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Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | 13ren: I have decided to embrace my variations on the ideaYes. It's not the "same" precise idea - maybe, the same concept. And you'll see more as you go along:I find my creativity is very local. I have to be at a new vantage point, to see new things. That is, to have a prototype, to play with it, to hear what problems ... |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | trevorturk: I consider it a kind of validation of an idea to see that other people are working on the same thing, but I know how you feel. It depends on your product and market, but I think there's pretty much always room for more than one success story. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | tptacek: I'd be careful with some of the advice in this thread.Your idea doesn't need to be original, but your execution of it needs to be better. In at least some small way that will gain you customers, it needs to be better on day 1. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | aquarin: The World is big, the market too. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | bradgessler: I don't really think ideas are worth that much. Anybody can come up with an idea. What is, "I have an idea to build a fusion power plan to supply all of the World's energy," worth? Not much.The value of any idea is the execution of that idea. In the world of software its the implementation of that idea. If... |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | webwright: Write a list of all of the companies/products that you admire. How many of them attacked a new market or idea? Ipod? Google Search? Google Adwords? WordPress? Facebook? Microsoft? Starbucks? Walmart? Ebay? Craigslist? YouTube? HackerNews (!)? None were the first to try what they eventually succe... |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | blader: It's 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration.If you sweat harder and sweat smarter than the other guy, you'll clean house. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | sdurkin: There are virtually no totally original ideas. Its one of the reasons for the "ideas are worthless" mantra around here. Execution is the key.You will never think of something totally unique. Just do it first, better, or cheaper. |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | danielhodgins: Ideas = worthless. Execution is everything. I have come across that statement in numerous articles and books by successful people. If you need proof, go to Marc Andreeson's blog and read his body of work. Multi-billionaires tend to know their stuff, and he is way more convincing than me.Some argue that b... |
How do you write a book? | zeynel: Thanks everyone for great advice! This was very helpful |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | pedalpete: Wow, you've got a ton of great and positive advice here.
I agree with almost all of it, but would add this...There are no shortage of ideas, and no shortage of businesses to build if you have the ideas. If the company/market you are looking at has a good implementation with market penetration and barriers t... |
Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original | cardmagic: Having another company doing successful business with your idea means that there is a market, which is a very good sign. There is no shame in not being #1 in a niche. Success does not have to mean overtaking the world. |
Review our startup (bitloot) | inimino: Nice idea. (Aside: I'm running some experiments on similar themes, the first one is at: http://inimino.org/pffs/experiment )As others have said, the site would benefit greatly from proper use of Web standards and accessibility. Perhaps these problems are due to GWT. What you have is probably good enough to ... |
Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC? | pmjordan: As far as I know, the SDK will only work on an Intel Mac running OSX. (10.5?) Cheapest option is to go for a Mac Mini, or ask to be allowed to use someone's mac remotely to use the SDK. As there are a few of you, you could share the cost. (although you should probably work out who keeps it when you're done/in... |
Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC? | jdg: For what it's worth, while the SDK claims to be Intel only, I managed to get it mostly working on an old PPC powerbook.The only piece that did not work was code signing.In any case, just splurge for a Mac Mini if you're not ready to make a bigger financial commitment. |
Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC? | charlesju: Nope, you need a Mac. I have a mac mini and it runs the xcode SDK perfectly. |
Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC? | there: i recently had to be the middle-man for a pc user with an iphone that paid someone a few hundred dollars to have his idea transformed into an actual iphone app. i had to do all of the work as far as generating the certificates, managing all the stuff on apple's iphone developer site, building new releases, and ... |
Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC? | scumola: There are some pirate half-assed ports of OSX for the PC that I've heard about floating around on the net somewhere. I heard that you can get OSX marginally working on a stock PC, so I'm guessing that if you can get that far, the SDK probably won't know the difference. |
Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC? | xtrimsky_: you can install Mac OS X on some PC's, my Dell laptop Inspiron 1420 can run Mac OS X perfectly |
Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC? | bjclark: Macs aren't "trendy", they are better. |
Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC? | silencio: It's possible, but whether you actually want to and have the know-how is a different matter. I would assume that the cost of a used MacBook or Mac mini would end up being more cost-effective in the long run than finding any other way to develop apps for the iPhone in terms of the time it will consume. For wha... |
Review our startup (bitloot) | gojomo: See also 'BountySource': https://www.bountysource.com/(Never used it, don't know much about it, just made a note of it when it first got attention.) |
Review my app - Cell phone analytics for Android with Phonalyzr | davidw: calling "habbits"? Spell check time:-)Is there any way you can associate those stats with money? That might make it more compelling... learn how to save or something like that. |
Anyone know how to publish code samples to Posterous? | rantfoil: swombat, thanks for the suggestion!Hm, I'll whip something up and post back here when it's ready (hopefully in the next hour).====================UPDATE: It's taking a little longer since I'd like to get some really slick syntax highlighting going. It's 3:25 am and I'm still recovering from a cold so I'm goin... |
best way to become a "Numerati"? | ntoshev: http://netflixprize.comStatistical language processing is also cool:http://nltk.sourceforge.net/index.php/Main_Pagehttp://norvig.com/spell-correct.html |
best way to become a "Numerati"? | hugh: If numerati were a word, it'd be a plural. I'm reasonably sure the correct singular forms would be literatus (male) and literata (female).Oh, as for your actual question? I can't think of anything. |
best way to become a "Numerati"? | scott_s: Look at graduate programs in statistics. |
best way to become a "Numerati"? | mechanical_fish: You need to ask a biologist, a sociologist, or an epidemiologist.Or you could take up statistical process control. Useful skill, and applicable to many things besides semiconductor manufacturing. Here's a hilarious quote that I've remembered for years, from http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2003/pulpi... |
best way to become a "Numerati"? | fbbwsa: i think there are still plenty of fun things to find in stock market data. most quants are looking at the same problem. i play with market data a lot and you'd be amazed how uneducated the general public seems to be.also, i second ntoshev's recommendations for netflix prize -ish applications. collaborative filt... |
best way to become a "Numerati"? | jbert: Read some good sources:http://www.badscience.net/2008/11/you-are-80-less-likely-to-...http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=the+tiger+that+is...Perhaps take some public health scares and look up the papers behind them (if they exist). Try and work out if the scares are justified or not, based on the evidence.Pe... |
best way to become a "Numerati"? | sammyo: If you're a hacker you might look for a niche in the R project and do some development. |
best way to become a "Numerati"? | helveticaman: I would still use stocks, like you said, for starting out. I don't know if you're unlikely to find new things, but it'll probably be more interesting than sports. |
best way to become a "Numerati"? | dronethebone: Look at some fun stuff like the Monty Hall problem, and Benford's law. These are delightful examples of how counterintuitive probabilities and statistics can be. If either of these things surprise you, you are in the great majority, and unlikely to perform practical statistical work without first doing... |
Possible to write iPhone apps on a PC? | inklesspen: I recently read about a guy who developed an iPhone game in Visual Studio, but even there he had parts of the job (such as compilation) that had to be done on a Mac, so I'm going to join the others here and say you'll have to bite the bullet. |
Community software for Overcoming Bias? | aristus: Check out slinkset.com -- it's a pretty good roll-your-own-reddit. If you talk to the guys they might help you customize it. |
Community software for Overcoming Bias? | trickjarrett: Drupal is the powerhouse when it comes to these sort of sites, but it's not for the faint of heart. It's got the flexibility to build whatever you want but it doesn't have to be a deep indepth site or the endless links of a link aggregator. It can provide the social base for those of your members who do w... |
small office network | hs: "192.168.0.* and the switch will give off something like 192.168.1.."i think you mean wired-router instead of switch, because afaik switch & hub don't assign ipsbut if u use switch, then the workstations & int_serv are 192.168.0. |
small office network | run4yourlives: There is a lot in this post to digest.Some questions: What kind of equipment do you have here? Home stuff? Commercial Grade?What does your external server do?To be honest, I'd keep it dead simple, especially if you are using home grade stuff like linksys. Switches don't do DHCP, but routers can. Think of... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | yan: (I'm not trying to sound condescending, so bear with me)How else would you write software with modular and re-usable components? |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | dexter: Data structures with self referential code |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | thomasmallen: It's amazing that you've been able to spend four years coding without having to work on code that used object orientation. If you collaborate with others, you'll learn many useful as well as useless coding techniques and will be come a much better programmer yourself. So pick apart a few of your favorite ... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | dgabriel: What language are you using?edit: I assumed that the vast majority of languages typically used in web development incorporated some OO features. I'm interested in what is familiar to you; perhaps that will help people describe something that means something to you.Your question is sort of odd. |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | speek: OO property 1: You're in a house. An appliance is a physical object that does something.
A fridge is an appliance that keeps things cold, a toaster is an appliance that makes things warm, a blender is an appliance that blends things.
If you change the definition of an appliance to be "a thing in a kitchen that ... |
Community software for Overcoming Bias? | aikiai: I am using Plone for a similar sort of venture. Same idea as Drupal, a bit of overhead to get ramped up, but once you figure out how to get things done it's a very cool, useful, well built tool.Plus it's python based instead of PHP, which I prefer. |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | bprater: OO programming is great fun!Take a real world model and simulate it with some OO code in your favorite language.For instance, model an elevator system in a large apartment complex. Model the buttons, the elevators, the call buttons, the system the decides what elevator goes to which floor, etc. Those are all o... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | rmenke: Think of it less as "Object-Oriented" and more as "Message-Oriented" and things become clear. Every object has a vocabulary of messages it can respond to. The only contract you have with the object is what it can do, not how it does it; therefore, the supplier of the object is free to implement algorithms as he... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | cabalamat: Programming is about state (variables, constants, data), and behaviour (algorithms).State and behaviour are deeply intertwingled, and object orientation seeks to make programming easier by acknowledging that fact.Put simply: an object is something with state and behaviour, and an object-oriented programming ... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | Herring: I didn't quite get it either till I worked on a functional language. (btw while you're at it, take a writing class) |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | yourabi: Model behavior and attributes of program on real-world objects. If you are programming a house, a door object would have open() and close() member methods you call on a particular Door object. Easier to work on collaborative projects by virtue of clear interface. |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | stevedekorte: "In all other languages we've considered [Fortran, Algol60, Lisp, APL, Cobol, Pascal], a program consists of passive data-objects on the one hand and the executable program that manipulates these passive objects on the other. Object-oriented programs replace this bipartite structure with a homogeneous one... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | whacked_new: OO operates on ownership. The String's length, the String's text. Create a new String, and you expect it to look like a String and talk like a String.If there isn't an inherent ownership and hierarchy of data and data properties, OO isn't at all necessary. When the structure is well-defined though, which i... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | 13ren: Complex and confusing problems can be tackled by breaking them into modules, with interfaces between. Objects are one way of doing it.Each object wraps up a program. The program's global variables become variables of the object. The program's functions become functions of the object. The public functions are the... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | iamelgringo: What is Object Oriented programming?I wrestled with this one in school for a while, because the name is so screwy. What is an object? It's a blob of code. It's a walled off place in your computer's RAM that has variables and functions. It's just a bit of reusable code.Why is that special? If you've sp... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | jerf: Data structures bound to operations on those data structures, and some obvious elaborations on that theme.Going much deeper gets controversial; there are many, many elaborations on that theme, each of which you can find a language that implements it and a language community that considers it anathema. |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | shadytrees: OO is something you can't learn by reading an OO textbook. (Program!) |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | keefe: Computer programming is all about declaring abstractions that make computers easier to control. Objects are an intuitive way to model your program by defining logical subsets of data and operations on that data. Classes are define common, readable patterns in the data - a person class can have age, name, height ... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | brandon272: This is probably the wrong community to mention this, but this discussion is an excellent example of why I am largely procedural in my programming and don't focus too much on OO. I need to tackle real world business problems. Likening objects to things like refrigerators and toasters is where I get lost. Pe... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | rcoder: Objects combine information and operations. They should help keep disjoint things separate, and related things together. They do provide a simple metaphor for modeling.Not all objects are alike. Smalltalk is "pure"; Python and Ruby mostly "just work"; C++ is very complicated.No programming paradigm can save you... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | tlrobinson: data + methods |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | arebop: http://www.paulgraham.com/reesoo.html is a very good short survey of the OO paradigm. |
Can you start an original, open source, project without writing a line of code? | lethain: Could you be a bit more clear? Are you asking if an individual can come up with some idea, write a blog post about it, and have other people build it?Yes, that can definitely happen, but only if the original person has capital. Most developers who do opensource work have a bunch of ideas and projects they'd li... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | spc476: Procedural programming concerns itself with actions acted upon the data, whereas object oriented concerns itself with data upon which actions can be applied. Think of code as verbs, and data as nouns, and procedural languages are verb oriented, object oriented are noun oriented (I talk about it at http://bosto... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | aagnihot: nightmare :) |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | jdunck: Software development is an exercise in managing complexity.
Being able to isolate the functionality and verify the correctness is valued. OO is one attempt to make this practical in the large[1].Smalltalk is a great start. If you want to read more, this poorly named book is by far the best I've read on the to... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | gengstrand: I'll do one better. I'll summarize OO in a haikuabstraction, hierarchy, modularity, encapsulationmanage complexity reduces resistance to change over timedesign patterns give best practice advise |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | scott_s: What kind of applications have you developed? |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | jaxn: What can you do with a car? Move it forward, backwards, stop, turn. Those are the methods. What features does a car have? Doors, color, age, stereo, etc. Those are the properties.What can you do with a string? Set it, save it, match it. What properties does it have? Length, value, encoding, language, etc.Object ... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | ninjaa: The best thing about OO in app development is that it lets you abstract the main routines of your program into what is effectively business logic. For example,"
$customer = new cp_customer();
$customer->add($customer_form_data);
/* Customer_Info => Customer_Storefront*/
$customer->link_to_storefront($SID);"... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | ashleyw: class Animal
def initialize(options = {})
@type = options[:type]
@name = options[:name]
@legs = options[:legs]
@noise = options[:noise]
end
def type?
return @type
end
def name?
return @name
end
def noise?
... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | henning: Lexical scope + hash table + closures |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | seshagiric: You do object oriented analysis of your problem domain. This results in a set of objects. Then you design a class hierarchy for your objects (base, child etc). Trick is to realize objects themselves do not accomplish project purpose, they just have behaviors. How you play these behaviors decides what the ap... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | msg: I remember my first class. It was a Stopwatch. It had start, stop, reset, and read methods. It maintained an internal counter by calling time(2) or something like that.A lot of objects have no real-world equivalent (they are not "objective", I kill myself), but that doesn't make them useless.Objects are an odd mas... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | Kaizyn: Object oriented programming is definitely the way to go. OOP came about as a series of incremental improvements made to procedural programming.First came the idea of segmenting functionality into more manageable 'building blocks' called modules that worked together to provide the functionality of the entire sy... |
How do you source a hardware product/project? | RobGR: It can be done on a small scale, and is all the time.The first step is likely to assemble a few yourself, or even manufacture a short run yourself. If you don't have the necessary knowledge, advertise among your friends or here and find someone to help you. You can hire someone to design and make a single exam... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | vlad: In 64 words or less:Start reading this and keep going until the end. In two hours or less, you will understand object-oriented programming. This is very well written and explains many differences between functional languages and object oriented languages.http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | neilk: Others have done well here, but I'll give it a go too, in procedural terms.Objects are just a style of programming. As our program begins to process different types of data, we begin to see that some data always goes together and tends to hit certain branches of code together. This is because the code and the da... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | neilk: To respond to your other concerns:Are you sure you're doing it right? Maybe your design is too abstract. Beginners to OO often overdo generality and they especially overdo inheritance. If your only goal is to handle a few operations with one particular filesystem, there is no shame in writing well-commented proc... |
Can you start an original, open source, project without writing a line of code? | there: i see this quite often and it's usually a good indicator that the project is going to go nowhere.non-developers post on a users mailing list about an idea, some other non-developer joins in with "hey i'll setup a wiki!" and someone else chimes in with "i'll make a logo and a website!" in the end you have all th... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | scrollinondubs: so this is not < 64 words and less of a description of OO and more to your solicitation of "inspire me" of why you should care about it. The critical distinction IMHO:Procedural programming is like a recipe- you program a sequence of instructions and while there can be if/then, loop and other logic con... |
Community software for Overcoming Bias? | camerontaylor: One system that appears to meet your needs is Joomla Community Builder with the Simple Machines Forum plugin.This gives you a fully configurable forum including multiple ways of configuring Karma/Reputation, etc. It also gives you the community features that would potentially facilitate the rationalist m... |
Community software for Overcoming Bias? | mattmaroon: Check out bleacherreport.com. It's a lot like what I think you're describing, but for sports. People write original articles, other people can edit them, and everyone can vote. Writers who have gotten big on there have gotten contracts.I'd love something like that for rationalism, and would write for it a b... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | horia314: one good way to start seeing more objects around you is to try to search for a pattern like this one in your procedural code : a group of functions operating on a certain kind of data structure. A classic example would be the stdio functions in C. You have FILE (which is your data structure) and then fopen,fc... |
Community software for Overcoming Bias? | swombat: Very sad news that two OB contributors are stepping away.I find that the reason why Overcoming Bias is a great source of articles for me is that the articles there are without exception written by extremely sharp, clearly brilliant people with both an excellent brain and a top notch writing ability. The topics... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | chardan: A strategy to manage complexity by decomposing problems into hierarchical type relationships through the mechanisms of
encapsulation (code and data together in an "object"), polymorphism (actions on abstract types trigger behaviors without knowledge of their specific implementation), and derivation (relations... |
How do you source a hardware product/project? | samlittlewood: Lots of modules and ideas at http://www.sparkfun.com, and lots of activity in the support forums.Other sources of inspiration & contacts:
http://blog.makezine.com/
http://hackaday.com/ |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | sross: Why not ask Alan Kay?'OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things.'He might know.... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | davidmathers: large automaton
complexity is too high
for my meager brain
small automatons
your prison cells will prevent
intertwingling
you aren't alone
use the pneumatic tubes for
sending messages
edit: 28 words! |
Where do I find a custom browser/app? | koraybalci: Isn't it easier to implement it yourself. For instance with wxwidgets (that's what I usually use for platform independent app dev). It has html browser wrappers, ftp, etc. And I am sure many other similar libraries like Qt have similar wrappers.I am sure other people here can suggest alternatives from pytho... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | nailer: You make things, and make methods to interact with them to achieve what you want to do. The re-use of methods means more understandable code. |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | Spyckie: Just think about it as a change in structure - all your implementation stays the same, but where the code resides gets moved around a bit. This moving around eventually ends up making your code read like a short hand walkthrough of some task, which is better than reading the code directly. |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | volida: You will only appreciate what OO programming has to offer when you are doing a more complex application, of which some parts could be reusable for another one in the future. For the same reason OO is suitable for teamwork. |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | abecedarius: You make objects out of a directed graph of simpler objects, recursively. To answer a message they can ask their acquaintances for help, make new objects, or change their state. To an object, all that matters about other objects is how they respond to messages.This is more cohesive than parallel hierarchie... |
can you summarize OO for me in 64 words or less? | cousin_it: Other commenters here have covered the theory well so I'll take the practical angle. OO in practice means Java and C#: procedural languages that make you organize your code as a collection of "classes", which means files. A class is a collection of related functions that you get to use after calling a "const... |
Community software for Overcoming Bias? | Eliezer: Drupal, Plone, Joomla, Slinkset. And as previously referred, Scoop.Thanks all! |
Good Common Lisp blogs? (new to CL) | icey: I'd start here:http://planet.lisp.org/ |
best way to find christmass presents online? | allanj37: http://coolproducts.com/ has a bunch of different categories of gifts. You should be able to find a unique present for someone based on their interests... |
When should a startup should use cash vs. accrual-basis accounting? | cperciva: You should always do both forms of accounting.Cash accounting tells you if you're going to be in business tomorrow. Accrual accounting tells you if you're going to be in business next year. Not doing cash accounting will cause problems sooner; but either of them will cause problems eventually if ignored. |
Asked to Give a Lecture | realrbman: It starts out really basic, but "Snake Wrangling for Kids" is a great resource for introductory programming and python especially. You might be able to take some of the more advanced idea's and explinations out of the book and elaborate on them.http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kid...G... |
Can the iPhone play videos on websites? | Morieris: No.
I know of no method that works, other than YouTube videos. |
Can the iPhone play videos on websites? | DarkShikari: The iPhone's video capability is extremely limited. I talked to someone recently who was trying to stream video to the iPhone. The main issue is that the internal video decoding API is not open, so you can't arbitrarily open it up from an iPhone application and pass in a video stream to be decoded. You ... |
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