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Rate my startup - Backpedalify | vital101: While good for a "lol", doesn't anyone else hate April Fools day on the internet? It's nearly impossible to find a serious post. I can't take anything seriously on the internet for the next day or two.Guess my productivity is going to go up. |
How many have learned a language they hated just to get a job? | TeHCrAzY: How can you hate any language until you have spent the time to learn and understand it? |
How many have learned a language they hated just to get a job? | astrec: I've never learned a language I've hated to get a job, but I've learned to hate many languages (or at least aspects thereof).Learned being the operative word.At this point in your career you'd be well served to learn idiomatic blub a few times over, in the same way you'll be well served to work with a variety of personality types.When the time comes for your next venture, be it in 6 months, or 6 years, you'll make a better decision i.e. grounded in understanding, about each.Rinse; repeat.Edit:I'm not suggesting you take just any old job, however. Be discerning. |
Rate my startup - Backpedalify | PG-13: For this to be funny, your actual product has to be well-known. |
Should I create one website or many? | po: In my opinion, it depends on the crossover of users. If the information is clearly not useful to different users its ok to put them on different sites. If one site is fastestanimals.com and one is baseballplayers.com then it might be better to create separate sites to cater to the audiences separately.I sometimes wonder why serverfault, poweruser and stackoverflow are on different domains as I think in many cases its the same user community. nobody is going to search three times in each service.I think you're lining yourself up to be spread too thin. Creating infographics is time consuming and I would suspect that it would be better to focus on one topic and really nail that first before thinking about spreading out across multiple topics. Can you really create enough infographics on one topic often enough to have users coming back to your site over and over? What about multiple topics?I'll admit that I don't know much about the SEO aspects of this though. |
New project, pick.im, A Freelancer Marketplace | jamesshamenski: what about the ability to post jobs? |
Rate my startup - Backpedalify | barmstrong: If it's a joke - I don't actually get it. I get what backpedaling is and it's funny when politicians do it - but your description on the homepage is confusing (at least to me). |
How many have learned a language they hated just to get a job? | etherael: ColdFusion was the big one, I hate the language with a white hot passion now, no job is ever worth the abomination of learning that steaming pile of garbage.To a lesser extent, C# I ended up learning only because a side project was in desperate need of more coders. I didn't like it much but nowhere near as bad as CF.And lesser still, Java proper the language rather than the environment. I don't much like it but I totally forgive it because of the JVM and all the excellent other languages that run on top of it. |
Is a website & blog combo the way to go? | Raphael: Yes, communicate what you're doing and why. It will help others understand and also help you solidify your plans as you write. |
Is a website & blog combo the way to go? | kjbekkelund: Obligatory Kathy Sierra read: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/0... |
Is a website & blog combo the way to go? | amund: My startup uses a wordpress-based website - since last September - which looks more like a blog than a startup home page (which has been ok so far since we started out small - bootstrapping and later getting getting some revenue and funding).In order to get startup web site visibility tech-related blog posts (in average 2-3 postings a month) have been the main source (with del.icio.us, twitter, reddit, hacker news and google as the main traffic drivers).We will probably eventually change to a more business like website, but blog-like will do for now.Conclusion: unless you have extremely viral services, your startup blog is likely to drive (much) more traffic than the rest of your startup website. |
What to do after college? Master's degree? | strlen: A Masters degree can mean concentration and specific skills. It's not the only way to obtain that, but it certainly pays off. It's not really the degree itself, it's specialization. I'd also suggest specializing in something technical (what is that you're passionate about?) rather than generic "software engineering" (i.e., UML diagrams) or management (what are you going to manager). These sorts of "professional" engineering masters degrees mean more if you've already been in the industry (much like an MBA) and want to move to people or project management.You can also work in the industry for a few years and then go for a masters. That has the advantage of showing you what you'd want to focus on and letting you take risks with your career prior to a masters (additional degree lets you reset a career). The disadvantage is that going back (especially if you are happy with your career) is hard. It's also easy to build up an industry arrogance (I found it in myself) and gloss over lectures when the way things are done in industry is different -- only to realize in a few years (when someone else builds a real-world system on an "academic" concept) that someone in academia had an answer to a problem you're only realized you're having now 30 years ago, but you dismissed as theoretical and impractical.You can also do what I did: work full time and do your masters. Just be prepared to have a limited social life and less sleep for the next 3 years (you won't be able to take a full time academic load at all times while working). Not only does this mean you don't have to go into debt (and/or voluntary poverty) to get through graduate school, in many cases your employer can pay for part of this (although this limits you to companies big enough to provide tuition reimbursement). |
How many have learned a language they hated just to get a job? | adn37: I've learnt Java (J2SE). I have an embedded systems background. Hated it at first (lack of possibilities vs C/C++), but in the long run there are benefits. Frustrations are still there and the fun is limited (no risk, no fun), but you can work your way out.
Brainwashing yourself is option #1.I still enjoy working on side projects too, with the tools I like (web dev, PHP MVC...). |
How many have learned a language they hated just to get a job? | brainlock: Maybe a bit late, but here is my experience.At the end of the job search I had to choose among two companies. One was developing in python, the other in php. At first I felt inclined towards the python-based one, mainly because of my taste in programming languages. I had sweared to myself I wouldn't do java, asp or php, and like you I was disappointed at the fact that the vast majority of job offers required those languages.After getting to know both, however, I ended up going to the php-based company.I realised that what I actually dislike of java & co., more than the languages themselves, is the mindset that the people pushing them _often_ have. Mind you, often, not always. And that was the key.The people at my company started this project about 10 years ago, and at the time php was the natural choice. They're not the old-aged, process oriented, boring, enterprise-y. They're agile, quick, creative, curious. We use git, introduced and extremely cool release management strategy, started a new project in python, moved a lot of the functionality on the client (on the browser), and so far even the work on the php backend has been a lot of fun (~1 year into this job).I'd say the key factor is: do they have a hacking mindset or a process-enterprise mindset? With the right people php can be fun too :-) |
Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA? | vide0star: Interns! |
Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA? | PG-13: Mechanical Turk is pretty crappy, so I don't think you're really missing out. |
Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA? | jongos: Crowd Flower |
Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA? | tayles: The apparently soon to be released Gridworks project from Freebase (http://blog.freebase.com/2010/03/26/preview-freebase-gridwor...) looks like it could go a long way to help with data cleansing, especially with grouping and batch editing similar mis-spellings and such. |
Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA? | iamelgringo: I had a project where I had to verify several thousand addresses that I had scraped. I ended up outsourcing it to eLance. I found a company in India via eLance that had 25 people in front of computers with an internet connection, and they chewed away at the list. It took them a month or two but they verified 6200 addresses by hand for me for $700. |
Aussies, put your hands up | latent: Brisbane developer, into govt research mostly. Involved with humbug (unix/linux), brispy (python), dorkbot (arts/eletronics), the edge (creative/design/tech), hackerspace (engineering/electronics), linux.conf.au and other things most likely :)cheers, |
Is a website & blog combo the way to go? | papaf: Further to the main question, should the blog be on a different domain or is it preferable to have a blog subdirectory on the main website? |
Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA? | zen53: Try SmartSheet - Based on Mechanical Turk. |
Is a website & blog combo the way to go? | Mc_Big_G: Putting the blog in a sub-directory on your startup's domain will give you more content on that domain and therefore more "google juice".If you put it on a subdomain, it is considered a completely different site. In this case, just like if it was on a different domain, you theoretically get some benefit from back-links to your primary domain. Putting the blog on your personal domain allows you to blog about things not related to the business. This gives you a bit more opportunity to write interesting articles that aren't overly self-serving. Assuming you can find an audience, you'll get rewarded with traffic to your startup's domain.Of course, you could always have two blogs, one for personal, sometimes talking about the startup and one for the startup. Probably not worth it unless you really have enough content for both sites. An added benefit of using your personal blog to talk about the business is that if you sell it, you don't lose all of your content. |
Is there anything better than Zoho Office for group collaboration? | rlpb: What's your situation? How many users working from where, and what do you actually need to get done? |
How many have learned a language they hated just to get a job? | fisadev: JavaScript is my hated-needed |
What to do with underutilized VPS? | seven: You could donate some bandwidth to the Tor network.
http://www.torproject.org/ |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | kilian: Oh, lighten up ;) |
What to do with underutilized VPS? | ErrantX: Check your AUP but you could run Folding@Home on there. |
Please review my startup. | hrishimittal: Hmmmmm, very nice concept. Have you thought about how you are going to deal with scalability and monetising issues? |
Please review my startup. | jdrock: What's the monetization strategy?? |
Please review my startup. | seven: Love it!But I would be afraid that somebody will figure out how to make a 13 character only twitter clone. This is a race that you can not win. Sooner or later some genius will make a service that allows you to broadcast nothing at all. Probably this service would even be free!1!.. killing all the other services in no time. |
Please review my startup. | messel: Haahahhaha, awesome one mixmax.
I'm a fan of your well timed launch :) |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | castis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Downer |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | kylemathews: Hmmm... I disagree. But feel free to not click on any of them. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | mquander: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.I don't see anything in there about not wasting everybody's time! |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | bdfh42: The definition of an "April Fools" post could be tricky. I posted the latest at the dailywtf.com ( http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Announcing-APDB-The-Worlds-F... ) - is it an April Fools or a clever parody of some of the "No SQL" rants around? |
Please review my startup. | Tichy: Do you support location information, too? |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | JoelMcCracken: I agree, but lets instead add a label for the April Fools items.I suggest [AF] for things that are certainly April Fools, and [AF?] for items that the submitter isn't certain about.But I do find it a bit irritating not knowing exactly what I'm about to look at. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | matthavener: Thanks. I really hate it when HN wastes my time. |
let's do a startup website link party | hrishimittal: http://localhost(Seriously, this is probably going to be the crappiest day for signal to noise ratio on HN. Time to get some work done.) |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | webwright: TO honor your request, I will not upvote this story. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | ottbot: I could see this coming a mile a way.. Are April Fools stories something so unbearable for one day a year? I think a number of people find these things interesting, creative, and possibly even funny.. Not sure if the fact don't enjoy them constitutes policy. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | randrews: The word "hack" comes from the tradition of elaborate practical jokes at MIT. I can't think of anything more hacker-like than April Fools stories. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | hubb: dear hn: please don't ask the rest of us to not submit stories that you personally don't enjoy.just don't read them.regards,
the reasonable people |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | smackfu: You are telling other people to not vote for things they like, just because you don't like them. THAT is not the HN way. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | quinto42: Yeah, no. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | chegra84: What you want to do? Reach on HN news and kill the hackers' fun and mash up the plan for wealth and power.[non-sequitur]But seriously, I think everybody gets it's april fools; tomorrow they will be back to their old ways. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | jlgosse: I was JUST wishing there were some April Fools posts on the front page. Hopefully some are floating around somewhere |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | mattdennewitz: sounds like someone got pranked this morning :/ |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | pclark: Oh please. This is the way social news sites work. People upvote stuff they think is interesting. |
Please review my startup. | david927: In a word, "am |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | joshfinnie: We could look at this in a different way. I created a new Ask HN to allow for people to link to their favorite April Fools joke. This should help control the April Fools joke submissions and still allow people to express their joy of being fooled.Link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1234653 |
Please review my startup. | david927: It was working earlier but now I'm getting a "Fail Guppy". |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | runevault: Youtube's textp. If you haven't seen it yet somehow, many of the videos where you normally pick the resolution of the video now has a textp option, kinda hoping they keep it past april 1st. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | yan: "Submitting April Fools stories is just not the Hacker News Way." I'll respectfully disagree. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | tomerico: A more proactive and reasonable approach could be to submit this:"Ask HN: Please submit all April Fools stories to this thread" |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | chollida1: Perhaps this post itself is in fact an April Fools story? |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | felideon: xkcd's command prompt for sure |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | joshfinnie: My favorite so far is XKCDs Command Prompt. There are so many easter eggs to find, it is definitely a time killer! |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | Sukotto: Personally I find April 1 to be one of my most productive days of the year. It's the one day I tend to stay away from tech-news sites since I cannot trust that the news is genuine.It's only a happy coincidence that I even noticed this thread as I was switching to the "no news" version of my iGoogle page.Enjoy your prank day guys (seriously. Have fun). I'll give it a few days for the joke stories to fall off the front pages of HN, /., etc. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | cgranade: It's not an April Fool Joke per se, but http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/april-fool/ has to be the funniest thing I've seen in quite a few Aprils. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | henrikschroder: Do a Google search for anything and look at the stats for the search.Results 1 - 10 of about 397,000,000 for anything [definition]. (0.30 microfortnights) |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | tghw: Isn't this an April Fools post? |
Please review my startup. | meroliph: Sorry for breaking it, but you really should make sure you convert special characters to HTML entities. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | Cornify: Personally I'm most excited about the paranormal romance "Unicorn School: The Sparkling". Start reading half-way down. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/psa-new-... |
Please don't vote up stories I wouldn't vote up. | KeepTalking: I agree that there have been many instances of self promoters and articles of low quality / cred on the homepageBUT>> "Today I see several front-page stories that don't interest me!"Everyone has an opinion on an article and they clearly like articles which endup on the homepage.I suggest: this rant of yours be turned into something more positive "how to keep HN clean" than a reflection of ur tastes. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | reynolds: Am I the only one who hates April Fool's day on the web? |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | streety: I find it interesting that so many of the comments here are pro April Fools stories and yet on the site as a whole April Fools stories seem to be quickly flagged and killed. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | pWneD: Google Translate for Animals, this is just hilarious http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/ |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | MicahWedemeyer: I humbly submit my own attempt at humor: http://blog.obsidianportal.com/?p=362It might be funny to anyone who has to deal with user-generated content. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | pw0ncakes: Is this one of them? An April Fools item about April Fools items? I think the Y combinator (the mathematical abstraction, not the company) just became sentient and is recursing all over the place.Oh fuck. Omega's here. (\x. x x) (\x. x x). (I advise you not to evaluate it.) I never should have mocked that mockingbird. |
Please don't vote up stories I wouldn't vote up. | oscardelben: This is not reddit. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | Goronmon: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/games/mobile/As a runner-up...http://www.cheapassgamer.com/ |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | empire29: Is this an april fools entry? should we actually be submitting april fools stories? im confused! |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | jthyme: I think you're just annoyed at being exposed as a fool on this fine April morning. Get a sense of humor. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | sofal: I've found that the most consistent and prevalent thing about HN on April Fools' Day is the whining about April Fools' Day. It's like a rehearsed puppet show. |
Please don't vote up stories I wouldn't vote up. | jqueryin: Please stop upvoting this story so I can see more front page stories I would enjoy reading. Thanks. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | weegee: because HN is a Very Serious Forum |
Please don't vote up stories I wouldn't vote up. | gfodor: Yes. More Erlang, please. |
Please don't vote up stories I wouldn't vote up. | bmelton: I was about to post this exact same topic, only more clumsily. Here here. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | Groxx: Given that the ones posted here are often programmer-related (ie, the UniXKCD), why not? Far more inane and less-geek-related things are posted year-round, and at higher rates, and they get attention too. I'm not saying this is good or bad for HN, but they're clearly interesting to the inhabitants, so there's definitely a valid argument that that's what's best. And arguments against. Bah, whatever.I, however, wouldn't oppose a "[A1]" (or similar) tag prefixing April Fool's threads, and would happily modify my lonely submission if people would prefer. |
Please don't submit April Fools stories. Please don't vote them up. | socratees: Just flagged this. Meta-meta discussions and talking about HN way? not to up vote April Fools related stories, and then get in to arguments about it? Not definitely worth it. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | zaphar: I can honestly say Ars Technica's gets my vote. http://arstechnica.com/staff/nate/2010/04/tentacular-tentacu... |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | scdlbx: LHC used to discover the Neutrinosaurushttp://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2010/100401.html |
Please review my startup. | phillaf: Holy s*
a html wall of text! |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | tlrobinson: I'm pretty partial to our own, which includes a working implementation: http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/04/01/solving-the-javascr... |
Bootstrapping a Startup Alone | adrianscott: Check with a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure foreigners can start and own businesses in the u.s. (e.g. toyota, hyundai, ...) You may just not be able to be an employee of said business. Build your network online. Go for it and good luck. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | borism: eBay buys back Skype http://skypejournal.com/2010/04/ebay-buys-back-skype.html |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | cperciva: I rather like Werner Vogel's 'AWS Import/Export for Legacy Storage Systems' joke -- once you read the text, it's very obviously a joke, but the title itself sounds rather plausible: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/04/aws_importexport... |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | mtinkerhess: Reddit has a "turn admin on" link next to your username. When admin is on, you can change headlines, vote multiple times, see user's IP addresses and likelihood of being a bot or a spammer, and ban users in three different ways. And the background on comments pages is from the Sistene Chapel. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | arethuza: I rather liked the Y Permutator story - if for no other reason than it made me think whether it should have been C Combinator. |
What to do after college? Master's degree? | geebee: A MS can be a good use of time. For me, it was a good opportunity to:1) Get a resume upgrade. I went from having a BA in Math from UC Santa Cruz to having an MS in Engineering (Industrial) from Berkeley. Personally, this kind of thing irritates the crap out of me, and I don't think I'd put much stock in it if I were hiring, but it can make a difference.2) I got to investigate a new field. I suspect that if you already majored in CS, you probably don't really need an MS in CS. You'll learn something, sure, but I suspect you'd learn more just by going out there and learning. But if you majored in Math (like me), and discovered you really aren't good enough at math to make a career of it, you can obtain a more employable major through an MS. A lot of MS programs will allow you to apply a certain amount of upper division coursework toward an MS - so you've taken data structures, compilers, operating systems - almost like you've double majored, except now you get to say you have an MS (note: some of us are on to this trick - some grad programs are a little easier on their students and give them a lot more leeway to pursue a specialized interest - it's the undergrads who go through hell and get F's if they can't hack it, so I personally don't view an MS as necessarily "higher" than a BS in CS - it depends on what the undergrad studied and whether he/she filled these gaps in the MS program).3) As I said above, you can pursue your own interest. MS programs tend to be much more flexible than BS programs. When I was in grad school, I pretty much learned to hack. My coursework wasn't all that interesting to me - lots of proofs about optimality in convex sets. I thought I was getting away from pure math, turned out I was right back in the land of proofs (that's Berkeley for you, other programs in IE are much more management-ish or engineering-ish). But I got really into writing apps, and that was my focus. Fortunately, the MS program is so flexible that you can get away with this - as an undergrad, I was far too busy with, well, proofs about convex sets (heh).It's expensive, though. Fortunately, I got in before the price went way up - fees were only about $4k/year, and TA jobs kept the costs down. So I graduated with minimal debt and an OK experience. But I still gave up almost 2 years of earnings and had a small student debt at the end. If you can get this experience through working, eh, I'd probably just do that instead. |
Bootstrapping a Startup Alone | icey: Just to be clear; your wife can support both of you while you're waiting for your green card to come through?This seems like the perfect opportunity to try to make something to me, as long as she's on-board with the plan. |
Bootstrapping a Startup Alone | shareme: non citizen will be the problem.This is an Ask Jason on This Week IN Startups question..I would submit this to this week in startups as I believe Jason would skype cal you during the podcast to get the question answered. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | halv0112: I like Atlassian fourwalls. Bringing foursquare to the enterprise with developer checkins. The site is funny. "Devlopers: use our API to write your own APIs". http://atlassian.com/fourwalls |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | m0th87: Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39029552,49305387,00.htm...at least I hope it's an April Fools joke, or we're seriously fucked.EDIT: Actually this wins: there's a vowel outage at gmail
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/todays-vowel-outage.ht... |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | yanw: YouTube's TEXTp they should keep that in the labs projects,
and the Google translate for animals was quite funny. |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | kez: The Independent's piece on the Circle Line (London Underground) being turned into the second Large Hadron Collider.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hadron-collider-ii... |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | chasingsparks: I don't know my favorite, but I do know my least favorite:http://www.kernel.org/ |
What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | hubb: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/equipmentpotenc... |
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