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Title: As I write this, there are currently three Obama submissions in the top 5 and four in the top 20. I get it, people are excited. I get excited about things, too. Sometimes they involve computers or programming or business.<p>Come on guys, you've got four more years with the man. Maybe eight. You don't have to wear the keyboards out in the first week. Exercise some discretion, please -- if Obama puts a bunch of grants for tech startups in the stimulus package let's hear about it.<p>Obama wears a bullet proof vest? Obama reverses Bush policy decision X? I don't think we'd be noticeably poorer if that kind of story was handled by other forums on the Internet.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I can't seem to get any code written during the day, just too hectic.<p>My favorite time to code is between about 10pm and 3am when the world is asleep and there are few interuptions.<p>So, question: When do you code?
Extra Credit: What do you do to give yourself more time to code during other parts of the day?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Lately, I've noticed that some really good submissions aren't making it to the homepage.<p>Help bring back great articles -- once or twice a day, hit the new link at the top and see if there is anything worth upmodding!<p>It'll only take a minute and can really help what makes it to the homepage!
Upvote: | 157 |
Title: Just curious how you guys get your freelance jobs and contracts. Word of mouth? Advertising? Self marketing (i.e. blogs)? Job boards? Other?<p>Curious to hear what you guys out there do.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: In the future I plan to let people put code in their profiles to customize various aspects of HN for themselves. What would you like to be able to customize?<p>(Note: This may not happen especially soon, and at first the options will be very limited.)
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: My current job is pissing me off. Most of the people I work with don't seem to have a clue as to what they are doing. I'm given a "must do next-day" priority, then the next day they change their mind and I'm off to work on whatever else they think is important today. We're a community-focused site and yet there's little care shown for site size, future extensibility, best practices, building for the future, etc.<p>I have spent over a year trying to improve the situation, promoting better development practices, evangelizing community oriented features, and more. The other frontend developer and I are constantly ignored and major frontend decisions are being made by the lead of engineering who is a straight "Java expert". Frontend dev is a completely separate team with our own manager, and yet nothing is done to respect or even solicit our ideas and opinions.<p>I'm just tired of regretting waking up each morning and slogging uphill through a mountain of mud and not having achieved anything at the end of the day.<p>I want to work on something important, where we can build and iterate fast and where I can have a hand in shaping the future of what I'm working on.<p>I do a lot of side experimental projects ranging from better CSS and javascript techniques to building around public APIs and experimenting with new languages. For example, I've been working pretty heavily for the last 2 months on implementing a server-side javascript environment based on V8 and got an API proxy working in Google App Engine 2 nights ago in a few hours. (I've never used nor touched Python before that). I released a Twitter promo tool on Google Code a couple weeks ago (http://code.google.com/p/fathomer/). I want to be in a place where if I am working on something cool on the side, there's a chance that it could be used and further adopted by the business.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: What web framework(s) do you guys (and girls) use? And why not their competitors?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: What cities are good for hackers that don't require a car? Being a hacker I can be anywhere, but I'm tired of driving across country in a car.<p>It would be nice to fly somewhere that has good public transit. Good connectivity, inexpensive cost of living, and good people.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: One of my favorite movies is the 2004 film Primer which was written, directed, scored, and stars a mathematician and software engineer. Aside from the obvious (gems like Wargames, King of Kong- stinkers like the Matrixes and Hackers) what other (good) tech films are there?
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: I'm nearing the end of my undergraduate Computer Science degree and I've been presented with the opportunity to read/study for a PhD fully funded by my University. The trouble is, I also hold job offers with two of the most prominent software vendors in the world. I'm at a cross roads as to which route to take at this point.<p>To add further confusion to my life, I've also been given a great idea for a startup and have the chance of working with a really cool co-founder. I really don't know which way to go with this one, any ideas?<p>I'll give a short description of the startup just in case you are wondering. My friend did a year long industrial work placement at a finance company while at University. He worked in the anti money laundering division. While he was there he had to use some god awful enterprise software that made use of some pretty bad pattern matching algorithms. Basically, he wants to do a startup with me where we would develop a SaaS based application to do pattern matching against bank transaction records to spot fraud, this is a big market with a few well established players. There is no doubt that we can make better software with better pattern matching algorithms, our problem is getting clients (same with everything I guess).
The software is commonly refered to as AML software in case you wanted to do a small amount of background reading on it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-money_laundering_software)
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I am getting a lot of stress lately and have trouble focusing, so I'm looking to start meditating to help my case. I failed to find something useful on searchyc.com. My only experience with this are the 5-minute meditations a professor made us do in class. I am basically failing to see the difference between meditation and sitting on the couch and watching empty space for a couple of minutes.<p>So, what is the hacker way to meditation? Do you have any tips as to how to approach it? Thanks!
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: The only books in that vein I know are "The Art Of War" by Sun Tzu and Clausewitz' "Vom Kriege". I suspect german book shops don't tend to stock as many books on war as some other countries (I remember seeing the "military" section of a bookstore for the first time in London).<p>Anyway, I would be interested in more detailed stuff, like how to use tanks, planes and so on. Maybe analysis of historical battles would be good, too.<p>I guess it won't help with a startup, but for some reason I have wondered about this (maybe for strategy game development...).
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: I checked searchyc - doesn't look like there's ever been a discussion about this! What blogs do you love? Not even what blogs do you think are best, what ones do you love reading?<p>My favorites: The Big Contrarian (http://www.bigcontrarian.com/), which has incredible essays (one of the best is on something like the third-to-last page), All of Andy Baio's blog posts and links (http://waxy.org/), Daring Fireball (http://daringfireball.net) - which I started reading <i>before</i> I was a Mac user, and which got me into both Apple stuff and typography, so perhaps there's a bias - and Shawn Blanc writes excellent reviews of software he loves (http://shawnblanc.net/).<p>What about you? Which blogs really get you going?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Fantastic implementation.
Upvote: | 164 |
Title: This post is inspired by the "Wikipedia list of algorithms" submission at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457579 . Props to soundsop.<p>On several different occasions I've brought up the Wikipedia page on discrete cosine transforms and hoped to understand it. This selection was made because DCTs are apparently fundamental algorithms for lossy data compression like that found in JPEGs or MP3s or whatever. I want to be able to write decoders for these things -- I've poked around in mplayer's source and want to change stuff, want to create a JPEG decoder as proof-of-concept to myself, etc.<p>But, here's the hitch: I have no mentionable background in mathematics. I got up to geometry in high school (i.e., I know cosines in triangles but have no idea what a cosine wave is, how it works, and/or how they're related if at all). Where can I learn all of the things I need to learn for these things to make sense to me, and to become blessed with the skills and understanding necessary to create and/or decode such algorithms? I need something somewhat simple and plain, something I don't have to chain through five hundred articles to understand -- that's the problem with WP; I don't understand one thing, so middle-click it, do that about ten times per math article, including on the articles I opened to understand the first article, and there's a never-ending lot of WP articles for me to read, and that's not really tenable. I need something focused on teaching, not necessarily technical precision and exhaustiveness.<p>I know what a logarithm is, I looked it up. I've also tried #math on Freenode but those dudes just don't know how to talk to someone without any mathematical training. Ask for a simple explanation there, it's usually kind of funny.<p>Please help me. Thanks. : )
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: There's been a big spike in new users the last couple days.
Unfortunately it's been visible not only in the traffic stats
but in the character of the comment threads.<p>New users: we'd appreciate it if you'd please read the site
guidelines before commenting. Most importantly, the principle
that you shouldn't say anything in a comment that you
wouldn't say to someone's face.<p>http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html<p>Hacker News is an experiment. We're
trying to see whether by asking people to be civil we can
avoid the kind of nastiness that anonymity breeds by default.
The experiment has worked so far. And while the new users
may not realize it, this is why they're here. People like it here because one can have a civil conversation.<p>The principle that you shouldn't say things you wouldn't
say to someone's face means you can't express yourself the
way you might be used to doing on Reddit or Slashdot.
This, for example, would not stand out on either of those
sites,<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459250<p>but it's not cool here.
Upvote: | 532 |
Title: Cornify is all about giving internet users choice of customization. MySpace is a great example of a successful company with a similar vision. Facebook with its Windows 3.1 look - not so much. Cornify provides a service that allows users to cover any website in a beautiful array of unicorn and rainbow imagery - taking back the web one 'corn at a time.<p>To give credit where credit is due, this concept was heavily inspired by AddThis.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: I was thinking about group think and how to keep it out of HN. And I ran into a fundamental problem/cause:<p>Psychologically, people naturally follow groupthink. No matter how much you stress not following it, they'll still be inclined to follow the herd.<p>So just saying "try not to follow groupthink" isn't good enough. Instead, why not make it less possible to follow groupthink?<p>So here's my suggestion: stop displaying the points. Maybe still gray out downvoted comments, but I think even that is unnecessary. They'll float down to the bottom of the thread anyway. And I know that when I see a downvoted thread, I read it differently. I don't say "maybe a couple people just didn't like what they said, and it was actually ok" coming into it, I say "what did this person do wrong? What stupid thing did they say?" I come into it biased because of the points it has.<p>Same goes for a comment with a lot of points. I say, "what great wisdom does this person have for me?" and thus am naturally more inclined to upvote it or at least like it.<p>The rankings would still work the same, so the good comments would still float to the top, but there wouldn't be an absolute number to tell you "this is amazing" or "this sucks." High posts might just be very new. Low posts might just have gone unnoticed or been overshadowed by more amazing ones.<p>I realize that the points serve many positive purposes too, and it's just an idea, but I think if individual, unprejudiced discussions are what we want, eliminating the display of points would help a lot.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hello everyone,
Well, I have reached a crossroad and need to figure out how to proceed from here.
I am, like most of you a founder of a startup(s)... long story short I have lost my job that was funding my startups and currently have no income. my 2nd start up is about to launch any day now and all our hopes (5 people) are hanging on this to succeed.
My first startup was a failure/success, it has won many awards some very "prestigious" and still gets tons of traffic and not to mention gets me some positive recognition but NO MONEY!
basically, Traffic is not enough to make any real money.<p>I am seriously considering starting a pay porn site (my friend owns 7) and explained how I can make some decent amount to at least keep paying the rent.
I have already contacted an attorney because I am concerned about my name not being affected by this... I frankly dont want to be associated with porn and explained to me how to make start this with out using my name.<p>My question is this:
Would you (startups/entrepreneurs/VCs/funders/anyone in the industry) do business or be associated with someone in the porn industry?<p>Thank you.<p>P.S: If its not obvious I have started a new account to hide my identity.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I need some help navigating the SSL cert oligopoly. What vendor has a reasonable price while delivering a no-scary-messages experience in virtually all browsers?<p>Personal experience with various vendors and any gotchas I haven't thought are especially welcome.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: I'm slowly getting up to speed with Emacs, switching from TextMate. There are a lot of ways to use emacs on Mac, from Aquamacs to Carbon Emacs to the Cocoa port of GNU Emacs. I've dabbled in each a little bit.<p>I'm most interested to hear your thoughts on keybinding (and which Emacs distribution you use). I like the thought of keeping Mac shortcuts consistent a-la Aquamacs (having CMD-Q still bound to exit, etc), but it seems like the Option key is too poorly-placed to be a useful Meta key.<p>(I've bound Caps-lock to Ctrl.) It seems like binding CMD->Meta and CTRL as Control would provide the best placement ergonomically, but obviously you then lose the standard Mac keybindings when in Emacs.<p>What does your Emacs setup look like?
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: I ran a little experiment... in a popular story, I said basically the same thing three ways:<p>Angry sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465422 (current score: -5)<p>Definition of my scope of knowledge, followed by the same opinion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465428 (current score: -4)<p>One-sentence witty sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465436 (current score: 9)<p>Now, I really value our relationship, and it's meant to me more than any other coder/news-community relationship I could have imagined, but this isn't the Hacker News I feel in love with.<p>We all know "karma doesn't matter", but it definitely shapes the discussion that takes place. So let's reiterate some social guidelines which always helped this relationship flourish. I'll start:<p>- don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which are egregiously offtopic or seriously detract from the conversation
Upvote: | 91 |
Title: Thanks to the immortal jellyfish and the mortal will smith for the recent jellyfish plugs...<p>My startup breeds jellyfish and makes specialized aquariums for displaying them.<p>www.jellyfishart.com<p>The first jellyfish exhibits opened in public aquariums in the 90s and scientists have been making achievements in breeding and displaying jellies since then. The exhibits are hugely popular and now jellyfish are found in virtually every public aquarium. Jellyfish Art uses proprietary tank designs and new breeding techniques to commercialize jellyfish aquariums with the same success they have achieved in public venues.<p>We started last year by making large custom aquariums, but we're building a website now to launch a line of plug-and-play desktop tanks.<p>Staring at a jellyfish tank beats staring at a computer screen I promise
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: My name, at the time of posting, is orange. It's kind of nice to be recognized for being upvoted on average, even if I don't make a huge number of comments and will never be on the leaderboard.<p>However, it just feels wrong. I've been unconsciously working on getting a high average for a while, and this will only encourage my unproductive behavior. I sometimes refrain from posting when I know my comment won’t be read or won’t be upvoted.<p>In the spirit of pointing out the full effects of this change, I will now offer a simple list of guidelines so that you too can get your name in orange and feel like a real man/woman/entrepreneur.<p>As for me, I’m with tptacek—opt me out of a colored name.<p>1. Only post in threads that are on the front page or look sure to get on the front page. If no one will see your comment, no one will upvote you.<p>2. Don’t post on a front page post that already has more than a full page of text. Your comment will appear at the bottom and no one will scroll all the way down there. You’re just yelling into the void.<p>3. When possible, reply to a highly rated comment that doesn’t already have replies. Particularly focus on getting your comment to appear "above the fold" when it is posted. This will ensure that your comment is read and enjoyed.<p>4. Don't post against the prevailing mood of a post. If the mood of that article is pro-libertarian, beware critiquing that philosophy! On the other hand, when the population is more balanced in that individual thread, feel free. In general someone who agrees is more likely to upvote than someone who disagrees, so you should get be ahead on balance.<p>5. As soon as you make a comment, upvote the article and all of the parents to your comment. This will put your article closer to the public eye. If you want to truly join the dark side, vote down the other comments on the thread or other replies. I’ve never done this, but it’s an option.<p>6. Say something interesting. Without this, you’ve got nothing!<p>7. If you’re trying to be funny or sarcastic, make it incredibly obvious. If it’s not incredibly obvious what you’re trying to say, don’t bother posting.<p>8. Don't get involved in a long discussion! This will only end with a bunch of 1 point posts that drag your average down.<p>Let me say in closing that HN is one of the best discussions on the net and I’ve been privileged to be here with you all. pg, thanks for all the work you put in.<p>Still, we should be realistic about the behavior that we are promoting. Goodnight and good luck!
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: http://www.commandlinefu.com (and related http://twitter.com/commandlinefu)<p>In short - it's a repository for unix/bash commands that you want to save for future
use, featuring autocomplete search, voting and commenting (very much inspired
by daily reading: HN, Programming Reddit, Stack Overflow ...). Kept as clean
and simple as possible.<p>More: I really wrote this for myself as my own collection of command-line
snippets was getting too unwieldy and hard to parse. I just wanted
autocomplete really so I could jump straight to that command I can vaguely
remember in a few characters.<p>We're quite hot on using Twitter at work for project communication (all SVN
commits tweet) and commandlinefu lends itself nicely to tweet-sized nuggets.
It turns out that it's quite a good way of staying in touch with the latest
commands. All command lists are available as RSS feeds also.<p>It's still pretty raw at the moment - I've got a few features in the pipeline that
should make it better such as tagging and requesting a needed command (see the
uservoice link). However, it's gone onto reddit today so I
thought now's as good a time as any to ask for HN feedback.<p>All feedback appreciated via this forum, or uservoice.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I know what I am going to say is borderline hubris in this web 2.0 world we live in, but bear with me.<p>A lot of problems this site faces are due to the large influx of new, anonymous users. So I was wondering, how would this website be different if there was a small (say $5/yr) subscription needed, at least for posting. For one thing, it would have less (active) users, but we know that the sweet spot for social news sites is when they have a relatively small amount of users. Also, these users would be easier to identify and perminently ban if necessary. Finally, these users would most likely be those who are more positive in their interaction with the community. I find it hard to imagine a troll paying.<p>There are of course negative side-effects, not least of which is the locking out (from posting) of hackers who may not have a paypal account/credit card. Also, some may feel a sense of entitlement, an expectation of service-level. On the plus side, if there is anything left after the transaction processing, it may go towards covering server costs and whatnot. Even if pg/YC was to make some money off of this, I doubt us raging capitalists would mind, given the value we get out of HN. It might also go some way towards proving (if successful of course) that users will pay for quality and that ad-supported/freeminum is not the only way.<p>So, do you think such an alternative-reality HN would be desirable?
Upvote: | 101 |
Title: I didn't think that this new Orange Name feature, which is currently the talk of HN, was a big deal until I read this comment in a completely unrelated thread:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467657<p><i>Without trying to be harsh, and given your 'orange' status I realize I'm walking on thin ice here ;)</i><p>[Note how, unprompted, the responder bows and scrapes!]<p>... and suddenly I realized that I've seen this <i>Frontline</i> documentary before. It's the legendary blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment:<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott<p>"On that day, a Friday, she decided to make the brown-eyed children the superior first, giving them extra privileges like second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym and five minutes extra at recess. She would not allow blue-eyed and brown-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain. She would offer them praise for being hard-working and intelligent. The “blueys” on the other hand, would be disparaged. She even made the blue-eyed children wear crepe paper armbands.<p>"At first, there was resistance to the idea that blue-eyed children were not the equals of brown-eyed children. To counter this, she used a pseudo-scientific explanation for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making brown-eyed children… also was linked to intelligence and ability, therefore the “blueys” lack of pigmentation would result in lack of these qualities. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.<p>"The following Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the blue-eyed children superior. While the blue-eyed children did taunt the brown-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous Friday, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Monday, Elliott told the brown-eyed children to take off their armbands and the children cried and hugged each other."<p>I'm not sure what to conclude about this. Except that I want to issue a desperate plea: Please don't go on to reinvent the Stanford Prison Experiment!
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Self posts like this one have very low contrast when they use grey text and I find it impossible to read them.<p>In contrast, the comments which are in black text are easy to read.<p>Can something be done about this?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: For the past month or so, HN has been getting slower and slower. Do you experience that? A few minutes ago it was not even responding.
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Hey guys,<p>We're http://mobify.me - a hosted mobile transcoding service for existing websites. Launching our Open Beta today!<p>Pain: most sites look and work terrible on mobile. Latest devices (iPhone, Android) work OK as emergency web access tools, but don't provide a proper mobile experience (like http://iphone.facebook.com/ does).<p>Designing for mobile is time-consuming and expensive, so most sites don't bother.<p>Current solutions: build a separate mobile site (lots of work), mobilize an RSS feed (not good enough for most sites), use an automatic transcoder (poor look & feel).<p>Painkiller: Mobify.Me lets you, the web designer, <i>quickly</i> design a "mobile projection" of the existing site by picking content blocks off your site in our web interface, styling it with CSS and deploying via a DNS CNAME. Mobify.Me takes care of device recognition, image resizing (sites download 2x to 10x faster), feature detection, template matching and many other mobile problems.<p>We're bootstrapped and will be introducing several premium tiers this weekend. There is a completely free limited tier as well.<p>It would be great to get your feedback! Please let us know what you think.<p>Here's some examples:<p>http://m.grousemountain.com (powered by a custom CMS, 3 hrs of work)<p>http://techvibes.mobify.me (powered by a custom CMS, 3 hrs of work)<p>http://spin.mobify.me (unofficial mobile version of spin.com, Drupal, 4 hrs of work)<p>http://momo.mobify.me (unofficial mobile version of mobilemonday.net, WordPress, 2 hrs of work)<p>Thanks!<p>Team Mobify.Me
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I feel bad that I still haven't produced a variant of HN that works well on an iPhone. A helpful user just sent me what he says is the minimum I'd have to do.<p>http://www.archub.org/wohl.txt<p>But I've learned that code people send by email generally doesn't work. ("It doesn't work." "Oops, I forgot, you also have to..." "It still doesn't work." etc.)<p>So I'd appreciate it if someone would produce a verbatim, tested snapshot of the HN frontpage that shows the minimum amount of stuff I'd have to change to make the site work decently on an iPhone. (I know I need bigger arrows; you can make those too if you want.)
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: I'm a freelance RoR and PHP developer with every other relevant skill set (XHTML, CSS, AJAX, SQL, et cetera), but I'm having a rather difficult time finding work.<p>I'm rushing Craigslist, writing on my blog, and asking everyone I know if they know anyone in need.<p>The economy has been treating me miserably lately, and I haven't had work in over a month. Do any of you guys have tips for me?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I work from my laptop, and my laptop is constantly moving between my home, cafés, libraries, schools, etc. I have SSH windows open and I want them to simply stay open and work all the time. I want the session to automatically persist changes in wireless networks, temporary lack of network connectivity, putting my laptop in suspend, etc. I also want my SSH-forwarded ports to keep being forwarded as long as I'm connected to the internet. It's such a huge pain to constantly re-login to all my SSH windows on every minor blip of connectivity.<p>Is there any way to accomplish this in any OS? Every time I have posted this problem elsewhere, everyone shouts "screen!" but I think the HN audience understands that while screen is cool, it doesn't even come close to resolving this issue; so I'm hoping for a better answer here.<p>To give an example of my problem:<p>Let's I have 5 SSH windows open doing various things (perhaps I am running top, emacs, a window that i'm using to type svn commands, etc). I also have port-forwarding set up so that I can use Firefox securely through a SOCKS proxy, and access websites that are only available from behind the SSH machine.<p>If my wireless network switches or even drops for 1 second, I now have 5 dead SSH sessions. I have to somehow reinitialize them, and when I do it's a mess to get them back in the correct state. I can solve the latter with screen. How can I solve the former automatically, without wasting time re-establishing those connections?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: After seeing the ticketmaster/livenation merger post, there's probably a long list of industries ripe for disruption. ie- ticketing, riaa/music,etc. I'd love to start putting together a list of other industries, so hence the reason for this post.<p><i>Please post reasons and/or a piece of information that provides insight as to why that industry is ripe for disruption</i>
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: Recently, I have been thinking about these two opposing styles: the hacker style ---rapid prototyping and incremental improvement---, and the Dijkstra (academic?) style ---think hard and get it right the first time---.<p>Given a problem, the hacker style is to:
1. Suggest a partial solution
2. Improve solution,
add to solution to cover all cases
3. Repeat 2 as necessary.<p>In contrast the Dijkstra style is to:
1. Think hard to get the RIGHT solution
2. Justify that it is the right method,
if failed throw it away
3. Go to 1 as necessary
4. Build solution using the method.<p>The hacker style makes you get started and enables you to make steady progress. Even though the resultant system is not always an elegant solution, you are blessed with the advantage of predictability, and always having a more-or-less working product.<p>Dijkstra style prevents you to commit the sin of over-specialization and to settle with a complex or suboptimal solution when there is an elegant solution that also covers the general case of the problem. The downside is that you may not able to make any progress at all, since you are not to accept a mediocre solution.<p>I am sure the HN community has a lot of success stories and arguments supporting Hacker style over the Dijkstra style. I am wondering if you had any cases where the Dijkstra style saved you, and I am interested in hearing your arguments/anecdotes supporting the Dijkstra style over the Hacker style.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: After an incredible amount of complications and pushing the launch date back over a year, we've finally just made the site live.<p>This is blog post documenting the entire story. I'd love to get some feedback from the HN community.
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: We are planning to launch a new startup in the next few months but are having difficulty finding an available domain name. What process do you go through when trying to come up with a name for your startup?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388578
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: As a computer programmer, I've realized that one of the best way to improve myself is to read the code written by the masters of the art and try to emulate them. This is helped by the enormous amount of opensource code out there.<p>However, along the way, the very act of reading code has become a stumbling block in my journey.<p>I'm posting this because I want to get a perspective of how other programmers approach this problem. When faced with a huge chunk of code, how do you guys read it? do you read it line by line? do you guys put it into an IDE, look at the outline and simply jump into functions you are interested in?<p>Do you read through the "main" function first and then branch out to the utility functions or do the reverse where you read the utility functions and subroutines first and then figure out how they are put together?<p>please share with me some of the tips and tricks of code reading that you have discovered.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: The tinyurl goes to this article:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DEFD61538F934A3575AC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all<p>HN was bouncing me to some old NYTimes submission when trying to post that original link.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: For me, learning how to sell was simply a matter of survival.<p>Twelve months ago is about when I started my company, and I now alternate between coding and selling. I consider "selling" anything related to marketing (I know there is a distinction), lead generation, sales calls, product demos, quotes, contract negotiation, etc.<p>The most important lessons that I've picked up so far are:<p>- Get good at networking. Events are a big part of this.<p>- Networking is hard if you're not doing anything interesting. If you are, then it's quite easy.<p>- If you're doing something interesting and start meeting a lot of people, then leads seem to come your way.<p>- Leads are your lifeblood, so getting your network to provide a majority of these for you vs. you going out an hunting them yourself is critical.<p>- Most developers I know (including me) are a bit rough around the edges even if we're not dicks. We just tend to be more straightforward about almost everything. You have to learn how to smooth that over, but most of the smoothing process just comes from screwing up by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and then not doing it again.<p>- A corollary to being a bit rough around the edges means there is probably a lot of subtext that you are missing. It took me several months to pick this up, but executives and sales people who are used to interacting with high-octane clients seem to read a lot into slight gestures, certain phrasings, etc. that I previously would have thought nothing of. As it turns out, quite a bit hinges on these subtleties so it behooves you to pay attention.<p>- Acquiring the skill of situational awareness (also related to above). When you walk into a new client's office, there is a lot that you don't know. Your job is to learn as quickly as possible about their business, pick up their vocabulary, listen for the subtexts, discern cliques in the customer's team, and more. Beforehand, you can learn a lot about your prospect by reading their financial statements (if they're public), website, executive bios, social profiles, LinkedIn Profiles, etc.<p>My own situation is perhaps a little unique as I went from being a developer / development manager in San Diego to an entrepreneur in Japan in less than 30 days, so I've had to do the above in Japanese, which has its own complexities, of course. But in some ways, I really appreciate the Japanese market because prospects are generally very courteous and interested in ideas / technologies from the West.<p>I'm still quite a beginner in sales and probably not that good but I love it and, well, I'm still here. :-)
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I'm posting this from an anonymous account, for obvious reasons. I just sold my company and have 2 million dollars in the bank. What now? I basically have nobody to consult. It's a business I bought for 90k that just kind of swelled up really fast, and I'm really not set up to manage this kind of money. I'm canadian, the economy seems to be going to hell down south and I'm sure it's gonna hit here soon and I have no idea who to take advice from.<p>My bank is trying to get me to put all my money into money market mutual funds while I wait, my accountant tells me I should diversify, get some cashable GICs while I wait, and start looking into stocks, as well as investing in insurance companies since they usually guarantee your investment (so long as they don't go bankrupt). I used to just put all my money into a high interest savings account at ING and collect the 3% (which is good enough for me to live on at this point).<p>Any advice to offer? Any good reading (canadian-specific would be good)? Any good software for mac to manage all this? :)
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: Facebook just launched a comments widget powered by Facebook Connect.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I have recently exchanged Q&A emails with Ivan Kirigin, the founder of tipjoy.com, about his experiences being in the Y Combinator. I want to really thank Ivan and Abby for replying all these questions with depth. I've promised I would share these Q&A with the community so all YC applicants can have a taste and feel of what's to come and more importantly what the application process is like.<p>I also want to thank Andrew Warner from mixergy.com for helping me and inspiring me to apply for Y Combinator. If you ever need to learn entrepreneurship, his interviews is a great way to learn it from.<p>Here's the Q&A:<p><i>Q: Did you have to assist the financial risks that were involved with both of you in the same business? Isn't it like putting all your eggs in one basket?</i><p>The worst case scenario was that we would have to go back to 'regular' jobs. Leaving a job at a big company to start your own company is probably the best reason to leave, and it is important to keep ties with that world so that you can rejoin it if need be. We figured out how much time we had before needing to move forward with this "nuclear option". We just keep aware of our runway so we don't get surprised. Between our savings and our investors, we've been able to be secure.<p><i>Q: What was your overall Y Combinator application experience like?</i><p>I told Abby about it in summer 2007, saying it might be for college students. She looked it over and thought it was good for any company. We'd been reading lots of Paul Graham's essays and thought YC's approach was exceptionally creative. We edited our application over time, crafting the message and wording a lot. Working through the application like this really helped us refine our idea, our goals, and our vision. It was very valuable. Once we were accepted to the interview, we practiced pitching to a few friends and colleagues. It was amazing how much our approach to talking about and presenting Tipjoy evolved during those sessions.<p>The interview was definitely not what we expected. We butted heads with Paul quite a bit. There were some user experience approaches
which Abby felt were key to what we were doing. Although the UX approaches don't add up to the entire product, YC's main concern was that we were so passionate about our idea that we might not be willing to alter it if the market demanded. Abby thought we didn't get in. I wasn't sure. Ultimately they must have enjoyed the debate because we were accepted! Working with YC has been an amazing experience.<p><i>Q: Besides submitting an application, did you do anything extra to help you get into the interview round with Y Combinator?</i><p>We had a demo system live that I'm pretty sure they didn't look at. Making it was a good exercise for us though.<p><i>Q: What was your interview experience like? Do you have any advice for the new applicants this year?</i><p>Lots of people make the mistake of assuming the interview is a presentation. That's not the format. It's a conversation with maybe a 3-second demo component. They asked a lot of questions right away and that guided the conversation. I'd recommend practicing by pitching to people that understand your market.<p><i>Q: When you got funding by Y Combinator, did you have to give up a lot to move to California? How did you feel right before you moved?</i><p>We had to move from Arlington, Massachusetts. We had a house, which we kept and eventually moved back into after moving back to
Massachusetts. We had a spot in a nursery school for our son, which we also managed to keep. Really we didn't have to 'give up' anything. Everything that mattered was coming with us.<p>Once we knew we were moving (of course we accepted YC's offer right away), Abby spent a lot of time getting all the logistics worked out. She found a temporary place for us to live in Mountain View which would work for our family. In addition to our son Luka, we brought our dog and also my mom who came to live with us and take care of our son Luka full-time. When it came time for the move, my brother helped me drive a carful of stuff across the country. We owe a lot to our family who are always there to help.<p>We were very excited to move. It felt a bit crazy like a fox, but the opportunity was too big to pass up.<p>In fact it was great that we were taken out of our normal routine and life in MA. That way we were able to completely focus on building
Tipjoy. It was also great to spend several months entrenched in the Valley network.<p>Taking this leap together has been pretty amazing. Our company and our family are stronger and richer from the experience.
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: Peter Norvig's new post on reporters, fact-checking, models and data.
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Your startup's blog should have a link to your homepage.<p>It seems obvious, right? But three or four times now I've read a post at some startup's blog and got interested in what they do, but I couldn't quickly get to their homepage – there was no link!<p>Make your logo link to your main site. Don't make it link to nothing and don't make it link to the first page of your blog. I am usually interested enough to hack the url, but it shouldn't be that hard.<p>(I was prompted to write this after reading the Heroku blog post about instant deployment and not being able to get to their homepage. But like I said this is definitely not the first time I've seen this.)
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: There's been a few cases recently where I found an interesting article to submit here and was unable to submit it. The site appears to accept the article, but the story remains invisible to everyone and to me appears to have no comment box. I've verified that this happens when other people submit those URLs. Here are a couple of examples of apparently legitimate, genuinely interesting articles being blocked:<p>http://www.infochachkie.com/thescrew/<p>http://gawker.com/5161908/ceos-500000-salary-burns-startup-into-fire-sale<p>I'm not arguing that those sites necessarily need to be unblocked. Perhaps, on the whole, the content from these sites is not useful enough, or too much gets submitted, or someone spammed one of these sites here, or any number of other reasons.<p>However, in the interest of transparency (which this article suggested is an important component of a successful community culture : http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html ) I think that the list of banned sites, along with the reason why they're banned, should be made public.<p>Or, if there's a good reason why it shouldn't be public, then I would love to know it.
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: No need to install any applications on your computer. The simple interface allows you to save web page as a PDF file in 1 click without registration!
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I've seen a ton of url shorteners (like tinyurl.com) out there but haven't seen any real business model behind them... but they seem to survive. Are they doing it from donations, advertising or do they have other techniques?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Note: I'm posting this under a different account than I normally use on HN because I want to remain anonymous.<p>For the last 2+ years I've been the CTO for a technically successful startup. I have successfully navigated the company around some very real disasters and have built a highly dedicated tech team that has excelled at realizing the technical vision of the product; despite whatever curve balls have been thrown at us - externally or internally. In those two+ years, I've worn every hat one could wear (from IA to project management to product development to systems admin to front end development to back end development) and have worn those hats as well as I could. We've staffed up to the point that I no longer am wearing as many hats, which I am grateful for, but still have a few key roles to fill, mostly in the project management category.<p>Several months ago, we hired a new CEO, whom I partially respect, but don't necessarily like. As is typical, his first criticisms were aimed squarely at the tech team because the tech team is always the first to blame - despite the fact we've always done what we said we would when we said we would. Obviously, as the only part of the company that produces tangibles, it's fairly easy to square operational issues on us. I've fought those criticisms as well as I could, but have been unable to make him see the real problem is the front office's lack of vision and an inability to communicate clearly whatever vision they might have. I've done the best I can given the sheer number of things I am required to do during the day, but, as anyone can correctly surmise, isn't the best I could do if I had a more singular focus. It's really hard to context switch from installing nagios on our production servers to doing IA to doing project management; all within the span of a few hours, day after day. It wears one down.<p>So he recommends we hire a VP of Engineering, which I agree to. It makes sense. Let that person run the process and let me focus on the bigger picture, architecture, product, etc. But then I read the job description and notice the line where it says this role reports directly to the CEO. Which means, since the entire tech staff is reporting to the VP of E, that I lose my staff. When I bring this up with the CEO, he tells me that I should see this VPE as a peer. Say what? It's bad enough that I have to explain to employees that have been with the company for 2+ years they are going to have a new boss, but now that boss doesn't even report to me?<p>Am I being paranoid that I'm being marginalized for an ill-perceived picture of the tech team? Is the CEO playing politics? I'm at a complete loss.<p>Advice?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: With the recent public talk and growing awareness about marijuana and the failed policies against it, it occurred to me it would be interesting to get an idea of how many fellow programmers use marijuana and how it affects their work. I find it specially positive in my work, as an aid to better concentration and also greater creativity.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.<p>You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter.
Upvote: | 270 |
Title: This guy made a LISP syntax front-end to the Erlang compiler.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: Hey all,<p>I'm trying to learn Erlang. I'd like to know if you had any sources on learning it. Thanks.
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: HN was down today for around 2 hours. Sorry about that.<p>The News server currently crashes a couple times a day when it runs out of memory. All the comments and stories no longer fit in the 2 GB we can get on a 32 bit machine. We'd been planning to upgrade to a new 64 bit server. In the meantime it was arguably a rather slow form of GC.<p>Unfortunately the process somehow got wedged in the middle of segfaulting. We're not sure why and will probably never know. But that meant the process that usually notices when News is wedged and restarts it was unable to kill it.<p>Fortunately rebooting the machine solved the problem. But now we'll presumably be switching to that new, bigger server sooner rather than later.<p>As far as I can tell it was a coincidence that this happened today. It doesn't seem to have been caused either by the increased traffic, or the excessive number of posts about Erlang.
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Just a thought about the recent surge of traffic from Coding Horror's link. It's true that things like this can threaten to swamp HN with an "Eternal September."<p>And making the front page boring is a very amusing defense against the random hit-and-run tire kickers. But let's not forget that 33,000 new visitors will contain a few potential hackers.<p>Sure, most will say "Erlang, WTF!" But a few will say "Erlang, What the... Wow!!!" It would be a shame if HN lost its way and suffered from the tragedy of mediocrity that has poisoned reddit and other sites. But it would also be a shame if folks with lots of good stuff to contribute stumbled upon HN and found it repellant.<p>I guess I'm just trying to say that while we should be very aggressive about keeping undesirable content and poisonous commentary off HN, we should also be careful to make sure people know that the door is wide open for like-minded folks to join in and participate, no matter where they came from.
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: "We're down for (we hope) a few minutes while switching to a new server."<p>... and they are back.<p>Thank you pg, rtm and everyone who made this happen.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: So, this article seems to have gotten traction on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215<p>It's not a new idea. Tim Ferris has been preaching that since the Four Hour Work Week was published, and affiliate marketing programs are clearing houses for people doing this sort of thing.<p>Is anyone on HN doing this, or have you done it in the past. I'd love to hear some anecdotes from this community.
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Do you need the UNION? and do you think "Business Is Killing The Art Of The Hack"?
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: It seems like you can change the about field under PG's account http://news.ycombinator.org/user?id=pg using this appjet app
http://notabank.appjet.net/
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: So, I think I'm quitting my job today. I've always valued the discussions that take place here, so I thought I would solicit your input (though my mind is pretty much made up).<p>See, if the economy were in any other state, I wouldn't even give it a second thought. I'm pretty well-qualified for many jobs, so I think I could get another one if I needed to. But still, I have several friends who have been applying and interviewing everywhere and cannot even get a job. Yet, here I am quitting the relatively stable job I landed just 8 months ago.<p>I feel that it's just something I must do. I've grown very discontent (bordering on depression) since I've worked here. Though I graduated at the top of my class with Mechanical and Electrical degrees and a solid 2 1/2 years' industry experience, this company misrepresented my position pretty significantly, telling me all the cool fascinating things for which I'd be responsible. Instead, 8 months later, I'm not much more than a glorified tech support, making much less than I should be, and tolerating somewhat intolerable work conditions (like abiding by a lunch bell (yes, just like in high school)).<p>Anyway, the point of this solicitation is not to rant or bad-mouth an employer. Rather, it's simply to ask, am I off my rocker for quitting in these hard economic times? I've been working on building a web-based company for the past couple years. It's really close to taking off, but not quite paying the bills just yet. I also have a web development company to help fund the startup. Recently, a (really cool) friend who owns a bigger, more successful web development company, approached me about contracting their extra work out to me. As it turns out, they have enough extra work to keep me busy for at least a few months (probably much more), and I'd be making more than I make here. In addition, I've got a couple months worth of expenses already saved up as well.<p>What do you guys think? I think I'm ready to stop hating 5/7ths of my life, regardless of economic conditions.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: The life is too short to be sleeping a major part of it. What do you do to getting up early, or do you think it is not really important at all?
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: Just finished reading Founders At Work. Amazing book!
I am curious, Paul, what were the first feelings you had when you knew for sure the Yahoo acquisition was for real? What did it feel like? Was it a big relief? Becoming rich? What were you first immediate thoughts?<p>Thank you for sharing with us.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: If we woke up tomorrow and all technology had gone, assuming we could still make a fire, how long would it take to get back to where we are now?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I'm starting to research payment processing systems for my startup, and was hoping to get some feedback from some HN readers who have had some experience with some online merchant service providers.<p>Which payment processing provider do you use? And how would you describe the quality of your service?<p>Google, Yahoo, and PayPal all provide this service, and they all charge similar fees. How do they stack up against each other?<p>Also, the ability to charge for recurring payments (subscriptions) is important to me.<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: http://www.geotrust.com/ssl/wildcard-ssl-certificates/<p>This certificate costs $995 per year. If you think about it, there is very little that the issuer does, other than supposedly validate your ownership of the domain. They don't even need to maintain considerable server infrastructure.<p>So why isn't there no serious competition? Why isn't there a company that issues certificates for $10?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: We made a big mistake in our server setup. We bought beefy as app and db servers but went for ultra reliable sun ultrasparks and openbsd for firewalls. This was fine until the DDOS started. After 3 days of many different attacks we now how much better firewall hardware installed thanks to our fantastic colocation which went the extra mile and helped us when we needed their help most but we are now surviving on total brute force.<p>Our firewalls are faster then the SYN Floods that hit us. This is an arms race that we cannot win in the long run. Yes we can buy more hardware but it's much easier to infect more machines with bots over time.<p>How do people protect themselves against extortion and malicious ddos attacks? What software / hardware protects the bigger sites on the net?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Note: I'm a regular HN reader/commenter, but posting this under an anonymous account for obvious reasons.<p>There has been some discussion here recently about the value of computer labs in universities. This is my experience with the university computing facilities as a CS graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. While it is a personal perspective, it is also pretty representative, as you will see.<p>When you walk up to one of the machines in our lab, you are greeted with a text login. I guess that separates the men from the boys right there--if you aren't l33t enough to know how to run X, you can't even get started. And X is set up to run fvwm2 by default.<p>No, that's not a typo. I really meant fvwm2.<p>If you haven't used it, you really can't even imagine how bad it is. It's one of those Unix beasts from the 80s which uses desktop metaphors that aren't in use today. Mostly it just draws windows, everything else is up to you. Windows gets focus when you mouse over them. Things we take for granted in a desktop like the task bar aren't available. You need to right-click to do anything, but the right click menu isn't stable--it disappears when you release the click. I could go on, but you get the idea.<p>Here's the kicker: since most students have never used Unix before, <i>they assume that's what Unix looks like</i>, and they spend their entire college years dealing with this shit. Our department has been expending major efforts to increase computer science enrollment; I'd say everything they're doing is a <i>rounding error</i> compared to the effect that students' first impression of being a CS major will have.<p>Often, I'd be working in the lab, and some kid will come up to me and ask something like, "hi, I downloaded this text file, now I have no idea how to edit it." The <i>really</i> ironic thing is that all the machines run Ubuntu, the whole point of which is to have Mac OS-like usability! Note that Ubuntu doesn't even ship with fvwm2 by default, which means they actually went and installed it. They are not lazy or incompetent, it seems they are actively trying to hurt their users. (To be fair, they have an FAQ that tells you how to start other window managers, but of course no one's ever read it, and even if they did it wouldn't do them an ounce of good because they don't know what a window manager is to begin with.)<p>One time, when a student asked me a question about the window manager I showed her how to edit her .xinitrc to start Gnome instead. She was like, "Oh my GOD!!" and wouldn't stop thanking me. After this happened a couple of more times I felt heartbroken and powerless to stop the atrocity and stopped going to the lab. I mean, many of them are 18 and 19 year old kids, they shouldn't have to suffer like this :-(<p>By the way, you might wonder how the professors put up with the admins (their machines are also set up to start fvwm2). Since most of the professors graduated decades ago, fvwm2 is probably what they used as students. They don't seem to find it all that painful, since they probably never upgraded from pine and fvwm2.<p>After a while, I got my own office, which meant I could go and work there without having to see the other students and scream silently to myself. But that didn't last long.<p>There was no sound on any of the machines, even those in semi-private offices. I don't mean no speakers--they removed the audio drivers from Linux; /dev/dsp didn't exist. While that was mighty annoying, it was nothing compared to my troubles when my research started to involve writing code. Other than the fact that our disk quotas were 1GB, that is.<p>They wouldn't let me run jobs overnight. I had to get some kind of special permission; the reason was apparently "security." I have no idea what that had to do with security. I bet the character "Mordac, preventor of information services" was based on these guys. It was truly a synthesis of everything that's wrong with academia and everything that's wrong with corporations.<p>Apart from security, the only other thing they cared about was covering their asses. (Now that I think about it, their emphasis on the former might have been merely a manifestation of the latter.) If I went down to their office to ask a question, they'd say "send an email." The idea being they'd have a record in case of a dispute, I guess.<p>One time I needed a package installed. After a week of passing the buck, they said they couldn't do it. The worst part? It was something that was available in the Ubuntu repositories! But apparently they don't install things using aptitude, the easiest package management system in the world; they have a policy of installing everything from source (!!)<p>That was when I gave up; I worked from home after that until I graduated. I would still occasionally go in to use the printers, which gave me a chance to observe things deteriorate even further. At some point, campus IT removed the guest wireless access. As for the authenticated access, I don't know why they couldn't authenticate you through your browser like everyone else, you actually had to install their crypto shit. I got it working on Windows after some hair-pulling, never did on Linux (which is what I was on 90% of the time).<p>The incredibly ironic thing about this is that since Austin is #1 in the country in Wi-Fi hotspot density, you can get wireless from somewhere as soon as you step out of campus but the campus itself is a Wi-Fi wasteland.<p>While my experience with IT might have been exceptionally bad, many a time, when I complain to students in other universities, the answer I get is, "oh my god, I know, right?" I have some first-hand experience of it since I travel a lot for research. When I go to Berkeley, for instance, I know that the campus Wi-Fi AirBears is nearly unusable, we just go to Brewed Awakening and use the free Wi-Fi there.<p>So there. I hope this adds something to the discussion of whether Universities should have computer labs. By far the best approach, IMO, would be for the department to buy the machines but <i>let the students run them</i>. Of course, this leads to questions of who gets to be root and so forth, but that's kinda the whole point: working together, building trust, resolving conflicts, and administering networks of computers are all vital parts of the education that CS students should receive but currently don't. Some Universities may not be bold enough to go this route for fear of lawsuits. The second best option would be to scrap the labs altogether, rather than prolonging the insanity.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: Article here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004957
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: What are the Hacker-News for other domains?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: "Whatever country you live in, whatever language you speak, you have the same access to the accumulated knowledge of the world as every other citizen of the planet Earth. I believe the rules are different for programmers. So much so that I'm going to ask the unthinkable: shouldn't every software developer understand English?"
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: I just wanted to sing the praises of StackOverflow.com for a second. I wanted to put together a custom query to display a few key metrics for my social news site. The folks on IRC ignored a polite request and I found a few folks willing to help for $50/hour. Both of these were expected, sensible outcomes.<p>StackOverflow came through with the answer in about 15 minutes.<p>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/696289<p>The impressive part, to me at least, is that the initial answer posted wasn't yet easy enough for me to follow. I asked a few questions in the comments, more detail was added, I asked a few more questions and came back in a few hours and a copy-and-paste code snippet was waiting for me.<p>A+
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: It is that time of the year again. People who are not really as funny as they think they are will be flooding the net with "prank" sites, stupid fake rumors, and similar dumb links.<p>Can you please post the gag link to reddit, digg, or some other site and spare us all?
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: ...please review the submission guidelines definition of "on-topic" (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):<p><pre><code> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer
might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual
curiosity.</code></pre>
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: The exploding termsheets<p>http://ycombinator.com/exploding.html<p>have started to arrive. I just talked to a group who got one, and they hadn't realized we were willing to interview groups early when this happened.<p>So I should be more explicit: If you get an exploding offer, send us an email, and if we were going to interview you, we'll do it early.
Upvote: | 83 |
Title: For your startup, what services do you use? I'm using Amazon AWS for hosting, Pivotal Tracker for project planning, GitHub, and a few others I can't think of right now.<p>What paid services do you find the most useful in running your startup?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: You do some unpaid programming for interesting TechStars startups, in exchange for the ability to listen to other startups get advice about their startups. Can't wait to sign up!
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Just curious. I'm seeing people get press on places like the NYT, Business Week, etc... For those of you that have gotten that type of press, how did you manage it? Any tips or tricks?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Just got an email informing me of my rejection to YC this summer. Bummer.<p>I'm still going to go on and develop my idea. It's just going to take a little longer than I expected without the money.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: In the coming hours, and days, HN will be seeing submission after submission regarding their YC application decisions. It happens every application period and can become quite annoying. As such, I will address most of the issues many of you will be submitting threads about.<p>"Why did I get rejected?!??"<p>I don't know, many of us don't either. Other than your idea possibly being a pile of garbage, none of us here know as to the exact reasons you got rejected. Sure, pg will, but I doubt he'll write up a critique of your app and post it publicly. If you want to know why you were rejected, email someone at yc to see if they're even willing to give you feedback.<p>"Maybe we should start a YC-rejected group!!!"<p>Go for it. Honestly, it's a big waste of time. Last year someone created RejectedByYC.com, but that seems to have vanished. I don't really know why you'd want to limit yourself to giving/receiving feedback and support for your project from other YC-rejected companies. The rest of us who got accepted or didn't apply aren't less willing to encourage/support/critique your efforts.<p>"I got rejected, but I'm moving on!!!"<p>Awesome, but really, even considering to discontinue a project based on your YC decision is foolish. Sure, the experience is great, you get a little cash to get you off the ground, but if your motivation was that dependent on the outcome of whether you'd be accepted to YC, you need to realize that there are much higher hurdles to be conquered ahead. Plus, we don't need to know you're moving on. Create something, ask for feedback, and we'll care.<p>"MyStartup (YC reject '09) asking for feedback!!!"<p>Don't label yourself as a YC reject. I don't know why people do this. I am no more interested in your startup whether accepted or rejected from YC. There are several YC companies I think are crap, and many rejects that I think are awesome. I guess what you're trying to get across by labeling yourself as a YC rejects is "PG thinks we're crap, but I'm out to prove him wrong!" That makes you seem bitter and unable to emotionally settle with your rejection. We are a community of startups and people interested in them and we need not to label ourselves into various camps. There are startups that are accepted into YC, and for those companies, they were each merely granted an opportunity. For every YC accepted company, there's another who has received angel investing sans incubator-type program, and another who has been hooked up with a client that could bring lots of business, and another that just took vc funding. Starting companies is about finding opportunities. And if YC isn't an opportunity that came your way, you have hundreds of other paths to pursue.<p>I've said this before, but please realize that Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Myspace, eBay, Amazon, PayPal, and 99.999% of the most popular and/or highly valued acquired companies didn't go through YC, nor any other YC-like program.
Upvote: | 171 |
Title: I’m not the type of person that you’ll hear commenting all the time here on Hacker News. Fact is, I couldn’t stop and see all these people feeling bad about them because YC rejected them.<p>I’m not interesting in applying to YC. Come on, you don’t need YC to succeed. You don’t need them. Many of you guys are just here because you think YC would be the salvation to your startup. Don’t kid yourself.<p>If you feel bad because you got rejected, because you lost the “golden mentorship” and the 10,000 grand, then you shouldn’t be doing your startup in first place.<p>You should believe in your idea and go on, even if the other people don’t see what you can see. Thomas Edison didn’t stop because everyone believed he was nuts. Henry Ford didn’t stop back then, the Google guys didn’t stop, and you shouldn’t stop.<p>Keep going, keep moving, don’t let fear or rejection stop you. Never.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I'd like to see where those people who got rejected by YC ended up. Did you finish your product? Abandoned the idea? Still working on it?
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: The April release of xpud brings a re-designed interface, called 'Plate', based on XUL and moblin patches integrated with the 2.6.28 kernel.
The distro is built off a build system that repackages Ubuntu debs.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: <i>Hacker News Guidelines<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.</i><p>Good hackers do not find PHP bashing interesting (or Ruby/MySQL/Java/Python/.NET bashing).<p>If you do find this sort of thing interesting, please respect the site guidelines and don't submit or upmod it. There are many other places on the web that specialize in this sort of thing.<p>EDIT: This isn't specifically directed at today's ironic "PHP vs. Ruby" post. That's a relatively mild instance of a more general trend.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Google shows her quotes ALL over the web. But it does not (within my googling ability anyway) give a hint who or where she actually is. Since PG has her quotes on his website, I hoped it would be alright to ask here.
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: Linear algebra comes up in almost every area of modern research, but what applications have you made most often? Is it SVD for latent semantic analysis or computing eigenvector for PageRank or something else? Discuss.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: My startup went down the pan due to lack of money (what's new?) I was always told the expereince you get from a failed startup is a good thing. Well, a certain large software company doesn't seem to think so. Apparently, "as an entrepeneur you are obviously a free spirit, not the kind of person that settles well in a normal job, we would never hire people with a failed startup on their resume".<p>Thanks HN. You lied to me about the true cost of a failed startup.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Check this out: http://www.printgreener.com/news.html
WSJ, CNBC, Entreprenuer, ComputerWorld, CNN, Inc, ... How could they get so many coverages?<p>I've written a similar algorithm and sold it to a few companies, which you could find at http://purifyr.com/. I've also emailed all relevant bloggers for review. But I just couldn't imagine getting so many positive coverages.<p>How did they make it?<p>Ideas?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: More information about this here:
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: Is he really correct about Microsoft creating that illusion? It just doesn't fit the idea of M$ I have.
Upvote: | 92 |
Title: In terms of <i>servers and hardware</i>, how much does it cost to keep hacker news up and running each month?<p>In terms of man hours, how much is needed to maintain and moderate hacker news?
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: So, I run the hackers and founders meetup here in Silicon Valley every couple of weeks. People really seem to like getting together and having a beer with fellow HN readers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566583<p>I've noticed that it can be really hard to get something like that launched, unless you can get your announcement on the front page of HN.<p>While that works for larger metro areas, like SV or the recent HN gathering in NYC, smaller areas like Padova, Italy it can be a bit challenging to get a HN meetup off the ground: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566583<p>I own the domain www.hackersandfounders.com. Currently it just points to the Hackers and founders Meetup page, but I've been toying with the idea of building a Craigs list style community meetup listing. Would the HN community be interested in something like that?<p>I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: How much time do you spent making sure you are healthy?<p>What type of exercises do you do?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: CAMPINAS, Brazil — On the night of March 8, cruising 22,000 miles above the Earth, U.S. Navy communications satellite FLTSAT-8 suddenly erupted with illicit activity. Jubilant voices and anthems crowded the channel on a junkyard's worth of homemade gear from across vast and silent stretches of the Amazon: Ronaldo, a Brazilian soccer idol, had just scored his first goal with the Corinthians.<p>It was a party that won't soon be forgotten. Ten days later, Brazilian Federal Police swooped in on 39 suspects in six states in the largest crackdown to date on a growing problem here: illegal hijacking of U.S. military satellite transponders.<p>"This had been happening for more than five years," says Celso Campos, of the Brazilian Federal Police. "Since the communication channel was open, not encrypted, lots of people used it to talk to each other."<p>The practice is so entrenched, and the knowledge and tools so widely available, few believe the campaign to stamp it out will be quick or easy.<p>Much of this country's population lives in remote areas beyond the reach of cellphone coverage, making American satellites an ideal, if illegal, communications option. The problem goes back more than a decade, to the mid-1990s, when Brazilian radio technicians discovered they could jump on the UHF frequencies dedicated to satellites in the Navy's Fleet Satellite Communication system, or FLTSATCOM. They've been at it ever since.<p>Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations.<p>Today, the satellites, which pirates called "Bolinha" or "little ball," are a national phenomenon.<p>"It's impossible not to find equipment like this when we catch an organized crime gang," says a police officer involved in last month's action.<p>The crackdown, called "Operation Satellite," was Brazil's first large-scale enforcement against the problem. Police followed coordinates provided by the U.S. Department of Defense and confirmed by Anatel, Brazil's FCC. Among those charged were university professors, electricians, truckers and farmers, the police say. The suspects face up to four years and jail, but are more likely to be fined if convicted.
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: jQuery plugin - ImageSwitch is an easy-to-use, simple and fast plug-in to create effect when you switch between images. Minimize the arguments you need to input and still give some beatiful effects.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I found http://www.senseboard.com/ a few years ago. It's a keyboard-substitute that clips over the back of your hand, and interprets the tendon movement as you "type" into text.<p>The device is elegant and compact, but better yet it's an elegant solution to the problem of mobile typing/data entry. It's the missing link for a new era of mobile computing - it completes the trio: Cellphone, Pocket Projector, Senseboard.<p>Use just the phone, or the phone + projector, the phone + senseboard, or all three. That trio would be smaller, more portable, more comfortable and more flexible than any netbook.<p>Now is the perfect time; screen size and data entry are <i>the</i> major limitations for mobile devices. Powerful PDAs and cellphones are here. Phones with 'proper' operating systems. Pocket Projectors are just appearing to get around the limitations of small, low resolution displays and they wont stop at being 640x480 and dim. Soon they will hit netbook screen quality. But data entry is still limited to those foldaway keyboards that are both big and unwieldy compared to a phone, full of delicate moving parts, and still small and cramped to type on. Senseboard is a much better alternative.<p>The big problem is - it's vapourware. Best new product of 2001. Nothing but a couple of minor press releases since then.<p>"So what?" you ask. Well, I've mentioned it here a couple of times and had no discussion. I decided to submit it directly as a link to publicise it a bit - it plummeted from the new submissions page with no comments and no votes. That's life, eh? I would probably have left it there except I said this:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=570994<p>and got <i>27</i> upvotes. 27! For a pernickety grammar correction one-liner! Right now, that contrast is really getting under my skin. I know there are technical people here, people who've used the Twiddler, successful business founders, hardware and software developers, VCs, people who might see what I can't, might also care, and might have influence, so I Ask HN:<p>Do you think the Senseboard is as cool and potentially game changing as I think it is? Do you think it could be a successful product?<p>Can we outsiders <i>do</i> anything to encourage it into existance, and - should we?<p>(I have no affiliation with the company, I'm just tired of seeing what seems to be first class ideas like this sidelined while streams of clone digital cameras, media players, GPS receivers, cellphones and so on pour into the market as if the world wont be satisfied until there's ten models for every human - and that needs to happen yesterday!)
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Google Labs' open source 3D rendering browser plugin.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: This is a pretty amazing new development on the road towards open source law.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: Is it just me or is any humor on hacker news down voted right away?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Maybe I will write a greasemonkey script to change the name to Erlang Innards
Upvote: | 64 |