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Title: Ask HN: What if I don't have an idea?<p>I have,<p><pre><code> Time: I recently left my job. (in this economy?! yup)
Skill: I'm proficient in Django, system administration, a bit of scaling, but not so much front-end / design.
Money: I'm not talking retirement fund here, but my expenses are "tiny" and savings (for my age) are "high".
</code></pre>
(I really don't want to imply I have a _lot_ of the above. I don't think I'm a "Rockstar" [I hate that as much as you do]. I'm not trying to say I have all the time and cash in the world. I just want to explain my situation.)<p>I don't have,<p><pre><code> An idea I'm passionate about
Someone else to work with
A better physical location (I'm in Dallas right now, but that also helps the money part above)
</code></pre>
I've been out of school and doing Django development for ~3 years, the development was fun but the app/idea itself was never my passion (I was just an employee, by the way). My plan when I left my job ~3 weeks ago was to do self-study and decide what I wanted to do (by which I probably mean: who I wanted to work for). I've given myself until March, where I figured I could find some leads at PyCon. I've been catching up on books, blogs, projects I wanted to look into - but I haven't found anything to work on that really takes my time. Nothing that keeps me up at night.<p>I can certainly fill my time until March just doing the self-study thing with no specific goal in mind, but I feel like I'm missing an opportunity. Especially reading about the other guys here who saved to a specific goal so they could quit and do their thing. I'm there already, and time is ticking down.<p>I guess one easy-mode answer is: "Find another startup you could be passionate about". I agree, I'm in a perfect situation to take a dive with other people, except for my location. Anything is possible, I guess, but lets just say that I'd like to stay in Dallas for the next few months. How are my options affected in that case?<p>Is this too vague? Whiney? Should I be sad/ashamed that I don't have a list of ideas I want to work on?<p>I'm just sort of confused, and seeking your advice.
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: I was wondering, as a soon to be startup founder, what opinions do all the hackers out there ;) have on the best ways to promote a brand new web application. Thank you all.
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: I'm posting under a different name for various reasons but I'm a regular contributor here.<p>So, my host is a pussy. I have a site doing a good amount of traffic - 2mm uniques, 8mm pages/month, heavy data and growing - but we're having some legal issues right now. I can't really get into it but suffice it to say we're being bullied by a major public company and our host is flipping out. No, we're most certainly not doing anything illegal and no, this doesn't involve the music/entertainment industry. ;)<p>So we need a new host - right away. Ideally, I think we might be looking to go offshore because that will at least give our oppressor(s) one less avenue through which they can attack us. At the same time, this is scary to me. We do a lot of data and we can't afford to be slowed down or, god forbid, drop offline for any period of time.<p>So my question is - does anyone have any recommendations for a stellar offshore host or even a local host with some marbles that won't retract into their stomachs every time they get a frivolous BS C&D? The Planet seems to be the go-to option here in the US. Any others?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I'm on the fourth lecture, higher order expressions, part 2 (lambda, ycombinator, etc) Thus far, I like it, I really like it. Anything else of this quality for sophomore or (looking ahead) or junior level CompSci? Also, anyone know if Anarki is stable on PLT Scheme 4.1.1? I installed 3.5.2 for arc, but I think I'm better of learning scheme as a beginner.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: There seems to be a lot of people even some intelligent ones who are lately talking about and exploring clojure, a new lisp dialect run in JVM. It looks really promising, but a lot of people especially lisp programmers have an inherent hatred in java. How is that? what do you think about this ``lisp in JVM''? Is the clojure the future of lisp?
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: I know that the TED talks are up free, I'm familiar with MIT's OpenCourseWare, the free educational material up on iTunes, and that Google puts some tech talks online. Unfortunately, it looks like you have to be a member to see Long Now Foundation video. But I figure I must be missing something. Any suggestions?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: When I started working for my company, I was ploughing through code at a good rate. A few months in, I was given a project that I never liked.<p>I don't know what an acceptable level of programming productivity is; I just feel as if I am 5-6 times slower than when I started.<p>Should I commit seppuku (this feels like the most honorable thing)? Should I renegotiate to take long unpaid breaks (this should revitalize me)? Am I panicking too much (I always panic too much)?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: We're about to send out the responses for this cycle, and we've found that a lot of applicants haven't put their email addresses in their profiles. So if you applied this cycle and you want a response, please edit your profile and put your email address in the email field.<p>(Sorry for the inconvenience. In the next version we won't let people submit applications unless there's a valid address there, but this sw only gets used every 6 months so it doesn't evolve very fast.)
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: My partner phoned me on receiving a YC response email. I was surprised, not having seen mine yet - but actually it was in my Spam folder in Gmail. Since I might not have seen it for a while otherwise, I thought this information might be helpful to others.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I've been amazed how helpful people have been here to career advice questions earlier, so as I feel I have hit rock-bottom today, I give it a try myself (I am a regular poster, but anonymous this time). I guess others might be in similar situation, so discussing this might be helpful.<p>I have always dreamed of becoming a scientist. I always loved maths, sciences, puzzles, theory but also programming and engineering. To illustrate this, I would say that probably I look up to Sergei and Larry more for inventing PageRank, than for building up their company, although I'm interested in the workings of the economy as well, but more at an abstract level.<p>So getting accepted into grad school in one of the top labs in its field seemed like a dream come true. I really admire some of the professors and postdocs in the lab. Many of them have achieved ground-breaking theoretical results in the past and their groups have produced a great number of widely cited papers, surveys, useful toolboxes, etc. I was anxious to take part in similar work, however small my contribution would be.<p>I was even excited when I was told that I will work on a newly started, well-funded, "interdisciplinary" project, that will greatly impact people's lives. Well, I was suspicious of the buzz-wordiness initially, but how could I not trust the judgment of such smart people. After almost a year, it is fair to say that I have good view of the project and it is almost surely a giant failure. I am completely burnt out and have given up all hope of getting any meaningful work done in this project. It does not solve any real problem, there is no potential for any good science within it and no-one has the slightest idea what it is about and where it should progress. I can't say exactly what it is, but in scope it could be imagined as similar to the EU-funded Google competitor that has been widely ridiculed before.<p>On the surface everything still looks good, we have plenty of meetings, senior group members travel to conferences to project partners, we have an active wiki, we make demos from time-to-time, the reviewers are happy, funding is good, etc. etc. However, I find it the most soul-crushing experience to continue working while pretending that the whole thing is getting anywhere. Any attempt I made to point out ways how it could be made more practical have been ridiculed, or even trying to question some of the assumptions have met aggressive reactions from the professor, so I have given up.<p>Watching my collegues I have noticed different kinds of behavior. Some of them are smart and realize what is going on but they have become cynical and play along, trying to get their own stuff done on the side. Others are just too incompetent to notice something is wrong, and are happy to have a good place where they can surf the net the whole day, while pretending to be scientists. Some of my collegues are completely clueless about programming or engineering, but having good observations, comments on meetings, being generally friendly goes a long way. I have to mention that this is in a place where tuition is free, grad-school pays about 60-70% of what one could earn in the industry at the moment, so it is a safe choice financially. Not much is expected of anyone, I guess if I wouldn't turn up for a few days in a row, no-one would notice.<p>So what do you guys suggest I should do? I have given up getting anything useful in this project, but still research is my main dream. Is there hope of better in a different grad-school or project ? How can you tell from the outside ? Is this frustration common or is there actually a way to get honest theoretical work done in grad-school ? I consider myself a hacker as well, so working at a start-up or big co. would both be an option, but I would still most love to work in research, in the idealized way that I imagine it. (find elegant solutions to difficult problems that have wide-reaching implications). Should I ignore the environment and just try to set my own research agenda ? Is it possible to do research outside of academia ? (I'm a bit afraid of becoming a crackpot publishing papers on perpetual motion machines on arxiv :-) ? Have you been in similar situation ? How did you manage ?<p>Sorry for the long rant, and thanks for any suggestion...
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: Like others, we were down about our YC rejection last night.<p>This morning, we got a commitment from an anchor client (we target small/medium businesses). It took 15 minutes to convince the owner of this multi-million dollar business to say: "I love it."<p>We built a demo for our customers and decided to send it to YC as well. In the past 3 weeks, the only one who has turned us down is YC. 6 for 6 (knock on wood!!) We have even turned down a business that is not a good fit for us. These are all paying customers, btw.<p>We may not be headed to YC but we are still building stuff people/companies want. Hope this inspires others to forge ahead.
Upvote: | 93 |
Title: On friday I woke up to find my google account had been disabled. No gmail, no adsense,adwords,webmaster tools,blog etc etc. No reason given.<p>I've filled out the forms, got an automated response which is totally irrelevant - ("If you have forgotten your password...") etc.
Now I'm trapped in an email conversation with what seems to be an auto-responder which is just quoting stock emails at me with more irrelevant 'answers'.<p>Has anyone been through this? (Looks like a big yes http://search.twitter.com/search?q=google+account+disabled) Does anyone know the best way to get it resolved, or who to contact?<p>Google seems to have lots of things sorted out, but <i>surely</i> there is a better way of dealing with this sort of issue. I would happily pay for a premium google account to have some sort of support for this eventuality (Even though I'm paying them via adwords already).<p>Any help gratefully appreciated...
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: Github added a new feature to search through all of their public source code.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: If you can, vote. It is your duty as an American to speak for yourself. We have the power to change things, we have the power to make the world a better place.<p>Just vote.
Upvote: | 184 |
Title: I enjoy reading. I have actually devised a time table to organise all of my activities and reading takes most of the time (although not easy to stick to it).<p>I was wondering though if you read and by read I mean books. If so what are you currently reading and why? What is your most favourite book and why? How many books would you estimate you read a month and finally do you think all this reading is worth it, would it not be better if you spent your time doing something else and why?<p>Now I know that's a lot of question, I am not doing a study or anything, I am just curious to know what you guys (I assume slightly more intellectually curious that most) think about engaging in reading.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: :)
Upvote: | 145 |
Title: In the interest of anonymity I would prefer not to reveal my real username.<p>I have a site that does about a 150,000 pageviews and 5,000 uniques a day. It is profitable, making about $50,000 a year, not from adverts. The average pageviews per visit is over 30.<p>At the current growth trend I would expect it to be making over $150,000 in a couple years. It is also an influential site for its niche, market leader in its own right.<p>It comes top of google for any keywords pertaining to the market it targets.<p>What do you think is a good price?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Fourth entry from the top: const float GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I = 3.5303614E-7.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I want to start doing things like building a rep-rap, making an RFID cloner, maybe even some robotics. What's a good book to teach me the basics of electronics, e.g., why do circuits need resistors, when do I use a capacitor, etc?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Sorry that this is so long, but, I need advice.<p>I've included a TL;DR version at the bottom.<p>I'm 25 and I have delayed sleep phase syndrome. Depending on the individual it manifests differently, in my case it presents as a natural tendency to go to sleep each night about two hours later than the night before (8:00 PM -> 10:00 PM -> 12:00 PM) sleeping for 8.5-9 hours.<p>I've been this way since infancy. In high school it was difficult, in college it was manageable, while working it was unbearable.<p>Five months ago I left my first job of out college.<p>I had interned for the previous two summers and was essentially told by HR that I was obligated to comeback full-time. More than that, I wanted to comeback. Up until that point I had an extremely flexible schedule. As an intern I had a loose schedule, typically working more than 40 hours each week, and they were happy enough with me to offer a full-time position.<p>All of my life I was terrified that my sleep was going to make consistent employment impossible. I was thrilled to have found a job that paid extremely well and allowed for a flexible schedule. My confidence soared. In the three years since first interning I've contributed over 30 KLOC to various open source projects, traveled, and generally lived without fear.<p>When I started full-time, everything changed.<p>For the first three months it wasn't terrible. I would usually arrive between 6:00 AM and 10:00 AM, netting between 4-5 hours of sleep on a typical week night. After the first three months I was exhausted. I talked to the President, telling him that I was exhausted and that I needed a change. I was largely ignored. I would take sick days to catch up on sleep.<p>Six months of this and I was out of my head tired and my performance was slipping. On Friday / Saturday nights I would sleep 12-16 hours and go to the office or work from home during the weekends just to keep up. People started to call me a zombie. I stopped reading, visiting family and friends, and watching tv or movies. I would go home after work each night and just wait for sleep. I stopped existing.<p>I requested two weeks of unpaid leave, and essentially slept through the first six days. After that I tried to catch up on some open source work. By the end of the two weeks I was wracked with anxiety, terrified to go back to the way things were, but, I did.<p>The president asked me to see a doctor, and I scheduled an appointment for after the holidays. 6.5 months in, our daily developer meeting was moved to 8:45 AM (from 1:00 PM) and arrival time / meeting attendance was now being monitored. I actually started getting less sleep that I was before, 3-5 hours a night.<p>I offered to quit, twice. Three months into employment, and about seven months in. If thing weren't going to change I was eager to leave. I stayed because I earnestly believed that they were going to work with me. The president actually said to me: "You have a number of years ahead of you, let's find out if there's something wrong." This statement more than any other made what came next seem like a cruel jape.<p>Now seven months into my little experiment with prolonged partial sleep deprivation I had my results back from my sleep doctor. I was diagnosed with delayed sleep phase syndrome. A polysomnogram (PSG) was performed and no easily correctible physical reason was found for my sleep condition (restless legs, sleep apnea, etc.) Sleeping pills were largely ineffective.<p>The next week I had a series of conversations with my direct report and the president of the company. Giving them the results of my PSG, and the diagnosis I requested a schedule change, any schedule change.<p>I was asked: "What would happen if we don't change your schedule?"<p>I replied that: "I would have to quit."<p>Sometime later my direct report came back to my office and said: "We're not going to fire you, as long as you come in on time, as you have been doing. But, we will not be changing your schedule."<p>I had a lease for another three months and my girlfriend of 8 years (seriously, we had been together since we were 16) had just left me because I was exhausted and working all of the time.<p>I asked for some time to think about it, eventually telling them that I would have to quit, but, that I would give them my notice two weeks before my lease was up.<p>I asked if I could have a schedule change to make the next three months a bit easier. The request was denied.<p>I spent the next three months exhausted and in a state of shock.<p>About three weeks before I was scheduled to quit, my direct report actually asked for my notice. While giving my notice I practically begged for my job. I, again, asked for any kind of schedule change of any kind. Even offering to move to a part-time position.<p>I was exhausted and afraid for my job every single day for a year. Ostensibly, this was a fun place to work, video games, snacks, etc. I just couldn't enjoy it on so little sleep<p>I've spent the last five months living with family and have now decided to reenter academia terrified by the though of living through this again. I'm actually afraid to get another job.<p>TL;DR Version:<p>Does anyone else here have a sleep condition?
How do you deal with it?
How do you live?
Where do you work?
Any advice?<p>I know nothing about contracting, or how to go about starting my own company, but, I see these as my only options.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: The user KrisZolar seems to have a vast amount of throwaway, spam accounts, which are upvoting one another and cluttering up this thread in particular: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359551.<p>Those users are: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ScottHanson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SkylerNovak, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RobertHenderson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Huxley78, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Nerdlinger, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Dino, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AVC, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Haggen, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KeshRivya, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KimStarr, and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=HugotheMongoose.<p>I wanted to be absolutely certain of this before making the accusation. I'm dead certain of these names, for the following reasons:<p>1) They follow similar patterns. Either they are very old, inactive user names, or they are extremely new. They all make small comments in other threads that, while not contributing anything useful, are upvoted slightly - to the point where they can upvote other account names.<p>2) Each one has a similar, one-sided look at Ayn Rand. They all react with very immediate hostility and none of them stop to make decent arguments.<p>3) Every single one gets incredibly hostile towards people who claim that the article KrisZolar submitted is a poorly-written article. (That article, for the record, took a similar approach to debunking Rand.)<p>4) They respond to one another's comments, always in the affirmative. When discussing with other people, they each respond in turn, rarely starting a long back-and-forth discussion, and their comments are all upvoted similarly to their original comments: up one or two points in thin trickles, after they've been downvoted. This despite a lack of content.<p>5) Several of them have deleted their posts after being responded to.<p>6) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360063 is a comment thread in which Nerdlinger, who has not been a part of the ongoing thread, responds in the defensive as if he has been here for a while.<p>7) Similarities in the way that they speak and the way in which they use grammar.<p>8) If you open each of these accounts at once, you see a pattern in their posts: each posts one or two at a time, in a cycle, never simultaneously. There are gaps between their posts in which none of them speak whatsoever.<p>I flagged their posts, but I don't know exactly how to approach this case. I've never seen something like it on Hacker News. Hopefully this is the right protocol.
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: A friend and I are pitching in mountain view this weekend (13th to 17th) and are looking for like-minded people in the SF area that have a spare couch or floor. Hotels seem to be expensive and don't provide the hacker atmosphere we're looking for. We're going to be busy practicing our demo, so we will try to stay out of your hair. We'd gladly compensate you for any expenses.<p>We're both male and in our early 20s. We're also not crazy, if that matters.<p>I'm posting this here because there's probably several other startups in town this weekend that might be interested in the same thing.<p>My email: sam -@- odio.cøm
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I've got a concept for an online service that will work properly only if the servers can receive and process a million + hits a minute for a minimum of one hour at a time. Each hit will post new data that needs to be updated in the online database, and the newly updated data will become part of the dynamically generated page returned to the visitor.<p>The pages returned will be very small so I don't think page size will be an issue. Instead I think that HTTP server (or perhaps database) speed limits may be exceeded here, or perhaps the dynamic page rendering engine will become the bottleneck.<p>???<p>My ultimate goal is to come up with an clear understanding of how to create a system that updates the database, and generates the dynamic HTML pages, and serves the pages to visitors -- fast enough that they do not experience slowdowns during the hour that this heavy load will exist.<p>How do I go about learning how to do this? Have any of you done something like this in the past? This is way beyond my personal experience level. Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can provide.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: How do Flickr, Youtube and other high traffic websites handle file uploads? I am mostly interested to know what they do on the server side.<p>I might be mistaken, but I read PHP might not be great at being a daemon to handle file uploads due to memory leaks. Is this true? Is Python or Java a better choice? How do you handle your file uploads?<p>I appreciate any help in pointing me to a better solution.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I'm learning datamining, machine learning, image processing etc by myself now but will start uni next year probably doing the same.<p>I tried Octave briefly and wasn't that impressed. Ok some neat functionality and easy matrix manipulation but pretty ugly and language isn't as nice as Python. Not sure about interoperability with other tools.<p>I already knew Python so I naturally tried numpy+scipy+matplotlib and was literally blown away. So easy to use, really nice plotting capabilities and it is extremely convenient using a real and interactive programming language, especially when that language is Python. Being able to do everything with one tool is awesome.<p>I haven't tried Matlab yet because it costs money. Big minus right there obv especially since it is not exactly cheap.
It is also proprietary which is a another problem.
From what I have gathered it is an awesome tool though and there are huge amounts of Matlab-code out there.<p>Have any of you tried both? Which do you prefer and why?
Do you think Scipy can take over?
Python seem to be used everywhere in science; signal processing, chemistry, bioinformatics, NASA, Google etc.<p>I have found a library for pretty much everything for Scipy though. I mean having 10 different FFT-libs isn't exactly much of a plus, one great one is enough.
So does Matlab beat Scipy on that point or not?
And is Matlab much better than Octave? Different feel?
Does Matlab allow easy interaction with databases and other tools?
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: I finally took the leap and quit my day job today (well, gave notice to be precise). Just wanted to thank the community here:<p>1. For teaching me about web-app design & development, and inspiring me with your stories.<p>2. More specifically, for cheering on Dabbleboard. I had launched the beta on HN, and -for many months- your words were my greatest source of encouragement, since it took a while to build a user(fan)base.<p>I hope to someday be able to return the favors... And good luck to you too :)!
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: To what extent do you share the list of entrepreneurial characteristics outlined in this post?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Dude, a kid just offed himself on your service, and BOILERPLATE is the best you can do?
Upvote: | 99 |
Title: We're cranking along with organic customer acquisition nicely at RescueTime and have decided to do some experimentation with AdWords (both search and the slightly scary "content network"). We have a pretty good understanding of the lifetime value of a customer, so ideally we could spend X in AdWords and acquire enough customers to justify the expense. Has anyone personally experienced a successful AdWords campaign for a SaaS offering (or heard of one)?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I would like to take a moment to publicly apologize for what I said in the Justin.tv thread. If you've decided to hate me forever, haven't read it, or simply aren't of the opinion that it's a big deal you may stop reading now.<p>Upon returning home, I read a message from Dan (my co-founder) stating that, in hindsight, he felt it was a bad thing to say and, quote, "I feel sick to my stomach." I knew then that no matter how serious I felt the infraction was, I had try my damnedest to clear it up.<p>First off, I'd like to state that I take full responsibility for what I wrote. Even if it's a single person, I do not want anyone to think negatively of Dan, TS, YC, or anyone else they may feel was tangentially involved.<p>I realize that I essentially made two mistakes here,<p>1. Instead of expressing my view of the article in question properly, I instead made an inappropriate joke.<p>2. I did this without considering how someone's views of me could affect their views of those connected to me.<p>To those of you who were offended, I am sorry. I have a history of complaining about poor comments/submissions to HN and I have since made one that I should be complaining about. Not only did it contribute no meaningful dialogue to the discussion, it was not in the spirit of this community. I consider HN one of the last bastions of social news discussion and it was quite wrong of me to tarnish that.<p>In a frail attempt to justify my initial comment, I posted a follow-up. A couple of members got the point I <i>should</i> have made in the first place, but at that point I still considered myself in the right and I once again made a horrendous ass of myself. I should have realized by that point that I was obviously <i>not</i> in the right and an apology was in order. I wish I could apologize for my bullheaded nature, too, but I don't think I'll be fixing that anytime soon.<p>I hope that you do not feel negatively about our company; one that I work on each day because I want to make it better for our users. And, if nothing else, please do not think poorly of Dan, YC, or anyone else. If you want to hate someone, please simply let it be me; I'm much better adjusted to it. Seriously. If you want me to never contribute here again just say the word, if that will be sufficient for you to absolve everyone else.<p>P.S. I post this as a submission because it's slightly less likely to be destroyed instantly.<p>Reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=371255
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: If you could tell your younger self one thing what would it be?<p>I was curious what the YC crowd would say to this.<p>Personally, I'd tell myself to live for the moment. Don't worry about the future too much, as long as you have a good head on your shoulders things will work out. Before you know it years have flown by and you'll wonder where they went.<p>So, what would you tell yourself?
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: For the past few years we've been using Perforce at the company I work for. For a number of reasons, we've been given the OK from management to switch to a free SCM system. This is supposed to be a big opportunity to improve our process and save us money, but we're having problems finding a good replacement.<p>Our must-have features include; ability to import our perforce history, easy/trivial branching and merging (preferably the ability to use an external merge tool), large file support, ability to pass changes from one workstation to another without affecting everyone, and ability to work with multiple gigs of binary files (most are roughly 500k, some are 100+megs). The binary files are mostly build artifacts, but for a large number of very good reasons we can't expect developers to generate them. Each developer having their own branch would be nice, but isn't critical.<p>Our products only run and compile on Windows, so decent windows support would be nice. We aren't exactly an MS house; our product works with the artifacts of programs that only run on Windows so it runs on Windows. Our products are very-much closed source, so things like Github are of no use to us.<p>Distributed systems like Git are compelling for the workstation to workstation support. Unfortunately Git chokes on our binary files (I get an out of memory error), and I'm afraid that the other DSCM projects will stagnate in favor of Git. Centralized systems like Subversions are in line with the way we've always done business, but they lack the ability to view/review/pull changes on another workstation and branching/merging isn't as easy.<p>I'm a big fan of Git, but if it can't work with large file it won't work for us. Subversion seems like a step backwards, but I could be wrong. Whatever we choose, we'll be with it for a long time and use it every day.<p>So, HN; what revision control system would you suggest?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: We're in a recession. Many great, talented people are out of work (including plenty of folks here at HN, I'm guessing). We know, though, that many companies are also still hiring - so let's put these companies and job seekers in touch.<p>Are you hiring? Does your company (or your friend's) have openings? Let HN know!!! Let's get some good people good jobs.<p>(We've got 900+ startup jobs at Startuply right now, and we'd love to get you all involved - it's easy and completely free for everyone. That being said, post any openings you know of here, too, to get some love from the best hacker community evar.)
Upvote: | 163 |
Title: I'm working on a web startup with a partner and I'm just feeling unsure of whether whole SaaS thing <i>really</i> works. Maybe it's because I'm personally reluctant to pay for stuff online, but I feel like some of my enthusiasm for this thing is waning because I'm doubting whether anyone really pays for anything.<p>I mean, I've read all the success stories about the YC companies and other web startups, I've read the "Autopsy of a web app" article that the Particletree guys wrote (awesome, btw). But I would love to see more numbers, as well as hear success stories from others, no matter how small.<p>To be blunt, though, I have a hard time believing that people will really sign up and pay for this in the numbers that we need. Our service isn't that expensive, starting at about $20 / month, and we need about 500 paying users to be "ramen profitable". But once we get to several thousand users, things start to get really interesting. Is that at all realistic?<p>I know it's heavily dependent on the market, what value we add, etc, but to give you an idea, our target market is primarily small companies, tech startups, bloggers, and others with a strong online presence. Probably a little smaller than the market for something like Basecamp, but similar in nature.<p>Bottom line: is it unrealistic to think that we can get 5000 users paying $20 / month? I know this is an unrealistic question to ask without more info, but I'm just trying to get an idea of what the upper limit of realistic expectations is. If a company like 37 signals only has 2,000 paying users for Basecamp, then I don't feel great about our chances. But if they have 200,000 paying users, I feel better about it. I just literally have no idea of what's realistic in terms of the size of a paying userbase. I know that others will be reluctant to post their numbers, but perhaps you can post them under a different account name or something? I would absolutely love to know how many paying users you have. Help a fellow entrepreneur out here :-)
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I'm playing around with memetrackers and looking for interesting "scenes" to create trackers for. I've rolled a few so far with interesting results and would like to make one for hacker blogs (blogs written by hackers).<p>Usually, I surf around and pull sites from blogrolls. And I'll do that here, but who's got the best blogrolls for these sorts of blogs?<p>Also, if you're a hacker and have a blog, feel free to post your RSS feed URL below. It takes about 30 minutes to make a new tracker once I've got all the feeds together. If it turns out to be interesting, I'll share the URL on here to see what you all think.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: Last October I left a comfy job at a marketing startup that had become very profitable (Inc 500, NY Times articles, and all that jazz). I had stopped taking classes full time to work with this company, so I never completed my CS degree. After leaving my job, I started my own company to develop some consumer site ideas. My partner bailed early to go to law school, so there was a bit of a gray cloud overhead from the start.<p>In order to get money coming in I began running lead generation and online marketing for a few clients. Over time, that grew to consume my entire working hours. It peaked at about $70k in revenue in July and has been steadily declining from there to a low of $15k in November, thanks to the economy and increased online ad competition.<p>On Monday of this week, without warning, my last two clients pulled the plug due to economic conditions. The deals were profitable, but they had too many account defaults. One client has seen his annual bad debts total double in November. So, to free up cash flow, they cut me loose.<p>I poured my entire savings into the company and had up to $50k in credit card debt at one point. Running online campaigns and lead generation, you pay for ads up front and invoice in arrears.<p>As the company made profits, I paid myself as little as possible to cover my bills. The rest was used to pay down debt. Early on, I tried doing contract work on the side to pay my personal bills. This worked until I was stiffed on a large project. Since the business was making money by this point, I focused on it full time.<p>As it stands, the company has about $13k in credit card debts. I have an additional $17k in personal credit card debt from living off of credit before the company was profitable.<p>The corporation is getting one last $6k check. There are no finished products to show for the last year, no remaining savings, an incomplete CS degree, and $30k in debt between the company and myself. The corporation also has contracts to keep its rack space until the end of January at a cost of $600/month.<p>I just sold my old (expensive) car and got a Toyota. I am vacating my apartment and bumming with parents and friends.<p>The corporation has an internal advertising and lead management system that I am tempted to lease to customers. There was talk with some local Austin marketing guys of launching that as a product a few months back, but it never worked out. There are currently four servers sitting idle that could be put to use. There are also three consumer sites in various stages of completion.<p>If you were in this situation, what would you do? Dissolve the company, get a job, and move on? Go back to school? Launch the advertising product? Launch the consumer products while bumming around to avoid rent? A combination of the above?<p>Has anyone been in a similar situation? I am seriously stressed out and likely not thinking clearly, so I would love an outside perspective.
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: Online? Real estate? Investing?
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: Rather, do you think primarily in your native language, or more in terms of abstract imagery?<p>I've noticed that rather than forming images in my head to represent ideas, I will instead often <i>think in English</i>. For example, if I'm working through a logic problem, I will repeat the various elements of the problem in my head <i>in English</i> repeatedly until I solve it.<p>I'm unfortunately unilingual. English is the only human language I have ever learned. I've noticed that when I speak phrases in Spanish, I'm actually speaking English in my head. It's like a lookup table. By that I mean, let's say I want to communicate "How are you?". Rather than attempting to reason through this task in Spanish (by trying to communicate the individual elements "how", 'in what way', "are", 'your state of being', and "you" 'the person I am communicating with'), I try to remember the phrase in Spanish that corresponds to the ordered set of words "How are you?". So it is rote memorization -- I'm not thinking in Spanish, I'm translating from English to Spanish, speaking it, then hearing a response and translating that back into English. No wonder I was never able to learn another language. There's always this complicated layer of indirection.<p>Anyway, back to the topic: do you find that you think more in terms of words or of images?<p>Here's one reason I can't imagine thinking through a problem without reciting it to myself in English several times. Let's say for example I need to describe the concept 'empathy', which is to say, understanding another person's situation by virtue of having been in a similar one yourself. I'd imagine it would be very difficult to conjure up an image which succinctly describes empathy. It seems like the verbal encoding "empathy" is probably the most succinct way to describe it. So why try to think in terms of images when our native languages are so very precise?<p>And yet, "thinking in English" can be a burden. I can feel how it limits me to thinking through problems in certain predefined ways, just as a given editor forces you to edit text in certain predefined ways. I would imagine that most extremely creative people (such as DaVinci, Tesla, etc) probably don't have this limitation imposed on their neocortex.<p>More importantly, my reading speed is significantly degraded. I tend to recite each sentence to myself as I read it. I've been unable to find much information about how to break this limitation, so any references would be very appreciated.<p>Thoughts?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I've been working on a startup for a number of months now. If I could go back in time and give myself one piece of advice at the very beginning, this would be it:<p>Always date more than one girl at the same time.<p>This is symbolic of course, and couched in terms applicable to a heterosexual male. But what I'm saying is always have multiple paths to success. Always have more than one meeting lined up with a potential client or potential investor, and pursue them in parallel. (Edit: To clarify, this is business advice, not technical advice.)<p>This is way better than if you pursue each one serially, and here are the two main reasons why:<p><pre><code> - You cling to any one option less, appearing
less desperate, and therefore more desirable.
- You always have something to hope for, supplying
optimism and motivation.
</code></pre>
Also, some smaller benefits:<p><pre><code> - You drastically increase your rate of learning.
- You can leverage work and preparation between
opportunities.
</code></pre>
The trick, though, is that you need to line up good, viable paths to success. You have to believe in them, otherwise the magic doesn't work.
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: My co-worker was reviewing Dropbox as an option for our company's file backup, sharing, and syncing and he came across this language in their privacy policy:<p><pre><code> Business Transfers. Dropbox may sell, transfer
or otherwise share some or all of its assets,
including your Personal Information, in connection
with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or
sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy.
</code></pre>
https://www.getdropbox.com/terms#privacy<p>Perhaps this is a question for a lawyer (maybe we have one reading HN...), but doesn't this give Dropbox too much freedom with my data? Would you still use their service with this policy in place? Am I overreacting??
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: Check it out at http://userfly.com/<p>In short, Userfly captures actual browsing sessions from real users as if you were looking over their shoulder. What we've found is that watching real users actually use your site can be remarkably insightful, so we built Userfly to accomplish that goal.<p>There's a screencast that will walk you through the basic functionality. Click on the demo button above it to mess around without having to sign up for an account.<p>Would love your feedback on the idea and its direction!
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Just curious, what drives you? Why exist?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Story/motivation behind the site at:<p>http://www.mobileorchard.com/iphone-developer-profiles/
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: My current Dell system is in need of replacement and I'm considering switching to a Mac with VMWare. I am a long time Windows user and my work involves mostly web development, research and technical writing. I use Eclipse, UltraEdit, SQLYog, WinSCP, TortoiseSVN, Adobe CS3, Camtasia Studio, MS Office and a local WAMP server for most of my work.<p>I've done quite a bit of research on hardware/software, but it's been hard to find objective opinions on switching to Mac. I'm especially interested in experiences from other web developers that recently switched to a Mac -- did you notice an appreciable improvement in workflow to justify the learning curve (OS, keyboard shortcuts, etc.)? Has your overall experience been positive?<p>Edit: To clarify, I would prefer using native Mac software over the VM wherever possible and have found equivalents to everything except Camtasia Studio.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I'm guessing others have this experience, the uncle who's the hardware salesman who thinks your sitting at home for the last 12 months and is loud about it, the relative who just nods and looks a bit sad when you tell them what you're doing. All folk who know nothing about startups, IT and what the process is, and with christmas coming I'm dreading it.<p>Has anyone hit on a magic formula to explain what you're doing in your startup so they'll leave you alone and stop suggesting maybe you can get a job in uncle bob's shop? / you did so well at school / and so on.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: The Subversion Sucks meme is popular on the Internet. However, if we imagine a world without Subversion and other centralized version control systems, it's easy to see why Subversion does not suck, is not fading away, and in fact, has a rapidly growing user base.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: I've been a professional developer about ten years now and I don't want to do it any more. I don't mean developing, I love coding. I mean work.<p>At every workplace (big to small, profit and non-, startup to hegemony), I'm enthusiastic the first couple weeks but inevitably slide to keeping up appearances with 2-6 hours of actual work per week. Sometimes I like coworkers and projects, sometimes I haven't. In any case, after a year or so I'm completely frustrated and I leave, to happily live off savings for a few months. Yeah, the million-dollar question from 'Office Space', find a way to make a career of whatever you'd do if you didn't have to have a career. It's possible, but it's the "career" part I hate. I fail to understand the Protestant Work Ethic. I don't see any reward in work, just lost time.<p>I've studied history some, things are great in America: abundant food, clean water, safe streets, no civil strife, no wars (yes, two occupations), effective medicine, efficient sanitation. It's not utopia, but there's no need to bust my ass to 'change the world'. The last 50 years are some of the best in history and the good times will likely keep rolling, so why waste them? Any if they're going to stop, why waste them?<p>Does anyone else feel like this?<p>I'm winding down on the best job I've ever had, two years at a small non-profit. It's taken longer, but I'm just as fed up with working. My plan is to take the money I've saved up and start a business. I think I've found a niche with a need, and if I can put enough in my pocket that I can buy insured and very low-risk securities to quietly live off a trickle of interest.<p>I've already done all the lifehack stuff, so I don't own or want to own much. I want my time, all of my time, to pursue my hobbies and relationships with friends and family. Consulting doesn't work, I'd have to charge hundreds per hour to work as little as I'd like, and that's before the client management/sales overhead. I've read 4 Hour Work Week and found the nuggets of good info in the fog of bad writing and hyperbole, but it basically comes down to becoming a manager. And if I was OK pushing pills I'd probably go hang out on the Digital Point forums to pick up some shady deals, but I have too much of a conscience.<p>I know it's not the PG startup plan, where you work like hell for a few years to make something people want. I just want to make a bankroll and get out. I'm not sure why I'm posting, except that hanging out here and reading about startups has made me think it's possible to break my frustrating cycle of work, and I'm curious to hear what folks think.
Upvote: | 224 |
Title: We have a large list of people waiting for invite codes, but we're having problems with our mass emails getting caught by spam filters. We're looking for a service that will help us see how many emails are bouncing or not, as well as sending emails with domainkeys authentication. We've looked at http://www.industrymailout.com, http://www.campaigner.com/, http://www.jangomail.com/, http://www.authsmtp.com. What do you use for sending mass emails? Any tips for getting past the spam filters to our legitimate subscribers?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Below is my decline (form) letter from applying to Seth Godin's Alternative MBA program. Did you apply? why or why not? what are your thoughts on the idea and Seth Godin in general?
---------------------<p>You are amazing.<p>I’m stunned.<p>Bowled over.<p>Amazed.<p>And optimistic about our future (and yours).<p>The applications I received were astonishingly good. Thorough and honest and clear and direct. They were motivating and demonstrated just how much people can do when they put their minds to it. I read every word of every application and I learned a lot.<p>If I had 60 seats, I still would have had too many people awe-inspiring applying. Unfortunately, I have nowhere near that, and so I had to make difficult, irrational and not particularly fair choices. Alas, I’m going to be unable to work with you in 2009. There are still interviews and such to go through, so I don’t have the final group selected, but I thought the fairest thing to do was let you know as soon as possible.<p>The good news, and I hope you think it’s good news, is that you don’t need me. As I said before, I have no magic wand, no secret recipe. Your decision to just make it happen, to push forward, to change... that was the hard part.<p>Go. Do that. Blow them away. I fully expect it will happen.<p>Thanks for taking the time and thanks for understanding.<p>Seth<p>PS I’m going to post on my blog about how stellar each of you are... and I’m linking to a Google listing of applications (all of them, accepted and not). If you don’t want to be seen by others, you should delete your lens (if you made one). But I think you should be extraordinarily proud of what you’ve built and what you’ve done... and you might even get a new gig because of it.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: This question is just for fun:<p>Let's say you sold your startup yesterday for enough cash that you never have to work or worry about money again.<p>What would you do now?
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Instead of asking for money, we thought we ought to pool the talents of our community (and the greater geek community) to improve the most worthy non-profits we could find (submissions and voting going on until next week). And for volunteering your time, you become eligible for some great prizes...
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: I am seeking an intern to work on the open-source probabilistic
learning of programs project over Summer 2009 at Google in Mountain
View, CA. Probabilistic learning of programs (plop) is a Common Lisp
framework for experimenting with meta-optimizing semantic evolutionary
search (MOSES) and related approaches to learning with probability
distributions over program spaces. Possible research topics to focus
on include:<p>* Learning procedural abstractions<p>* Adapting estimation-of-distribution algorithms to program evolution<p>* Applying plop to various interesting data sets<p>* Adapting plop to do natural language processing or image processing<p>* Better mechanisms for exploiting background knowledge in program evolution<p>This position is open to all students currently pursuing a BS, MS or
PhD in computer science or a related technical field. It is probably
better-suited to a grad student, but I'm open to considering an
advanced undergrad as well. The only hard and fast requirements for
consideration are a strong programming background (any language(s))
and some experience in AI and/or machine learning. Some pluses:<p>* Functional programming experience (esp. Lisp, but ML, Haskell, or
even the functional style of C++ count too)<p>* Experience with evolutionary computation or stochastic local search
(esp. estimation-of-distribution algorithms and/or genetic programming)<p>* Open-source contributor (esp. Maxima)<p>* Interest in artificial general intelligence (i.e. building a thinking
machine)<p>More info on plop at http://code.google.com/p/plop/, more info on the
Google internship program at: http://www.google.com/jobs/students<p>Please contact me directly (email: madscience at google) with your info, so I
can watch for your resume.<p>Thanks!
Moshe Looks<p>P.S. Disclaimer: I can't promise anyone an internship, you have to go
through the standard Google application & interview process for
interns, yada yada ...<p>P.P.S. Any Googlers reading this and looking for a cool 20% project should contact
me as well ;->
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Learn the subtle differences between Blocks, Procs and Lambdas with Ruby and how to use each effectively in your methods.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: This is in response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406995<p>How about each week or month (I know we're all busy, so perhaps monthly is better), we all agree on a book to read and discuss? I am very busy for many parts of the year, and often don't have time to read leisurely even though I would very much like to. I imagine the idea of an HN book club would help in this regard, as I would be much more motivated to make time (like a co-founder motivates you to keep going!).<p>What do you guys say? If this post has enough upvotes (say 10), start discussing options for the first book, and whether weekly or monthly would work better.<p>EDIT: lallysingh below has made the following suggestion of topics. This seems like a very good fit judging by the posts on HN, as well as the comments already present.<p>1. High-level programming, probably functional-related.<p>2. Business/startup<p>3. Some quality-of-life stuff.<p>Perhaps newer releases (or exotic material) might be a good choice due to the presence of ideas not yet assimilated, discussed, or pondered by many of us.<p>EDIT2: Judging by the time concerns below, maybe it is wise to start with something short (say under 250 pages).<p>EDIT3: If we're going to go with fiction, this looks like a good list to pick from:<p>http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/6.Best_Books_of_the_20th_Century<p>Personally, I've read almost none of these!
Upvote: | 126 |
Title: I used to have panic disorder, which I've essentially squashed through meditation practice. Panic cost me a job and a relationship, but I seem to have trained my mind well-enough of late to have PD in permanent remission.<p>I also tend to be mildly bipolar. I'm not diagnosed, but I've known myself to be cyclothymic since 13. I treat this as a spiritual and personal challenge. It only affects me 10-15 days out of the average year, and it allows me to have experiences that most people never will, so I regard it as a blessing, though a mixed one.<p>I'm extremely sensitive to light, sound, and drugs. I don't use recreational drugs, and "social drinking" is out of the question because a 5-year-old could drink me under the table. (I love beer, but I probably drink 1-2 per month.) The high school cafeteria was torture, because lunch was the main social context of that era, and I wanted to be a "normal kid" but the intensely loud noise rendered me a social cripple.<p>My most beautiful but also damaging mental quirk, however, is probably hypergraphia. I don't think I have OCD, but I have an intense compulsion to write. I'm good at it. I can pound out 2000 words of coherent English prose in half an hour. Unfortunately, it can be a bit dicey. When I had a blog, I'd inevitably find myself posting inappropriate personal confessions on it... hence the reason I do not have a blog. I've ruined relationships with brutally honest emails. I also used to have a "flame habit"; I was addicted to the flow state I could attain by launching offensive/provocative discussions on Internet message boards (that was before I came here) and watching hundreds of people react. Some of these online misbehaviors have been tied to my real name but, worse yet, the "troll" era has cost me an immense amount of time that could have been better employed.<p>If I could divert the hypergraphic tendency into a more precise (and, frankly, often more useful) form of writing-- code-- I would be able to go from a 5-6 hacker to a 8-9 in a matter of weeks. Unfortunately, I haven't refined this mental quirk to such a degree yet. Does anyone have any suggestions?<p>What mental challenges have you faced, and how have you dealt with them?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Best wishes to all of you. May the new year bring everything you hope for.<p>http://www.questionablecontent.net/comics/1303.png
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: For obvious reasons I created a new account for this post.<p>I just had a miserable 8 days where I suffered from an embarrassing and painful ailment called hemorrhoids which were the byproduct of a two day hack-a-thon. As embarrassing as this is to write, I wanted to provide a word of warning to hopefully prevent someone from having to endure the same annoyance.<p>Because I have a full-time job and only have weekends to work on our startup, last Saturday-Sunday we coded for 12 hours, slept 5, then coded for another 12. During that time, I sat at my desk for virtually every minute. I was certainly uncomfortable at times, but was getting so much done that I kept telling myself to grin and bear it. This was a catastrophic mistake! You should move around and shift positions a lot. Also, get a good chair. My wood chair with a cushion is not built for long term comfort.<p>My second error was diet. My diet constituted chips, cookies, soda, and candy. As peculiar as that sounds, I have always found a diet rich in junk food to be advantageous for coding. Turns out, it may help you accomplish more in a few hours, but it could cost you days of lost productivity if your system doesn't handle it well.<p>Finally on Monday I developed the problem which stemmed from the weekend. Twas a grind of a week and had to miss work nearly all of last week.<p>Until last week, I thought Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, poor eyesight, and bad posture were the only occupational hazards of hacking. Not so!<p>I hope by sharing this someone will avoid a repeat situation.<p>Please list any other warnings or health tips for hackers. And Merry Christmas!
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: The operations of <i>big</i> websites fascinate me. Sites such as http://highscalability.com/ give an glimpse into the architecture of Amazon, Twitter, and other large systems, but leave out the operations side. So, can anyone explain how they deploy new versions of their sites? For instance, I can't imagine Amazon choosing to go down for even a minute, so what do they do? Am I wrong? Thanks!
Upvote: | 110 |
Title: I wrote a short blog about Mark Cuban and his journey to becoming a billionaire. Not surprisingly, he was motivated by money. I always have disliked money as a source of motivation, I still do. Tonight at dinner I was caught off guard when my brother and both parents said "well of course everyone is driven by money... you mean you thought they were driven by something else?" Regardless, a guy came to my blog and posted a comment that I found inspirational:<p>---<p>This is the first time I have read a blog and of course the first post of any kind. As a 36 year old plumber I have been fired from every plumbing company I have ever worked for. All of them fired me after about a year. The reasons have all been the same, they asked my opinion about their problems and I told them the truth. It seems every company always has some sort of problems they deal with but never know the answers. The last job I had was running a new hospital project and after 9 months I was asked by management to get rid of half the plumbers and replace them with non-plumbers to drive down cost.<p>The short story is I said no way, it’s illegal and I want no part of it. I then said if they go over my head I will turn them in to the state dept. of health. Well, I was fired….With the economy the way it is no jobs are available. So with a family of 4 and a new house and $300 in checking I started my own plumbing company. Anyone who cares to listen here is what I have to say. Weeks went by with no customers calling and I didn’t know what to do.<p>We were out of money and my wife gave me a choice of getting a wal-mart type job or get out. That night I freaked out and was up all hours of the night just thinking and thinking. Then it came to me. My problem was simple, I was going about this backwards. Money is a stupid motivator, customers are the real motivator. So here is what I did. I went to a printer and had them print up a 1000 $50.00 gift cards on heavy paper stock all of them with code numbers. The next thing I did was go door to door and meet people one at a time. Ya, it was crazy at first but the people were blown away, they loved it. As of right now I am the number one plumber in a town of about 40,000 people and am looking to hire another plumber.<p>So whats the secret? Give people what they want. All these years I was right, most people let money motivate them and that creates poor decision making. I let the customer decide. The economy is tough so just give the customers what they want, money. People were so blown away they thought it was a joke. Think about it for a moment, have you ever heard of a business come to your door, shake your hand, and while looking in there eyes tell them you would like to earn the business and by they way here is a fifty dollar gift card that can be used anytime for any plumbing service they need.<p>When it’s all said and done I wished I would have done this years ago. I enjoyed the article about Mark Cuban but I think money is just a poor motivator, money is the result of good business practice. My wife by the way thought it was crazy to give $50 to everyone I meet, she was wrong, but now she is my biggest fan. That $50 is nothing when you consider a customer spends thousands during the course of a life time, not to mention they spread word of mouth business like fire. Mike
Upvote: | 233 |
Title: Last night, I got this idea to create a Gmail account for my 15 month old son, and start emailing him daily about "things". Let me explain.<p>Especially the last four months, my son has been a lot of fun for us. Everyday he has been learning new things and making us smile with a new peculiarity he develops. My wife and I point these things to each other and talk about these. But, I always wanted to find a way to document them.<p>I thought of documenting these into a text file in my laptop. Although I use Emacs extensively and I do a lot of writing, I never got myself to write about my son. I guess that failed because it felt too impersonal and mechanistic. It felt like a scientist writing about a subject.<p>I thought of having a blog for the baby, but that felt too pretentious. I wouldn't want the blog to be open to public. I am not doing this to show off to other people. Then, who is the audience?<p>The audience is my son. By addressing my writing to him, now I suddenly have more incentive to write about him. The email is also the perfect medium for this. I will be sending him emails daily, which he can read when he grows up. Email is informal, so it is much easier to write emails than more formal letters, articles, or blogs. Finally, Gmail will be doing all the safe-storing, timestamping, and indexing for us automatically.<p>My wife loved the idea. She will also be doing this everyday. Since we will both be doing it, chances are we will support each other to keep sustain the practice. I hope to continue this until at least my son is 5 years old. I think this will also serve as an excuse of a diary. I hope when my son reads these he will have a window into our souls.<p>I wish I had thought of this or heard of this earlier. (I am sure somebody must have thought of this earlier, but my google searches do not return anything.) Anyways, the reason I am posting this to HN is twofolds. If you are a parent, you might also want to start trying this for your toddler. Or, maybe you may think about a creative service to cultivate this practice. For example, you may provide an application that downloads the accumulated emails and puts them together as a pdf, and even orders them to be printed as a book that the parents can give as a gift to the child. Another service might be to deliver these emails to the child daily: this is what your parents wrote about you this day in 2009--2014. Another idea would be to data-mine the child's developmental and health history from these accounts for medical and statistical purposes.
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Hi,<p>I have developed a small side project which I will post on here when it's ready to go.<p>It's not meant to make any money and I only store a very small amount of info - it uses OpenID only to login/register.<p>Do I need a T&C / privacy policy?<p>If so, is there a template for one lying around?
I don't want to spend much time on this - I want to launch the project and move on to the next one.<p>Cheers<p>kev_the_dev
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Is it crazy to quit a 6+ figure salaried job to do a startup right now? Is my new year's resolution misguided? Was thinking about pulling the trigger tomorrow.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: There was a ton of hacker news in 08.
What were your favorite threads?
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: nice tutorial on how a simple x86 OS works
Upvote: | 130 |
Title: That's just a link to the blurb; here's the full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/22/diy-adjustable-glasses-josh-silver
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: How often do you backup?<p>Is it automated or manual?<p>Do you run your own script, or use some opensource/paid solution?<p>Do you encrypt your backup data?<p>Which files do you backup? DB? source? images?<p>How many and which sources do you backup to?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: So there seem to be some major trade-offs between AWS and dedicated servers, the most obvious of which being that AWS seems much more difficult to configure, while it's easier and cheaper to scale.<p>Considering I only have experience with setting up dedicated servers, I was wondering if someone with experience setting both up could comment on whether the difficulties of using AWS outweigh the benefits.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: I just saw a comment by pg reminding another commenter of the HN guidelines.<p>http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html<p>This seems like an opportune time to ask how I might implement the guidelines quoted below:<p>"What to Submit<p>"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<p>"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."<p>I've read most of pg's essays<p>http://paulgraham.com/articles.html<p>over the years, so I have some sense of his intellectual interests, and I remember the very early phase of Reddit (which I think was seeded with participants by a bunch of personal friends of pg and the Reddit founders). But please inform me so I do better. I can see empirically which links and which "Ask HN" posts get upvoted the most, but which links and which Ask HN posts are the ones you would most like to see? What posts that gratify intellectual curiosity should there be more of?<p>Still learning at age fifty,
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I've been coding away on my startup for a few months, the end is nearly in sight (for the beta at least) -- my product is a product similar to Techmeme and other news aggregators, but focussing on news recommendation of quality, not speed (ala Newspapers)<p>Where would you advertise? Would you sponsor a relevant blog, or advertise via Google Adwords / the deck etc?<p>Or would you put that $1k towards "impressing" blogs and marketing tools?
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Recorded almost a year ago (before the bank busts, and shortly after Zed’s first famous rant), this presentation was given to about 400 Canadian undergraduate software engineers and computer scientists. Zed talks about management and his ACL-killer at a bank job accompanied by Factor-powered slideware. Also: steaks, strippers, and statistics.<p>N.B. This video might damage your vision of Zed swearing all the time and may make it seem like the last year of ranting was a terrible joke gone wrong. Oops.<p>P.S. - Check out this year’s lineup (Ingalls, Stallman, Bryant, Culver, Hwang, and Bowkett are just the keynotes). This is one of Canada's best kept secrets, and tickets are super cheap.
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: We charge for private repositories at GitHub. As a result, we often
get emails from students asking for free, private accounts (usually
of the $7/mo or $12/mo variety).<p>"I'm working on a website with some friends and we don't have any
money. If we start making money, we'll gladly move to a paid account!"<p>While we offer free private accounts to instructors for classes, we
haven't given students free accounts to work on commercial projects in
the past.<p>Should we? Would you?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Google never liked Cisco. Now they've gone sour on Juniper. They've decided to do it themselves.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: With a price tag of $0.150/GB/month, storing 1TB of data costs around $150/month on Amazon S3. But this is a recurring amount. So, for the <i>same</i> amount of data it would cost $1800/year and $3600/2-years. And this doesn't even include the data transfer costs.<p>Consider the alternative, with colocation the hardware cost of storing 1TB of data on two machines (for redundancy) would be around $1500/year. But this is fixed. And increasing the storage capacity on each machine can be done at the price of $0.1/GB. Which means that a RAID-1+redundant copies of data on multiple servers for 4TB of data could be achieved at $3000/year and $6000/2-years in a colocation facility. Whereas on S3 the same would cost $7200/year and $14,400/2-years.<p>Also, adding bandwidth+power+h/w replacement costs at a colocation facility would still keep the costs significantly lower than Amazon S3.<p>Given this math, what is the rationale behind going with Amazon S3? The Smugmug case study of 600TB of data stored on S3 seems misleading.<p>I do see several services that offer unlimited storage which is actually hosted on S3. For example, Smugmug, Carbonite etc. all offer unlimited storage for a fixed annual fee. Wouldn't this send the costs out of the roof on Amazon S3?<p>If your startup is using Amazon S3 for its storage needs, for the benefit of the startup community, can you please elaborate your rationale for choosing this service?
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Practically every morning when I tune into HN, I find an announcement of at least one if not more new apps related to Twitter. I always check the comments to see if anyone else is as sick of Twitter apps as I am, but all I ever find are other hackers cheering them on.<p>So, am I the only one who thinks there's an enormous waste of developer/entrepreneurial resources here? Aren't there more interesting problem spaces for developers to explore -- especially ones that are relevant to people outside the ubergeek set most us belong to?<p>This isn't meant to be a rant against Twitter, and it's certainly not a rant against any individual one of those apps or developers working on them. (In fact, I posted this as a separate discussion because I didn't one to impugn any one developer or group's efforts.)<p>But I'm just curious if anyone else feels the same way as I do -- or if Twitter is such a revolutionary new platform, akin to email or blogging, that I'm being short-sighted in poo-pooing innovation efforts in the space.
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: "One of the most masterful hacks of the financial system in history."
Upvote: | 224 |
Title: I've been approached by some investors who want to invest in my startup. They've asked me to put together a business plan - listing costs/revenue etc. Do I include my salary costs in this or do I assume that I won't be taking a salary? Any feedback/reading material will help!
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: At school we often had to draw class diagrams, basically boxes containing some text, with arrows pointing to other boxes. The free tool we were using for this was made with Java, and would often be very buggy and was generally hated. I couldn't really find anything I liked and ended up making the diagrams in Gimp, not fun. I was really pining for a small perhaps Flash-based web tool that would let me make diagrams and download as PDF.
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: "the room at bally's started at 69 bucks.. then it was 59 bucks.. i just rebooked it again at 50 bucks! i figure if i keep going they're going to pay me to stay there. meanwhile, i also think i figured something else out.. that rate came up after i had been doing some housecleaning on my laptop.. and deleted all the cookies and the web browser history. i wonder if that made me appear on the bally's web site to be a totally new customer?"
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Semi interesting background - part of the team behind Sproost met each other here on HN.<p>We always respect the HN community feedback. Thanks in advance for your comments on what we've built so far...<p>http://www.sproost.com
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: My brother is 13 and asked me to teach him "how to code". I really don't know what programming language would be the best to start at this age.<p>First I thought of C because it will also teach him how the Linux he runs was made. But… I hate C.
I personnally learned programming with OCaml and Pascal. I still love OCaml (pattern matching FTW), but it didn't really teach me anything about Unix…<p>I'm looking for a language that would be easy to learn, with a beautiful syntax, and that would gently introduce a 13 year old to the amazing world of Unix/Linux.<p>Any ideas?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I've starting reading SICP but haven't been too good at keeping at it. Does anyone want to join in to help each other work through the exercises and stay on track?
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: In April, I left my job at a hedge fund. This was, admittedly, not the best time to leave a job in New York, but I needed out because the lack of purpose in my work was starting to affect my health.<p>Even though we didn't "technically" know ourselves to be in a recession, I knew something bizarre was going on that summer. I had some really surprising rejections. I never find rejection to be shocking, because even if you're really good, you might not be a fit... but I got turned down for in-person interviews at companies that would have been slam-dunks (for in-person interview) in mid-2007.<p>Anyway, I found my way to a really cool startup and began working there, the only downside being that pay would be deferred until we had funding. I was told that we'd probably have funding by November. I figured January - March was more likely, since PG's essays have educated me on the fact that funding matters are always a lot worse than expected, but I had enough savings from the hedge fund days to hold out that far.<p>It's January. I enjoy the work a lot more than I have at prior companies. The problem is that I have no control over the funding situation, and it's started to scare the shit out of me the minute we crossed into 2009. I only have 5-7 months of living expenses now (<i>fuck</i> New York's ridiculous housing costs). I honestly have no idea what I'll do if this doesn't pan out. I don't want to go back to Wall Street and might not be able to (there may not <i>be</i> a Wall Street). With an imploded economy, even a traditional job search is going to be risky and time-consuming. I don't have any contacts that could lead into consulting projects, and taking a typical software job (Java to implement some business guy's lame vision) is about as palatable as selling out and getting an MBA. I want to stay in technology, but working on cool projects and using decent languages (e.g. Lisp, ML, Haskell... or Python/Ruby at the very least).<p>If the startup gets funding, and it probably will, I'm fine. However, I'm worried about that 1-in-20 (?) chance that we don't manage to line up funding in time, in which I need to do a crash job search in an imploded economy and on shaky ground (and I don't want to do <i>any</i> job search, because I really like the startup and the projects I am working on). It's getting to the point where I hate spending money and I'm delaying necessary expenditures.<p>So, I'm staring down a 1-in-10 or 1-in-20 risk of utter disaster and now that it's 2009 I'm starting to get scared. Has anyone here been through disaster before? How did it pan out?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: A few notes in defense of libertarianism:<p>In response to the recent slew of articles posted to HN criticizing libertarianism, I have decided to jot down a few points that I think were overlooked.<p>First, George W. Bush and the Republican party are NOT libertarians. Zed's argument was essentially this, and it's about as logical as declaring that you're going to write an essay about the flaws of vegetarianism and then proceeding to mention a bunch of bad things about pepperoni.<p>Republicans occasionally use some libertarian rhetoric, but they do not follow it at all. George W. Bush has increased the size of government tremendously, and he's intervened in international affairs and created all kinds of entangling alliances, etc. Libertarians are also strongly opposed to the "family values" rhetoric used mostly by Republicans and by some democrats. Libertarians have been opposed to nearly everything Dubya has done, from No Child Left Behind to the Iraq war to the Treasury's bailout of wall street.<p>Before we continue, I'd like to recommend two books for those curious about what libertarianism actually is -- Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" and David Boaz's "Libertarianism: A Primer". Both articulate a lot of the philosophical and pragmatic aspects. Of course, Atlas Shrugged is interesting for its presentation of a moral argument in favor of capitalism. Notably, it is mainly a critique of crony capitalism, something I think most people would agree is quite different from what capitalism should be.<p>I've found that many times, people stop at the superficial goal of a government program when determining how they feel about it. Social Security is an example: The idea of everyone paying 1% and then being able to offer everyone basic financial security in old age is not controversial -- I'd say most libertarians would consider it very low on the list of programs that ought to be changed. However may people seem to stop with the program's initial goal and forget about the trends -- increasing costs and increasing retirement age, and no guarantee that the congress (and the public) will support the necessary tax increases needed to keep benefits remotely the same.<p>So some consider the program "good" because it has a noble end, and others express scepticism because of the various deficiencies.<p>It's worth noting that if we judged all programs by the nobility of the proposed end, there would be absolutely no reason to think any of them would be successful.<p>One argument I am quite sympathetic to is that with federalism we get "50 experiments in democracy" to paraphrase the Federalist Papers. Doing a program at the federal level is like using 1 Petri dish, and doing it at the state level is like having 50... which seems more scientific to you?<p>I'd like to see state legislatures, governors, etc., challenged to come up with creative ways of solving the nation's great problems... this doesn't really happen today. Instead, both parties raise vast sums of money fighting over "wedge issues" that are extremely unlikely to change any time soon. It would take a 2/3 majority to create any of the amendments that the parties promise/refuse, and that's just not likely to happen the way congress is at present. Federalism is a good example of a concept embraced by libertarians -- it respects the basic "engineering" that the legislative process actually is, and recognizes that the first solution may not be the best one. I think it's hard to read the Federalist papers without seeing the whole process as a massive engineering work in progress. So it's just good QA to have a lot of tests running simultaneously.<p>It's probably not necessary to mention this, but libertarians aren't opposed to regulation, they just try to have a clear-headed view of the actual outcome regulation without getting attached to the stated goal of the regulation. One study that was done by Regulation magazine (affiliated with Cato) showed how an EPA law about polution failed to account for how wind blows pollution between municipalities. Anyone who cares about the planet would hope that environmental regulation be as effective as possible. Cato wasn't throwing stones at the idea behind the regulation, just the alpha version of it (which was the first and only attempt, and current law). Critics would claim that Cato's critique proves that the institute opposes environmental regulation of all kinds, an assumption which couldn't be further from the truth.<p>People respond to incentives, and every law or regulation creates winners and losers and sets in motion incentives that will have effects over time. Libertarianism is about having a scientific view of this and not getting attached to the first attempt. I see how this is possible when everything seems like it's winner take all, which it is at the federal level, which is yet another reason why it would make more sense to focus on state laws as trial versions of important regulation, so that after a few years other states would modify their laws to include the best ideas of other states, not just on paper but the ideas that actually got the best results and lent themselves to the most effective enforcement.<p>I should add that libertarianism does try to maximize freedom, both social and economic. People should be able to have adult sex lives free from government intervention -- anal sex, oral sex, gay sex, etc. But they should also be free to engage in whatever they want to do economically -- buy some marijuana, take a job that pays $1 per hour, invest in risky stocks, etc.<p>Compared to libertarians, those in both parties are extremely paternalistic about some or all of these things. Paternalism is the idea that someone sitting on high is in a better position to decide what you should be ALLOWED to do than you are.<p>Part of the allure of many politicians is, I think, the "Frodo Baggins" similarity -- an inexperienced yet pure of heart leader to vanquish evil and usher in drastic change. Ironically both George W. Bush and Obama fit into this mold. Libertarians are skeptical of this top-down wisdom and are hesitant to put too much power in the hands of one person. I forget who said this, but "power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely". One question to ask is, if people had trusted George W. Bush less or if he'd had less power, would we have had a hugely expensive, wasteful, futile war?<p>Bottom line: libertarianism is about economic and social freedom, an engineering approach to legislative problem solving, and a scientific assessment of the actual effects that regulations cause. Ironically, libertarianism is painted as extreme when it's actually the least dogmatic of the major political persuasions. Note that you may have gotten quite irate at the mention of states deciding Roe v Wade, at the thought of discontinuing social security, etc. If you did, it's because you are reacting in a dogmatic, not a scientific way. Libertarians have the courage (and the philosophical obligation) to continue to question reality at the expense of loyalty to the grand causes of either party.
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: One of the startups in the current YC cycle is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet. If there are any Excel power users here, could you please describe anything you'd like to be able to do that you can't currently? Your reward could be to have some very smart programmers working to solve your problem.
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I find the comments on HN to often be much better quality than the actual link. As a result, I've been clicking on the comments first, and then decide whether to read the full article. A somewhat strange reading habit - just wondering if others do this too?
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Several 'Review my app' type of questions are posted here every day. The questions are either just a link to the app in question, or an explanatory post containing the URL which we are supposed to copy/paste to visit it.<p>Am I the only one wishing that I could just click the link in the latter type of questions? I understand why the restriction is in place, to prevent spam/abuse/etc, it's even in the FAQ. However, if the question is legitimate and gets upvoted, why not just show the link after a certain number of upvotes?<p>Do I make any sense?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: HN crew -<p>What is your advice for the best provider to accept micropayments? Ideally the economics work for products that are $0.99 - but anywhere from $0.99 - $9.99 would be ideal.<p>Obviously the transaction charge is what makes the small prices so difficult... any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Python is 19 years old and Guido Van Rossum is starting a new blog on the history of the language. Here is the from his regular blog that announces it. http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-introduction.html
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: http://www.txtful.com/<p>We're a small bootstrapped team based in Chicago who've built a platform that anyone can easily use to take a bit of functionality on the web and make it accessible via text message, IM, email, Twitter, etc.<p>We've learned lots from reading other people's submissions and comments here on HN, but we now would like to open it up to the community and get some direct feedback about what's good and what can be improved.<p>The beta is still private so that we can manage the demand, but the first 100 people who use this Invite Code get in:<p>HACKERNEWS<p>After that I promise we'll get invite codes out to everyone else who is interested ASAP.<p>Thanks in advance for all your help!<p>Ted Homatas
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: How do you deal with social alienation? Over the past couple of years of high school, I've slowly lost contact with all of my friends. Whenever I do speak with them, I constantly think about the differences between me and them, and why I'm not friends with them anymore. Despite that, I'm so alone now that I desperately want to have a peer group to be with again.
The problem is that the only people I consider to be good friends all have different interests, and all belong to different social groups. I have no social group of my own and go back and forth between their friend circles. It seems that their respective friend circles are very close knit.I always feel like the odd one out of whatever group I'm with at the time.<p>I don't think I could consider my close friends a social group of it's own, as they are all from different groups and aren't friends with each other.<p>Am I setting my standards for friends too high? I don't think I am, because I just want a friend that I can talk to on a wide variety of subjects, not just the few we have in common. I can't do that with anyone I know. I feel like when I talk to my "friends", I either have to talk all about computers, or all about music, or whatever that they're interested in, but never a mixture of everything. The peer groups I see are all so specialized and serve niche interests; none of them are generally interested in everything.<p>I feel even worse about this, because I think that because I am feeling like this, that it makes me a walking adolescent stereotype. I feel like just another Holden, which probably makes the entire situation worse. I'm being self-conscious about myself being self-conscious, so that probably doesn't help.<p>I feel like I can recognize the flaws in how I handle friendships, but I have no idea of how to solve them.<p>The only thing that feels like a solution is waiting until I am out of high school to find new people. Everyone has told me to wait until college, and then I will find new people, but everyone I know in college generally sticks with the same friend group that they had in high school (hence why I would know), so I don't have much hope in that.<p>How do you go about meeting new interesting people? How do you stop yourself from over-analyzing your current friendships? I never post here on HN, but I love reading the articles and discussions, and you seem like a wise and interesting bunch of people. Please give me your advice. Whenever I try to talk to people in person about this, they just tell me that they don't know what to say, and I can't stand talking to psychologists because they seem to just regurgitate what you want to hear repeatedly.<p>Where are the truly interesting people in life?
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: I would like to show a product demo video (screen capture) on my homepage. Seems like this is a common requirement. Can anyone share some advice from their experiences?<p>What software do you use to produce the videos? Any free solutions? What resolutions worked well for capturing text in a browser? Streaming or progressive download? Any other hints?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I'm about to get laid off from a very nice job, but I have a couple of projects I'd like to focus on. Does anybody know of ANY job where I can sit at my desk and more or less hack away at what I really want to work on?<p>Jobs I've been looking at:<p>house sitting<p>night shift security<p>library desk<p>etc.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I've just been a little curious about this recently, since I've noticed things appearing that weren't there before. I now have a "flag" link under the title on comments pages, and can set a topcolor in my profile. What becomes unlockable, and what are the milestones to each?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Hi guys,<p>I have three good ideas, each of which I'd be capable of creating. But they're all significant investments of my time, and I really need help deciding which one is better.<p>My goals are: a business that will provide me with a reasonable income, in an interesting problem space, that will grow quickly allowing me to become self employed.<p>Having made a decision I can work much more quickly on the best idea.<p>________________________________________<p>Idea 1. <i>Decent Performance Tools for Linux</i><p>Problem: Performance data on Linux is distributed in many places, obfuscated, and very poorly documented.<p>Idea: This started out as a better version of the unix top command that I mentioned on Hacker News at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=405361. I'd like to expand on this to offer a full suite of performance analysis tools - eg, an visual strace analyser, allowing you to:<p>* highlight errors<p>* focus on just what happened to a particular file<p>* fold 'the looking through every folder in ld.co.conf' into a neat summary of whether a library was found or not<p>* allow context for each recorded system call, eg, what each system call argument means, what package owns files being operated on, etc.<p>Pros:<p>* Its an area few people have explored, that I'm interested in.<p>Cons:<p>* I haven't figured out a decent way to monetize this. The community is used to free tools. Perhaps a Ghostscript style setup, where older releases are Open Sourced after a year, but the latest features require a subscription?<p>* Unix people often blindly prefer the way that Unix implements anything by default over alternatives - selling to them could be frustrating.<p>____________________________________<p>Idea 2. <i>Overseas Buying Agent</i><p>Problem: When you travel, you can often find particular clothing brands are cheaper overseas. Converse is cheap in the US, but expensive everywhere else. Hugo Boss is cheap in Germany, but expensive in the UK. Australian Swimwear labels are cheap in Australia, but expensive in the US. Agent Provocateur is available in the UK, but sometimes not available at all overseas. Prada is cheap in Italy. But you can't travel all the time.<p>Idea: A web based overseas buying service. Full service, deliberately targeted at the fashion market, not a re-posting service. Users would log in, provide some instructions, and have a human agent purchase whatever they need in another country. The agent would open the package, insert a card, send the now 'as new' (but second hand) goods onto the user.<p>Pros: As an Australia -> UK expat, I have good contacts in Australia, the UK, Germany and the US. The business could be quite fun. My wife is in the fashion industry.<p>Cons: Potential for legal hassles, even though the goods are now second hand. Can I rely on my close friends to work, even if they're being paid?<p>_____________________________________<p>Idea 3. <i>Security Analysis Tool</i><p>Problem: Large business need to check server's compliance to a known standard (eg, ISO security standards) and produce a report stating the compliance results. Have noticed in my last two day jobs that the solutions to do this are incredibly poor - unpackaged software, which don't comply with modern operating systems (eg, the Linux definition files are for Solaris circa 1992), far too many false positives, and no proper guidelines to actually fixing the servers.<p>Pros: I know businesses want these tools. They're easy to program. The competition is both technically poor, and poor to look at (making it hard to sell).<p>Cons: I'd be competing with some very large software companies.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: To give some background, I'm looking into building a Linux-based touch-screen device that I can run stuff on.<p>I have no knowledge in electrical engineering or anything of the sort. I'm primarily a web developer, trying to move away from just doing web apps. I have a bit of C knowledge, and I have a plan on how I'm going to go about doing this (prospectively.)<p>I have a hard time figuring out where to start.<p>I don't have access to a college, so I can't really take a course. With everything tech-related, the only choice I've ever had was to self-learn, so I'm looking for any textbooks or books in general that will give a crash-course on electrical engineering, PCBs, and building hardware in general.<p>I'm especially interested in Picwing's Smart Frame. They've built a Linux-based(?) hardware device with wifi and Flash (though I'm not looking into doing Flash)<p>###<p>So to pose a question: how would you suggest I get started on the path of building a touch-screen device, with no knowledge of building hardware stuff?<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: When you have a startup, you hear a lot of mean words about people who want you to fail. It's time to talk about it. Feel free to add a link.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I really like Hans Rosling, Clay Shirky, Richard Dawkins, and Nick Bostrom's talks. I've found TED talks to be pretty hit-or-miss, so I'm reaching out to HN.<p>I'm also aware of this thread:
http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=16384
but I'm more interested in what you guys think.
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: Warning: This question is likely so stupid that I'm going to wish I had posted it anonymously to avoid ridicule, but what the hell :)<p>I find the subject of space exploration and colonization fascinating, but the incredible costs for access to space seem to be a nearly-insurmountable obstacle to true progress in these areas. I've recently become interested in the Google Lunar X Prize and started looking at the teams who are competing. While these teams are probably going to accomplish some amazing things, I suspect they're going to do it on the back of tens of millions in funding...is that truly the only way?<p>I guess my question is something like this: is there any <i>theoretical</i> way to win something like the Lunar X Prize for $1 million? $100k? $10k?<p>Here are some ridiculous thoughts that I've had:<p>1. Using high-altitude balloons to cut down on launch costs.<p>2. Going small. Very small. Like a pound or two for the rover. Maybe smaller.<p>3. Getting the cost low enough that you can launch multiple missions, knowing that most will fail.<p>4. Travel to the moon over a period of months...would this reduce launch difficulty?<p>I'm sure I'm probably missing the scale of the problem here, and perhaps the simple laws of physics dictate that there's no cheap solution that we know of yet. Or is there?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrderPresidentialRecords/
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: I wish you both all the joy and blessings which a child brings. The up side is you're used to short nights from the startup lifestyle, so you can pull the night shift with the kid!<p>But in all seriousness, congratulations and I wish you all the best :)
Upvote: | 149 |