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What are you working on tonight? | odajay: Working on the new financial reporting requirements and preparing my financial courses startup. |
How did you learn programming? How long did getting good take? | Kliment: I first played around with DOS on an 8088 back at school. I'd edit batch files and make it print out amusing things. Made a text adventure, self-replicating files etc. I then tried editing an exe file to change it, and realized it wasn't quite that simple. Later on, I found QBASIC and used it to write "real" programs, such as little animations and an alarm clock using the PC speaker. I learned some Pascal at school, which is where I found out about flow control structures and functions. Later on, as a teen, I played around a lot with Delphi, finally getting over the disappointment of not being able to edit .exe files that I had as a child. I made a lot of one-off programs I'd put on CDs with autorun as greeting cards and personal messages to friends. I later did a couple of months of VB at school, but didn't learn anything new compared to what I could already di with Delphi. I sneaked into the high school Java classes when I was in 8th grade, and thanks to a particularly tolerant teacher got to unofficially participate. I learned Java and C basics at university classes I took as part of a cooperation agreement between my high school and the local university. Later, officially in university, I took more Java classes and learned what I could of C++ on my own. I was fairly comfortable with C, but C++ was frustrating, because a lot of the complexity felt unnecessary. I stuck with Java for the most part. I wrote C++ and Java at a number of research assistant jobs, and learned bash script and awk on the side for one-off tasks. my first exposure to Python was when a student at a course I was TAing asked if they could submit work in Python. I accepted that, and learned a fair bit from dissecting that program. I didn't touch Python for a while after that. Later, at another job, I did C# one-off programs for psychological experiments. On the side, I was playing around with virtual reality and used Vizard, which is a 3d visualization package built on Python. I started playing around with Python seriously at that point. I now write mostly in Python, except for C and C++ bits for performance-dependent stuff and hardware interfacing (which I use from Python with ctypes.)How long did getting good take? It's hard to say. I feel I've learned something from each of those experiences, and gotten better in the process. I'd say I've gotten to the level where I'm confident in my skills as a programmer within the last couple years, as I've seen meaningful things done with my code. |
What do you use for search on your app/site? | andyjdavis: Assuming you just want search for your users and you're not concerned about how it works Google may well do the job well enough. As long as everything you want to be searchable is public (not password protected) it works pretty well and only takes a few minutes to set up and embed in your site/app.imo, go down this route if search isn't a core concern. Better to spend your time on whatever is core rather than tweaking with your search if that is peripheral. |
What are you working on tonight? | lindelof: A building thermal performance model written in Octave/MATLAB. |
Selling intangible goods (website) using Escrow, is it safe? | dangrossman: Escrow, along with a good contract, is a great way to transfer a website. The buyer has to send the money to the escrow service. You know that they have the money to buy your site, and that it's been transferred to the escrow service, before you have to turn over the website. You transfer the domain to the buyer, then they allow the escrow service to transfer the funds to you.The reason this protects you is that if the buyer tries to back out, the escrow service still has the money. You can provide proof that you transferred the website and they can release the funds to you.The reason this protects the buyer is that you don't get access to his money until you've transferred the website to him. |
What do you use for your site's FAQ? | dimarco: We are in a transition between a Joomla plugin and rolling our own.
We all really hate the Joomla plugin. |
What are you working on tonight? | s3b: playing around with android |
What are you working on tonight? | natep: This thread looks pretty crowded already, but I'll throw this in anyways.I'm adding a few screenshots to my part of my team's presentation. We have a program review tomorrow (today).My project: http://cusat.cornell.edu/violet/ |
What do you use for your site's FAQ? | cperciva: I have a webpage where I put questions (and their answers) if I notice people asking them a lot.Sometimes the dumb solution works just fine. :-) |
What are you working on tonight? | siculars: building riak on a couple ubuntu 9.10 virtual servers. checking mem usage n 32bit vs 64bit for a new project. riak > node.js > jquery. |
What are you working on tonight? | dawson: Preparing for admissions interview. |
What are you working on tonight? | dacort: Backing out the latest changes we spent the week building because it "wasn't right". |
What are you working on tonight? | ashleyw: Building a barebones game framework for HTML5 Canvas. Or at least, decoupling the reusable pieces of code from a game I've been building. |
How was the Seattle YC meetup? | dmnd: It was very worthwhile for me. The feedback I got on startup ideas was motivating.It'd be great if others that attended could post here as well, if only to help me remember all the names! |
What are you working on tonight? | jdoliner: A raytracer as part of a class project. |
How was the Seattle YC meetup? | dacort: From Tony Wright, a YC alum:"Probably over 100 people came to the YC meetup in Seattle. Crazy success. Note to self: Hackers suck at RSVP'ing."
http://twitter.com/webwright/status/9666575618I couldn't make it, unfortunately. |
What are you working on tonight? | menomnon: As part of writing my first Thunderbird addon, started in the way I usually do by doing a demo. Setting up the parallel dev profile was a little tedious and is not explained in the documentation. I wanted to get actual messages into the dev version (because I'll need them) and ended up flying blind (but correctly) by simply copying the right files from out of the default profile into dev.The exercise itself was very fast - which was nice. There were a number of places where one could go subtly wrong and I managed to miss them all and at the first pass. Which was even more encouraging.Now I have to grit my teeth a bit and dig into the Thunderbird API to accomplish my real goal. What I do now know is the landscape. |
What are you working on tonight? | david927: A better database. |
What are you working on tonight? | zefhous: Just made a little jQuery plugin:http://github.com/zef/jquery_form_toggleIt makes it easy to show and hide elements based on the state of a checkbox, radio button, or select menu.Demo: http://madebykiwi.com/files/jquery_form_toggle/I'd be surprised if there isn't something like this out there already, but I couldn't find one.If you have a suggestion for a better name, I'd be happy to hear it. |
What are you working on tonight? | snikolov: Signals and Systems problem set http://mit.edu/6.003/S10/www/handouts/hw3.pdf |
What are you working on tonight? | Lazlo_Nibble: Coverscans, coverscans, coverscans. |
What are you working on tonight? | iamwil: Working on getting data to be more easily imported for http://graphbug.com |
How did you learn programming? How long did getting good take? | c1sc0: I learned programming in BASIC at age 10 when a computer-science-teacher uncle of mine explained how Super Mario worked. It was all a bit over my head but after about a week I was drawing some Mario-inspired shapes on the screen. The next big push came when I taught myself to do early CGI-based stuff: it was just so exciting to be able to share something with dozens (!) of people. If you define being good as "being able to pick up a new language in a few days" then yeah, I guess I'm good & I think that's a goal well worth pursuing. Picking up a new language will expose yourself to new constructs & practises, it trains your programming muscle. If you define good as "expert at programming task X" then, sadly, I am not very good. The best part about programming is that you never stop learning. That uncle of mine is now well into retirement and he's still programming microcontrollers for fun. |
What are you working on tonight? | kogir: Real C# support for Thrift, consisting of WCF metadata providers and channels. |
What are you working on tonight? | X-Istence: Working on my Google AppEngine based website. I hope to launch by the end of this month. |
How did you learn programming? How long did getting good take? | rdj: I learned just before leaving the military. A contractor said, "Learn Perl and you'll have no problem finding a job". So, I grabbed the "Learning Perl" book and forced my way through it. I was horrible (a Linux 'man' page wrapper; or basically system()). I do remember the day, while working on a project, that it all "clicked". All the concepts suddenly made sense. I'm good now, but not great. I can solve problems in just about any programming language. This is 10+ years later. |
What are you working on tonight? | pmjordan: I was sleeping when this was posted, but now I'm working on a consulting project (embedding an existing game into OpenSocial and Facebook apps). Once I finish with that for the week, I'll carry on building the prototype for our SSD-based I/O caching driver. I'm hoping we can finally make that do something useful over the weekend. |
What are you working on tonight? | mcxx: A web interface for MongoDB. |
Location Poll | niyazpk: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752262 |
What are you working on tonight? | Gertm: Trying to get the hang of the Furnace webframework. |
What are you working on tonight? | jparicka: Looking into memcache http://bit.ly/ceIa49
Beepl's (django) eating up 400MB of mem/apache process. :-( |
What are you working on tonight? | cosmok: Adding more polls into my photo poll page @ http://i-am-bored.in/polls/ |
What are you working on tonight? | cookiecaper: The baby my wife had on Tuesday, I guess. We just got home. |
language choice for dynamic website given our skills | nmp0906: If you want to leverage your existing collective talent, choosing java is an easy choice. If your co-founder wishes to learn something new & different or you have a specific use case where python-based frameworks make more sense, then you choose this route. Both languages have their pluses and minuses. Without getting into a language war, choose to leverage existing ability, the best for your use case, or the one that will be most fun and interesting. After all, if this venture takes off, it is a language you will most likely be stuck with for some time. |
What are you working on tonight? | splat: Writing a lab report for my lab class. I'm using electron diffraction to measure the Planck constant. |
What are you working on tonight? | tcarnell: NOW: Working to pay rentTONIGHT: Adding graphical reporting into Femtoo.com (to view graphs of change history of trackers)...and then getting drunk. |
What are you working on tonight? | epi0Bauqu: Editing a new interview I did earlier in the evening with Steve Welch on getting traction. Hoping to upload and post it today. |
I just don't care anymore. Any advice? | kentuckyfried: Even if you're bored and feeling unchallenged, you should stay in college and perhaps take the initiative to self-study on more advanced topics, or better yet, broaden your skill set with other things that you're interested in.For example, I can tell you that it's very rare to find somebody who has strong software skills AND a solid background in mechanical engineering/civil engineering. Which explains why finite element software, alot of it feels like its stuck in the Stone Age. That's a field that could use a ton of help from a user-interface standpoint.That's just one example, I'm sure there are many others. College is one of the best chances for you to learn something without being hampered with alot of responsibilities like a full-time job or other obligations, so make the very best use of it that you can. |
How did you learn programming? How long did getting good take? | regularfry: Learned Sinclair BASIC when I was 10ish. Graduated to the C64 and a BBC Micro through school, ended up doing C and a load of ARM assembler by 16. Picked up PHP, Delphi and Java at college, got PHP and Java work after then. Got into Python 5 years ago, then Ruby 4 years ago, and dabbled in C# in the interim. In the last year I've picked up Common Lisp and Clojure after trying (and generally failing) to make headway in Haskell.I've only started to think of myself as a "good" programmer in the last couple of years, but I'm not so sure it's a healthy perspective - it's mainly in response to increasingly interacting with other peoples' code and realising how shoddy a lot of it actually is.And I'm still learning :-) |
I just don't care anymore. Any advice? | kentuckyfried: Another area is 3-d animation + coding...if you're already a good artist, you can rule if you have a robust set of programming skills (so I am told). |
Location Poll | epi0Bauqu: Valley Forge, PA. Our Philly meetup group: http://www.groupomatic.com/haqsm3vj |
What are you working on tonight? | chronomex: I'm setting up a development environment to work on writing a FTP search engine tomorrow afternoon. It's a new laptop (new to me, Thinkpad T30), so it's not all perl'd up yet. |
How did you learn programming? How long did getting good take? | hga: '77-78 school year: Punched card FORTRAN IV (really more like a II) on the IBM 1130. Prompted me to start and never stop studying software engineering ("structured programming" et. al. was the rage back then).Summer '78: most everything but C and the like on a rich UNIX V6 system. Focus then besides exploration was still writing the best quality systems, started learning how to work on other people's code bases helping others with their final class projects.After some time off for first year of college, starting in the summer of '80 heavy duty C (Lions' notes best reference then) on UNIX V7 and BSD 2.x. Plus playing around with Lisp Machines.'82-83 Lisp at LMI, although wasn't able to get a whole lot of time in (Lisp Machines were scarce back then). First serious work with SICP and Scheme.'84: C on a variety of 68000 BSD UNIX workstations. Learned how to grok and port code between these subtlety different systems. Also some Common Lisp on PCs, followed by the T Lisp dialect.'85 on, moved from working on ersatz versions of EMACS to the real thing (mostly Gosling, which was what Gnu EMACS started from), some heavy duty debugging required to find wild pointers (e.g. ATRON on 8088). More work on other people's code and first client-server project.Long break for more school and aftermath in a period when Route 128 was dying.'90 or so, MS-DOS and Sun OS C (WORM filesystem and system interfaces), followed by C on Windows 3/3.1 and Sun OS 4.x. Starting transition from journeyman to master.After various C and Oracle consulting work, transition complete in mid-90s with a serious greenfield C++ client server system using OOSE methodology (The Unified Process nowadays). That's when I considered myself to have become "good".With all the interruptions and distractions (was trying to become a scientist in this period, but finances got in the way), took perhaps 10 years of concentrated effort in 20 calendar years. |
What are you working on tonight? | egor83: Working on my word-learning application.
Partly to learn Dutch (though the program can be reused for any pair of languages, with some features (irregular verb forms) making it more suitable for Germanic languages - Dutch, English, German etc), partly to get experience with C#. |
What are you working on tonight? | Tichy: Finishing touches on porting my chinese checkers game to Android. It is mostly an exercise in writing a HTML 5 app for Android, as I don't expect many people to be interested in chinese checkers. Then, start working on the next Android app. |
What are you working on tonight? | Mc_Big_G: Working on a quickie startup using a domain name I've had since '03 which is foreverlist.com. It's a paid classified ads site where, for $5, you can list an ad with unlimited images that never expires and which you can change to anything at any time.So, as an example, you have a classic car which just sits in your garage collecting dust. You're somewhat interested in selling it, but only for the right price, and definitely don't want to fuss with relisting the ad every 30 or 60 days like ebay, craigslist or kijiji. So, one day you sell the car and then want to sell your snowblower. Just change the listing.Cheaper than ebay's fees by far, less hassle than CL or kijiji. The $5 keeps out the spammers and scammers. Yeah, I know, it's extremely saturated but like I said, it's a quickie. |
What are you working on tonight? | thenduks: Been working on a new bug/ticket tracker for a while... Continuing to do so :) |
What are you working on tonight? | kylebragger: I'm working on Forrst. |
language choice for dynamic website given our skills | patio11: Java was my first "real" programming language. I went to a Java school. I did primarily Java programming at my first job. I've done almost exclusively Java programming at my current job. I made a business selling downloadable Java software half just to show people it could be done.I say this so that when I tell you DO NOT USE JAVA you won't think me biased. Its strengths are more apparent in Big Freaking Enterprise applications with teams of dozens or hundreds of people working on them. Its deficiencies are even more glaring when there are only two of you -- chiefly, the productivity lag you'll suffer to do even the smallest things.You'll have a bit of a ramp-up period learning Rails, Django, or your favorite modern MVC framework of choice. Trust me: it is worth it. It will probably even make your cofounder a better Java programmer in the bargain. |
What are you working on tonight? | vault_: Working on an experiment for my psychology class. It's fun because I made it a web application, and it's been a good chance to mess with Couchdb. (project is here(http://github.com/vault/Word-Superiority-Effect), it's pretty crappy currently) |
Location Poll | vorador: By the way, I'm parisian. Maybe we should create a meet-up thread ? |
What are you working on tonight? | abyssknight: This Friday night, I'll be working on getting the Orlando Defcon Group together at Stardust Coffee and Video @ 7pm.This will be the first time the group has convened since it was marked inactive in 2006. |
What are you working on tonight? | wglb: Working through pickaxe ruby, tinkering with lisp program to decode pcap files and explain packets/protocols, keeping an eye on the Cluster, figuring out xen. |
We got an invite to TechStars for a day, should we go? | andrewhyde: (I'm with TS)Keep in mind that attendance at TechStars For A Day is not required in order to receive an invitation to participate in the program. It can obviously help, but there are plenty of examples of companies that didn't attend and were still invited to the program subsequently.It is also a really fun day filled with a lot of smart people looking to help. Plus Boulder is a fantastic place to visit (and live).Let me know if you have any more questions or anyone wants some offline answers andrew@techstars.org |
Any good stories you have about writing? | RyanMcGreal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120356http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=778108(P.S. thanks, searchyc!) |
Any good stories you have about writing? | krevels: George Orwell - Why I Writehttp://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw |
We got an invite to TechStars for a day, should we go? | henryci: Reasons to go:
- Meet new entrepreneurs in your physical location or technology space.
- Get free advice from great mentors.
- Be involved in the community.
- Increase your chances if you apply next year by learning about TechStars.
- 5% is significantly more likely than life happening, and yet here we are.Reasons not to go:
- You miss 8 hours of development, of which you'll probably work for 4 at best.
- Might catch a cold from all the hand-shaking.Seems like a no-brainer to me, but I'm biased because our company got in to last year's Boston program. |
We got an invite to TechStars for a day, should we go? | quigebo: with an attitude like that, you wont get very far with your business. Figure your startup has an even smaller chance of being successful but you still want to pursue it, correct? Have faith in yourself because no one else will. |
Any good stories you have about writing? | raffi: I used to work as a scientist for the Air Force and part of my job was writing reports and proposals. My community expected clear and concise technical writing. At the time I had a lot of trouble with passive voice and complex expressions. I was intimidated by our style guidelines and it really made it hard for me to start writing. One day I took a look at Style and Dict (GNU Tools for checking your writing) and wondered if I could do better.I then set out to create After the Deadline (http://www.afterthedeadline.com) and it has changed my writing in two major ways.1) Having a good tool in my corner gave me the confidence to focus on the content of my writing and not the mechanics. I knew I could run my writing through my tool later and get rid of the passive voice and complex expressions.2) Having software beat me over the head with my bad habits forced me to notice them and what they were. I then stopped making some of these same mistakes. My writing is not perfect (and I'm in the position where some people find meaning in their life pointing this out), but it's passable. :)So my recommendation for writers:Know that not all spell and grammar checking software sucks. There are solutions beyond Microsoft Word. Find something that matches the style of writing you're going for and use it to help with the mechanical things.I also recommend turning off the "as you type" spell and grammar check as it's a distraction. |
We got an invite to TechStars for a day, should we go? | hiroprot: Come out, we'll have a beer :) |
Template for Software License agreement | Roridge: what kind of licence? Like The GNU Licence, MIT licence, Apache Licence? or a Proprietary licence? |
What are you working on tonight? | rmanocha: Learning Clojure (by reading Programming Clojure) - oh and trying to setup VimClojure and failing miserably (file detection is working, but everything else including syntax highlighting & indentation isn't). |
Is doing a PhD from Oxford a better option than a Research based Job? | cperciva: a three year doctoral programYou do know that's a myth, right? When I turned up OUCL for my DPhil, one of the first things the department head told us was "in the history of OUCL, only one student has ever done the DPhil in 3 years".I'm not sure if that's true or if he was exaggerating slightly; but the norm is 4-5 years, not 3. |
inspirational startup sites | nathanh: Have a look at http://www.abtests.comThey have great landing page examples. |
Any good stories you have about writing? | tankman: Maybe you will be as surprised as I was to hear the name Stephen King mentioned in the context of writing advice, but 896 Amazon reviewers can't be wrong:Stephen King - On Writing:https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743455967?tag=0596800673-20&c...;This is what Roger Ebert said about the book:"A lot of people were outraged that he [King] was honored at the National Book Awards, as if a popular writer could not be taken seriously. But after finding that his book On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, I have gotten over my own snobbery."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Writing |
Is there an open-source shared task list app? | pasbesoin: ToDoList is open source. Unfortunately, it is Windows based. On the other hand, I've heard it runs fine under Wine.The developer, Dan, is a good guy.http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/todolist2.aspx |
Open source Stack Overflow equivalent? | billpg: I'll build one this weekend. |
Open source Stack Overflow equivalent? | OmniLarry: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/5558/am-i-allowed-to... |
Open source Stack Overflow equivalent? | pragmatic: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source... |
Open source Stack Overflow equivalent? | hcm: Django implementation: http://github.com/rickross/osqa/Rails/MongoMapper implementation: http://gitorious.org/shapado |
Rate our Start Up Image Terrain | rmk: Do you support Chrome? |
Any good stories you have about writing? | pmichaud: I wrote this a while back. Writing is Thinking:http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/the-secret-about-writing-... |
Rate our Start Up Image Terrain | pedalpete: I didn't quite get it until watching a bit of the video.
Might be nicer if on the main page you had a 'we turned this image into these images'. kind of thing.
It looks like it could be an image library, rather than a product which creates images. |
What are you working on tonight? | Semiapies: A designer friend and I will likely play with a redesign of some mutual friends' university club's website.EDIT: And then I notice that this was posted yesterday. :) |
Everyone-Must-Follow Blogs? | mbrubeck: I posted some links in this recent thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134392 |
Where is Steve Yegge? | pook: He and _Why are obviously forming an underwater hacker's paradise. |
What are you working on tonight? | headShrinker: There is a merge lane right out my window in NY. Horns honk all day, due to narrowly missed disasters, and occationally theres some contact. Soooooo, I pointed a webcam out my window and created the http://WorstMergeLaneEver.com |
Where is Steve Yegge? | amarcy: When he was on the Stack Overflow podcast a while back he said that he was going to be finished blogging shortly thereafter. That was about a year ago. |
Location Poll | shrnky: About an hour and half outside of New Orleans, LA. |
What are you working on tonight? | ElllisD: Searching my email / Paypal accounts for orphaned / unlogged receipts. |
Anonymously register a C Corporation? | startupcomment: If you are an incorporator, director, or officer, the jurisdiction where you incorporate or are required to qualify to conduct business may require disclosure of all such parties. Your involvement could be more concealed if you were merely a stockholder or if the state where your business incorporates and any other state where your business is required to qualify to conduct business do not require that all directors and officers be disclosed. Note: You may be able to have a third-party serve as incorporator. Bear in mind that your business may be required to qualify to conduct business in jurisdictions with disclosure requirements for officers and directors that differ from those of the state where your business is incorporated. |
Anonymously register a C Corporation? | pseingatl: An attorney can incorporate and keep your identity secret. As long as the corportion isn't public disclosure requirements are trivial. The problem is with respect to banking business; banks will insist on knowing who the real customer is. It is almost impossible to conduct banking business though third parties. |
What are you working on tonight? | wendroid: Working on our backup path. I run some Limbo[1] code using Windows Scheduled Tasks. This copies the contents of My Documents and Desktop (or wherever) to a Venti[2] server running on Linux on the LAN. The storage arenas of that server are extracted in 500Mb chunks and encrypted, along with the scores for accessing them, using GPG[3]. These are then copied offsite, via the internet and bundled into DVD sized groups and burned to optical when appropriate. As Venti arenas are append only this is minimum transfer, secure backup.
That's obviously just the Windows machiens that use Limbo. Unix likes have native clients. Our Venti store also contains data from other soruces such as the website and imap servers. Though it might make sense to separate them out, that's the decisions I'm working on as I go along.I would also like to find an encryption method that uses fixed size chunks so I can upload only the appended data. That's something I need to look more into. I know they are around somewhere.[1] http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/
[2] http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/venti.html
[3] http://www.gnupg.org/ |
Rate our Start Up Image Terrain | joshmeth30: pedalpete we were trying to hint at that by our slogan "one image endless possibilities and we do support chrome. If anyone is interested in a free trial or promotional rates contact me atimageterrainjm@gmail.com |
Still using thesixtyone? | timmorgan: I had never used thesixtyone until the redesign made waves here. That discussion made me finally try the site. Now I use it a lot.Not sure if that helps answer your question, though. |
Still using thesixtyone? | bjplink: I was a semi-regular user before the redesign, didn't particularly like the new look and have pretty much stopped using the site. |
Still using thesixtyone? | yannis: Somehow, the social element is gone now and the interface lost its appeal for me. As for the game is gone! From daily logins I am now to about once/twice a week. I only login to listen to my favorite artists. I hate the redesign, I like to look at lists and choose, scrolling is so 90's. (Karma 28000 Lvl 14). Hope for the sake of the owners and artists of the site it works for them, but certainly does not work for me anymore.I understand your frustration. |
Still using thesixtyone? | mschaecher: I was never really a frequent user. I have some friends that didn't know of the site pre-redesign, but have since discovered it and love it. |
Still using thesixtyone? | maxtilford: I used it a lot before and I use it a lot now. It took a bit of getting used to, but I rather like the new design. I've found that I'm listening to a lot more new music, where before the redesign I just kept listening to the same stuff over and over. |
What are you working on tonight? | jasonkester: The Plan: Finish documenting the little i18n library for .NET that I built last week and release it open source.The Reality: It's 95 degrees here in Cartagena and my fingers are sweating onto the keyboard. Cuba Libres sound like a much more viable option. |
Still using thesixtyone? | inmygarage: I used the site both before the re-design and after.love the re-design.Lots of reasons:-the core of thesixtyone is about discovery and the problem with many discovery sites is they are too bogged down with choices. the browsabilty of the new design is commendable.-all of the stuff they are clearly doing around machine learning is more obvious in the second version-the new design is edgy and i'm sure they knew they would alienate some users, but it's also gorgeous. about time artistic content was more aligned with artistic design.sure, there are definitely a few usability kinks (trying to delete a song from a saved list, for example) but am i confident that they'll fix them eventually? absolutely. |
Try my Jeopardy game | jsomers: I built this game using the data made freely available by j-archive.com (a wonderful site). It's "multiplayer"---so you'll get the most fun out of it if you've got some chums around. But there is also a single-player "study mode" at /blast.I'm worried that the site (made using Ruby on Rails) won't stand up to serious traffic, and so I'd appreciate some advice / info on that front. Please forgive me if you notice sloppy performance. Also, have low expectations re: bugs and the like.Finally, I am working on a "real-time" multiplayer version using the Juggernaut plugin for Rails. I'd say it's about 40% of the way there. I'd be happy to open the code up if anyone wants to pitch in. If nothing else my rake task for scraping j-archive might be useful to other folks. |
Still using thesixtyone? | jgilliam: Compete shows traffic shot up in January.http://siteanalytics.compete.com/thesixtyone.com/ |
Still using thesixtyone? | niels_olson: I was on t61 fairly early but never used the site much. I use it much more after the redesign. Now it's on par with Pandora as my go-to music source. Pandora is more reliable; thesixtyone is experimental.OTOH: last.fm has lost me. It's like facebook for musical tastes, except none of my frinds use it. Many of my friends and relatives use Pandora and they seem to get the new t61. I think a lot of people are looking at formats like last.fm and the old t61 and saying "I don't need a facebook for every niche of my life". |
Looking for interns / entry level? | vide0star: We're looking for either marketing or engineering interns to join Smarkets in London for a minimum of three months. Our front-end is Django and back-end Erlang with a nifty RESTful API.http://smarkets.comSmarkets is a simple and social place to bet online. Our tech team is top notch and we recently launched publicly.
For more information: http://smarkets.com/about/internships/ |
Still using thesixtyone? | jmathai: I used it for a few days after the redesign but have since resorted back to pandora. I've got a few stations that I've been listening to for a while and I've provided a great deal of feedback for which songs I like/dislike. A few of my stations really nail it for me at this point. |
How to get into SEO consulting? | brk: At 17, I'd suggest you probably just bypass this altogether.SEO is not magic or difficult, it is what HTML was in the 90's.I remember when a person who did little more than a webpage layout could charge $3,000+ for what was basically a set of static page templates because most people thought that HTML was a "language" akin to C++ or something. Now you can get a web page template for free, or $50 at the most.When you get right down to it, SEO is just basic layout best-practices and having fresh, relevant content on your page. You can carry on all you want about "backlinks" and "pagerank" and "referrer text", but at the end of the day you can fit 98% of all SEO rules on the back of business card.In the next few years, SEO is going to be thought of as highly as "HTML writing": it will be assumed that any 14 year old can do it for free (and this will be mostly true).Most of the more savvy web-marketing types I've spoken with over the last couple of years don't see a future in SEO as a "career".At your age, you need to be looking toward the next thing, not the last thing. If you really want to play with SEO in the meantime though, start with seobook.com. |
How to get into SEO consulting? | jaxc: If you wanted to learn about SEO then you could always jump in the deep end and setup a small website or blog with a dot.com domain name with some original content around a niche (topic) something small that you know a lot about and try play the Google/bing/yahoo(?) game and aim to get your site ranked well. It will take a while especially with a new 'virgin' site.The best place to start would be google webmaster Tools. Follow best practices they recommend and go from there. There are loads of articles on SEO, some good, some bad and some erm shady.Google's algorithm is regularly updated and changes and there is no 100% certified or guaranteed no matter what anyone may say or try to sell you to get to number 1 spot. It is a mixture of luck, links, good original content and more luck. There's no one way to be top and the best is to just jump straight into it and get your hands dirty. Build up experience and go from there.Some people who I would trust with good SEO advice is Google's Matt Cutts. His blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ is a good way of keeping in the loop.For search engine news there is a journalist called Danny Sullivan. His personal blog is http://daggle.com/ and he also blogs at http://searchengineland.com/ He is someone who I would respect with good reporting on search engines.There's plenty of others too. Google et al are your friends there. They are just a couple that came into my mind.The only way to stay on top is to follow Google's and other best practices as they evolve and experiment with your own site and plenty of research.Sorry its not quick but best way to learn is through experience.Good luck.Edited for typos and readability. |
What % of YC companies were "pro" | pg: You mean which have some kind of post-school work experience? Certainly the majority. Maybe 80%. Though interestingly some of the biggest successes (e.g. Loopt, Dropbox) were started by people straight out of school.Young founders have more variance. They often flame out, but when they don't they often do really well. For that reason we've made a conscious effort not to get conservative and fund only startups that seem safe.When we first started, we had no choice but to fund risky startups, since those were the only ones that applied. Now that we're better known we get a lot of applications from older, more legit seeming founders. It would be easy to start funding only them and ignoring the 20 year olds, but that would be a mistake. The median 20 year old is going to fail, but the best one is Sam Altman. |
How to get into SEO consulting? | jfi: One person you might want to Google is Mike Mothner - he's a Dartmouth College graduate and started a business from his dorm room when he was a senior (I believe). He turned it into a company called wPromote, which specializes in site optimization (which, I agree, will pretty much fall into the category of "writing HTML" if it hasn't already) and other consultative areas. He's an interesting guy and his story might be of interest to you! |
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