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What are you working on? | JangoSteve: Still working on http://www.RateMyStudentRental.com, trying to improve student rental housing one school at a time. |
What are you working on? | nick-dap: "Crowdsourcing" for grassroots activism: http://dreamact.info/ |
Who's the Best Domain Registrar? | jacquesm: This comes up with some regularity.I use 'moniker.com', I'm pretty happy with them but I only register my domains there, everything else is on my own servers, so if you go for hosted DNS and other goodies I can't tell you much.Moniker prides itself on never having lost a domain and their prices are pretty good.Previous experience would lead me to stay away from bulkregister/enom, godaddy and netsol. |
What are you working on? | williamallthing: I'm working on Sup, the email client for nerds. http://sup.rubyforge.org. |
Who's the Best Domain Registrar? | slapshot: Are you doing API-based or automated registrations? If so, check Tucows. The pricing isn't the best, but the API integration is good. |
Recommendation for book related to ethics and hacking/computers? | mbrubeck: Larry Lessig's books are especially strong on public policy. |
What was that programming language based on creating new grammar rules? | jdp: I think you might be looking for the Pi programming language: http://www.pi-programming.org/What.html |
What was that programming language based on creating new grammar rules? | mbrubeck: I've seen a few of these recently...My favorite, OMeta is a pattern/grammar-oriented language (and one of the most interesting papers I read last year). This comes from Alessandro Warth at VPRI, where Alan Kay and others are doing some really great research: http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/there's the Bondi language and its "pattern calculus": http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3695and the one that's most like you describe is π (Pi): http://www.pi-programming.org/What.html |
Who's the Best Domain Registrar? | dasil003: I like Dreamhost. I can stick unlimited small PHP or even Rails sites there for just $10/month, and their control panel is excellent. You can mask your domain ownership for free as well. $9.99 per domain is not the cheapest, but it's competitive, and I trust them more than any other top-25 volume web hosts. |
What are you working on? | Kaizen: I'm working on my browser-based game (kind of like Kingdom of Loathing, but with cavemen) at http://www.shinyrockhunter.com and a more business-focused product that needs a bit more work before it's a minimally-viable product. |
Please write the year or 'old' in non recent submissions | wycats: I'd prefer (2007) to (old) |
Who's the Best Domain Registrar? | DanBlake: Ive spent alot of time in this field and can give you a perfect answer:Serious domainer (buying + selling domains for a living): Moniker or Fabulous.com - Both are designed to handle mass updating of domains easy and for optimal parking. Monikers support is 9-5 and fabulous is invite only. Both are still fantastic.Everyone else: Name.com :Why name.com? Outstanding support staff, Free privacy, Low prices, Great reputation in domaining community. Outstanding security.You are right to not use godaddy. They are pure evil, see godaddysucks.com for more proof. I recently moved all my domains off of them just to be safe.Also, do not use a domain registrar thats tied to a host ( dreamhost or otherwise ) - While they may be a good HOST, they can not simply compare to a dedicated registrar. I do believe they are nothing more than opensrs resellers anyways so their involvement is limited and should you have a problem, prepare to jump through quite a few hoops. |
What are you working on? | SAHChandler: I'm currently working on a build system. I'm effectively scratching an itch. It's my first serious project, where I actually plan to use it on a regular basis. You can find the repo at http://github.com/sahchandler/buildit :) |
What are you working on? | covercash: Last month my mom emailed me asking if I knew of any new/good places she could take her friend to eat in Philadelphia. I went on Yelp and found a few suggestions for her. Had my mom known about Yelp, she could have done that herself. I went over the next day and showed her Yelp and now she uses it every time she wants to go out to eat.I'm tired of my mom treating technology like it's a chore so I'm working on something that will introduce her to new tech that can really make a difference in her every day life. Like most of you, I'm immersed in the latest and greatest technology every day but she's too intimidated and too busy to discover it herself. I find that once I get her past those two bumps in the road, she actually enjoys the benefits of whatever it is I introduced her to.Right now I'm compiling a list of awesome sites, services, gadgets, etc. that I think my mom would actually like and benefit from... if she only knew they existed.Then I'll send her a weekly email with a 2-5 minute video showing basic use of a new piece of technology and explaining how it can benefit her.My gift to my mom. |
Should I trust online password management services like passpack.com? | niyazpk: From their website:Your data is encrypted on-the-fly before leaving your browser. Passpack uses the AES-256 encryption algorithm...only you can decrypt it with your secret Packing Key.If the technology works as they say, it is secure. Now the problem becomes how to verify whether it works as they say. It is almost impossible to verify claims like these. Theoretically, they can read your password anytime they want just by modifying the JavaScript (or whatever they are using ) and you will never know.Personally I would not trust them with my really passwords. |
Should I trust online password management services like passpack.com? | swolchok: They can grab all your passwords, because you're going to type them into their service, and because it's a web service, they can switch the implementation as they please. If it's implemented as they seem to imply (server just sends you an AES-crypted blob of passwords, JavaScript AES implementation decrypts the blob client-side using the packing key), then what happens if the bad guys root them and "enhance" their JavaScript to send the packing key back to the server?I think that you are going to have to trust such a service with your plaintext passwords, because you need to recover the plaintext passwords from it. The problem is aggravated by it being a web service whose implementation can be switched at any time. |
Should I trust online password management services like passpack.com? | sebastian: I been using 1password for a couple months and I love it. |
What are you working on? | ErikDeBruijn: Assembing the parts for an open source 3D printer, which were 3D printed on an open source 3D printer.
See RepRap.org for general info and www.erikdebruijn.nl for my blog. |
What are you working on? | daveungerer: http://www.simplepay.co.zaOnline payroll system for South Africa. It's my startup. Just launched a while ago. How's it going? Got a few trail users. Busy climbing the search engine rankings. |
Clojure as a first progamming language? | lkuty: This is a good idea I think. I would consider learning Java, the basics, with Clojure. At the same time because you will have to regularly make use of the huge Java library. So it's a good idea to know about classes, objects, basic syntax and primitive types.
Of course you will put the focus on Clojure. I also recommend SICP and Scheme. Scheme, in its R5RS form, is a really good pedagogical programming language. I learned it at school and it was a really good experience. One that forever changes the way you think about programming. But I didn't get that at the time, only later :)
You can do the SICP exercises with Clojure instead of Scheme.
I would avoid digging into C++ or Common Lisp now. Those are quite complex. Keep CL for later, and forget about C++ :)
Next get deeper into Java and start to learn a "scripting" language like Ruby, Python or Perl.
All in all, I think it is really important to grasp different programming paradigms: functional (Lisp, Haskell, ML, Erlang, ...), logic with Prolog, procedural/OO with Java (can get you a job :-), distributed (Erlang) ...
There are a lot of other interesting languages out there but it is a good start: Clojure + Java. |
Who's the Best Domain Registrar? | covercash: Here are some relevant links:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150561http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=708640http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186369http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963838 |
Should I trust online password management services like passpack.com? | cjg: I use KeePass on a memory stick. When I need a password I can just plug it into whichever computer I happen to be using. |
Celestial Mechanics Book Recommendations | RiderOfGiraffes: I would suggest you start with WikiPedia.Main page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoonRelationship with Earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth-Moon.PNGDetails of the orbit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_MoonRelevant terms and parameters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Orbit1.svgThen decide what you want to know next.And while I applaud your interest and enthusiasm, why didn't you simply use Google to get started?http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+moonhttp://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+moon+orbit |
What are you working on? | talkeinan: http://www.headup.com - connecting users with great content as they browse. |
Who's the Best Domain Registrar? | gasyoun: fatcow is ok for me for the last 5 years I use them for my blog |
What are you working on? | paulsingh: http://www.snailpad.com - snail mail for small business and freelancers. I'm hoping to find a way to meet someone from MailChimp, Aweber or other places to see if they'd be interested in integrating. |
Get in touch with low latency people from Sun, IBM or RedHat? | cperciva: We have a Java application that trades in the financial markets. Latency is important to us; we are continually trying to improve latency, increase throughput and reduce jitter.Seriously? You want low latency but you're using Java?If you want low latency, you really want to avoid anything which does garbage collection. |
Get in touch with low latency people from Sun, IBM or RedHat? | jacquesm: Have you ever tried running your low-latency stuff on an environment more real-time oriented ?C on QnX would come to mind a long time before I would start to make anything with those requirements in Java on top of a JVM on a 'regular' (non-hard real time) unix.There are simply too many layers on top of each other to be able to make any hard predictions about worst case latency.I think you picked the wrong tool for the job, and no expert outsider is going to be able to undo the consequences of that decision. You are looking at a fundamental flaw here.On a side note, I do hope that you have at least configured your garbage collector to work incrementally, that will decrease overall performance but it will significantly improve your worst case. |
Should I trust online password management services like passpack.com? | Vandy_Travis: Ignoring the concerns about AES256 cyphers for this response...The site that I use for my passwords is called Clipperz. (www.clipperz.com/beta). They encrypt everything in JS like the others, but they've fully released their source code for inspection. I know JS, and it looks legit, although I can't speak to their encryption technique (although they did everything else so well, I use that as a proxy for their competence).The other cool thing is that they allow you to download an html/js/css file so you can open your passwords even when offline (big file, 1.5MB or so, but handy to keep your encrypted passwords around offline). |
What CRM/PM/DM/TT application do you use? | blender: Since I didn't get many replies I would suggest that an opportunity exists for someone out there to build this and disrupt the market :-)The hard part will be differentiating yourself in a very noisy market - but products that deliver value always find a way.Cheers |
Review my startup - YakGroups | cadwag: Clickable link: http://www.yakgroups.com |
What do you do for health insurance? | mbrubeck: The ACM has some group insurance plans for members: http://www.acm.org/membership/insuranceI haven't used them myself, so I don't know how they compare to plans offered to employers, or to individual plans. |
Get in touch with low latency people from Sun, IBM or RedHat? | wglb: It may be that they don't want to tell you that jvm is not adequate for the task. For something that is true low latency, you will be competing against outfits that hack the OS, tune their carefully hand-crafted C code, rewrite libraries for performance, possibly diving into assembler at some point, and measure the length of the network cables.Pick a target latency for a round trip, then figure out what your budget is for network travel, decoding the message, performing your logic, and sending the response.There are different categories of "real-time", and even different degrees of hard real time. You are in competition with folk who understand all the nuances of what that means. |
What do you do for health insurance? | ca98am79: I use ehealthinsurance.com |
Get in touch with low latency people from Sun, IBM or RedHat? | bensummers: Regarding Sun, join Sun Startup Essentials in your area and talk to them. Access to technical help, for free, is one of the "selling points" of the scheme.http://www.sun.com/startupessentials/Get in there before Oracle cancel it. :-) |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | mixmax: I would say absolutely not.Submissions should be voted up based on their own merits, not on how many friends you happen to have on HN to help you. This, as far as I know, is an ongoing problem at sites like Digg where it is reportedly almost impossible to get on the frontpage without being a member of some kind of voting ring, or having the right connections.I hope we're above that. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | icey: I've mentioned this a few times before, but I really wish votes here were public information. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | angelbob: Seems like a bad idea to encourage such things. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | adityakothadiya: Ideally it's not. But I've seen all YC alumni and founders upvote all other YC company related posts within very short amount of time. Just add (YC Year) in subject line, and it gets an upvote from other YC fellow.I guess everything is fair in love, war and marketing (your startup or you). :) |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | Perceval: This kind of behavior is exactly what made Digg the useless oligarchy of content promotion that it is.I think asking other people to vote your favored story to the front page is really an exercise in egotism, and it kinda misses the point. If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit.If other people aren't interested, why would one force it to the front page? For what? So that people can see it and skip over it and not discuss it and wish something more interesting were on the front page?I hope it doesn't come to the same measures that Digg tried (and mostly failed) to implement, with algorithmic detection of rigged voting and banning of people doing scripted submissions and votes. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | sophacles: I've done some experiments, it seems to me that the first vote is critical, and that it should occur w/in 10 - 20 minutes of posting a story. Otherwise the story just won't get noticed. I've seen this with submissions many time, and in fact have intentionally voted up a "worse" version of a story to test this. Turns out the upvoted version gains the momentum most of the time, even when the other story is better written or has more detail, or whatever.Now whether or not it is ethical is different, but it seems to me that this general behaviour of how stories go would suggest a single "friend vote" at the right time carries more weight than having friends cheat anyway. So the question becomes: if I post something to HN, then link a friend to my HN posting, instead of a direct link, is it ethical since I know he will probably vote up the HN post.Edit: another question that arrises... many of my freinds and I link each other constantly in private communications, does moving part of this to HN constitute an ethical dilemma since there is now voting and a larger audience invovled? Part of me says no, as those articles are interesting to us anyway, hence the linking, and the upvote is just a formalization of that... |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | alain94040: We all agree that merit should be the ultimate judge. And I have experienced it myself: great posts I submit will rise on their own, not so good ones will linger.However: without the initial boost of making it to the home page, great posts tend to die off and don't even get a chance to win on merit.Some data to confirm my point: my submissions typically either get 1 vote (mine), no matter how good they are, or get from 10 to 30 votes, based on their merit. There is no middle ground.So I find it a little bit naive to believe that merit alone will win the day. On the other hand, as everyone else said, I don't want HN to turn into guild of ringers... |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | rms: If you're going to do it, there's a big difference between giving a story 1 or 2 extra points and 5 or 10. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | axod: I've seen it happen...The other 'quirk' which makes it a little worse, is that if someone submits something, and just asks a couple of friends to upvote it immediately, it pretty much goes to #1.Maybe the ranking algorithm should have some protection against that.I think really, articles should rise and fall on their own merits, but I don't think there's any reason not to tell friends about a cool submission. They should then use their judgement as to if they upvote it. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | blhack: I'd say that for HN, absolutely not.One of the problems that I have with most moderation systems (reddit, digg, HN, etc.) is that everybody has got unlimited mod-power.I can only speak for myself, but when I get slashdot moderator points, I make sure that I use them correctly; it feels like a privilege to get them.Now, I don't think that that is the best way of doing things, but I think it is good.The way I did it on my website (which is small, so I haven't really gotten to see if it works or not) is that you have to earn your mod points by submitting things and then having others upvote them. Points also expire after 24 hours. To me, encouraging your friends to upvote your stories is okay with my mod system because if they upvote on thing, it means that they can't upvote another.I guess what I'm saying is yes, it is bad...but only because you don't lose anything by upvoting something. If mod points were limited, I don't see a problem with it, at least not as much of a problem...it would be a bit like encouraging your friends to use a product that you make, but still charging them for it.(my website is: http://www.gibsonandlily.com if you want to see the mod-system I'm talking about). |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | jacquesm: This is all in response to this exchange:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035080 |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | kyro: Yes and no. Yes in that submissions do not rise solely based on their quality and merits. But no in that I have seen many many submissions, specifically Ask HNs, fall right through the 'new' page without an upvote. So I'll upvote them after reading the title, and not clicking through. If it's something I can help them out with, then I'll click through; if not, I upvote in hopes of someone else answering. I'll admit, I've asked many times for an Ask HN of mine to be upvoted because it seems that only when it hits the front page do people come of out of the woodwork.For some reason, many more submissions are slipping through the cracks. I don't know if it's the algorithm that needs to be tweaked again or what. Stories will skyrocket to 150+ points while others are left unnoticed. I'm getting sick of seeing the same story on the front page for 2 consecutive days while Ask HNs and other interesting submissions are falling through on an hourly basis. That's why I'm ok with asking friends for upvotes. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | mcantor: I'm surprised that there are no voting systems which simply detect cliques, and make your votes weaker when you're voting for someone in your clique.That is, the more you vote for someone's submissions, the less "power" your votes have when voting on them. As long as you balanced it correctly, you would maintain the theme of compelling submissions hitting the front page while removing clique-based vote problems.If someone is so awesome that everyone upvotes every single submission they have, and are thus part of their "clique," it still wouldn't be a problem, because there would be enough people upvoting their submissions to counteract the juice being removed from their individual votes. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | prodigal_erik: In an attention economy, this is shoplifting. An upvote should mean "I genuinely think this is interesting and worth reading". If I can manipulate you into upvoting for any other reason, that's scarcely better than cracking your account and pushing the button myself.I want "how marketing works" to remain on topic here, but why must that always attract the unscrupulous? |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | scott_s: Asking your friends to look at something you posted is fair and expected. They will do so because they're your friends. But then further leveraging your social standing with them and explicitly asking for a vote is, I think, detrimental to HN. |
Should I trust online password management services like passpack.com? | ScottWhigham: Egads that is crazy to me. What happens when/if they go down for several hours/days? What happens when their web host gets knocked offline? What happens when they get DDOSed? What happens when/if they get acquired?Wow - I can't imagine using a web company of individuals I know nothing about to store something so important.And besides, I wouldn't post what password solution I use on the internet anyway. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | JoelMcCracken: How about a page that shows posts that are "about to die"?Or, even, the ability to resubmit/revise one of your own almost dead posts? |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | axod: Also, related question - is asking your friends to flag a 'flaggable' article ok. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | ankeshk: Ideally should not be done. But disclosure: I've done it before. And I've done it before because the first 10 minutes of submission seem to be very very important for the life of the submission.Ideally: it would be awesome if we could hide the entries we've already read from the front page. And these entries are replaced by "new" entries. This would give the new entries a fair chance - and people wouldn't resort to gaming the system.Also - giving points to people to visit the new page is a good idea. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | ivankirigin: Yes. But don't be annoying about it.A nice way to do it is to link to hacker news to comment. If they upvote, good. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | rjurney: Most of my high up-vote links were seeded with my friends, and on twitter. Its not necessary to ask for votes, they just happen. The first few friend votes got the thing to the main page, after that they took off.If its JUST friends, it doesn't stay on the main page. The algorithm works. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | petercooper: I've trawled /new a bit (though only once every couple of weeks or so) and seen some good stuff that deserves to make the front page but only gets a few votes - usually due to the time of submission or a crappy title. I wonder if there's a way to get "around" that problem without resorting to bloc voting. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | nishantmodak: I never care about who posed it. If I like it, I recommend fellow HNers by upvoting it (the content, not the author) |
What are you working on? | mschaecher: I moved back home and I am working 60 hours a week of manual, back breaking labor :( Saving money to move to the SF Bay Area this spring :) |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | jrockway: People will read whatever is on the front page, regardless of interest. If you want eyeballs, which almost everyone does, ensuring that you get on the front page is an effective way of getting them. Getting your friends to upvote your article is a good way to do this.Saying it's unethical is not going to change anything. It's a social news site, not some place where imaginary ethics matter. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | ErrantX: Define friends: do you mean HN users or just randoms? CLearly the last is unethical and the first should be discouraged.With that said I don't see anything wrong with either going to your HN friends and saying "hey check this out and see what you think". It might well amount to the same thing but I feel it is the right side of the communities "eithics" [on the assumption that said HN friends are community spirited enough to judge the post on merit] :)----On a related anecdote; this is how I joined the community here. A friend asked me to vote up his "here's my new site" post (actually to be accurate and fair to him he asked a group of us if anyone had a HN account to add an upvote). Anyway I created an account and upvoted... and then hung around.I like to think I'm a net gain to the community :) (certainly it has been good for me personally) so perhaps this issue is not wholly cut and dried! :) |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | jedwhite: I suspect most users (seeking interesting content) infrequently look at "new", and mostly stick to the front page.Items already on the front page get voted up more because they are already on the front page.The only stories that get on to the front page with the current algorithm are those that get a handful of votes very quickly (within first 10-20 mins).Therefore, the story selection for the front page becomes a self-reinforcing loop. The combination of the algorithm prioritizing stories that get a few votes quickly, and the fact that new stories get reduced exposure, means, I think, that it's often random whether a story makes the front. Once it does, if it's interesting it will stay there and get a lot of votes (so that works) and if it's not it will drop off again quickly.So the system is good at ranking stories that are already on the front page and keeping them there longer, but I think fails at selecting the best new content submitted. I often notice great items dropping off new that never got any votes or comments while there are less interesting ones that made the front.Without wanting to suggest damaging the simplicity that makes it such a great site for surfacing interesting stuff, maybe there could be a sidebar or secondary area on the front page with a simple headline list of the lastest new submissions separate to the "hot" items, so that all users see what's coming in, rather than the subset who consciously go to "new" to look for new stuff to vote for.Be interesting to know what the traffic difference is between the front page and "new" - that would determine if my theory had any merit. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | alex_c: I have occasionally done this, for stories that are of personal importance to me. I won't argue that it's absolutely justified, but there are a few reasons I can still sleep at night after doing it:1) I love the HN community, and would never do it for a post that I don't think is of interest (for that matter, I wouldn't submit something that I don't think would be of interest in the first place, so maybe that cancels out).2) It's never been more than about 2 votes, beyond which it floats or sinks on its own merits. Yes, it can be argued that a story floats or sinks on its own merits to start with, but there IS an element of luck - the 'new' page moves pretty quickly now. If a story is only "worth" 20 votes in its lifetime, what are the odds that one of those votes will happen when it's sitting on the new page at 1 vote? Asking for an initial boost doesn't put a story on the front page anymore, but it does guarantee that the community passes an actual judgement on it.3) I don't abuse it (by my own definition of 'abuse' - whose else would I use?). I don't do it more than once or twice a year, and it's never for ego, karma, traffic to my blog, etc. It's for something that is personally important to me, and potentially useful to at least some members of the community.There IS one thing that bothers me:1) It can too easily be a slippery slope. "Just this once" or "just a bit" can too easily turn into "well, everyone's doing it", to the obvious detriment of the site.Overall, I see it as asking a friend for a selfish favor. If it's done too often, or without giving anything in return, or without regard for the cost to the friend, then it's a problem. If it's done judiciously - give and take - it can be the basis for a stronger relationship. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | tokenadult: Many of the interesting problems mentioned here can be alleviated in large part if a large part of the veteran participants here browse the new submissionshttp://news.ycombinator.com/newsand upvote those that most contribute to the HN community's interests, as defined by the guidelines.http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htmlI'm sure some people ask for upvoting help from their friends, but I'm sure I don't, and most of the time I think I get a fair response from the (unknown to me) group of participants who either upvote or pass by my submissions. Random issues like at what time of day in what time zone I post probably make a difference, but I mostly don't worry about that. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | gyardley: I'd love to see Hacker News release who upvoted what, when - 'anonymized' if necessary (although I'm skeptical whether anonymization with a unique ID would truly be anonymous). The quantitative among us could mine the data for interesting things and vote-rigging would be exposed.Any reason why this data couldn't be made public? There's an implicit social contract here - you don't expect the private to suddenly become public - but if that's a concern, we could get around this by just exposing the data from a publicly-announced point in the future. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | pg: There's a fuzzy line. I think it's ok (or at least undetectable) if the voters are genuine HN users. There are limits to what they'll upvote, unless they genuinely like it. Whereas it's not ok to email a bunch of people and tell them to create HN accounts for the purpose of upvoting your post; that's basically sockpuppets by proxy. The threshold is somewhere between these two cases.There is a lot of code for detecting voting rings, and it itself embodies varying levels of punishment (ranging from votes not affecting the position on the page, to votes not affecting the score, to the post getting flagged to be killed) depending on how abusive a vote seems. So far things seem to be under control, probably because the way I decide when to add more countermeasures is when I notice lame posts doing suspiciously well on the frontpage. |
Y Combinator-esque program in Chicago | pg: The first YC clone of all was in Chicago, actually. I think it's called Illinois Ventures 10. I'm not sure if it's still running. The site is still up:http://www.iventures10.com/ |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | johnthedebs: For one of the (few) stories I've submitted, I asked friends to take a look and upvote the story if they found it interesting - not all of them did.I felt that approach was okay because I routinely recommend my friends to stuff I find interesting and, since I posted the story here, I obviously thought it was interesting.The votes I got were still based on merit, though, even if I did generate a little bit of extra attention trying to get those votes.That said, this is a really hard problem because it goes against the way humans operate. We learn to trust or distrust certain sources and that affects the way we view information we get from them - it simply takes too much time to evaluate the trustworthiness of everything we encounter.I don't have any specific suggestions (although I'll be thinking about it), but maybe a system that operated with that in mind would have better success even as it grew in popularity. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | koepked: I don't like the idea of doing this, but as others have pointed out, there are many many submissions that never make the front page, and in many cases I don't believe it's because they lack merit. I've seen times where the same information was posted several times before one of the submissions hit the front page. I've attempted submissions about 3-5 times, and pretty much gave up on submitting after watching those submissions fall from the front page of the new threads in a matter of about an hour. It very well could be that the quality wasn't there in what I tried to submit, but, like others have said, a lot slips through the cracks until it hits the front page. |
Celestial Mechanics Book Recommendations | route66: To develop terminology and understanding of the physical/mathematical problems you could look into the books of Jean Meeus. "Astronomical Algorithms" contains, ...well, exactly that: small recipes to solve problems in positional astronomy or calculate ephemerides. Check Willman Bell publishers for the english version of his books.I liked "Celestial Mechanics" by Laurence Taff, but it's calculus-heavy which is nice if you're interested in the mathematical background and want to see some practical calculation examples.Somewhere in the middle between these books is "Astronomical Methods and Calculations" by Acker and Jaschek. The exercises and solutions in this book come very close to the example you give.Apologies for not putting links to the books but just google for author/title. Or check your local library. |
Y Combinator-esque program in Chicago | asp742: I know some angels in Chicago that are interested in starting an incubator program focusing on translational medicine startups. They have contacts and experience on the regulatory/testing end. Not sure what market you are specifically interested in, but feel free to email me. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | aplusbi: Anytime a friend of mine has asked me to upvote something (usually on digg) I've read the article first and, if I liked it, I upvoted it. Most of the time I liked it and most of the time I would not have read it if they hadn't asked me to. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | azharcs: I would say posting and getting upvoted on HN should be like a litmus test for the blog posts, write good blogposts, put your effort into it and post it on HN to see if people like it or upvote it. If they don't, get back to work and improve your writing or style enough to get upvoted by itself (not by rigging). By asking your friends to upvote your posts (which I am assuming are not good because if they were, you wouldn't need your friends) you might be able to get couple of thousand views to your website, make couple of dollars in advertising money and then maybe some discussion too, but you wouldn't learn failure and improvement. So all I can say is, treat your posts like litmus test and improve enough that they can't ignore you.Be so Good, They can't Ignore you - Steve Martin |
What are you working on? | blownd: My first Mac app: http://www.windowflow.com - it gives you keyboard shortcuts for moving, resizing and tiling app windows. I'm getting ready for a big new release today so if you try and it and it's not quite right for you, give it another go later. |
What would you build with real-time data | mrduncan: A very similar question was posed a few days ago with some pretty interesting replies - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015079 |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | anonjon: Why can't it be weighted so that if one person up votes the same person all of the time, the up votes start to count for less.Or if one person up votes more in general his up votes count for less.Could be the same with down votes as well.Would be a pretty easy system and would keep people from spamming up votes. Maybe people would choose a bit more wisely about who it is that they give points to. |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | j_baker: I think the deciding factor is this: are your friends voting you up because your post was good or because they're your friends? I think there's only a problem if it's the latter. |
What would YOU do with a massive amount of computing power? | icefox: Work on finding algorithms for the longest path (aka critical path) in cyclic directed graphs. The general case is NP, but what algorithms can you come up with for specific graphs? How much could you brute force with a massive computing power?Edit: been working on this on and off for the past few years. A very fun problem.Also recommendation algorithms are another fun problem that you want to toss hardware at. |
Good recruiter/job agency in NYC? | vaksel: best depends on you...do you want someone who can get you into Goldman Sachs? Or someone who has inside connections to a bunch of smaller banks? Or someone who can get you into some tech companies?All of those are different people, so you need to be more specific about what you are looking for. |
Feedback and beta test my startup, SocialBlaze | adityakothadiya: Clickable - http://www.socialblazeapp.com |
What would YOU do with a massive amount of computing power? | keefe: my neural networks, I train them....... depending on how much time I had with it, I'd work on additional networks maybe something on stock data |
Feedback and beta test my startup, SocialBlaze | pgbovine: minor nitpick - you probably want to change the HTML title to something other than "Home Page" |
Feedback and beta test my startup, SocialBlaze | hikari17: I've signed up for postling, which offers some similar features, but it hasn't really "wowed" me yet. Your service sounds a little more ambitious in some ways... and it hits a particular pain point of mine (managing Facebook pages). I filled out your form, but forgot to explicitly express interest in being a beta tester... please count me in. |
Feedback and beta test my startup, SocialBlaze | tcc619: less text on the landing page! |
Get in touch with low latency people from Sun, IBM or RedHat? | bgurupra: I don't find rtteam@us.ibm.com on either IBM internal or external sites - what page did you get that id from?I can try to see if I can lookup somebody's relevant id |
Feedback and beta test my startup, SocialBlaze | rrikhy: Any reason why you guys haven't secured the socialblaze.com url? |
am I too old to learn the guitar/music? | shaunxcode: hell no you're not! And if you are a programmer/math inclined you will probably actually do really well once you get a few fundamentals down and start to see the patterns/logic in the tuning. (learn to play a power chord and then realize that the same finger pattern applies all the way down the fret board for the first two top strings and you're on your way to writing some ramones-esque songs!)For the record I am a drummer but I understand guitar well enough to write songs that other people can then play better haha. |
am I too old to learn the guitar/music? | dnsworks: My 62 year old father just took up Piano and is loving it. |
am I too old to learn the guitar/music? | surgesg: There's no replacement for good private lessons. |
am I too old to learn the guitar/music? | dasil003: No.That's the template response for questions of the form:/^Am I too old to learn .*\?$/i |
am I too old to learn the guitar/music? | plinkplonk: You aren't too old to learn.It is hard (though probably not impossible, given sufficient motivation and practice) to get good enough to play professionally with a late start), but if you plan to learn for the joy of music and playing songs at parties and so on it is very doable. If you practice (guitar) for 20 -30 minutes daily for a year, you should be good enough to play some popular songs at parties and so on, ideally with people playing other instruments.The key is to regularity (don't miss practice) and focus (be aware of what you are doing when you practice) and not so much short bursts of intense practice.As mentioned above if you can get good private lessons , go for it. You can teach yourself with books and an electronic tuner and so on, but it is way harder than getting a good teacher. Since your wife is a musician she (or her friends) should be able to find you a good teacher.Good Luck! |
Any Open Source Projects Looking for help from College Students? | celticjames: I worked with David on the Mozilla Education project. Here's my two cents.It's easy to put out the call for volunteers. It's hard to cope with the deluge of people who want to help.Code bases are complex and/or large in any meaningful project. Even skilled programmers may take time to get up to speed. Core developers have limited time available to answer questions. (People don't scale.)For someone working outside of a classroom, this may be fine. They aren't on a schedule and can claw their way into a community over time.But if you plan to unleash a classroom of students on an open source project, what you really need is an instructor who operates at or near the level of a core contributor to that project. The instructor is the one who bears the overhead of scaling up developer time by funneling student questions into a high signal to noise stream.Mozilla is a bit unusual in that they actual pay someone (David) to do that.I know instructors have attempted to replicate this model with other large open source projects, but it hasn't been a success. Attempts I know of to work with openoffice or the Eclipse Foundation didn't really go anywhere. RedHat/Fedora might be a good place to look. Try to get in touch with Greg De Koenigsberg there. |
Any Open Source Projects Looking for help from College Students? | mainsequence: HFOSS might be interesting, they work almost exclusively with students: http://hfoss.org/ |
Any Open Source Projects Looking for help from College Students? | DarkShikari: This is done by hundreds of projects every year--often quite successfully--through Google Summer of Code. I've been a mentor for GSOC for two years.If I understand you correctly though, this is a case of a whole classroom forced into a single project as opposed to a few students in each one. This creates a massive management disaster and many other issues:1. Coding for open source works best when you're interested in the project you're working for. If you force everyone to work on one project, many people won't be interested, and in my experience as a manager/leader of an open source project, such people are an utter waste of time. Of course, it's not their fault they were assigned to something they're not interested in.2. I've educated quite a few people in the full inner workings of our codebase. But it's one thing to mentor one or three people; it's another to mentor twenty.3. Most projects don't have enough work for twenty people. Assigning a ton of people to one task won't get it done faster, and assigning everyone a separate task will just make the load on the mentors/developers absurd.4. The single biggest problem with these types of systems, including GSOC, is the problem of ensuring that code gets merged at the end of the development period. Many students will simply disappear, leaving behind huge patches with nobody to maintain them. For example, the ffmpeg project has suffered greatly from this, with many feature patches taking years to merge and others simply languishing for eternity with nobody to finish them off.I have mentored many students for my project, both in GSOC and otherwise. I had one student who simply came to me one day and said that he wanted to learn the codebase: so each day he took one module and learned how it worked, asked me questions about it, and studied until he thought he understood it--the I quizzed him. After about two weeks, he had a pretty good background in most of the program. He has since become a significant contributor.My policy is that anyone who wants to learn can ask questions and get answers in their quest to understand how things work: this was how I became an expert, so it's my obligation to pass on my knowledge to those who want to do the same.I could do great with a few highly interested students. But I wouldn't even be able to come up with enough tasks for a whole class, let alone the resources to teach them all without a classroom. My suggestion would be to let students pick their own open source project, or some other method of splitting students between projects, to avoid dumping an entire class on one project. |
Y Combinator-esque program in Chicago | harper: There are a bunch of people talking about this. The most promising stuff seems to be coming from Sandbox industries (i have spent a lot of time with them - so i may be biased).There are also a bundle of VCs that are talking about this as well. If you want email/jabber me at harper@nata2.org and i will introduce you to peoples. |
Any Open Source Projects Looking for help from College Students? | m0th87: For undergraduate research, me and a friend made a recommendation engine web service (very similar to Directed Edge) using Python + Tornado. I've put it on the back burner because other priorities necessitate my attention for now. But I certainly wouldn't mind help.I've implemented a recommendation algorithm using a modified version of TANGET, but it is untested. I'd love it if someone with more knowledge in ML than I stepped in and worked on it. I wouldn't even mind if they completely scrapped my algorithm and made a new one.I think this would be a good opportunity for anyone interested in ML because everything except the recommendation algorithm is decently solidified: it includes several tools for testing, and it exposes everything through a simple REST API. Theoretically, it would just be a matter of dropping in your algorithm and seeing how it goes. Practically, however, I must warn that code comments are ridiculously sparse and there isn't a single unit test, because I'm a terrible person. There is, however, a decent integration test suite and some solid documentation.It is available here: http://github.com/heliumpigs/snowballThese are also several related open source projects that we made and our project depends on:* A tool for running blackbox tests on REST APIs: http://github.com/heliumpigs/catnap* A key-value store built on top of MySQL (inspired by FriendFeed's use case): http://github.com/ysimonson/scarecrow* Some useful stuff for Tornado: http://github.com/ysimonson/ozEmail me if you're interested (info in profile).
PS: I'm posting here in case anyone else is interested. |
When data is code, what is the meaning of a config script? | Kliment: Well, as long as you are the only one editing them, it doesn't make a difference where you put the limit between code and data. This changes once you release though. Configuration files are meant to be user-edited as part of standard functionality, program code is not. Your users expect nothing major to break if there is a syntax error in the config file. Does that make your entire program crash with an undecipherable (to someone unfamiliar with the language or programming in general) error? You want to be as robust as possible when reading user-editable files, and directly executing them as code could cause problems. There is also the security and stability issue associated with encouraging users to enter code into a config file. Do think about it. This, to me, is the main reason for treating data as separate from code. You have to be robust about parsing data, your compiler has to be robust about parsing code. |
Any Open Source Projects Looking for help from College Students? | shaddi: I took a course like this a couple years back and actually started an open source project through it. My group found a local organization who was interested in using the software we had in mind after and they served as our "client". So, if you have any ideas you'd personally like to work on, perhaps you could take that approach.Since then I've been the client for student groups as well; we had a student group last semester work on an experimental component of the software I wrote when I took the class. Having served in both roles (student and client) I have a good bit of advice on strategies for this type of course (hint: it's totally different than any other group project and most personal projects you've likely done), but it doesn't really belong here. Feel free to contact me via email if you'd like to chat. |
am I too old to learn the guitar/music? | patrickryan: There is no age limit to learning. In fact, I bought a guitar at the age of 19 and began teaching myself chords, strumming, and scales with no previous experience. I am 23 now, wrote and recorded a full length music album 2 years ago, have played numerous live shows as a solo artist, and continue to learn guitar everyday. My suggestions for learning guitar: Find a tab for a song you enjoy on http://ultimate-guitar.com, and practice it daily. |
am I too old to learn the guitar/music? | babycakes: Sounds just like our situation.I've been playing guitar for 15 years now. My 30 year-old wife just picked up the guitar. She's doing quite well. I spend about 15 minutes per day helping her with her technique and giving her a new exercise to try.When we picked out her guitar, they offered us a month of free group lessons. Maybe you can swing the same deal? Guitar is not a difficult instrument, relative to piano, trombone, or violin. A little spousal assistance is probably good enough if you can't wrangle a professional. |
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