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Which school do you attend? | GrandMasterBirt: Brooklyn College -- Brooklyn, NY |
Which school do you attend? | gommm: INSA of Rennes in France (National Institute of Applied Science), graduated 2005
+ Rochester Institute of Technology for 6 month as an exchange studentThe courses between both were pretty different and kind of complementary... |
Which school do you attend? | peregrine: Milwaukee School of Engineering |
Which school do you attend? | twak: Glasgow |
Which school do you attend? | elviejo: ITESM Campus Zacatecas (Mexico) |
Which school do you attend? | Javache: Ghent University |
Which school do you attend? | davekell: Georgia Tech alum |
Which school do you attend? | furyg3: University of Amsterdam |
Which school do you attend? | unalone: The College of New Jersey.Not too impressive after some of the names listed here. :-/ |
Which school do you attend? | yesimahuman: Wisconsin |
Which school do you attend? | almost: University of Sussex, UK |
Which school do you attend? | frisco: Duke, BSE Biomedical Engineering (Exp. 2011) |
Which school do you attend? | boorad: Cornell University |
Which school do you attend? | incomethax: University of Wisconsin - Madison |
Which school do you attend? | anoved: Hard Knocks. |
Which school do you attend? | baddox: Missouri State University (previously Southwest Missouri State) |
Which school do you attend? | harpastum: Marquette University |
Which school do you attend? | sidmitra: Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.Hmm, no one here from IITs i guess. |
Has Facebook Connect helped your user growth? | ryuio: check out meetupdiary.com on alexa - the spike is due to connect. |
Which school do you attend? | jgranby: Durham |
Which school do you attend? | apgwoz: Graduated from Temple University, and am currently auditing classes at the University of Pennsylvania. |
Which school do you attend? | ddemchuk: San Diego State |
Are you still planning to make big money? | jaytee_clone: I don't plan to make big money. (How much is big? A billion dollar?.)However, I do plan to have a tribe of smart, fun, and motivated friends.Have a billion, you can do a lot.Have a tribe, you can do anything (including making a billion.) |
Which school do you attend? | manny: State University of New York at Stony Brook |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | jws: Interruptions = BugsI wonder if you might be more productive by changing your habits. Get up and hack for two hours before going to a job that does not require creativity, then perhaps hack a bit more in the evening as life permits. The advantage here is that you will have plenty of thinking time between execution periods and it will support the quality of your work.I know an author that does just this, his problem though is that he is too conscientious and competent and keeps getting promoted to positions that require too much creativity. At that point he has to change jobs. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | pg: Trevor has always said that his dream job was to be a projectionist in a movie theater. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | wicknicks: I used to work in a video store. Not many people used to turn up, so had a lot of time to myself. You might want to just jump into the store next door. Would be a good bet. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | enomar: In college, I worked 2nd and 3rd shift doing tier 2 tech support at an ISP. I spent most of my time doing my CS homework. The guys working 1st shift didn't have that luxury.Not sure you'd find the same thing...just another data point. |
Which school do you attend? | callmeed: Cal Poly SLO ... CS (left after jr. year in '00) |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | zackola: Librarian +1 |
Which school do you attend? | ensignavenger: Ozarks Technical Community College |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | brl: Night security at some office building sounds like a dream job to me. I would do it for free and maybe I would even pay to do it since I would get more (computer) work done there than working out of my apartment. |
Are you still planning to make big money? | nostrademons: Eventually, yeah. But not right now. I'm working for Google for now, and will see what things are like in a few years.I think I explained why in another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426341) - basically, I didn't know what to do next. So I figured doing something is better than doing nothing, and applied for jobs. We had maybe 6-12 failures, depending on how you count what a failure is. Is a great idea that turns out to not be feasible to implement a failure? How about a site that you launch that's kinda lame and nobody uses it? How bout misconceptions for what the UI should be?Mostly, I see this as a chance to start fresh and rectify some of the mistakes I made last time. Going by http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html, we did #1 (eventually; had cofounders to start, but they all quit), #2, #8, #11, and #18. Well, now I'm out in Silicon Valley, fixing #2. I'm hoping to meet lots of cool people, increasing the pool for #1. Working at Google gives me a credential that seems quite valuable to investors, helping with #11. It also helps build my technical skills, to avoid #8. And it's sort of a career reset, so if I see a good opportunity, I can go after it, avoiding #18.Besides, I had an idea for a project that could only be done with Google's resources. So instead of somehow finding $100M in venture capital and duplicating their infrastructure, why not join them as an employee? Yeah, it's not as financially remunerative, but they do have Founders Awards for people who make a significant difference to Google's bottom line, and the credibility of having launched a major product, even within a large corp, gives you a big boost when starting on your own. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | hotpockets: I've sometimes thought about how I could get paid 2x, 3x, or more. As a graduate student RA it wouldn't be that hard to get 2x. Just do my computer research at a nightshift security job. But how about:
RA+security+baby sitting+baking in my portable easy bake oven! |
Which school do you attend? | bmac: Worcester Polytechnic Institute |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | sabat: Actually I've had that situation several times in technology jobs. It's not so much the job itself as it is the company. I had a great gig at a company in Marin County (read: north of the Golden Gate, laid-back, hippies) where I was able to learn Perl, the WWW, and Unix. Find a non-critical role in a company that isn't audited heavily (non-public company, smaller division of a large company) and hack away.One option to stay under the radar: use virtual machine to do your coding in. It's not that you have to hide what you're doing, but you might not want to keep answering questions or might otherwise just rather stay underground. |
Which school do you attend? | ttam: ISEL (Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa) - Portugal |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | joshuarr: Dog-sitter? |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | SwellJoe: When I was in college I worked the night shift at a television station in the tape room, and spent most of my time, four to five hours each eight hour shift, learning UNIX system administration, shell and Perl programming, or writing songs. However, last I heard, stations had started automating away most tape duties and merging the master control and tape operator jobs into one. Master control is not a "lot of downtime" kind of job--there are interruptions every few minutes, though I imagine it's seen some automation improvement since then.System administration positions often have a lot of downtime, since if you're doing your job well, nothing is urgent and everything just hums along real pretty-like. Night watch in a hosting data center would probably be a great choice. If you're still in school, night shift in a university tech center would probably be a good choice, too (assuming it's open 24 hours...I think most large universities do have at least one center that is open all night).Finally, have you considered contract work? This is a different model altogether. Instead of taking a job where you can half-ass it, and work on what you really want to most of the time, you take jobs every few weeks where you work your ass off, get paid a metric ass ton (like $100-$150 per hour), and finish the project in a week or two. Then you're free to hack for pleasure for a few weeks before taking on another paying gig. This has mostly been what I've done since leaving college and the television station. I usually billed $1000/day plus all expenses, if travel or whatever was involved, and often made more than my friends who worked full-time at regular jobs...it only takes a few projects for that math to work out. |
promoting an open source product? | russell: One of the most basic things to do is tell people who you are. HN readers can give lots of useful advice, but hiding yourself as $productname is a definite turn off. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | ramchip: I sold tickets on the phone for a small-medium ticket company. Some nights were busy, but usually I had plenty of free time. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | myelin: Or, you could pick up a part time job doing what you're good at (hacking), earn as much money as a full time "mostly idle" type job, and use your actual free time for your projects.The jobs you mention can't pay much more than $1500/month, which is 30 hours at $50/hour (or much less if you bill higher). One freelance project per month will fund your hacker lifestyle, and will probably look much better on your resumé later on in life. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | fallentimes: I worked at the University library and it was a dream. In a given 4 hour period I probably did 20 minutes of work. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | pclark: why not a sys admin? its fairly easy work 95% of the time ... |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | callmeed: Front desk at a small hotel.My wife had this job when we first got married. When she was pregnant, the hotel actually let me cover some shifts for her. It was awesome. I'd bring my laptop and once the check-in rush was over (6pm-ish), it was real quiet and I could hack away. |
Working with Apache/PHP on OSX | smoody: Definitely start with MAMP, in my opinion. As it doesn't build/install anything itself, it keeps your system ultra clean. If you need to move beyond it, just drop it in the trash and you're done. A few hints:- By default, the apache doc directory is mapped to an os directory inside of the MAMP folder. Change this to something in your ~ directory right away so that if you upgrade MAMP, you won't accidentally write over your work.- Make sure MAMP dirs are at the beginning of your shell path because there are conflicting binaries pre-installed in OS X (basic, I know).- In my opinion, the MAMP PRO upgrade is worth it. It gives you much finer control over many things.- I've only compiled and installed the memcache pecl extension and I did that through the standard make/install process and it worked fine. I just had to drop the memcache.so file into the proper directory and find the right php.ini file to edit to enable it. See this post (and my comment -- 2nd from the end -- to see how to configure MAMP PRO): http://www.lullabot.com/articles/setup-memcached-mamp-sandbo.... Note: I did not use their process to build the extension, I used this: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-... .- I don't think there is strong support for php pecl extensions in MacPorts, but MacPorts is great for a great many things. For example, I used it to install the memcache daemon.I hope that helps. |
Which school do you attend? | dandelany: University of Colorado at Boulder |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | c1sc0: Well if you're in Europe, what about: 'unemployed'? 80% of your current paycheck for the first 6 months, then you really should start looking for something that resembles a job. I know people who travelled the world on 'unemployment'. If you're looking for quiet time, why don't you just skip the social obligation of 'having a job'? |
Which school do you attend? | r11t: Louisiana Tech University.Anyone else attending school in Louisiana? |
What's the state of the web in your (non-English) language? | rjprins: I'm from the Netherlands and I'd say the Dutch web is very healthy and developed.
There are only about 16 million Dutch, but you can pretty much get all you need without visiting an English website.www.tweakers.net - A big IT-focussed news site with a great community and even better features (e.g. complete price listings of all Dutch electronics webshops for easy comparisons including webshop reviews. Is there an English equivalant to this?).www.hyves.nl - Our own social networking site that gained popularity before Facebook or MySpace could.www.nu.nl - Very basic, very popular generic Dutch news site. Everyone I now reads this.www.uitzendinggemist.nl - Online repeats of recent TV shows.www.9292ov.nl - THE integrated route-planner for public transport. Combines all trains, trams, buses and ferries timetables to extract the perfect route.Also every Dutch company or institution has a professionally developed website these days. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | davidw: Incidentally, this is RMS' (Stallman, of course, not our own 'rms') suggestion for those who are unable to find a day job doing free software: do something unrelated to software (with the idea being the avoidance of contributing to proprietary software) that gives you free time. Hearing that in person from RMS was the beginning of the end of my interest in RMS style free software. |
How do you start something? | davidw: C-x C-f |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | jraines: I sell lift tickets at a ski resort. Some of our ticket windows are not at the main resort & get about 5 customers on a slow day.Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.comI also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome so far. |
Why aren't there any business-related Q&A sites? | anthonyrubin: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | tlrobinson: Whatever it is, make sure it doesn't require an IP agreement. The ones you mentioned obviously wouldn't. |
How do you start something? | pg: Make something you yourself want to use. To get started, pick a subset small enough that you can implement it in a couple hours max. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | johnrob: Finding a job that pays the bills while allowing you to hack is an interesting way to become 'ramen profitable'. That might be the ultimate way to hack the funding process... |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | hbien: As a student, I worked as technical support at our libraries to help other students with computer stuff.For every 4 hour shift, there was maybe 30 minutes of work.During "work" was when I discovered/experimented with Ruby on Rails, got interested in start ups, read a lot of PG essays, starting hacking on side projects, etc...Actually, that job is probably why I'm not working for a BigCo. |
How do you start something? | kirubakaran: "... one man army ... will be better than ... multi million dollar corporations?"This one is easy. No bullshit bureaucracy that sucks the soul out of you. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | jwilliams: Behind the desk at an Internet Cafe? |
Has Facebook Connect helped your user growth? | travism: I just finished an FC implementation on a site I'm working on. The site still has local accounts, but users can now connect their local accounts to their facebook account Facebook or just login through Facebook (which actually creates a local account).Beware: integrating with FC turned out to be a surprisingly large undertaking, although lots of that effort was spent a) trying to assemble an understanding from the FC docs about how the thing actually works and b) figuring out how to handle all of the weird cases (and the common cases, for that matter).The FC developer docs are not all that coherent. The wiki seems to cover most of what you'd need to know, but lots of the information is on pages only linked to from obscure other pages, and there's not a good big-picture technical explanation. Even worse, much of the wiki is locked down so you can't fix it.And there are a bunch of special cases to handle.. what if a user is logged into a facebook-linked local account on your site but is logged in as the wrong facebook user? Or what if they're logged into a facebook-connected local account and not logged into facebook? If you make a mistake, Facebook doesn't usually provide a helpful error message, and their javascript is all compressed, so it's a pain to try to use firebug.If anybody's interested, my site's at http://mushpot.net. If anybody's got questions about the implementation, feel free to post them on mushpot and I'll try to respond. |
How do you actually get paid the money? | russell: I do consulting and I get a written agreement giving rates, total amount, and other terms. Usually the company issues a purchase order and I invoice against the purchase order, usually net 30 days, 15 if I can get away with it. They send me the checks. I dont give discounts. I havent worked with mom and pops. My clients are multi-million to multi-billion corporations and I havent had any collections problems. It's may be more problematical with sole proprietorships and such. My billings are typically 5 digits per month. If you are talking a few hundred per year, the purchasers usually expense it on a credit card because the PO process is so cumbersome.Getting large companies to pay on time hasn't been an issue, but you need to agree to their idea of a schedule. Sometimes 15 days works, but one insisted on 45 days and the 45 days was when they put the check in the mail.See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438740 for another perspective. |
promoting an open source product? | cdibona: I'd get a handle on how to understand those users. The smaller shops need a fair amount of help dealing with almost every aspect of codecs on their devices. From patent clearing to implementation, deploying these systems are ridiculously complicated if you want to do so legally and in compliance with the gpl, iso and other licenses around these tools and when you combine this with some of the less , ahem, legit codecs that are floating around (people pulling code from qt and wma players then representing them as their own work, etc...) there is a fair amount of consulting opportunity out there.This is assuming you are with any of the following: ffmpeg, mplayer, vlc, gstreamer, etc... |
How do you actually get paid the money? | RobGR: I am not the best person to give advice on this, because I have had only a few customers that were big companies.However, the standard for payment is still a check via US Mail. If you anticipate slow payment, bill early and include some standard text on the invoice about net terms of 30 or 90 days, whatever is appropriate, and if you wish specify that late payment is subject to a 2% per month late fee. This is fairly common, although there is a wide variety of practices.If they wish to pay with a credit card, I send an invoice using the Google Checkout email option. This costs me 2% of the bill, but it is probably worth it to get paid early, and I eat that 2% (but treat it as a business expense).Some companies and some industries are known for ill treatment of contractors and vendors, such as habitual late payment, suggesting that they will only pay the outstanding bill if you agree to some future work, etc. I suggest you simply cut off all business with anyone who starts treating you like that, one of the advantages of being a startup is that you don't have to put up with shit from "long term customers", so don't get fresh new shitty customers. |
How do you start something? | cchooper: Do what this guy did: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438646I'm always most successful at getting something done when I: choose the smallest useful thing I can think of, choose something even smaller instead (which can be expanded later), develop a schedule for getting it done (e.g. 1 hour per day), keep a calendar showing whether or not I'm working as hard as I said I would (no slacking!) and timebox the whole thing (lack of time is the greatest motivator in the universe).Update: for fun, I actually just tested this. I tried to write a language interpreter in Arc that could execute the following function: (def fib (n)
(nth n (sequence s 0 1 (+ s.-1 s.-2))))
which is written in a hypothetical Arc-like language I just invented. I gave myself 30 minutes. I didn't get it done, but I did pretty well. The language had a namespace, functions, macros and all the basic operators I needed. Unfortunately, I didn't quite finish the eval function. Another 10 minutes and I would have had something I could run (although I don't know how long it would have taken to fix all the bugs). |
Which school do you attend? | steffanwilliams: Exeter University, UK. |
What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? | RobGR: I'm surprised no one threw out some crap about the Four Hour Work Week.I have at various times applied for work at movie theaters, Kinko's, video rental places, etc. I have not yet ended up working a side job, but I have done contracting work (programming and sys admin) that I ordinarily would not take (windows stuff) when desparate. My impression is that these types of side jobs are harder to get than you think, because employers like someone whose main focus is this job, who is likely to stick around, and who cares enough about the job to try hard not to get fired.As a result, at one time I thought hard for a while about how to make jobs that were more suited to my needs. Rather than be able to work on my stuff at work, which I suspected would not work, I tried to think of a way I could make rent plus ramen money working one long 12 hour day per week.The useful result of that exercise is that I thought long and hard about how much money I really, really needed to survive, and cut down my expenses considerably.The more entertaining result was that I came up with a number of crazy "part-time business" ideas. The one which I partly did and made money on was finding old books at garage sales to sell online. (Very little money.) The one which people like to talk about is my "human powered lawn care" idea: Every Saturday, I and 4 or more one-day-a-weekers would meet up, ride on bikes to our rich green-freak hippy clients, and mow their lawn in a "carbon neutral" fasion, with reel push mowers and other hand-powered implements. I had this pretty well figured out, from the hauling of implements with bike trailers to having one bike with generator you put the back wheel on, to power a single weed-wacker (weed-wackers being indispensible tools of modern lawn care). People like to talk about that idea, but no one wanted to do it with me.Another strategy would be to seek out a job that is by it's nature part-time, and thus maybe undesireable to the people who would normally do it -- such as assisting in managing a farmer's market stand, which would limited to one day a week. If you severly limit your expenses, you can survive and then invest the rest of your time in your startup idea. |
How do you start something? | stonemetal: First off drop the "next 'killer app'" idea. I have as of yet never been killed by a computer application. It is marketing speak for over promise under deliver. Look at your OSS heros how many of them ever had a "killer app". As far as problems beyond your skills, how do you think you get better skills? Playing it safe isn't the answer. |
Hackers Netbook? | loglaunch: I have a dell mini 9, its great for college and checking email. Also good for light web browsing. Its not great for programming because the keyboard is a bit to small.It works great with the new "cloud" web apps like dropbox and google docs offline. |
Choosing a industry/field | frisco: I'm finding (not that this is a unique observation at all, though) that there are two kinds of founders: engineers who are accidental entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs who are founders. If you need to think hard to find even a sector to found a startup in, you're probably doing it wrong. Not that you can't be successful, and I wish the best of luck to anyone, but it seems like the giants we all know come from founders who started coding to solve some problem, and let the company grow from there on its own, instead of the other way around. |
What unlocks with karma, and when? | brandonkm: At 250 apparently you can change the color of the bar on the top.6 more points to go!*Thanks to everyone who voted this up. I can now confirm that this is indeed legit. On your settings page you can enter a six digit hexadecimal number that will change the color of the top bar. I'm going to try some of these out! http://www.somacon.com/cgi/colorchart.pl |
What unlocks with karma, and when? | rms: You've won everything you're going to get. Congratulations. |
Choosing a industry/field | vaksel: just build something that you yourself need for day to day life or your hobby |
What unlocks with karma, and when? | walterk: I have downvote arrows on comments, but at some point they ceased to affect the score. Which is to say, I click on the downvote, and the points go down by one, but upon reloading the page, the score is the same as before.(And yes, it's happened enough times that I know it isn't just someone voting the comment back up in the intervening period.) |
What unlocks with karma, and when? | CalmQuiet: My question would be: why the secrecy? HN worried that transparency about the processes of ratings & their "rewards" (which (plus + $5.00) will buy you a cappuccino) would lead to abuse of the system?
I think openness system would allow for HN viewers to discuss the value of different site-karma processes -- enabling the site designers (and all of us) to benefit more from the community's collective genius and experience (on this issue the way it does on others). |
Choosing a industry/field | bprater: It is super important that you find something you are passionate about. Don't pick a field because it'll make you good money.Make life an amazing journey for yourself and give yourself permission to jump into something with both feet and experience it fully, without the worry of "did I pick the right one". |
Site for new businesses to build business | mixmax: The difficult part of making a site like that is getting customers: Actually programming the site is quickly done.The reason Joel's jobsite works is because they already have a lot of smart people coming to the site, and can push them on to the job section.So in answer to your question: Yes, if it isn't out there (and since you've looked and haven't found anything it seems like a good presumption) it's a good idea. But don't kid yourself - marketing the site is at least 2/3 of the effort. And if your original problem is that it's hard to find customers this may not be what you want. |
Best way to create and send snail mail via an API? | bprater: You need to clarify what is being mailed. Is it teddy bears or form letters?Have you considered finding some "mom power" via Craigslist and hiring them for an hour a day? |
Choosing a industry/field | elviejo: I have the same doubts as you.My current plan is:
1 Find an industry with a ROOT problem that hasn't been solved.
2 Solve the problem.
3 Implement the solution in software form.
4 Sell the Solution, packaged in sw.
5 Profit.I'm still trying to find step 1 |
Site for new businesses to build business | SwellJoe: So, this raises a few questions for me:1. Your dismissal of eLance, getacoder, guru, etc. seems questionable, at best. "non-serious/spam" type posts, I imagine, must be a problem for any site of this sort. I'm not sure I see how you could prevent it better than they do. And, I'll mention that I've used rent-a-coder, eLance, and 99designs for work in the past, as a buyer. All of them worked, by some definition of "work". But, what you're describing is...different. It sounds like I can't list my projects, I can't get bids, and I have to do my projects the old fashioned way--find someone via an ad, contact them, beg them to get back to me with a quote for services, etc. I'm not saying there aren't times when I prefer the old-fashioned way (when I need programming done well, for example, it's simply not possible via the outsourcing sites I've tried), but the reason these sites do well is because it's possible to get quotes from a half dozen providers in a day, and have the project underway in two.2. What do you believe will draw buyers to your site, as opposed to the many, many work for hire sites out there? Without the buyers, you won't find any providers willing to pay you a dime, much less $250/year. Why wouldn't they use craigslist, if they want to find a specific talent? It's either free or $75 to place a want ad on craigs (depending on the market), and you can know that thousands of people will see you ad. Without lots of eyeballs, Joel's post is nonsensical. He happened to have a large readership that fit exactly the profile of employers looking for tech employees.3. $250/year for effectively an online listing service? Are you out of your damned mind? Again, you'd better have a hugely popular website if you want to pull this off.So, maybe I'm just not grasping the value add you are offering here for buyers or sellers of services. I'm not saying it's a bad idea...just that I can't think of when I would use such a service (and it sounds kinda like I'm your target demographic: business owner, hires technical talent regularly, and in the past I have been technical talent looking to get hired). |
What unlocks with karma, and when? | bouncingsoul: 20 karma – downvote comments.200 karma – make polls (http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll).250 karma – customize the top bar background color.??? karma – flag posts and comments (on their individual page). |
Choosing a industry/field | Tichy: Just thought today in bed that with software development, one can never completely lose. Even when unemployed, you can still build stuff, and eventually perhaps even sell it. On the other hand, I am not sure how to pass time as an unemployed stock broker, for example? One could write a book about investing, but after a while, that could become boring.So I think for starters it might be a good idea to pick the profession where the skills you acquire enable you to create stuff... |
What unlocks with karma, and when? | lani0: your destiny unlocks with karma. it ensures that in your next re-incarnation, you do not come back as a Digg user |
Choosing a industry/field | lallysingh: Don't. Try around in a few forms and see what sticks. Don't think too hard about any of them: Overintellectualizing is a real problem. There's a good chance you'll find what you like fairly early on after a few attempts.There's enough random chance and other variables involved (e.g. your marketing & business skills) that this variable just isn't worth blowing too much time on. You'll probably have to make a lot of attempts & drastic course corrections to make it stick. |
How do you start something? | iamwil: There's all sorts of roadblocks to making stuff, but I'll just pick one.A lot of times, you think that the first thing you make will be the right one, the brilliant, the innovative, or the perfect one, so you want to spend time getting it right.To those that build things I admire, I find that they spent lots of time building things that have already been built, mostly because they wanted to have their own. Through the process, they learned lots of stuff they needed for their opus later on.Built behind every masterpiece are thousands of throwaway sketches you never see.And oh. From the mouth of Robert Morris, keep your system simple enough, so it fits in your head. |
Which school do you attend? | jaydub: University of Maryland, College Park |
What unlocks with karma, and when? | giles_bowkett: At 600+ karma, you get infinite bonus mushrooms and infinite ammo. You have to beat the game twice on impossible mode in the military suit and max out all your guns, though, even the stupid one that takes forever to fire and then the zombie eats your head because you were sitting there trying to warm it up instead of shooting zombies, which would have been the logical thing to do.At 1000+ karma, you take off your helmet and guess what you're a chick. If you win three times in a row on impossible mode with perfect karma without getting shot once, using nothing but the annoying gun that takes forever, you take off your armor and guess what you're a hot chick. Then you can play the game again wearing a bikini.At 2000+ karma, Paul Graham comes to your house, tells you the meaning of life, and makes you a sandwich. It is the best sandwich known to man. Only rich people can make this sandwich. |
Site for new businesses to build business | nolanbrown23: I don't think another website is needed, businesses just won't use it. I've seen it tried before and it just doesn't work.In your case you can find an enormous amount of new clients by getting involved with your local startup community.What happens is startup founders talk to everyone and often times they get asked to build an app or website or whatever. If you network with these founders, you'll end up having extremely high quality clients because these founders start referring you. It takes a little time but it works great for anyone looking for clients.The web solves a lot of problems but not yours, that just comes down to networking and talking with people who need your services. |
Best way to create and send snail mail via an API? | oldgregg: http://postful.com/http://click2mail.com/http://www.viapost.com/http://www.postalmethods.com/http://www.cfhdocmail.com/http://www.l-mail.com/http://www.pc2paper.co.uk/ |
What unlocks with karma, and when? | kwamenum86: Every two weeks it seems like someone writes this post and it hits the top 10. Astounding. |
promoting an open source product? | nailer: Do you want to make money or not? You refer to your competitors as commercial - don't you intend to profit from your software yourself? If not, why bother putting so much effort into promotion?Or do you mean proprietary instead of commercial? There are many commercial Open Source projects. It sounds like you want to become one.In which case, are you selling support? Bespoke development?I'd start by getting some testimonials from your existing users. |
promoting an open source product? | chanux: Hey there is are godd FOSS blogging platforms. I like wordpress. Why don't you check one. If you need I can write for you for "free as in freedom". Just google for chanux, you'll find me :D |
Looking for feedback on side-project | zepolen: Very simple and easy to use, I would suggest 2 things though: 1. Remove the ajax interface, so it's possible to use the reference offline, also it means you can tell the client to cache the entire thing (as it is static).
2. Abstract the javascript code into a framework that lets you just pass in a heirarchical js array of definitions.
In fact, it's a perfect idea for a webapp, you provide the interface, and people can plug in their own 'definition' list for whatever they are working on. So if a person is developing an app, he can document the usage of it in a simple js array and plug it in to get a snazzy interface. |
Looking for feedback on side-project | cx01: You should make the clickable target area larger, i.e. to select the "<a>"-tag I have to click on the little "a"; it would be much easier to just click on the gray box surrounding the "a".Still, I'm not really happy with menus in webpages. It takes several clicks to get the needed information. Maybe you should consider making the information text beyond each tag visible all the time; I'm talking about the "This element defines an anchor..." kind of text. It's always easier just to scroll than having to click. |
Has Facebook Connect helped your user growth? | xtimesninety: One of my projects use it (http://eatmycharts.com).. I'd say it removed the registration barrier, but that's about it. People will come back for the service.I can't track which users publish to their mini feed (is there a way to tell? you ask the user's permission and there's no javascript callback to know if the user approved on publishing). Most of my users that are in my facebook network prefer not to publish to their mini feed.I myself don't like to use my Facebook account on other websites (unless I really want to use my identity on purpose). That's why on my website, I automatically assign a nick to the user (which they can change), so their full name won't appear on public.Overall, I don't think FC helped a lot in my case. |
I have three good ideas. Help me choose idea 1, 2, or 3. | nailer: So what do you think? Are they all OK? All terrible? One stand our more than the others? Thanks for any and all feedback. |
I have three good ideas. Help me choose idea 1, 2, or 3. | jhancock: I like Idea 3 in terms of "you can makes money here". Your "con" on it is genuine but if you can make a product that saves time, you can compete.The first idea seems like a nice project but its risky as to if it will ever pay the bills. It is about time for the linux world to grow into paid software utils. I certainly wouldn't mind paying for such a tool.The second idea is too large a market to find and educate. Good service though, I'd like to have access to it if you chose this one. |
I have three good ideas. Help me choose idea 1, 2, or 3. | fallentimes: Which one would you enjoy working on the most? |
I have three good ideas. Help me choose idea 1, 2, or 3. | c1sc0: I ran idea 2 with my in-house shopping expert (gf) & her first reaction was 'This is so old-fashioned, plenty of people are already doing that on bbs/forums'. So people are already doing it, how are you going to make it better? http://www.dolc.de. (in the second-hand forum / Chinese)What about taxes? Fraud? You'll need a solid reputation system. I like the idea though. |
I have three good ideas. Help me choose idea 1, 2, or 3. | inovica: I think number 2, whilst an interesting idea, has a lot of potential pitfalls. I wonder if this could be done in a social network sense where the community contacts the community looking for items, rather than via one centralised source. The two main barriers as I see are trust (once the money has been sent) and the legals of sending goods into other countries (ie import tax). This one would interest me the most. The Linux one could be useful, but I agree that it could be difficult to make money on it. The 3rd one is interesting on the basis that it should provide a much better service than is currently offered but your main barrier is that the larger companies prefer to deal with larger companies. You may look to sell to the likes of Capita as they could re-package what you do and they are already 'in' with these companies.Are there any other ideas, or have you refined your ideas down to these three? |
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