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Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | lmkg: I, for one, agree that the pace of technological innovation has somewhat slowed down of recently. Compared to nuclear energy, television, the space race, the complete eradication of small pox, personal computers, test tube babies, and the internet, the last 10 years seem a little disappointing. Modern miracles like the iphone and even-faster broadband and faster JavaScript engines seems like incremental improvements rather than major breakthroughs like quantum computing or true AI or whatever. On the other hand, a lot of people are trying and succeeding and changing people's everyday lives with the technology we have, so maybe it's good that we've had a little breather for industry to catch up to science, as it were.Technological development in the United States between WWII and the last decade was propelled by a couple of conditions that don't exist currently, most notably the Cold War spurring billions of federal dollars into technological research and a few big-ass monopolies dumping billions of dollars into long-term research.The Space Race raised the profile of science and math education in the US, and quite a lot of modern technology has roots in the space program or military programs, including a lot of CS-related technologies. The internet was a military project, and the US has had AI run their logistics since 1991. A lot of industrial-type innovations, including manufacturing and deployment operations, nuclear technology, and the first digital computers even trace back to WWII. The US government was also a huge early adopter of computing technologies like mainframes, spurring private development.Meanwhile a few large monopolies had major research labs, most infamously Bell and IBM. I'll be the first to admit that monopolies have drawbacks and usually aren't a good thing, but because they didn't have to worry so much about quarterly earnings they dumped massive amounts of revenue into long-term strategies. Such research investments are arguably important primary causes of desktop computers and our national communications infrastructure. Google and Microsoft seem to have assumed these mantles. Microsoft, for its part, is putting a lot of work into more fundamental research, although we haven't seen a big payoff yet. Google seems to spend a lot of time on pet projects like Wave. That's probably an unfair assessment, but their long-term horizons are more on the order of 18-month product cycles than 10-year research projects.So that's my take on it. The military-industrial complex and industrial monopolies allowed for massive projects to create big-ass breakthroughs. Without those drivers, academic research has delved into political infighting for funding and companies have become myopic so our view of 'innovation' becomes faster paced, but incremental rather than revolutionary. There's been more focus on use and users, but at the cost of fundamental developments. Whether this is "better" is anyone's guess. Faster incremental improvements get to market faster and therefore affect day-to-day life more, but my personal opinion is that the pendulum ought to swing back towards the breakthroughs, at least temporarily, to give the rabid markets something big and juicy to improve upon some time soon. |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | slvrspoon: i work with a hacker startup focused on impact of these issues and there is a ton of info there: http://www.givewell.net |
What are the good alternatives to Google Groups? | snitko: You should give ReSubj a try: http://resubj.com |
The best way to put technical skills to the greater good? | roundsquare: One software problem yo can try to solve: micro finance institutions are in dire need of good systems. Many of them run on excel and have a horrible time keeping track of data. If they need to generate a report, they often have someone doing it by hand and the data comes back jumbled up. This hurts their operations as well as prevents them from getting funding. Many of them are small and can't afford good systems or to hire any developers. |
How do you organize your git branches? | zb: Using Stacked Git to maintain multiple patches is a useful alternative to keeping multiple branches for some workflows. Obviously it depends on what you're doing with them. |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | tungstenfurnace: Affluent people are aggressively hooked on entertainment and stress-based productivity, which has dampened creativity and optimism somewhat, imo.One field generating a lot of exciting discoveries seems to be materials science. |
Git Hosting | cellis: not sure if you've already checked them out, but projectlocker has free git hosting. |
Hacker News Los Angeles Meetup? | ApolloRising: I'm up for it |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | jodrellblank: I'm in bed typing on a triple radio, camera, touch, motion, sound and proximity sensitive phone so I can't easily get links for citations from the wotld's first distibuted volunteer enyclopedia, but I think I read there that Guinea worm infection is well on the way to being the next eradicated disease, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.I think you have rose tinted glasses on the past - in 2000 I was at university where they ran NT4 with Netscape, and was rocking a Celeron 433, with a new USB1 100Mb zip drive. Now a 4Gb pen drive holds 400x more and costs 1/25th the price and tranfers data faster.New cars today can have vision recognition blind spot checkers, radar based cruise control, pedestrian sensors, brake appliers, regenerative brakes, head up displays, Internet connections, all in ordinary models not 100k luxury ones.The UK has migrated to digital TV and Radio. In 1999 I bought a VHS recorder, now HDD recorders are standard.In 2000 there was nothing as good as Skype, train times were on paper in stations, airport checkins had queues, maps were paper based, polyphonic ringtones on phones were fancy, the HP200lx was the netbook of choice, the L prize for LED lights was nowhere to be seen, nor were snooks or really Amazon and Internet shopping and consumer reviewing on such a grand scale. Joule Biotechnologies, the LHC, ITunes university, the idea of an OLPC, virtual machines all absent.China, new fastest train recently.Now, if I had the cash, I could put a deposit down for a personal space flight!I hear you on the computer still chugging thing, but don't want Netscape back. |
Simple, fast JavaScript Framework? | parasctr: use YUI 3.0. |
How do you keep track of your service ? | alanthonyc: I keep a personal wiki of all my projects. I just note everything down on there. |
How do you keep track of your service ? | dangrossman: Just memory. I have a desktop widget I whipped up in a few minutes to constantly poll load averages from all 6 servers.There are so many more important things to track when you run an app/service. |
When is the best time of day to post? | niyazpk: I assume you are asking about HN.1) The quality of the post and a good title is more important than the time you post.2) Luck is a more important factor than the time of the day. Just remember that if there are more visitors in the site, there are more new posts too. |
When is the best time of day to post? | swombat: From my experiments- As niyazpk mentions, quality is more important than timing. A poor article will always sink, and most of the time a great article (properly promoted) will rise. However...- To give your article the best chances, post in the european morning.Why?- The european crowds are generally more discerning, and there is less noise (à la TechCrunch) during the american night.- If you can get a decent number of upvotes from the european crowd, chances are you'll still be high on the front page by the time the US HNers come in.- Already having 50-100+ votes generally will translate in even more upvotes once the US crowds come in.That's been my observation, in general. That said, the difference is not really worth worrying about too much. The main difference is that an evening submission requires a little bit more promotion. |
Anybody here got use for micropayments? | spokey: I happen to be working on a micropayment strategy and implementation for my day job (we're content producers in this scenario) but we're US based.I am curious to know more about the micropayment problem your startup is solving.The technical issues--transactional processing, account management, integration with the web experience, etc.--aren't trivial but they are relatively straightforward.The harder nut to crack seems to be the social issue: Customers don't want to break out a credit card for a $0.01 purchase, so you need some sort of digital wallet or debit account to deduct from. Yet there is no "digital wallet" service with broad enough acceptance to assume that your (or at least my) average customer will have one.The chicken-and-egg problem seems to be a challenge: Sellers won't offer the digital wallet payment option if there aren't existing customers. Customers won't sign up for a digital wallet if there aren't sellers who use it.Are you doing anything to address this side of the problem? |
Why are there so many NoSQL databases? | kez: Thanks for all the comments; I have put together a brief summary: http://www.justkez.com/why-are-there-so-many-nosql-options/It's been very interesting reading the responses. |
How do you keep track of your service ? | ScottWhigham: I'm a Windows guy and we use OneNote. I suspect EverNote would be a good option too. |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | dazzawazza: It may not seem like a revolution but I think the micro loan model is a huge revolution. Not just because it lifts people from poverty and empowers.One of the most important things it does is show people in rich countries that poor people are both hard working and honest and are not in need of charity but are in need of help.We've been stuck in a cycle of giving charity to poor countries and nothing seems to be getting better. MLs have helped to break that cycle and empower ordinary people (not warlords, clerics or politicians).So I think that's an innovation :) |
Why I can't upvote on a comment? | ErrantX: I had this on occasion (one reason I now only upvote and downvote very rarely now) in the past - and know a large number of regulars have too.Im guessing the formula is just throwing a false positive; you will get it back in a few days.pg has never explicitly commented on what constitutes "abuse" in the mind of the system - I assume to avoid gaming/avoidance :) |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | synnik: I haven't linked the page anywhere but here yet. I trust this community as a reasonable gauge of how people will react, and wanted to know whether or not you think people will have enough interest to make this happen.(see my comments on the 'what are you working on' thread for a little more info on the project I was trying to build. |
Git Hosting | hopeless: I've just been trying out unfuddle and codebase. Looks like i'll go with codebase for the slightly more polished ui and faster pageloads. |
What are you working on? | david927: I've created a relational database that can horizontally scale and now I'm putting it to use. |
What would be a proper Boing ball demo for a current Amiga | rbanffy: No ideas?I know it's hard. Graphics and polygon count would not impress the PS3 generation, but what would? Real-time video interference? A new desktop-less webcam-captured gesture-oriented 3D environment? |
Anybody here got use for micropayments? | jdietrich: No. It's a solution in search of a problem. There are plenty of businesses that would like to receive micropayments, but time after time customers have rejected them. Even if you somehow created a system that was absolutely seamless and required zero effort on the part of the user, you'd still have to convince people that they actually want to make micropayments.The trouble is that if you set a price that is very nearly free then you are inevitably competing with actually really free. Dan Ariely's research has shown that customers massively overvalue anything free. Customers overwhelmingly prefer a free good to a good at any price, even when there is a significant difference in quality. No experimenter thus far has managed to break this natural gravity towards free in preference to any price. Add in the inevitable friction of the act of payment and you've got an overwhelming barrier to entry that without fail drives the mass of the market towards free alternatives.There have been a litany of failed micropayment services, all of whom failed for the same reason - rather than doing the Agile thing and finding out what the customer wanted, they tried to impose a 'great idea' on a market that has consistently rejected it. Why exactly are you going to succeed where dozens have failed? What are you going to do differently?http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/zerofree.pdf
http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | samstokes: Smartphones are transformative. They're already affecting popular culture and will do so even more as they become more widespread. (One simple example: arranging to meet a friend at a location new to one or both of you can be more spontaneous if you both have GPS-enabled local search.)I suspect most of the changes are for the better, although I'm sure there's an argument to the contrary. |
Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider? | davidw: Why not just use a cheap Linode (or slightly less cheap Slicehost if that's your thing)? |
Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider? | ichverstehe: There won't be a market. Yet. It will take a lot more momentum before it happens. Ruby has Heroku and Engine Yard. But the Ruby ecosystem is much larger. |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | covercash: So you want $20 and if you succeed in reaching your goal, you then want me to create art to display in your gallery. If that artwork sells, you then take a cut. If you don't succeed in reaching your goal, you keep my $20...Sounds risk free for you. |
Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider? | bengl: I was thinking along these lines as well. I was keen on Appjet and I think it would be great if that void were filled with something node.js-based. (Or maybe narwhal? Or both?) |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | mschy: Correct me if I'm missing something, but won't this require that you raise $700k or so, so you can pay the taxes, and then spend the $400k?That strikes me as... ambitious.Also, the whole thing seems much more 'help me out of my problem!' than 'let me do something cool for you!' I think if you want a good shot of this working, you need to frame it very differently, and find a way to provide easily communicated value to the donors. |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | michael_dorfman: I hate to be that guy, but this sounds crazy.Let me get this straight: You want 20,000 people to send you $20 each, and a postcard. You'll have an exhibition of these 20,000 postcards, and send the "artists" 60% of the sales price of whatever postcards you happen to sell. So, if someone picks my postcard out of the 20,000 and then decides to pay $33 for it, I break even.Huh?So, that's how I react. I would expect response to be close to nil.What would I recommend instead? Well, first of all, I would continue to work banks/foundations/investors. If you have a viable business plan, and a piece of property with some value, you should be able to raise some money (and leave a gap significantly less than $400K).If you are going to crowdsource the remainder, I'd either a) go with straight donations-- it's simpler, and more honest, or b) raise the "donation" amount to $100/$200, and use it as an "entry fee" in a skill-based contest (not a game of chance-- you'll want to talk to a lawyer about gaming laws) with a big enough payout to raise interest (i.e., a slice of the company, or a piece of the property, etc.). |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | brk: It's reasonable, it just seems improbable.You need $400,000, and you're going to take donations $20 at a time. That's 20,000 people. Let's even say 10,000 people (you have some cash of your own, some people will just give you free money).I think this is the sort of thing that you end up stuck in the middle. You'll raise $5,000, and get stuck in red tape around tracking and paying taxes on the "donations", and won't have gotten any measurable amount closer to your goal. |
What would be a proper Boing ball demo for a current Amiga | slater: How about a realtime ray-traced version of multiple balls, with the viewpoint turning around the balls? |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | DanielStraight: Go to a doctor. Not the most exciting answer, but there's any number of sleep conditions you may have that a doctor can diagnose and treat. |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | mahmud: I deleted several replies, and decided to go with the following:If this is your best/last idea, move on. Cut your loses short and find something else within your means. |
Requesting code sample from potential employer? | hga: Good idea! And for the right company, they'll be impressed that you're doing your due diligence on them.I haven't done exactly this (hey, I made some of my best (but most painful money) working on wretched code bases), but I've done this sort of thing when helping my company decide whether to partner with another.If you've got enough experience looking at code bases, you could ask them to let you at a terminal with one of their experienced engineers at your side. 15 minutes of that could convince me the code base was worth dealing with (obviously, it can take considerably less time if not :-). |
Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider? | Klonoar: I've been running my Node.js instances on a shared hosting account at Webfaction. Extremely stable, very easy to set up, very cheap to maintain.It's where I test my builds of Luno, actually. (http://github.com/ryanmcgrath/luno) |
Requesting code sample from potential employer? | mahmud: You do that as a contractor, when you're asked to give a fixed quote for a maintenance job.For full time positions, it's reasonable to inquire about the engineering practices of the shop, code guidelines and similar, what freedoms you have to make spot decisions, etc. But asking for actual code is just silly. It does nothing but paint you as a picky cry-baby who couldn't work with others, or cajole them into working with him (IOW, you lack both a cooperative spirit, and leadership.) |
How might the most compact programming language in the world look like? | michael_dorfman: APL |
How might the most compact programming language in the world look like? | mbrubeck: Guy Steele knows a bit about language design (having co-invented Scheme and Fortress, worked on early implementations of TeX and TECO/Emacs, and helped write the specifications for Java, Common Lisp, ECMAScript, Fortran, and C). In Coders at Work he says,"There's this Huffman encoding problem. If you make something concise, something is going to have to be more verbose as a consequence. So in designing a language, one of the things you think about is, 'What are the things I want to make very easy to say and very easy to get right?' But with the understanding that, having used up characters or symbols for that purpose, you're going to have to make something else a little bit harder to say."So it definitely depends on your domain. If you do some of the harder Project Euler problems and then look in the forums, you can see the same problem solved by a hundred different programmers with different approaches. The shortest solutions there are always in APL-family languages like J and K. But it's partly because those languages are so well-suited to the typical problems in Project Euler.If you want to implement a concurrent server for binary network protocol like memcache, then you'll probably find Erlang a more concise language instead, because its syntax, its libraries, and the primitives of the Erlang VM are all better adapted to that domain. |
How might the most compact programming language in the world look like? | bdfh42: The language called MUMPS only uses single letter key words as I recall - but that way lies insanity. |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | JimboOmega: I don't know about your weight/diet, but if I wake up hungry, it's because I really skimped on dinner. Maybe your meal isn't big enough?When I used to wake up early, the general reason was because of medication I was taking - ironically to sleep (Ambien in this case). What medicines do you take? Do youIt's also possible, as other posters have noted, that you might have any number of conditions. Sleep apnea was a factor in my problems, but can only be diagnosed/treated by a doctor.And finally - though it doesn't sound like your case - it's possible you might be trying to get more sleep than you need. Now 3-4 hours is almost certainly not enough, but if you sleep 8+ hours some days - and you always shoot for 8 - that might be more than you need. Try reducing your "goal" sleep time, until your "sleep efficiency" increases (this is a classic treatment for insomnia) |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | frankus: I've had this problem in the past and continue to have it occasionally. I'm not usually thirsty and/or hungry, but usually my mind will wander and I'll start getting excited about some project I'm working on or (worse) start worrying about something that at 3 in the morning I can't begin to do anything about.Here are a couple of obvious things to try (granted, they were only obvious to me in retrospect):- No caffeine (not even tea/soda) after 3 in the afternoon. Better yet, no caffeine at all is best. Counterintuitively, your body will totally wake you up when it wants a caffeine fix.- No alcohol if you have to get up at any particular time the next day. It will put you to sleep, but meanwhile your body is trying regulate itself and will release adrenaline, which will wake you up once the alcohol wears off.- Likewise, no sweetened or starchy foods in the evening. This is basically the same effect as alcohol, except that it's the sugar/starch crash that's putting you to sleep.- (Never done this, but) keep a journal of when you eat, drink, caffeinate, and sleep and see if you notice a pattern. You might find that, say, eating a late dinner screws with your sleep. |
How might the most compact programming language in the world look like? | pierrefar: Kinda related: there are various genomes that encode overlapping genes. This makes them very compact in that they take less physical space to achieve the same end result,In this analogy, the language is the genome (DNA or RNA) and the program is the set of proteins that make up the virus or whatnot.As far as I know, there aren't any computer programming languages that do this. Not that I want them to...A reference: http://www.bookrags.com/research/overlapping-genes-gen-03/ |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | Scott_MacGregor: When you work out your burning energy (calories) and losing water through sweat. 1. Try eating an extra healthy snack like a cup of yogurt and a piece of fruit before you go to bed every day, like a ritual even if you’re not hungry.
2. Your body seems to need more water to replenish what you sweat out, that’s why you’re thirsty. Try hydrating yourself more by drinking "a lot" of water starting when you get up in the morning and sipping all day long like bodybuilders do.
Maybe that will help. |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | crocowhile: You wake up thirsty and hungry in the middle of the night? Sorry for the silly question but are you having proper dinner at the proper time? |
Where to get data for a Web/iPhone app idea? | maxklein: Use Amazon Mechanical Turk. |
Requesting code sample from potential employer? | ShabbyDoo: Many times, I have been shown architectural diagrams that painted pretty pictures of what turned out to be disastrous codebases. In retrospect, there were other, non-technical "smells" that indicated that the sausage might not be so well made -- dumb developers, vague managers, production broken-ness, etc.I've seen a lot of Java codebases over the past decade, ranging from good to awful. To get a feel for the overall quality, I've learned to check out some common things that are usually indicative of overall quality. For example, bad developers never seem to understand exception handling. Database connection management is another easy spot to check out -- letting the pool close up one's connections seems to be a favorite pastime. Other stuff that's not necessarily Java specific -- use of custom frameworks that, according to the developers' own descriptions, are replicas of existing stuff.Perhaps, as @hga pointed out here, sitting at a terminal with an experienced developer and insisting that he/she show you the stuff you want to see (as opposed to a passive, guided tour) would be a quick way to gauge overall quality. And, you'd get a pretty good idea of management's notion of "experienced developer." |
iPhone app like BB messenger? | kyro: I've been searching for something like this for a long time and haven't found anything similar to BBM. I do use an app called WhatsApp (http://www.whatsapp.com/) which gives you free text messaging capabilities via your 3G connection; so I can text to groups of my friends, and those over in the UK without being hit by texting fees, especially the pricey international ones. But there's still much to be desired, and seeing as BBM is a major point of attraction for users to choose BB over the iPhone, Apple should follow suit with a similar system. Ideally, we'd have a BBM type system accessible to all phones. |
What makes things/memes "trend" on twitter? | kyro: For the Facebook bra color meme, I think the mysterious nature of it all helped give it momentum as many people didn't quite understand what was going, leading people to either post a color to mock the situation or ask around to find out what exactly was going on, and then posting a color to taunt others who weren't part of the in-crowd. Mauve, by the way.If there's any way to engage Facebook users, it's to give them a feeling of unique purpose that can be broadcast to others in a subtle and unintentional manner. |
Git Hosting | pjhyett: What about the plans at GitHub seems pricey? (Not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious)edit: what sort of guarantee of privacy are you expecting as well? |
Open source software liability? | imgabe: I think most open source licenses specifically disclaim any liability for damages caused by faults in the software. |
Open source software liability? | clueless123: That is funny! you really think you can pass liability to someone like Sun or MS ? :)Small suggestion: Re-read your eula/terms etc .. |
Open source software liability? | jacquesm: I've yet to see a single case where a closed source software vendor accepted liability for data loss and / or security related issues.Do you have a documented case where you can show that a closed source software vendor was forced to cough up at least a sizable part of the damages sued for ?They all pretty much rule out stuff like that, and it would surprise me if such a case existed.The situation is actually the reverse, because closed source gets leaked to the 'bad guys' only (by buying it off some employee with access) the chances of trouble there are a lot larger than with open source where there is a level playing field and the bad guys have just as much access as the good guys.So, no, you can't sue anybody in the open source scene, but you can stay current. And you probably can sue some party in the closed source scene but the bigger question is what you'll do with the outcome of that suit.Most likely the damages are limited to the price of the product by contract. |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | jacquesm: First time was in '86 after working for a bank for a while and talking to my boss who laid out for me why I should go and do a thing on my own. Awesome guy (Thanks Eddy!).I sold that business and traveled for a while after that, freelancing whenever the money pit was at low tide.It was '93 last time I started from scratch, re-migrating to NL from PL, baby on the way, no outlook at getting a job (minor IT crisis in NL at the time).Simply a need to put food on the table. Which I can guarantee you is a very powerful motivator, especially when it includes little humans.I wouldn't worry ao much about what others think about it.What is more important is that you cut down your costs to the absolute minimum (this may require a serious change in lifestyle) to give yourself as much 'runway' as you can get. It takes a while to get off the ground, and with a lower expense pattern your chances of success increase tremendously.edit: You know you've made the right decision when you're happy. In spite of all the risks involved (no pension, no social security for me) I wouldn't want to be doing anything else. |
Coming soon pages worth it? | kyro: I'd say it's worth it. It won't take long. Try and do what you can to squeeze out some SEO juice, throw in Google analytics, and an email field; see if you get any hits or email addresses. |
Coming soon pages worth it? | dawie: Add a mail chimp form with: We will let you know when we launch.There is definitely some value with getting a page up. I think there is even a webapp that will do it for you. I forgot the name though. |
Coming soon pages worth it? | jasonlbaptiste: It's definitely worth it. You need to have something. I'd throw up a Wordpress install with a landing page theme that you modify. I saw a few on themeforest for $7. You should certainly start blogging around your industry as well. |
Coming soon pages worth it? | jacquesm: There are two sides to this:Yes, do it if there are already people operating in this space, the idea is already out in the open so you won't lose any 'window' by announcing your intentions.If not put a fake for sale sign on the domain so that you get an idea how many people are thinking about entering the space, that's valuable information. (Assuming the domain name is linked to the product you intend to market). |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | alanthonyc: My experience, just for mulling over:I've worked in my industry now for over ten years. Over that time, I've made a pretty good living. Now, I've got enough in the bank that I can take time off without worrying about rent or any other basic necessities. I started on my webapp last year part time, but I'll be going full bore on it once my current client gig ends.On one hand, a good paycheck is nothing to sneer at. I'm self-funded. I'll have something to fall back on if things don't work out (the time off will be a "sabbatical"). On the other hand, time is more valuable than money. If you have something to do, the sooner the better.Regardless of these two polar views, ultimately the combination of my current idea + opportunity + capability is what pushed me to make this change. I would have done it earlier if it had presented itself then. I'd be continuing on my current path if it never had.Don't make the switch just because you feel you have to. Keep your eyes open, and jump on it when you see it. |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | pclark: I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be CEO of a startup |
Review my holiday project | webdance: I have to thank you so very, very much for this application. It is changing my life, no joke. I'm an adult with ADD and perfectionism. Everything I've ever succeeded at has been a last-minute adrenaline-filled fire drill. My hopes for this year are things that can be accomplished only through slow-and-steady actions, repeated daily.Your tracker is the first thing that has ever worked for me. Even after just 8 days, I can tell that this is different from every other new years. I can do bits and pieces of my daily goal whenever I find time, and your app keeps count. I can keep my goal in mind without having to remember the numbers or play head games. There is nothing complicated, no 'options' to vacillate over, no pretty pictures or quotes to distract me and no features to figure out. The calendar--like Seinfeld's 'Don't break the chain' is a tremendous visual motivator.I'd be happy to pay ala shareware. |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | YuriNiyazov: I've worked in companies for other people; time and time again I would find myself in situations where some sort of decision had to be made; some sort of meeting would be called where I would say "my opinion is that we should do X", people above me would say "no, we should actually do Y", Y would be done, a few months down the line it would be discovered that Y was the wrong thing to do and that X should've actually been done, and we would spend a lot of time backing out Y and doing X.It sucks to sit at work and think "God damn it, I said we should've done this 6 months ago, and no one listened, and now we are doing it anyway."I am not purposefully trying to toot my own horn - I just discovered time and time again that often my intuitions are correct, and I should trust them more. Once that became obvious, doing a startup was the only avenue that I could find that would allow me to make my own decisions, bask in the glory that their correctness would bring, and assume the responsibility for the failure that their incorrectness would bring. |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | ddemchuk: No matter how high up you go in a company, you're always ultimately building out someone else's ideas. My happiness has a direct connection with seeing my own ideas come to fruition.The full process of coming up with an idea, planning and designing, grinding through all of the shit that comes along with actually tying up all of the loose ends and making it go live, and then being able to say "Yep, that is all my idea, I made it happen" is perfection in my mind.You don't want to look back at yourself 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now and realize you're doing the same job you started doing. Take the leap, if it fails you'll always have that impressive resume to fall back on anyways.Good luck. |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | jeff444: Java libraries aren't as simple as the Python counterparts, agreed and I too just built a sudoku solver http://sudokusolver.info seems like everyone has built one of those... I wonder why? |
Coming soon pages worth it? | zb: Google Apps + Google AppEngine. Total cost: $0 (since you already have a domain). |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | araneae: The algorithm actually deals with this; if the same person keeps upvoting your posts it will no longer work after a while.So if you're using this strategy, save it for special occasions. |
Could celebrity only leaderboard(s) make an iPhone game more popular? | jacquesm: How are you going to identify those celebrities in the first place and how are you going to get them to play your game in a way that you are going to be allowed to 'associate' your name with theirs without paying up ? |
Could celebrity only leaderboard(s) make an iPhone game more popular? | jodrellblank: A high score board I can't get on no matter how hard I play or how often or how much I pay or how long I spend playing or how many people I recommend to? A game that I paid for which contains a bit I can't play and never will be able to play because of my social status?Why not rename the current score board the "untouchables high score board" and have it frequently inaccessible, slow and losing all the scores? And charging non-celebrities extra to cover the shame and embarrassment of dealing with nobodies? |
Weekend update -- What weekend projects are you upto? | sunir: I'm working on Bibdex, online bibliography software for the community of scholars and scientists.http://www.bibdex.comLast weekend I was working hard to get it onto the production server. I've done that. The marketing website is good, and the blog is designed and functional.This weekend I am continuing down my launch list. I'm going to focus on finishing the server management, e.g. testing the backups, getting the 404 and 501 pages to look pretty, and polishing the deployment process. |
Weekend update -- What weekend projects are you upto? | nostrademons: Compiler for a new programming language. Implemented in Haskell, compiles to LLVM.May go in to work and do some work stuff instead, though, since my project there's in a fairly exciting phase. |
Could celebrity only leaderboard(s) make an iPhone game more popular? | hkuo: I think there is definitely something to this. In the show Top Gear, we see celebrities competing for the fastest (or maybe most entertaining) lap time in their reasonably priced car. I love seeing how they will compare, even if, as an American, I don't quite know who all of them are.But what if Top Gear created a service where people could show up and pay to drive this car around the track to see how they would compare with these celebrities? How fun would that be? Look...I've got the exact same time as Mark Wahlberg! I'm as fast as he is!So, well, this example wouldn't happen. But, as an avid gamer, whether it's Call of Duty, or Desktop Tower Defesne, or any iPhone game, it would be quite fun to see what celebrity I am on par with.I love this idea and could totally see it work, whether as an independent business idea or folded into Xanga or any game development studio. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | docgnome: Some of us don't cut Apple any more slack. I am rather tired of the free pass they seem to get from others. They are probably worse than MS in terms of vendor lock-in but just don't have a large enough market share to bully people around. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | almost: There is usually at least one comment putting forward this idea for every story about Apple or Google and I wouldn't say it's particularly controversial. "we" are a collection of people, many of us with differing ideas on many subjects. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | zitterbewegung: I think people tend to associate slack with quality. If a product is better than the average then people will tend to give it more slack. But this isn't uniform to everyone. Not everyone will give a value greater than zero for the slack. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | MikeCapone: I think it's pretty clear why geeks tend to go easier on them: they make good products.When Google and Apple start making products that are on par with Microsoft products, I'm pretty sure they'll be just as reviled. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | csomar: This community is Anti-MS (not all, but many); so you'll find a lot here that hates Microsoft and loves Google. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | mechanical_fish: The word "monopoly" is often abused. Neither Apple nor Google have one. There are other phones than the iPhone. There are other MP3 players than the iPod. There are other computers than Macs. There are even other search engines than Google, as Microsoft will be happy to tell you.Things were different back in the old days. One reason why people seem so much more relaxed about things is that the alternatives are so much easier to find than they used to be. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | ThinkWriteMute: Eric Schmidt's dismissal of the notion that people have a right to privacy.Wow, started out with word twisting, now it's up to out right lying about what he said? That's impressive. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | blhack: Also Google's privacy invasions including Eric Schmidt's dismissal of the notion that people have a right to privacy.I'm sorry, but I understood his comment on this to mean "You can't put stuff on a server you don't own without...putting stuff on a server you don't own".I wouldn't lump Google in with Apple at all...google, at least to me, still isn't doing any evil. Apple on the other hand leaves me speechless. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | gcaprio: Ironically, I just blogged about this, except with FB in the place of Google: http://blog.1530technologies.com/2009/12/where-is-the-disgus...I remain confident that a portion of the success of Google has come from the fact that they came along at the peak of anti-MS fever in the industry. People were yearning for someone other than MS and jumpped on to Googles wagon and haven't looked back. Everything Google does is spun as the ultimate good. Even though if MS launched hotmail and had the phrase 'scanning the users email to tailor ads', people would have erupted. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | drhowarddrfine: "Google's privacy invasions..."Could I have a list, with details, of these privacy invasions?"the shenanigans that Apple and Google have been pulling"Is that your opinion or fact? Were they mis-steps, mistakes or shenanigans?Are you bringing these popular topics up because you read about all this on forums or do you have facts? |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | GHFigs: This may surprise you, but there are intelligent and rational people who aren't personally offended by the same things you are. |
Weekend update -- What weekend projects are you upto? | spiralhead: Working on a web crawler that tracks the associations between websites online. Currently working on the front-end which will, at first, simply list websites ordered by how many other websites link to them which is not incredibly interesting in and of itself but my rough plan is to implement some sort of crowd-sourced categorization system to demarcate the data in such a way that people will find useful. |
What languages used to write computer languages? | jacquesm: There are 'bootstrap' languages that are mostly written 'in themselves', Forth (in your list already) and Lisp come to mind but there are plenty of others.For performance reasons usually some of the more frequently used constructs will be re-written in a lower level language but there is no strict requirement to do so.You could write any language in any other language, provided the first one is 'Turing complete'.The only reasons people will pick a certain language to do their (language writing) work in is because of constraints.edit:Another common technique is the 'DSL', or domain specific language. Some programming languages (again, such as forth and lisp) lend themselves better to this technique than others. Basically the idea is to extend the language within the accepted syntax with new words that add the required functionality.After that these additions can be used like any other language primitive, even if they sometimes will run a little slower because of internal overhead.edit: Being programming 'in itself' is a sort of coming of age ritual for languages, it means you can now face the world entirely on your own terms instead of standing on top of the scaffolding provided by another language.But not all languages are very well suited to this, the more specific to solving a particular problem a language is the less likely it is to be bootstrappable. And plenty of times it just isn't worth it, if you get adequate portability and performance from being written in C then that's fine too. |
What languages used to write computer languages? | daeken: A good deal of higher-level languages are completely bootstrapping. C#, Nemerle, a good number of Scheme implementations, etc all compile themselves. You of course have to write your initial implementation in something else, but once that's done many compliers bootstrap themselves completely. In fact, when I design a language I write the smallest implementation possible before bootstrapping up (as I'm doing with Dynemerle, a reboot of the Nemerle project). |
What languages used to write computer languages? | swolchok: Arc: MzScheme core, then Arc. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | sker: Not only that, but anything released by Apple or Google is omg awesome and fantastic, and anything released by Microsoft is another me-too product, no matter how innovative it actually is. |
What languages used to write computer languages? | dkersten: A natively compiled language can be written in whatever language you feel is easiest to write the compiler in, so either the language you are most comfortable in or the language with the best parser/code gen libraries.Once you can compile your languages source code, you could reimplement the compiler in your language, so that it is self hosted. Of course, you can't do this until you can compile your code, hence doing it in another language first.If your language is interpreted or JIT compiled, running on some kind of VM, then obviously you won't be self hosting, so you need to use a lnaguage which is suitable for executing your language. Most people seem to choose C, I guess because its low level and they want to reduce overhead.I myself find Python to be nice to write parsers and such in (and it plays nice with ANTLR), though my most successful code generator toy project was written in Clojure. |
What languages used to write computer languages? | silentbicycle: Lua and Awk are written in C. Scheme is often written in another Lisp or C, and many Prologs are written in C or Lisp (or other Prologs). Erlang's VM is written in C, though it was originally prototyped in Prolog. It's not unusual to write scaffolding for a language (i.e., an interpreter or a VM) in C, and then to write most of the rest of the language in itself. It can be a reality check on the expressiveness of the language.If you want to learn how to implement a language, I'd suggest starting with a subset of Scheme or Forth. If you leave the advanced features (e.g. continuations) for later, they're really not that complicated. You're better off using a language with garbage collection and good string support, such as Python (though if you're already comfortable with them, OCaml and SML are particularly appropriate.) Mainly, you don't want to have to figure out garbage collection, complex parsing, etc. on top of everything else. Also, don't worry too much about efficiency when you're still feeling out a language's overall design.There's a great explanation of a Forth here (http://www.annexia.org/forth), and pedagogical Scheme texts aren't hard to find. Christian Queinnec's _Lisp in Small Pieces_ is particularly good.Also, claiming to be "faster than C" is one thing, but claiming to be "a faster way to get things done than C" is another. The difference is significant, particularly when you can prototype your ideas in something flexible, get hard data from a profiler, and then just move the hotspots out to C. C has its strengths, but exploratory programming is not one of them. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | ErrantX: As someone who never "hated" MS in the first place I am amused to see the recent spate of anti-Google posting.I think... people have fads and at the moment Google is getting to be on certain individuals radars. I have to say I will just continue using products I think are cool and useful and keep an eye on their practices (without getting too excitable about certain, umm, things). |
What languages used to write computer languages? | scott_s: I'm confused by question 1. I assume by saying "cross compile the language in C" you mean "the compiler for language X generates C code." If so, the answer is easy: to leverage the heavily used, portable and well optimized machine-code generators that exist for C. |
What languages used to write computer languages? | berlinbrown: Factor: Factor and a little C |
What languages used to write computer languages? | berlinbrown: * Python: C, but also Java and C#
* Ruby: C, but also JavaDo you mean there are different implementations in other languages?* Jython: Java
* Cpython: C?
* Jython: Java |
What languages used to write computer languages? | jcdreads: Here is a great description of how Alan Kay and friends wrote the Squeak (Smalltalk) VM using another (Apple) Smalltalk:http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.htmlAlso consider that a bunch of languages (most?) consist of a kernel (or other VM) written in something native (like C) surrounded by a bunch of libraries written in the language itself. Off the top of my head: python, java, clojure, most schemes, etc. are like this.For ridiculous exercises in bootstrapping minimalism, check out Ian Piumarta's work on Cola:http://piumarta.com/software/cola/http://piumarta.com/software/cola/objmodel2.pdfhttp://piumarta.com/software/cola/colas-whitepaper.pdf |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | jsz0: Microsoft does basically all the same things but doesn't provide me with any upside like Google & Apple. The Xbox/Zune are locked down walled gardens like the iPhone. Microsoft has had a history with DRM-ed audio files just like Apple. Windows is commercial software with an EULA/TOS attached to it just like OSX. If Bing gets a subpoena for user information they'll comply because it's the law. Personally I don't feel like Google, Apple or Microsoft have ever invaded my privacy. So yeah, all things being equal of course I'm going with the company that does provide me a better product/service. |
What languages used to write computer languages? | zitterbewegung: Clojure: Java |
What languages used to write computer languages? | cmelbye: Ruby has also been done in Objective-C, hasn't it? |
What languages used to write computer languages? | mhansen: Javascript: C++ (TraceMonkey, Spidermonkey, V8), Java (Rhino) [EDIT: Sorry, C++, not C] |
What languages used to write computer languages? | anonjon: lisp is written in lisp. (and sometimes C) |
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