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Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | vchakra: I can read fast when I want to - easily upwards of 1000 wpm, but the main focus IMHO must be to just read (without trying to comprehend), and then trust your unconscious mind to absorb the information. The biggest problem I see with people speed reading is that they always link reading with immediate comprehension and understanding, rather than making it two independent processes. This leads to re-reading and trying to make more sense of the words by going back to them rather than acquiring more information in order to see the big picture.Especially when I'm trying to cover a new field (right now, dsp and speech recognition) I just follow a scorched earth reading process where I read a few dozen papers and articles. In the beginning none of it makes sense, but a day/week/month later things just click, and the whole thing makes sense. |
Favorite Books or Articles about Economics? | zupatol: I studied economics, but I never had the feeling of understanding much about the economy. Most of economics, including microeconomics and macroeconomics always seemed to me completely detached from reality. Theories for developing poor countries seem to follow fashions that change every ten years. But there are a few topics where I felt the knowledge was interesting and relevant. This was 15 years ago and in german, but I'll try to find the right words in english.National accounting: how gross domestic product, the balance of payments etc... are calculated.The creation of money: how central banks create money and control inflation. This is probably the only theory on which all, well most, economists agree.Economic history: this is the most down to earth subject, the one that relies most on evidence. It's where you will find accounts about industrialization and crashes that micro- and macroeconomics almost never consider, because they're too busy dreaming about equilibriums.History of economic theory: For every topic there are a thousand contradicting opinions. It's dismaying if you want to find an answer to a question, but it's fascinating if you look at it like a history of thought. Then it becomes interesting in the same way as philosophy.Finance: the rocket science behind valuing options, exotic financial products, Black, Scholes and Merton's nobel prize and the crash of LTCM. This looks like hard science, there's a lot of math, but it all rests on shaky assumptions. If a model gives you a different value than the market, it's more likely you found a flawed model than a mispriced security. Here I actually have a very readable book to recommend: Capital ideas, by Peter Bernstein.And last but not least, one of the most enlightening sources, although systematically biased in favour of free markets and international trade: the economist, I mean the magazine. |
What's on your bookshelf? | Tangurena: I try to keep all my non-fiction cataloged at LibraryThing. I've been kind of sloppy entering tags, so most books aren't tagged. I suppose I should fix that.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/TangurenaAs you can tell from the already tagged books, I'm primarily a .NET developer. |
How would you change this blog community? | tokenadult: Get rid of the black background. |
AWS or dedicated server? | aquaphile: AWS -- we run our entire insurance company, and its multiple applications, using the EC2, EBS, S3, SQS, and FPS services provided by AWS. I think the only AWS we haven't used to date is Mechanical Turk. We highly recommend AWS: we started with dedicated hardware years ago, migrated to an excellent virtual host, and then finally moved to AWS last year when they implemented EBS and provided the SLA. Once you have multiple servers, it makes increasing financial sense to use AWS. |
Rate My App | noodle: it seems pretty functional and useful. the design could use some polish, though. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | truebosko: Source code is on a mix of Github and Subversion serversCustomer data (basically, SQL data) is backed up daily, archived, and put up encrypted on Amazon S3 with the date/time appended to it. The files are tiny so we have no issue with keeping year-old ones there as the costs are minuscule.All other things like documents, staff related items, pictures of products are stored on a single server, that uses rdiff-backup and sends it to a second drive on the same pc. rdiff-backup is very nice as we've had a few instances where we needed to fetch a file from 2 months ago that was heavily modified since. The version history helps a lot |
Where have the "Review my startup/app" posts gone? | qhoxie: I haven't really noticed a drop. There is not a whole lot of consistency to how often they are posted, but it seems to be about the same to me. |
How do you follow people's submissions / comments on here? | qhoxie: I use http://ycfeeds.com/ for this. |
Where have the "Review my startup/app" posts gone? | JayNeely: Fewer people launching around the holidays. Why would people want to compete with the increased noise, when there's even less attention available?Next week we'll start seeing more things launch. Before/around Valentine's Day I bet we'll see a ton of new dating site startups. |
Free accounts for students? | eisokant: I think you should - the obvious point of view that it's just kind to do so. From a business perspective it's allowing you to hook in the future startup founders and coders. It'll get them excited and used to GitHub and in a few years from now when they're working somewhere or starting a new project they'd be more then happy to pay. |
New Ubuntu Desktop--what would you install? | poppinphresh: Pidgin - IM clientPHP, Apache, Postgresql, pgadmin IIISongBird - Media playerEclipse - IDEXchat - IRC ClientVLC - Video playerRTorrent - Torrent downloaderSubversion - Version Control |
Free accounts for students? | qhoxie: I like the idea of giving students free accounts, but I feel like it would probably be abused by too many people. If it is important that it be a private repo or they needs lots of space, they should consider setting up their own and then move to GH if they have revenue. |
Free accounts for students? | wallflower: How many people would hang on to their GitHub student accounts way after they ceased being matriculated (fancy SAT word for registered) at that school? Maybe a one or two semester-long free trial - get them using it for their projects.Usually, at a university, when you have a .edu email address, the school knows when you're a student. If you graduate or leave, unless you went to a school that graduates you to alumni.school.edu - you lose that email address. |
Free accounts for students? | makimaki: As long as cost is manageable and the number of free accounts limited, why not?How about free accounts for a set period of time (3 mths)? And maybe setup a special referral program to give kickbacks (commission) to students who refer people who sign up for paid accounts. This can be credited to each students account. Don't know your audience though so these are just some general suggestions.. |
Free accounts for students? | mdasen: I'd be in favor of it. In fact, it's one of the reasons that I use Mercurial/Bitbucket (bitbucket.org - they allow you to have one free private repo no matter who you are). Offering students a Micro plan probably wouldn't cut into profits too much and it will get them in the mindset of using git (rather than svn or hg or whatever). Most people don't like learning new things when they're comfortable with one - get them while they're young. You're the premier git host. More git people means more money for you. |
How do you follow people's submissions / comments on here? | hs: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=merrick33 |
Free accounts for students? | sachinag: I remember downloading Netscape Navigator for free as a student. I also remember doing the same on my father's work computers.Unless you absolutely need the network effects - and I don't think you do - then I say no. We've thought about a reduced commission structure for students at Dawdle, and I just can't justify it - when do you expire free access? |
Free accounts for students? | NoBSWebDesign: I know one of our startup's founding principles is to always be free for students. I was a student when we started it and know all to well how tight money is. I don't feel right contributing to the insane amount of debt American university students are already forced to take on.If you're worried about abuse, you could provide a free account to registered students, which you can verify with their .edu email address. To keep the account free and active, you could send them a confirmation email once a year (or 6 months) to make sure their original .edu address is still active. |
Free accounts for students? | paulgb: Yes!Most students I know who know what git is are technically adept enough to install Trac and svn, or their own git or hg central repo, and would rather do that than pay $7-$12/month. So I doubt you'd be losing many paying customers by offering free student accounts. But once people moved on to other projects, they are more likely to go with what they know, which will by then include GitHub. |
Free accounts for students? | pageman: maybe special discounts? almost free? |
Free accounts for students? | Jebdm: Chances are, whatever they're building doesn't need to be put in private repositories. If it really does (as in, they're working on commercial stuff), $7 a month (even $12) shouldn't be hard to scrounge up, and I'm an in-the-red student myself. After all, we all need to learn about business expenses sometime--and they're not having to worry about paying for food or rent. If a private repo is that important to them, most schools offer private server space. I say no. |
Free accounts for students? | danw: It's a good idea, but theres no easy way of verifying if some one is a student. Facebook back when it was student only had a big list of valid uni domains but this only worked for the universities they'd rolled out to |
Free accounts for students? | albertcardona: I don't know of any student who, in interest of their project, couldn't save $7 or $12/mo. That's only one or two Starbucks purchases! |
Free accounts for students? | avinashv: I say yes. You could flag all accounts registered with a .edu email address and send out a confirmation email at the start of traditional semesters--i.e., September and January. A graduate shouldn't have an email address by then. Once it happens, drop them to the free account. It would be really cool if you guys would just freeze the private repos and leave them there for a bit while the account exists so that people can get their data.$7/mo and $12/mo are $84/yr and $144/yr respectively. That's money that I would rather put to rent/utilities/cable as a student.Of course, many universities allow students to keep their .edu for a fee after they graduate, but you have to imagine the number of people paying for a .edu to maintain a free GitHub account is going to be pretty small. |
Free accounts for students? | mixmax: T = turnover per client per monthE = variable expense per client per monthA = Average lifetime of a customer in monthsP = Percent of students that turn into paying customersAs = Average lifetime of a student account before it is either terminated (graduated) or turned into a paying accountThe lifetime value of a customer is (T-E)xA
The cost of a student account is ExAs
The acquisition cost of one customer that has previously been a student is ExAs/Pif ExAs/P < (T-E)xA then you should do it.Stick the numbers into an excel sheet and play around with the basic assumptions. Chances are that your answer will be obvious.Note I had to use x for multiplication since the character normally used for this is used for markup :-( |
Free accounts for students? | tialys: I'm a student with a paid plan, and I'd love it if you'd give up even 1 free private repo with more than one collaborator. I don't need a ton of repositories, but It'd be cool to not have to worry about having more than one person working on a project. I think it'd be a great way to get more people interested and develop customers in the long run. Also, I'm going to give a talk about Git at our next ACM meeting in a week or so, if I could hook people up with some kind of free private account they could play with, I think you'd have a few new customers. |
Free accounts for students? | tlrobinson: Providing SCM to universities is a great idea. My university's CS program didn't once expose us to source control, which I think was a mistake. Going through four years of not using source control produced some bad habits which took a little while to rectify (my source control consisted of occasionally doing "tar czf backup-timestamp.tar.gz project" occasionally)Our UPE chapter (CS honor society) tried setting up a SVN system, but it never really got off the ground. |
Free accounts for students? | vaksel: seems like a pain in the ass...why not simply give people with .edu accounts a 1 year free access, and then make them pay? 1 year should be plenty of time for a person to make something thats $12 a month profitable |
Free accounts for students? | theantidote: As a student I say "Yes!"Just require a valid .edu address at sign up and send a confirmation email. Allow students to put in their edu email as well as their personal email because I really only use my personal account, as do most of my friends. Just send a confirmation email each semester or something as recommended by another commenter and that should be strong enough verification. Some people may try to cheat the system by either using an alumni email address (which you should filter: alumni.*.edu) or purchasing an edu domain to host their own email on, but those are both very unlikely and I doubt you'll run into them often if at all.
There is at least one school that I know of that doesn't give out email addresses to its students anymore (Boston College or University, I forget which one); for those students just put a note next to the .edu field saying something along the lines of "Your school doesn't give you .edu addresses? Just email us and we'll help you out."I don't think there's much else you can do to verify student accounts. If you're really ambitious you can ask for the student's ID number, full legal name, and university and then call up the registrar office to verify their registration. My school also participates in the National Student Clearinghouse: http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/ but it costs money for each verification. Obviously these options are kind of extreme and I'm pretty sure only banks and hiring agencies would spend the time verifying an enrollment this way. |
Free accounts for students? | SapphireSun: Working on a startup as a student has a lot of unique challenges. When I'm away from school, there's no where good to work. When I'm at school, everything vies for my attention.I've discovered that the public library is extremely useful. The thing is, the soon as my project takes off I'd be willing to spend money, but with my resources so constrained, I really have to be frugal.If you perform a service for the public good, I have a feeling that within a few years, it will start to pay back in some way. Whether it puts you in the black from providing free service is another question.The public library doesn't have much to look forward to because the people that hang out there are mostly old. However, a service where people are creating value is likely to turn over into something useful to the service provider in some way. You might want to consider offering the free service to students for a year and watching the conversion rate. If nothing else, you'll certainly help train the next generation of software engineers which will certainly turn into something useful for everyone. |
Free accounts for students? | koenbok: We (from http://www.versionsapp.com, a Mac SVN client) had the same debate in our mail group. We decided against free as we want to offer email support to everyone and that just costs money. We ended up giving almost 50% off and almost everyone seems to be satisfied with that. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | trickjarrett: I do automated backups of the dev environment nightly to an external hard drive and to an ftp location off site. |
Free accounts for students? | run4yourlives: $7? Couldn't you just politely tell them to drink 2 or 3 less beers a month?Seriously, I think the "I'm a student, I'm so poor" shitck is getting a little tired.I think you'd get a better bang for your buck (in the feel good department) by offering free accounts to Indian/east European coders, given purchasing power. |
Free accounts for students? | travisjeffery: Even though it may become complex I think it should be judged per project. WingIDE (Python IDE) for example gives out free copies of it's Professional version to people who have existing semi-notable Python projects. So you could do something similar. Or perhaps just a discount. Just as long as people don't abuse your services. |
Free accounts for students? | transburgh: You could do 3 or 6 months for free then charge if they have a school email. |
Free accounts for students? | pc: The people suggesting .edu email address verification (especially fancy systems with 'alum' filtering) forget non-US colleges.One solution might be to use Facebook Connect -- I'm not sure if you'd have access to all the data you need, but people on FB tend to be honest about this kind of personal info, FB maintains a comprehensive list of colleges (and requires email verification to join a college network), and for extra security you could perhaps restrict it to people with over 10 friends in the college network, to make it a bit harder to scam. |
AWS or dedicated server? | lsc: I would say "do both" - aws is awesome if your site is running slow 'cause you are out of capacity, or you otherwise need a box 'right now' or for only a short period of time. spin up another instance and be done with it. But for the boxes you leave on all the time, you are probably better off buying and co-locating your own server. Usually the capital cost difference is made up in only a few months.The times when a Xen host makes long-term sense are when you want a box that is smaller than optimal. Right now, I buy dual quad-core opterons w/ 32G ram and 2x1TB disk... assuming I am ok with moderate-speed low-power opterons, it costs about $3K up front. Hosting, say, another $150/month. That's a whole lot of ec2 instances. At those prices, well, AWS is pretty expensive over the long term.But yeah. AWS is awesome for the servers you don't need on all the time, or servers you don't have time to setup (or your whole ball of wax if your margins are such that paying more for computers won't break your business model.) |
Free accounts for students? | lallysingh: I'm a student -- and have been for way too long.My answer's no for free. Instead, a heavy discount's a good idea. You can make it really significant, like 50-90% off. Cheap enough for anyone serious to afford it.But, the fact that it isn't free will get most of the worthless ones off your back. |
Free accounts for students? | jfornear: I think you should only consider giving free accounts to students who go out of their way to ask. |
How would you change this blog community? | makecheck: I don't personally like sites that "resist" resizing. Try increasing the font size in your browser by even 1 or 2 levels, and you'll see that the content of your site is truncated. Try making your browser twice as wide, and ask why you can't see twice as much content. |
Free accounts for students? | gourneau: As one of these student with no money, yes that would be awesome. I enjoy using github.com, however because I need to protect my source I have been using http://unfuddle.com as a single user. It works, and it is nice, but it is a single user environment (the free version).I would prefer to use github.com, just think of it as a mini-investment for each student startups. I for one would pledge to use your service for a while if any of my ideas "make it". In addition to this it might encourage students who use your service to become evangelists for github.com once they matriculate from college. |
Free accounts for students? | abugosh: Speaking as a student that is about to start working on a startup I think the prices are fair and hell, I'll probably end up signing up for GitHub myself in the next couple weeks. |
Free accounts for students? | rokhayakebe: 1-3 month for free. That should be enough to see the value. |
Free accounts for students? | umangjaipuria: It would be a bit like investing in your customer's business. You want to, but is that the business you're in?Besides, the two all important questions: How do you decide who is deserving of the free account, and how do you know when they should start paying. You need to cover these both rationally and legally. |
Free accounts for students? | pclark: I would - good hearts and minds. |
Free accounts for students? | tsally: Absolutely not. I'm a student and it's easy enough to come up with $7 dollars a month for something you care about. |
Free accounts for students? | patio11: I (very occasionally) get asked for free copies of my software. Past reasons have included "I am a nun", "I live in a country where $25 is a lot of money", and "I teach at an inner city school district with no instructional aid budget".I told the first person to ask this that I would make an exception just this once and "write off" one copy as a marketing expense. (Nota bene for US-based software writers: you cannot actually treat free licenses as a business expense.) This is also what I have told any subsequent people who were motivated enough to try to ask for it.My theory: software licenses cost me nothing to issue, I can say "Yes" faster than I can say "No", and I already am philosophically OK with giving out metric tonnes of free value to get a small percentage of visitors to pay because that is, after all, my entire business model. The fact that this practice creates rabidly vocal fans of my business is a bonus. |
Incorporating in Ontario - Advice? Recommendations? Experience? | thehickmans: I've incorporated a number of companies in BC and the process has been simple enough to do on a self-serve basis. After a quick search, I found the following site for incorporation in Ontario, http://is.gd/eDJP - it looks the same as what I went through in BC. The big thing you'll have to deal with in Canada is the GST as you'll likely have to remit on a quarterly basis, so you'll need to watch your cashflow carefully.Dealing with American customers is largely a matter of choosing whether to accept payments in US dollars directly or do a currency conversion with each payment before it hits your bank. I'd recommend caution with this one as some banks will hit you with a currency conversion fee and give you a crappy rate, so a good payment provider may help in this area.PM me if you have any other questions. |
Free accounts for students? | lpgauth: Make sure you ask for a scanned studend id or something so that you get less "fake students", but this would be great. |
Free accounts for students? | rickharrison: I have been wanting to try GitHub for use in my new startup, but I cant justify paying for it out of my extremely shallow pockets. I know if I used it now I would upgrade in the future as funding allows |
Do you guys use speed reading techniques? | Todd: You can improve your speed a great deal just by reading the introductory tips in most speed reading courses. Most of it comes down to observing how your eyes work mechanically and trying to make the input process more efficient. Probably the biggest detriment to speed is the regression. Whenever you stumble on a word or phrase and back up, you loose a tremendous amount of time relative to the overall process. If you can just minimize or eliminate regressions, you will notice a good improvement in speed--without any reduction in comprehension. It just takes a little discipline to develop the habit. |
Free accounts for students? | kjell: I was considering working for the CSCI department at my school to update the cobwebbed CVS repository hosted in our lab that some teachers actually expected students to use to turn in code. Funding/grant hurdles and my graduation got in the way, but I was thinking what would be awesome is some kind of sub–github: maybe a walled–off version of the entire site restricted to students at a particular school and their professors and TAs. In whatever case, some kind of github.edu site, where CSCI departments sign up and encourage student use would be a lot cooler than just giving students free accounts.I paid for an account for about 7 or so months while I was a student, but after a few of my private collaborative projects slowed down or ended I was paying for nothing and have now cancelled. |
Anyone interested in sharing a PnP (Sunnyvale) cubicle? | rms: Interesting place, I toured there. They are Amidzad and form part of startup lore for their lucky space above their Persian rug store on University Ave in Palo Alto -- Google and Paypal had that space at different times. After their hits, they bought this big building and turned it into a huge startup incubator. As far as I know they are the only people doing this in the Bay Area right now. They might even be making money doing it, as they are solidly, comfortably in the real estate business.The rent certainly isn't cheap, but once you get your pitch/demo together you'll be able to get meetings via your PnP connections. It's a friendly enough place and the food in the cafeteria is good. |
What is your startup's backup policy? | viggity: two chicks at the same timeoh, oops, wrong question |
Faster alternatives to Tinyurl? | nreece: You can also try:http://is.gd / http://is.gd/api_info.phphttp://bit.ly / http://bit.ly/app/developers |
Faster alternatives to Tinyurl? | amichail: Anyone jealous of tinyurl.com? So little effort to build but with very high traffic now.http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tinyurl.com+techcrunch.com/... |
Free accounts for students? | drewcrawford: When working on our startup, we used to use Assembla solely because it was free.
After we moved past the whiteboard phase, we switched to Unfuddle immediately. The productivity gain alone...
If your site is awesome (like GitHub), peopel will pay for it, even students. The bigger problem (for us at least) was not lack of funding, but lack of a funding method. Source control should really be a business expense. Sure, everyone can kick me five bucks or something, but that tends to make accountants mad. |
Free accounts for students? | waratuman: I would like to have a free account, but I don't think that a free account should be given out to students. I understand give private accounts to instructors, however, $7 a month is very little and think that most students could come up with the money. I truly enjoy using github, and think that $7 or $12 per month is a great value.If the account were to be free I think that there should be a timeframe for which the account should be free (for 2 - 4 years). After that the user is given the option to continue or drop the account. |
Free accounts for students? | ALee: At the very least, do it for students working on projects related to their classes (in which an instructor approves).Think Lexis-Nexis. Get students so acclimated to your product that the mere use of it is your competitive advantage. Set some limits on git like what psyklic was saying. |
What's on your bookshelf? | joe_bleau: Books that are currently nearby: Art of Electronics, The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design, The Intelligent Investor, Fooled by Randomness, Front Panel, SICP, TPU Microcoding for Beginners, Planar Microwave Engineering, This Is Your Brain on Music, three of the Tufte books, etc. |
Faster alternatives to Tinyurl? | timf: Write your own! :-) |
Faster alternatives to Tinyurl? | andrewhyde: is.gd would be my choice |
Free accounts for students? | cabalamat: It's already free for open source. If someone wants to use it for a commercial product, they shouldn't mind paying commercial prices. It's not as if $7 a month is a fortune.What you might want to do, however, is give people a free trial period of say 3 months. |
Faster alternatives to Tinyurl? | sanj: I appreciate all of the leads, but does anyone have performance numbers? |
ad driven iPhone apps? | yan: I use the free version of Twitteriffic which inlines ads with normal tweets occasionally, but the ads are maybe 30% larger in height and not very intrusive. |
Using SBA Line Of Credit For Startup Costs? | pchristensen: I'm also interested in any information about this. I've looked around a little but all of the sites I've found are way unorganized and hard to read. |
Using SBA Line Of Credit For Startup Costs? | profgubler: For me the real question is, if this is even a reality if you are trying to run your web based startup. All you hear about is VC, angel funding or complete bootstraping. But, what if you only a smaller sum of money in regular intervals, let's say $3 to 5K, because you feel you can repay this easily due to your business model. I know it would help free up other capital and let you run your business and not give up ownership to VC. |
Using SBA Line Of Credit For Startup Costs? | patio11: Bandwidth charges are so small relative to the value of data that unless your business plan is "host pirated content for poor college students" (hello, Youtube) you should be able to absorb them easily without needing a loan to do so.Hosting/bandwidth expenses next to a business which is actually designed to charge money for value are chump change. I could quite literally pay mine for the year with loose change I found around my apartment (I found $250 on Sunday in my annual cleanup but I'll confess I'm just a wee bit pathological about it, and helped by the fact that Japan has very common 100 yen coins). |
Using SBA Line Of Credit For Startup Costs? | fallentimes: I know nothing about you, but it's really hard to get an SBA line of credit at a young age even if you can show _revenue_.Unless you have an established income history, or a profitable business or two under your belt, I'm not sure if it's worth your time. |
Using SBA Line Of Credit For Startup Costs? | vaksel: the problem is that its next to impossible to get a loan for a web based startup |
Using SBA Line Of Credit For Startup Costs? | caseyjdavis: I will post my experiences dealing with the SBA. For the record I have NOT secured an SBA loan in the past.For starters, you're going to need a very refined and up-to-date business plan. This is a no-brainer to most, especially HN readers but my banker told me I would be surprised about how many people shuffle in for an SBA loan with no biz plan.The way the SBA loan works is that you have to find a lender in your area that will agree to lend you the money after they do a financial screening and feel you are worth the risk of the loan.After that, the only involvement the SBA has in the process is they guarantee the loan that you receive from the bank. They do not disperse any of the money.After the bank approves you, and the SBA agrees to back your loan (which can take several months), then the money is released to you via the bank.Sadly this process was too lengthly to me so I just resorted to using an Amex Business card to get me running in the time-frame I needed. :)That's all I know from the process. I hope this might help some folks in the future |
Using SBA Line Of Credit For Startup Costs? | quellhorst: When I researched SBA loans I found they are more willing to give you a loan for property or equipment than things like marketing costs.Also, in the environment its much harder to get a loan. Instead I ended up getting an American Express plum card to help give me some extra time to pay for expenses. This really helps with cash flow. |
Using SBA Line Of Credit For Startup Costs? | mdasen: The question you have to ask yourself is: what makes the bank think my company is good for the loan?Banks like lending if they get collateral. For example, buy a house and the bank gets that house if you don't pay. Buy a dump truck and you don't pay, they get the dump truck. They can't really take bandwidth.Part of the problem is that a start-up might try something for 6 months, fail, and then just declare bankruptcy. Since the shareholders/members of corporations and LLCs aren't liable for debts, the bank just looses the money. Would you be willing to be personally liable for the debts by co-signing?It should also be recognized that banks are wary right now. They've been burned and are strapped for cash. Unless you can prove that you're safe to lend to, you won't get it.In terms of rates, prime + 2.5-6.5% would be normal depending on the risk and size and such.Do you really need it? Bandwidth and servers are cheap today unless you're doing a lot of video serving. Heck, you can even find Content Delivery Networks that will serve for less than $0.20/GB. If your site really takes off with traffic, don't worry because you'll have VC banging on your door. If it doesn't take off, you don't have to worry about bandwidth too much. |
Using SBA Line Of Credit For Startup Costs? | amobilebiz: Everyone thinks that an SBA loan is "easier" to get or that any business can go right out and get one. That is far from the case. The process of getting an SBA loan is the same with a standard bank loan, except you now have an added layer with the SBA application. You first must find a bank that is an authorized SBA lender (not every bank is, but all big banks are). You will then go through the bank's standard screening process (i.e. credit check, biz plan review, collateral) and simulataneously have your application submitted to the SBA for approval. If both the bank and the SBA approve your loan you get your money from the bank. Also, the bank may approve your loan contingent on the SBA approval.SBA loans do require collateral (i.e. home, equipment, etc...). That is why typically businesses use them to finance equipment or buildings. The SBA loans, and bank loans for that matter, are not geared towards "web startups". You will have a much easier time convincing your friends and family to lend you a few thousand for the next great internet company then you will have convincing a bank manager.The above is just my two cents, I have never applied for or received a SBA loan. I have, however, considered getting one a few years back. I had a lengthy discussion with my bank manager and decided after it was not worth the hassle. I just begged friends and family instead and the turnaround time was much quicker. |
Should email providers add "UNSEND"? | noodle: in my opinion, no. it raises a lot of concerns about misuse. |
Should email providers add "UNSEND"? | qhoxie: While it's not impossible, email just does not work that way. Email has no sense of state on the other end of a message. The extent of the feedback it gets is a bounce that may or may not have a descriptive error attached to it. Some systems could implement a recall option (Exchange may allow this, but I'm far from an expert) if the accounts are housed in the same system, but it is rarely done as it is against the stateless aspect. Email as a protocol(s) is very simplistic, which is why spam and spoofing are so prevalent. There is little room to have complex extensions on top of the existing system.If, say, gmail implemented this, it would likely require an ACL from the receiving user that specified senders that were allowed to recall. |
Should email providers add "UNSEND"? | ConradHex: Outlook has this sort of thing, but the receiver sees the notification and has to accept it. Which is always a clear sign to me that someone sent something out and then thought better of it, so I always look extra-closely at the email in question.Anyway, if people didn't accidentally send stuff like this, cnn.com and other mainstream media couldn't write an article about it every 6 months. |
Should email providers add "UNSEND"? | cchooper: Some clients (e.g. Outlook) let you put a delay on your outgoing email, so you can cancel it if you change your mind in time.And the email recall feature of Outlook/Exchange is also quite good. It even tells you how many emails couldn't be recalled (because people have already read them). It will only work within an organisation though, as it is a feature of the Exchange server. |
light mathematical/scientific reading with computer exercises? | gcheong: I plan to get this one soon: The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine |
Free accounts for students? | zaidf: Unfuddle does it. And I love it. |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | bdr: These departments are not interested in your coding skill. All they care about is your research ability in the area you're applying for. Software you've written or worked on might be relevant, but only if you're doing something hard and/or novel. It's easier to imagine this for some areas (graphics) than others (complexity theory). Overall, I imagine that very few programming jobs would be valuable on your application.Also, note that the top-tier programs generally don't have academic Master's programs. Stanford offers one but it's career-oriented. |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | tjr: I received my bachelor's degree in 2002. I've been pondering graduate school on and off, and have done a bit of graduate study online. While I can't speak from the position of someone who is currently there, I can offer this with regard to your first point...It's been nearly seven years for me now. I've stayed only slightly in touch with one of my undergraduate professors. I feel that getting academic recommendation letters may be difficult at this point. If you're going to wait, I would suggest maintaining conversation with the professors most able to write letters for you. |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | jayp: To be frank about it: with a 5+ year break and coming from a "lowly" state university, it is going to be tough to get into the type of CS PhD programs you have listed.Most schools do run a low pass filter on your GRE scores (if required) and GPA. The GPA is weighted according the repuation of your school. However, once you get beyond the filtering, these things don't matter.The most important thing at a top PhD school is letters of recommendations from faculty, with the greatest weight given to letters from a professor they might know. ("They" being any of the members of the admissions committee who happen to read your file, or are present during the discussion. There is a fair amount of luck involved). This maybe hard for you to get if the professors at your current university do not publish (i.e., attend conferences, etc.). However, no matter what, do keep in touch with them. You'll need at least 2-3 letters from them. Letters from work will be fine, but do not carry heavy weight -- especially beyond one letter.The other relevant things include: the school you attended, research experience (publications are your greatest asset), and lastly, your statement of purpose. I don't think anything else really matters too much -- at least to a top CS program.But if you really want to go to grad school, there is always a way. Some tips:(1) Apply to a lot of schools, as the admissions process can be fairly random. However, do not apply to safe schools for the sake of applying.(2) Also, an alternative is to apply for a Masters program. Get in. Impress a professor or two. Upgrade to PhD program. Obviously, it is hard to find financial support for Masters student at some schools. If you are local to a great university, you can also take graduate courses a non-degree student (very easy to get in, as schools love money), impress one or two professors, and apply.PS: I served as a student representative on an admissions committee at UIUC in the past. I also came from a "lowly" state university. However, I jumped to PhD program directly after my BS. |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | time_management: 1. 0 years is the optimal gap. Time off counts against you. If you want to do this and don't see a strong reason for delaying, go in right now.2. You probably won't be publishing when you're working, and open-source projects are good but not enough to put you over the cusp.3. If you can get a research position, that'll be better for your grad school prospects than finance.4. I don't know the answer to this one.Caveat: I was in a math PhD program for a year, and CS may be different. |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | yummyfajitas: Having gotten through this process for a Ph.D., albeit in a different field (Math), I'll answer this as best I can. My answers relate to getting a Ph.D.1. Don't wait. Opportunity costs are low right now (bad economy) and waiting hurts your chances. If you wait at least 5 years, you are > 27 when you start grad school. You graduate at age 32. That's over the hill. Many grad schools will flatly reject you for this reason.2. Publications might help, if they are solid technical works in peer reviewed journals. Industry experience could also help IF it's hardcore R&D work. Academics care relatively little about open source, unless you did something truly awesome (e.g., FFTW).3. Yes. R&D type jobs are the only jobs that won't hurt you when applying to grad school.4. GvR could probably get into a good grad school. Below that will probably not help very much.However, many places will give you a masters if you pay tuition. Don't expect to jump from the masters to Ph.D. track, however. |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | timf: "does the length of time I wait to apply matter?"If you are doing things that are not academia oriented, the longer you do those things, the less chance you will have at acceptance."I'm obviously going to continue the work that I enjoy doing."Careful, academia may not be right for you :-)"Publications, open source contributions, industry experience?"Publications will by far trump anything else for most departments. And letters of recommendation (preferably from people the department has heard of...)."Should I take the time to find a research based position at a company like IBM or HP?"This is probably the only thing that would realistically help you. You would need to stay at one place long enough to contribute directly to refereed papers, this will really help your application. There are a lot of research positions at places that are not big companies, too, and those tend to submit more papers. Often they are looking for staff programmers and you can "get in on" some papers over time as you work hard and make good observations etc. Or you could be the assistant who is writing the performance harness, etc.The hard part would be getting in the door probably, in my experience anything CS related will usually accept CS graduate students into internships etc. but finding a full time job there with a BS and no previous CS research experience will be tougher.---Academic departments typically only care that you can code well enough to pass their classes. You need to be able to program, for sure.The better you are, the easier it will be to get through school -- you will need all the time you can get in order to concentrate on algorithms, linear algebra, etc. But it probably won't you help you too much at application time (unless maybe you have won programming competitions)."Does status in the software community affect acceptance into a CS program?"Probably not too much, unless the program is linked to a software product (like where I work, the University of Chicago CS department and the Globus grid computing community are intimately tied). |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | kcy: I think you have about 1 year in industry before your academic cred is used up. Generally speaking, a research position in a company like Google, IBM, HP, etc. is definitely more in-line with what the admission committee will understand and respect than a code-monkey job at a web 2.0 startup or in finance. I think these latter sorts of jobs hurt your chances of getting into a highly respected academic program, though they may make you a better entrepreneur. I think status in the software community (e.g. at HN or in the open source world) matters little unless someone on your admission committee knows what that status means. My experience has been that many university professors at Stanford and MIT have no clue about this sort of stuff (though of course some are very well-informed).You should probably ask your current professors for letters of recommendation now and have them sent to your registrar so they can be forwarded on later when you decide to apply. Unless you have a natural way to continue your connection with your professors it will likely be very difficult to go back to them even a year later and ask for the letter and have them remember you (unless you were a super-star of course). Just get your letters done now. You can always have them update the letter in x years if you feel there's something relevant they can add. More likely than not you'll just be thankful that you already have the letters since you never really maintained contact. On the other hand, remember that the longer you wait, the more unusual it's going to be for the admission committee to see a letter from so many years back.If you're really serious about wanting to get into one of those programs you could actually move to Stanford/MIT and try to get a research position working with some of the people in those departments. Or perhaps going to them and asking if there's any companies they would recommend working at prior to a graduate program. |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | jderick: I have to agree letters of reference are the most important factor. Of course you need good GRE scores as well. Unless you do some academic research and publish a paper or two before you apply (senior thesis at least), there is little chance you will get into MIT or Stanford. A friend of mine prolonged his undergrad for a year or two in order to work on some undergrad research for a while and got into MIT that way. Of course, if you are willing to settle for something other than a #1 school then you could get by without any publications as long as you have an interesting class project or two that you can talk about and you do well on your GREs (remember to study your vocabulary). Programming experience will not help you get in. If you can find some kind of research position, that would help, but it could be hard to find a position like that at IBM or HP with your experience. A better bet would be to look for a prof somewhere that does something you are interested in and go work for him for a while (paid or not). Starting with a Masters is another route that can work.Also, I have to put a disclaimer here that getting a PhD will probably not be worth it from a financial standpoint, and most likely you will not find a tenure track position afterwards. |
Looking for a student partner to get startup off the ground | ericwaller: Hey Rick, I didn't see your email in your profile but I'd love to hear from you (erwaller at gmail). I'm a developer/sort-of-designer and a senior in college. |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | raffi: I don't know anything about applying to PhD programs. I would like to add something to point three though:You could grab a research position with the government. Lincoln Labs at Hanscom AFB is associated with MIT for example.If you work a few years as a program manager or bench scientist in the government civil service, you will network with prominent folks and have a chance to gain their respect. After all--where do you think that research money that professors love so much comes from?I had a positive experience. I was able to network with people who wrote papers I really liked. One particularly touching experience--months after I left, someone contacted me to let me know that a Professor whose work influenced me quite a bit would be in town. I was (as an outsider) given a slice of his schedule to meet with him and have lunch. Its like a family, once you're in... you're in. |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | brent: (disclaimer: I attend a non - "top school")0. If you want answers as to what schools look for in students start by looking at CV's of students in the department. More specifically, look at students in the research areas you may be interested in. This is probably the single best resource available to you. I knew my weaknesses (non top 10 undergraduate school, several years in industry, no undergraduate research experience, relatively unknown letter writers, and a non-CS undergraduate degree) and adjusted my expectations accordingly (ie I knew I wasn't going to get in a top 10 school despite high grades, good industry job, and perfect quant gre).1. 0 years. There are a number of reasons from familiarity with your letter writers to the lack of commitment if you work in a non-research position.2. If you are working in a research position and could publish that is ideal. However, I doubt this type of position will be available to you (usually it requires a phd). In terms of acceptance I believe industry experience is nearly meaningless. There are plenty of reasons to do it for personal reasons, but look at the CV's of current students at the schools you are targeting and look at how many of them worked between undergrad and grad.3. Again, a research position is probably the only type of position that will help you in the admissions process. It may give you access to significant letter writers, a chance to be an author, etc..4. I presume that status implies a significant contribution. This could help, but unless the contribution is related to computer science it probably isn't worth much.Good luck.edit :: a couple small updates. |
Looking for a student partner to get startup off the ground | vorador: Hi, I'm a sophomore and I'm curious about what you plan to do.
email me at khamidou-at-gmail |
Getting accepted into a top level CS program. | blackguardx: Some people here are advocating jumping to a PhD with zero work experience. I think this is a bad idea.Getting a PhD involves very focused research. You want to make sure that you will truly love the field before you go into it.I strongly recommend that you take an R&D job at a well-known company if you can. These large companies often sponsor research with top-notch universities. You might be able to use these relationships to get in. My company's sponsored research with Stanford allows me to work with a professor and grad student there. That can't hurt during the application process.Also, many of these large, research oriented companies will pay for graduate education, although that will probably drop off as the economy tanks.The only downside to getting a job at a large, research oriented company is that these places are often cube farms that epitomize office space and dilbert comic strips. I guess thats why you leave after a few years and go to grad school |
Average Screen Resolution? | lsb: You probably won't have much space if you're going to be a little widget on someone's page. 1024x768 is a safe bet, but most laptops have higher-resolution; low-end macbooks have 1280x800 default. |
An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit? | qhoxie: Shoes has been more and more impressive lately. I'm not sure about ports or equivalents in Python and Perl, but people are doing great things with it in Ruby.http://github.com/why/shoes |
An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit? | gaius: The current Tk (8.5 and above) looks a lot better, using native widgets where possible, and Starkit makes deployment of Tcl/Tk applications a breeze.Those who forget history are doomed to reimplement it. |
An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit? | makecheck: I am most curious about GNUstep (gnustep.org). GNUstep is similar to the Window Maker window manager on Linux, like Cocoa uses Aqua on Mac OS X. From what I've seen, GNUstep and Cocoa are very similar (both Objective-C, both using the original NS* classes, etc.) and the project aims to remain compatible with Cocoa where possible. I've used both Window Maker and Aqua, and I like both GUI styles.Apparently GNUstep is usable on Windows, but I've never tried it.At least in theory, the same Cocoa-like source could be used for a GUI app on all 3 major platforms.Objective-C isn't as simple as C, but it's pretty simple, and fully compatible with C. It's also been bound to every major scripting language I can think of. |
An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit? | nailer: 'GTK...Doesn't look enough like MS Windows on MS Windows.'GTK apps for the most part look exactly like other Windows apps [1], and have for the last threeish years. Some, however, still use GTK style File dialog boxes, rather than native Windows ones.Alas I haven't written any GTK for Windows, so I'm not sure what determines the File dialogs.[1] Per poster below, I mean Microsoft apps included with Windows XP or Vista |
An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit? | coryrc: wxWidgets is "big" because it has features. Considering it meets all your other criteria (aka features), in addition to ones you'll only find out you need halfway through a project, I would look closer at it. Use wxGlade and wxPython if you want easy, C++ if you demand compiled. Use dabo (http://www.dabodev.com) if you are interfacing with databases. |
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