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How to allow users to add Adsense code without security risks
ohashi: The old adsense code simply required publisher id. Not sure how to get around that for new ones.
Dedicated advertising?
dkasper: Think of getting direct advertising like any other business sale you will make. You are selling the advertiser on the idea that getting their ads in front of your traffic will be valuable to them. This involves either you contacting them or if you are high profile enough them contacting you. There are lots of ...
Dedicated advertising?
apowell: The fact that Comedy Central is your first example of an ideal advertiser means that you're probably not in a high-CPM niche. That's okay, but it means you probably ought to be running a couple million impressions each month to make direct sales realistic.At lower volume (say, a 500k/mo+ impressions) you can ...
Review my Facebook app: Freeciv.net
roschdal: I would really like some feedback from the Hacker News community again, on my http://www.freeciv.net/ project. I have previously received feedback from HN, and now done a lot of improvements according to that feedback.What are the next steps which can be taken with this project? Which opportunities do you see...
Review my project: Using unicode to break Twitter's 140 char limit
proexploit: I really like your idea and the simple effectiveness of your design. I personally am very put-off by Twitter's character limit (not that I use it anyways). I hope it gets some users, maybe try to contact a popular platform or create an API to integrate with other existing services? I guess that depends on i...
Please review our startup
chegra84: It might have legs, but here are my sticking points: 1)The instructions arent clear. "3. have a snack"? I get that it might be a joke, but I dont get it. So, try to make that clear.2)The value of this is lost unless you are familiar with its competitors. I am left thinking how is this useful to me? That is a...
Dedicated advertising?
proexploit: If your site generate a relevant amount of traffic, you shouldn't have any trouble finding advertisers (example: if you run a televisions comparison website with a healthy readership, Samsung should come to you).As far as payment, it's going to depend whether they're paying by the amount of views their ad r...
How many of you founders are girls ?
lutorm: Is that "mera iphone" as in Swedish "more iphone"?
How many of you founders are girls ?
smokey_the_bear: I'm in a start up of three, I'm the only girl. None of my friends in other start ups are girls.
How many of you founders are girls ?
seltzered: just curious, do you live in India? I wonder this because I'm curious how the process is in making iphone apps from there. Do you get the same profit as us developers from apple? Is it easier to make a living off of iphone development due to lower cost of living there?
What do you do if your startup idea involves hardware?
noonespecial: We do embedded work with arm and geode mostly in the networking and remote telemetry realm. I might have some advice to give. What sort of device were you looking to build?
what do you think is the best UI for setting up recurrence?
mmelin: Examples of the classic form:http://www.taskcoach.org/screenshots/0.71.2-Windows_XP-Task_...http://crowdfavorite.com/images/screenshots/tasks/2.7/recur_...
what do you think is the best UI for setting up recurrence?
jaymon: A lot of what is "best" has to do with how specific you want to be. Appending "every" to a date is great if you want something to occur every N. But what if you want it to occur every other N? Or the first N of every M? There's a reason why things like Crontab or iCalendar's RRULE are so specific and verbose.In...
What do you do if your startup idea involves hardware?
brk: I'm in Boston too and my experience is 99% with hardware based startups (from big networking switches to little embedded security cameras).If you want to get together for a coffee (days are better for me) sometime I'd be happy to share with you what I know or can help with.
How many of you founders are girls ?
mbrubeck: My friend Seema is CEO of a robotics/toy startup in Pittsburgh, which she co-founded with other students from her grad program at CMU:http://www.interbots.com/
What is the best way to get an unavailable but unused twitter name?
Mark_F: Thanks for the feedback. I will keep researching it and post my findings.
What do you do if your startup idea involves hardware?
michaelisaok: It would be a device that plugs into your car's onboard computer. There are dozens of devices out there that do things on the hardware side that are very similar to what I'm looking for, but just not exactly. I don't think I'm going to get very far asking them to change their products either, since the ...
What do you do if your startup idea involves hardware?
beagle3: Go to your nearest hackerspace - http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces - 4 are listed in Boston.MakerBot, the maker of affordable, open source, 3D printers, grew out of Resistor in NYC.
What do you do if your startup idea involves hardware?
ewams: Here is a pretty good list. Also, including some information in your profile can't hurt either.http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052950
How many of you founders are girls ?
saurabh: Seems like you are located in Mumbai! I am the cofounder of stareable.com based in Lamington Road.Very cool to see a Mumbaikar doing cool stuff like this. Would love to have a chat with you sometime.
What do you do if your startup idea involves hardware?
michaelisaok: brk - That would be great, thanks for the offer.Send an email over to michaelisaok@mailinator.com so we can connect.
A site where devs can exchange back-end skills for design skills?
timmorgan: Wow. What an idea. I've always wanted to meet someone I could personally exchange work with like this, but never considered an app to hook me up with a designer.Please someone post a link.
help me think of a domain name
david927: rumblesale.com
Review my project: Using unicode to break Twitter's 140 char limit
shiro: Haha, it's clever. Did you limit the list of compressable characters by frequency? Since there seem more of them; U+3370-33DF range (from which you took 'ms', 'ns', 'cc' etc) also has 'da', 'bar', 'in', 'log', 'mil', 'mol', 'ha', 'gal' etc. Also U+32CD 'erg' U+2480-249B and U+1F101-1F10A has digit(s) + punctu...
help me think of a domain name
kadavy: Sorry to get all MBA, but do you have a value proposition in mind? That could help with branding.
What do you do if your startup idea involves hardware?
djb_hackernews: an OBD ii interface isn't that complicated. I bet you could find an upper level EE student or grad student willing to partner up pretty easily. Put a decent bounty on it and they could use it for a class project or self study credit.I don't think you need to go to a boutique engineering firm.
Please review our startup
EGF: Seems very similar to our basic design and usability at Eat.ly, but I think I understand the use case. Would love to connect if you are interested in speaking further - couldn't find your contact info via profile, so throwing this out there publicly.
A site where devs can exchange back-end skills for design skills?
og1: This is one I remember seeing, never used though.http://programmermeetdesigner.com/
help me think of a domain name
billpg: not-ebay.com?
help me think of a domain name
timf: Check out nameboy.com and sedo.com. Enter keywords and see what's available. I find that helps with generating ideas.And a lot of times someone might just want ~$100 for a domain which should be easily justified if it's the right name.On nameboy.com you can quickly see domains that just have a .com taken, those...
The value of ideas
mikecane: Ideas are useless in the sense that at any one time, many people could have the exact same idea. Ideas do "get in the air." So in that respect, ideas can be seen as commodities. It's getting the idea out there as something people can buy/use that matters. All writers understand this. It's not the story t...
How many of you founders are girls ?
JangoSteve: Congrats. I'm not a girl, but my co-founder for my startup was (I say "was" because I've since bought her out).
The value of ideas
coryl: Ideas matter, but not that much. We'd all rather have good ideas than bad ideas, which proves theres some value in the idea itself.But GREAT ideas usually come from some form of execution and iteration. Great ideas just don't come from sitting and brainstorming what to build your startup into. Using your compari...
How many of you founders are girls ?
anitgram: just promise you wont resort to stripping when it does work out, k?
help me think of a domain name
newobj: rocktion.com
The value of ideas
mikecane: Let me try another tack. You're out with a friend and your friend remarks on a great service.product he/she just bought that's brand new. Yet you had the idea for that product too. You tell your friend this. Do you really expect your friend's honest reaction to be anything other than, "So what?" See, you...
The value of ideas
DanielBMarkham: A lot of this is about definitions.An idea is useless.A piece of execution is useless.Execution means taking an idea, any idea, trying it out and then coming up with new ideas at the same or lower level and trying them out.A good high-level idea by itself? Totally worthless. A team that can take a bad h...
help me think of a domain name
kadavy: You also may want to check out http://brandstack.com I haven't used it (I have a friend who has), but apparently you can buy pre-made logos and domains. Might find something you like.
What technologies still impress you most today?
mixmax: Cars. Making a box that will carry 4 people around at 80 mph is a pretty neat accomplishment. Doing it comfortably, safely, and at a a competitive price is an amazing feat of engineering and optimization.
What technologies still impress you most today?
melling: Would it be wrong to say we're ending the first decade of the 21st century and I was really hoping for a lot more tech. Most of us grew up on sci-fi. I'd say we're a little behind schedule. "Sorry Dave, I can't do that." is a pretty old movie quote.
The value of ideas
Travis: Let's play a thought experiment:I'm Paul Graham, and I've got a fantastic, knock-your-socks-off idea for a business. How much will you pay me for it?ORI'm Travis. I've got a mediocre idea, but have spent a lot of time learning about my customers and market. I've built a kickass piece of software that solves ...
What technologies still impress you most today?
grayrest: I think it's amazing that the Internet works.Topical video (Everything's amazing and nobody's happy):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
The value of ideas
Mz: Is the "ideas are useless" meme being put out there just because so many newbies to the startup culture are too enamored with their ideas and think that the idea is all that matters, and so they have to be hit hard with the "ideas are useless" to snap them out of that thinking and start valuing execution?I wouldn't...
The value of ideas
jorkos: If you have the ability to execute on your idea to test it's validity, then it's worth a lot! Think Chatroulette...hotmail....youtube...etc. Conversely, if you can't execute on the idea then it's worth far less and you should share it widely, get feedback, and work towards building a team around the idea that c...
The value of ideas
mixmax: If you take a look at successful companies you'll find that the ideas behind them are in no way unique, and more often than not they're not based on an idea but on a market. Here are the ten most profitable companies in the Forbes 1000 list and what they do:ExxonMobil - Oil & Gas OperationsGazprom Russia - Oil ...
What technologies still impress you most today?
anigbrowl: Transistors. The sheer complexity and speed of what can be achieved by stacking together a large number of electrically activated switches never ceases to amaze me.
How many of you founders are girls ?
angelhaze218: the start up girl scene is nonexistent, which is why it's awesome, it gives me the advantage ( and the confidence) to talk to any venture capitalist, and know am definitely making more of an impression than the next techie guy
What technologies still impress you most today?
MaysonL: The scientific method. It works on just about any problem you're able to apply it to.
How do you keep your energy?
wgj: Your instinct might be not to do some of these things because they take more time, but in my experience (of doing it right and wrong) these habits work.* Anything to reduce stress. That's a whole topic in itself, but stress saps your energy more than anything.* Small consistent meals throughout the day. Just enoug...
What technologies still impress you most today?
mrlyc: I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
How do you keep your energy?
adrianwaj: Power nap in afternoon. Be warm, lie on your back, breath, and drift off. Have an alarm go off after an hour in case you fall asleep. Will improve mental clarity and energy.Also, fresh dates, water, and walnuts for long programming sessions.
How many of you founders are girls ?
fburnaby: Wouldn't it make more sense if your tagline was "hot masala applications?"
The value of ideas
apsurd: The problem is ideas do not exist. It is only when they morph into a tangible reality that they can be tested, verified, iterated on, and developed.Put another way, an idea can be as great and fantastic and beautiful and groundbreaking as you dream it up to be - but none of that matters if it exists in your hea...
I/O Ventures?
bragiel: Hey... this is Paul from the i/o team. We're still getting through all the applications. :) We shooting for mid april to have people in the door. So please hang in there.
How do you keep your energy?
jacquesm: The size of your 'battery' may simply be 60 hours per week, pushing yourself beyond what you can naturally do should be done slowly and with your finger on the pulse looking for signs of trouble.If you want to suffer what people call a 'burn-out' then try pushing yourself harder and longer than your body can ...
How do you keep your energy?
keefe: Regular exercise, a proper diet and a pretty strict schedule have helped me maximize productivity. It's very easy to skip working out or push yourself to just 7 hours or 6 hours of sleep, but really it catches up to you as another poster says.
How do you keep your energy?
Mz: A) Work on taking better care of yourself so you have more stamina, mental focus, etc (eat right, exercise, stay hydrated, take your vitamins, etc)B) Streamline your life in terms of material things that need upkeep and the like. If you have less housework and what not to do when you aren't "working", you will hav...
How do you keep your energy?
patio11: 60 hours? Slacker. ;) Sorry, Japanese salaryman humor.I honestly was trying to write a blog post about this last night and just couldn't sustain the mental effort required to make a good job of it. So I stopped and will take a run on it another day. That is, ironically, one of my tips.Design your business...
I/O Ventures?
benologist: I was lucky enough to meet with one of I/Os mentors this last week ... I have to say there is a really cool bunch of guys on their mentor list.Although I was a little disappointed I/O didn't get back to me after he emailed on my behalf. :(
What technologies still impress you most today?
nfnaaron: Having been to the moon.
Ethics and the "hacking system" Q from YC application
jacquesm: I think your examples are pretty 'light', and not in any way detrimental, but I could be wrong.To me it is as simple as 'whitehat/blackhat' hacking.And what you did when you were a kid should be taken with a grain of salt, there is a reason we keep childrens criminal records sealed.
What technologies still impress you most today?
jason_tko: The fact I can sit in a cafe, wirelessly connect to the internet, then connect to the office through my VPN, and then log into a virtual machine that doesn't even physically exist.
Ethics and the "hacking system" Q from YC application
patio11: Beating the system doesn't require dishonesty -- it just requires approaching the problem in a way the system did not anticipate.For example, we all know what "the system" looks like for getting hired, right? Send in your resume, which looks like every other resume. We'll have an HR drone read it. You may b...
Ethics and the "hacking system" Q from YC application
Rust: One way to "hack the system" is to do what you said - employ some type of deception or misdirection in order to gain something you shouldn't.Another way is to re-purpose something to do what it wasn't designed to do. For example, any contraption that would be called a "Rube Goldberg Machine" would qualify as (non...
Ethics and the "hacking system" Q from YC application
JacobAldridge: "Naturally, beating the system requires some form of deception (some degrees of lieing, cheating, dishonesty)"I think that's a flawed premise. Remove the assumption (as others have done) that "beating the system" means any of those things, and the argument fails.
What technologies still impress you most today?
jacquesm: Technology will only really amaze you when you have to do without it for a week. Or even just an hour. Even the most basic stuff is so far beyond what you personally would be able to re-create starting from scratch, even with all your knowledge that it might as well all be science fiction.We're standing on to...
Ethics and the "hacking system" Q from YC application
cperciva: On one hand, PG wants people who beat the system. On the other hand, someone told me PG is high on ethics.I think this question serves two purposes: First, to see how creative people have been in hacking systems; and second, to see how people interpret the question.
Why is this clojure example so slow?
itistoday: Wouldn't this be better asked on the Clojure google group?http://groups.google.com/group/clojure
A site where devs can exchange back-end skills for design skills?
jsidhu: agreed, this would be good.
Ethics and the "hacking system" Q from YC application
pg: On one hand, PG wants people who beat the system. On the other hand, someone told me PG is high on ethics. These seem to contradict one another.They don't when the system is evil.
Why is this clojure example so slow?
swannodette: I'm curious as to what you mean by slow? Maybe you would see this on JVM cold run, but after that it should be pretty darn fast.
Is anyone doing any significant work with the play framework?
newobj: never heard of it before. the demo seems to leave itself open to CSRF though. shrug.
What personal metrics do you track?
davidcuddeback: If you're interested in this for the sake of software development, you might be interested in the Personal Software Process (PSP). It's an attempt to turn CMMI into a process that an individual software engineer can follow, and it comes from the same people that invented CMMI (Carnegie Mellon's Softwar...
GPL copyleft applies to ports?
_delirium: Yes. Any work that counts as a "derived work" of GPL'd software must be licensed under the GPL. I would think a direct port is almost certainly a derived work.
GPL copyleft applies to ports?
CoreDumpling: IANAL answer: if you want to release under a different license, you are urged to do a "clean room" implementation that could not possibly have derived anything from the original. If it's a mere translation from one language to another, your version of the library almost certainly falls under the "derivat...
A site where devs can exchange back-end skills for design skills?
dnsworks: In the past when I've been involved with or observed schemes that involved bartering software development services for other services, it has ended poorly. The main problem is that software development never really ends. There are always bugs to fix, new features to add, etc. When you're trading a service lik...
What personal metrics do you track?
jarsj: I track number of lines of code I write every month. I use statcvs which generates nice graphs over my CVS repository.
Experience earning side income with elance, oDesk, RentACoder, etc?
seymores: So what I learn from all this are:1. Differentiate on Quality, Never on Price2. Find a niche, fill the niche3. Avoid cheapskates4. It works, be persistent
how do you backup your servers?
oomkiller: Rsync.net, simple, cheap reliable, and helpful. If you call their telephone # you get a real person, that knows WTF is going on, not some L1 support tech.
How many of you founders are girls ?
paraschopra: Congratulations, are you based out of India?
Is anyone doing any significant work with the play framework?
SI1233: It's perfect, I think, unique in Java world.
What technologies still impress you most today?
zbyszek: A relative of mine recently had heart surgery of a type that is fairly routine nowadays. But when I think of the fact that you can pull apart someone's rib-cage, stick knives into their heart and then put it all back together again such that the person is walking about not long after, I am still impressed.
(Yet Another) HN Comment Quality Going Down?
ableal: Two suggestions: make votes cost (e.g. 1/10 point); put a threshold also on upvoting (e.g. 10 or 20 points).Eroding over time (e.g. 1 pt/day) probably would also be beneficial.
Internet timer for specific website? Urgent
duarte: I know there is a program that tracks how much time you spend on each website, application, etc.. I tried googling but can't find it now, I'm sure someone will remember if you think it's helpful?You install it (mac and win) and then could log into a control panel with all that info, updated to the minute!
What personal metrics do you track?
go37pi: Kevin Kelly has a blog dedicated to "self quantification" and has a bunch of interesting resources and thoughts on the process. For example, one interesting study he did was on the efficacy of caffeine on his daily productivity. The blog is worth a look: http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/
how do you backup your servers?
forkqueue: duplicity is great for off-site backups - full encryption, supports a wide variety of destinations (amazon s3, FTP etc)
Review my mockup tool: WireframeSketcher
wlievens: I was looking for this just minutes ago! Will certainly check it out.
Review my mockup tool: WireframeSketcher
nathan82: The tour pages are really well put together content wise; When trying to decide if a program is worth a downloading, I usually scan the screenshots page and make a quick decision based on first impressions. Comes across as easy to use but with some nice power features.The landing page screenshot has been poor...
Review my mockup tool: WireframeSketcher
duck: What makes your tool better than Balsamiq Mockups?http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups
A site where devs can exchange back-end skills for design skills?
ost: http://builditwith.me/
How many of you founders are girls ?
silverlake: I thought chicks prefer to be called women.
Review my mockup tool: WireframeSketcher
pierrefar: Looks good. I couldn't see anything about exporting as (say) HTML? That's one thing I really really really would pay for: I sketch, and the tool exports a basic HTML & CSS template. Probably best used for what you call "Masters".
Is anyone doing any significant work with the play framework?
bigclumsyoaf: I don't have any systems deployed to production yet, but am in the process of creating an internal app using Play and am liking what I see so far.There are a few minor problems with the framework being quite immature, and I don't always think the creators have a clear roadmap of where they are going. Howe...
(Yet Another) HN Comment Quality Going Down?
jacquesm: edw519 already noted once that it is cyclic, and that the cycles have their 'lows' when YC has their application round, we're in the midst of that.
Review my mockup tool: WireframeSketcher
dugmartin: I think the Eclipse integration is a very interesting way to differentiate.One nit: I'd put a space around the "&" in the page title for SEO.
Review my project: Using unicode to break Twitter's 140 char limit
csomar: Clever idea,however the compression ratio doesn't seem to be enough to make a real difference; try㏌g it a few times,this will only save you few characters.(Saved 4 char in this comment)
(Yet Another) HN Comment Quality Going Down?
benwalther: It's my fault and people like me.Reddit's quality has been dipping significantly lately (there's been 3-5 front page self posts on "are you smart but too lazy to do anything with it?") and so people like me are subscribing to HN again to get that 'old reddit' feel.Keep the focus on immediate actionable step...
Review my mockup tool: WireframeSketcher
adamhowell: Man, there are a lot of these "Balsamiq-esque" apps lately.I've started wondering if it has anything to do with Peldi's financial transparency. People saw what a cash cow it was and decided they wanted a piece.
How should I approach buying my ideal domain name?
slater: Isn't it pretty much automated with domain squatters? Eg, they have a "buy domain" or "request price" button, and see what you get back?
How should I approach buying my ideal domain name?
jorkos: Ask for the price from an anonymous email as a starting point....fairly easy.