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I suck at marketing, can you give feedback on my startup's homepage? | rmc: You should try doing some A/B testing |
developer resources for your favorite SAAS services ? | shafqat: The NewsCred Platform just launched our API, but all how-tos (including company supported wrappers) are on our own site. Feel free to link to them though if you want: http://developer.newscred.com. |
Who's hiring? | oliryan: Twitter is hiring all kinds of engineers at all levels, http://twitter.com/jobs and @jointheflock has info. Located downtown San Francisco, we're about 150 people now and growing pretty fast. Looking for everything from front-end engineers to infrastructure, performance, storage engineers and more. |
How does a hacker have maximum fun with 500 euros? | Kliment: Go to sparkfun. It won't last long. |
How does a hacker have maximum fun with 500 euros? | noodle: an arduino, an arduino book if necessary, and the rest on whatever parts you want to buy to build something. |
I've run out of webapp ideas. What to do? | rick_2047: Polish your older ones i guess? |
Looking for an internship this summer at a Boston-area tech startup | bgnm2000: You should definitely contact Techstars boston and apply to be a hackstar, I did it last year, and I'm doing it this year. Its a lot of fun, and great networking. |
Why is Dubai saving 'The World'? | yannis: The rationale is that the UAE and generally the Gulf States at a point decided to invest their money instead of investing them in funds in Europe of the Americas. They had a vision to create a 'Singapore' in the desert and they almost achieved it.The financial crisis that hit the world - and which did not origi... |
Python's bidict - what's a good use case for this? | nfnaaron: When you have a set of 1-1 data pairs that you want to be able to look up both ways, and you don't want to maintain two dicts, as described in the article's HTMLEntities example. |
How to become friendly, communicative and talkative? | pg: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=carnegie... |
How to become friendly, communicative and talkative? | skmurphy: "A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something." Wilson MiznerFriendly - practice smiling by thinking about something you enjoy.Talkative - focus on asking good questions.Communicative - consider who you are talking to and what they are asking for. Real communication isn... |
How to become friendly, communicative and talkative? | megamark16: Look people in the eye when you're talking to them. This helps me focus on the conversation and not get distracted, and it also helps to convey to other people that I'm focusing on them. |
How to become friendly, communicative and talkative? | adrianwaj: Alcohol, ecstasy and cocaine might be of help: only in terms of a mind-state reference point.People that have had cocaine try and remember what it's like to be in that cocky and confident state and relive it. Also the memories of being drunk: if you can trick your mind into behaving tipsy or loose. Or the op... |
Why is Dubai saving 'The World'? | Mankhool: A colleague of mine's father was one of the engineers that designed the first Dubai "island" - the one that the Burj Al Arab was built on. Even more so than the subsequent Palms, The World was a colossal expense, but that is not the main reason for the Emiratis to save it. They will spend any amount to avoid ... |
How to become friendly, communicative and talkative? | martin_valiente: Talkative:
* Make a question
* Hear the answer
* Repeat the answer with your own words
* Relate yourself with the answer: me too and... / not me, but I experienced something similar...
* Repeat |
Contract Forms: Give away Word doc, sell annotated PDF? Or vice versa? | underdesign: You're getting into a market rife with competitors, and they're all offering the same product for free, or more value for less money.Plus, no one like NDA's and they've very hard to defend legally. That product is designed for big business, who already have lawyers drafting NDA's. Not regular consumers.S... |
Startups in Switzerland | daveying99: The Newscred guys are based in Geneva and are active participants on HN. There was also cocomment but I don't know what's their status now... |
Contract Forms: Give away Word doc, sell annotated PDF? Or vice versa? | apowell: Until recently, I worked for a major retailer of online legal forms. You can get in touch with me if you'd like to learn more about the landscape. To answer the questions:1) I'd expect my attorney to react like my doctor would if I brought him a kidney in an icebox and asked him for a transplant. The kidney m... |
Startups in Switzerland | shafqat: That's right- we're (NewsCred) here in Geneva! The scene is small but I love it. Drop me an email and I'll be happy to share details and help. |
Do you have any interest in this? | vyrotek: Hmm, I find calling the phone more useful. When I receive a text it only plays the alert sound for a second. |
Tokyo, Japan meetup in late March / early April | rgrieselhuber: I'm interested. Please include me on any emails: ray@firewatchingmedia.com |
I've run out of webapp ideas. What to do? | proexploit: I've got a dead simple, amazingly awesome idea. Email me if you're interested in hearing more and we can talk. Don't mean to be so secretive, I just want to be a part of this one, not make it after someone else :) |
What's wrong with procedural programming? | noonespecial: Try this:So what's wrong with assembly? Is C really better than assembly?Each has its place for certain task. Languages let you abstract away different things and therefor think different kinds of thoughts while programming. Procedures add a whole new dimension to subroutines. OO adds a whole new dimensio... |
What's wrong with procedural programming? | scorpioxy: Nothing wrong with it.I am not sure you're asking the right question. If you need a language that is close to the machine(but not assembly), then you go with C. If you need the OO concepts, you go with C++. Mind you, whenever you start using abstractions such as OO, you start to get away from the machine.You... |
What's wrong with procedural programming? | chanux: You need to read this http://web.mac.com/jimbokun/iWeb/Site/Blog/AB35C167-7755-411... |
What's your philosophy on page scraping? | _delirium: I guess it depends on what they're doing with it. I'm not particularly against scraping per se, but I would look askance at some of the more sleazy uses, like just republishing (slightly modified versions of) blog posts on some AdSense-laden blog as if it were their own post. The key issues to me are: 1) tra... |
What's your philosophy on page scraping? | benologist: Depends what it's being scraped for. MFA spam blogs stealing content, or some valid use that could further your own interests. |
How to become friendly, communicative and talkative? | roundsquare: Lots of good ideas here. One thing, its probably easiest if you start with people with very similar interests (development or otherwise) so you know the topic well. |
What's your philosophy on page scraping? | nostrademons: I'm happy to page scrape other sites and not happy to have mine scraped. ;-)More seriously, if there're bots that you don't want scraping, just robots.txt them away. If they ignore that, then they're being rather rude and you can figure out some way to auto-block them. |
What's your philosophy on page scraping? | rmanocha: I think that if you're generally respectful of the target websites - scraping them is ok. For example, I scrape various government websites for my website. I use a random delay between requests and am generally very careful about not requesting the same page multiple times (this is hard 'cause a lot of the pa... |
What's your philosophy on page scraping? | DanielBMarkham: On the consumer side, I'm happy with the following rules.I'm happy writing a program to let individual users scrape from their computers. After all, they have a right to visit the site and retrieve their data in whatever format suits them.I'm not so keen on setting up a server to scrape data, or having ... |
What's wrong with procedural programming? | pmccool: It's not just C. A lot of procedural code is written in perl, for example. It's true that languages that force you to write procedural code are relatively rare, but languages that force you to write OO are by no means the rule.IME, OO sometimes works, sometimes not. It's not necessarily about getting close to ... |
What's wrong with procedural programming? | DanielBMarkham: Instead of going down this same road yet again, I've got a better question for you:I can pull out my C++ compiler and write straight C (mostly)What do you call that? C? C++? If I don't use classes in my C++, is it C? Or, conversely, if I develop a complicated module structure in C, does that make it C++... |
Good usability service? | scorchin: Why not have a go yourself?If you have a Mac laptop, you've got yourself a mobile usability station. Just get a copy of Silverback App ( http://silverbackapp.com/ ) and start usability testing!Following on from that, if you'd like to make the most of your usability tests I'd recommend getting "Rocket Surgery ... |
Startups in Switzerland | c1sc0: I'm in Switzerland most of my time & even though it's a lovely country, it's a bit sleepy startup-wise. |
Who's hiring? | egb: Anybody in Chicago? I only see a few on here - there's gotta be more! :-) |
How to become friendly, communicative and talkative? | revorad: http://sivers.org/book/Influence |
How much does it cost to live in London? | davidw: My guess is that London is not at all cheaper than the Veneto, just that you can earn more money there, and, likely, more money in proportion to your expenses. |
Advice on features and when to ship an iPad app | c1sc0: I'd release it just to find out if Apple approves it. Could save you a lot of wasted effort. Cool app, IF Apple allows it! |
How much does it cost to live in London? | blahpro: There are plenty of wonderful places in the UK outside of London that are considerably cheaper. If you’re a freelancer, there might not be any need for you to live in The City. |
How much does it cost to live in London? | yetanotherlogin: For a fairly but not horribly austere lifestyle, you're looking at ~£20k GBP to get by.By this I mean you have a place to live somewhere in a fairly unfashionable/average zone 2 or 3 area, a place which is not that big or plush, but not a rat-infested crack den either. You share it with at least one, ... |
How much does it cost to live in London? | revorad: Registering a company only costs £25. I'm not entirely sure about the taxes yet as I'm just in the process of setting up mine.If you are sharing a flat with one or two people, you can get a good place starting from around £600 (inc of all bills) in zone 2, which is say 10-20 minutes bus/train ride to the city ... |
I'm way too shy, please help | missizii: You might find the book "The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You" by Elaine Aron helpful. Shyness isn't the same as being highly sensitive, but sensitive people are often considered shy. |
what document management tools to use? | faramarz: box.net seems like a good fit for your friend, except it's cloud based.Do test drive the service with a free account. I'm pretty happy with the service |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | vital101: I generally try to step away from the problem for awhile. Even if it's only for 10 minutes. I come back with a fresh perspective that usually helps me get through it. |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | thecombjelly: I try to attack the problem persistently and creatively. Often I will walk around and just ask random people what they think. Sometimes even describing the problem in non technical terms for the non techies to understand. People usually have some ideas that you haven't thought of. I've found that any i... |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | kmak: The part I don't understand is, for this particular problem, it is well-known enough that a simple visit to Wikipedia would've been enlightening.I remember reading up on it awhile ago, and it seems like the Wikipedia entry already had the dancing links algorithm by then. |
Naïve startup idea? | maxdemarzi: The challenge content producers face is not so much on the technical side, but rather on finding an audience.I'm sure you've seen this:
http://www.learnivore.comSomething like that where I could upload my videos and have a (tag based or provider based) e-mail go out to an audience would be the real selling ... |
what document management tools to use? | pierrefar: Would a wiki work? If you can find one that has page-level authorisation based on the username, then you can host it and give individual clients' usernames access to specific pages.Not sure if Mediawiki allows that. |
How much does it cost to live in London? | ig1: That would be around £1700/month, if you setup a company for the money to go through your takehome pay will probably be around 70-80% of your company's income (so around 1200-1360). That'll be fine if you get a flatshare, if you want to get a one bed flat to yourself it'll be tight.Also see if you can find a busin... |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | ntoshev: I have a programming problem, and I'm pretty sure I'm aware of the basic components of the solution... it's just that I get swamped in complexity pretty quickly when I try out different combinations.I know this is a very meta question but this is not the only case. I'll solve it eventually but I'd like to ask ... |
Advice on features and when to ship an iPad app | mcav: Your app looks very cool. I'd buy it. One minor thing that you've probably already noticed: Make sure that the draggable edge of the apps are big enough to move with a finger (as opposed to the mouse in the simulator).I'd put it out right away and improve incrementally. |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | NEPatriot: I look for inspiration from the world around me and focus on trying to always find the simplest solution with the least resistance. |
How much does it cost to live in London? | hcho: Choose a cheaper place on the commuter belt and your income will go a longer way. For instance Woking is 30 mins to London by train, but is a lot cheaper than London. You can get a flat for around about £700 pcm bills and council tax included and without sharing with someone else. This will leave you with a grand... |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | dwwoelfel: Use Poyla's methods of problem solving described in his book: How to Solve It (http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0691023565)He deals specifically with mathematical problems, but the same ideas apply to computer science.For an outline of the method see this Wikipedia article:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_So... |
Naïve startup idea? | Rust: Considering the small number of players in this market (zoomwebvideo.com, wistia.com, jitrinc.com, tikilive.org, veevu.com, etc.), you might actually find a market for this service. The competition is quite varied in focus (example: JITR likes subject matter experts, Wistia likes enterprises), so finding a niche ... |
We're still developing - A competitor has launched - what to do? | jellisjapan: How is their current marketing and recognition? It might be worth it to start up an early marketing strategy and at least out-market them before you actually can launch. I don't know about the retailers, but some of them may be willing to wait on purchasing a product if they knew something better was com... |
We're still developing - A competitor has launched - what to do? | bobbywilson0: "we can't really cut scope now"Why not? |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | josh33: This is very high level, but: take a step back and remember who it is you are trying to serve/help with the problem you are solving. If it is a particular market/industry, often the answer can be found by trying to focus on how to help them than by trying to solve a problem. I think there is something about foc... |
We're still developing - A competitor has launched - what to do? | Roridge: Keep at it. If your product is better, you will win.Try not to give those "coming soon" promises, you don't want to be under even more pressure.Good luck |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | gfodor: There are multiple meanings of incremental progress. Just fleshing out a test suite is only one means of defining progress. |
We're still developing - A competitor has launched - what to do? | pinksoda: What's your competitors site? |
What's your philosophy on page scraping? | evancureton: hey can put you on my page |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | Goladus: Avoid stress and distractions. Do not multitask. Take breaks to eat (healthy foods), exercise, and sleep. Feel free to discuss the problem with friends and colleagues but minimize emotional investment with other people. Read books and articles on the subject. Study existing tools and study similar problem... |
We're still developing - A competitor has launched - what to do? | bgnm2000: Go sell your product now. Get some evangelists. The worst thing to do is wait, because unless your product is going to save someone time/money - there won't be a real value in switching for some nicer features if they've already put the effort into registering with your competition. |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | myth_drannon: TRIZ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
-"TRIZ is a methodology, tool set, knowledge base, and model-based technology for generating innovative ideas and solutions for problem solving."Generations of Soviet engineers were educated on that methodology. Many western companies use it as well. |
Advice on features and when to ship an iPad app | vishaldpatel: Looks like a great app. I'd spend a few hours to pretty it up... but I say go ahead and submit it! |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | smallhands: Why not pay somebody to solve it!!!!. |
We're still developing - A competitor has launched - what to do? | dskhatri: What about your trusted customers? Do you have any customers you are working with to develop your product? If they still believe in your product, keep working hard on it. Release a version - with fewer features than you planned on - sooner. What do people think about this suggestion? It sounds reasonable to m... |
What's wrong with procedural programming? | subud: C is probably better for writing cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) code than C++. See Linus Torvalds comments:http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linusOn the other hand, large corporations probably prefer OO programming. Paul Graham has some good quotes:"Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to... |
What's wrong with procedural programming? | humbledrone: The fact that C is the most popular programming language is not a good argument for procedural programming, because it is quite common to use OO techniques with C. In fact, most of the C projects that I have worked with use OO techniques in some form. For instance, look at the Linux kernel. There are pl... |
Who's hiring? | RobM: SideReel is looking for an experienced Agile Java guru (beard optional) to join our team as a web software engineer.Check out our full posting here: http://www.sidereel.com/_us/jobsSideReel is a great place to work. We are a small well-established start-up located on the top floor of an old brick office building ... |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | oomkiller: I'm not sure if I'm unique in this regard, but I seem to have the ability to fully visualize complex systems and problems. The key for me is understanding the problem fully, as I have to pull all of the pieces together. I find it difficult sometimes because other people aren't used to working this way, so ... |
We're still developing - A competitor has launched - what to do? | joeld42: Learn from their mistakes. Look at the reactions from their customers, and make sure that you ship with their #1 wishlist feature and make sure that feature is emphasized.Also ... "They do not have all the pieces we have so our platform is far better" This is dangerous thinking. People generally prefer the mos... |
Running a contest/competition | brk: (disclosure: it's been ~10 years since I last had direct first-hand knowledge of this).Giving away something for free in a "no purchase required to win" sort of promo is generally not a problem. The giveaway should generally be cheap (less than $600, or maybe it's $2000 now)... anyway, less than the amount that w... |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | diN0bot: norvig actually does make incremental progress in understanding the problem/solution space in terms of constraints, bounds and correctness. |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | michael_dorfman: Many (perhaps most) hard problems don't need to be solved from scratch; rather, it is a matter of applying a well-known solution that somebody has already found.The example in the article is a good one: there's absolutely no need to attempt to design a Sudoku-solving-algorithm from scratch (except as a... |
We're still developing - A competitor has launched - what to do? | sganesh: Things learned from building a best of class enterprise product and trying to beat out the competitors. We were the last entrant in the market.(i) List all completed features. - Guarantee these will work now & compare & contrast with your current competitors. Preferably give them a testing environment after th... |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | msie: The link mentions a Norvig-Jeffries showdown on writing a Sudoku solver. Kinda unfair since Norvig pretty much wrote the book on it. :P |
We're still developing - A competitor has launched - what to do? | danudey: It's rarely about being first to market. Apple didn't make the first MP3 player, Microsoft didn't make the first GUI, Google didn't make the first search engine. Stick with what you're doing; you can't be first, but you can be the best.Personally, I would also keep in mind the 'competitor card'. 'Well, your co... |
Why don't more open-source projects charge for support/features/bugs? | lsc: many of the projects with less-technical users do just that. The guy who wrote the billing system i use, http://freeside.biz is a good example. He charges for features and if you want it installation and other support. |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | kvs: How about solving related or similar problems? The way one may approach those problems may give insight into incremental steps necessary to solve the hard problem. |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | Tichy: Isn't the Norvig solution completely straightforward? Just the basic back propagation algorithm?So maybe in some cases it just helps to read the literature a little bit...For example at the Google Code Competition (forgot the proper name), I am not very good, but I learned some things from reading solutions of o... |
Running a contest/competition | dctoedt: Contests that don't have a sweepstakes component are generally simpler from a legal perspective -- many states regulate contests in which prizes are awarded at random.Contest losers sometimes sue on grounds that the contest sponsor supposedly changed rules after the fact. (Such suits are often brought for bre... |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | jacquesm: Explain the problem to someone that doesn't know anything about it.Usually that 'clicks' at some point and I realize what I'd been missing all along. The less the person knows about computers/programming (my usual subject matter) the better it seems to work. |
Why don't more open-source projects charge for support/features/bugs? | coryl: So open source devs should offer premium support and paid options for better features...I think thats called running a business, right? |
opening a company in US (for non US citizen) | hga: It's a pity that Slovenia doesn't have a well established "brand" as a nation in the US; if so, you wouldn't necessarily have to set up an US subsidiarity (since those who know about Slovenia by and large think well of it).Anyway, however you get set up, I wish you luck! |
How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress? | simsam: i sometimes browse this site: asknature.orgit is often a very strange approach and cannot be replicated by humans, but i like the ideology. |
Good usability service? | yeti: Is there really nothing else? |
opening a company in US (for non US citizen) | algul: You don't have to be a U.S. citizen or resident to form a corporation in the United States. You could do so yourself, but it might be easier to use an attorney. Take form Articles of Incorporation, send with a check to the Secretary of State in most states along with 3 name choices (in case yours is taken by the... |
Which of these two designs should we use? | wakeupthedawn: The first one seems friendlier. The second seems a bit more professional.I think you need to make it so when the arrow opens the bubble it doesn't cover up other information on the page. |
Which of these two designs should we use? | cscotta: I like home2 much more. The contrast is nice, and the choice of gray gradient works well with the bright blue.The spacing and alignment is a bit odd (e.g., the placement of the [ Try It ] button relative to the open space to the right, but it's very simple and you have a well-defined call to action.Then again... |
Which of these two designs should we use? | ashleyw: I much prefer the first, it's far friendlier. The second looks a bit unfinished and cheap if I'm honest - lens flare? Purple to gray gradient? Glossy icons? Eeek... |
Which of these two designs should we use? | hajrice: Your vote link doesnt work.I like #1 more. The green CTA button is really nice. |
Which of these two designs should we use? | appathy: I like the second better because the capitalization makes it easier to read."HELP BUBBLE CAN SAVE THE DAY"vs."Help Bubble can save the day"I didn't realize your product was called Help Bubble when I read the text on the first website and I was confused. I thought maybe there was a can of bubbles that needed he... |
Which of these two designs should we use? | fierarul: You guys did hear about A/B testing didn't you ? |
Which of these two designs should we use? | dmix: Your poll needs a neither + why field. |
Vesting? Really? | jacquesm: If you've been going for 4 years then vesting is not in the picture. At least, with a reputable VC it would not be.The VC should end up with a minority (<49%) block of shares, in that situation your biggest worry is a minority share holders lawsuit that you settle by giving them shares, they then control the ... |
Which of these two designs should we use? | wdewind: http://www.helpbubble.com/?p=home
http://www.helpbubble.com/?p=home2home2 redirects me to / |
Which of these two designs should we use? | proexploit: Here you go: http://www.scribd.com/doc/29010574/Help-Bubble |
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