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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 comprehen... |
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 ar... |
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 ... |
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 li... |
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... |
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 ... |
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 ... |
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 ... |
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... |
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 ab... |
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,... |
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--... |
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 y... |
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 ... |
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... |
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 doin... |
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... |
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 spen... |
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 purc... |
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 do... |
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... |
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-lo... |
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, ju... |
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 le... |
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 th... |
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 Cana... |
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 ... |
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... |
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. A... |
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 lea... |
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... |
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 y... |
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 c... |
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 shu... |
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 r... |
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.... |
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 au... |
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 f... |
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, cn... |
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 wi... |
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 (c... |
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 o... |
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... |
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 ... |
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... |
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 sourc... |
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 thi... |
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 ... |
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 civi... |
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 kn... |
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 ca... |
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 wi... |
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 w... |
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... |
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