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Title: When I was 14, I started working at my Dad's workplace (he a mechanical engineer) doing embedded electronics design & programming. I did that until early 2009. I had to quit that job since Dad retired and we moved away, but since then I've been doing freelance web dev & programming (Python). Unfortunately, because of my lack of connections, I can't really find enough work.<p>I realize that I'm no where near as good a programmer as most of you guys, but I think I'm a reasonably good Python dev w/ a lot more experience than someone fresh out of school. So, how do I get a job? How can I convince HR to look past my lack of college and to my actual programming skills? Right now it seems that any job I apply to doesn't even reply to my email. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Seriously, I am inclined to stop using Gooogle just because of their "Net neutrality" posture. I want to find alternatives, I know about Bing, Yahoo, but want to find out what people are using besides Goooogle
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-green/breaking-google-goes-evil_b_676021.html
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: In about 6 months I've got a lovely bundle of joy coming into the world, needless to say I'm extremely excited.<p>Like many Hackers I work fairly long hours, especially weekends (sometimes when I get my best work done).<p>I'd love to hear some tips from fellow hackers who have had kids & some tips on managing the transition to a more family focused life, without losing sight of goals & milestones that you have for your startup.
Upvote: | 136 |
Title: The success and temporary "failure" stories are informative and sometimes inspiring, but what about the permanent "failure" stories? I don't mean your startup tanked and you're starting a new one; I mean by all indications this stuff just wasn't for you and you dropped out of entrepreneurship for good. What happened afterward and how was your career affected?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: This is the story of my startup experience of a company that took $38million in funding in 3 rounds. I am almost fully vested and I've just resigned and here is my story.
Upvote: | 183 |
Title: Facebook is just growing & growing. It has also proven to be duplicating popular startups and effectively killing potential competitors while they're young. Facebook has also proven to be filled with excellent hackers and lots of capital + cash flow. What are possible things that will lessen the power of Facebook and eventually cause its downfall if ever?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I've got a ~35GB text file full of data, and I want to parse it so I only have unique results in the end file. In the past, I've had no problem with cat FILE | sort | uniq, but I've never worked with anything of this magnitude. Even running a line count takes an extraordinary amount of time:<p>time cat FILE | wc -l
2608560847<p>real 11m18.148s
user 1m35.667s
sys 1m33.820s
[root@server src]#<p>Any suggestions on how I can go about getting unique records from this type of file?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: What resources, methods, etc, have you all used to learn a second speaking language? I've been trying to learn arabic for some time, but have usually hit walls along the way. It's been an on-and-off type of effort, which I realize is probably the worst way to learn a language, or anything really. I'd like some seriously good suggestions. I've tried a few sites out, most of which were usually a pain to use. Is software like Rosetta Stone worth it? What is?
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: I'm doing consulting to bootstrap my startup. Business has been great these past years. My problem is it's taking me so long to release my product. I also have a couple of other ideas that I can't find time to work on. The immediate income gained from consulting is very tempting for someone with a wife, a kid, monthly expenses, and mortgages. Consulting became the priority and startup work moved back. For those who experienced something like this, how did you handle it? How did you break free from consulting?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: All recent startup websites look the same to me. I don't have the designer chops to explain it clearly, but the main style is:<p>A whole lot of white, plus one dominant color (usually blue, green or dark grey) used for footer/header.<p>Layout uses light-grey-to-white gradients to make gentle borders between columns and even tabs.<p>Borders that don't use gradients are always 1px grey.<p>Large rectangular rounded buttons in dominant color (or green, orange) with white lettering.<p>Sans serif font everywhere.<p>Bunch of links that don't fit anywhere are moved to lower footer in small font.<p>Approximately 940px wide fixed main layout.<p>http://www.loopt.com/<p>https://indinero.com/<p>http://www.nozbe.com/<p>http://www.peerindex.net/<p>Does anyone know how/why this came about?
Upvote: | 165 |
Title: I'm a developer who is interested in doing some web (and CSS) design. Are there good introductory online tutorials/courses for learning design and best practices? Any long term tutorials with design exercises, instead of simple How-To's?<p>The question is inspired by the recent design about startup web design [1].<p>1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1604693
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Hi PG. As a Nigerian Internet start up founder, I was quite disheartened to read Leila Janah, post (http://tcrn.ch/aE4UqK) where you were quoted as saying you would "rather fund an incubator for less glamorous businesses, like gas stations and plumbers." than start a Y combinator in Kenya.<p>A continent with 1 billion people and, 110 million connected online (growing in triple digits) I would like to believe we can produce companies that can have product market fit before deciding to scale up and probably open offices in the west. .e.g US.<p>When I wrote my blog post "A cure for Nigerian Internet Scams (http://bit.ly/ayCTUX), I counted you as one of the people that we would seek support from to become relevant in the world of startups.<p>So hearing that you think there is no hope for us, is quite deflating.<p>So my question is, why do you believe Africa cannot produce global scale startups?
Upvote: | 130 |
Title: historious is basically a search engine for sites you have bookmarked. Think of it as a cross between delicious and google, you bookmark something and the entire content of the page becomes searchable.<p>It's at http://historio.us/<p>I have posted it here once before, and you guys were very helpful, giving a deluge of very good suggestions. Right now I'd like to ask for your opinion on the pricing model.<p>Our model right now is a free option, which has a limit of 1000 bookmarks for a month, and then it becomes unlimited. This is to avoid people coming in, importing their 20,000 bookmarks and leaving, never to return.<p>There are also some extra features here: http://historio.us/pricing/<p>The main problem, and what we'd like your feedback on, is that every bookmark a user adds is expensive, as we have to store the entire page. Right now the service is profitable, but we'd like to improve it so we can scale it better.<p>What features would make you pay for it? What sort of things would turn you away from it as a free user with a mind to convert later on?<p>A good point we heard for not having a bookmark limit is that, even with 1,000 bookmarks, users would think twice before bookmarking something, and we don't want that.<p>Any feedback you could give is greatly appreciated!
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I love hacker news and I check it everyday for a stream of great information. I was wondering what other sites do people use for other really good content, it doesn't have to be business related.<p>Not the common, digg, reddit etc, but the underground ones :P
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I have a unique opportunity on my hands, but lack the ammo to execute with.<p>In my senior projects class at CU-Boulder I have been given the go ahead by the professor to forego the standard curricula of CSCI 4308 and create my own project as long as it has "substantial business influence". This of course directly translates to building a startup.<p>I have six months, a team of five senior cs-majors, and the support of the university, but there is still a glaring hole.<p>I don't believe I have a good enough idea to run with.<p>Some that I have been contemplating are a comedy-mashup site (basically a last.fm for stand up comedians), a Haskell web development framework (which I asked for feedback for in a previous post and was pretty much told not to do it) or trying to edge my way into point of sale restaurant software/hardware.<p>I am not sold on any of these and am looking for some inspiration because I only have a couple more days to write a formal proposal or else I default into the standard class and must take a project from the industry.<p>Any ideas that are within the scope of this project?
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I decided to apply for the YCombinator program this fall. I am a solo entrepreneur/startup and one of the reasons for doing this by myself is because I see it as a way of bootstrapping my way to success. I am sure I can get another person to be my co-founder, however by doing that I'll be adding more expenses that I cannot afford right now. That does not mean I cannot get people to help me, but they will be helping by me offering sweat equity.
What do you think? am I nuts? do you someone who has succeeded applying to YCombinator's program by themselves, without co-founders?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Hi everyone! My co-founder and I just finished our second pass at our new app and we were hoping to get some feedback from the HN community.<p>https://www.airdropper.com<p>AirDropper is a Dropbox companion app for requesting files from anyone with an email address. You just authorize your Dropbox account, make a request, and we put the file the person uploads into your Dropbox. Everything's secure in transit, we can handle larger files than most email services, and it's really easy for the person sending the file.<p>To provide some context, I started my own law firm this year, and I immediately ran into some friction in trying to securely get files from clients. Many clients were uncomfortable sending sensitive documents as email attachments. I walked a few clients through signing up with Dropbox and sharing a folder, but that caused a lot of back and forth with creating an account, setting sharing permissions, etc. I talked through the issue with my perennial side-project partner and AirDropper is what we came up with as a solution. We made a "two week" version a little while ago and we got some great feedback, especially from designer friends who need to get files from clients that are too big to email. Today's version incorporates their feedback, along with some improvements we've stumbled into along the way.<p>What do you think?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I was reading Steve Yegge's recent post on learning about compilers, and, as I'm sure is true for many HN visitors, the post resonated with me in a couple of unsettling ways. I have my undergraduate degree already, but my education did not include AI, OS, compilers, distributed computing or algorithm design. (That's what I get for going to a hippy liberal arts college.) It wasn't as bad as what Yegge described as a "Java certification program," since I came out of it knowing a lot of real-world skills like version control and command line use. However, I still consider the lack of things like compiler construction to be unacceptable gaps in my skillset.<p>Two problems: I have a full-time job and student loans now. I can't really do the undergraduate schooling thing all over again.<p>What's the best way to pick up these skills post-undergraduate degree? Should I take night classes at a graduate school, or will those curricula assume prior familiarity with the subjects I'm trying to learn? I already purchased "The Unix Programming Environment" since it seems to have some good basic information about lex and yacc, but is just the tip of the iceberg. There's only so much one can learn through years of Googling and reading the odd Hacker News post. What are my options, really?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: How do large sites like fb/myspace/amazon/ <insert large email sender> manage to send millions of emails a day. What kind of infrastructure is used. How are the IPs warmed, how are the messages queued. How do they manage connections?<p>Any interesting reads on this topic?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Why wait? I'd like to hear what exactly delays YOU from starting your dream company TODAY? Right now I am launching my third company and that makes me very excited! So why wait? I'd like to hear your excuses!
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Hi guys,<p>yesterday I launched a new book notification service called 'Any new books?': http://anynewbooks.com<p>The idea is that you enter your email, subscribe to a few categories of your interest, and then you'll receive one weekly email per category with a list of new interesting books that were just released.<p>The first day was pretty good I think, with many people signing up. Among these, I've already spotted a few key players in our industry (which I take to be a positive sign, of course) and the feedback I've been receiving by email has been very positive so far.<p>I'm posting this here because I think you may like this service and also because you may have some good advice. I'm particularly interested in hearing suggestions on how to get further traction (I have some plans in the works, but the more the merrier). I really trust this community when it comes to startup advice. :)<p>Cheers,
Antonio
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: One of the most repeated advice for startups is build something people want, something that solves a problem. What problem do these services solve? They are just games/tools for sharing where I am right now. It's fun, but I can live without it. I get that there's value for business owners, but that's just a byproduct, at least I percieve it that way. For a regular user who is just checking-in, there's no real value.<p>So, what problem do they solve?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: The format of this site is great for news, but I've been thinking: this community could really compile some very high quality information related to technology and business.<p>If I built it, would you come?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Paul Graham said in his essay "How to start a startup" that the best age to start a startup is between 23 and 38. Among these people, some of them must be married, right? So I have been wondering how a married life (and possibly one with kids, ugh) affect the chances and the process of creating and running a startup. Now, assuming that marriage is supposed to be a very important part of life, I imagine that it is rather hellish because Paul Graham also said that "Startups Take Over Your Life".<p>How does a married hacker do it?<p>I am 28, I just got married in May and I am pondering the possibility of starting something with my hacker friends in Hong Kong.<p>Would any married startup founder enlighten me (and other prospective married hackers)?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Hi guys,<p>I’m 24, got a masters in business and I am totally clueless on what to do with my life. I would like to ask you for some advice because I have been reading HN every day for the past 6 months and saw some brilliant advice given on these boards.<p>I am from Europe and when I was 18 I chose to enter a business university because I liked to organize trips for my friends, had excellent grades at school and teachers and parents told me it’s the safest bet because a good income and future are guaranteed with this kind of degree.<p>6 years later, I have my degree, I have a job in a Spanish business consultancy but I feel pretty much useless; I spend my days preparing elaborate 300 slides power point presentations full of citations of market reports and always followed by some bs excel projections about future revenues and promises of a brighter tomorrow. The bosses love my work, the clients happily pay astronomical fees to listen to our "expert" advice, and I wonder how is it even possible to make so much money selling what we are selling, air.<p>During my business studies, startups were never mentioned, I grew up believing a good idea is what matters, and that either you have it, or you do not, and that lady luck was the one who distributes ideas to whoever she chooses. After stumbling upon HN and the plethora of other blogs and articles linked here I started to see how narrow my vision was and how much more there was to creating a business than writing your 100 page business plan.<p>So my question is, how can I get out of this vicious circle of unfulfilling work 9-20 (officially its 9-5 by I never get out of the office before 20) and do something that I care about?<p>I have been trained to be a good office boy so I can most likely get employed for the majority of big companies and start climbing the corporate ladder starting with €30k . It just that, working the 40 years of my life doing stuff that I do not care about just to earn a lot of cash does not particularly motivate me.<p>On the other hand there are startups, 100% dedication to your product, the whole team believing in what you are doing. Sounds like fun, but I realize that I am useless in an environment like that. With no tech expertise and 2 years business experience I do not see myself critically contributing to any serious startup.<p>I have tried finding a solution myself, I read countless posts on the quarter life crisis, vault and wetfeet industry reports, talked with my career manager, my friends, my parents - nothing really helped me. I do not know what kind of job I could do with my current skills that could make me wake up in the morning and feel motivated to go there.<p>Perhaps some of you have gone through the same path, perhaps you can see something I do not, but any word of advice would be appreciated!<p>Cheers from a sunny Spain!
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Did a Wireshark session vs. Foursquare for iPhone's traffic after reading the news today. Found something very unpleasant.
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: Four textbooks available so far: http://www.inkling.com/about<p>Having used Raven's biology text, which is a good textbook but would've tremendously benefited from something like this because of how much data you need to retain for biology, this makes me pretty excited for THE FUTURE.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: Details?<p>What kind of meditation do you do? How long/frequently? What benefits have you experienced?<p>Basically, are the time and energy requirements worth it?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I've been reading everything I can from HN and elsewhere on the tech startup industry and have done what seemed necessary so far. But I don't code and would be looking to find a good technical co-founder.<p>I have what I think is a good idea for a web app, it's a pretty simple concept and while I expect the equity split to be most of the motivation for the technical cofounder, (I would deal with the business side of things) it seems that I would have a better chance of getting a good programmer on board if I offer some cash in addition. Ideally it would be someone looking for experience but also with the ability to have a guaranteed paycheck as well.<p>And I'm in San Francisco- what now?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: For those of you working on a startup, how did you meet your cofounder? Did it work out? How would you recommend someone in the early stages of a startup find a trustworthy cofounder?<p>There seem to be two conflicting types of advice. Some say to work with a good friend, someone you already know and trust. Others say to never work with your friends because if you fail, and chances are you will, then you lose both the business and the friendship. What do you think?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: Fast Date/DateTime classes for ruby. By just installing the home_run gem/lib you'll get an amazing performance increase!
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: A lot of founders don't understand what a product manager does and when to bring one in. This is an attempt at an explanation.
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: I've noticed recently that for almost every submission that hits the top page, the top-rated comment is a skeptical response to the thesis of the link content or the poster's argument.<p>Go ahead, pick any 5 of the front page posts right now and see if I'm right or not.<p>In general, this is a good thing as taking the skeptical position forces a minimum degree of critical thinking, which makes that comment more useful. And it's an excellent form of filtering out the large amount of BS we come across everyday.<p>But I certainly would like to see more top comments that agree with what the poster said, or expands on their argument.<p>(Eagerly awaiting the top comment to this post !!)
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: Wikipedia article on The Buzzer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I keep hearing that only 10% (if that) of startups succeed, but what happens to the other 90%? What happens to you personally? Do you just start looking for a new job or do you have baggage for the rest of time?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: #15 of patio11's summary of pg's future business trends (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632689): "I can't name a company which did too much OSS. If no one has gone too far, we're probably not doing OSS enough yet."<p>As one example, I've thought a lot about open sourcing all or parts of DuckDuckGo, but have been hesitant for the obvious reasons (trade secrets, gaming the system, etc.). Of course, anyone interested would have to wade through my Perl. On the other hand, I'd love the opportunity to develop more of a community around the code.<p>So where's the line?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hey guys we are looking for a helping hand from the HN community.<p>We are building a game that aims to bring your drawings to life exactly the way you envisioned them. graFighters is an online fighting game for your hand drawn characters. By taking a picture of your drawing with you phone and going through a quick process we can bring your character to life to battle other drawings on the site. The interesting part is that you don't control the character, they take on a life/attitude/stats/abilities all on their own based on our systems analysis of how it was drawn. We are calling this algorithm "Cornelius".<p>I'm reaching out to you guys for feedback on the concept and the potential to spread the Kickstarter link to people who might be interested. This algorithm has been underway for a year and it is not cheap, so we are looking to raise 20,000. Thanks!<p>graFighters on Kickstarter - http://kck.st/cnTzcP<p>Main Site- http://www.graFighters.com<p>Footage from the Demo - http://bit.ly/9J1wdc<p>More videos - http://vimeo.com/user1881676/videos<p>Feedback, criticism, verbal abuse, and donations will all be highly valued.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead
By Matthew Stewart
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: Hi, first time posting here.<p>I've been thinking about applying to YC but the thing is that I am not a US citizen. I know I can travel to the US to do busines (attending meetings and such) done so fo my current employer. But how about starting a company and writing code?<p>I've read somewhere that YC has funded startups with non US citizen founders so it should be possible somehow. If there are any YC funded startups founded by non US citizens reading this (or anyone else that knows anything about this), how did you do it?<p>Note that I do not have a green card or visa or anything like that.<p>Cheers
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: I noticed that avoiding the mouse is very useful to lessen the effects of RSI.<p>Do you have tips (useful tools, hints, ...) on how to avoid the mouse for almost all tasks on Mac OS X (I'm a developer, most of the day) ?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Arnold Schwarzenegger: "Few Californians in the private sector have $1 million in savings, but that’s effectively the retirement account they guarantee to many government employees."
Upvote: | 199 |
Title: More and more frequently, I notice that online services charge $10/$15 a month. For example. I just saw a service that tracks your laptop/phone, and they want $15/mo to track more than three devices.<p>B2B services are more excusable, but still, the fees are pretty high. It seems to me that you need to spend $150 a month to subscribe to the 10 services you might find useful. $2/$3 a month sounds much better to me, especially for services for which users aren't very expensive.<p>What are your experiences with this (from either standpoint)? How much do you pay a month for various online services?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I'm located in the EU and have built a server software project which is currently in private beta. This week, out of the blue, I've been contacted by an US company expressing interest in an acquisition. They talked about some cash up-front (6 digits) and hiring me. This is all new to me.<p>The company and I communicate via email and telephone conferences. I guess such a deal won't be closed only remotely and they will probably invite me over before reaching an agreement.<p>* Which steps would be involved in selling my project and getting hired by them?<p>* What guarantees can/should either party ask for?<p>* Should they be able to see the full source code in advance?<p>I would greatly appreciate your advice and experiences!
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: I'm seriously considering quitting my job. I make plenty of money, but the money isn't what's important to me. The culture is bad and I'm just not able to write great software. The skilz, they are suffering.<p>I can survive for a while, so I'm thinking about taking a six-month sabbatical and rebooting my career. I want to work on open source projects, learn Clojure, and finish my master's degree (not for the paper, but for fun).<p>So the big question is: can I emerge from the other side of this and find great people to work with and cool stuff to work on?<p>What would you do during a six-month sabbatical in order to find more awesomeness?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: I'm a fourth year college student with a few years of programming classes, but not much outside-class experience. Many people have said that contributing to open-source projects is a good way to show off your ability level and to learn more about how to code. I'm not sure how to begin - in other words I don't know what I don't know about open source projects.<p>Which open source project should I contribute to?
How do I know what part of the project to work on?
How do I get the code and how do I submit changes?
How do I ask for guidance/get feedback, besides asking HN?
Which IDE should I use?<p>Thanks for the advice, Kevin
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Had a great discussion of Gabriel, the founder of DuckDuckGo Friday... podcast is up.<p>Gabriel is a great entrepreneur... really enjoyed having him on the show.<p>show notes here:
http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-startups-72-with-gabriel-weinberg/
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: Hi guys<p>I am an NYC based hacker who has had enough of dealing with the horrible process of finding and getting an apartment. One of the major issues you have is that you can only trust what the broker tells you to be true, ie "trust me, this is a good deal."<p>I have a solution: collect the rents of people in the city, and get a general idea of how yours compares (or how much you should be paying for a neighborhood if you are planning on moving).<p>Right now the app is very simple: it's just collecting data. Ultimately I'm not 100% sure how I'd use the data, but it would likely be open/free via an API etc. on top of my product. One vision I have is something like a Yelp.com but for real estate.<p>I am open to your ideas, and I'd love to get any feedback about the idea you have (I know the site itself isn't much). If you are a New Yorker, I'd really appreciate if you could take 30 seconds and fill out the form.<p>Thanks!
NYC RentEnforcer
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: [Created this weekend as part of Node Knockout.]
Upvote: | 208 |
Title: If that question is too general, which it is, then consider the case of building a data structure and its accompanying algorithms. Now, how, IRL, is code verified both for correctness and for desired performance.<p>Right now, I rely on running a bunch of functions that I write, but I was wondering if there's anything out there that's better (or sort of a methodology that dictates which tests one ought to write).<p>(if the question is still too general, lets consider the case for Java, and maybe C).
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I think it was Fred Brooks Jr in "The Mythical Man Month" who said that when planning a project he spent 1/3 of the time on design, 1/6 of the time coding, 1/4 of the time on component testing, and 1/4 of the time on system integration and testing.<p>I've found these estimates to be remarkably accurate and use them all the time. If I think something will take a day of coding, it usually takes a week of work to get it properly done. That's not one day from midday Tuesday to midday Wednesday because I turn it into 3 mini-projects and run around the design/write/test/integrate cycle as fast as possible, but it's a surprisingly good predictor.<p>I now use it when estimating other people's work. If they say it will take a day, or a week, I multiply by 6. If they say it will take a month, it'll never be done.<p>Unless they're using the same rule ...
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Hi everyone -<p>I'm part of a start up working on creating a tool to simplify web development. Our first app makes it easy for developers to position elements of their site. People can draw in divs directly on top of an image/mockup using our editor (written in Cappuccino!) and we output cross browser compatible, table-free code. We'd love any feedback on this product and any tips on how we can improve it.<p>App is at: http://gen1.recreclabs.com<p>We eventually hope to make this a completely automated process (we have algorithms that detect various elements of a website) and have the editor be used only for minor fixes. Is this something you guys would find useful?<p>Edit1:<p>Some sample screenshots of websites we have been using are in:<p>http://dontbite.me/~okay/screens/
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: This post is spurred by seeing the Hacker News guidelines this evening: [Moderator: feel free to remove this]<p>What IS Hacker News? Is it a social site for startups? Or venture capital? Is it similar to Slashdot (or was Slashdot once similar)? Is it a combinator for startups? (No pun intended). Or is it a more "elite" group of like minded individuals?<p>I am relative newcomer to the Hacker News scene, being a member for just under a year, but I've gained significant knowledge from those that participate here. I own and manage a well established Internet business, but with regards to Hacker News I struggle to understand who exactly Hacker News is designed for, and targeted to. Frankly, I suffer from an identity crisis at times.<p>I may need to be content with the understanding that I gain great perspective for my business by reading and participating here, but my curiosity still recommends that I ask this question.<p>Warm regards,<p>Lindsay
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: This is a hot topic near and dear to my heart.<p>I create a site 4 years ago that I've been writing on every since... there are probably near 2000 articles on it. Everything from fixing your MTU settings on your Q1000 modem to Java framework tips I find handy to years worth of game and movies reviews to hilarious cat pictures.<p>It's just anything and everything I've ever found interesting written in a slightly more professional manner than "stream of thought" with a small amount of attention paid to titles and internal links <i>only</i> when appropriate and valuable (I HATE how sites like Engadget inner-link every keyword for Google sake).<p>My understanding was always that "If I wrote it, they will come".<p>4 years later and that's not the case at all... I seem to be hitting a goddamn glass ceiling that I cannot figure out for the life of me why it exists or who is imposing it and I want to scream.<p>This topic on Reddit recently:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_game_digg_using_infographics_voting/<p>Got my ire up... then combined with typical junk search results I see on Google in any given day for a legit topic I'm searching for and I'm coming to the conclusion that you just can't win online unless you are an SEO-douchebag.<p>When was the last time you searched for something technical and found a CNET link and headed over only to notice it's a landing page that says "We didn't review this BUT we reviewed..." and has 97 links to other things on the site?<p>What the fuck.<p>Is this the only way to succeed now with this content diarrhea mill that is the web?
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: Sorry for the throw away account for obvious reasons.<p>I've a small startup,all telecommuting,8 technical guys. Most of them with the team for a year or more now. Their performance is generally bad, it's sometimes good sometimes bad, but I have to nudge them to get things done,constantly.<p>I've tried lots of things to motivate them and didn't succeed. I'm part of the core technical team which means I end up working extra, covering for them as well as working with all other business related stuff. Put it this way,I'm fed up with them.<p>I'm planning to fire 5 problematic ones and hire new guys slowly and carefully.<p>2 Questions;
* Shall I fire, and how should I proceed?
* How can I hire new telecommuters and ensure that their performance will be good? (I know many thinks performance is nothing to do with an office, but my experience in several companies makes me think different)<p>FYI: All getting well paid, happy with business and if you ask them all performance problems are personal and they do accept that their performance is bad and unacceptable.
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: I'm wondering where i can find good online communities for front-end design. There's too many 'graphic design' forums but I can't find any good places to get feedback on GUI design.
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: I'm curious as to what others' development environments look like. Screenshots are best. I'll kick it off.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I am a student living in Canada, over the last 2 years I have built out a company in a niche market where at the time there were a couple of competitors (now around 5-6). 3 of them are VC funded.<p>I am doing this part time still and trying to earn my business degree but now I am finishing up and want to sell this business so I can try something new, the business generates around 2 million a year (CAD) in profits, so I am wondering what sort of 'investment banks' or people I should get in touch to sell this company.<p>I love working on this and would not mind working on it a more, the sad part is, being in Canada and not a active guy in the 'VC/Tech' scene so I don't know which route to take or who to approach.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: ....and got away with it?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Identified and defined the six key metrics you need to measure for your recurring revenue web app. Also shared an example Google Spreadsheet which can be downloaded and modified for your app.
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Not sure how practical it is, but it was fun to make!
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Are there any key bindings or modes that have been especially useful for you? If so, what are they?<p>Cheers.
Upvote: | 131 |
Title: this is a video search engine for lectures and talks. It extracts keyframes like slides, analysis them with optical character recognition, and shows them in a nice UI for quick skimming.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: They treat you like you're the best man on the planet when you're making them money right. But what what do they do when things go south? What is the best way to deal with them?<p>Do they force you to sell every asset? What about IP? What about virtual assets? source code? Will they make you take pennies on the dollar?<p>I have heard horrible stories about this, so I am curious about your stories.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: When I signed on with my current employer, I ensured that I wouldn't be prevented from working on something on the side. I made it clear during the interview process that my intention was not to be there forever. Recently, I submitted a disclosure regarding the side project and today it was just approved by the Legal and Compliance departments.<p>I've become disillusioned with my current work situation, which is better than most places, but still has the usual fundamental issues (project mismanagement) that won't be remedied in the next two to three years. I've let some contacts know that I'm looking for a change of scenery while I work towards a release, however based on some events today, I'm strongly considering giving my immediate notice. Tomorrow is Friday, so the opportunity is there.<p>Who here has done just that: Just up and quit, then didn't decide to take up another job? (I've done part A without part B before) If so, aside from the obvious need to immediately produce revenue, what did you take away from the experience?<p>Thanks in advance.
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: I'm really interested in London, UK but I'm sure one of these is overdue so feel free to let others know what else is out there.<p>A little format to the first couple of lines is always helpful.
<Vague Job Title> - <City>, <Country><p>And then a little bit describing the role and your startup/company.<p>Thanks in advance.
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: I've been noticing that Perl doesn't get mentioned that much anymore in articles, blog posts, HN threads, etc.<p>A current example is the "Who's hiring" thread which is now on HN: Most of the requirements are C/C++/Java/PHP/Python/Ruby, and almost none are for Perl.<p>However, this is not just about hiring. In almost anything I read, there is barely a mention of Perl anymore.<p>FYI, I use Perl extensively for text file parsing and processing, and I'm not familiar with Python or Ruby, but it seems that these two languages are "winning the war" against Perl (although I assume some of you may dispute that these two languages are even comparable to Perl, for a variety of reasons)<p>Is my general observation correct?<p>Will Perl 6 be able to turn things around, or is it too late?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: In the same vein as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659409, Who's looking for a short term consulting/contract gigs on HN? I am myself interested in Chicago area/telecommute and something e-mail/server/Linux/perl/ruby related.<p>Post away and thanks in advance !
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: I've noticed that many of you are looking for a technical/business co-founder. Give a description of what you are looking for in a co-founder and for what.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Basically, I was wondering what would be the ideal introduction and flow to teach this - ideally it would start out easy and the more engaging the better! Obviously it makes no sense to try and force something if the kid isn't interested, so help me make it interesting and easy to understand!<p>I was thinking<p>-Scratch or Alice for the basic concepts<p>-Then either learnpythonthehardway, diveintohtml5, diveintopython3, ruby+shoes (hackety hack) (thanks to the respective maintainers/creators of these apps/sites)<p>Any comments (with or without experience) would be appreciated greatly, as I am unsure which of these would be most appropriate for a complete beginner, or whether there is something else that would be more suitable.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Problem:
As an academic I am overwhelmed by the number of articles that are published in the relevant journals every week and there is no "efficient" way to filter out the irrelevant ones and keep up with the on going progress in my field of research.<p>Solution:
All good journals have RSS feeds and in the context of academic interests you can "easily" detect relevant papers based on author, keywords and affiliation (one might eventually add some social feature as well, but it definitely would work based on individual ratings without any social features).
So a user would select some journals and starts by staring the relevant papers or authors or ...
After a while there would be enough evidence accumulated to support the classification of new papers into relevant or irrelevant groups.<p>Also there would be room for all sorts of alerts and sharing and commenting and ...<p>I (and I am sure many others) have had this idea for a long time but I am a currently not a position to do this myself and other people who attempted to do it had done it wrong, I was wondering if there is anyone who want to do this (I would be happy to help in design or even implementation or I'd be also happy if anyone gets the idea and build their own tool without getting me involved).<p>Ali
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: Hi...My team does not have experience in setting up a server. I mean a production server. We are thinking about using heroku, because it removes the system admin. Heroku is costly compared to the setting up a server. So can you guys please give your opinion about using heroku or not?
Thanks :)
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I've been working on a side project called Streak.ly with a friend of mine for the past month or so; it's intended to help keep you motivated to do otherwise mundane daily tasks (like do 10 pushups, read for an hour, etc.) by letting you log "streaks" — consecutive days in a row of doing something.<p>It's in private alpha/beta/gamma/whatever right now (has some rough edges to clean up), but is more or less functionally complete and pretty stable.<p>I'm a big fan of the Seinfeld calendar, and have seen other services which do similar things but were unsatisfying to use, either from an aesthetic or functional perspective. Streak.ly is designed to be simple, good-looking, fast, fun, (and hopefully addictive). (FWIW, it's also a place to experiment with user stickiness stuff I can potentially roll back in to Forrst.)<p>There are also some in-progress social/game/motivational features I plan to roll out in the next few weeks that hopefully contribute to the enjoyment factor of the app.<p>Streak.ly uses Twitter for authentication, and I've set up a URL to let HN folks in early: http://streak.ly/auth/twitter/start?secret=showhn<p>I'd love any and all feedback and/or criticism you may have.<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I just published a first release of a new console app called htty. I like to think it’s something of a cross between curl and the Lynx browser.<p>Some bullet points:<p>* Intuitive commands and command aliases
* Support for familiar HTTP methods GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, as well as HEAD, OPTIONS and TRACE
* Automatic URL-encoding of query-string parameters and URL fragments
* Transcripts, both verbose and summary
* Dead-simple cookie handling and redirect following
* Built-in help<p>Why do this when the admirable Node.js-based http-console exists? To begin with, not everybody is into Node yet, and so installing http-console is not as simple as 'gem install htty'. Furthermore, http-console's spare UI is not as full-featured as it might be.<p>I have some killer features in mind for the near future. Fork and contribute!
Upvote: | 128 |
Title: Hi, I am relatively new to HN and really like the quality commentary that the community provides. So here's my first question.<p>I realise this question may have already been asked, but we are launching a new product which will be the first product we are attempting to monetise. Ideally we want customers paying for the service on a monthly basis. Our first question was simply 'how much should we charge per month' which now feels rather naive without making other considerations. We have therefore started discussing pricing strategy.<p>I am particularly interested in how other HN'ers have tackled the launch of their product in respect of pricing. Has it been a gut feel type of thing, or have you invested a significant amount of time in creating a pricing strategy and, for example, related the price of the service to the cost of the infrastructure and the expected number of customers? Thanks in advance for your thoughts, suggestions or otherwise.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: This is something I've always wondered about... When you take a VC round, how do you (as a founder) get your salary determined? Is it purely up to the board and investors? Is it up to you? How does it compare -- is it the bare minimum to live on, so that everything can go into the company? Is it comparable to an executive you'd hire? Somewhere in between?<p>I'm very curious about the calculus. I imagine it varies quite a bit by the type of investment made (e.g. angel vs. VC vs. institutional), but that's just a guess.
Upvote: | 105 |
Title: I realize that HN is the place for startups and living the dream. Sometimes it's not a happy dream, so I ask, "Where were you most happy?"
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Fantastic article. I can only wonder how the Greek government will move forward.
Upvote: | 157 |
Title: - How you think about a problem
- Pushing past resistance<p>things like that
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: More details:<p>http://developer.apple.com/appstore/guidelines.html
Upvote: | 464 |
Title: I have stumbled across SEOMoz and SEOBook but the price point seems fairly steep for me (student/founder). Are these worth it or are there other better resources for learning the ropes of seo?
Upvote: | 135 |
Title: For myself, I value spending money on non-fiction books, craft beers, well designed things, and experiences with friends and family.<p>What do you believe is worth spending money on? What is the right price for some of the items you value? How do you determine this?
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: I'm part of a 100+ person startup and I've just received my stock option agreement packet, and (not surprisingly) I'm terribly confused.<p>I've been granted X shares of an "Incentive Stock Option" and I have an "Option to purchase Common Stock of the Company". Does this mean I have to buy into my own stock?<p>Also it looks like it will take five years to vest, so what happens if the company is acquired/goes public between now and then?<p>Any help is greatly appreciated. I still do my taxes using the online TurboTax basic plan, to give you an idea of how not difficult my taxes are currently. :)<p>UPDATE: Wow thanks everyone for your responses so far! I looked a bit more at the paperwork and it says (paraphrasing): 1/4 of my shares will vest on my 1-year anniversary and then 1/48th remaining will vest each month after.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: i.e.<p>Feross (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1678111) gets an offer:<p>From Chad Hurley's Twitter:
"Hey @FreeTheFeross! Loving YouTube Instant... http://feross.net/instant/ Want a job? ;)"
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: I'm working on a startup to sell physical goods. We'd like to setup a pre-order page to accept payment information but not bill the individual until the shipment has been made (we're shipping in about 4-6 weeks). Of course after we're shipping I think that we'll have higher conversion rate if we have a true credit card processing system rather than relying on a third-party.<p>I've only done payment processing through PayPal and Plimus.com. I've read about the complexities of setting up a true merchant account for credit card processing, but it still seems a bit complicated to me.<p>Can anyone recommend a payment gateway and processor for someone new to the process?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Let's say i have $10000. Is it possible to build the following existence (for one person's lifetime)?<p>- Food/water (or equivalent), shelter from elements and predators, comfortable temperature, ability
to stay clean and free from disease.<p>- Upper limit for time spent on daily involuntary tasks (say 1hr/day) with definite certainty on ability to maintain existence. Assuming no outstanding terrestrial occurences, there should never be any stress from fluctuation of shelter or resource availability<p>- Visibility at night; fire/candles ok, i guess<p>- Bed, chair/desk, say 10 sheets of paper a day, writing utensil to fill 10 sheets a day<p>- Internet access, say 100 hours lifetime total, accessable at some definite rate, say at least once a month for an hour at a time max (Richard Stallman style is ok)<p>- Ability to receive shipment of goods whose requirement cannot be predetermined (such as books), with finite extra funds set aside for purchasing of said goods<p>- Ability to escape the system as i see fit
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: I've been happily programming in Python for a long time (6+ years) and so far I've been fortunate to never have to write a single line of PHP. Recently I was contacted by BigNameCorp regarding a good job opportunity. Problem is, PHP is the main language (among several others) of said company and chances are that at least part of the job will be writing and reading PHP code. Although that's not necessarily a show stopper, I'm afraid I have been spoiled working with a high level language for so long and I'm not particularly thrilled to move down the language totem pole.<p>I've seen blog posts about moving away from PHP to Python, Ruby, and other better languages but not much about the opposite direction. Have you been in a similar situation and if so how did you manage to adapt and maintain your sanity ? Any suggestions, warnings or pointers on learning the good parts of PHP (if there are any) for advanced programmers would be most helpful.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I have a lot of personal and company information on 2 of my laptops (Windows 7 and a MacBook). This includes bank account information, private keys, passwords and proprietary source code. I'm always paranoid about my laptops being physically stolen while I'm traveling or if my office is robbed. To help put my mind at ease (somewhat), I've been looking into whole-drive encryption. Incase my laptop does get stolen, I can be sure the thief does not get my data.<p>It looks like there are 2 solutions out there for Windows - TrueCrypt and Microsoft's Bitlocker. I can't use Bitlocker because my laptop doesn't have a TPM chip, which I'm told is required to encrypt the boot volume. TrueCrypt looks like the only option available right now for Windows.<p>Also, it looks OS X does not have built-in whole-drive encryption like Window's Bitlocker. Luckily TrueCrypt also has support for OS X.<p>What do you use to protect your data? Are there any pitfalls that I need to be aware of (besides loosing your password)?
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: A recent Erlang article in Communications of the ACM portrays Erlang as a specialized language for messaging/chat (Facebook chat, XMPP, etc.)and distributed storage (CouchDB, Riak, etc.)<p>I think this is probably right, but I'm wondering what else you've built in Erlang. Was it a good fit? Why or why not?
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: Let me make it clear that I do like the idea of Google Instant. And, YouTube Instant. And, HN Instant. Edit: Now iTunes Instant too.<p>But can someone give me an official reason why it's better? I think it's safe to say that I prefer the old Google better than this...being instant and Ajaxy is nice but for now it's tacky.<p>I really did just prefer the Search Suggestions more than anything.<p>What am I missing?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: While writing the job description for GazeHawk (P.S.-we're hiring PHP/Python/UX hackers - brian AT gazehawk.com) I realized that most job descriptions are generic and boring.<p>I'm wondering what attracts you guys to a particular job posting?<p>Do job postings even matter beyond that fact that company X is hiring? Does a posting with descriptions of the company culture, future plans, values, etc actually mean more than "PHP/Python hacker for YC startup"?<p>Looking forward to your feedback!
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: And on a similar note, is a chance at a big payout an important factor for anyone going the startup route (founder or employee)?<p>maybe it's just me, but it seems like it's just taboo to talk about money - everyone says do it because you love it, job descriptions talking about passion this and passion that. not that I disagree with those ideas, I don't - but how do you all look at the financial element?<p>I make a significant amount of money now (not bragging, just providing some context), so leaving it behind for a startup is a difficult decision. yes, it could be an awesome working environment, and yes, it could be a stepping stone to other opportunities. but given startup success rates and typical equity I would expect as a non-founder, it's a big time loser, at least purely financially.<p>anyone have similar experiences, whether they decided to go with startups or not? what was your thought process? alternatively, how much would you have to make to stick with a day job, assuming it was at least somewhat stimulating?<p>(throwaway account since I didn't want to go into my finances with my main account)
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: From: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/12/youtube-live-streaming/<p>The widget embedded is rendering this on the page:<p>Traceback (most recent call last):<p><pre><code> File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 511, in __call__
handler.get(*groups)
File "/base/data/home/apps/yt-live/1.344714172147360500/event.py", line 69, in get
evs = get_rows()
File "/base/data/home/apps/yt-live/1.344714172147360500/event.py", line 9, in get_rows
client = gdata.spreadsheet.text_db.DatabaseClient('[email protected]', 'projectmetal')
File "/base/data/home/apps/yt-live/1.344714172147360500/gdata/spreadsheet/text_db.py", line 106, in __init__
self.SetCredentials(username, password)
File "/base/data/home/apps/yt-live/1.344714172147360500/gdata/spreadsheet/text_db.py", line 127, in SetCredentials
raise CaptchaRequired('Please visit https://www.google.com/accounts/'</code></pre>
CaptchaRequired: Please visit https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha to unlock your account.
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: Have any of you moved to the Bay Area for tech and hated the atmosphere? How long did you stay and where did you move to after?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: The recent post on the shortcomings of R has attracted a huge number of readers and Ross Ihaka has now posted a detailed comment that is fairly pessimistic… Given the directions drafted in this comment from the father of R (along with Robert Gentleman), I once again re-post this comment as a main entry to advertise more broadly its contents. (Obviously, the whole debate is now far beyond my reach!)
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: This is pretty typical. Every few years something slips my mind and I end up stuck with a "Erik, you're a moron tax".<p>I was experiencing a spike of traffic when my site was on national news a few weeks ago, and I turned my dynos and workers way up on Heroku to handle the traffic. The spike went down, but <i>I forgot to turn off the dynos</i>.<p>Flash forward a few weeks, and I am stuck with $1300 bill on a site that I'm not making any money on. I asked Heroku if they could help me out a little... I'm a good customer, and even though I'm a cash-strapped in-the-red bootstrapper, I gladly pay them hundreds of dollars a month to run my sites, bills payed on time and in full. I was hoping they'd maybe give me a little discount... not pay for my servers, but maybe not take a profit off of my stupid mistake.<p>They shot me down. No refunds available, even though these were virtual servers, and didn't contribute any real load to any of their machines. Although obviously they provisioned machines for me, so they had real costs.<p>Part of me wants to be upset, but obviously I was the one who screwed up. Still, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I guess a smaller host might offer more personal care, but I wouldn't get Heroku's world-class engineering baked into their platform, which I really, really appreciate.<p>What do other folks think? Am I just a dumbass who lost a chunk of paycheck, or is this poor customer care?
Upvote: | 105 |
Title: How and more importantly why the process works.
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: Hackers and Founders is having scaling problems. We've accidentally overbooked our Tech Talk event[1] tomorrow night at the Hacker Dojo, and we have over 100 people on the waiting list as well.<p>We could really use a venue in Palo Alto/Mountain View area that can accommodate around 400 people for a 2 1/2 hour event tomorrow night between 7 and 9:30pm.<p>We're checking in to space at Facebook. I don't know people of influence at Google :D. Hacker Dojo fits 150 comfortably. Stanford hasn't been very excited.<p>Feel free to call me:
408-963-7366 or email me: [email protected]<p>If you can help out, we will sing your praises and give you a pound of fair trade coffee that was hand roasted for my by Mennonite/Amish missionaries in Honduras 3 days ago when I was there. It's a tasty cuppa Joe.<p>ref:
[1] http://www.hackersandfounders.com/calendar/14399920/
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: The best deployment solution for Ruby on Rails apps just got better! Test it, and see what it can do for you!
Upvote: | 158 |
Title: It's hard to believe we once saw Bill Gates as the pie-splattered villain and others as the idealists.
Upvote: | 351 |
Title: Long time HN'er using a throwaway account.<p>Basically, I want to know: What are the chances of a startup's chances of making it big after going through the program?<p>I realize it's vague but any facts or figures would be very helpful.
Upvote: | 62 |
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