instruction stringlengths 4 105 | output stringlengths 8 56.7k |
|---|---|
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 people have - just to know more.My experience: I began with one concept that seemed really cool to me, I did a little research and saw things vaguely similar, but they didn't get "my" idea (fortunately for me, I didn't find the several attempts that did get my idea). But as I began executing, I hit a roadblock - something that really spoiled my idea, made it impossible to realize the cool vision properly. I asked around, dejectedly, and someone suggested I look at how an unrelated project solved that particular problem - I did that and found the solution! But then bizarre twist 1: through doing this, I came to realize that the "unrelated project" was really doing exactly the same thing as me - just in a different sense.
I would not have seen this connection (and did not) until I was intimidate with the details (i.e. was at a new vantage point). Bizarre twist 2: the title of my project perfectly described both my old conception and my new conception, although I could not see this ambiguity til after the journey.Take the journey. You are surrounded by opportunities you cannot see.Also: "What do you understand about your business that other companies in
it just don't get?" http://ycombinator.com/app.txt (is there access to a more recent application form?) |
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 your competitor has done a kick ass job implementing the idea you thought of and you really don't think you could do a much better job, I would probably look for other ideas that you feel you could do better.Another thing to look at is the capability, velocity, and momentum of the competitors idea; you may be able to out maneuver them if it took them a long time to get to the point they did and they suck at software development. If they are kicking ass and getting funding to add more resources and move faster, this could make your life harder.That said, don't do a feature-by-feature copy of the competition. That adds absolutely no value to the world and you're going to have a hell of a time escaping their shadow. Plus it would make you a slimy person its just really bad PR.One of our competitors is copying us feature-by-feature and it actually puts us to an advantage because they don't understand why we did what we did and our software development delivery is much faster and higher quality than theirs.How do we know this? Just by looking at their web page source. They have all of this test javascript code and fixtures mixed in with their production javascript, they use tables to control their page formatting, left /phpinfo.php on their root web server, use Dreamweaver to code their PHP and image roll-overs, and push everything out via FTP on port 21. Who the hell does that? On top of that they haven't delivered any new features in the past 4 months.At the end of the day, very rarely are ideas original. You're better off focusing on the execution of an idea and out-delivering the competition. |
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 succeeded at.Seriously, unless the other folks are literally owning the market, keep chasing it. Most markets have plenty of room for multiple successful players. |
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 being the 5th or 6th entrant into a market is optimal. The first few entrants make all the mistakes with product development and marketing in the early months. They then make changes after learning from the mistakes they have made over time, and you benefit from their painful trial and error.Originality goes way beyond product ideas though. If you truly want to build a business, you have to create a company behind the product. That consists of many, many systems, a founding team with business instincts and vision, and the panache to bring ideas to life and build a company culture with flair. Everything has to be built from scratch. For my company, I see the products as one small part of who we are and what we do. Zappos calls themselves a customer-service company that just happens to sell shoes. If the shoe market goes to hell one day then they can take the business system they have built and pursue other markets. The value is in systems and top talent to run the systems, not inventions. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen, and we all have too many interesting ideas that we can't get to for lack of time. Systematic, consistent execution will make you that million bucks. If you have made it this far in the post, I highly recommend Michael Gerber's book called "the E-myth". It addresses why most small businesses do not succeed, and it has probably been the most valuable knowledge I have ever acquired. Also, check out sequoia capital's idea page, and see if your idea passes their test.Now go out and execute!Take your best idea, run with it, and make everything up as you go along.is defined as having a unique spin on a product/service with a proven market, stunning marketing materials, and silver-tongued salesmanship |
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 to entry, and if you can't SIGNIFICANTLY make a difference, then maybe keep looking.
Take a read of Rick Segal's current post (and my comment there).
http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/2008/11/features-of-the-wor...So, your final sentence says it all... go develop, you'll learn a ton going through that process and maybe find more ways to differentiate and improve on the market.Don't forget to let us know when you launch. |
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 test the idea, so I won't beat this into the ground.As for the model, I think users are much more likely to fund software that they already know and use. Once software is actually released, it develops a community of users, some of whom may be willing to support it. Asking the small fraction of users with the foresight to anticipate using a program to bear the entire cost of developing it may work for a few cases (e.g. device drivers, or cloning existing software) but there are many other software projects that would have more success if they can rely on donations after they have been written and released.A model that finds a way for developers to work on credit against donations from future users would be interesting. |
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 case you give up) |
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 e-mailing him binaries so he could try them on his phone.the entire process is laborious enough with a mac and xcode, i can't imagine how any of it could be done on windows. if nothing else, you will need xcode just to be able to cross-compile and sign your app with the necessary certificates to be able to transfer and run the app on your phone.however, the integrated debugging with gdb that xcode offers is invaluable. being able to use your computer to step through the code running on your iphone while it's running is very useful and was required to fix some problems with this app i was dealing with. without it, all you get is your iphone closing the app with no error or warning. xcode also allows you to watch the console of the iphone and see errors/debugging info that is being printed that you wouldn't normally be able to access from the phone.that said, you don't really have to switch to a mac to do this. buy a used macbook or mac mini just to do your development on it, while still using your pc to do everything else. |
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 what it's worth, I have some friends who bought a Mac expressly for iPhone development but when they're not doing that, they use their prior computers and run Windows in bootcamp. If you are really dead set on not buying a Mac, then http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/11/11/develop...There is also osx86, but if you run into any problems either with the above suggestion or a hacked version of OS X to run on non-apple hardware, you're pretty much screwed, especially if it doesn't happen on "legit" installs. Apple won't support it (you do get a couple of opportunities to get code-level help from apple engineers with the iPhone dev program), and neither will most people you encounter on forums/mailing lists due to all the little complexities of running an OS on unsupported hardware.Lastly, what's up with the "trendy"? I just use whatever works for what I need. For the iPhone, that is a mac. Getting a mac for iPhone development only makes me trendy in being an iPhone developer, but still I'd be getting it because I needed it. There is no shame in that :) |
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 going to call it a night, but expect an update on the Posterous blog tomorrow: http://blog.posterous.com====================UPDATE 2: I couldn't sleep, so I kept working on it. I've just popped an early version of it live for you to try out. All you have to do is surround your code block with the following tags: [code]
your code here
[/code]
Additionally, if you want to get fancy, you can specify a language with the following syntax: [code lang='java']
public static boolean isAwesome = true;
[/code]
This should work for both through the web interface and through the email interface.The available list of languages is:
'cpp', 'c', 'c++', 'c#', 'c-sharp', 'csharp', 'css', 'delphi', 'pascal', 'java', 'js', 'jscript', 'javascript', 'php', 'py', 'python', 'ruby', 'rails', 'ror', 'sql', 'vb', 'vb.net', 'xml', 'xhtml', 'xslt', 'html', 'xhtml'Current known issues: HTML formatting might be a little spotty at the moment. Will be fixing asap. I also see some intermittent errors where the code isn't getting properly recognized.Please report any bugs to me at garry@posterous.com. Thanks for all the support and ideas. Please do keep the feature ideas coming -- the best way to reach us is to email help@posterous.com, but voting up to the top of Hacker News works too. ;-) |
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/pulpit_20030925_0004..."I taught over 300 courses for industry where we designed cars and electronic devices, but it wasn't until one day I took over my wife's kitchen and used Taguchi to perfect my recipe for vanilla wafer cookies that I realized how broadly it could be applied," Kowalick recalls. "It took 16 batches, but by the end of the afternoon I had those wafers dialed in."Go forth and bake some cookies. |
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 filtering/clustering seems to be an inadequate science at best as far as i can tell. |
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.Perhaps do some meta-analyses of studies to see if you can determine evidence of publication bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_biasFind something that interests you and Do Science To It. |
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 a great deal of studying. Nothing to be ashamed of, not even Gauss was born knowing this stuff. |
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 want forums or to organize meetups. |
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 switches basically as giant line splitters.Your front door is the wireless router - firewall on (assuming it's a full router, not just an AP), DCHP with your DMZ behind that, use 192.168.1.1 or whatever, and then your internal router is 192.168.1.2 on this network.Second firewall/router to your internal network, DHCP on. You can actually use the same addys as the other network, but it may make sense to use different ranges. Switch behind here if you need it.Ports open on both firewalls as required. That's how you see your DMZ server. (Don't use the "DMZ host" crap on the routers if it has such a thing, you're setting up a real DMZ manually.)All wireless access should receive a different (untrusted in your DMZ) range from the first DHCP.If you can't see the internal server from a laptop with wireless, you're doing thing right. If you can, you are open.Under no circumstances should you allow wireless internet access to be granted access to your internal network without VPN.>>>>>>>>>>>>>The really simple way though is just to use the wired router with every port closed and expose as required. Throw the Wireless router outside of that with the internet attached to it. It depends though on what that external server is doing. I wouldn't do this for web, but if it's just mail I might. |
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 open source projects; I'll bet you find plenty of practical object-oriented programming.^ 64 words. |
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 does stuff," all of the other things that I've used "appliance" to define will still continue to be what they are, but their "scope" will be different.OO property 2: You've got a cookie cutter and dough. The Cookie Cutter is the constructor, it makes a object the shape of the cookie cutter insides. It looks like the shape of the cookie cutter, it smells like that shape, it _is_ that shape; but it's only really a copy of that. Which is why people have issues with "equals." Equals can refer either to having the same value, or actually being the same object.There are other really nice analogies (is-a vs has-a and children vs people), but I hope that my analogies make sense to y'all!EDIT: the above is 181 words, sorry :-( |
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 objects interacting with each other in some form.You can't hardly screw up. Mastering OO takes many years, so just get out there and starting hacking around.BTW, you can read all you want about driving a car, but until you sit down in the driver's seat, it isn't going to "click". |
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 sees fit. (60 words)Bonus analogy:The web itself is object-oriented. You ask a server to return a resource for a given URL; what server it is (Apache; IIS) and how the content is generated (static page; CGI; PHP) is unnecessary for the conversation. |
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 system is one that makes working with objects easy.Two ways they do this are information hiding (so you can consider an object a black box and not care about its inner workings) and inheritance (when two objects are similar, you only need to specify the differences between them). |
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: they consist of a set of data systems, each of which is capable of operating on itself."
- David Gelernter and Suresh J Jag (61 words) |
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 is in many cases, it is the most intuitive abstraction. |
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 interface of the object (an interface is the part of a module that interacts with other modules, like the surface of an object). So basically, you have the inside of the object, and the outside (surface).Think of it as support for the modules that you already wanted, that seem to be naturally present in the problem, or in how you naturally want to divide it up and think about it. That is, use OO to support your conception, instead of a priestly template to mold yourself into. Tools are good slaves, poor masters. If you follow your conception, you will make mistakes - but those mistakes will belong to you, and so you will learn from them.Using objects for modularity does not work well for every case (e.g. I think parsing works better in the old-fashioned style).OO is nothing special. There's no wonderful mysterious secret. It doesn't even have a precise definition that everyone agrees on. It's just a tool. Inheritance and polymorphism are grossly overrated, but presented as a quasi-religious AI solution-to-everything - but are useful in some cases (e.g. great for windows/GUIs). There's also a danger of having overly theoretical modules - the "spaces" you mention. Be problem-driven. What does the problem need? |
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 spent your programming life copying and pasting code in a text editor, it's probably not going to be readily apparent. It's pretty easy to reuse code without having to jump through OOP hoops.In OOP, those reusable bits of code aren't copied and pasted, in the text editor, however. They're reused automatically in memory. When programming in an OOP style, you create one blob of code (an object), and then without touching the original, you can use the object and use it's methods and variables.You can modify or extend the object, and you're never changing the original object.For instance, in Ruby. Everything is an object. Even integers are objects and strings are objects. That is, every time I use the integer "5" in my code, I have all the methods from the Integer class available at my finger tips.So, I can do something like this: 5.next #this returns 6
5.next.next # this returns 7
Or, I can use the "times" method from the Integer class, to create a loop: 5.times do |i|
print i, " "
end
#produces
0 1 2 3 4
Why can Ruby do this? Because all integers are a type of object that has the .next() and the .times() method that we can use every time we use an integer.The same goes for strings. In Ruby, every string is automatically given all the methods from Ruby's String class for free. So, you can do stuff like this: "hello".capitalize #this returns "Hello"
"HELLO".capitalize #this returns "Hello" as well
and "hello".empty? #returns false
"".empty? #returns true
"hello".length #returns the length of the string
"hello".reverse # returns "olleh"
Every string that you use in Ruby has all the String class methods available to the programmer, because in Ruby, every string is an object.There are lots of other things that you can do with OOP, this is just a taste of what Ruby does. I think the key to learning OOP is to learn it in a language that uses it very elegantly like Ruby, or even Python. If you're trying to learn OOP in PHP or Perl or Java, you're in for a rather difficult time, because there's so much other stuff that gets in your way.But, if you learn OOP in a langauge that uses is really well, you can isolate some of the OOP concepts, and you can go back and use them in your language of choice if and when you need to.OOP certainly isn't the be all end all of programming paradigms, but it's well worth your while to learn if you're going to be writing code for a living. It's one way to reuse code. It's certainly not the only way. |
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 and weight and methods to manipulate these. At runtime, only the values of data are replicated with pointers to single copies of methods. OOP is just another way to organize your code. Inheritance of classes gives a higher level of abstraction, allowing you to reduce the code footprint of your application and make it more maintainable. |
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. Perhaps those examples work well in the classroom to help kids wrap their heads around the concept of OO, but I just don't see how or where they fit in the real world. OO evangelists are always quick to cite a lot of technical reasons for why programming in OO offers up major benefits in their work, but (from those I've spoken to) can rarely match examples to those reasons. |
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 from under-specification. You need a very good description of your desired behavior before you start coding. |
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 like to be working on, so you're going to have to pay them to work on your project instead. Payment doesn't have to be money, it can be reputation or an exchange of services, but basically you have to have something to contribute.Otherwise you're asking them to do something for you for goodness sake without actually put any effort into the project yourself. In particular if you want to be the legal or cultural head of the project, people will sniff that funk immediately. |
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://boston.conman.org/2004/10/19.1). |
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 topic:
http://www.amazon.com/Software-Development-Principles-Patter...[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_in_the_large |
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 Oriented software is built with methods and properties.(Do I get extra credit for using 64 words exactly?) |
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);"Earlier this was a garbled mess, full of functions like
custID = addCustomer(form_info)
updateAddress(custID, "Billing", some_args) and so on ...On the flip side, OOP is trickier (b/c of encapsulation) to debug esp when object model gets complicated. In terms of programming the only way to do it better (and this is frankly v debatable, esp when you consider management of DB connections and API administration etc) is "LISP style", where you effectively concoct a DSL for your specific app. |
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?
return @noise
end
def legs?
return @legs
end
end
dog = Animal.new(:type => "Dog", :name => "Pipin", :legs => 4, :noise => "Woof")
puts "#{dog.name?} the #{dog.type?} has #{dog.legs?} legs and goes \"#{dog.noise?}!\"\n"
cow = Animal.new(:type => "Cow", :name => "Kevin", :legs => 4, :noise => "Moo")
puts "#{cow.name?} the #{cow.type?} has #{cow.legs?} legs and goes \"#{cow.noise?}!\"\n"
Output: Pipin the Dog has 4 legs and goes "Woof!"
Kevin the Cow has 4 legs and goes "Moo!"
…a simple class which turns the dog and cow variables into objects, like small boxes with information referring to that animal. By the way — I hope code isn't classed as words, else I've failed to describe it in under 64! :P |
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 application finally does.
I am surprised to see no one has mentioned the analysis part. To identify and abstract (like pulling oil well from well) "classes" of objects in your problem domain is the core proponent of OO programming. This is the basis for all data hiding and reuse.The OO design principles (not design patterns) tell you how to go about your class design.Check this link: http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/publishedArticles.htmlOnce you have completed all your classes, you will realize how easy (and natural) it is to script the actual business logic of your application - more or less like a movie: while all the actors have their identities, the "script" tells how they interact and decides the movie experience. |
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 mash of concepts: inheritance, interfaces, global data with limited access, encapsulation, memory management. The object model will differ from language to language, and your objects will look different depending on what features you use.You can program in a pretty object-oriented way in straight C. Some languages bend more easily to these ideas than others.http://www.planetpdf.com/codecuts/pdfs/ooc.pdf [pdf] |
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 system.Next came abstract data types which incorporated the idea of treating a set of data and the logical operations on that data as a single unit. Different ADTs were naturally stored in separate program modules.Next came the idea of information hiding, or separating out a module's interface from its internal structure. Information hiding serves two major purposes: a) allowing a module implementer greater freedom in changing how a module works without distrubing clients of the module and b) making it so a user does not have to understand everything about a module in order to use any part of the module.Having figured out modularity, abstract data types, and information hiding, programmers then turned to the task of how to better reuse code. Structured programming reduced the amount of duplicate code in a system, but still had quite a bit of code with only slight differences. Inheritance was developed as a mechanism to deal with this problem. Basically ADTs, now called classes, were arranged in a tree structure with the most general classes at the top and the most specific classes at the bottom. Several additional mechanisms were added to the system that allow child classes to have access to their parent class definitions and for runtime polymorphism.More than 64 words, I know. However, because seeing how OOP evolved out of the solutions to procedural programming problems helped me to understand it and see its value, it seemed like it may help you as well. |
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 example of the product, and then take that to manufacturers.Electronics has had a revolution similar to Open Source in software, but more gradual and less hyped, and it is much less expensive to make short runs of things now.When you are ready to make a couple hundred or thousand items, look on mfgquote.com and outsource it the same way you would outsource grundgy coding work on rent-a-coder.com.If you post more details of the device here, you will get more explicit help, maybe even a partner . . . just a suggestion. |
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/OO... |
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 data together form an implicit model of how a particular kind of data should be handled.Object orientation makes this explicit. We can store a little namespace of data in an object, and also give it a way to find the right code to run when it receives a 'message'. Then we can start to think of our program as a cascade of 'messages' between objects. |
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 procedural code.OO is not in itself a way of solving problems. It's supposed to model your problem so you can change different parts independently. So, for instance, in code modelling a filesystem, you can have code that performs a 'read()' and gets data but doesn't have to know where the blocks are or if it's talking to a pipe or an inode.I struggled with understanding OO for a long time too. In retrospect, one of my biggest problems was that I simply hadn't worked on systems that were large enough. I could fit all my programs in my head. When you can't fit the whole program in your head, you need strategies for knowing (not just guessing) exactly how many things your code will affect. So the idea of an object as a sort of contract emerges. You want a read() of 12 bytes from an inode to work just the same as a read() from a pipe. So you devise a sort of 'contract' that the general class of "FilePointer" has to adhere to, and then you try to fulfill that in InodeFilePointer and PipeFilePointer. Make sense?Where OO really takes off is in collaborating with other programmers.Some languages are so in love with OO, they decree that everything is an object. This can be annoying, but it's also helpful in the long run. If you're strict about it, it's impossible to write code with weird side effects or that relies on mysterious globals to communicate information. Because all state changes are captured in the object, and the object also carries around a notion of how to modify itself, you can write a new kind of object and be very sure it will Just Work.Once we have divided responsibilities this way it becomes possible to change our models in one part of the code without changing them in other parts. (In procedural code we might have to change the function signatures of just about every procedure in the codebase.) It's even possible to add in 'Mock' objects that just test the behaviour of other objects. |
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 this planning and meta-development for nothing, and no code ever gets written.look on sourceforge and see how many projects are in pre-alpha/planning stages with no code uploaded and how long they've been there.a common phrase in the openbsd developer community is "shut up and hack." a developer's time is much better spent writing code and showing it to someone than writing up a technical spec about how something should quite possibly maybe some day be if we're lucky and follow the roadmap exactly. |
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 constructs, it still runs like a "choose your own adventure" book. Since you have an imperfect view of the world and how requirements will evolve and you're providing what are essentially sequential instructions, it's brittle and unforgiving to unanticipated requirements.OO is less about writing instructions and more about creating a representation of the world (or at least the aspects you care about) as objects and having them interact with each other to achieve things. Because you're modeling the entities involved and having them interact rather than imposing a prescriptive set of instructions from above, it's cleaner and more resilient to unanticipated requirements.Granted it's overkill to use OO for simple tasks when a script will suffice. But if you're building a system that involves interaction of different entities and will need to be adapted & maintained it will almost certainly be more productive to use an OO approach. Btw, I found this book provides the most concise and useful primer on OO I've seen: http://www.amazon.com/Object-Technology-Managers-David-Taylo...sean |
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 meetups that you mention. |
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 bit. I'd even invest a small amount if you need. In fact, I'd be surprised if you wouldn't get into YC with that idea :) |
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,fclose,fscanf etc. which are the functions operating on FILE. This is object orientation at it's most basic (an object is some data and methods to process that data) even if C is not regarded as an OO supporting language.There is only a small step from writing stuff like this :FILE* ofile = fopen("test.txt","w");
fprintf(ofile,"%s %s %s",1,2,3);
fclose(ofile)to writing code like this :FILE ofile("test.txt","w");
ofile.printf("%s %s %s",1,2,3);
ofile.close();So. you've grouped some data and some code together so it's easier to work with it. This is just the first step though, but the small objects you make will be very useful. You can make a small library of useful objects that way : file, string, date, time, point, rectangle, socket, regexp etc.Also, you don't have to make the whole program OO. You can keep it procedural (and for most scripts that's the case), but you can use the above objects just like you'd use their procedural counterparts before. Slowly, and with experience both with OOP and larger programs, you'll see other parts of your work that would make sense as an object. On the other hand, some of them won't. And it's perfectly ok - not all problems can be naturally modeled as a system of objects. |
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 aren't what brings me there, it's the quality.I don't think I'd bother reading a community powered Overcoming Bias... maybe I'm wrong, maybe I will read it, but it doesn't sound appealing at all.Perhaps it's better to just reduce the posting frequency but keep the quality... as it is OB is too frequent for me to read everything, since each post requires careful thought and concentration to get the many points made within. |
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 (relationships between classes) such that specific behaviors increase toward the leaves and decrease toward the roots, leaving implementation and general behavior isolated at appropriate levels. |
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 python etc, I am just a c++ guy.. |
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 hierarchies of data structures and code that must be kept in sync.(63 words) |
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 "constructor", unless they're "static". Also a class can contain some data that's easily accessible to functions in this class; other classes can access it with "getters and setters", which is called "encapsulation". One class can "inherit" from another, giving you a more convenient syntax for calling functions in the "parent" class at the price of a little confusion for everyone reading the code.People with advanced OO skills use clever techniques to write interesting programs. For example, sometimes we want to give a class (technically, "an object of the class") to other programmers without letting them know which class we gave them. To achieve this goal, we give them another class with a function to generate objects of the first class without telling them which one. If you have trouble following, don't miss the helpful diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Abstract_Factory_in_LePUS... An award-winning book of twenty-three such techniques is required reading for good OO programmers.So your gut feeling is right. |
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...Good Luck, Sounds like a cool opportunity. |
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 can only open it on a full file.One of the problems with this is streaming video. You can do video downloads a'la Youtube, but that's because those fit the model: they are mp4 files with a header atom at the front containing index information for the entire file. You can't do this in live streaming, for obvious reasons. The guy I had talked to basically concluded that it was impossible to view a live video stream on the iPod with an ordinary application, since Apple's API was closed and the built-in ARM CPU was an order of magnitude too slow to do the video decoding on its own with a custom decoder rather than using the built-in decoder chip. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.