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Title: Did HN get hacked? Screenshot here: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/10731/Snapshot%202009-04-23%2016-45-32.png
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: How many hours do you spend at your workplace? And in that time, how many hours of actual work do you do?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I just flagged two submissions that were blatant spam, both submitted by accounts created two seconds before the post.<p>Wouldn't a 2 point karma minimum to url submission and voting fix a lot of spam posts? For legitimate users it's pretty easy to get one upvote on a comment and as a nice bonus it would raise the chance that the user has a basic grasp of community values.<p>For spam bots OTOH it's impossible to submit links before they get one upvote and it's impossible to upvote themselves before they get one upvote. I think that it effectively locks them out.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I'm in CA, and about to form a corporation. I've read lots of conflicting things on the web. I was going to pay to talk to a lawyer. Then it hit me, YC does this all the time, numerous times a year. They must have this process highly optimized.<p>Can you share the documents you use to get YC startups incorporated, along with administrative info (things like: pay franchise tax every year) that needs to be covered?<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I'm a chronic procrastinator, and I want to change. I have hundreds of ideas jotted down on a notepad I keep on my table, but I never get around to implementing those. There just seems to be this <i>inertia</i> that stops me from ever starting to work on my tasks. "I'll do it next month, I have exams right now", "Now? I can't work in this state of mind!", "Let me just finish reading my RSS feeds. I got to keep myself updated" are some of the excuses I give myself.<p>Of course, once I do start working on something, I get in the zone and completely lose track of time. Once in the zone, I'll work at a task until I've completed it. Overcoming the "inertia" is the difficult part.<p>This is what I've done to combat my situation: I've started keeping a TODO list. I've also cleared my desk of unneeded items and removed useless feeds from my RSS reader. I'm getting into the habit of putting my MacBook to sleep when I'm not working. That way, I can't wander off to Digg or the WTF subreddit. I feel I'm about 2x more productive now, but I'm still far from the stage where I can spend more than 50% of my computer time doing productive tasks.<p>Tips? Links? Blogs? Also, I <i>love</i> anecdotes :)
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: I'm building a web site that will include multiple graphs and printable reports. The graphs are pretty simple line graphs (perhaps with multiple data sources). Ideally, the graphic library would be able to do some smoothing of the data.<p>The reports are also fairly simple (lists of data with said graphs).<p>What do you think the best graphing and reporting libraries (for the planned usage) out there are?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Throughout my career, I've viewed C as the sleeping monster that mere mortals such as myself dare not waken. However, as I increasingly seek to achieve more complex goals in my projects, I find myself encountering C libraries (such as GMime) which will answer all my questions, if I could actually program in C. I have a copy of C Primer Plus Fifth Edition at hand, a development FreeBSD server as well as my Mac, but would like to ask of this community if they are aware of any other references, such as old CS course materials, which may help. Many thanks in advance. I realise that this is a long term goal, but feel that with my taste in server platform and operations software, C will prove a boon to me.
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: If so, feel free to share any advice you might have, and plug your own product as well.<p>I'm a programmer always looking for inspiration, and my dream is to make a living writing and selling my /own/ software, from my /own/ computer chair.
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: I feel really selfish even asking this. My parents are helping in every way they can despite my complaining, I've exhaustively switched schools and basically tried every possible option other than homeschooling or dropping out (which makes it even worse to say that I still hate it, after all the effort they've put into fixing it). But I do hate it, I'm not learning, and I feel like I'm wasting time, and it's not just because of the usual reasons teenagers seem to attribute to hating high school: I don't think the school subjects are boring, or <i>any</i> subject for that matter (the logic I use is, if it were boring, no one would have discovered it; you can only dull down a subject, it's already interesting in its own light), I'm introverted and spend most of my time reading or obsessively working on hobbies like programming, and I absolutely can't stand wasting time. I've feel that I've had one "good" year of school in all of middle/high school, wherein I was extremely lucky to have a group of passionate teachers all at once. That year taught me a lot, mainly because it showed me that these subjects school had dulled down before aren't actually uninteresting. I haven't had a good year since, though, which has been frustrating to say the least, although I have had a few good teachers...<p>I was reading one of Paul Graham's essays the other day (http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html), and came across one of those "dwarping" moments, as one of those passionate teachers I had used to say, in that almost every other paragraph were ideas I had thought about endlessly about before summed up concisely by someone more articulate than me. One of the ideas addressed, though, has been really tormenting me lately, because it's an idea I've had myself that I've been trying this past year to do but has not been working for me.<p>"If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work."<p>This sounds great in theory and helps me to some degree, but in some ways makes things even worse. I try and get through every school day and have decent grades and all, but each day is so monotonous and so many of the things we do are such wastes of time that it just drives me insane. Going home to work on something more I feel is more important that I actually enjoy and am challenged with, while obviously provides enjoyment, in another sense make this feeling even <i>worse</i> because it diminishes school even more. I do 'real work', but I want to real work <i>at school</i> too.<p>I'd like to think that I'm just the problem. Maybe I'm just taking my education for granted and this is just a "self-fulfilling prophecy" sort of thing. But, I spend nearly every moment outside of school learning, just because I love to do it. I want to love school. I love learning. Why don't I love school? I can't express in words how frustrated this question makes me.<p>I was just wondering if you guys had any experiences or suggestions to share about school. If anyone else has gone through this could or could give me some advice or just show how I'm wrong I would really appreciate it. I know it doesn't sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but I really don't want to waste the next two years of high school.
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Just thought that was interesting.
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: Graduating from college soon, so I won't be able to make use of the chairs/desks at the library for long coding sessions. That said, I don't want to pay $400 for a used Aeron. What other alternatives are there?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Tired of other discussions dominating the front page? Tell us what you're working on right now, and please include a link to actual code. Let's get back in touch with hacking!
Upvote: | 165 |
Title: Check out the screenshots :: http://code.google.com/p/django-filebrowser/wiki/screenshots
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: So, I might get razzed for this - but I figured I'd come to a place where I would receive useful insight on my situation.<p><i></i><i>Dilemna</i><i></i><p>Zillow wants to buy the domain that a website (optimized for iPhone which uses their API) I've created resides on for literally "a couple hundred bucks".<p>This seems like an easy way to take advantage of the work I've put in to building the domain/ranking.<p>Additionally, they've threatened to cut of API access if I do not comply with their wishes.<p><i></i><i>Data</i><i></i><p>It's located at http://izillow.net<p>Since launch the site has received ~50,000 visitors + links from techcrunch, apple, google (appengine) and numerous blogs + recognition in the New York Times.<p>(also ~90k pageviews)<p>It's in compliance with Zillow's TOS & they've threatened to cut of API access if I do not comply with their wishes.<p><i></i><i>History</i><i></i><p>Last year in May I created an iPhone interface for Zillow's "zestimator" - it was all fun and games, got a little bit of blog coverage/mentions & an overall good response. Zillow seemed to be all for it.<p>Then the New York Times included it in one of it's articles - and Zillow asked me to very simply put the words "unofficial version" and a link at the bottom of the app.<p>No problem. Done.<p><i></i><i>Now</i><i></i><p>Zillow has launched their own iPhone app (which rocks) - but wants me to take down mine and hand over the domain for "a couple hundred bucks".<p>I dont feel this is fair and they're trying to stiff me with a measely $250. What would you do? What do you suggest? What are your thoughts?
Upvote: | 145 |
Title: Hi!<p>I'm a young wannabe-hacker looking to move for a summer to SF area. I'm working on a web project (Rails) and will try to reach ramen profitability over summer. If I fail I'll go back to living with my parents/continue college in the fall.<p>I can't move until June 13 since I'll only be 18 then (and be able to rent). So 2.5 months of living.<p>I already have around $3000 (paid taxes recently) and mainly telecommute part-time on C++/COM gigs. I might continue working with my current employer down there but I don't think I should rely on that. I'd rather rely on what I already have rather than hope I don't get cut off :)<p>Can somewhere answer these questions:<p>a) Will it be easier to pick up some part-time C++/Rails gigs in SF bay than Seattle? I'd really like to have some continuous source of income so I'd have money to come back/extend my runway.<p>b) Is it possible to live on $1000/month in SF? I subtract $600 for transit gas, emergency, etc.<p>For the rest, I summed up rent+utilities to be around $700, $100 for food, and $200 for everything else.<p>Am I correct in my calculations? Is there anything I'm missing?<p>c) How is the weather down there? Is it much hotter than Seattle?<p>e) Am I fucking crazy?<p>Thank you much.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: I launched a new service yesterday and I'd like to get some feedback on it.<p>It's a URL shortener that allows you to safely share NSFW content with people. You create a URL, give it a rating, and the user has the option to follow.<p>Thoughts? Ideas? Rants and Raves?<p>Cheers
-eli
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: Ok, so I might be completely missing something here, but bear with me. I want to use AWS to build my service. But I am a bit perplexed when it comes to storage. If I have MySQL running where do the database files get stored? Does each EC2 instance come with a certain amount of storage? Would be glad if someone explained this for me :)
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I'm curious as to why I rarely see PHP articles on Hacker News.<p>Is it because PHP isn't considered a "serious" language, and is mostly the realm of "designers" and "script kiddies"?<p>Do the developers who visit this site <i>all</i> code in Ruby, Erlang or Objective-C? Are PHP developers a minority in this community?<p>I play with Ruby & Objective-C on my own time, but at work it's an all PHP shop. We primarily use the Zend Framework, and honestly it's pretty good (good enough for IBM...). With the recently announced build tools, and some of the classes we've developed on top of ZF, I can develop just as quickly in PHP as I can with RoR.<p>PHP is also fairly popular with successful startups. Larger sites like Digg, Flickr and Facebook are using at least <i>some</i> PHP to scale to fairly massive traffic; even Wufoo (a site which I feel represents what so many of us here are trying to achieve in essence) is written in PHP.<p>I will agree that PHP is a bit of a mess (backslashes for namespaces?), and that the internet is full of the wrong way to use it; however, there certainly are talented developers writing quality software in PHP. Is there no interest in that here?<p><i>Apologies if this is a rehash of a tired topic; I poked around for a few minutes and didn't see anything relevant/recent.</i>
Upvote: | 99 |
Title: Two UC Berkeley School of Information students redesigned the BART kiosk interface using Flex 3 an Arduino and AS3Glue.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I'm building something that's going to store 2 billion media objects in the short term, with each object having 10+ related objects on top. Think crawler with some interesting extrapolations/filters/etc applied.<p>Would want to be able to power multiple views on data, mostly in aggregate form.<p>This is all greenfield: the data exists but i'm starting from scratch to crawl and reformat it. I'm interested to know how you might consider storing the info?<p>Thanks :)
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: A mourning friend of Fravia, new to Wikipedia, is trying to write an article about him, but his lack of experience triggered the heavy hand of admins, and the article is currently a semi-protected minimal stub.
I didn't know Fravia until yesterday, so I'm in a bad position to help him personaly, besides trying to explain him the local, arid rules, but it's a bit hard to explain that to a man in sorrow. The stub is here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia, and the WIP article here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fravia/WIP
On a related note, there seems to be little reliable information (in the Wikipedia meaning of reliable) about Fravia. He was more of an underground hero.
Having an eulogy or a tribute published in a respected publication may help sourcing the article. I know it's silly to have an eulogy written only for that purpose, but Wikipedia has become the default knowledge repository, and it would be a shame not to have an article about him. If (the friend of) a high profile hacker who knew or was influenced by Fravia read this, it would be nice if he could do something about it.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Hi, I just learned programming for about a year. I am familiar with a few programming languages such as python, scheme and java. My experiences with them include 1 OO programming course using Java and 2 courses using scheme and python. I feel I want to advance working on some simple projects but not sure where to start. Ideally the problem is not too simple or too complex. I have been reading source codes on sourceforge but not many really suit me. (either uninteresting or complex) So no idea what I should work on. Could you please share your experience with me about your first major/minor programming project that made your friends say, "wow"?<p>PS, I prefer writing in python or scheme.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Just a reminder that's it's mother's day. ;)
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: Pitch totally unrealistic Startup ideas.<p>Why do this? Well think of it like a brute-force brainstorming method. Very low SNR but hopefully a few of these will inspire someone to come up with a realistic/sane/good idea.
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: A great (but long) read for any start-up founder or those part of entrepreneurial organizations.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: (or is it just for me?)
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: <p><pre><code> Yesterday I left my wife and 3-month old son
to come to Singapore for my US investor visa
second interview.
Today my application was denied
because the visa officer thinks my $65,000
startup investment is not substantial.
This application has cost me countless number of
hours and $10,000+ to prepare
that I wanted to ask her if I could have
invested that time and money in my startup
would it make my investment substantial?
But I wasn't given a chance to dispute.
Today is a long day
that I wonder why America does not welcome
entrepreneurs
and have to rant from a hotel whose desk is
smaller than my laptop.
But tomorrow I will return to my wife and son
and continue to work on my startup
then write a much longer rant someday.</code></pre>
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Yesterday there was a absurd post about a guy who would rather be in jail than in college. Instead of flagging it, I thought I'd turn lemons into lemonade by posting a smarta$$ comment, as many of us often do.<p>Humor is a strange animal on-line, especially in the hacker world. What would obviously be a joke in person can easily be interpreted differently in writing. I have often resorted to using <sarcasm> and </sarcasm> tags, but sometimes forget. Also, hacker humor has an even higher standard. There's a fine line here; too subtle: nobody "gets" it, too obvious: take it to reddit where it belongs. But humor does have its place here. Some of my favorite comments have made me ruin keyboards when I read them while drinking.<p>I often joke that I feel like I'm in jail working in a cubible in someone else's office instead of my own company, a common theme here. So my response to the "accounting vs. jail" post was 3 words: "What's the difference?" Interesting things happened. In the first half hour, it got 6 up-votes. I imagined fellow hackers in the same situation getting a chuckle. Then I got this response from kyro:<p>"Your childish, baseless, and condescending comment is actually quite offensive. You'd think someone as old as yourself would know that there's more to life than a job. And you'd think these types of garbage comments wouldn't get upvoted. To be honest, it's not even that witty."<p>Ouch.<p>I have a personal rule to not respond to something like that for 24 hours. So I just said something like, "Lighten up," and forgot about it.<p>24 hours later, I haven't forgetten. kyro, would you have said that to me in person? If not, then please don't say it here. I have bumped into about 25 fellow hn'ers at various events, and couldn't wait to meet them in person. Now I wonder what I'd say if I bumped into kyro (whoever that is) at an event.<p>I once made the mistake of referring to someone on-line (OP, not a poster here) as a pussy. Big mistake. I still think he was a pussy (he talked about how he needed drugs to make it through school), but I never should had said it. You guys straighened me out in a hurry.<p>I would suggest everyone remember the site guidelines, which are basically the same as in any kindergarten. Don't say something you wouldn't say in person. If you downvote, add a comment (why?) And most of all, treat others how you would like to be treated. With so much talk about, bits, bytes, and dollars, it's easy to forget that it's always people first.<p>Oh, and if you have a smarta$$ remark, go for it, but make it clever. After another 300 lines of code, I could use the respite.
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: One of my friends just finished working through SICP (progress here - http://lawfulsamurai.blogspot.com/search/label/SICP, - the last few sections still have to be updated) and asked me for reccomendations for future work.<p>I thought of telling him to get really strong on algorithms etc (perhaps by working through Tardos/ Cormen et al, doing all the exercises like he did for SICP), but thought I'd tap the good folk of HN for better (or different) suggestions. Working through CTM for example is an option (another of my friends was doing this http://ctm-himanshu.blogspot.com/ but he didn't quite complete it).<p>(This has nothing to do with his day job which is java/python/Django. Just something for him to work through when he has a few hours and learn cool things.). Any suggestions gratefully accepted!<p>Thanks in advance.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: Preface: So this afternoon I had the opportunity to attend a session at TiEcon on early-stage funding, in which Paul was a panelist.<p>Here's his list of 6 unexpected advantages:<p>1. You don't have to spend a lot of time raising money.<p>2. You are forced to grow a culture of efficiency within your company.<p>3. The only way to impress somebody is to build something great.<p>4. You don't attract the wrong type of people (the ones who are obviously only in it for the money)<p>5. You can't buy things so you're forced to build them.<p>6. You can't afford to hire someone to do sales. You have to do it yourself, which forces you to interact with the end-user.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: A little lighter subject for this late saturday evening. I have considered starting a site along the lines of "startup recipes."<p>These recipes would be focused on inexpensive meals that don't take a lot of time away from coding but still provide excellent nutrition and lasting energy.<p>Of course we all know the "ramen profitable" stage, but Ramen is horrible for the body. Restaurants in general produce not that great of food and the amount of time saved by having them cook it isn't always advantageous considering you have to drive there, stand in line and be away from the computer. Not to mention the expense of convenience makes them not the best choice economically.<p>I went to college in New Orleans, so I became aware quickly of lots of inexpensive dishes that could be cooked without a lot of distraction: Red beans 'n' Rice, Gumbo, and Jambalaya. I also like to make a nice Pot Roast with potatoes, onions, and carrots in there.<p>So, my question for you is, what do you eat to keep yourself going while you are coding or working on your startup or just living?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Just purchased my first macbook and I'm already digging it. When it comes to Windows and Linux I have a standard set of apps for both programming and security auditing that I load up. I know what's available and where to get it.<p>With this new mac I've already loaded up some stuff but what else is available? What are some free, and even low cost "essential" mac apps I should look into?
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: To what extent do you do this and why? How has it affected you, and your relationships with people?<p>I've been doing it my whole life (I'm 30) because I felt that it would be easier to fit in with most people. So when I hear people confidently repeat urban myths like "we only use 10% of our brains", or "you'll drown if you don't eat an hour before swimming" etc, I don't bother trying to explain why I think they're wrong. Some people take it too personally (because of their ego, perhaps), and if they think you do it too often they tend to avoid your company for various reasons. Then there are times I avoid discussion of a topic completely because it tends to happen at a very superficial level or from a very narrow perspective (maybe because of things like lack of understanding or confirmation bias). I find that when I try to expand on certain areas of discussion I just get blank stares. So I usually just stick to topics like gossip, sport, women, cars, or I let other people do most of the talking. Obviously all individuals (and my relationships with them) are different to a degree, but these are some of the things I tend to see and do.<p>Anyway, I'm 30 now and I think "dumbing myself down" (at least on an intellectual level) has really taken it's toll on me. I never really had a big problem with managing relationships with people but it's getting to the point where I find conversations with my friends unbearable. eg. Last night I was on my phone reading HN and reddit while a group of us were in a lounge at some club (we had just come from a strip-club). I've vented occasionally about how I felt about this to my mom and she always says I should get new friends. The problem is that part of trying to fit in is emulating the behaviour of your peers. When I was younger, I was hung out with the street-thug type (avoided crime and drugs though). Then I left that for the clubbing and partying scene (took me a while to adjust). After leaving college I found there are very few people with my interests and lifestyle. They usually tend to fall into one group or the other. To put it simply, the one group is smart but boring, the other group is exciting but being around them is a mind-numbing experience. I've tried having two sets of friends but it didn't work out that well. I could also try changing my social circles again but where to next? And I don't really feel like changing my lifestyle again. Perhaps balance is the key, but finding people with the right balance is not that easy.<p>In the meantime I've resorted back to my (unhealthy) hacker nature. Dark bedroom, bright monitor, and 20 tabs open in a browser.<p>Anyone else going/been through something similar? How do you cope/are you coping?
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: Introducing Socks. An easy to use javascript UI toolkit with Shoes (http://www.shoooes.net) like syntax. Build webapps quickly and easily with no knowledge of HTML or CSS.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Every hacker has a workspace and coding/working environment that has been personalized, optimized, improved, tweaked and hacked for countless hours and days. This is one of the, if not the most, sacred things each hacker posses.<p>Share it with the community so we can learn from each other while improving our own.<p>Share yours.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: I am wondering how many people here have published articles in peer-reviewed, professional or academic journals without either holding or seeking a PhD. Also, how did you go about getting published? I am interested in general advice from PhDs as well.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Hey,<p>I realize this appears OT, but I don't think I'm the only one on HN with this problem, and we can just think of it as 'hacking social interactions' instead.<p>Here's the problem -- I've broken through the fear (of rejection) of talking to random, attractive girls. However, I have problem maintaining the smalltalk (i.e. conversation generally dies after 2-3 minutes).<p>Here's a typical scenario:
(<i>) I find some reason to talk about them -- if waiting @ bus stop (do you know when the next bus comes along?); if waiting in life for smoothie (those are nice ear rings ...); etc ...
(</i>) then, conversation starts dying; [btw, I'm on a college campus]; i.e. we can chat a bit a bout their major / field of study, etc ... but that's about it<p>The goal here isn't the pickup society's goal of: hey, go into a random bar, get laid; it's just figuring out how to meet new people + have interesting conversations without those .. ehh .. awkward 10 second silences that kill everything.<p>Suggestions? (help me debug my life, lol)<p>Cheers!
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I'm interviewing Dr. Wolfram in a few hours, so I wanted to reach out to the HN community and see what questions you'd like to have answered, technical or non.<p>Most of my interview is going to be straightforward, but I'd love to throw at least one tech Q in somewhere.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: As I imagine a lot of people have Macs here, I thought it appropriate to post this. It's a desktop app for ripping videos from the web and converting movies to a format suitable for iTunes & iPod. So those bittorrent videos can finally find a place in iTunes & your iPod. You can rip movies straight from YouTube by dragging the url icon into the app.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Are there any outdoor jobs that cater to the geek mind? The only thing I could think of is maybe naturalist (running around collecting and cataloging biological entities)?<p>It seems difficult to code while walking outside. Perhaps one could shift ones career in such a way that at least it involves long talks full of philosophical discussions (thinking for example about Ray Kurzweil).
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I have been developing web apps for almost 8 years now. I worked at agencies, development shops, I freelanced, I was CTO of an startup, had the six figure salary, etc. I just can't do it anymore. I hate sitting on my ass all day writing some code. My neck has been hurting for two years for spending so many hours in front of the computer. I kind of have been hating my career for a couple of years now and I have no clue about what I should do. I'm in my late 20's and I don't have a lot in savings left (six months of living costs at the most). I quit my job last year to work on a webapp of my own. I finished about 50% of it and haven't been working on it since. I got some freelance web maintenance work just to help cover some of my bills I get paid monthly and it's really easy stuff but I find it very boring as well and I wish I didn't have to spend any time working on it. I'm not lazy I just got tired of writing code and this industry in general. I always delivered the best work. In all of my previous jobs and was usually the best developer, engineer, etc.<p>Has anything like this happened to any of you?<p>What do you recommend I do?
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: I find myself writing comments, looking them over, and then not submitting them pretty often. A friend of mine is the same way.<p>I'm just curious how common this is.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: This is a bit strange, but somehow I figured I would find fellows among this crowd. For some time now, I've been experiencing what I would characterize as highly distracting and annoying dialogue going on in my head, out of my control. This goes far beyond the usual stuff that happens during e.g. debugging or any other puzzle-solving activity. There are various different disconnected voices, and they will constantly whisper, speak, and shout inanities. Oftentimes it's quite profane, and sometimes I catch myself unintentionally vocalizing it.<p>Does anyone else here face this? Have you found any remedy? Have I gone nuts?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: When I was a boy, I learned BASIC on the Apple II+. It was a joy, because I could turn on the computer and instantly find myself in a programming environment that was easy to learn and fun. Granted, I had to plot sprites on graphing paper and then convert them to hex digits. Still images were created much like an etch-a-sketch, but using cursor movement keys instead of dials.<p>Later, I purchased an Amiga and was full of excitement and joy when I learned how to use AMOS BASIC. It was more powerful than Apple BASIC, and I could use a mouse and graphics utilities such as Digi Paint to create bitmaps for sprites.<p>In recent years there have been few programming experiences that rival those early days. Ruby on Rails was a joy to discover after Perl and PHP. But as it evolves, I find keeping up with new features and best practices tiresome.<p>Yesterday I downloaded the Android SDK and followed the "hello world" tutorial. After completing it I had almost no desire to continue developing on that platform. The emulator took several minutes to load and many of the instructions on the developer site were confusing or plain wrong.<p>Are there any modern programming environments that are simple, fun, and a joy to use? It seems strange to me that as computer hardware has grown increasingly powerful and software tools more sophisticated, making programs that take advantage of these advances has not become easier or more enjoyable. On the contrary, programming seems to become more frustrating as it advances, like always trying to keep up with a frantically moving target. Am I missing something that can bring back my early joy or discovery, or am I just being nostalgic?
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: (Or a week in the life, if a day is too small a sample size to be particularly meaningful..)<p>How much time do you devote to coding, marketing, sales, support, biz dev, modifying your website?<p>How many hours a day do you spend working?
How many hours a day do you spend on recreation?<p>These are fascinating questions to many of us.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: As a reader and lurker of HN, I've come to respect this community as a group of intelligent, high-achieving, commonsensical people<p>I decided to post this today as a last-ditch effort to receive some kind of useful counsel, fully realising that this is a highly impersonal, ridiculous, and most likely ineffective way to ask for advice. But what the heck.<p>My first experience with computing and programming came at a fairly young age, messing around with Q BASIC and GW-BASIC on my mother's 386 computer. I would devour library books on BASIC programming, and I would spend hours tinkering around writing little text-based adventure games, and drawing circles and squares on the screen.<p>My interest in computing continued into my early teenage years. I developed the habit of taking apart whatever our family computer happened to be at the time and figuring out how everything fit together. I learned some assembly language, some simple C programming, and wrote a few little games using whatever technologies I could get my hands on. I had dreams of growing up and writing software that everyone would use one day.<p>My dreams were never really reality-based, however, and I didn't ever do the hard work it takes to translate them into actuality. I just assumed that I would be brilliant and rich one day, and everything would be fine. I grew up in small towns where people didn't talk about college very much. I always felt pretty smart compared to my peers. I guess I wasn't as smart as I thought I was though, as I had no presumption that I should try hard in school, try to get into a good college, and surround myself with intelligent people.<p>So, I ended up goofing off in high school. I got caught up in the social drama, partied, and I don't recall cracking a book outside of class. I graduated with a 3.2 GPA and a 1500/1600 SAT. Until my senior year, I didn't sweat my GPA too much, I wasn't even sure I wanted to go to college. When I did realise I wanted to go, I didn't see any utility in applying to anywhere out of state since I didn't think I could afford it. I could only get into mediocre schools anyway with my miserable GPA, no AP courses, and no soft factors.<p>I ended up spending my first two years at Podunk Community College, surrounded by the same friends I'd had since elementary school. I was miserable. I finished my liberal arts requirements, with a reasonable gpa, but no desire to finish my bachelors. I started my spring semester, got depressed with my prospects, withdrew from all of my classes, and moved away to the mountains. I now work at a grocery store making $8/hour. The good news is, I'm only 20, and hopefully still have time to turn it all around.<p>I've recently rediscovered my love for computers and programming, and decided that if I ended up going back to school, I want to major in Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or Computer Science. My only problem is that I don't even have the prerequisites done to start Calc 1 which is a prerequisite for just about everything else in those majors. I sort of want to go back to school, but at the same time, I think it will take a while to graduate when I'll have to fill up an entire semester with just a Trig class, so I can fill up another semester with just Calc 1 so I can get to Calc 2, just so I can get to the basic engineering/mathematics curriculum! I would be glad to take 20+ credit hours a semester to get myself back on track, but 20 credit hours of what? Besides that, will it even do me that much good to have a degree from an unknown state university? Is that really the best use of the next 2+ years of my life?<p>I have high aspirations. I want to found a start up. I'm sick of suburbia. I want to move to a city full of intelligence and ambition. I'm still young and idealistic - I want to change the world. I'm willing to work as hard as it takes, but as of right now I seem to be at a stand-still with my education. I've been working my way through SICP and I've recently learned the basics of Python, but I don't know if I can learn everything I need to know through self-study. Credentialism, like it or not, is still a huge factor when you have no work experience.<p>I wish I'd read Paul Graham's essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known" back in high school. I'm lacking sources of good advice here in Cherokee County, Georgia, so, as stupid as it sounds, I find my self asking, "What would PG[insert name of any other intelligent person] do in my situation?" On a whim, I decided to ask HN -- seems like the closest thing I'll ever get to an answer.
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: Hello,
I'm trying to work on my own startup for a while. I sometimes do some Ruby and Javascript contracting to burn trough my savings a little slower (ping me if you're looking for a part-time UI guy).<p>I've started to work on my current idea more than a month ago. But I'm going forward REALLY slowly. And, mostly, because I cant focus. I waste a lot of time on 'hacking here and there' or writing some small utility for myself.<p>Do you have any ideas how to stay focused on my main project? How do you get rid of hacking on side-projects too much?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Imagine you are a reclusive scientist genius who after spending the last 15 years exploring the space of algorithms for solving 3SAT, has stumbled upon a fast polynomial-time solution.<p>Somewhat tired as you are of the academic community, and not very interested in prizes or distinctions, you decide it would be in your
best interest to try to monetize your discovery privately. To this purpose, what massively lucrative applications can you think of for such an algorithm?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Winamp plugin that is able to extract chords from any mp3 on your playlist. It is very good in that. You could edit missed chords if needed in plain text file.<p>You could see chords and guitar tabs synchronized to a song and even hear chords mixed to a song.<p>http://chords.fm<p>Thoughts?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I'm curious to know how many YC companies with founders over 30 yrs old have been funded.<p>We hear so much about founders right out of college. I also wonder how much of a factor is age in selecting companies.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: [Condensed version of this narrative: the news.yc code, prior to the
the release of arc3, contains a remotely-exploitable vulnerability
permitting account theft. Anyone running a news installation who has
not yet upgraded to arc3 should do so.]<p>Hacker News login cookies are random eight-character strings, stored
server-side in a hash table mapping them to user names. I discovered
a few weeks ago that these strings were rather less random than they
were meant to be, and, through a delightful combination of exploits,
could be predicted, enabling an attacker to steal accounts.<p>Here's the rand-string function from arc.arc, version 2. It gets
called with n=8 to generate login cookies, and n=10 for the "fnids"
that get used all over the site as hash keys identifying closures.<p><pre><code> (def rand-string (n)
(with (cap (fn () (+ 65 (rand 26)))
sm (fn () (+ 97 (rand 26)))
dig (fn () (+ 48 (rand 10))))
(coerce (map [coerce _ 'char]
(cons (rand-choice (cap) (sm))
(n-of (- n 1) (rand-choice (cap) (sm) (dig)))))
'string)))
</code></pre>
The first thing you might notice about this function is that not all
characters are equally probable. Each digit has a 1/30 chance of
occuring, while each letter has a 1/78 chance. This alone is no big
deal: this distribution means that each character carries 5.826 bits
of entropy, versus the 5.954 that a uniform distribution would
provide. So for an eight-character string, this bug reduces the
effective keyspace by just over a factor of two -- not enough to have
any practical implications.<p>The 'rand' function is an arc primitive, bound directly to mzscheme's
'random':<p><pre><code> ; need to use a better seed
(xdef 'rand random)
</code></pre>
The comment seen here is prescient, as we'll see.<p>This is the C function which implements mzscheme's 'random' function:<p><pre><code> static long sch_int_rand(long n, Scheme_Random_State *rs)
{
double x, q, qn, xq;
/* generate result in {0..n-1} using the rejection method */
q = (double)( (unsigned long)(m1 / (double)n) );
qn = q * n;
do {
x = mrg32k3a(rs);
} while (x >= qn);
xq = x / q;
/* return result */
return (long)xq;
}
</code></pre>
Where mrg32k3a() is:<p><pre><code> static double mrg32k3a(Scheme_Random_State *s) { /*(double), in {0..m1-1}*/
double x10, x20, y;
long k10, k20;
/* component 1 */
x10 = a12*(s->x11) - a13n*(s->x12);
k10 = (long)(x10 / m1);
x10 -= k10 * m1;
if (x10 < 0.0)
x10 += m1;
s->x12 = s->x11;
s->x11 = s->x10;
s->x10 = x10;
/* component 2 */
x20 = a21*(s->x20) - a23n*(s->x22);
k20 = (long)(x20 / m2);
x20 -= k20 * m2;
if (x20 < 0.0)
x20 += m2;
s->x22 = s->x21;
s->x21 = s->x20;
s->x20 = x20;
/* combination of component */
y = x10 - x20;
if (y < 0.0)
y += m1;
return y;
}
</code></pre>
This, obviously, is not a cryptographically strong PRNG. Is it possible
that we could break it, computing its internal state by seeing a few
consecutively-generated rand-strings? Probably: it looks as though it
could be represented as the solution to a manageable system of diophantine
equations. That, though, was more math than I felt like doing, so I went
looking for an easier approach.<p>Where does the RNG seed come from? Ah ha:<p><pre><code> rs = scheme_make_random_state(scheme_get_milliseconds());
</code></pre>
Where scheme_get_milliseconds is defined, after eliding some
preprocessor cruft, as:<p><pre><code> long scheme_get_milliseconds(void)
{
struct timeb now;
ftime(&now);
return now.time * 1000 + now.millitm;
}
</code></pre>
In other words, the random seed is merely the number of milliseconds
since epoch at the time the seed function was called.<p>The part of mzscheme that calls the seed function is a bit daunting:
it appears that in some cases, the PRNG state can be thread-local and
be initialized when the thread is spawned. However, instrumenting
sch_int_rand() with some debug output showed that in arc, the same
state vector gets used everywhere, and is initialized when the
mzscheme runtime starts up.<p>The millisecond at which news.yc last started is not an immediately
simple thing to determine, though it was at least easy to verify the
sanity of the system clock, thanks to an open NTP serevr:<p><pre><code> dfranke@feanor:~$ sudo ntpdate -q news.ycombinator.com
server 174.132.225.106, stratum 2, offset 0.370866, delay 0.08228
17 May 01:45:13 ntpdate[27901]: adjust time server 174.132.225.106 offset 0.370866 sec
</code></pre>
So for a start, I thought, perhaps I could determine the server's
start time to within a few seconds or minutes. A boring way to go
about this would be simply to monitor the server for downtime, and
record when it became accessible again. But impatience is one of the
three great programmer's virtues, and the best way to predict the future
is to create it, and so forth, so I decided on a more proactive
approach: crash it!<p>A couple months ago, PG left this comment after news.yc recovered from
some downtime:<p><pre><code> HN was down today for around 2 hours. Sorry about that.
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.
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.
</code></pre>
(The server had since been upgraded, so these crashes are/were no longer
happening.)<p>I figured that the watchdog works by requesting a page and checking to
make sure it gets a response, and that if it doesn't get one, then it
assumes the server is wedged and restarts it.<p>Here's arc2's top-level request handler:<p><pre><code> (= srvthreads* nil threadlimit* 50 threadlife* 30)
; Could auto-throttle ips, e.g. if one has more than x% of recent requests.
(= requests* 0 requests/ip* (table) throttle-ips* (table) throttle-time* 30)
(def handle-request (s (o life threadlife*))
(if (len< (pull dead srvthreads*) threadlimit*)
(let (i o ip) (socket-accept s)
(++ requests*)
(= (requests/ip* ip) (+ 1 (or (requests/ip* ip) 0)))
(let th (thread
(if (throttle-ips* ip) (sleep (rand throttle-time*)))
(handle-request-thread i o ip))
(push th srvthreads*)
(thread (sleep life)
(unless (dead th) (prn "srv thread took too long"))
(break-thread th)
(close i o))))
(sleep .2)))
</code></pre>
So, there's a limit of 50 concurrent threads, and threads are killed
after 30 seconds if they haven't already terminated. So if I were to
hold open 50 concurrent connections, and the watchdog were to run during
the following 30 seconds, then the server ought to restart.<p>The watchdog code has not been released, so rather than soil my hat
color by DoSing the production server, I decided to continue hacking
on my local install on the assumption that I had the ability to
determine the server's start time to within one minute.<p>So, a one-minute interval is 60,000 possible PRNG seeds. If I kept
polling to see when the server came back up after the watchdog killed
it, then let's very conservatively assume that I could be among the
first 50 people to issue an HTTP request. Each page that comes back
from the server typically contains 2-3 fnids, so the reply I got would
contain some from among first few hundred to be generated, and thus
from among the first few thousand iterations of of the PRNG.<p>This leaves determination of the PRNG seed comfortably within the
reach of brute force: run the PRNG for 10,000 iterations for each of
the 60,000 possible seeds, and see which one produces the fnids I saw
in response to my request. I wrote a program that does just this:<p><pre><code> http://dfranke.us/hacknews.c
</code></pre>
So now I was able to determine PRNG seeds, but I couldn't conclude my
adventure quite yet. Since logging into news.yc is an uncommon
operation compared to simply browsing around, only a tiny fraction of
rand-strings that the server generates correspond to login cookies.
Furthermore, since fnids and login cookies have different lengths, and
since the PRNG gets called for a few other purposes at unpredictable
times, every individual PRNG iteration begins a candidate login
cookie. That's 40 or more false candidates produced for every page
view.<p>Nonetheless, online brute force would still be manageable. If each
page view produces an average of 50 candidates, and one in every
thousand page views is a login (this might be slightly optimistic),
that's 50,000 attempts necessary in order to find a working login. HN
gets about 500,000 hits on a busy day, so this could be done in a day
or two while likely staying under the radar.<p>A marginally more efficient approach would be a bit of social engineering:<p>1. Request a page. Find a generated fnid from the page source and
look it up in our candidate list. Call this A.<p>2.
ERC> /join #startups
<dfranke> Hey guys, I haven't been able to log in to news.yc
since the server restarted a little while ago. Anyone
else having problems?
<jrandomsucker> dfranke: Works for me.
<dfranke> Hmm, weird. I'll just try again later I guess.<p>3. Request another page, note the fnid, find it in the candidate
list. Call this B.<p>Step 4: Test the cookies that fall between A and B.<p>If this conversation takes one minute, then this reduces the search to
about 17,500 attempts -- less than a day's worth at a modest rate of
querying -- and possibly picks up multiple accounts in the process.<p>Epilogue:<p>I sent PG a draft of this post. RTM and I wrote a better implementation
of rand-string which reads from /dev/urandom and obeys a proper uniform
distribution. This new version appears in arc3:<p><pre><code> (def rand-string (n)
(let c "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
(with (nc 62 s (newstring n) i 0)
(w/infile str "/dev/urandom"
(while (< i n)
(let x (readb str)
(unless (> x 247)
(= (s i) (c (mod x nc)))
(++ i)))))
s)))
</code></pre>
PG removed the 50-thread concurrency limit and replaced it with a
per-IP rate limiter, so the DoS attack described here should no longer
work.
Upvote: | 928 |
Title: I can't live without Freshbooks. Recently i subscribed to BaseCamp (and loving it so far).<p>What are Your web apps that you can't live without that boost your creativity/productivity?<p>Thanks in advance.
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: I once worked for a company that did not allow us to use object-oriented programming. This is because their 2 most senior programmers did not know OOP.<p>Other things include putting a lot of business logic in stored procedures (SQL) so that migration is easier.<p>We were also not allowed to use folders, all web pages should be on the root directory. I can't remember the reasoning for this.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Hacker News tends to generate interesting, long discussions, which is great. I read the first screenful, glance at the bottom of the window and see that comments reach all the way to the bottom, so I hit the spacebar to bring up another page and keep reading, and the process repeats.<p>However, on the last page, the comments still reach all the way to the bottom of the screen, and I wind up hitting the spacebar a couple of times before I figure out I've actually come to the end of the page rather than my browser being sluggish or whatever.<p>If there were an inch or so of the white page background below the last comment, I think that would work wonderfully.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: It's kinda weird. Is it a bug ?
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Anon for this. I'm sitting on some cash - I'm not sure buying a condo, some index funds for retirement, or some such "sensible" thing is really my temperament. I'm far more tempted to try some angel investment. Ideally I'd start my own company but I'm a couple of years away from a greencard (will probably be 2 more years and I'll be 35 and ready for a mid-life crisis :*).<p>I've been here a little while working in large semiconductor companies as a compiler/systems software/architecture guy. But, I'd rather invest in some small groups which are not in such a capital intensive.<p>I don't have the extensive network of contacts, startup experience or cash that yc has, but perhaps hackers here can suggest a way to dip a toe in the water?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: It take a hackers mind to understand the genius of Calvin and Hobbes
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Scotty had a hilarious video series until his boss found out about it.
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: I just saw that New Mogul has a search box that pipes through to searchyc.com without ruining the site design. I'm sure you've considered adding a search box in the past, but might now be a good time to reconsider?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: While thinking of ever more imaginative ways to punish domain squatters following yet another abandoned hunt for a domain-cum-product name, I finally became aware of the irony that I am sitting on a few decent domain names that I'm not using.<p>Then, I wondered, if one of the parked domains I've come across recently is held just by someone like me, not maliciously or out for profit, but just as a by-product of a non-startup startup, an abandoned weekend hackery project or whatever really.<p>So, rather than set up www.domainnameswap.com (partly because the name is parked ;o) ), how about a thread where we have a rummage down the back of the sofa and throw in any parked domains we'd be willing to give/swap away. If there's a match up, the relevant poster is contactable via their HN profile.<p>[Note: this idea may tank, but it's got to be worth a try. My fingers are being worn shorter with each fruitless domain search]
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: A friend and I are sitting on tailrecursion.com wondering what to do with it. I suggested it would be a cool name for an HN-like site that catered specifically to those who spend 8 hours a day behind an emacs or vi session (and no less!), rather than the marketing/sales/non-hacker-founder types (which HN perfectly addresses). What do you guys think?
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: More specifically: Is there a book on biology that requires little or no prior knowledge, emphasizes principles at the expense of real-world practicality, and requires considerable intellectual effort in exchange for a genuine, satisfying foray into the field?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: a now dead submission from earlier today inspired me to ask about this.<p>its been a personal goal of mine for a while to be able to do this before i would want/need to settle down: setting things up in my life in such a way that i can grab a laptop and travel the world. travel to a new country, stop for a while, see and do things, and pop open the laptop to do enough work to fund the traveling.<p>the intent would be to stay in one place for longer periods (months, depending on the visa) so that work would be less random and so that i could properly experience the new location's culture, atmosphere, etc.. the intent would also be to aim for the more inexpensive places so that i wouldn't necessarily have to work 40/wk to get by. kind of like where the hell is matt (http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/) except less dancing (also, i had this idea in my head way before i ever saw matt's stuff).<p>we're a community of smart people who like to solve problems. so, i imagine someone else has gone down this road. i was just curious about this, since i've done a lot of thinking (read: daydreaming) about it myself lately.
anyone have any thoughts/experiences/resources/insights/etc.?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: For some time I've been using Clicky for my real time analytics. But now that free period is expired, i have to buy a pro version.
Before buying I thought it would be better if I could get some opinion on other alternatives as well.<p>Please share your experience with real time analytics.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Dear HN, I need some insight from you.<p>While I have very solid foundation when it comes to algorithms, unfortunately my math skills are kind of rusty and lacking.
I have big holes in my math education, partly because of bad luck with teachers in high-school/college. And the math I learned, I'm starting to forget because of lack of practice.<p>My domains of interest are data-mining, NLP and AI. These are domains where knowledge of mathematics is required to understand the underlying phenomenons. I mean, I got to some level of knowledge, but it is based on experimentation, empiric conclusions and cargo-culting.<p>Going to a local college for lectures is not an option.<p>I want some recommendations on good math books on:
calculus, discrete math, probabilities, statistics<p>I'd also like to start from a comfortable level, so I prefer books that at least start with an introduction of the prerequisites.
Upvote: | 111 |
Title: Do you buy and read math books? do you read them cover to cover or do you just use them as a reference book?<p>I typically buy a lot of math and physics, hard cs books, etc., but they take a lot of time to read so I end up collecting them, while reading them slowly (because hard science books could take months to read, at least if you don't have a lot of time for that!). Is that a typical hacker thing or is it just me?<p>I'm asking because I keep buying books about stuff I want to learn, but I also look at my library and I ask myself: "why don't I read these first?" Who knows, maybe today I want to learn something different than yesterday.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: At least, it is in the US. Go, do something special!
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: Bit of a head-scratcher here.<p>I run a social news site for Chicago over at WindyCitizen.com. Since a massive redesign back in January, I've seen its traffic, activity, and influence grow steadily.<p>Problem: I've been really successful so far in working WITH the local media. But completely unsuccessful in getting any coverage FROM the local media that I could show to advertisers to let them know we're legit. I knew it would be tough to launch something aimed at a market without a "Techcrunch" to speak to early adopters, but this is getting ridiculous.<p>Here's what I mean:<p>1. I've hammered out partnerships to have our submission/voting buttons on the local alt. weekly site and all major local blogs. This was a nontrivial feat.<p>2. The local CBS affiliate has added our top stories widget to its site. Also nontrivial.<p>3. Journalists from every local publication have glommed on to us and are posting their stories to the Citizen on a daily basis. Of our 2000 members, I estimate we have at least 50 Chicago journalists among them, including editors and deputy editors who are posting stories and leaving comments on our site on a regular basis.<p>4. Last month we had over 4000 stories and events posted and reached about 80,000 people.<p>So these journalists are all using the Citizen and these publications all want our traffic (because it's local), but no one's ever run a "hey, check out this cool site!" story on us.<p>I'm beginning to think the statute of limitations for that happening is running out.<p>I've also had zero luck getting coverage from tech blogs. I've assumed that's because the site's aimed at Chicago.<p>I think part of my problem is that I have a background in journalism. The idea of aggressively wining and dining reporters at local papers, courting them and calling them up all the time to tell them what's new is pretty gross to me. I e-mail a good number of folks when we have news and have made friends with a lot of local media, but no dice on the coverage front. It's very humbling.<p>Clearly, I'm doing something wrong here. What?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: A humorous but truthful approach on what it means to be a productive slacker.
Upvote: | 127 |
Title: Recently I have tried approaching a few good developers through their blogs about various matters including advice on how to go about some projects I'm undertaking but I am surprised at the unfriendly responses I have received. Maybe I have been going about it the wrong way but it got me thinking; Shouldn't the guys whose work we look up to be keen on what some of us young aspiring developers have to contribute to the community? I mean sure, we don't have the experience or skills some of these guys have(yet) but we still have some ideas that are viable with the right technical skills to back them. If any of them want to reach out and help nurture some potential talent, it may very well benefit all them in the end, whether financially or in terms of new ideas and experiences.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I saw that Kevin Rose came and spoke at YC last night, and of course we know that other entrepreneurs do regularly as one of the benefits of being in the YC family.<p>I can completely understand that the talks take place in a safe environment such that companies may reveal details they don't want public, or that the entrepreneur may be giving sneak peeks into their own upcoming projects, but even so I was wondering if these talks are recorded with the intent to be published sometime down the line?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: After the large number of posts I've seen asking about reading math, returning to study, wanting to know more about foundations, etc, I've decided to make some of my writings and masterclass material available on the web. There's a lot of it, and it needs work, so I'd appreciate some comments about what you'd like to see first.<p>I'm intending to create an undirected graph of topics, so you can start where you want, then go forward once you get the idea, or back if you're struggling. Then you can concentrate on the bits you're most interested in.<p>But what should I start with? I've read what people have advised others to read, and I'm looking for a start point.<p>Oddly enough, I will start with "Adding Fractions" and basic algebra (expanding, factoring and simplifying), but where then? I will eventually cover O(..) notation, basic calculus, infinities, series, convergence, combinatorics, graphs (vertices and edges) and more, but what do <i>you</i> want to see first?<p>It will also be on a wiki-like system so you can contribute later if you want, although not at first while I get it running.<p>Comments, thoughts, suggestions welcome.
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: Just wondering if you guys can recommend any fundamental reading on internet marketing, advertising and related subjects (probably with more emphasis on theory such as knuth or cormen for programming).<p>Thanks.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Hey Guys,<p>I just finished reading Risk (The Science of Politics and Fear) by Dan Gardner and figured I should recommend it as a great read. I wouldn't normally recommend a book here but I <i>suspect</i> it is the kind of book a lot of people would dismiss as not-relevant to the hacker sort of mentality (I thought the same).<p>Basically it sums up the Human reaction to perceived risk. One way to describe the whole thing is how many people, after seeing a coin land heads up 5 times in a row will bet it has a higher chance of landing heads up again next time - regardless of the random aspect.<p>The most interesting thing I found in the book though was when he presented common "risk puzzles" where our gut causes a knee-jerk answer to a posed question. Several times I thought "that's silly, I'd never fall for that" only to read on an find that I had done :) one big point he makes there is that bad responses to risk and fear are just as much a problem in "intelligent" people.<p>If I had to sum it up Risk is a good link between some of Dawkins/Hitchens anti-mythology books and popular science concepts (like A Brief History of Time etc.).<p>His initial example is how after Sept. 11th people stopped using Aeroplanes whilst car travel went up: except more people <i>extra</i> died in that year than died in the Sept 11th tragedy. Car travel was perceived as "safer" even though it wasn't in the slightest.<p>I think it is really relevant to some of the stuff people here are working on: because it assess how people respond even after considering a problem. It's also proved useful (to me) in making several tough(ish) choices in the recent past. If nothing else it has sat there in my mind so that when "gut" kicks in I have a little bookmark to stop it and rethink what I just did/said/thought.<p>Anyway, I found it incredibly fascinating & enlightening to read so.... recommended :)
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: (Posting this under a different account to my usual, for reasons which will become obvious)<p>So, I find myself in this situation: After developing my start-up over the last 2 years outside of work, I quit, and launched doing it full-time 3 months ago, and have been working at it since then.<p>Without going into too much detail, my start-up is in the B2B space, in a reasonably conservative industry. I have been doing everything myself, from development, to sys-admin stuff, to sales, marketing etc. I'd characterize the feedback I've got from people in the industry so far as "mildly positive" - they express some interest in the idea, but are not yet willing to commit to it.<p>At the moment, I have enough cash on hand in the business to last until November, at current boot-strapped burn rates, and I have enough cash on hand personally (since the business isn't paying me a wage) until the end of September. After that, I can sell some stocks (around $10K worth) which would give me enough personal income and business income to last until around January 2010. However, if I took that path, and the business didn't then succeed, I would be facing bankruptcy.<p>My feeling is that I have perhaps started a business which attempts to do too much for a single founder with no employees and limited capital, trying to do something in the business/enterprise space which has long lead times, big perceived risks (for my clients, not me) and in an industry which is very slow to change.<p>I don't want to give the impression that I've already decided to give up, because I haven't.<p>So that's why I'm asking HN: How should I decide whether to give up, and go back and get a job until I have another startup idea, or keep going with this one, knowing that there is perhaps only a slim chance of success (but if I do succeed, it will be well and truly worth it)?<p>Happy to provide any further information if you think it relevant.
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Awhile back, raganwald created a thread with the sole purpose of discussing what the community is hacking on. Not start-ups and/or business, but just hacking on for fun in our spare time. I really enjoyed that conversation and would like to have more like it.<p>With that goal in mind, I suggest we use Saturdays to highlight our open-source and/or side projects that we're working on. Saturday seems like a logical fit since it is generally a slow news day, and what better time to talk about our "weekend projects" than the weekend?<p>So, to get the proverbial ball rolling, I submit to you my most recent side project which I released earlier this week, the WordPress Console.<p>http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/06/introducing-the-wordpress-console/<p>If you've developed in Rails then you know the joy of script/console. I have been writing a lot of WordPress plugins for clients lately, and wanted a way to interact with the development environment similar to how I can when writing a Rails app. This desire resulted in the WordPress Console, which is a plugin that creates an in-browser shell where you can execute arbitrary PHP code with the full WordPress env loaded.<p>It isn't a huge technical achievement or even all that challenging to create, but it is kinda cool, imo. The project is also still wet behind the ears, but usable.<p>What do you think? Worth developing further? Have ideas to make it more awesome? Anybody want to join in and hack on it with me?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I would like to understand why Python is so much more popular than Ruby. Much of the software I've seen supports Python for scripting (e.g. Miro, OpenMoko, XBMC/Boxee), and people don't seem to care so much for Ruby. At the same time, people agree that Ruby is great for writing DSLs.<p>I don't want a flame war or religious arguments. I would like to understand what made Python win in this space. Thanks so much for commenting!
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: After many years of development, PostgreSQL has become feature-complete in many areas. This release shows a targeted approach to adding features (e.g., authentication, monitoring, space reuse), and adds capabilities defined in the later SQL standards. The major areas of enhancement are:<p><pre><code> * Windowing Functions
* Common Table Expressions and Recursive Queries
* Default and variadic parameters for functions
* Parallel Restore
* Column Permissions
* Per-database locale settings
* Improved hash indexes
* Improved join performance for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries
* Easier-to-use Warm Standby
* Automatic sizing of the Free Space Map
* Visibility Map (greatly reduces vacuum overhead for slowly-changing tables)
* Version-aware psql (backslash commands work against older servers)
* Support SSL certificates for user authentication
* Per-function runtime statistics
* Easy editing of functions in psql
* New contrib modules: pg_stat_statements, auto_explain, citext, btree_gin</code></pre>
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: I concur with the value of keeping meta-discussion on HN to a minimum, but sometimes it really surprises me when a story gets killed.<p>At one point, you could object by commenting in the thread under an existing comment. That often caused moderators to reverse the kill if a legitimate point about relevance was raised. It seems this has been disabled.<p>This came to mind today when I noticed that the stories of recording studio engineers about the experience of working with Michael Jackson, about his work ethic and management style, was killed after 77 points [1].<p>If anything, that set of stories is the very most relevant, and definitely the very most interesting, of all the things about Jackson that have been posted here. The stories are told from a very 'hackerly' perspective, and the peripheral environment of the stories -- recording studios and the related technology and business environment -- are interesting to many people in this audience. The comment thread had some interesting tidbits, and looked in no danger of going astray. And as a point of comparison, I very much doubt that a much less interesting or timely 400 word blog post about the "value of a strong work ethic" would have been killed on HN.<p>Anyway, this is all just peanuts in the long term for HN, but it seems we should work out a way of raising a legitimate objection to a moderator kill without resorting to an 'Ask HN' comment such as this.<p>[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685603
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: I'm a regular reader and commenter, but for this question wished to remain anonymous. I apologize about the length of this, you can skip to the end for the question if you are short on time, but would really be grateful for any responses as I really value the HN community.<p>Background:<p>I'm 21 and currently approaching the final year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia. I'm a business major at the McIntire school which is fairly respected (http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/index.html) and concentrating in management with a sort of sub-track in a newly launched entrepreneurship program that I'm excited about (co-taught by some entrepreneur alumni). The business program is a two year program and I came out of high school with enough college credits that I've been able to take more or less any classes I've been interested in (mostly Philosophy, Political theory, Psychology.. I seem to like the P's). I absolutely love the college academic environment as I love learning. As a result I've done excellent in school all while managing to have sometimes too much fun in the process.<p>I got involved with my first web based start-up when I was 13/14. I saw a business model (niche market, digital product related), thought I could do a better job, and more or less copied it. Within a year I ended merging and working with the business I copied. My age never really came up until I was there for a while and at that point I was 17 or so and the owner ended up getting out of the business and I split off with some others and we formed our own company doing the same thing (although a bit better). We ended up growing the firm to $250,000 in revenues with a great profit margin, however at that point we became distracted and complacent (I was enjoying college, the head "techie" partner was rapidly advancing in his day job as a programmer, people got married and had first kids etc.) and more or less let the business die down.<p>I've played with a few other startup ideas since then related to the same niche I had experience in (one was doing fine, but I didn't have the passion for it and couldn't deliver a product/service that I thought was good enough so shut it down; another I started last summer and the business model works and it is generating maybe a steady $10-20 a day, but that is only with about 100 unique users a day..it's very scalable and is designed to be a semi-passive cash cow but am having trouble bringing in the traffic; if I could get 1,000 <i>targeted</i> uniques a day probably about $100/day and so on). I just recently bought out a partner of the original start-up and am trying to bring it back to where it was before. However, the competition is a lot stronger now, and I'm a bit burned out of the business and would probably prefer to work on other things.<p>In this process I've managed to save about 100k in cash/liquid assets that aren't in a Roth IRA or anything like..and I have my expenses for next year (class/rent/food) covered. The question deals with what to do with those assets...<p>The Question Arises:<p>This summer I'm interning at a global high tech physical manufacturing firm. Great brand name, the compensation is great, and I'm more or less doing a lot of financial analysis and writing whitepapers related to internal business processes and international banking. All the main projects I work on are fairly interesting (Even if most of my downtime I'm doing silly intern things like the occasional printing, photocopying, filing, or any work someone else doesn't want to do etc.) and I work with good people...but really don't seem to like working for a large corporation. All the roles are so specialized and bureaucratic, it's very 8-5 cubicle work, and there just seems to be a constant "cog in the machine" alienation from the work that is being done and the finished product. I've realized I really don't like that. That's partly because the finished product is unbelievably complex and there isn't really another way to setup the system, but I feel my early start-up experience has spoiled me and for the most part I dislike the job and could in no way see myself doing it for the rest of my life or even a year.<p>The Question:<p>So, I have one more year of school left to sort of prepare for my exit into the real world. Unlike most on HN I'm not much of a programmer (I tried to teach myself some C++ back when I was younger, but never really enjoyed it that much; I've recently been teaching myself the basics of Ruby because I got tired of hiring people to fix things, but not sure if I have a passion for it although enjoy learning it as of now...will see when I learn a bit more) although I am very technical and been working with/building and playing with old computers since I was probably about seven or eight years old.<p>I really want to move to a major city, and have wanted to move to the Silicon Valley area/region since I was a kid. I always felt like I was too young or left out of the early web boom (for better or worse). I'd probably love to move to San Francisco and get involved with some sort of start-up related work related to either web, tech, or finance.<p>However, I'm sort of torn as in a poor job market I'm lucky enough to attend a school with a nice almuni network and great recruiting right out of school. About 70% of my business school are finance majors and a great deal of them all go to Wall Street or the top Management Consulting Firms. I could see myself potentially doing that as I like finance, the markets, strategy, and the whole nature of closing and making big deals... but have this nagging feeling that if it weren't for the money or prestige that isn't what I would want to spend my life doing. I felt some of PG's essays pointed this out rather well. When I did startup work... it just didn't feel like work and my currently internship feels a lot like work. However the paycheck is nice...<p>So, any ideas on what I should do with my remaining "vacation" from the real world in college or what I should do with the 100,000 in the bank? Any ideas on what to do after college?<p><i></i>Note: At the same time I can't help feeling how out of wack this question is with a world where many live on a $1 a day and a global GDP per capita of about $10,000/year and how lucky I am to have the opportunities I have had (especially on the 4th of July here in the U.S). It's something I've always felt a bit guilty about even though I've worked hard, because so many never had the chance that I had. For that very reason I've always had that sort of nagging feeling to really make the best use of what I've been given; hence this question.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Deconstructing the "I can do it in a weekend" fallacy, feature by feature.
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: From National Geographic, Dan Buettner's search for the fountain of youth among the longest-lifespan cultures of the world.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I'm in a kind of dilemma...<p>I'm 25, computer engineer with masters. I have a day job, I also have a halftime startup. I also have french lessons at saturdays. In the startup, we have several ambitious projects in execution. I enjoy my work (although sometimes I recognize myself as feeling exhausted...), however as I come from a mid class (more towards poor) family, I have a strong perception (with evidence) of that if I do hard work I can achieve some moderate level of wealth. I really did like my relationship with my girlfriend, but lately she keeps saying about how little time I dedicate to herself, and how my main interest had been turned on the startup success...<p>I admit the quality of our relationship has been seriously lowered, and I feel very sad on both of us. I imagined a future with her. I really love her but according to her expectations (reasonable after all) my dedication is not enough.<p>I don't know what to do. What should I do? should I focus more on my gf and quit my aspirations of becoming "rich" in the near future (with high costs like losing her)? or should I prefer a more balanced lifestyle with lower expectations?<p>Please some experienced advice would be grateful.<p>[ EDIT ]<p>She was involved on the startup with ideas and support, and formally too with 33% of representation and legal paperwork.
A couple of days ago she told me she want to leave the thing because my lack of commitment with her. Her argument was a sort of "given that you aren't going to anywhere with me, I want to quit of the startup"
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: http://www.zenbe.com/shareflow
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: a few of mine:<p>apartment design / DIY - http://apartmenttherapy.com<p>working on my car - http://altimas.net<p>all around randomness - http://lifehacker.com
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I know this question has been asked before in one way or another, but in the mean time projects have been started and finished. People have changed jobs or even fields, etc...<p>What are you working on? And where? Start-up? Academia? Your favorite MegaCorp?
Upvote: | 136 |
Title: I have a day job, but I'm looking to break into doing some freelance programming. However, I keep losing potential jobs because my price is too high. I have been saying my price is $50 an hour, which I don't think is unreasonable considering my experience. Should I lower my rate, is there somewhere I should be looking for work?
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: As usual, when your mind races at night, it's tough to sleep. Instead of tossing and turning, I decided to quickly bang out some code using twitter's search API that displays the latest images posted to twitpic.<p>There's probably so many places I could go with this - so, any ideas for enhancements?
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: First a brief background about me.I am 30 years old IT Architect working in the IT Services wing of a large MNC.Almost for the last ten years I have dreamed of doing interesting things like doing a start up,hacking on open source software, learning quantum mechanics, learning music etc.I believe I am most happy when I do creative things.<p>Now here is the problem.From the time I can remember I have always been lazy and procastinate everything till the dead last moment(I have almost made procastination into an art form).Almost always I find some excuse or another to not do either the regular mundane day to day administrative type of work nor do I ever get to do the more "creative" type of work which I sincerely want to do.<p>Now a lot of people told me I am just a lazy jackass and should get off my ass and get something done.That does sound like a simple solution but every time I try by planning my day and focusing on my tasks it works out for a few days and if I am lucky even a week or so but inevitably I get back to my old ways.This leads to a lot of stress for me because I am never truly happy - its almost like one part of me wants to do something and another part of me does everything to prevent me from doing it and the vicious cycle never lets me have any kind of satisfaction with anything I do<p>Now I have started to believe that my laziness is a part of my personality and probably more hard wired in me than I think.<p>It would be truly truly helpful if anybody out here ever who suffered a similar problem and were able to get out of it can provide some advise or even if they were able to successfully change a personality trait for life.Thanks in advance
Upvote: | 105 |
Title: How did it happen? How did you recover? What did you change so it wouldn't happen to you again?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: We’re kicking off a programming contest today that is sure to challenge even the most comp-sci heavy engineers out there, and we’re excited to see what you all come up with. With the difficulty of the challenge in mind, we’ve got some great prizes for the winner: an iPhone 3GS AND $2,000 of Cloud (Flex or Solo) credit.<p>You must tweet a sequence of twelve words that when hashed is bit-wise closest to a hash of a challenge phrase that we will announce the morning of July 20th. All words must be from a 1,000 word dictionary we will provide at that same time. You are allowed to append up to five random characters to the end of your entry. We’re pretty confident you’ll want to write a program to automate the finding of close matches, so announcing this a week in advance should give you enough time to get your programs up and running.<p>See the blog post for more details, rules and prizes!
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: For whatever ungodly reason, the news.yc web server doesn't terminate header lines properly when sending a response, which happens to break any HTTP client that actually follows the RFC. Please see RFC 2616 section 3.7.1 and use <i>\r\n</i> as God intended.<p><pre><code> This flexibility regarding
line breaks applies only to text media in the entity-body; a bare CR
or LF MUST NOT be substituted for CRLF within any of the HTTP control
structures (such as header fields and multipart boundaries).
</code></pre>
Thank you!
Upvote: | 124 |
Title: I have a three really great desks. One is a large 'L' shaped corner desk and the other two are medium sized an multi-tiered. I also have two swivel chairs. I'm happy to give them away to anyone who's working on a startup. May they bear you to greater fortunes than they bore their riders :)<p>My contact is in my profile.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Preamble:<p>The Zed Shaw Celebutante License (ZSCL) is designed to meet the objective of some open source contributors, which is to gain fame and notoriety in the open source community as a result of widespread adoption of open source software they have written.<p>The ZSCL is a "viral" license like the GPL, but instead of requiring derivative code to share the same license, the ZSCL simply requires a weekly tweet or blog post that meets the ZSCL Terms and Conditions (described below).<p>Terms and Conditions:<p>0. Virality. Anyone using ZSCL licensed code must write a blog post mentioning Zed. The post need not present Zed in a favorable light, but it must mention that Zed is the author of the Mongrel web server and the Lamson email system.<p>1. Qualifying posts. In order to meet the ZSCL community guidelines, a "Blog Post" must consist of at least 500 words and three hyperlinks. "Microblogging" posts such as Tweets are allowed, but multiple tweets are required to reach the 500 word minimum. Use of URL-shortening services is discouraged.<p>2. Attribution. Uses of ZSCL licensed code must mention in their post how invaluable the code was and how they plan to attempt to hire Zed to perform some consulting on a vital aspect of their project.<p>3. Fights. Users may also publicly threaten to start a fight with Zed, so long as Zed is granted full permission to disclose the threat on his own blog, as well as any relevant IRC snippets.<p>4. Reality Television. Zed Shaw reserves the right to discuss your blog post and code in any future reality television series that he may star in. This includes any sponsorship and in particular extends to action figure royalties.<p>How to Apply these terms to your new programs:<p>If you develop a program and want to license it under the ZSCL, you must create a blog post on your own personal blog that meets the above terms and conditions, and also makes some particularly brash and bold claims about the software. It is recommended that you predict that your code will mostly be used by black hats, spammers, or Fortune 10 companies.
Upvote: | 106 |
Title: What's the inside scoop on Tipjoy (YC'08)? They haven't Tweeted in 3 weeks (since they spammed their userbase). Their payment system isn't cooperating (users can't pay in and are getting long delays in payouts). And I've heard from a few folks that now, they aren't even responding to emails. Are they moving in with Madoff, or what? If they're done, it's OK. But, there's a proper way to fail and a way <i>not</i> to fail.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: When you read a book, watch tv, or consume other type of media, you do it for a purpose. Most of the time the purpose is to entertain yourself. But on the web, specially on so called social media like Twitter, the purpose is constantly being challenged and shifted. It’s a two way, or asynchronous conversation as it has been proselytized, but you still have to manage that expectation. To listen or to talk, to participate or to follow, to write or to read. This is theoretically great, but you will never have that sense of completion I was talking about. It’s an open loop that never closes in your head.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Shareholders voted today to officially sell the company to Oracle. And Jonathan Schwartz wasn't even in the room when it happened.
Upvote: | 115 |
Title: Hi, Everyone, if i have a web app, i would like to know how many page views or unique visitors i need to have in order to make about $5000 dollars a month from Ads? Any (educated) estimation or guess? It will be great to hear from your own experience. Thanks.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: My site is Launchset.com. According to Google Analytics, here's the breakdown of browsers used by my users.<p>1. Chrome 37.50%<p>2. Firefox 34.53%<p>3. Safari 22.50%<p>4. Internet Explorer 3.59%<p>5. Mozilla 1.09%<p>6. Opera 0.31%<p>7. Camino 0.16%<p>8. Konqueror 0.16%<p>9. Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.16
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Have you had slow-to-resolve real life problems that made it emotionally difficult to focus on your job, startup, or coding?<p>What techniques did you find to make it easier to focus despite the problems? (e.g. looming divorce, girlfriend breaking-up, death in the family, loss of great friends, etc.)<p>Obviously it's important to deal with those things in your own full way to heal/resolve them, but the practical matter is that you've got to get some things done during that process, too. What tricks do you use?
Upvote: | 51 |