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Location Based Dating? | eraad: I don´t think it exists. Sound like a good idea as long as it doesn´t turn into a stalking device.IMHO location and social data should be used together when existing personal relationships between participants exist already. |
Location Based Dating? | whimsy: Very, very interesting...I think it would be a good idea to keep the actual location data inaccessible to the end user, but I can imagine it fitting in well with a site like OkCupid.com. OkC currently has a feature that parses profiles for relatively unique words and points out that you and the profile you're looking at share an interest in X (maybe a movie title, or a book, or an activity).I imagine an interesting implementation being "this user also frequently visits Starbucks on 6th Ave" as an ice-breaking feature along with the match recommendation system. |
What Are Your FOSS Philanthropy Hypotheticals? | drats: Sorry for the formatting snafu.edit: mostly fixed. |
where those deal sites find those information? | dmn: Scripts to capture the information? |
Please suggest a Facebook Connect gem/plugin for RoR | tobyhede: I use facebooker - it's under active development and has generally kept pace with the changes to the FB platform.I started using rfacebook several years ago but made the switch to facebooker - the rfscebook author has announced his intention to discontinue in favour of facebooker. |
where those deal sites find those information? | talbina: For that site, it would be a combination of the community http://www.deals2buy.com/sdeal.htm, and also the editors of the site finding deals.Notice that most of the deals are affiliate links. Sometimes they and the vendor have partnership where if they the vendor offers a discount, deals2buy will post an affiliate link (but just because it's an affiliate link, doesn't mean that's the case).In Canada, red flag deals is one of the top 10 sites in canada. http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/ . Go under the Hot Deals FORUM...and it's community. Go under the DEALS tab on top, and that's the site editors (And some of those are the same posted by the community). |
What Are Your FOSS Philanthropy Hypotheticals? | blintson: Emacs in Scheme. I really, really hate dynamic scoping. |
Best practices for server redundancy? | bozmac: DNS propagation doesn't have to be that long if you set the TTL for your records to be the lowest your nameserver will allow.Your problem is severely limited by your budget given that at your level, redundancy will at least double your hosting bill. If your site is that important, I think you should spend a bit more on hosting. |
Best practices for server redundancy? | sfall: have you separated out your database?
How much traffic can it handle?Upgrade your hosting budget. |
Best practices for server redundancy? | dlsspy: This depends a lot on your software design. You have to shed a lot of assumptions before you can even begin to consider redundancy. If your software can only run on one computer, then nothing much matters.It would be a worthwhile experiment to see what it'd take to get your site running on GAE or perhaps heroku. In both cases, you are sufficiently constrained such that front-end scalability is trivial, and backend redundancy is managed for you.Of course, many of us have done this ourselves, but these days I'd rather just get it in a box where I'm doing something fairly small (i.e. could even run on one computer). |
Best practices for server redundancy? | oomkiller: DNS rarely takes a day or more to do anything. The only place I have to wait on it is when I change my name servers at my registrar. If you set your TTLs low, the greatest amount of time you're looking at is probably an hour. Another option is dynamic DNS load balancing. |
Best practices for server redundancy? | thaumaturgy: There are a couple of options for making your front-end redundant: round-robin DNS, or a CDN.In either case, it still leaves you with a single point of failure in the backend. Your best bet there is probably to get a second VPS through a completely different provider -- and figure that you'll never lose both at the same time -- and then set up replication between the two databases, along with a monitoring process to switch the front-end to the backup database in the event that the primary becomes unreachable. |
Best practices for server redundancy? | olefoo: 1. Monitoring; if you lost a significant number of sales, it was mostly because you didn't know your site was down.Solution: nagios running on a pc in your office. Or use one of the many external monitoring tools that will send you a page if your site is unavailable for more than 90 seconds.2. Separation of concerns, the server that handles credit card transactions should be a different machine than the one that delivers static media. Databases shouldn't depend on webservers and vice versa.3. Load balancers don't need to be fancy, you can distribute high impact loads across multiple backend servers using nothing but free software.4. Eliminating single points of failure is a good idea, but it gets expensive quickly. Try to identify which bottlenecks are actually giving you grief before you charge into building complete multi-tier architectures.All that aside, if $50 bucks is the limit of your hosting budget you are in trouble. To run a relatively high traffic site you should have at minimum separate web and database servers, and your database server should be on dedicated hardware. |
Best practices for server redundancy? | ArtemD: You could use something like Rackspace cloud sites: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/sitesThey claim to offer automatic scalability and server redundancy out of the box. I have no personal experience with this product thou. |
How can I start my own bank? (Let's redesign banks) | greyfade: Two words: Credit Union. |
Best practices for server redundancy? | stingraycharles: Our service needs to be highly available, so our infrastructure reflects this. Basically, we have a hosting provider that has 3 geographically separated datacenters within the same IP subnet. We have a clustered loadbalancer solution, with one loadbalancer in each datacenter, that monitor each other. When one loadbalancer goes down, another one picks up the same IP address of the one that went down, and the whole thing fails over to another datacenter.Of course, the load balancers have a lot more webservers behind this, but this is what we consider a pretty highly availalbe solution for the front-end.The problem is in the backend: how do you handle databases going down ? Do you make a master/slave setup like the loadbalancers I just described? Or a multi-master that sync periodically ? It all depends upon your requirements. So in the end, there is no best practice, there's just a good practice for your problem. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | oscardelben: I have the same problem but I'm based on Italy. Banks can be really expensive but paypal is too evil for me to even consider it. If you've been here for more than two weeks you've seen how many horror stories about paypal are published.I'm considering google checkout and I'm wondering if anyone has experience with them.UPDATE: based on another response, I learned that google checkout is available only for USA and UK customers? That makes it pretty unusable in my opinion. Are there similar services? |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | awa: As a buyer mostly, I would recommend having paypal/google checkout along with an alternate method so your site is still usable if paypal blocks you or goes down... I don't feel safe while handing out my credit/bank details to a new website. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | cperciva: For Tarsnap, I just use PayPal; I don't like it, but they're better than the alternatives.Since you're in the UK, I'd recommend looking into Google Checkout -- I understand it's available in the US and UK, albeit not the rest of the world. Then you can offer your customers a choice.EDIT: I'm also looking forward to using Amazon Payments -- so far it's US-only, but I'm sure they'll be expanding to the rest of the world any decade now... |
Best practices for server redundancy? | Mc_Big_G: Your budget does not allow for building a redundant system. The only way to mitigate risk is to set up monitoring and automated backups. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | pierrefar: There are MANY consideration in addition to the technolgy:1. You'll get killed with currency conversions with PayPal. They're the equivalent of thieves in this regard. If you're expecting lots of non-GBP income, this could become a significant cost of running the business. But they're very convenient and easy to link to UK bank accounts.2. Don't get married to one provider. Use a "meta" API like Spreedly (http://spreedly.com/ ) so that you can quickly/easily switch if something goes wrong. With all the "PayPayl is evil" stories of late, this is simply prudent. I haven't used Spreedly yet, but heard good things about them, and they answered a quick question I recently asked them.3. Google Checkout is not as well-known as PayPal. Funny anecdote I can't find the reference for now: A website was using PayPal and thought to add Checkout, with both icons next to each other on the page. Their Paypal earnings shot up significantly, and Checkout got very little additional revenue.4. If you accept credit cards for payment, ne careful with PCI compliance, even if you don't accept credit cards on your own servers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Secu... . If you process the CC info yourself, PCI compliance can be very expensive for a sole hacker or small business, so consider off-loading the processing to a provider. You'll still need to have some level of compliance as I understand it, but it's easier. IANAL so get proper advice from your lawyer and accountant type friends.5. Taxes and HMRC. 'nuff said. |
Best practices for server redundancy? | mdasen: First, if you aren't already, get a hosting company that offers IP-failover/shared IPs. Linode, Slicehost (among many) offer this. See: http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/10/28/ip-failover-high-av...Basically, you have two VPSs (or servers) and if the first goes down, the second jumps in to take its place on the same IP address so that you don't have to change the DNS or anything.Second, you can turn your TTLs down for your DNS so that when you make changes they happen faster.Third, you can have an offsite VPS mirror with a different hosting company ready to roll.That's usually how I deal with the issue of high availability. Have two boxes with one company with a shared-IP setup so that if one goes down, the second just takes over. Then have an off-site mirror with a different company and have my DNS TTLs set low enough that hopefully most people can get access in a couple hours.The problem is that it all costs money. Rather than one server, you now have three. Costs have tripled to move you from, say, 99.5% reliability to 99.9%. So, you're paying a lot more for a very marginal improvement and the question that you have to ask is whether that tiny marginal improvement warrants paying triple. I think it's worth it - servers always seem to go down when I'm least available. So, that's my 2 cents. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | milestinsley: I use http://www.fastspring.com/. I too am UK based and this solution works nicely. They're US-based, but it means anyone with a credit card (US, UK or whatever) can pay for your software and FastSpring just wire the earnings to your UK account.I find this to be a far better experience than PayPal, Google Checkout and some of the others. They have great support and a really nice, intuitive backend admin interface. I think their fee (which can be 5.9%+$0.95 or 8.9% flat) is well worth it.It's certainly a good starting point, even if you then build a custom solution later.Good luck with your venture.EDIT: Spelling :P |
Where's all the spam? | jacquesm: http://www.senderbase.org/home/detail_spam_volume?displayed=... |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | forkqueue: I'm based in the UK, and we use HSBC for payment processing on http://kutoken.com/The API documentation is a bit frustrating, but the service itself is good and gives you the option of recurring payments. We can also accept payments in multiple currencies, which a lot of customers appreciate - if you bill people in GBP but they have a dollar card, how much they actually pay is an unknown. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | swombat: A couple of articles that might help you:http://danieltenner.com/posts/0006-how-to-get-a-merchant-acc...http://blog.boxedice.com/2009/05/20/taking-payments-online-m... |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | jerguismi: File a complaint to Apple, it may work. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | tjic: Raw data isn't copyrightable, at least here in the US.It is perfectly legal to go through a phone book and copy it. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | bensummers: Check out "Database rights".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_rightIn the EU, while the data itself may not be copyrightable, the act of compiling it into a usable database makes the database defensible. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | sfall: it's not that the information that is being stored but rather that the method and some user choices and UI are the same |
Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden? | c00p3r: Because it is not a next big thing anymore and even teenagers can do it. And because google itself is just a mainstream. =) "The main navigation system" as some clever guy named it. |
Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden? | mattmanser: The first post submitted had a link to at least one of those other sites. Then I guess some HN people went through the linked sites and submitted stuff they found interesting.Happens all the time, a fairly unknown blog gets submitted, then all of a sudden two or three more posts from that blog pop up on HN as people start exploring the new content (well, new to them). I've also noticed it happens to unknown stories linked in blogs. |
Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden? | chaosmachine: If people see a particular topic being upvoted, they're more likely to submit articles on that topic. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | andywar: I guess one obvious question is do you have permission from the Dublin Bus company to use their data yourself? From their T&Cs (http://www.dublinbus.ie/en/Legal/) ‘No part of this website may be copied, performed in public, broadcast or adapted without the prior written consent of Córas Iompair Éireann. All rights on this material are reserved.‘ Your own ‘scraping’ of the data is itself legally questionable. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | bensummers: Check out merchant gateway products. You can start with something where they process payments on your behalf and then graduate to getting your own merchant account. (Join the FSB to get a good deal at Natwest Streamline.)We use http://www.paypoint.net/ |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | flashingpumpkin: Obviously the guy knew that he's onto something shady. Why else would someone name an sqlite database .png2?Can't give you any legal advice though. I reckon you should go after what others recommend here. |
Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden? | rms: Maybe because lots of people who like SEO read these forums? At a certain amount of users, sub-interests can gain a voting-block like effect. We'd need to see more data about increased SEO posts to know for sure though. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | buro9: You're in Europe, you are protected. The database is copyrighted whilst the data isn't itself copyrightable. It is when the act of compiling the data is non-trivial and you can show that the data has resulted from this process (which you appear to be able to given that you have used names and entered routes in a way specific to your process) that you are covered.I'd start off with talking to him. His website http://www.philipkirwan.ie/site/index.html states that he's doing an undergrad at Dublin City University, which no doubt includes lessons in the social aspect of computing including Copyright, Patents and Data Protection, etc.My points: He will be well aware of copyright, and the institution really does not want to bring itself into disrepute as a result of the actions of their students. It would not do his study well at all to provable have stolen the work of someone else having been made very well aware of copyright during prior study. The question raised, "Is all of Philip Kirwin's work his own work?". And that for a university, and for Philip himself is a very big deal.So I'd simply appeal to his own sense of self-preservation in that if he has indeed (as it appears) taken the content from your work and passed it off as his own then he is playing with fire that will burn him far greater than just losing the right to sell one iPhone application.At this point, he's already potentially damaged his reputation through his actions, now it is up to him to determine whether he wants to salvage this or risk burning himself totally. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | haasted: Map makers often add a bit of erroneous information to their maps, which allows them to detect when competitors copy their data outright. A similar approach seems applicable to this kind of application. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | ciex: Any experiences with Amazon Payments? They look like a viable PayPal alternative to me as most people already have an Amazon account. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | patrickmclaren: Check out http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/
They've been recommended by quite a few people around here. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | pclark: techcrunch europe would be all over this. You should reach out to Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher) and chat to him. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | medianama: I have observed most such issues get resolved after sending a threatening mail |
Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden? | jacquesm: It's not just SEO, it is practically any subject on HN that gets a periodic wave of interest.I think it is simply tied in to the nature of the web. If you 'inject' a bunch of users via a link on HN in to a spot on the web then from there they will spread like sinking a mineshaft will exhaust the resources in the neighbourhood of the shaft.Then, when that particular mine is exhausted (no more interesting content to be found around that locus in the web) the subject dies down until someone finds a new and untapped reservoir.I've seen this happen around all kinds of subjects, from programming languages to hardware hacks and political stuff. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | JunkDNA: I think once you have sent him a forceful note or two asking him to back off, I would probably drop it. If you want to try and drum up some publicity over it on some other blogs, you might be able to make some headway. But I wouldn't expend lots of energy on him. This sort of thing is akin to people who have their blogs stolen and mirrored by SEO sites using their RSS feeds. You can spend all infinte time and energy chasing after people like this. Alternatively, you can use that same time and energy making new apps and improving existing ones.I haven't looked at both apps, but I would venture to guess that someone who is cutting corners by stealing from other people is probably also not spending a whole lot of time on design, polish, and user experience. Those are things that are hard to copy effectively and a place where you can set yourself apart. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | didroe: We use http://www.sagepay.co.ukYou get the choice of using their servers to handle card details and processing, or you can do it yourself and hand the numbers off to them using an API. They were recommended by RBS. |
Review my site -- socialreader.net | rama_vadakattu: I thought a lot on this application.Can you please guide me on1)Is this idea worth trying and to focus on?
Iam relying on a) friendfeed API to fetch diverse content like delicious, facebook,Google Reader
b) twitter API for twitter
2) Its sole aim is to provide interesting content for a topic (users can rely on this if he needs to keep track on a topic ),3)What parts of the application requires an improvement?Thanks |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | sharpn: I've had no problems with paypal, selling mostly in the UK; I charge £12.50 & get £11.87 from them. Overseas customers see whatever the paypal converted cost is in their currency.
But if you're taking recurring payments (say monthly) then definitely look into setting up direct debits - zero or tiny transaction costs. The downside of this is that you'll have to get signed paper mandates until your bank sponsors you to automate this. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | anonjon: Do nothing? This isn't worth it.Spend your time/money making an application that isn't so easily duplicated. You said it yourself that you weren't planning to make a mint on this. No point in dealing with the hassle of lawyers, paying the lawyers etc.If you only had one competitor, it would be possible, but being that you have five competitors, and some of them are free, I'd have to say that the market is saturated and its time to get out anyway. |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | jacquesm: Ok, here is one:Lisp makes you think in terms of higher level memory structures than just other than bytes and pointers to structs.The 'lists' and all the operations that you can perform on them will initially feel terribly inefficient (filter??!), but this will literally free you from having to think about how stuff is laid out in memory.The upshot of that is that you will see more clearly what the real solution is to your problem.As for functional programming, that in and of itself is a great way to get an alternative look at your programming.For a fantastic example of that look at the 'hashlife' code, it's written in C but it could only have been done by someone with a profound insight in to the benefits of functional programming.The reverse is also true, learning C as a lisp programmer will make you a better lisp programmer.In fact I doubt that there is any language that does not have to contribute some unique bit to the world of programming, and that will enrich you if you learn it to some level of proficiency. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | stevoo: Basicly you should have done this from the start.Since you know that you will not have a profit , why didnt you add the app free and add commercials to it.That way yours will be free and there will be no need for anyone to copy it and at the same time have some profit from ads. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | jot: If your turnover exceeds or is expected to exceed £68,000 you'll need to be VAT registered. This means you'll need to charge VAT on all sales to customers in the EU and deal with loads more paperwork.This makes taking payments in the EU even more complicated. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | viae: Don't waste your time on legal action on this iphone app. Yes, notify Apple and publicize it. But, your energy is better spent innovating and hacking. While screen-scraping is hard work it doesn't bring success and other good programmers can re-implement your work without stealing it. Hell, this might be a good opportunity to open source your screen scraper. Publicize it so that others will collaborate on improving it. Then you can focus on more interesting work. Data gathering is hard work, more people doing it make it easier.What can you do with your app that isn't so easily stolen (and reproduced) and turned into a carbon copy? As you've already seen, public transit apps are a dime a dozen. How about a bigger/better itinerary application that includes trains, planes, and automobile times so that one can put an itinerary together of vacation travel across all of Ireland? Add hotel info, confirmation info, etc, etc, etc...I don't have the links handy put there have been other articles on HN about lessons from stolen work. Big lesson: it rarely matters because the people stealing ideas and work don't have the skillset to do it themselves. In the long term they can't compete with the new features and directions that you'll go.What I'm trying to say is, use that energy from your anger to create something fcking awesome that that stupid muppet won't be able to compete with.* I'm from the US. Yesterday, I learned about the use of the word muppet over on that side of the pond. BRILLIANT! |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | gabrielroth: In future versions you might include made-up data for a nonexistent bus line, in the same way that cartography companies include nonexistent streets on maps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | pmarin: lisp doesn't make you a better C-programmer, It make you a better programmer becouse It make you think in a more high level abstractions (I am removing the "C"). learning Assembler may make you a better (efficient) C-programmer. |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | arto: You will at least be able to recognize the symptoms of Greenspun's Tenth (http://lispers.org/) in your C code and know when to cut your losses in those cases when C is not the best possible fit to the problem domain at hand. |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | jerf: Others have already taken your challenge on directly, and that is a part of the truth. However, I want to point out that if you want, you can sit and nitpick each one, pointing out how C is just fine on that front, and talk yourself into a position where it's not that big a deal, by focusing on one thing at a time and appearing to knock out each thing one by one. For this reason, "enlightenment experiences" tend to resist concretization; focus on just the words and you can talk yourself right out of them without much effort.But the point is not the laundry list of bullet-point features, the point is the whole totality of the experience. There isn't a thing that Lisp can do that C can't be beaten into doing; for one thing, writing your own Lisplet isn't that hard (and a good exercise, too!), and there you have it, "all of Lisp" right there. But it makes those things so hard that you won't really want to do them. You can intellectually learn the value of some of the things that Lisp provides, but until you live for a while in an environment where they are easy you will never fully grok them.Even though Lisp teaches nothing that could not be theoretically learned in C, in practice you won't learn them in C. The bar is too high, and if you're really trying to do it from scratch you'll make too many mistakes on things that were worked out 40 or 50 years ago. Learn something like Lisp.(Haskell is another choice on that front; Lisp will teach you better metaprogramming, but Haskell has some advantages in forcing you to completely follow through with an alternate paradigm. Arguably Lisp is more practical for permitting such things, but less educational.) |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | anonjon: Perhaps part of it is that you will no longer feel the need for methodologies?When programming lisp, the syntax is so regular that the patterns in your code become very obvious. When I see patterns I pull them out into macros or high-order functions, and name them. (Then sometimes I see patterns in the macros/hofs, and I pull those out and name /them/).I personally /boggle at the guys who love 'design patterns' and the like. I mean, I understand the utility of using patterns in software, I do it all day.The problem is that only having maybe 23 (?) different patterns seems very limiting to me. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | thinkbohemian: Artistic works have a "natural" copyright. (in the united states anyway). You could potentially argue that the schema of your database was a geeky but artistic work. (Layout of data structure, naming of tables etc.) or maybe some other feature of your app.Anyone with some legal background agree, disagree?? |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | blantonl: I think a lot of folks are missing the point of this blog post, and that is the App Store ecosystem has turned into the wild-wild west of development. I've never seen anything like how bad it has gotten.In my case, I run a Web services platform that approximately 10 or so iPhone app developers have licensed and coded applications to. In the beginning, there was only one app that used our services and it became a top-10 paid app. Within weeks I found there were 6 or so apps that sprouted up in the App Store with similar names, exact functionality, yet they were not licensed to use our API and content.The common thread? They stole the original app's SQLite database, repackaged the interface, and off they went. We blocked these apps from using our platform until they were licensed, but to this day I weekly see apps sprout up that are following the same nefarious business practice. They steal content from a popular innovative app, repackage as their own, and throw it to the masses for the quick buck.It is disgusting ecosystem. I'd be willing to bet that 80% of the app store content and market is teams stealing and repackaging the 20% of actual true innovation that is occurring. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | Vivtek: Consider Moneybookers, too. They work pretty well within Europe. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | Luyt: Have you considered encrypting your database, so that only your app can make sense of it? That's what a friend of mine used to do, and it indeed stopped some superficial copying. |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | randombit: Learning new languages makes you a better programmer. It really has very little to do with C or Lisp specifically.The more different the language you are learning is from ones you have used in the past, the more new approaches you learn. For instance if you already know C++, you'll learn a lot less from learning Java than you would if you learned Lisp (or ML, or Haskell, or Smalltalk) - purely because the delta is much larger. Similarly, if you already knew Ruby you'd probably learn fewer new techniques learning Smalltalk than Haskell, and if you already grok Scheme you'll learn very little from Common Lisp.If you are a C hacker, and especially if C is your first and primary language, Lisp just happens to be on the far other side of the wheel of languages, so you'll learn a heck of a lot from it. I would wager that learning C would make a Lisp hacker better at Lisp, too, though I don't know anyone for whom Lisp was a first language. |
Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden? | patio11: Phase one: spend a year here, amassing 16k karma by being mostly helpful and well informed.Phase two: write a post on a favorite topic I havent covered in a while.Phase three: lure a cynical,disinterested, and not really wealthy audience to my blog.Phase four: while you are not on HN, wage a sudden takeover by SEO content. After that it was all over but the cackling. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | Nassrat: Cheers mate, you got ripped off, that's why I embrace open source.You should only blame yourself though, you could have had a simple crypt on the db, with a key stored inside the binary. At least it would take a bit more work to rip you off.I would suggest you go ahead and release your database to the public. The one thing you have that they do not is that you still have your scraper script(s). If it was me, I would create a (restful) web service that allows anyone to utilize your data, moreover, allow people (maybe with a nominal fee) to download the entire database, or if you really wanna get into it, implement keys (kinda like google maps) to access you bus timetable api. |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | malkia: I came to understand and appreciate exceptions better, once I learned how they were implemented in Common Lisp. The same goes for macros, multiple-values, dynamic binding, closures, multiple-dispatch, the REPL, and many other things.Not all of them are available in C/C++, but in one form or another they could be done.The biggest revelation for me was the most of the C++ patterns, are just weaknesses of what the language can express. This made me free of what was expected as norm in C++, and I came to appreciate just C more and more (being more simpler). |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | geocar: I want a pony.Learning a new language- truly learning it- puts quux in your brain. Those quux are unique to that language. You can try to make do by translating the meaning of those quux into your favorite language, but the fact is that "gravitas" doesn't really mean "formality in bearing", so there's some difficulty in working that way.Consider recursion: Generally accepted you can simulate it with stacks and lists, the recursion quux is very powerful because binary tree traversal is simply walk(t){walk(t.left);walk(t.right);}Recursion is available in many languages, but not all languages. In those languages an expert programmer won't have the quux for recursion and you'll see lots of arrays and array resizing as the programmer simulates recursion when it is needed- and terrible contortions when the function can be implemented without recursion.Without knowing more about your background, it is difficult to give a better example than that. If you know Java and perl, this is why Java programs written by a perl programmer look strange to a Java programmer: The perl programmer is using "perl quux" to work out the program in their head, and is translating them to Java syntax and grammar. I suspect that you've seen other examples you can use here.The important bit: Lisp has a powerful quux in it; it is powerful because it reduces huge problems to much simpler problems. Learning lisp (or inventing it independently) is the only way to get that quux in your brain.However here's hope: Once that quux is in your brain, you won't see parenthesis anymore. |
Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden? | CoryMathews: To me most SEO articles = Spam. Thus when I see a lot more articles I just assume o yey more spam. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | acangiano: This Philip Kirwan is a real class act: http://www.philipkirwan.ie/site/android.html |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | lbj: Here's why: http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2009/11/mind-games-ascen... |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | zandorg: Plimus are good. |
Mass SMS text message services? | brm: txtmob is at sourceforge now: http://sourceforge.net/projects/txtmob/here's its history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob |
Please review my site favilous.com | DanielStraight: First impression. Note that the tour is a slideshow, not a video. I sat there for 2 minutes wondering why your video was broken.Second impression. It was a pain to get rid of "my links", which are not my links at all, but links you want me to have.Third impression. The "Create new categories" button is very confusing. It acts like a drop-down menu even though it's really a button. I thought I had to try to maneuver my mouse to the legend and click there.Fourth impression. If things I favorite are added to Favilous Buzz, and then I can make them private, then how is it really private? I should have a way to add links as private from the "My Sites" page that are never displayed anywhere.Fifth impression. I will not use any bookmark service full-time that doesn't have an export option. I am not going to put myself in a position of having to manually copy all my bookmarks into a new system when I decide to change. |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | es: Take a look on 2checkout.com. We are using it for more than a month already(moved from PayPal to accept customers who can't use PayPal). |
Any new hacker podcasts? | awaretek: There's Python411 at http://www.awaretek.com/python |
Please review my site favilous.com | icey: Clickable: http://favilous.com/ |
Mass SMS text message services? | eraad: If you are OK with a free, ad-funded service, take a look at zeepmobile.com, they offer a free API with which you can send and receive SMS to your subscribed users.The only con is that it's an API and you need to spend a small amount of time developing the app. |
Please review my site favilous.com | Eddiewills: Good job guys. I really like the style of the site and I definitely think there is a Market for a site like this. I would like to something for my media but otherwise good job |
Review my site -- socialreader.net | keefe: From a design point of view, I would put your two columns inside a fixed with div centered in the page. On my 1920x1080 monitor, there's a huge pile of whitespace between the two. I would replace all the detail with how it works with some actual content. Nobody cares how it works. I look at it for a second and go OK, why wouldn't I just go to alltop?
not trying to be critical just my first impression and why I'm not looking at it further. |
Where's all the spam? | RiderOfGiraffes: In case you're interested, and in case it helps, here are my personal spam incoming figures: 2009 06 : 44832 @ 1494 /day
2009 07 : 74855 @ 2414 /day
2009 08 : 66190 @ 2135 /day
2009 09 : 62081 @ 2069 /day
2009 10 : 63961 @ 2063 /day
2009 11 : 57362 @ 1912 /day
2009 12 : 37663 @ 1214 /day
20100101 : 1041
20100102 : 1045
20100103 : 902
20100104 : 1201
20100105 : 1168
20100106 : 1535
20100107 : 1800
20100108 : 1396
20100109 : 1548
20100110 : 1650
20100111 : 1629
20100112 : 1881
20100113 : 2692
20100114 : 2695
20100115 : 2712
20100116 : 2495
20100117 : 1966
20100118 : 2683
20100119 : 1646
20100120 : 1221
20100121 : 1351
20100122 : 1423
20100123 : 1306
Average : 1648 |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | jcl: Here is an example of a programmer who was able to produce a much more efficient and reliable C program by applying principles he learned in a Scheme course:http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txtNow, this may not be exactly what you're looking for, in that the C code he ended up with is not what you would call idiomatic C, so whether it made him a better C programmer per se is debatable. But doubtlessly few of his classmates were writing idiomatic C either, and his program's performance and reliability would not have been possible if he hadn't worked through the problem in Scheme first.(Edit: The closing paragraph, in particular, illustrates the broadly applicable "profound enlightenment experience" that Eric Raymond describes.) |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | durana: Does anyone know how iPhone apps are licensed? If this Philip guy bought the app and the database was included with it, are there any terms that say he can't do whatever he wants with the database (e.g., use it for his own app)? |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | Hexstream: Lisp dramatically lowers the bar to make a compiler. You don't have to mess with parser generators and do complicated parsing, the Lisp reader and s-expressions already provide a ridiculously simple and powerful framework to make your own syntax and semantics.You can easily invent your own language, basically you can just represent the structures of your language as objects and then walk that structure to generate a tree of closures that represent the semantics, the code to execute. With a compiler, you can give your language very "special" semantics and performance isn't adversely affected (it might in fact be better). What's more, if your custom language is very declarative, really close to what you actually mean to say, your "programs" written in that language is actually useful data you can use to make high-level debuggers and such.And for generating that tree of objects in the first place, you can use macros to make a nice s-expression representation that expands into object instantiations instead of having to do objects manually, which is harder to both read and write.If you try this, you'll see that languages really are not that magical, that it's within your reach to design and implement one even without investing hundreds of hours in learning arcane skills, if you use the right tools. |
Please review my website, job4dev.com | rglullis: Clicky: http://job4dev.com |
Cases where software patents have prevented progress? | jacquesm: The GIF patent is the first one that comes to mind.A more recent one is Acacias patent on video transmission via networks and this gem: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/04/acacia-claim...Are there cases where software patents can be proven to have fostered innovation? |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | jff: Don't fall into the trap of listening to Eric Raymond too much. He likes to romanticize the whole thing too much, as this quote kind of demonstrates.That said, let me echo some of the other posters: Learning any new languages will improve your skill in all languages. Even if the only benefit you get out of learning Lisp is a better understanding of recursion and linked lists, you win. There is also a great deal of satisfaction for a newcomer in writing a good solid Lisp routine, because you're thinking it'll never work, and then it works perfectly.Where C is so close to the machine you can taste it, for example structs and pointers, and I love it for that, Lisp is quite far away. Maybe Lisp is also useful to pull your head out of the MMU and think at a little higher level. |
Location Based Dating? | noodle: i don't think it is an idea that will, by itself, sustain a dating site. it is a good single facet, as things like this do help when pairing people, but it misses other facets that combine to make a good match.i think that an interesting idea might be to combine hyper-personal data like this into a site that is more closed and private. can't freely browse people and the data they submit, you only get algorithmically matched up to a handful of people per time period.that would address one of the bigger issues with dating sites, i think, which is that people don't tend to get good matches because they don't feel comfortable putting their entire personality out on display to the internets-at-large.just my $0.02, though. wanted to give some kind of input since you were having trouble getting some before. |
Cases where software patents have prevented progress? | bioweek: Were there patents on compression algorithms? Are there any weird things Linux has to do to work around patents? |
I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK? | neiljohnson: Depending on your product, have you considered taking payment from the purchaser's mobile phone (even if it's just an alternative payment route), that way people without Paypal can still make a payment without having to leave your site while they sign up.http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/payforit#about
http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/tech/cta/webpfiJust a thought, I work for these guys, so I can't claim to be impartial. |
A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do? | orblivion: Maybe avoid getting law involved and see if Apple has a way to arbitrate this sort of thing? |
Cases where software patents have prevented progress? | dpcan: This question is circular.The potential "technological progress" doesn't exist because it was thwarted by software patents, so there really is no way of knowing what doesn't exist because it couldn't be created to begin with.So, are you asking us what things don't exist? |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | dlsspy: Learning something new makes you better at things you already do (if it doesn't, it's not worth learning). |
Cases where software patents have prevented progress? | jfarmer: Blackboard's patents come to mind. |
Please review my website, job4dev.com | petercooper: Consider the most important thing for visitors who come to this site.. finding jobs that are in the place they want and related to the technologies they know. You can currently go down by tags (though it took me 10 seconds to notice this) but I don't see a location search.I think you need some sort of search or widget smack bang in the middle under the header that lets people do searches or filter by location and/or tags. |
Cases where software patents have prevented progress? | petercooper: Apple's patents on sub-pixel text anti-aliasing. The text in both Windows and Linux looks hideous by comparison. You can enable these features in certain situations on Linux with extra packages, though.Correctional update: Microsoft holds patents in this area but Apple has a cross-licensing agreement on them. |
Why does learning lisp make you a better C-programmer? | wingo: There are counterexamples too. I feel like my C has gotten worse in some ways (and not for lack of practice) because of Lisp -- I tend to make more expressions and assign fewer temporary values. C code often benefits in clarity from named temporary variables, but my Lisp style tends to eliminate them. |
Cases where software patents have prevented progress? | yuvi: Elliptic curve cryptography and LDPC codes are two that come to mind.Though afaik the latter hasn't really been improved since ~1960 and were only patented after rediscovering them in 1993, and I have no clue whether progress in elliptic curve cryptography stalled due to patents or because they don't offer any practical benefits over RSA. |
Cases where software patents have prevented progress? | mrshoe: I would point to the current HTML5 video element debacle:http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun...Patents are playing a large role in ensuring that what could be a wonderful thing for the web will almost certainly not be. |
Cases where software patents have prevented progress? | BearOfNH: There certainly have been cases where alleged software patent violations result in lawsuits. There the lawyers get rich while very senior engineers cool their heels in court or give depositions in places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant.I don't know how measurable this is but it is patently obvious it is preventing progress. |
Cases where software patents have prevented progress? | pmichaud: One thing that's difficult to measure but probably not trivial is the overall cooling effect. What I mean is that the tangible cases in which patents really ran into conflict don't indicate the number of cases in which technologies were never researched to begin with because of the risk of infringing a patent.The cooling effect probably isn't significant for the mythical basement hacker who does it for love, but decisions about what research to pursue are made all the time in larger companies, and one of the factors is potential for legal trouble. |
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