instruction stringlengths 4 105 | output stringlengths 8 56.7k |
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copying terms or FAQ off of other sites? | JacobAldridge: IANAL.Strategically - does the site you are copying have the same objectives as you? Even similar size and age businesses in the same market may have different strategic plans (eg, I want to build a passive income v I want an IPO exit), so copying any of their collateral may push you towards their goals, not yours.Operationally - Do you really want to be setting the same expectations with potential / actual clients as a competitor? Or do you want to stand out? Again, their terms of service or responses to FAQs may not align with what you want to achieve - save time by copying now, and wake up in 12 months realising you hate your clients because they want all the things you didn't actually intend to deliver.Googlely - Duplicate content does an SEO disservice.Legally - A lot of legal boilerplate stuff is basically or exactly the same because it's based, eg, on the wording of legislation. You may get pinged for copyright, if their copy (particularly in the FAQs) is distinct enough. And if a user ever sues or kicks up a legal stink about your service, you won't be able to go to your competitor's law firm and say "Hey - you wrote some stuff for XYZ, I ripped it off, now it's being challenged, can you help".tl;dr - The risks are greater than just legal. Ask yourself if it's worth the effort. |
Review my site Artevolve - Remix and Derive Artwork/Photographs | dryicerx: Just a side project I just hacked in the last few days. Think of it as Github, except for artwork. You can use it to store your creative stuff, but also to fork and derive from other users and the site tracks the derivative/fork tree.Example of derivatives http://alpha.artevolve.com/art/view/321667ea2e7a4db4a2089802...By the way this is still Alpha as still a lot to be done |
Review my site Artevolve - Remix and Derive Artwork/Photographs | amock: Is there any way to search or filter by tag? Right now you can just look through all the photos, but once you have more photos it would be nice to be able to filter them. |
Books That Should Be Read | hellotoby: Neuromancer - William GibsonAnything by Haruki Murakami |
Books That Should Be Read | lochnessy: "Ender's Game"
[O.S. Card even wrote his own review on Amazon]"The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship"
[a Bukowski book about getting high on making good work] |
Where did you go to college? | heypaul: Auburn University |
Review my site Artevolve - Remix and Derive Artwork/Photographs | jaymon: The site looks great. It's very clean, which I love.One of the things I would do is split the main page into left and right and move the "Recent Artwork" to the right of bullet point list on the left. This will let prospective users see artwork right away and you don't really lose anything since there isn't much content in the bullet points anyway.Also, I would lose the captcha for the signup until you have a spam user signup problem. No point in giving people another obstacle to signup if you don't have to. I would lose the "password again" field also as I've never really liked it.Good luck. |
Lightweight/Quality Blogging Software? | _delirium: At the very lightweight end of the scale, one of the more popular ones is blosxom: http://blosxom.sourceforge.net/Development has been mostly dormant for the past year or two, though, so there are a bunch of forks, one of which is: http://toroid.org/ams/loathsxome |
Lightweight/Quality Blogging Software? | taitems: EDIT: Whoops, I didn't see the part where you want to want to host it yourself.---------------------A popular way of achieving this at the moment is to register for a blog on Tumblr or Posterous. A lot of designers and iPhone developers are doing this to relieve themselves of all the responsibility of hosting/maintaining blogs. You can then redirect your URL if you want to as well.Case in point: http://blog.graphicpeel.com/The theme integrates back into his website's design seemlessly. |
Lightweight/Quality Blogging Software? | jarsj: Hold on. I have been building something and you sound like a perfect customer. I will be sending beta invites in few weeks. Will remember you. |
"Basic SEO"? | DotSauce: If you use WordPress I have written an article detailing some common SEO mistakes and how to fix them:1. Bloated title tag and abandoned post titles2. Lack of relevant keywords and phrases3. Disregarding the NoFollow link attribute4. No Sitemap or ping notification to search engines5. Not adding images in posts6. Improper anchor text for internal linksFor my suggestions and solutions to these basic SEO issues, continue reading...http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/11/17/wordpress-seo-mistakes/Do not listen to the black hat advice! Organic SEO pays off much more in the long run. |
Lightweight/Quality Blogging Software? | cperciva: I like the "blogsh" script I wrote for my blog: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/ |
Lightweight/Quality Blogging Software? | telemachos: There are a number of good static-site compilers for Ruby (for example): Webby, StaticMatic, Jekyll.You can use your version control system of choice to deal with the source and then a simple rsync over ssh to push the pages up to your host. |
Lightweight/Quality Blogging Software? | alastair: if you just want something simple and secure, maybe you should consider jekyll (http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll) or another static site generator. this way there are no scripts running server-side, just plain and simple html. |
Where did you go to college? | imp: Case Western |
Review my site Artevolve - Remix and Derive Artwork/Photographs | tptacek: I click this link and see a wall of text. Bullet-y text to be sure, but text. I don't even think to scroll down to see the artwork below the fold. My eyes don't really read your text; they're just looking for some indication of something I can click on to actually see the thing. They find "browse"; I click that, and now I'm actually in your app, and I'm thinking "what-the-hell, why isn't this the first thing I see when I visit the site?"Long story short: find another way to organize the front page of the site. You picked a niche where you get to put pretty pictures on your site. They need to be the first thing I see. |
Why do threads die? | JacobAldridge: I imagine it was flagged multiple times, and tipped over the flag/vote weight. I'm personally in favour of this system on HN - it may be biased towards threads dying, but I would rather kill some good threads than have a bias that allows off-topic, link-bait etc rising to the top.Of course, I have Show Dead on, so in effect dead threads are just an extra datapoint when I decide whether to read. |
Where did you go to college? | rmanocha: UT Austin |
Would using rpxnow.com hurt the chances of Google buying your app? | hga: There's a difference between planning for any particular company buying your application and precluding it from happening (not that I have any idea about your first question). |
Where did you go to college? | ajdecon: Michigan Tech |
Where did you go to college? | makeramen: University of Wisconsin — Madison |
Review my site Artevolve - Remix and Derive Artwork/Photographs | ow: I think that your design would be much more successful if it were more visually content-centric. Focus on 1-3 of the best images (I guess based on your voting system) to show off on the front page. "Finally a Home
for your Creative Work!" is too generic. It forces me to read each paragraph below to know what's going on. Try explaining the site in a few bullet points reinforced with descriptive and visually appealing icons. If you try that stuff out I think it would also positively influence the flow of the rest of the site. |
How to assess an application for investing purposes? | jmount: I would say the team and market need is more important than the code (since he is investing in the company, not outright buying the IP). |
Books That Should Be Read | kimfuh: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman |
Review my site Artevolve - Remix and Derive Artwork/Photographs | tcagri: I think you should left align the introduction texts and title on the homepage.Also it is not clear if everything on the page is 'recent artwork' or not. |
Review my site Artevolve - Remix and Derive Artwork/Photographs | eam: I would have to say the only thing that bugs me is the many different font styles and colors. I'm not feeling the #B55008. Just giving you my meaningless opinion. :) |
How to open a U.S. bank account without stepping foot in the US | patio11: Your main hurdle is a regulation called Know Your Customer, which requires banks to have some idea of the actual identity of folks who bank with them. However, banks have wide latitude in satisfying KYC. Some will accept a faxed passport/driver's license combo, for example, others can direct you to an affiliate in a foreign country. CitiBank, for example, will happily open an American CitiBank account for a Japanese citizen who walks into a Japanese CitiBank and asks for help with their international banking needs.There are other ways. One which used to work but which I haven't tried recently is to open a brokerage account -- which have very lax verification requirements -- with ETrade or one of the other international low fee brokers. They're quite used to having folks abroad open accounts to invest in the US markets. After you have a brokerage account, ETrade knows you for the purpose of KYC, by reference to your "pre-existing business relationship". Then you call up ETrade and say "Hey, you're also a bank. I'd like a checking account tied to my brokerage account." Bam, done.After you have one American bank account getting a second one is a cinch, incidentally. (cough ING Direct cough.) |
How to assess an application for investing purposes? | skmurphy: Do they have paying customers? Talk to them.Do they have prospects evaluating it. Talk to them.Can your friend supply expertise or connections in addition to money? |
Hurts your career if you write a tech book that gets negative reviews? | Madfrogme: I'm sorry I dont't know about the negative reviews to the author's career.But I think it's best to do what you like ~ Gook luck~ |
Hurts your career if you write a tech book that gets negative reviews? | SwellJoe: Don't write a bad book.Also be involved in good things. You get some leeway for making mistakes if you are a developer on an Open Source project that a lot of people like. My first (and, so far, only) book had many flaws, but the reviews were almost universally favorable (the biggest negative sentiment was that it was too short, which is about as good negative as I can think to have) because peoples opinion of me were mostly favorable, and they knew I was trying to do good things.My book was also available for free, which tends to make people like you better, thought it's no guarantee.As long as reviews aren't really bad, which I can only imagine would happen if you were obviously writing crap to cash in rather than transfer knowledge, having a published book will not hurt your career. It can only help. My book got me my best contract ever, almost single-handedly (I was one of a handful of people they interviewed for the gig, and the moment after my book was discussed, I could tell they'd decided the search was over and I was their guy). |
Hurts your career if you write a tech book that gets negative reviews? | ezf: If you're that concerned about it, plan on astroturfing your own Amazon reviews. |
Hacker News meetup at SXSW? | RobGR: SXSW is so packed schedule-wise, having your own meeting this late in the game is kind of hard.I suggest piggy backing on the Nuclear Tacos meeting 6 pm aMonday the 15th in Brushy Square Park ( http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/4965 ) and the Dorkbot at 6 pm on Saturday the 13th in the same place ( http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/5292 ). I think that you should be able to get into those two without a badge, but I am not sure.There are also events at Austin Hacker Space, and some people from the Austin Linux groups are having a party 1pm to 4pm Sunday the 14th, at Texas Coworking, which is over BD Riley's near the Driskill. |
Where did you go to college? | mangoleaf: Stanford |
Hurts your career if you write a tech book that gets negative reviews? | bootload: "... However, after reviewing other related books on Amazon, I've noticed that reviewers/customers can be merciless. This seems to be all the more true for programming books, perhaps because these books are generally expensive and disappointed customers tend to be more upset than others because of the financial loss. But also, perhaps, because programmers tend to be more critical in general - I'm not sure. ..."Take a look at how both the Django (Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss) ~ http://www.djangobook.com/ and HTML5 (Mark Pilgrim) ~ http://diveintohtml5.org/ are evolving. Both started online and have moved/moving to publication. The interesting bit is how the content is influenced by their readers reducing the chance of poor reviews. |
How to assess an application for investing purposes? | jaddison: Does the product solve a problem?If so, what is the problem?Does the problem exist for a large enough number of users?Are those users likely to be paying users (or a sufficient percentage of them)? Or are there other relevant revenue models that exist - hopefully the company is aware of them?The product isn't really the determination of whether the company is investment-worthy or not; it's whether the problem it is meant to address is inconvenient enough for users to WANT to get the product. |
How much should I pay a mediator? | coryl: Why do you need mediation? You can't negotiate for yourself? |
How to look for a programming opportunity | lpolovets: I think the claimed point is valid. If you are a good programmer, you can improve your chances of finding a job much more by polishing up your resume, writing awesome cover letters, networking, etc. than you can by learning new programming languages.It's all about bang for the buck. If you spend 100 hours learning, your programming skills and hence your ability to find a job might improve by a few percent; if you spend 100 hours on marketing yourself better, your programming skills stay the same but your chances of finding a job will improve greatly. It's like a lot of software... once the internals are good enough, it's much better to make the UI good than to keep the UI crappy while making the back end a little better.Also, anecdotally, every good company that I've interviewed with has said that if I am the right person for the job, then they will give me the benefit of the doubt that I can pick up whatever technologies are necessary. |
Modern Day CS Curriculum | Kliment: Try "The Perils of Java schools" for the classic. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool... |
How much should I pay a mediator? | credo: I think it would be unethical for the "senior manager" to get any compensation from you.He is being paid a salary by his company (i.e. the buyer company) and he should act in the best interests of his employer.If you pay him money for helping you sell your company to his employer, that introduces a significant conflict of interest for him |
How to look for a programming opportunity | kixxauth: Just write code. Work on open source projects, blog, twitter, and keep a GitHub account with interesting projects in it.I know that many jobs may hire by running "grep" on hundreds of resumes, but I don't think those jobs are the good ones. I think the good jobs want to hire your brain, not for any particular language, but for the overall value you can add to the company.Working on open source projects and posting your own projects on sites like GitHub demonstrate your ability to understand architecture and write good code in any language.This is what I'm looking for anyway, and it seems to be what Google is trying to get at with all the silly questions they ask during interviews. How good is your brain?http://www.fireworksproject.com/pages/extraordinary_people.h... |
How to look for a programming opportunity | patio11: I think this is largely good advice. You could expand it to thinks much more concrete than "improve your job-getting skill": make yourself a portfolio website if you don't already have one. Make decisionmaker-specific pages on your portfolio website targeting the exact interests of the people who you want to hire you.(Hypothetically assuming I wanted to apply to Google, Big Japanese Megacorp, and Cool Valley Startup, I'd be pitching myself in a very different way in the cover letters and resumes... why show them all the same portfolio? I mean, theoretically I'm supposed to be pretty good at this whole "Build a web page to sell stuff" thing -- if I can't build a web page to sell me, why should they hire me?)If you don't already have a blog and social proof of value which you can quote to people, start building them. For example: you put a recommendation on your resume in the hope someone calls them, they agree to talk, and then they praise you, right? That's an awful lot of opportunities for the recommendation to not pan out well. Instead, when you ask for a recommendation, ask for a testimonial, too, which you will prominently quote in your Hire Me salesletter. And write the testimonial for them. "Hey boss, can I quote you on '$NAME_HERE is one of the best developers I've ever had the pleasure of working with. He has done things with $PROJECT that we never thought were possible. I'd hire him in a second.'?" (This presumes you have, actually, made a good impression on your boss. If not, then just write down their phone number and pray that no one calls it, because that is apparently what everyone else does.)Networking is, obviously, another opportunity for improvement. Rather than spending time waiting for someone to call you back, it is (well past) time to start reacquainting yourself with friends and business associates (and mentioning, hey, you're on the market now) and making new friends/business associates. |
How to look for a programming opportunity | btilly: In most cases I agree. If you can't get a job with your primary language, you'll have a harder time getting one in a language you just learned.But there are exceptions. For instance if you don't have a programming background, learning the basics of something employable is a good idea. Also some things do become obsolete. For instance if your background is VB 5, you should update your skills to be more employable. (Actually you should have done that a few years back...)Another exception is when a particular area is hot. If not many know a suddenly popular language or library, teaching yourself that tool can give you an edge on those jobs. Of course most jobs are maintaining something that already exists, and so don't need to cool new stuff. And more people try that strategy than there are jobs, so it may be a losing proposition to compete there. But, for instance, a lot of people learned Java back in the mid-90s to jump on a bandwagon, and it worked out for many of them.Also it is fine to learn something for the job prospects when you have an obvious hole in your resume. For instance if you've been doing statistics professionally and you haven't learned R, you probably should. If you're a Perl web programmer and haven't learned Catalyst, it is at least worth playing with for a couple of weekends. A Java programmer is on solid ground in deciding to learn Spring better.A special case of the obvious hole is when you need to learn something to get a certification. The whole certification treadmill is something I hate. But there is no question that it can help you, and acquiring relevant certifications is not a useless endeavor.And a final exception is if there is a specific requirement for a job you want that you have a realistic shot at. For example I learned three languages before my Google interview. I knew that the interview would be in some combination of C++, Java and Python, and I knew none of them. So I learned the basics of all three, and made my lack of experience clear in the interviews. I was not hired for my knowledge of those languages. But without putting out that effort I couldn't have passed the interview. However this kind of situation is the rarest of them all. (This has only happened to me once.) |
Where did you go to college? | rphlx: caltech. before numb3rs/big bang theory made it cool. |
How to look for a programming opportunity | gnosis: There are still COBOL jobs. But are they the kind you're interested in?If you're interested in, say, web programming, you're probably going to have a hard time finding a job doing web programming in COBOL.. no matter how great your interviewing/job-hunting skills are.The same goes for many other preferences regarding work, from location to the kind of company you'll be working at or people you'll be working with. If most jobs you're interested in largely have openings for people who know language X, you'll probably be better off knowing that language.On the other hand, it's certainly a good idea to have well-rounded skills. So if you're particularly weak at people skills, or job-hunting skills, it's a good idea to work on improving those, as often being a good programmer is not enough to land the job you want. |
Best office chair | justrudd: I've had a Steelcase Leap chair (http://www.steelcase.com/na/leap_products.aspx?f=11852) for about 5 years now. It was simple enough that I had it adjusted to the sweet spot in about an hour or two of sitting in it. I've made slight adjustments over the years, but not too many.I tried to replace the Leap with a Mirra from Herman Miller. But I just couldn't adjust it to what was comfortable for me. And I didn't like the back. I'm not a fan of the webbing.I gave it to my wife, and she loves it. But granted I upgraded her from a 80 dollar Office Depot chair :)You should see if there are office supply stores near you that will let you demo the chairs. Not just for a few minutes but for at least a day.A friend of mine just bought 15 Leap's in AZ. He was able to get a Leap, Mirra, and a couple of others to test out for a couple of days before making his decision. Might be something to look for in your area. |
How to look for a programming opportunity | nostrademons: I'd disagree with this. Most of the candidates I've seen turned down weren't rejected because they lack some nebulous job-getting skill. They were rejected because they don't have the CS and programming skills to do the job.The part I would agree with is that learning a new language != getting better at programming. When you learn a new language, you're increasing your breadth of knowledge - but most employers don't hire for breadth, they hire for depth. They want you to be good at the job they hire you for. And when you pick up a new language, you'll perform worse than on your existing languages, until you've had the practice to bring your skills up to where they were before.Instead, spend time learning your language better. Most languages (even Python) provide different ways to accomplish the same task; try them all out, find out which is best, and most importantly, find out which is best for which tasks. Learn some libraries in depth. Write some actual code so you have something tangible on your resume - starting a project from scratching will teach you a lot that maintenance work at your employer won't, and even contributing some patches for an open-source project will teach you something new.A big problem with many candidates is that their knowledge is very shallow: they'll claim to be an "expert JavaScript programmer", where "expert" means they can only use JQuery snippets they found on the web. And they don't even realize that their knowledge is shallow; they're completely oblivious to the depth of the subject until they meet someone who really does have deep knowledge (and even then, only rarely). |
How to look for a programming opportunity | eliot_sykes: MySpace hired this person after they built http://myspacehire.me/I'm sure they've been other examples of people being hired (or not) after turning a cover letter into a dedicated web site for the employer they want - anyone remember any others? |
Would using rpxnow.com hurt the chances of Google buying your app? | LiveTheDream: No, that would not hurt the chances. Google would be interested in the unique technology behind the company, not how you authenticate users. Oauth is not the selling point of your app.As far as planning, you could use Python and protocol buffers instead of ruby and thrift, but the deciding factor is still going to be the underlying technology, not a clever marketing strategy. |
Best office chair | Roridge: http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/20103101Comfortable and a great price too! |
Best office chair | Kototama: Haider Bioswing 460, which is ergonomic and really flexible for its configuration (but expensive)http://www.bioswing.de/de/products/sitzsysteme/b450/ |
Whatever happened to Google pulling out of China? | davidw: Censored how? I was wondering the same the other day, and looked for Tienanmen square. I did get a few results from the protests. |
How to open a U.S. bank account without stepping foot in the US | eliot_sykes: Anyone successfully opened a US bank account with Citibank in the UK? |
Best office chair | jonsen: I've mounted wheels under an armchair. It's really good. For me at least.For years I had an old office chair. Got it used from a bank. I was happy with that. But eventually it was worn out. Tried a lot of office chairs. Never found anything like it.One day it struck me. This armchair of mine, which I used to sit and read in for hours, why not put wheels under it. I did. Four sturdy rotating 4" wheels. Made the chair a little higher which is perfect. |
Whatever happened to Google pulling out of China? | jarsj: I do not think they can run an uncensored google.cn as per the law stands. All the posting say is that they will spend few weeks trying to find a way to do that. These things take time. Let's hope Google is trying. |
How do you capture and analyse usage patterns on your RIA? | geoffc: I'm using jquery and google analytics to track this. Tie the interface actions into different analytic tags and use google to store and display the activity.http://www.thewhyandthehow.com/tracking-events-with-google-a... |
Modern Day CS Curriculum | jonsen: You are touching a controversial topic. Everybody knows we are not generally doing it right in computing education. It's a world wide mesh of trial and error. For a broad overview of the problem space you might find this informative [PDF]:http://www.acm.org/education/future-of-computing-education-s... |
How do you capture and analyse usage patterns on your RIA? | bemmu: I record everything to Google App Engine data store, then have a script to export the data into a simple text file on my machine that runs from cron. Then I can run Python scripts on my own computer to just go through the text. I get about 60MB of events / day. Soon I will have to start deleting old events from App Engine, because I have to pay Google for data store entities stored.At first I was planning on doing some clever incremental thing to get all the stats on App Engine, but it's a lot simpler if you can just have everything locally and rerun any analytics quickly when I make mistakes. It only takes a few minutes to load a week's worth of data and go through it, so doesn't make sense to spend days trying to be really clever about doing it on App Engine.My favorite thing to extract is kind of a life story of users. When a user joins, what do they do on average in the first 24 hours? How about the next day? This is a pretty different point of view than Google Analytics, because it is from the user point of view and not historical of the whole app.So does this point of view give you some new insight? At least in our case. For example we are now testing which of two profile box designs is better on our MySpace app. Just a simple stat would reveal that the new design has a better clickthrough rate. BUT, when I look at the whole story, it seems that users are more likely to remove the app when they have this new design, so end results may be worse.Additionally I use Google Analytics events tracking, but I end up looking more at the life story than those events, because it is difficult to pull out how many events happen per visit, or how many events happen per visit in first 24 hours since user joined etc. |
How do you capture and analyse usage patterns on your RIA? | stevejalim: Why not try Google Analytics for Flash's event tracking? I've used that in the past and it's been interesting |
How do you capture and analyse usage patterns on your RIA? | patio11: I'm kind of a metrics junkie.One thing I've learned over the years: tracking data is easy. You can generate a virtual firehose of noise just by snapping your fingers. Tracking data which actually drives decisions meaningful for the business is a bit trickier.I use a mix of Mixpanel, the DB, and key/value stores. I have log files, too, but log files are where data goes to die.In general my core activity loop is generating a hypothesis, asking what I need to answer the hypothesis, either building just what I need to capture that data or a more generalized system (particularly when I keep asking the same kind of questions -- this is how I ended up writing my own A/B testing framework), then analyzing the data and trying a few things in response to it. The hardest part about drowning in data is understanding, in your bones, that if it doesn't drive a decision at the end of the day, you're just wasting your time. Even though the graph is pretty.I generally get more bang for my buck out of simple hypotheses than complex ones. Simple ones are easy to describe, easy to instrument, easy to test, easy to improve, and likely to apply to a large portion of my users/business/etc. Complex ones are, well, the exact opposite. For example, while it is within my capabilities to target behavior at Mac-owning Firefox users who are interested in Catholicism... I'm probably going to spend time working on buttons seen by substantially everyone.I generally do the first cut of analysis by playing around in my Rails console. When I find something interesting in playing around, I often promote it to a graph somewhere on the backend.I think if you count all the data points I've got filed away somewhere you'd come up with a number in the low tens of millions, so my chief bottleneck is less technical/scaling (3 million entries in a key/value store? Oh well, iterate over all of them.) and more that the time, creativity, and attention to ask the right questions are very limited. |
Where did you go to college? | soramimo: Universitiy of Tuebingen, Germany |
How do you capture and analyse usage patterns on your RIA? | ynniv: http://mixpanel.com (YC '09)Basically, when something interesting happens, you make an AJAX call to a logging service. Mixpanel then graphs events and conversions over time and provides user profiling similar to Google Analytics.You can also create virtual page views in Google Analytics by calling pageTracker._trackPageview. |
What's the best way to acquire cheap computing power for uni projects? | Roridge: Like you have, I would have looked at using the cloud as it is only for 6 months. But even if you got one Extra Mem machine at 17.1GB RAM you would still be paying >£1400 for the 6 months use.I am sure that Sun used have something for graduate projects where you could apply and run on their servers for a set amount of time, but I can't see where it might be under the Oracle Regime. Sun also used to give you a server on sale or return 90(?) day trial at one point.I'm tending to agree with you, but I would build several computers myself (ebuyer.com or novatech.com for example), and then break them down/sell them on after the 6 months use.Failing that you could always do what the US government do, buy a shed load of PS3 and use them like a grid/blade server cluster. Then sell them on when you are done (cite: http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/09/military-purchases-2...)hth |
Best office chair | fragmede: My 'real' chair is nothing special at all (http://www.officemax.com/office-furniture/chairs/product-ARS...). My problem is I just can't sit still for very long, so I find myself fidgeting all the time. To support this habit, I've got a couple other chairs so I can switch it up during the day. |
Protecting HTML5 video and audio | grayrest: No more than you can protect an image in a page from being downloaded. e.g. you could escape the URL or check referrers, but that's not really going to stop anybody. |
How to look for a programming opportunity | jarsj: In my college first year, we programmed in two languages Fortran and scheme. It really made me a better programmer. Scheme rocks. |
What % of equity should a CTO get? | Roridge: Honestly, ask him to make you an offer. If he says 15% and you think "yes, that feels right" then go for it. If not at least you will know what ball park he is thinking of.If I was your CEO I would probably calculate it like this... If you are doing 15 hours of a 40 hour a week job, that would be about 6%. If you were to consider a CEO is the "top" position at 10 and a CTO is next a 7 then (as a friendly gesture based on work so far) I would weigh that 6% by the difference and come in at about 18% relative to the importance of what you are doing against how much time you do it for.But that is just me. |
How to open a U.S. bank account without stepping foot in the US | gautam_misra: what about the tax laws? Say I am in India and have a UK bank account(I was studying there).If somebody pays into my UK bank account for a project I have done, wouldn't I be taxed twice--first in UK and then in India when I transfer the money to India. |
Modern Day CS Curriculum | buro9: I'm in a C++ school mostly. They've just finished a transition towards a modular curriculum and exam system. We're also doing Groovy for the OODP module but I'm finding that there's a split between a well-established and very high standard for teaching C++ and a very ill-disciplined and poorly taught Groovy module.For background: I've been in the industry 15 years already, used PERL, TCL, Java and C# daily in different roles.I would definitely say that knowing C++ and relating that to Computer Systems (or whatever your hardware/operating systems module is), and then looking at compilers and modern languages from that perspective is the way to go.Whatever you learn should be transferable. The core concepts of C++ (when taught like C) are pretty universal. Implementing and using various data structures and algorithms is way more important than familiarity with a particular API or language library.I really dislike the Groovy stuff we're doing because it places an over-reliance on teaching the meta-object and programming that rather than teaching GoF patterns that are easily applicable to any language.I guess what I'm saying... skip language specific stuff. Have the core concepts taught. Those are transferable, those provide an essence... the real understanding of what happens where and how. That's the stuff that can be taken and applied anywhere. |
Quality of questions on Vark plummeting? | krainboltgreene: If "games" mean "dice, pencil, and character sheet" then it's not Vark with the problem. It's you.I'm an ttRPG designer/developer and even I am aware that ttRPG's are the smallest niche in gaming. |
Modern Day CS Curriculum | Ezra: Page "Selling Haskell for CS1"Joostena, Van Den Berga and Van Der Hoeven "Teaching functional programming to first-year students"Chakravarty, Keller "The risks and benefits of teaching purely functional programming in first year"Felleisen, Findler, Flatt and Krishnamurthi "The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum"You can get these all off Google Scholar. The papers listed do a good job, in my opinion, of discussing both the good and the bad of a functional approach.When I went through school, we were taught with a myriad of languages, and when I was finishing up, they were transitioning to a more "practical" java/c++ monoculture. I think that's a bad deal for the students, personally.Having been a tutor for a first year class teaching (a subset of) C++, I have anecdotal evidence against doing that. There are too many gotchas, and too much rainmaking to make it worthwhile, in my opinion. |
Which really famous people do we have on here? | lambdom: I don't think that is really important. I'm sure you can learn a lot by reading comments and always trying to analyze it, might it be a famous or not author. |
Modern Day CS Curriculum | djb_hackernews: If your CS Program is teaching languages, then it's not a CS Program.Most programs use languages to teach different programming paradigms. For my CS program we used Java for introductory OO, and Data Structures and Algorithms and Scheme for functional programming. After that students were generally encouraged to choose a language they felt comfortable with to illustrate their understanding of the course's topics.There were some exceptions (Computer Architecture was some ARM assembly, Operating Systems was purely C, Robotics was C, etc.)If your CS Program is teaching languages, I'd suggest you spend your effort to convince them they need to teach Computer Science concepts instead and not worry about languages.If your CS Program is teaching core concepts, but you don't feel you are learning how to program, well that is a common misconception about CS. If you didn't get as much out of your OO/functional courses as you would have liked, maybe there is an upper level Software Engineering course you could take? (My program had one that was mandatory)It sounds like it's somewhere in between, so my suggestion is get them to toss the practical stuff for core/ required classes and offer electives that do teach the practical. If you need help convincing them, just show them course titles/ cirricula from MIT, Stanford, etc. |
Rate my site - delishbits.com | parfe: What makes your site unique? No clue why I'd choose to remember your site over and of the other 10 million versions of the same thing. |
Rate my site - delishbits.com | nickFaraday: I think your going to need something else to drive attention/use of the site.Right now it's basically a standalone GIST app with out any of the social networking bits.If I were to rate the idea as-is I'd probably give it a 5/10 it seems like core functional works but there needs to be more...How do you intend to monetize the site?
(premium services, ads, acquisition?)Somethings I'd look into.1. Add Group Feature (Private Group Bit Repository)
2. Maybe some kind of game mechanic to drive initial traffic and increase the sites stickiness. (pts for posting, badges, etc)
3. Plugins for Wordpress, BBS, Facebook, etc.
4. Try narrowing your niche "Business, Open Source" you can always expand it later.Just some thoughts...Good Luck-N |
How to open a U.S. bank account without stepping foot in the US | faramarz: I'm a Canadian and I have a US business chequing account with my local bank (BMO).All my Canadian and US accounts are managed under the same login.See if your local bank does this. |
Recommend Statistical Software | nlabs: Of the proprietary options, JMP is the best.
R of course is a better option, however it can take more work to do stuff that is just a few clicks in JMP. My startup idea is to build a JMP-like interface based on R. |
How to sell an App Store company with 15m installs? | bugmenot: Questions the buyer will have:
1. How much money have the apps made? Either purchases or ads. (15 million installs of free apps = nothing really worth purchasing)
2. How much are they bringing in now?
3. Why are you selling?
and, of course:
4. What are the apps?I suspect they're not bringing in a lot of money for you, or else you wouldn't be selling.In which case I recommend you use the 15 million figure - which is pretty impressive in itself - as something to mark out your talent as a developer. Something for your CV, rather than something that you can sell. |
Rate my site - delishbits.com | iamcalledrob: I really like your integration with Google accounts.It made me log in and try it out straight away. |
How Best To Reach Hiring Employers? | pjharrin: Are you only accepting applicants from the schools list in the footer? |
Rate my site - delishbits.com | idoh: It seems like an OK site. With these things polish is really key.- Use fixed width layout- align the sign in link the the right margin- let people see submit links even if they aren't signed in. If they click on it, then sign them in.- stock it with a lot more bits. Right now there are just 3!- have more than one user. Get your friends in on the beta first.- make it seem alive and constantly changing, so people come back.- make the bits shareable on twitter / facebook, etc- the iconography is sort of weird, I saw a pancake, an asparagus (?), and the logo looks like a green folded piece of paper with eyes and a bite out of it. If you don't know how to design (which is totally OK), then go for minimalism. |
Recommend first programming language to master (options included) | hga: If you don't think you've mastered "Lisp" yet, you could do worse than one of the two lower level ones, Common Lisp or Scheme. In a lot of ways they're close to the machine while still giving you all sorts of nice high level stuff.However, looking at what you've done so far, you could do worse than getting a good mastery of C. It's a descent "smart assembler", it's not all that big as a language (plus the minimum of the standard library), it's good about teaching you concepts that are close to the machine and it's a common base for a lot of the higher level stuff that you've used or played with. |
Recommend first programming language to master (options included) | DanielBMarkham: If you wander too often, you don't need a language, you need a purpose.Find a project you're going to finish. One that's going to motivate you enough to go through all the work needed to build it and debug it. Then come back and ask us about languages.Any language is great if you spend enough blood, sweat, and tears bending it to your will. No language will be good enough if you don't commit. |
Rate my site - delishbits.com | Snoddas: Bug
http://www.delishbits.com/languages/c# shows same as http://www.delishbits.com/languages/c |
what sites should use ssl? | zacclark: It is good practice to at least encrypt the authentication process, so that someone can't grab plaintext passwords as they are transmitted. |
what sites should use ssl? | bugs: I like ssl for logins and signups and if it is something important or sensitive (like say email) for the whole interaction. |
Who are the best icon designers? | fras0132: I've heard good things about CrowdSpring, price efficient and get your pick of the litter from thousands of prospective Creatives.Crowdspring even guarantees 25 entries, worth checking outhttp://www.crowdspring.com/ |
How Best To Reach Hiring Employers? | byrneseyeview: One way recruiters sometimes do it is to send a blind resume, with the identifying data removed. But that's gotten harder to do thanks to LinkedIn ("Went to Dartmouth, worked at Bridgewater, lives in Dallas? There's only one in the whole wide world.")You could still give it a shot, though: find companies that are hiring, email the hiring manager if you can find his/her contact information. One slightly iffy tactic that recruiters use is to ask where people have interviewed, then to ask who they interviewed with. That at least gets you a name, though you may want to be vague about where you got it ("I was just trying to find a job for that guy you decided not to hire..."). |
How to simulate and rescue a complex project | Tangurena: I recommend agents rather than cellular automata.I remember some articles a couple years ago about using agents to simulate things like this. One that seemed promising used agents to simulate cargo handling at an airport (Airborne or FedEx), and improved package handling time. I was never able to find the actual research, though. |
Ideas for Monetizing? | bugmenot: Why have you just copied an existing site? What is to be gained by that? Bring something new to the table! (Free idea: do exactly this site, but for all the HNers looking for startup partners). |
Ideas for Monetizing? | nickFaraday: Seems to me that your somewhat limiting your revenue... The problem I see is no one wants to make the first move, so everyone would want to be the "featured" date and let everyone else do the "dating work" for them.In this structure I'd think you want to charge the dater not the prospective dates.My suggestion would be lower the barrier for prospective dates to contact your featured "date" by making it free.1. Charge your featured dates for the "feature" service.2. Charge more for "localized or placed features"... AKA I want to be featured in LA, and site-wide.3. Make the entire database searchable, your featured dater functionality is your hook, but no need to limit what who your members could find. (Maybe this is an extra pay feature)4. One thing I have always wondered about dating sites is why none of them have used alternate payment mechanics? For example, buy a date flowers from (FTD, with your affiliate code) and get 20 free contacts, sign up for netflix get 10 contacts, etc, etc... |
what sites should use ssl? | mattew: We try and make sure all our clients use SSL for authentication and transfer of secure data. Just because Facebook and Google aren't as conscientious as they should be doesn't let you off the hook.You don't need to pay a few hundred dollars for an SSL certificate, unless you need a wildcard. Go with a cheap reputable Certificate Authority and start this out right. |
what sites should use ssl? | fragmede: Google does do it after being being embarrassed into it by some security folk. The 'sign in' link on the main google.com page is ssl, as is Gmail, and http://google.com/a/domainname (at least for me) is redirecting to https.Facebook does support ssl (https://facebook.com) but the problem is that they don't forwards regular http login to it.Unless you need a wildcard domain, which you shouldn't, until you have to scale, it shouldn't cost you more than like $20 US for the cert. |
Mercurial or git? | alfredp: We ended up with mercurial. We needed Windows, Linux, OSX and code in all kinds of languages.git is fine I suppose - but we needed to support Windows and I'd rather know that Windows is supported properly (mercurial), rather than kinda hoping it works (git). Things might have changed since the last time I looked.In either case, be careful with case-sensitive/non-sensitive file systems.Also, consider the learning curve difference as you will suddenly become the go-to guy for issues.In the end, I'm really a Bond fan:
http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/git-vs-mercur... |
Are ACM worth a membership? | jacquesm: It's $99 per year and $50 for students. I've been on the fence for a long time, on the one hand there are tons of interesting papers to read, on the other I try to be a member of as little things as possible.Also, plenty of the content that is available on the ACM portal site is available elsewhere, usually pre-prints on the authors websites.Personally I think all research that is somehow subsidized ought to be accessible to the general public without payment.edit: make that 2x$99, once for the membership and once for access to their digital content.http://www.acm.org/membership/dues |
Are ACM worth a membership? | owinebarger: If you need more than a few ACM papers, it probably is. |
Mercurial or git? | morphir: GIT, because it has the best performance and are backed by large projects like the Linux kernel, Wine, etc.May I add that Mercurial has Python dependencies, while git are written in C.If I were to bet who outlasts who, I would put my money on GIT. Also, considering GIT is so simple by design, I foresee it will be used in many other cases than source code management. As it is just a matter of creating new high level porcelain, like say, revision control. ;) How about that Linus? |
Mercurial or git? | frio: I'd say mercurial will be easier to deploy across that range of systems, and easier for people not familiar with the command line (Dreamweaver users ;)) to use.Personally, I feel that git is technically superior, but throwing Windows into the mix changes things up a bit. You can use git confidently in Windows - I do at home, using Cygwin - but in terms of graphical support, it's still reasonably dodgy. You could definitely look into TortoiseGit, and then configure it using mSysGit and putty (I've tried this in the past and it works well) - but if anyone then wants to use Cygwin, things get very complex.GitX is good for Mac users though! |
Are ACM worth a membership? | spooky: Beside the academic papers, access to the Skillsoft courses and Books 24x7 are well worth the price of the basic ACM membership. I've found the free ACM journal often has useful content as well. |
Are ACM worth a membership? | portman: I renew my membership each year mostly to support the Turing Award.The journals (both online and print) are nice bonuses, but the satisfaction of supporting our field's Nobel Prize is well worth the nominal $99/year membership fee. |
Mercurial or git? | leif: msysgit works well on windows these days, and there are enough mac kids on github that mac support must be fine too.As far as I know, git is a bit more flexible than mercurial, in the sense that each user can use it the way they like to (with things like quilt --- and here I'm sure someone's going to yell "but mercurial has patch queues by default!!1"), without screwing up or imposing on everyone else's workflow. I'm not sure if mercurial does this, but I can't imagine anything doing it better than git.That said, they aren't that different I don't think, so I'm sure you'll be happy either way, and each one will have its own wonkiness that you'll come to hate eventually. |
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