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 man... |
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 e... |
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 d... |
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 kn... |
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
... |
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/Kansa... |
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 ... |
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 ... |
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... |
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.... |
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 st... |
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 yo... |
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 ... |
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 take... |
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 ... |
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 i... |
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 ... |
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... |
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 compan... |
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..... |
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 compu... |
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 p... |
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 s... |
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 ... |
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 le... |
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 ... |
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 t... |
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 w... |
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." -... |
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 ex... |
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 ... |
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 -- an... |
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 cl... |
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 b... |
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 ... |
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... |
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... t... |
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 ... |
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 c... |
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... |
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.youtub... |
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 liv... |
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. ... |
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.... |
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 wi... |
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 ... |
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 real... |
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_ad... |
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... |
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.