instruction stringlengths 4 105 | output stringlengths 8 56.7k |
|---|---|
Is making clones bad? | wesley: Err, localizing the site is already offering something better. I'd say go for it. Are you suggesting non-english people simply shouldn't have access to such a site because it already exists in english and the company chose not to build a localized version?There's a huge market there ripe for the picking and many American companies aren't taking notice. |
Is making clones bad? | parenthesis: MercadoLibre.com started out as a latin american 'ebay clone'. They seem to be doing okay (== monopoly in their region); in fact, ebay now own a stake in them. |
Is making clones bad? | mtw: it's a good idea as practice. Otherwise, if you or your friend are planning to make it a major business, don't, because of legal repercussions when it will be popular |
Interested in coworking in Thailand? | knarf: I'm already in Thailand since a month and am planning to do what you describe. Sill at the moment I am more into travelling around - Next month I'm going for Laos and Kambodschia. You definitly don't need a working visa if you work on your own startup code. Best to get a 2 or 3 month tourist visa which you can even renew two times by making a visa run to the border. If you come without a visa you'll get sort of a visa on arrival which used to last one month but seems to be now only 2 weeks! Best go to an cheap island resort with wifi or a nearby restaurant with wifi (where you can stay all day and use the net while ordering a coke every 2 hours).
$10-20 seems pretty high to my standards. I've seen rooms for $5. I would say you get an okay room for $8-14 but you might have higher standards. My current room is $25 and I have wifi by the hotel but I could easily go with less luxery and have wifi from somewhere over the street (often times you get an open wifi signal from next door).
If you have any questions, mail me. |
Is making clones bad? | danw: Amazon expanded into Europe by buying up it's 'clones' in other languages, so this might work out well.Facebook chose to translate and expand by itself instead of purchasing local clones.I guess the difference is amazon was buying shipping and warehousing. |
Is making clones bad? | rokhayakebe: I can guarantee that the site he will clone is an actual clone of another site.Everything you see today is a clone of something else and they simply change the theme, the message, this or that.True innovation looks too dumb to be copied. |
Is making clones bad? | visdo: Bad? No. Cloning idea is actually good thing. We need multiple choices. Doing better is also not a necessary thing. I say doing different. |
Interested in coworking in Thailand? | eisokant: Sounds like a great idea, I couldn't find your email address in your profile could you post it here? |
Is making clones bad? | eugenejen: "Bad artists copy. Great artists steal." -- Pablo Picasso.I think as long as your friend is conscious what Picasso said in the quote above, it will be ok. Because the clone is just the starting point. There is market there but no product is available. So by cloning this product, he gets his foot out of the door and the rest of journey is up to him. |
Interested in coworking in Thailand? | mtw: reminds me of the lifestyle described in 4 Hour work week |
Interested in coworking in Thailand? | bemmu: I fixed my profile now, anyway my e-mail is manga@bemmu.com. Hoping someone will join me, and if several people want to join then perhaps we can consider renting some larger place. |
Is making clones bad? | Timothee: I think there is a good market for cloning site.But I agree with you though, that if it's literally cloning, it's not great... and some people will notice anyway and that would give you a bad image.Overall though, I don't think there is anything bad about it. That means you start with a proven idea. We all know execution will make the difference anyway. |
Is making clones bad? | code_devil: I think its fine. Look at even the current social networks in English itself.Dating Sites ---> Friendster --> hi5 --> Facebook --> Orkut --> Bebo
--> WAYN
--> LinkedIn
They all started with the same base, a database of people that interact.Again, the App development platform was started by facebook and now everyone else copied it. So, once you clone it you can always give it your own unique flavor with time. |
Is making clones bad? | iamelgringo: I think that making clones is a great idea. My current project is making a reddit clone on top of Django. I'm planning on setting up social news sites focused on niche markets.I know that there's already sub-reddits, Digg, etc.. but I'm pretty convinced that your average person in Peoria/Des Moines/Kansas City isn't going to get past the first page of reddit or Digg without running away screaming because of the trolls.Think about it this way. How many web forums are out there that are devoted to niche markets? How many magazines are there? How many local newspapers are there? How many sitcoms are there? How many movies are there? The web is media.There's nothing wrong with taking a format or platform, and targeting it at a niche market. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you make a consumer facing web application.The problem of "What do people want" has already been solved repeatedly. As long as you're not infringing on IP, if you can take an idea and focus it on a specific market, you're one step closer to making money. |
Is making clones bad? | ojbyrne: I like to call the strategy "fast following" rather than "cloning." It made Bill Gates a billionaire. |
Is making clones bad? | swapspace: It depends on what he means by cloning. Speaking from an Indian perspective, there is a horde of vanilla Indian social networking sites which are just floundering. On the other hand, there is bazee.com, an ebay equivalent which was bought by ebay and is now known as ebay.in. There are other startups similar to US ones in travel, mobile payments and so on, which are doing pretty well.I guess it's not just about localization in terms of language but also about making related offline services available, which is sometimes not feasible for the original site(s) to do all over the world, at least fast enough. |
Is making clones bad? | known: "Imitation is the sincerest of flattery." --Charles Caleb Colton |
Interested in coworking in Thailand? | mistermann: Man, I'd be right with you a few years ago, all tied down now. After you come back, post a review on here, would love to read it.PS: Watch out for the girls, very distracting. |
Is making clones bad? | mattjaynes: I often find myself wishing for variations of popular sites and services since often I can find one that does what I want, but fits me better.For example, when I was recently looking for some good bug-tracking software I used FogBugz as a trial and really liked it, but they're pricing was really ridiculous for my use case. They would charge $20 per user per month for whoever uses the site. That will work great for other folks who have a static team, but I work with a revolving pool of outsourcers. So for me, it would cost an extra $20 for a outsourcer of mine to perform a $10 task that month and use the bug tracking system. Great software, but their pricing model was a bad fit for me.So, I started looking at other bug tracking software sites and found some that I'd never heard of, but that looked promising. I eventually settled on Unfuddle since it allowed me to have a revolving pool of users and not be penalized for it in the pricing. I tried Lighthouse and a few others, but there were slight variations in their functionality that didn't make them an ideal fit. Of course, those aren't exactly 'clones', but they duplicate significant portions of functionality and vary in small ways that can be significant for a user like me (i.e. pricing structure).So, I'm all for clones - bring 'em on. It keeps the established guys on their toes and innovating and gives users slight variations to choose from.It's basically slight genetic variation and natural selection in business.P.S. The only time it really seems wrong to clone is when the site's text is copied too closely - or if the visual design is too similar.P.S.S Also, if the site being cloned is super unique and pushing the realm of some new functionality, it seems bad form if clones don't at least acknowledge and give credit to the original site for their inspiration. |
Is making clones bad? | wheels: I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, from a market perspective I think, "Sure, why not. Just exploit the race condition that exists between The Next Big Thing in the US and those startups recognizing the European market."On the other hand, as someone that cares about the health of the European startup scene, it doesn't set a good precedent that successful European startups tend to far too often just be knock-offs of American companies, and in fact the cycle feeds itself -- it's such now that European investors often want to see a "proven model", meaning a knock-off, which makes it harder for European startups to find funding when doing something riskier. |
Is making clones bad? | mixmax: I actually hacked up a clone of HN because I thought it would be nice with a hn-like site for "normal" news in Danish and there aren't any. I don't feel bad about it in any way because it doesn't infringe or subtract from HN since it's a totally different crowd.If you want you can check it out here: http://www.deloghersk.dk (still has a few bugs...) |
Interested in coworking in Thailand? | andrewljohnson: My co-founder and I just did a similar thing, except we rented a cabin in the mountains for a year. We're working on www.trailbehind.com |
Interested in coworking in Thailand? | sivers: Those into this idea should read this great (encouraging) article:http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/05/laid-off-one-t...It inspired the hell out of me.It's more about NOT coding, and taking time to see the world cheaply, but looks like the author (Jason Kester) was so font of living this way that he started a company called Expat Software to code full-time from cheap exotic places.Expat Software's site says, "Where exactly are we located? That is difficult to answer, as it changes on a regular basis. A good place to look would be a nice beach with cheap bungalows to rent and a fast internet connection.":-) |
Interested in coworking in Thailand? | mikeyur: This is something I'm actually interested in doing as well. I have a friend who lives in Bangkok - so I'd probably be crashing with him and his wife for a bit.I'm also going to Hawaii for the month of February - lodging is free though since I have family friends who own there.Working away from home can give you a bunch of new ideas. I'm currently in Jamaica for xmas and have had at least 2 dozen new ideas for current and new projects. A change of scenery is always a good thing.Please let us know what you're doing - maybe start a blog. I'd be really interested in your planning/trip. |
issue tracking for open source project? | makecheck: I guess I'm surprised to hear anyone moving away from Trac (I've moved projects toward it), and am curious as to why.But for open-source projects I've relied on SourceForge, which certainly has a reasonable issue tracking system; and apparently it allows plug-ins for at least Bugzilla. |
issue tracking for open source project? | leftnode: If you want to keep it private only, I love Eventum from Mysql (found at http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page).However, for just a good solid bug tracker, you can't beat Mantis in my opinion.Not sure how it integrates with GitHub, they use git to manage the code, and the latest version of Mantis has the ability to have plugins, so you could always write a plugin for git. |
Is making clones bad? | palish: Awe. I thought this would be a philosophical discussion about the merits of human cloning. |
issue tracking for open source project? | wavesplash: Github + Lighthouse works pretty seamlessly for us. I wouldn't go back to self-hosted system. Why are the team members concerned? Lighthouse+github really beats the pants off of Trac IMHO. |
Interested in coworking in Thailand? | jhancock: I have been to Koh Samui, Lamai beach, many times. There is good "campus-like" wi-fi you can subscribe to easily. You should be able to rent a house south or north of the main beach area for a good price these days. |
Is making clones bad? | joshu: For an exact clone, it's pretty lame. And even worse, because the cloning process doesn't teach you any of the reasons the product is like that, when you DO need to diverge, you won't have learned anything.It used to really upset me as the creator, as well. But then I realized they don't really have what it takes to be successful, anyway. |
Is making clones bad? | gommm: I think part of the problem with cloning a website is the motivation. Feeling that you're just cloning a succesful website without adding your own touch is just not as motivating (at least for me).I'm a bit in this situation currently since I had an idea for a product that I really wanted to do, but by the time I quit my job to work on it, someone else had the same idea and implemented it for the american market... So, I let the idea by the wayside for a while but recently I decided to implement it for another market... So in a way I'm cloning someone's website (same base idea) without cloning since I originally wanted to do exactly such a website... |
issue tracking for open source project? | jlouis: I've come to the conclusion that a mailing list is the correct bug tracker, together with a file in the repository. The cool part is that unless people make an effort themselves, their "problems" are not likely to influence development.By the way: This is not a joke. Think a bit about it and you will see that it is a possible alternative. |
Classic games? | astrec: Alley Cat - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game). I still hum the tune from time to time. |
Classic games? | pavelludiq: The first time i played with real world code was when i messed with a LOMAC mod, it was just a few lua scripts and a XML file, and they were just configuration files as far as i was concerned. Game designers should make scripting and moding easy, so that it does not look like a cheap hack. It can be a good way to get kids in to programming. |
Classic games? | maneesh: Age of Empires and Age of Kings, without a doubt. Even led me to write a book on game programming. |
Classic games? | mapleoin: Building websites was what led me to become a programmer. Although I was programming BASIC before I knew what the Internet was, I didn't really have the drive to go further than what I was being taught.
The passion only started after I found Linux and the hacker culture. |
Classic games? | shabda: http://www.miniclip.com/games/hangaroo/en/This was the game which got me hooked to programming as
1. Seeing this game, it looked something cool .. and more importantly something which I can build. (If you played AOE, and thought you could build it .. more power to you.)
2. For some reason, I could just see how I could go about building it.I built it in pure Java, btw .. The source for it is lost, thankfully. (My first program, I didn't undersand arrays, and had code like char varA, varB .. varZ). The next game I built was probably better, and has the code http://code.google.com/p/spaceoddece/ and http://shabda8.tripod.com/java/Then I got a job .. left game programming ..moved to database/web development and Python. Hangaroo was how I started programming. Ah Hangaroo |
Classic games? | vorador: Unix - "UNIX is a glorified video game. People don't do serious work on UNIX systems - they send jokes around the world on UUCP-net, and write adventure games and research papers."
- Real Programmers don't write Pascal |
Classic games? | brent: Not a game, per se, but demos got me interested in programming.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene for the young. |
Classic games? | casta: I wanted to learn programming when I was at the high school and I saw the first 3d games on playstation:
- Wipeout
- Battle Arena Toshinden
- Ridge RacersMore than ten years have gone, and now I'm an almost happy R&D developer at www.milestone.it . ;) |
Classic games? | tjr: Zork and Planetfall were my biggest inspirations to learn how to program. |
Classic games? | endlessvoid94: Chip's Challenge.I remember finding a level editor for that game and I'm sure I spent a solid two weeks messing with it and subsequently learning VB (this was 5th or 6th grade). |
Classic games? | Darmani: Making game was my primary ambition when I was young. I got my start "programming" by using a drag-and-drop game-making program called Multimedia Fusion, and first understood a good deal of the basics of C-descendants by reading a lengthy tutorial on a game-focused scripting language put out by the same company meant for MMF users. |
Classic games? | gaius: Rick Hanson Trilogy on the BBC Micro. |
Classic games? | swombat: Too many to name, but I did do my "cocoon" stage by spending most of a school year (after school hours) in my room, building a Wolfenstein-3D-like raycasting engine. That was fun.I used this book:http://www.librarything.com/work/202092And this book:http://www.priceminister.com/offer/buy/501846/Collectif-Pc-I...Mostly. |
Classic games? | hs: KOEI seriesit led me to edit the save files and change the hex value (i think i used norton commander) for abilities & resourcesi did the same with civ1, had 65535 gold at 4000bc, stuffs like that are now easily changed with cheat codes / editornot really programming, i know, but that started my interest |
Classic games? | gcheong: First time I saw a personal computer was when a teacher brought in a Commodore PET and it was running lunar lander - the graphics were all text characters if I remember, but I was fascinated and I wanted a computer so I could make games like that. |
Classic games? | pmjordan: For me it's Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon (Deluxe), without a doubt. That game was and to this day is (in the form of OpenTTD) like a highly addictive drug for me. If I start playing, I'm compelled to optimise my transport network for many hours. I got it when I was 11, and incidentally, was the first computer game I bought with my own money.Oddly enough, when I introduced my girlfriend to the game, she instantly showed the same obsession with it. At university, when most other people were out drinking, we'd occasionally start playing Friday evening and play for most of the weekend.Although I didn't start programming based on it (I started programming because soldering increasing networks of an increasing number of logic gates became tedious and expensive) I did start learning graphics programming because of it. I dream of creating a worthy successor to it one day. (I'm too scared to start, considering what playing it does to me) |
Classic games? | nostrademons: MUDs. |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | pmjordan: Gradually. Except in very rare circumstances, not every visitor has to see the changes immediately. The main challenge is consistency of the data model, which should be separate from the presentation layer anyway, in an MVC-stylee. If you can upgrade the data model without affecting existing versions of the presentation layer, your presentation layer can be rolled out gradually. |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | wesley: Haven't done anything of the like, but perhaps using something like apache mod_proxy to redirect visitors to machines that are already updated? |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | cheez80: i remember reading somewhere that ebay changed the background color of their homepage from gray to white, gradually, over 6 months, as not to alienate customers who were used to the gray. can't provide links, and sorry because this isn't really related. i just thought that was interesting. :) |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | gaius: They'll take a few webservers and their associated middle tier boxes out of service on their front-end loadbalancers, wait for all the sessions to migrate/fail over to others, upgrade them and put them back into service. The loadbalancers will be smart enough to do affinity (put this customer onto this pool of servers if possible). At any one time after the roll-out begins, x% of the customer base will be on the new code where x->100 if things go well, or if something unexpected happens, (100-x)% of customers will never even see it, and the rest (x << 100) will see only a glitch before the loadbalancers swing them back across onto the old code.In apps like this the policy is to only add columns to tables and new tables, never to remove anything, so the database can be upgraded hot, and the old code can continue to run on it, only the new code will see any new columns/tables. |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | bjclark: It's totally different for different types of sites.
Facebook is different than Amazon is different than Yahoo is different than Flickr.In general, I'd say, most sites data is sharded or clustered.
Amazon, I'm guessing, basically has many many different instances of their app running on different clusters all over the world (multiple clusters per datacenter). So they upgrade a cluster at a time, and their databases all synchronize with others of the same version.Facebook's data is, obviously, sharded by network. So any given cluster runs x number of networks. Upgrades are then, again i'm guessing here, rolled out network by network. The data layer can be different from network to network.Most of the time though, updates to large scale services aren't changing db schemas or making huge changes to the data layer, so it's as simple as updating the code and rebooting some app servers.(Obviously I don't know exactly how they do it, cause I don't work at any of these places, but deploying it's that hard of a problem to solve) |
Classic games? | jim-greer: I got started on my Apple ][+ mostly by typing in games from magazines and then modifying them. Softalk was the best - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softalk. They had a Rogue style overhead view ASCII art dungeon crawler - I added my own weapons and monsters and stuff.Typing something in was a great way to learn how it worked.
The Shootorials section of Kongregate is our attempt to recreate that for Flash games - http://www.kongregate.com/labs |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | brianm: You roll out incrementally, and keep interfaces between components backwards compatible for all versions presently out and any you may need to roll back to, if you possibly can.When you cannot, I, personally, believe in partitioning traffic across concurrent versions. This can be done dynamically or statically -- really it depends on the nature of your system, in general something will stand out as obviously right for your situation.To take an example, if your service is primarily user centric, you can partition the system by user and roll out accordingly. Let's say you have four interacting systems: a font end proxy which understands the partition boundaries, an appserver, a caching system, and a database -- pretty typical.The front end proxy in this system is shared by all users (this need not always be true as you can do subdomain and dns games, but that is a different major headache), but everything behind it can be dedicated to the partition (this is not necessarily efficient, but it is easy).Now, let's say we need to make a backwards-incompatible,coordinated change to the appserver and databases associated with the partition. As we cannot roll these atomically without downtime we pick an order, let's say appserver first. In this case we will wind up rolling two actual changes to the appserver and one to the databases.The appserver will go from A (the initial) to an A' which is compatible with both A and B databases, then the databases will go from A to B, and the appservers from A' to B. You'll do this on one small partition and once done, let it bake for a while. After that, you'll roll the same across more. Typically going to exponentially more of the system (ie, 1 partition, 2 partitions, 4 partitions, 8 partitions, etc).This means you have a, hopefully short lived, interim release of one or more components, which is probably grossly inefficient, but you wind up in a stable state when complete. The cost of doing this is not pleasant, as you basically triple QA time (final state, interim state, two upgrade transitions) and add a non-trivial chunk of development time (interim state). That said, this is why most folks just take the downtime until the cost of the downtime is greater than cost of extra development.This is, of course, a pain in the ass to coordinate. It is easy to do with relatively small big systems (less than a few hundred servers, say, assuming you have good deployment automation), and probably the pain of coordinating is still less than the pain of baking component versioning into everything... for a while.An alternate model, which requires significantly more up front investment, is to support this in a multi-tenant system where you don't (for upgrade purposes) dedicate a clone of the system to each partition. Instead you can bake version awareness into service discovery and dynamically route requests accordingly.A very traditional (of the blue-suited variety) is to use an MQ system for all RPCs and tag versioning into the request, then select from the queue incorporating the version. This makes the upgrade almost trivial from a code-execution point of view, and can even help with data migration as you can queue up updates during the intermediate state database and play a catch-up game to flip over to the end state database. This is the subject for a blog post, though, rather than a comment, as it is kind of hairy :-) |
Advertising Books | russell: What kind of advertising? Traditional media or web-based? |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | aristus: From their whitepapers you get the sense that much of the point of Amazon Dynamo, Google Protocol Buffers and BigTable, YAHOO PNUTS and UDB, Facebook Thrift objects, etc is to release big systems from the tyranny of the SQL schema.When you can run multiple versions of code against the same dataset, upgrading the application layer one bit at a time becomes much easier. |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | seldo: For a moderate-sized upgrade, the description given by gaius is pretty accurate. Working at Yahoo, I've been around for a couple pretty huge property changes, and then the deployment process is very different.Basically, hardware is much cheaper than downtime, and very big web companies have lots more money. So we don't swap out old servers gradually: instead we buy and set up an entirely new set of servers, deploy to them several weeks in advance of the planned launch, and run QA against these production-level boxes. Then, when we are ready to "launch", all we're really doing is a relatively low-risk DNS change: all the potentially tricky deployment issues having been ironed out beforehand.After a couple of weeks/months of operation on the new hardware, if there have been no major problems, the old boxes are decommissioned -- either re-imaged and put back into service to expand capacity, or more often taken out of service entirely (I've no idea what we do with old boxes when we stop using them, funnily enough). |
Advertising Books | hs: i like trout for older products / media and godin for newer |
Advertising Books | nailer: Ogilvy on Advertising. It's the Kernighan and Ritchie / TAOCP of advertising.http://www.amazon.com/Ogilvy-Advertising-David/dp/039472903X...David Ogilvy came up with a lot of the ideas, terminology and concepts of modern ad compaigns. He's also the one who said "The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife." - a truth that technical people are often slower to pick up than the rest of the population.And this gem: "Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. 'Standing room only' creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure."Ogilvy also coined a hundred slogans you know - 'only Dove is one quarter moisturizing cream'. His surname's already in your spell checker.If you're interested in examples of inspiring communication created by advertising experts, check our Paul Arden's works, such as 'It's not how good you are , it's how good you want to be'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ogilvy |
Classic games? | DaniFong: I started playing SimCity and Lemmings when I was just a sprite (my mother was as obsessed as I was at two), which put my best foot forward in systems thinking. Then I was on to SimEarth, the Island of Dr. Brain, the Incredible Machine, Railroad Tycoon, Theme Park and Civilization. I played Nethack: it was exciting because the graphics were simple enough (heh) that it seemed like I could do it on my own.Then there was a 'game maker' video game that I forget, and the I played Cyberstorm but my first experience really doing coding was in making levels in Warcraft 2 and Starcraft with heavy use of the trigger system. Then I got 3D Studio Max, and learned MaxScript as my first serious programming language, but my machine was so underpowered I didn't end up making many scenes, just models. (I learned a lot about NURBS, though!)The games that really had the most effect on me were Alpha Centauri and Sacrifice. Alpha Centauri was amazing from a game standpoint, but what really hooked me was the science, philosophy: in essence, literary merit. Every technological advance was at least plausible, but included a wonderful quote from one of the main characters, or a famous philosopher or scientist from our past. It was this game that really immersed me in our intellectual history, and held me fast to science.Sacrifice was a beautiful game. There was a big map making contest run, and I poured myself into it. I couldn't legally compete (I was 12) but Shiny let me anyway, despite the objections of some of the other competitors. Of the 21 finalist maps, 4 of my maps were there :-) I got fourth place, and I won a nice sound system which I gave to my brother. It was the first creative endeavor where I competed and won against those much older than me, and it was a lot of fun to make things and win something. And people played my maps for a looong time :-) |
Classic games? | jmtame: I'm now 21, but I got started on computers mostly from the gaming, I started playing The Adventures of Ducktales when I was 8 or so. I also played Codename Iceman, Ultima, King's Quest, and a lot of older games. I got further hooked by Westwood Chat and their games, like C&C and Red Alert. By the time I was 9 or 10 I started doing HTML on an Angelfire. I thought IRC was pretty cool, so instead of pulling the wings off butterflies, I went around randomly k-lining people when I was about 11 years old ;) I made a terrible sysop/server admin.Eventually got into programming with a friend in middle school with a Borland C++ compiler. I got caught in middle school trying to get into the grading system and changing admin passwords (I actually didn't get caught, a friend ratted me out who got caught). I took a break from the stupid connotation of "hacker" (the 'Zero Cool' sense that is) and resorted back to online game hacks and web coding. Started looking towards entrepreneurship at about the time I was leaving high school, when I started doing contract work. |
Classic games? | bprater: When I was 5, my dad bought a TRS-80 Model III. He bought several programming books and I'd pick out a program and he'd type it in for me.I made the connection that typing in programs equaled fun.Eventually, he found a book for me that had very simple programs and I start with my first print/loop program -- and I was hooked immediately. The programming became more entertaining than the game!I could control the computer. I loved it. And have continued to love the "game" ever since! |
How do mashups avoid copyright infringement lawsuits? | inklesspen: By being too small to bother with. |
Advertising Books | gruseom: I got a lot out of Claude Hopkins' writings. He was one of the earliest pioneers of modern ads (turn of the 20th century), but when you read about how he meticulously tested his campaigns, it's as if he had the internet in mind. It's not the contemporary textbook you're asking for, but sometimes I think the classics have more valuable information in them. His stuff is also highly readable because it's full of good stories.http://www.amazon.com/Life-Advertising-Scientific-Classics-L... |
How do mashups avoid copyright infringement lawsuits? | villageidiot: Leaving aside the obvious ethical issue here, what's the solution? Don't do mashups? Or, do mashups in a moderate way so that you are only providing limited quotes of the originating site and providing attribution? Or, say to hell with it, I'll do what I want and only worry about legal problems if I get big enough that someone comes after me? |
Classic games? | lpgauth: Not a game, but a visual chat called The Palace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)).
I started doing VB programs to "hack" other people avatars and some other stuff... We kinda killed it when we found a bunch of way to overflow the server but that's another story. |
Where to find a potential co-founder? | curiousgeorge: Perhaps you can be more specific about why you need a co-founder? Can you build the product yourself? If you cannot what value do you bring to any venture?I'd suggest you put yourself in a position of strength by executing and other people will want to work with you. If you cannot clearly articulate why you are seeking/need a co-founder, you should not be looking for one. |
How do mashups avoid copyright infringement lawsuits? | russell: "Or, do mashups in a moderate way so that you are only providing limited quotes of the originating site and providing attribution?"That's the civil way."It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission." -- Grace Hopper |
Advertising Books | lionheart: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a classic.
So is Scientific Advertising. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | vaksel: 9 to 8 work8 to 2 life2 to 9 sleepMonday through Saturday, with Sundays off.Sure if there is some emergency all bets are off, but I find that this gives me the most productivity, w/o really doing any damage to my personal life. |
How do mashups avoid copyright infringement lawsuits? | kwamenum86: How do you know these sites are not retrieving content using RSS feeds? In this case the "social contract" says that the content owner consent to syndication.In reality any reproduction of content is a violation of copyright law- no if, ands, or buts about it. Even Google's act of displaying text from web pages in their search results is infringement but of course they are safe because they are so useful and the web would be nothing without search engines. But there is no implicit permission being given.The same rule likely applies to mashups (although I do not know of any that have been taken to court.) Why litigate if an app helps users consume your content (there are exceptions of course. For example, if page views on your actual site decrease and you lose money as a result.) |
How do you manage work/life balance? | hardik: I would like to add another dimension to this question, how do you pre-founders manage work life balance? (Pre-founders being those who are still working their day jobs, hacking away at nights/weekends) |
How do you manage work/life balance? | iamdave: I don't bring my work home with me. Under any circumstance.Period. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | speby: Pre-founder: 9 to 5 work, 5 to 8/9 part-time startup, 8/9 to 1 life. Mon-Sat., usually Sundays are full-life.Full-time founder: 9:30 to 11 work/coffee/eat, 11:30 to 3 work, 3 to 4 gym, 5 to 8 work, 8-11 eat/life, 11-1 work. Mon-Sat with Sunday usually being the most life and most relaxed.You read that right... technically, I work the same or slightly less hours than with a full-time job and part-time founder responsibilities. Either way, it's about 60-70 hours a week. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | markbao: 7am to 3pm, school.3pm to 12am, founder stuff.12am panic about homework |
How do mashups avoid copyright infringement lawsuits? | neilk: Mashups are not all one thing. Sometimes it's a lone hacker modifying their own data, so licenses are not an issue. Sometimes it's data that the authors intended to be shared. And sometimes people are just retards and they steal or misuse other peoples' stuff.Flickr is all about sharing and it tries pretty hard to give the users tools to control access to data and to express their licensing intent. For example, as much as is possible, there is simply no trace of private data in searches that don't have proper authorization. For public data, it is not a given that you can republish or modify the work. So the atom feeds have links to the licenses for each photo or video, and the API has similar features when obtaining photo info.Users are able to grant a mashup app access to their private data in a formalized way (and to revoke it later). Finally, Flickr is also able to revoke the rights of any particular app to download data or simply throttle them to a reasonable amount per day.All sites that offer RSS or an API should do these sorts of things. (The oAuth standard is a formalization of some of the techniques that sites like Flickr use.) |
How do mashups avoid copyright infringement lawsuits? | quizbiz: I am not a lawyer but isn't it just like comedians cant be sued for copying something and giving it a spin? These are service sites, not content sites, so they are preforming a task upon the content and thus it's okay to do what ever. right? |
How do we bring about world peace? | tokenadult: The bumper sticker answer is, "If you want peace, work for justice." And that's not too bad as a first approximation. It's very rare for two countries with genuine democracy and protection of civil liberties for all inhabitants and free enterprise economies to go to war with each other. It's rare for such countries even to have much internal strife that leads to bloodshed. Promoting freedom promotes peace.Of course, I haven't answered the question here that instantly arises: how does one promote freedom? (And, especially, how does one do that through peaceful means?) That's an interesting topic to discuss. I have lived through one country's (Taiwan's) transformation from one-party dictatorship with political assassinations at home and abroad to multiparty democracy with a vigorous free press and largely independent judiciary. I'd like to see some other countries make the same transition, as that would make the world a safer and more peaceful place. |
Where to find a potential co-founder? | GrandMasterBirt: Let me rephrase this question because I have the exact same problem:Granted that I do not have enough time to start a start up myself, or seek out VCs for money, since I NEED my 9-5 job to feed myself and family (literally), I am naturally seeking for one or few people to start the company with so that we have enough time/brainpower between the X of us to actually make the startup work at least while we are actually paying in peanuts.Now my unfortunate problem is that I don't have a friend I am willing to do this with. So is there a methodology people here use to find someone to start the startup with?Now it's either that OR I am forced to wait until my wife graduates with her masters and gets a higher-paying job than me. In which case I guess I can quit work and focus on the startup. Is this the better alternative than looking for someone? |
Classic games? | jaytee_clone: I actually got into programming in high school, when I needed tools for my math class, e.g. simplifying radicals, finding roots, etc.Well, I wanted to program games too, but they just seemed too far fetch at the time, and I had no idea where to start. |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | tlrobinson: Here's a couple of interesting videos, obviously very specific to the particular apps:"Developing Erlang at Yahoo" http://bayfp.blip.tv/file/1281369/ - Talks about the transition of Delicious from Perl to Erlang, including live migrations of the DB."Taking Large-Scale Applications Offline" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cePFlJ8sGj4 - in particular, the section on "Versioning and phased rollouts: what to do when you can't assume all servers have the same code" |
How do we bring about world peace? | whichdokta: Coming to agree with each other that it is not a cliche to ask terribly important questions is probably a very good start.Maybe there is hope for the geek of the earth after all!A modest contribution to chew on: * Peace is not only the absence of overt violence. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | lionheart: I work when I feel like it. I don't work when I feel like it.I don't have a separate office and I haven't been able to stick to any schedule more concrete than that.Its probably not an ideal situation, but it seems to be working out pretty well so far. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | catone: I recently wrote a blog post about something similar that might be applicable here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/12/19/12-ways-to-keep-sa...The article was geared toward home workers and focused on tips and tricks to avoid getting stir crazy. But a lot of it talks about how to keep work and personal lives separate, which is especially difficult when your home is your office. So much of the post may be helpful to you.Short version of my tips of things to do during the work day to stay sane:1. Clearly define your work space.
2. Take a walk.
3. Take a nap.
4. Have lunch with a friend.
5. Join a local user group.
6. Engage with a community online.
7. Use Twitter.
8. Subscribe to a trade magazine.
9. Keep work and personal contact info separate.
10. Get a cat (or a dog).
11. Take regular breaks.
12. Schedule time off. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | henryw: i used to believe in working lots of hours. reading 4 hour work week changed my mind some. one thing i took away was: do the 20% of things that gives you 80% of productivity and skip the rest. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | jmtame: "If you're going to half-ass your startup because of some 'work-life balance,' you're going to lose." - Michael ArringtonMark Cuban was known for working 7 years straight on Broadcast.com (originally known as AudioNet) and that was at the time the largest IPO in history, sold to Yahoo for $6 billion in stock. He didn't take vacations, holidays, or leave work during these 7 years.It depends on what you want out of life. I think too many people get into entrepreneurship because they think it sounds fun, but they don't realize it requires everything of you. If you're the CEO or President of your startup, you set the example. Every single person on your team will only work as hard as you will.If you're unwilling to sacrifice friendships, family, weekends, holidays, then you're not very competitive to others who are. I'm not trying to say that in a sleezy way, I'm just stating the facts. A lot of people are willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, so if you only want to be self-employed and do your own self-startup, then you can probably get away with as much or little work-life balance as you want. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | siong1987: 9am to 3pm: study
3pm to 1am: work <- Work is my life.Enjoy your work like you enjoy your life. |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | SingAlong: Well, when Google App Engine comes into play, this problem isn't big. They have something called versioning (in the admin panel) which allows you to change the app to the next version or revert back to an old version.From an amateur POV:
But when usual servers come into play, I have had no clue abt big ones.Infact a couple of months back, when my home server had a burst of traffic from my mobile app, it couldn't handle it (256kbps connection, 256MB ram with a 1.3 GHz P3 processor. well suited to serve a high bandwidth mobile app of 1000 users and also for constantly collecting data from APIs). But due to sudden traffic outburst, I had to string a friend's comp to mine.My procedure: I first stopped updating data from APIs to my DB and kept it static. No updating the DB. Copied it to my friend's fast comp. I had my computer interfaced with a mobile which accepts input from the user mobile phones. That was the app's requirement. So I had an advantage of lining up requests right there in the mobile phone while I was switching the server. That trick should help if you are developing a mobile app on a very limited resource (a hobby project). |
How do you manage work/life balance? | mattmaroon: Step 1: think about your priorities. This is something you should have done before starting up, of course. For instance I'm married, and my marriage comes before my business. If I had to choose one to fail, it would be the latter. My wife is very supportive, so I don't have to choose. If yours isn't, you will. Same to a large degree with friends and family.Step 2: I call it Agile Life Development. Apply the same principles you do to your startup to your life as a whole. Start with a routine you think might work, run it for a few weeks, see if it does. If you find it's not keeping you both happy and productive, and working toward your goals while keeping your priorities in order, try to determine why and make some changes. Test again. In this case your product is your life and your user is you (and friends and family) so good feedback is really easy to come by. And you're definitely making something you want.It'll take a while, but you'll get there. Just don't stop working on it. I've been attempting it for ~7 years now, and I'm still not where I would consider it perfect, but it's pretty damn good. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | auston: i dont, my girlfriend does it for me. |
How do big web sites roll out new versions? | Tangurena: Here is basically what one of our big financial clients [1] does twice per year:Integration, or sytem testing had taken place over the previous 1-2 month period.They have 2 large datacenters, let's call one "production" and the other one "disaster recovery" (abbreviated "DR"). Between these and the internet are some large routers (the Cisco ones that cost about what a house costs). At the beginning of "migration" the routers are switched to point from production to DR, so that all internet traffic points to DR.At this time, the servers are being updated with the new code. This can take some time, especially if large databases need to be restored as part of the migration, or if the update scripts take a long time. There are a lot of servers involved, a ballpark is about 100 servers: some Sun, some WinTel, some IBM mainframes. Some mirrored, some clustered, some all by their little old lonesome. Some applications are Java, some .NET, and some Cobol[2].Approximate timeline [3]:People start dialing into the main conference call about 5:30PM eastern [4].Switch to DR about 6pm eastern.Code in production is migrated/installed, servers rebooted if necessary. Done about 9-11pm eastern.Testing [5] starts and continues until about 3AM.GO/NO-GO decision is made sometime between 3 and 4AM[6].Rollback if necessary.Switch routers to point to production at 6AM.Preliminary postmortem report generally done by 2PM.If no rollback, then repeat the following evening for DR.Notes:
1 - They're a Fortune 100 company, I'm not telling who they are.2 - That I'm aware of. It would not surprise me at all that there are a number of other "brands" of servers or programming languages involved.3 - The actual timeline is usually a spreadsheet that's at a minimum, 50 pages long, plus about 10 more pages of first, second and third contacts in case something bursts into flames.4 - It is common to have 100+ people monitoring the main conference line, and 1-2 dozen other conference lines used for individual components/products. One has to be awake and alert in case you're "called out" on the conference line.5 - In general, because the main URL/URI/Hostnames are now pointing to DR, hosts files are changed so that configuration files don't get edited.6 - Sometimes the decision gets delayed until almost 6AM if there are some problems. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | known: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/25/0329226 for an IT worker. |
issue tracking for open source project? | abalashov: I have been very pleased with Mantis. |
Where to find a potential co-founder? | babyshake: I was lucky enough to meet a co-founder at school who is a good complement to my skills, and we have good "chemistry".That being said, it's really a matter of pounding the pavement. Meet lots of people, the types of people you'll make sure to follow up on.Since moving to the bay area, I've met plenty of really great people. I'd be happy to give you some advice or make introductions...are you already working on a project, or is this more hypothetical?Ping me - jamslevy@gmail.com |
How do you manage work/life balance? | cubicle67: badly |
Classic games? | cubicle67: text adventure gamesThe first big programme I ever wrote was a text adventure, and the book that got me started down that track was "Exploring Adventures on the Vic 20" by Peter Gerrard. I can't find any references to it (in its Vic 20 form) online, but I did find this: http://retro.icequake.net/exploring_adventures_on_the_c64/ |
Advice to Student Finishing School | siong1987: Which college are you going? But, college doesn't matter much.If you think that you want a head start before starting your CS degree, you can learn Java right now. Most of the 4 years college will only require you to learn Java, C++ and C. They may have some others languages that you have to learn. But, I am sure that these are the main three.In fact, you don't have to learn tonnes of language to be good in CS. From what you describe, you may be lack of some practical experience on programming. Try to work on some open source projects or your pet projects. But, I strongly recommend you to work on open source projects so that you can learn from other good programmers in the project.For Math, it is good for you to learn some basics of Discrete Math before you start learning some deep algorithms that may require more advanced math than high school math. I don't know any book that I can recommend to you. But, I am using "Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications" in my first semester in UIUC. The author of this book tried to relate Discrete Math with Computer Science. So, it may be a good head start for you. From the book, you can learn some basic algorithms and some Math theories such as graph theory, number theory, etc that will be very important in your CS degree. You will learn CLRS usually in the last year of your CS degree.Remember: Books are good to learn a new knowledge. But, practical experience is always more important in real world. |
How do you manage work/life balance? | juliend2: Quality of time is the key.
I wake up early (around 5h30 am) because it's the best time to get things done. My mind is clear and it goes fast.I never work during sundays. That's my only limit. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.