is highly conducive to learning about these new technologies.I think it's been a great year for innovation. 2010 should be pretty exciting too. New Years Resolution: explore server side Javascript (i.e node.js) and build something awesome with Rails! |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | hroman: Pylons, i love it because of its flexibility, I can use whatever I want in contrast to other frameworks w/o getting headaches (yes, I'm talking about you, Django).MongoDB and others NoSQL dbs, I don't have words to describe my feelings.Jquery, well, I began to use this framework in November I was a heavy Mootools user, but jquery is just amazing, it's so simple, I don't have to write things like "x.get('value')" (annoying!).These days I'm playing with Node.js which looks pretty amazing, in fact it's very possible I use it in a game I'm planning to do. |
Please review my DropZap web demo. It's written using GWT. | drhodes: For me, at first, the color and size had distinct significance. Instead of changing the size and color of the blocks, how about using one color and tuning down it's saturation, or transparency and keep the size the same. Or just change the size? Did you try this at first, was it too bland visually? Also, I thought it would be better too not have a row feed of blocks after every drop. Doing this would more clearly expose the mechanics. Presumably this wasn't feasible because trivial games could be played by stacking blocks in only one column. This expolit might be eschewed by introducing indestructible blocks, and may also allow arbitrary height of the board. I think the chain reaction effect is visually appealing, but takes away from game play. Past the second round of block removal, it's impossible (heh, well for this mortal) to definitively predict the consequences of a particular drop. Badda-bing-bang-bong and half the screen is cleared. When it doesn't work out so well the responsibility for failure can easily be ascribed to unfortunate randomness introduced by the row feed. It's a neat idea though, I hope it works out and that in 5 years I'm eating my words :] |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | xenophanes: the ipod touch. it's an awesome device. |
Advice or Resources on Revenue Sharing? | notauser: I have had a lot of experience in white label work from both the technical and commercial side. If you want a call to pick my brains about specifics you would be most welcome - email richard at the domain in my profile.If you can get cash up front. I can't stress how important that is.A common commercial model I'm used to is a per-user fee plus a percentage. Because that massively reduces your risk you can (and should) agree to a smaller percentage.No one ever wants 'just a re-skin'. It NEVER happens. Think hard about how many people you can afford to have sucked into the project.Be aware that you can't fully agree the scope up front. Make sure you lock down the agreed change process. Identify who is going to pay for changes.What happens if it's a success? Who pays for scaling? What changes would be on the table for phase 2? Are you trying to hand over maintenance, get bought, start up a white label business team to service this customer?What happens if it's a failure? Who makes the decision to terminate the project? Who covers the cost of shut down?You are clearly in a strong position here - it's an opportunity not a critical deal - so don't feel pressured to sign the wrong contract fast! And congratulations :-) |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | va_coder: I've been using Groovy and Grails to introduce dynamically typed, rapid development tech to a mostly Java only shop. In these scenarios Groovy really shines. |
Please review my DropZap web demo. It's written using GWT. | jazzychad: I have no idea how the block elimination logic works once they all start falling, but I don't care. I just want to play over and over. You will soon be earning my 99 cents. Kudos. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | DaniFong: My vote goes to Mathematica, which is probably both the best and worst technology I've used this year. Oy!A more one-sided review goes to Evernote :-) |
anyone here moved from academia to corporate? | DaniFong: Consider applying here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Wills_Neuroscience_Instit...They'll understand that the market is trouble, and Jeff Hawkens (and presumably many of his employees) have had one foot in both doors for a while. |
anyone here moved from academia to corporate? | michaeljung: Many good answers here already.What I can add is that having learned, worked or teached other parts of the corporate environment, say management, accounting, economics, entrepreneurship, public relations, which can be found in the corporate world will make the entry much more easier.Knowing something of the above will help you move faster and the hurdle 'to learn on the job' is not there. But still be able to apply insight of (say neuroscience) to your job.And consultancies aren't the only ones who are looking for outsiders to their business. Small companies and start-ups are much more open to people (IMHO) with a different profile but obviously in the last third part of the IQ spectrum. Smart people with a can do attitude are always an asset. |
a standard microblogging format? | abraham: Check out http://identi.ca/doc/openmublog |
Why aren't links clickable in the text of a submission? | mixmax: Probably because it would be an easy way to get links back to your site for SEO reasons. Google loves HN. Yes I know all links are nofollow, but I could imagine Google following them anyway. |
Why aren't links clickable in the text of a submission? | bdfh42: The text of a submission should be the title text of the article being submitted. This is unlikely to contain a link. thus the need to supply such functionality is just about zero.Editorialising the title of a submission is not encouraged at HN. |
More types of flagging? | mixmax: Have you considered downvotes for submissions? Maybe with a Karma threshold, so that it'll only be used to get irrelevant submissions off the front page. |
More types of flagging? | tptacek: This idea didn't work for Slashdot at all. |
More types of flagging? | swombat: The comment flags is a great idea - there's a good chance that it would cut down on "why am I being downvoted" types of posts, which would in turn reduce noise.Are you thinking of adding more flags to stories too? |
More types of flagging? | Tichy: I prefer to use my brain for absorbing news here, not for mastering popularity games. With more ranking options, HN would start to look like work. |
More types of flagging? | DanielBMarkham: I think this is a good idea and long overdue.Ideally the system will train new users. It has been difficult in the past for me to figure out exactly what downvotes meant.Over the last few months I'm seeing a rise in ad-hominem attacks. No matter what the subject of the article, technology, startups, history, whatever -- it seems like within minutes somebody has called the author's reputation or the news source into question. Sometimes the information is pertinent, but most always it's just an effort to look superior and/or take easy shots at people. If I remember correctly, we've even had posts about "check out my startup" where the founders were trashed, not to mention the nastiness with Dennis a while back.I don't think downvoting is sinking in with the people who are doing this. As much as most people don't understand ad-hominem attacks, it'd still be good to have that flag, because it's the same old discussion every time.EDIT: I meant Dustin, not Dennis. Sorry about that Dustin. |
More types of flagging? | m0th87: How about having tags, and then letting the community dynamically decide which ones are standard? I think this would work because the community is fairly observant of the rules. Plus you could shape behavior by suggesting certain tags when the user wants to add a new tag to a submission. On top of covering the use cases you detail, it would:1) Help with search if it is ever implemented2) Allow users to quickly disseminate the subject of articles on the front page without ever opening them (especially helpful for ambiguous titles)3) Maybe in the future allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe to certain tags if the front page starts getting too busy |
More types of flagging? | thorax: The only oddity for a feature like that is that it's a bit like "judging" their comment.I don't know how to explain it, but I'd almost rather the flag options be worded as "Sorry, this comment seems: uncivil" or "Sorry, this comment seems: off-topic" to lighten it a bit. If they were a friend in real life, I'd take them aside and say "hey man, that comment was great, but you might want to soften the tone. It kind of came across as rude."Downvotes end up being seen as judgments of your ideas, and I would love to be able to provide better feedback. This would be great if this could somehow give the user a nudge that they wouldn't feel defensive about.It may seem like a minor point, but I feel a little guidance would go a long way in helping users get the sort of social cues they already get in a real-life conversation.Edit: Instead of calling it out as flagging, I'd be okay with a downvote system that simply/optionally let you specify a reason to provide (with 3-4 common nicely-worded options). I don't care about upvote reasons at all. |
More types of flagging? | philwelch: If you're going to have flagging options on comments for uncivil or frivolous comments, you should probably raise the moderation floor to -1 or 0, because it doesn't seem fair to let people be downvoted below that point for disagreement alone. |
Favorite encrypted VPN provider? | pasbesoin: Get one that pushes everything over SSL / TLS / port 443. Other protocols / ports are often blocked in random and public settings. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | michaeljung: Certainly Google App Engine(Phyton). It is nice to have a small free version for experiments and own projects. Great way to get your hands dirty. AWS/Amazon has to do its homework and open up a sandbox type of platform where you can put your small project of your own at no cost, and opt-in that others can copy/improve.'Open' is the best way to innovate (small steps of improvement) on something.Zynga (the company and the concept) proved to be successful with enough leverage and network effects Facebook provided. |
More types of flagging? | scorxn: If public meta-commenting is the issue, and assuming the comment isn't an outright troll, it'd be nice to know who took issue with it, and be able to ask why privately. Hence, civil discourse as though we're face-to-face. Anonymous one-word stamps are no more sensitive than unexplained downvotes, and will give rise to the exact same questions. |
Advice or Resources on Revenue Sharing? | credo: One point to consider is whether this will be a one-off deal or whether this will be a good business model for your company.If you think that you'd like to work on getting more white label deals, I think that it will be worth it for you to spend a lot of times/resources on implementing this white-label deal. OTH if this is not going to be an important biusiness model for you, you may want to make sure you don't expend too much energy on a one-off deal. |
Please review my DropZap web demo. It's written using GWT. | fauigerzigerk: Hey, I love it! Brilliant game! It's simple but there's still something to figure out because you have to anticipate the cascading effects of squares getting eliminated.The explanation isn't good, but playing it reveals how it works anyway. |
More types of flagging? | gojomo: The number one kind of alternate flag I'd like is 'review headline' rather than 'kill'. There are many stories that would be OK, if they didn't have a misleading headline. |
More types of flagging? | gojomo: For handling individual comments, I think the better system would be to have two-dimensional comment rating. One dimension, upvote/downvote, is "valuable contribution/not-valuable contribution". A second dimension, agree/disagree, allows expressing support or dissent without the connotation of reward/censure that upvote/downvote has.Agree/disagree would only be tallied inline at the comment for reference -- there's no persistent reward for simply saying things many people agree with, nor penalty for saying unpopular things.Then, it's OK for downvotes to serve the role this "more flags" idea does. Downvotes then unambiguously mean: uncivil; frivolous; factually wrong; repetitive; unwanted. (And, moderators could focus on highly-downvoted comments as much as 'flags'.)(Previous comment, with more backlinks, on this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721853 )Another related idea: never show a comment at 'maximum negative' score to a person who hasn't yet voted. Show it as '-3' instead (no matter how many net downvotes it's received). Then, there's always a motivation for adding your own independent judgement. (Once they vote, the true-but-truncated-to-range score can be shown.)The poster could see the 'true' score, so they know if they've really touched a nerve. |
More types of flagging? | pavs: For the love of everything that is good, please either block techcrunch (very unlikely to happen) or put a hard cap on how many stories can be submitted within 24 hours from one domain (I suggest 2).Sometimes reading HN feels like reading TC rss feed. If I want to read every single story from TC I would have subscribed to their RSS feed. |
More types of flagging? | jmonegro: Replacing downvotes with a flagging system or similar might be a good idea: I've been noticing that people tend to downvote other users not because their comments are "uncivil" or "frivolous", but because they express an opinion different from theirs.I've seen many perfectly-civilized comments being downvoted, presumably, because they are controversial, though I have seen others that deserve downvotes because of their nature.The way I see it, replacing downvotes with a comment flagging system would probably reduce the amount rude comments because they'd probably be killed soon enough. However, it eliminates the penalty of being rude (a drop in karma), and some visible way of penalization must be put in place for it to be effective in deterring users from being rude. A work around might be that for every killed comment (due to numerous flags) a user gets -5 or -10 karma.Things would behave differently with posts, but these are just my first thoughts (when it comes to commenting). |
Lesser known blogging apps? | phinze: I recently found myself in a similar position, and found Jekyll ("a blog aware, static site generator") to meet my needs perfectly. Jekyll rejects the implicit assumption of most blogging software: that the solution requires a dynamic platform.When you approach the problem with that in mind, what you end up with is exactly the three things you are looking for, something that is inherently secure and low-maintenance, with a blogging workflow that is simplicity itself. vim _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-post.markdown
git commit -a -m 'new post'
git push
Project Page: http://github.com/mojombo/jekyllIntroductory Post by the Author: http://www.mojombo.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hacker.htm... |
More types of flagging? | maxklein: I think you should add this as an option, and only for the karmarific users. This way, less than 10% of the site would actually use this, and since these are likely to be the oldest and community invested users, the flagging would always lag behind the movement of the site userbase, leading to a stabilizing force in community feel. |
Favorite encrypted VPN provider? | jjguy: I pay $8/mo for a VPS and run OpenVPN [1]. There's a nicely-done OS X client [2], and OpenVPN will run on whatever port/protocol combination you need. You also get the benefit of a shell account on your own little corner of the internet, a lightweight server to toy with and full ssh access to play all sorts of games with ssh port forwarding [3].1 - http://openvpn.net/2 - http://viscosityvpn.com3 - http://www.ssh.com/support/documentation/online/ssh/admingui... |
More types of flagging? | whyme: How about allowing the primary post to have extra settings that affects what can/can't happen: Example: Min karma to post: 1000, Min Civility to post: -100 points.This way if the community sees a mob problem, the community can tweak the settings accordingly.
I'm sure you can come up a good algorithm to maintain a moving set of defaults.Also, maybe allow readers to filter posts based upon their threshold settings. |
How do you pitch a skunk-works project once the proof of concept works? | etm117: Unfortunately, every company has different politics that affects the answer to your question. Without knowing the politics of your company no one can properly answer. And even if we did, it would still probably be a "gut feeling" type of answer. So with that said...The way I would do it at my company (which has politics that could get you in trouble, even if what you did is better than what currently exists) then I would recommend starting with a trusted advisor. Do you have a friend inside the company who has been there for a long time that you trust? If so, approach them and ask them what they think. Having been there for a while, they probably would know the best approach and maybe could use their seniority and good will to pointing it out for you. |
How do you pitch a skunk-works project once the proof of concept works? | ratsbane: If in testing the system you used any data which may be interpreted as belonging to the company then be very, very careful. Hopefully you haven't, but if you have then you might want to delete all traces of that data before presenting it.If you're a contractor be very careful to document that you did none of the work on company time or equipment.If the company doesn't want anything to do with your project then they may prevent you doing anything else with it.If your friend is not associated with the company then you may want to introduce him as the author of the project. Ethically you can't conceal your beneficial interest in the project, e.g. if the company wants to buy it, but you might want to have someone not associated with the company be the point man. That may also make it more likely that you can reuse the project for something else.Your good work is probably going to make someone at the company look foolish and those people may make big problems for you. You really need to find some sympathetic and wise person with authority to champion it. And if it's a typical big corporation that's going to be hard.It's very unfortunate that large companies are not more receptive to what is essentially free R&D. What you've done shows an exemplary interest in going beyond the minimum requirements.I wrote this assuming that you're working for a large corporate machine but maybe that's not the case.Good luck! |
More types of flagging? | ScottWhigham: I'm likely to be of the lowest caste here but I think a single flag works for me. I tried to think of others and the only two logical ones I could think of were "Spam" and "Duplicate" for posts. I support you could flag comments but again I see two options: "Spam" or "Offensive".In any case - that is to say regardless of the reason it was flagged - I think it should be killed. Therefore one "flag" link and that's it. |
More types of flagging? | mrlebowski: Should down voting some one also negatively affect the down voter's karma? It will help restrict the number of down votes anyone will give.. |
More types of flagging? | mhb: Maybe this is the place to ask why, relatively frequently, there are comments which seem perfectly reasonable and inoffensive, that are dead. |
Books for writing a data-intensive Python webapp using CouchDB? | janl: Check this for CouchDB: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/ |
Please review Wordey - Remembrance dictionary | kalendae: really really loved the super simple interface. got what it did instantly and love the idea also. but i am not able to update my email, i keep putting it in but it's still 'none'.also i am personally not really trying to increase my vocabulary, can i use it to help like memorize/internalize just general ideas? for instance after reading something recently i want to memorize/internalize a few one liners. i tend to read things, really agree with it, but forget it after a while. or like if i do something stupid coding/process wise i wanna remember cuz after the pain fades sometimes i forget. do those things also work with the memorization algorithm? |
How do you pitch a skunk-works project once the proof of concept works? | SandB0x: Zed shaw talks at length about (roughly) this kind of thing in his talk "The ACL is Dead". Tbe video is at:http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/05/zed-shaw-the-acl-is-dead-cu...And there are summaries in the comments here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420650I wrote a few internal tools to automate various bits of drudgery at my last workplace. Nobody important wanted to know, but I and many other developers were saved hours of mindless work a week, and that makes me happy.Had I re-written one of our actual products, the important people would have cared - but not in a positive way - and the developers wouldn't have cared. |
More types of flagging? | gregwebs: I would like to be able flag a story as not a primary source/not the best source and give an alternative. Not sure if this will help the dicussions, but I think that a discussion tends to only get as good relative to the story. Often times the most helpful comments are ones which give alternative sources, so it might be good to think about supporting that. |
More types of flagging? | wglb: I would favor the addition of a rude/inappropriate/trollish vote that would be anonymous in addition to the current upvote/downvote. Perhaps those are three buttons that are downvotes in that category.This would add a useful dimension to the feedback.I find myself using the up/down arrow largely for "contributes to the discussion". There is an element of "I agree", but I frequently click up on a comment that I disagree with because it is well-reasoned or brings up a thoughtful angle that is new.To avoid the mob clicking of these new buttons, they could be shown only to the author of the comment, or very high karma individuals. |
More types of flagging? | breck: > Yeah, I've noticed a decline in the tone of comments too. The site seems to be getting nastier. I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here anymore.Could the community help monitor the general tone of the site? It seems like keeping things civil is a hard task for you and the top users.Could there be an automatic survey sent out each week or month to a random sample set of users to measure their overall satisfaction with the site and tone? It could even be just one question ("How would you rate the discourse on HN lately? Highly Civil, Civil, or Uncivil").That way there would be a good objective gauge to see trends in tone and to monitor the impact of any changes like flags.As the site continues to grow it gets more challenging to preserve the level of discussion. Having some long term measure of that might be helpful and make it easier to know when a new feature needs to be implemented. |
Which logo do you like better? Why? | glen: One was created by a friend with design skills. The other was created by a design professional with a portfolio of work for some pretty big companies (Chase, Polo etc.). |
Which logo do you like better? Why? | cmelbye: I like the lower one. The top one is too glossy/web 2.0. The bottom one is minimalist and stylish. |
Which logo do you like better? Why? | waterlesscloud: I like the 3 dot one. Better conveys the idea of "for everyone". Cleaner too. |
Which logo do you like better? Why? | aaronbrethorst: new one. much better. it's friendly. the old looks like it's filling up with water. too web 2.0'ish. |
Which logo do you like better? Why? | thejash: New (lower) one is way better. Does anyone like the other one? |
Which logo do you like better? Why? | onoj: I don't know about "professional" and depending on your ideal customer it is hard to say which is better for representing you but I think the new logo is a better "design". When looking at logos I think the following is important:
1) Are you proud of being represented by the logo
2) Who are you trying to appeal to - eg:walmart shoppers or Porsche buyers. |
More types of flagging? | gruseom: I hadn't noticed the site getting nastier (and since everyone seems to agree that it has, I'm now regretting a recent nasty comment!)Regarding flags on comments (not stories), I suspect it might have more of an impact to add just one new type rather than several at once. That would send a clear message about what we're all being asked to focus on. Along those lines, I'd say "uncivil" is more important than "frivolous". In my observation, over the last few months, HN users have gotten pretty good at using downvotes to regulate the merely frivolous.If someone's comment has been flagged as uncivil it might be helpful to inform them of this with a call to action such as "Please be more polite" and a link to a fuller explanation of what they are being asked to do. I'm quite sure that many (though not all) people just don't realize how their comment might come across.Perhaps comments flagged as uncivil could remain editable for a longer period. It's true that this would distort the history of conversations a bit, but maybe in a good way. If I find out that I made a comment that people found rude, I'd like the option (after my two editable hours have expired) of editing my comment for civility and having it marked as such. After all, if one is found "guilty" by a jury of one's peers, it's good to have a way to make amends in addition to the negative feedback. Besides, if people started noticing comments that had been "edited for civility", social proof might nudge their own behavior in that direction. |
How do you pitch a skunk-works project once the proof of concept works? | ramanujan: The fact that you are asking these questions indicates that the company you are working at is probably not a good place for innovation.You might think about quitting and spinning it out yourself. |
Do you have a "favorite" entrepreneur? Who? | breckinloggins: Mark Cuban. Grew up in my area, started a cool website in the 90's, got paid way too much for it, and then was smart enough to get his money out of that sector and buy a basketball team.... because he thought it would be fun and he could do it better. |
More types of flagging? | prakash: How about giving more people moderation access for a short time period, and then aggressively flagging/deleting a whole bunch of articles/comments. |
More types of flagging? | coffeemug: Gamedev.net has one of the most civil and informative forums on the internet. At some point they had a pretty mean spirited community too, and the owners pulled the site into one of the best sites on the internet. I spent a lot of time on these forums, and I think there are three main things that contribute to very high quality.- Non-threaded comments. I know this has been discussed to death, but I think the downside of threaded comments (fragmentation of the discussion and incentive for witty one-liners) far outweighs the benefit (having separate unrelated conversations). A non-threaded approach gives huge incentive to bring the community together into a single coherent conversation, gives the reader a great sense of a timeline (which gives further incentive to maintain an intelligent discussion), and discourages fragmentation of the discussion to a point where it isn't interesting to anyone anymore. I know this is a big change, but I would strongly encourage at least giving it a serious consideration - it can make a huge difference if done right.- Active topics - on sites like Hacker News and Reddit it's very easy to lose track of interesting discussions that are going on because top threads are tightly coupled with the top articles. We can have interesting discussions long after the article has left the front page, and an active topics page would go far towards encouraging intelligent interaction. Basically, every time an article is commented on, this article goes to the top of the list. This way I can see all active discussions at glance (including the ones I participated in), and continue interesting discussions, even though they're not on the front page.- User rating system (not article/comment system) - in real life, if I am usually a very interesting, intelligent person, and one day I suddenly act as a jerk, it can very seriously ruin my reputation. On gamedev people rate users, not comments and articles. So, I can give a user a rating - extremely helpful, helpful, not helpful, jerk. The karma is a combination of ratings for a given user, and the strength of a user's vote is proportional to his karma. So, if someone is a jerk one day, it can affect his karma far more significantly than simply downvoting his comment. In addition, jerks have less affect on the system overall. Rating people's comments never made sense to me - it always ends up signaling agreement or disagreement vs. usefulness. If people rate users instead of comments, this problem goes away always entirely, plus very strongly discourages aggressive behavior.I think these three things would help immensely to scale the community. These are big changes, but I think they're worth seriously thinking about. |
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